The rabbi leaned forward and lowered his voice. “As you pointed out, I have officiated at ceremonies for same-sex couples—gays and lesbians. But those marriages are not sanctioned by the state, though there has been considerable talk of changing Nevada law. Thus, the ceremonies accomplished nothing other than to provide a means for the couples to pledge to each other, with God as their witness, their love, trust, respect, and fidelity. Would a symbolic ceremony satisfy you? If so, I would be willing to give my support to your union.”
The three again nodded. “There is one more thing, rabbi,” Myra pointed out hesitantly. “Not only do Kimberly and Michael want to get married, so do Kimberly and I. We are also very much in love with each other. As Kim said, we all live together and love together.”
The rabbi rolled his eyes. “Oy, vey! That does put another delicious little twist on your situation. I told you I thought I’ve seen and heard most everything, but you’ve managed to prove I haven’t. I suppose if I can marry two men or two women, and if I can give my endorsement to a bigamous relationship, there should be no reason why I would not be able to marry the three of you to each other, as long as you realize your wedding will have no legal standing. Just give me a week or two to devise an appropriate ceremony.” Hellmann was already considering the size of his life cycle fee for a three-way marriage. Greater than a car payment, less than a house note.
Sixteen
IT WAS SUNDAY. Any other day of the week, if Marshall Brendan was in Las Vegas he could be found in one of his casinos. But on Sundays, unless an absolute disaster occurred—such as a hotel tower catching fire and burning to the ground or a lucky keno player winning a million-dollar payoff—Brendan let his employees run the business without him. Should he be needed, he was as close as the nearest telephone, 24-7. That is, Brendan—like most every casino executive—was available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Marshall’s massive frame was stretched out in his leather recliner. His high-definition big-screen television was tuned to a football game, but he did not know the score nor even which teams were playing. His mind was deep in thought.
I’ve made a helluva mistake, he decided glumly. I should never have let them talk me into building another casino. Not one so big. Not one so close to Gold Crest. And especially, not with borrowed money.
Thanks to Marshall Brendan’s uncanny ability to discern what gamblers wanted and his willingness to give it to them, the Silver Crest had been immensely lucrative. Much of the profit realized by Marshall and his Silver Crest partners had been parlayed into the Gold Crest partnership. Additional financing needed to build the Gold Crest was furnished by several other close friends, people who had made scads of money in their own fields of endeavor. One owned a chain of dry cleaners. Another, a half dozen medical clinics. Using the same formula that made the Silver Crest successful, the Gold Crest also thrived and prospered.
Both partnerships were like closely-knit families. All the partners knew and liked and socialized with each other. Most of them met every Tuesday for a private luncheon at Marshall’s, the gourmet restaurant in the Silver Crest. They went to rodeos and auto races together. They bought a block of tickets and flew to the Super Bowl on the corporate jet. They went as a group on hunting trips to Idaho and fishing trips to Alaska.
One of Brendan’s partners owned sixty acres of raw desert land about a mile and a half from the Gold Crest. It had been in his family for over fifty years. At one of the luncheon meetings, he suggested they build another hotel and casino on the site.
Marshall was as enthusiastic about the proposed project as the others. It’s now or never, he resolved. Gigantic new casinos had sprung up on the Strip like condominiums in Southern California, and most older properties were busily expanding their casinos and adding additional hotel towers. The Dunes, Landmark, Sands, Hacienda, Aladdin, Desert Inn, and other long-standing hotel-casinos were imploded in spectacular displays of the art of demolition. Phoenix-like, behemoth new resorts rose from the ashes and the rubble.
They decided to name the new hotel and casino Blue Hawaii and give the property a South Seas island theme, with a plethora of palm trees, tropical flowers, waterfalls, and swimming pools. It was to be a much larger, more luxurious resort than either the Silver Crest or Gold Crest, and, instead of being geared toward locals, it would be marketed primarily to visitors from out of state.
