Playland

by John Gregory Dunne

  Morris Lefkowitz turned to Jacob King. “You get your face in the newspapers too often.”

  “I’ve got a pretty face, Morris,” Jacob King said.

  “You get your face in the newspaper nuzzling too many broads not named Lillian.”

  “You don’t think they got newspapers out there in California?” Jacob King said. “You think they don’t got broads? You think it’s all avocados out there?”

  Lillian King toyed with the paper umbrella in her empty glass and pretended not to hear, her whole married life an exercise in not hearing or, if she did hear, forgetting quickly. Helen O’Connell was singing “Love Is Just Around the Corner,” and Lillian King, with no one at the table paying any attention to her, mouthed the lyrics in perfect sync, it being her fantasy, when she fingered herself on those all-too-frequent nights when Jacob did not come home, that one day she would head the bill at the Copa.

  A waiter set down a fresh round of drinks, a club soda for Morris Lefkowitz, a Rob Roy for Jimmy Riordan, a White Horse and soda for Jacob King, nothing for Lillian. “I ordered a Scotch sour,” Lillian King said.

  “You already had a Scotch sour, Lillian,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “In fact you had three.” He turned to Jacob and without a pause said, “I hope you appreciate this is a ground-floor opportunity I’m handing you in California. A major assignment. I look at the state of Nevada, the silver state, and you know what I see—”

  Lillian King interrupted, her voice louder than it should have been, “What am I, a little girl, Morris Lefkowitz counts my drinks now?”

  A waiter and a captain were hovering near the table, Joe Romagnola’s orders, a perquisite that accrued naturally to Morris Lefkowitz. Jacob King raised his arm and both the captain and the waiter sprang to his side. “A Scotch sour for Mrs. King,” he said, and then to Morris Lefkowitz, “You look at Nevada and you see someplace that’s not the schmata business.”

  “All gold is what I see,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “A gold mine in the goddamn desert.” His scalp glistened with sweat, as it often did when he talked about money, and his voice lowered.

  “Jimmy …”

  “Morris …”

  “The name of the place they’re going to build out there?”

  “La Casa Nevada. They begin pouring the foundations the first of next month.”

  “La Casa Nevada. A nice name. Italian, Jimmy?”

  “Spanish.”

  “What does it mean, this Spanish?”

  “Nevada House, Morris.”

  “I like La Casa Nevada better,” Morris Lefkowitz said. He leaned close to Jacob King. “Expansion, Jacob. We have to go national.”

  “You going to let the California boys move into New York then, Morris?” Jacob King said. If he was an unlettered man of violent urges, he was also not without irony, a rare combination in a gangster.

  Morris Lefkowitz had an old man’s laugh, more cough than laugh. His face would redden, and if he did not get his handkerchief to his mouth, he would spray mucus indiscriminately. Now he laughed and sprayed.

  “Morris, you hit me with a clam,” Lillian King said.

  Morris Lefkowitz ignored her. “That’s why I love this boy like the son I never had, Jimmy. Always kidding. Jacob, I know you since you were, what …”

  “Since he was fifteen years of age,” Jimmy Riordan said.

  “… fifteen years of age and you come around telling me what you could do for me. I laughed. I admit it. I laughed. Then I saw. Some of what you said you could do”—Morris Lefkowitz shrugged expressively—“you could do.” Another shrug, as if to shake away the bodies that were the by-product of Jacob King doing what he could do. He patted Jacob on the cheek. “This little boychik, Jimmy …”

