Neon Mirage nh-4

by Max Allan Collins

  “That’s white of you, George,” I said. “It’s been a long time. I hoped my name would ring a bell.”

  His thin line of a smile increased its curvature. “How could I forget that piece of business-though it woulda been healthy to.”

  What he and I were referring to was a job he had hired me to do, years ago, in 1933, to be exact. Only it wasn’t a job I did for him, really: it was a job I did for Al Capone, who was in the Atlanta pen at the time. Raft had only acted as the go-between, a role he was as used to as his tough-guy screen persona.

  It was no secret Raft had been a bootlegger, that his gangster friend Owney Madden had sent him west, pulling strings to get him going in the movies. Not that former pickpocket Raft was bereft of show business experience: he worked a Charleston act in vaudeville, and a specialty tap act at Texas Guinan’s El Fay. Of course, he’d still been doing a little bootlegging for Madden on the side, as well.

  “You say you’d like to meet Ben,” Raft said. “I think I could arrange that. But it’d be nice to know what it’s about, first.”

  “Actually,” I said, sipping my minty ice tea, “it’s personal. I’m out here on business, but that business has nothing to do with Ben Siegel. The personal matter does, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got a girl name of Peggy Hogan who came out here a little over a week ago. She and Siegel have some mutual friends. Have you heard of her, George? Met her? Has she been around?”

  Raft took his eyes off the nude vision in the pool and looked at me, perhaps to let me know he wasn’t lying.

  “Never heard of her,” he said with flat believability.

  “I have reason to think she’s gotten herself tied up with Virginia Hill.”

  Raft smiled a little. “Ginny attracts all sorts of people to her.”

  “And she’s Ben Siegel’s girl?”

  “She thinks she is.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Ben always has more than one woman in his life.”

  “Well, that stands to reason, doesn’t it? He’s married, isn’t he?”

  “Divorced,” Raft shrugged. “From Whitey Krakower’s sister. God rest his soul.”

  Whitey Krakower, in addition to being Siegel’s brother-in-law, had been a sometime Siegel accomplice, according to the indictment in the Harry “Big Greenie” Greenburg murder, anyway. Whitey got bumped off in July 1940 in New York, after word got out he was talking. It was a hit Siegel had supposedly approved. Even arranged. Which would, I suppose, have put a certain strain on his marriage.

  I was damn near a Siegel expert now. I’d been filled in by Fred Rubinski, an ex-cop from Chicago who had a small agency out here; he also owned a major piece of a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. One of my reasons for coming west was to talk to Fred about linking our two agencies; it was something I’d been thinking about for a while. Fred had an office in the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway in downtown L.A. We were old acquaintances, if not quite friends, and he’d picked me up last night at Union Air Terminal in Burbank shortly after nine o’clock, the end of an all-day long, puddle-jumping flight that had begun at eight that morning at Midway back home.

  We’d spent this morning in his office at the Bradbury, a truly weird turn-of-the-century building with wrought-iron stairwells, ornamental balconies, caged elevators and a skylight that bounced an eerie white light off the glazed brick floor of its huge central court. Fred, who was in his late forties and a hard round bald ball of a man, shared an outer office with an answering service overseen by a ditsy blonde, and the inner office was his alone. He had four ops in an adjoining office, and his business was going good. We’d discussed merging our operations once before, last year, when he came home to Chicago to visit family and friends for the High Holidays; and this morning we’d bounced it around more seriously.

  But mostly I’d pumped Fred about Siegel, for whom he’d done some collecting.

  “Bad checks,” Fred explained. “He’s got a piece of the Clover Club, you know.”

  “What’s that, a nightclub?”

  “Yeah, with gambling upstairs. It’s the stars’ favorite place to lose their money. He owns part of a Tijuana race track, too, and has interests in half a dozen joints in Las Vegas.”

  “What else is Siegel into, besides gambling?”

  Fred shrugged. “Narcotics, prostitution, diamond fencing, perfume smuggling, you name it. They say Luciano sent him out here, in the mid-thirties, to make sure the Chicago interests didn’t take over.”