There was only one small difficulty. Financing. After the recent expansion at Gold Crest, which doubled the casino area and added three hundred more guest rooms, there was barely enough money left in the bank to pay for the land.
Someone—Marshall didn’t remember who—suggested the Silver Crest and Gold Crest partnerships be combined and incorporated. The new entity, Crest Resorts, would include the Blue Hawaii project. Then they could raise the necessary capital by selling stock.
Marshall had his controller, Paige Garrett, run the numbers. After incorporation, Garrett said, Brendan would still be in control, with fifty-three percent of the outstanding shares of the corporation. The remaining forty-seven percent would be issued to the former partners in the Silver Crest and Gold Crest partnerships—all good friends. But if a public stock offering were to be made, Marshall and his present partners combined would wind up with less than fifty percent of the company’s stock and thus face the possibility of being ousted from the board. Worse yet, the company might someday become the subject of a hostile takeover.
Paige suggested merging the two partnerships and incorporating. As the Silver Crest partnership was virtually debt-free, the combined company would have a strong financial statement with a high assets-to-liabilities ratio. However, Paige recommended that, instead of selling shares in Crest Resorts, the company should finance construction of the new hotel and casino with a bond issue.
After meeting with a number of large brokerage firms, Brendan selected Hibdon, Hyde, Steinberg, and Company. A prospectus was prepared. A famous architect made renderings and built a scale model of the proposed resort. The company’s advertising department devised a multi-media audiovisual presentation.
Marshall Brendan, Paige Garrett, and three officers of Hibdon, Hyde, Steinberg took a dog-and-pony show around the country. They met with insurance company executives, administrators of pension funds, and other large potential investors. Within three months, sufficient capital had been raised for them to break ground and start construction on Blue Hawaii.
There was only one condition to funding. The brokerage firm, prompted by the institutional lenders, insisted that Crest Resorts bring in a professional team of executives to manage the corporation. Marshall and his staff, they said, were already spread too thin running the Silver Crest and Gold Crest. With the exception of Paul Carey, none of the former partners—now shareholders in the new entity—were active in the business. Marshall Brendan would become Chairman of the Board, but day-to-day operations would be relegated to the corporate executives who would be hired by Hibdon, Hyde, Steinberg, and Company.
The plan didn’t bother Brendan. He held a majority of the voting shares of the corporation. No matter who was hired, he would still be the big boss and his word would be final. So, what harm would it do if he wasn’t involved in every little decision? He’d been wanting to take more time off anyway. Soon, that would be possible.
Marshall longed to go on a wild-animal safari in Kenya, then spend a leisurely month or two traveling the rest of the way around the world. Europe. Russia. China. He hadn’t decided whether he would take his wife on the trip—he was so busy running Crest Resorts and she was so involved in community charitable organizations they seldom spent time together—or his long-suffering mistress, Johanna, a former singer in the Irish band that played in the Silver Crest lounge. Marshall felt somewhat guilty because, even though Johanna had borne him a son, he was a devout Roman Catholic and thus unable to divorce his wife and marry her.
While the hotel and casino were under construction, Hibdon, Hyde, Steinberg made a talent search.
They hired several executives away from other Las Vegas hotels. One man, a Pat Sajak look-alike, came from a Mississippi riverboat casino. Another had been working as the manager of a resort in Reno. The general manager of the new corporation was formerly the CEO of a large and very profitable casino in Australia.
In effect, what Hibdon, Hyde, Steinberg had done was impose an additional, expensive, and totally redundant layer of management on the corporation. Each property already had a casino manager, slot department manager, controller, advertising manager, marketing manager, sales manager, hotel manager, personnel manager, chief engineer, and executive chef. Now, the corporation also had a Director of Casino Operations, Director of Slot Operations, Director of Finance, Director of Advertising, Director of Marketing, Director of Sales, Director of Hotel Operations, Director of Human Resources, Director of Engineering, and Director of Food and Beverages.
And each director hired a retinue of assistants and a staff of office workers to shuffle papers and make their superiors appear important.