  Jimmy Riordan nodded, all the while playing with a gold pencil. He rarely spoke unless it was necessary. Listening was what he did best, next to remembering, his Irish welterweight’s face as always impassive. The criminal bar had never attracted him. Too many elements over which he had no control. Wild cards. He hated wild cards. A jury was the wild card he hated most. He did however vet the attorneys who appeared for members of the Lefkowitz enterprises when they were caught up in criminal proceedings. He favored Jews and Irishmen who had sharpened their courtroom skills in a district attorney’s office of any of the five boroughs or for the U.S. attorney in the southern district, men, now private practitioners, who knew their opposite numbers at the prosecutors’ table, knew the judges and the political clubs and what markers might be called in at what courthouses, men absent social advantages and with limited educational credentials who had not been recruited by the Wall Street law firms, class resentment being, to Jimmy Riordan, an essential element for success in the makeup of a criminal lawyer. Meyer Feiffer and Brendan Kean, out of the Bronx and Inwood respectively, City College for one, St. John’s for the other, each a former Queens chief deputy D.A. specializing in the more difficult homicide cases, both with top conviction rates, had defended Jacob King. If they had qualms about the coincidences attendant to the deaths of Ruth Wexler and the corner man at Sunnyside Arena, they kept their own counsel, the single exception Meyer Feiffer’s spontaneous spasm of distaste when he learned of Ruth Wexler’s demise. This was a lapse suggesting to Jimmy Riordan, with his compulsive attention to detail and his ability to anticipate the possibility of future problems, such as some later onset of virtue, that Meyer Feiffer’s services not be required in any future cases alleging criminality in the Lefkowitz domain. It is needless to say that Meyer Feiffer and Brendan Kean were not included in the party at the Copa. They were hired help, well-paid help, but help nonetheless.

  “I’ll call some people out there, Jacob,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “Lilo Kusack. Rita Lewis. She’ll show you around. You remember Rita.”

  “One of my husband’s whores,” Lillian King said to no one in particular, just loud enough so that Jacob and Jimmy Riordan and Morris Lefkowitz could hear, but not so loud they had to acknowledge what they had heard. Her Scotch sour arrived and she sucked on an orange slice.

  “You think the L.A. guys don’t know what they got in Nevada, Morris?” Jacob said, ignoring his wife. “You think they’re just waiting for someone to come out from New York so they can cut him in?”

  “That’s what I’m sending you out there for, Jacob. To convince them.” Morris Lefkowitz turned to Lillian King. “Lillian, you should order something to eat, you just eat the fruit in the Scotch sours you like so much, the orange slices and the maraschino cherries, you’ll starve. The shellfish is good here, they tell me. And the creamed spinach is a treat. Waiter,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “A plate of spinach for Mrs. King.”

  “Who’re you, Popeye, Morris?” Lillian King said.

  But Morris Lefkowitz had expended all the attention he intended to expend on Lillian King. The spinach was his way of telling her to shut up. Morris Lefkowitz did not so much talk as send out signals, and not to pick up his signals was to make the kind of mistake Philly Wexler had made. Lillian King heard the signal and said, “I hate spinach, I’ll have a steak instead. Well done. And a shrimp cocktail with the mustard and mayonnaise dressing, and not the red cocktail sauce. And a baked potato with sour cream and chives.” She could not resist one last sally. “Is that all right, Morris?”

  “That’s nice, Lillian,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “Jimmy, tell Jacob what we’re offering the people in California.”

  “National management,” Jimmy Riordan said. “We’ll help them maximize their profit potential.” James Francis Riordan, attorney at law, of counsel to Morris Lefkowitz and the Lefkowitz enterprises for twenty years and more, had grown up in Yorkville, on streets where words like cocksucker and motherfucker were the currency of communication, and he had once fought Golden Gloves, which accounted for his flattened pug’s nose. He thought the ring would be his ticket out of Yorkville, as dancing had been his pal Jim Cagney’s ticket out, but he couldn’t hit a lick, a welterweight with knuckles like potato chips, and he stayed in paroc
hial school and mastered the multiplication and logarithmic tables and sines and cosines and dollar signs and won scholarships to Regis Prep and then to Fordham and Fordham Law and now he talked about maximizing profit potential for Morris Lefkowitz, a man James Francis Riordan, had he remained a pug in Yorkville, would have called a sheeny cocksucker, he cuts the tip off his prick, the Jew bastid.

  “One plus one equals twenty-one,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “Blackjack. Everybody a winner.”

  “It’s just a question of calibrating the terms,” Jimmy Riordan said carefully, his tone implying what in truth he actually thought, that Jacob King was perhaps not the most effective of calibrators, his handling of the Philly Wexler situation the only example he needed to make his case.