  I nodded. “That must’ve been shortly after Nitti sent Bioff and Browne out here, selling strike prevention insurance to the movie moguls.”

  “Right,” Fred said, nodding back. “And word is Benny stepped in and took over where Bioff and Browne left off, after the feds busted their racket up.”

  “How so?”

  “Bioff and Browne had hold of the stagehands’ union, right? Well, Benny has control of the movie extras.”

  “I didn’t know Siegel was so powerful. All I knew was he was running the West Coast end of Trans-American, the mob’s race wire.”

  “Well, he’s doing that, too. And building some goddamn gambling casino in the desert. Near Vegas. Pipedream, if you ask me.”

  I shook my head wonderingly. “I guess I just don’t know much about Siegel-mostly just what I’ve read in the papers. If he’s thick with Raft, like they say, I may have an in. I did a job for George, once.”

  “Raft’s real thick with Ben. They’re close pals.”

  Last year, it seemed, Raft had gone to bat for Siegel in court, when Siegel and his crony Allen Smiley were arrested for bookmaking. Raft had been present, but wasn’t arrested, and later insisted on the witness stand that the three men, together in a hotel room, had merely been placing bets on the phone for themselves. Raft had behaved like a movie tough guy on the stand, barely skirting contempt (“Don’t I even have the right of free speech?” he demanded of the judge) and attracting headlines, which came back to me as Fred filled me in.

  “Why would Raft put his nuts on the line for a guy like Siegel?” I wondered aloud.

  “Hey, I like Benny, too,” Fred said, with a shrug. “He’s never shown his temper around me-and he pays his bills. He’s fun guy to be around, too. Charm the pants offa you.”

  “You don’t mind if I keep my belt buckled for the time being, do you, Fred? If Bugsy’s killed half the people he’s said to have killed, not everybody would agree he’s fun to be around.”

  “Make up your own mind, Nate. But you’re gonna be surprised.”

  Fred had a black book with the unlisted numbers of various stars and other celebrities and Raft was in there. I called the actor’s house from Fred’s office and caught him at home. Raft immediately remembered me, immediately invited me out.

  Fred loaned me one of the three cars the agency owned-a two-tone gray ’41 Ford sedan-and I discovered I’d been out here enough times now to find my way around okay. I pulled into Raft’s driveway as a sightseeing bus went by, gawking tourists looking out the windows, squinting in the sunshine to see if I was anybody. They seemed disappointed when I wasn’t, but then neither were they, so it evened out.

  Raft, sitting in his poolside deck chair, was somebody. I wasn’t sure for how long, though. His association with Siegel was getting him the wrong kind of press; and he was constantly studio-hopping, balking at roles, taking suspensions, battling his bosses. When he was a hot property, fresh off of flipping his coin in Scarface, he could get away with it.

  But at fifty years of age, Raft was not the combination tough-guy and Latin lover he had once been.

  The nude young woman climbed from the pool, her bare backside to us; that goddamn ass could have been made of marble, so perfect was it. Only it looked considerably softer than marble, and was tan. All of her was tan. The blue water had hidden that. She turned and faced us and stretched her arms, embracing the rays of the sun. Her pubic patch was blond. She tugged the bathing cap off and shook her long
blond hair to her damp shoulders and she smiled, looking a little like Betty Grable, one of Raft’s lost loves, or so the gossip columnists said.

  She walked over regally and stood before the small dark man in the blue silk robe; she was taller than he was, and half his age. Hands on her hips, she said, “Thanks for the swim.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thanks for everything.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Would you like me to stick around this afternoon?”

  “No, baby. That’s okay.” He dug into his robe pocket and withdrew a C-note, folded in half. He handed it to her and she smiled toothily and trotted off, cheeks of her ass wiggling and finally revealing themselves to have some fat content, after all, and she disappeared inside to wherever her clothes were and where the big band music was coming from.

  The girl had never acknowledged my presence. I might as well have not been there.