Crest Resorts became plagued with turmoil caused by internal politics. In no time at all, the bickering escalated into an irreconcilable power struggle between the Corporate directors and Marshall Brendan’s Old School faction.
Brendan quickly lost confidence in the ability of his directors. In his opinion, not one of them had the smarts and casino savvy of the managers he had personally trained and promoted from within. The directors made mistake after mistake, each blunder more costly than the one before.
In retrospect, Marshall thought, some of the construction and opening problems at the Blue Hawaii were actually funny. When the engineers affixed the room numbers to the guest room doors, they started from the wrong end of the hallway and thus only one room on each floor—the one in the middle of the building—had the correct number installed.
When sewage from the twelfth and higher floors backed up into the sinks and bathtubs of the guest rooms below, the engineers discovered the main sewer pipe went about ten feet into the ground but wasn’t connected to the horizontal sewerage line—or anything else.
The air conditioning and heating system took forever to get balanced. The temperature was in the hundreds in some of the offices, but in the keno and poker departments, customers were frozen out with numbers in the forties. Moreover, the sewer pipe vents were adjacent to the air conditioner intake, so the casino was constantly redolent of fecal matter.
It took several months to get the restaurants shaped up. It was a tossup as to whether the food or service was worse. Most of the time, it took over an hour to get even a cheese sandwich out of the kitchen. Food that should have been served hot was brought out cold and greasy. More often than not, the server would bring the wrong order and the diner, rather than wait another hour to get what he wanted, would accept it anyway—and vow never to return.
But those problems were relatively easy to solve. More crucial were mistakes that went to the core of the operation.
The directors decided Blue Hawaii would be geared toward tourists, so the casino would not be in direct competition with Gold Crest, which was just a few minutes’ drive away. So, the Blue Hawaii casino was filled with reel-type dollar slots and had only a few banks of the quarter video poker machines that Las Vegas residents love.
Prices in the restaurants were set considerably higher than at Gold Crest and Silver Crest. The ploy worked. Locals stayed away in droves.
Despite having oversized guest rooms at modest prices, the occupancy rate seldom exceeded fifty percent, because the Blue Hawaii was two miles from the Strip. Those who did stay at the hotel seldom gambled there. The guests would leave early in the morning and spend the day and evening and their dollars at the major casinos and tourist attractions on the Strip. They wanted to see the fake volcano erupting at the Mirage, the mock pirate ship battle at Treasure Island. They wanted to take the elevator to the top of the Stratosphere Tower or ride the roller-coaster at New York, New York. The last thing the tourists wanted to do was sit in the Blue Hawaii casino and lose their money.
Blue Hawaii’s showroom had eight hundred seats, but the boring country and western production show that the Director of Entertainment Tex Thomas, Jr. starred in, produced, and so glowingly espoused, sold an average of only forty tickets per performance. Even by papering the room with comps, seldom could more than a few hundred people be persuaded to attend.
Tex Thomas’s only claim to fame was his father, who was a relatively popular cowboy singer in the 1940s but nearly forgotten a decade later. Newspaper critics wondered in print why a hotel-casino named Blue Hawaii had a country-western revue rather than a Polynesian extravaganza with fire-eaters dressed in native costumes and topless hula dancers swaying sensuously and singing island music.
Losses in the theater exceeded $10,000 per day. Losses in the restaurants came to more than a million dollars per month. The hotel was losing almost as much. And the casino was so empty a bowling ball could be rolled down any of the aisles without hitting anyone.
Marshall Brendan particularly detested Trevor Weatherbee, the general manager hired by Hibdon, Hyde, Steinberg. Marshall didn’t like the man’s looks, didn’t like his Australian accent and slang, didn’t like the way he trotted through the casino at breakneck speed making a list of things that needed to be fixed, things Weatherbee should have made sure were done correctly in the first place. Marshall never referred to Weatherbee by his Christian name or his surname. Everyone who worked for Crest Resorts soon knew who Brendan meant when he spoke of The Goose.