  Jacob King picked up the hint of reservation in Jimmy Riordan’s voice. “Sure. Just like buying Manhattan Island from the Indians.” He did not mask the taunt. It was the eternal struggle between the man of action and the numbers cruncher. “I offer twenty-four dollars, throw in a couple of beads, we close the deal …”

  But Jimmy Riordan was rising from his chair, not paying attention. “Walter,” he said, “what takes you out of the Cub Room on a cold night in January?”

  “The chance to see Philly Wexler’s best boyhood pal,” Walter Winchell said.

  “Philly Wexler was a deviate,” Jimmy Riordan said, for the record. It was the first time that any principal in the Lefkowitz organization had ever been known to take a moral position. “You know Lillian King, Morris Lefkowitz, Jacob I know you know, we’ve been saving a seat for you, Walter, it’s our press seat …”

  Walter Winchell pulled back the chair and sat down. “I know your father,” he said to Lillian King. “Mendy Aronow, right? The accountant for the Keith circuit. Could multiply three-four-digit numbers in his head like it was two times six equals twelve. Carried a torch for Gina Hennessy that was in the Follies and married Fergus Choate, the elevator company Choates, he was a homo.”

  Lillian King preened. Her pedigree was not a public record written on yellow sheets, as was her husband’s, and no interest in it had ever before been publicly expressed. That Walter Winchell was aware of her family tree, and had spun from it an urban parable in four sentences, was a bonus she had not been expecting on that evening when her husband was celebrating his acquittal of murder in the first degree, and it revived her spirits. “That was my late Uncle Mendel. He was my late father’s brother. My father was—”

  “Whatever,” Walter Winchell said. “So, Jake, something nice happened to you today.” His eyes were constantly on the move, checking to see who got what table, who was coming, who was going. “I bet Billingsley a fin you wouldn’t go to Ossining when it came out about Philly and his sister. The pervert got what perverts deserve.”

  Jacob King offered no opinion on Philly Wexler’s sexual culpability. “You sure you want to sit down with a small-time shooter, Walter?”

  “It wasn’t me that said that, Jake. I was just quoting one of my sources.”

  “Unnamed. You want to give me his name, Walter, I’d really appreciate it.”

  Even Morris Lefkowitz laughed.

  “So you’re a big-time shooter,” Walter Winchell said. “I protect my sources. Like I’m entitled in the United States of America. Which is why the United States of America is the greatest country in the world. And why we got to get rid of the swishes and degenerates like Philly Wexler and the pinko-stinkos to keep it that way.” Without missing a beat, he leaned toward Morris Lefkowitz. “So how’s the fur business, Morris?”

  “Legitimate,” Morris Lefkowitz said.

  As if he were broadcasting to Mr. and Mrs. United States and all the ships at sea, Walter Winchell said, “And that’s how Morris Lefkowitz has stayed out of jail for fifty years.”

  A look of pain crossed Morris Lefkowitz’s countenance. “I’m just a simple furrier,” he said.

  Winchell was not listening. He focused on the stage, where Helen O’Connell was finishing her set. “Whatta set of pipes on Miss Helen O’Connell,” he said to no one in particular, as if composing an item for his column. “Every note a treat. Swellegant. The stems aren’t bad either.” On the back of an envelope he jotted the words pipes and stems and swellegant, then turned back to Morris Lefkowitz as the stage curtain rose and the house band arrived on a turntable, playing a routine with a Latin beat. “The scoop is you’re sending Jake out West, Morris. You trying to keep him on ice. Out of the newspapers for a while. Or does he just need a little sun after his stay in the Tombs?”

  Morris Lefkowitz turned his dead, deadly eyes on Winchell. “You want a little Russian sable, Walter? For you I can get it wholesale.”

  “What would G-man Hoover say if I did that, Morris?” Walter Winchell said, his furtive gaze now moving to a commotion at the maître d’s station. Flashbulbs popped. “Blue …” Winchell was on his feet, and he was gone, pushing past the adjoining tables, the gel in the stage lights catching his bald spot, making it gleam blue and then pink, Morris Lefkowitz left behind, just another old Jew at a ringside table who tipped too much. “You finished the picture, I hear it’s phantabulous,” Winchell shouted, and then to a man blocking his view, “Who let you in here, get out of the way,” clearing a path by elbowing the man onto his wife’s lap, and then again solicitous, “When are you and Arthur middle-aisling it …”

  “I should worry, I should care,” Blue Tyler half sang, half whispered, “I should marry a millionaire … Arthur, do you qualify?”