  Raft was conscious of me, though, and as he lit up a cigarette he said, “It’s easier with hookers. I had too many romances fall through. Take my advice, Nate. If you got the dough, stick with call girls.”

  I couldn’t understand why a guy like Raft, who even at his age could obviously get just about any woman he wanted, would pay. I didn’t say this. Just thought it.

  But he said, “I’ll give you an example. Just this week I find out I got to go to court. This nightclub singer I was taking out last year is getting divorced and I’m named in the suit.” He shook his head. “Stick with call girls.”

  “That’s probably good advice, George, but I’m serious about this Peggy Hogan. I want to find her, before Virginia Hill gets her hooks into her.”

  “Who is this Peggy Hogan, anyway? How’d she get from Chicago to Hollywood?”

  “She’s Jim Ragen’s niece.”

  “Jim Ragen…the wire service guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ben’s in competition with that guy. Didn’t he get hit, what was it, couple weeks ago?”

  Raft seemed to be sincere in his ingenuousness. He wasn’t a good enough actor, I didn’t think, to fake it so well.

  “Yeah. You remember the story from the papers? Remember the part about the bodyguard whose shotgun jammed?”

  He looked out at the pool, where no nude girl swam. “Naw. I don’t read so good. I just heard Ragen got hit.”

  “Well, I was his bodyguard.”

  “Are you working for him, Nate?”

  “Yeah. He paid my way out here. He thinks a lot of his niece. He wants me to bring her back home.”

  I didn’t see any reason going into why she’d come out here; no need to detail to Raft the desire Peggy (and for that matter her uncle) had to determine whether or not Ben “Bugsy” Siegel had hired that hit.

  “Why don’t you go talk to Ginny,” he suggested, smoke curling out his nostrils as he looked out at the pool, not at me. “She’s probably home, or will be soon. She’s renting a place in Beverly Hills.”

  “Peggy might be with her,” I said.

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  I didn’t know what I wanted, really; I didn’t know how to go about this. On the endless plane trip I’d tried to figure what I’d say to her, how I’d get her home. I was furious with her, of course, but I was also worried. And I felt a little battered, too. She was supposed to love me. She wasn’t supposed to run out on me like this.

  I’d waited a little over a week before the worry and no sleep got me on a plane. She didn’t call or even write, I couldn’t get in touch with her, it was maddening and I was scared shitless for her, besides. Jim was concerned for her absence, too, got really worked up, especially after I leveled with him about Peg talking about checking up on Siegel, by becoming part of Virginia Hill’s retinue. I didn’t like seeing the patient I was guarding get upset; it couldn’t be good for his recovery-even though Dr. Snaden said he thought Jim was doing much better than expected and would be going home in a matter of weeks. So I worked with Drury to tighten up security at Meyer House, putting Lou Sapperstein in charge of A-l’s end, and then proceeded to go west, middle-aged man.

  “I’d be glad to call over there and see if Ginny’s home,” he said.

  “Better not,” I said. “I don’t know if Virginia Hill would consider me a friend. I better just go over there. Can you give directions?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Or just buy a movie star map. It’s Valentino’s old mansion.”

  “La Hill doesn’t go second class, does she?”

  “She probably uses mink tampax,” Raft said. “Sometimes I don’t know what Ben sees in her-she’s a coarse broad. She swears like a fucking stevedore.”

  “I know her,” I said. “Foul mouth or not, she’s a babe, or used to be.”

  Raft smirked. “Take a look around you, Nate. Every street corner has the four most beautiful women you ever saw standing on it, and next to ’em are the four second most beautiful. Guy like Ben can pick and choose.”

  “What’s the reason he keeps her around, then?”

  “Could be business. She’s tied in with a lot of his friends back east. It’s a partnership. A sort of marriage. And, yeah, she is still a babe. I remember what Benny said, after that first night with her, up at the Chateau Marmont…”

  Raft looked skyward, as if summoning a romantic memory floating on some cloud.

  “…‘Georgie,’ Ben said to me, ‘she’s the best piece of ass I ever had.’”

  Touched as I was by that, I managed to ask a question. “How long have you known Siegel?”