Marshall would have called a stockholders’ meeting and voted in an entirely new board of directors consisting of his good ol’ boy buddies—to hell with Hibdon, Hyde, Steinberg, and Company; Crest Resorts had already received the proceeds of the bond issue—except for one salient fact. Each director had been given a five-year contract of employment. It would have cost a fortune to buy out all the contracts.
Yet, keeping the directors was equally costly, for it was evident that if they continued to make horrendous mistakes, the Blue Hawaii would lose more money than the Silver Crest and Gold Crest could earn, and soon the entire corporation would be bankrupt. Marshall knew he had to get the directors to quit on their own—but how?
MARSHALL BRENDAN pumped furiously on the pedals of the stationary bicycle. He was once again trying to lose weight. In the previous ninety days he’d added sixty pounds and the avoirdupois had all settled in his already ample middle. He resembled a snake that had just swallowed a very large rabbit.
Every calorie Marshall consumed turned to fat. Even carrot sticks and stalks of celery caused him to gain weight. His doctors said he had a metabolism problem. He knew they were wrong. Brendan wasn’t in denial. Not about his weight, not about anything. He owned up to his real problem. It was stress. The more stress he encountered, the more he was compelled to eat.
When it came to meals, he indulged himself splendidly and skipped few or none. And then there were the constant snacks. Banana splits from the casino’s ice cream parlor. Popcorn and soft pretzels from the movie theater. Styrofoam cups of straight chili from the snack bar. For the chili, he wouldn’t even bother using a spoon. He’d just put the cup to his mouth, tip it, and pour it down, like others would chug-a-lug a diet soda.
Marshall’s chief irritant at the moment was Trevor Weatherbee. Instead of doing something constructive—such as working on a plan to get more slot players in the casino—Weatherbee wasted time worrying the engineers about a squeaking door to a janitorial closet or something equally inconsequential.
And those damn weekly managers’ meetings of his, Marshall grumbled. Biggest waste of time and money I’ve ever seen. Every week The Goose ties up a conference room and has the catering crew arrange long tables into a rectangle, cover them with linen tablecloths, set out pitchers of ice water and glasses and coffee cups, and load another table with stacks of Danish pastry and urns of coffee. Then, for two hours, the department heads sit around and give meaningless reports to tr
y to make themselves look good, Marshall fumed.
My own management style is much more effective. When there are problems that need addressing, I call in only those managers involved. I’ll chew ass on one man at a time and immediately dismiss him from the meeting, so he can get right back to work and startmaking changes.
Even though the company had quite a few female managers, Brendan’s sexist attitude shone through by the way he always used masculine pronouns when talking or even thinking about his staff.
“The stupid Goose—” Marshall muttered out loud. He was wheezing and out of breath.
“Sir?” Rick Lacey fawned. He was on the bicycle next to Brendan. Lacey hadn’t even worked up a sweat.
Marshall was momentarily nonplused. He wondered how long he’d been thinking out loud.
“The Goose. He’s driving me up the friggin’ wall. I’d like to get rid of him, but I don’t want to have to buy him out of his contract.”
Lacey laughed. “So, Weatherbee’s not the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
“Not by a long shot,” Marshall replied, a sheepish grin crossing his face.
They climbed down from the stationary bicycles and strolled over to the juice bar. Marshall chose cranberry juice; Lacey, grapefruit. “If you really want to cook The Goose, so to speak, I can help you.”
Brendan stopped in mid-sip. One eyebrow raised expectantly and lingered in that position. “Oh? How would you do that?”
“Weatherbee’s wife is still living in Australia. She hasn’t seen her husband since the Blue Hawaii opened eight months ago.”
“So?”
“Invite her to visit the States. As a guest of Crest Resorts. Tell her it should be a big surprise for her husband, and not to let him know she’s making the trip.”
A Time For Us (Michael Kaplan Mysteries) Page 11