  Arthur French remembered:

  Or tried to remember, given the slippages of age, or was evasive, and perhaps even lied a little.

  I embroidered:

  She was almost eighteen, or perhaps nineteen, considering the uncertainty about her date of birth. She was wearing a black evening dress and a full-length red fox coat, and she was accompanied by two bodyguards, three Cosmopolitan Studio publicists, and Arthur French. She smiled and waved at the photographers, their cameras loving her and she loving their cameras in turn, the cameras wiping the teenage sulkiness from her face, Blue always in motion, posing, vamping, cooing, “I’d walk a mile for a man who walked a mile for a Camel.” Joe Romagnola, the maître d’, produced a cigarette, offering a light from his silver Tiffany lighter, a gift from Frank, who when he played the Paramount gave Tiffany lighters to all the maître d’s at all the gin mills where he drank, and Arthur French just as quickly removed the cigarette from her mouth. “J.F. says you’re too young to smoke in public,” he said, and Blue said, “I’m too young to do a lot of the things I do with you, Arthur, in public and especially in private, it’s called statutory something, isn’t it?”

  More flashbulbs as she threw her arms around Arthur French, kicking one leg behind her, Arthur, who she had fucked a few hours earlier in the top-floor corner suite at the Plaza (Arthur said that it was Blue who only liked to make love in the afternoon, not he, in his late seventies still unable to say the word fuck, irritable that I would even ask such a thing). Blue mimed a kiss at Walter Winchell, “Walter, love you, how’s June?” not stopping to hug him, and moving behind a phalanx of bodyguards and captains and publicity men she let her red fox coat slip off her shoulders onto the floor, where it was immediately picked up by a bodyguard and handed to the coat check girl. The band eased into a rhumba and before she reached their table she drew Arthur French onto the dance floor, Arthur a game escort but no Chocolate Walker Franklin as a dancer, and as he whirled and dipped, Blue doing the leading and not he, tico tico teek, tico tico tock, Arthur spotted Morris Lefkowitz looking at them and he favored Morris with an almost imperceptible nod. Blue followed his gaze and first she saw the old man with the liver marks at the ringside table and next to him the small man with the wary eyes and the broken nose and next to him the woman with the hard angular face tearing into her steak and then she saw the man who seemed to be with the woman demolishing the steak, the not-quite-tall man with the lacquered black hair and the prominent chin and the look of someone to wh
om no sexual experience was foreign. He was staring at her, she who men had stared at since she was four years old, men who would look at her on the screen and put their hands in their pockets to fondle their cocks and send her fan mail crusted with their semen, but he was different, he was a man who made her feel embarrassed.

  “Who’s the guy?” Jacob King asked Morris Lefkowitz, his eyes not leaving Blue Tyler.

  “What guy?”

  “With the actress.”

  “Moe French’s boy,” Morris Lefkowitz said.

  “Arthur French,” Jimmy Riordan said. “His father, Moe, runs Cosmopolitan Pictures.”

  “They call Moe J. F. French out there in California,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “When I first know him on the Lower East Side he was Moses Frankel. He was in haberdashery, and then he bought a nickelodeon. Fur is forever, and suits. But film …” He pronounced it “fillum,” as if it had two syllables, and even saying the word made him look as if he had bitten into something that tasted bad. “So, Jacob, you understand what you’re going to do in California?”

  “Let me get the feel of it first, Morris,” Jacob King said, rising from the table, leaving Lillian with her steak and Morris Lefkowitz without an answer and Jimmy Riordan uneasy. He walked across the dance floor and tapped Arthur French on the shoulder. A studio bodyguard moved to cut him off, but Arthur shook his head, and Jacob took Blue in his arms, more fluid on the dance floor than Arthur French, as the other dancers moved away, giving them room.

  “My name is Jacob King. I’m on my way to Los Angeles”—he pronounced it with a hard g—“and I want to get to know you better. I want to get to know you very well.”