  “Forever. Since he was a tough little kid on the Lower East Side-and I don’t mean of Beverly Hills. He was always gutty and ambitious. He came out here to Hollywood because he wanted to be somebody. And he made it. He was hardly out here a few months but that I was seeing him at the track or around town with big names, George Jessel, Cary Grant, Mark Hellinger, guys like that.”

  “And you.”

  “Hey, I figured if he was good enough for them he was good enough for me. I never knew anybody who doesn’t like him. He’s a great guy.” His expression turned sober. “Of course a lot of his friends deserted him, after he started getting bad press. Particularly after that son of a bitch Pegler took off after him, in his column. Ben had to drop out of the Hillcrest Country Club.” Shook his head sadly. “Giving up golf really killed Benny.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of him in the papers. He looks like he could be a movie star himself.”

  Raft grinned, showing his teeth, looking at me. “He’s a frustrated actor; he’d love to have a movie career.” He leaned forward, sharing a confidence. “He’s always coming around the set, standing on the sidelines, asking the technicians questions. He owns more cameras, projectors and other movie shit than half the studios on Poverty Row.”

  “What for?”

  “Homemade screen tests. He had me photograph him one day. I took some footage of him with his camera in my dressing room.” Raft smiled some more, and shook his head. “He re-did one of my scenes. Wanted to show me where I got it wrong.”

  “He isn’t serious about acting…”

  “Not anymore. This was years ago. But he showed some footage around. He let it be known he was available for parts. Nobody ever hired him. Not with his background. I’m no saint, but I don’t have no rape arrests on my rap sheet.”

  “Is he as crazy as they say?”

  “He’s got a streak. But that name he hates-Bugsy-he didn’t get that ’cause he’s bugs, you know. It comes from when a judge at a trial, years and years ago, real disgusted, called him and Meyer Lansky a couple of bugs.”

  “But the name ‘Bugsy’ stuck, even though nobody uses it in front of him.”

  “Nobody uses it in front of him for long,” Raft said, nodding slowly. “He’s got a bad temper, all right. Particularly if you insult him. He’s real vain. He dresses great. He works out every day at the Hollywood YMCA. Goes weekly to Drucker’s barber shop in Beverly Hills. He showers for hours, goes to bed early, hardly d
rinks at all. He’s real sensitive about his hair.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, when he was a kid it was nice and thick and curly. But he’s losing it, now. I tell you, I damn near bought it when I pulled a gag on him on his birthday last year. I sent over a gift-wrapped toup. Thinking he’d laugh. He drove over here pissed off as hell and it took me an hour to settle him down. Lucky I know what button to push with him.”

  “What button is that, George?”

  “Well, I just call him ‘baby blue eyes.’ It compliments him and calms him right down. I don’t think it’d work for anybody else, though.”

  “He sounds like a real interesting fella. I’d like to meet him-no matter how things go for me with Virginia Hill.”

  “How long will you be out here?”

  “How long do I need to be out here?”

  “Well, Ben’s not in town much these days. He’s in Vegas, most of the time.”

  “Oh, because of that casino he’s building-”

  “Yeah, only it’s more than just a casino-it’s a full-fledged resort. Hotel, restaurants, swimming pool. Gonna be a real class joint. He’s putting it up out on the strip of land between the airport and Vegas. Sinking a lot of dough into it.”

  “His own?”

  “His own and everybody else he knows. Me included. Mostly guys back east, I think; and guys from your neck of the woods. Ben says it’s gonna be so fabulous it’ll make DeMille look like a piker.”

  “I didn’t know DeMille was in the gambling business.”

  “You don’t think the movie business is a gamble? Nate, you don’t get where I am unless the dice has been good to you.”

  Killer came out and refilled our iced tea glasses from a sweating glass pitcher. Raft asked him if he’d got a cab for the girl and the Killer said yes, then went back into the house.

  I sipped my tea. “Why isn’t Virginia Hill out in Vegas with him?”

  “She is part of the time. But she comes back here a lot.”