Playland

by John Gregory Dunne

  “And another thousand in hundreds,” Jacob King said after a moment, passing the bills across to the dealer. The other two players looked at each other, then shook their heads. “Too rich for me,” one murmured as they gathered their chips and left Jacob King alone at the table. Jacob put five chips down.

  The dealer dealt a hand to Jacob King and one to himself. “Dealer holds on seventeen,” he said.

  Jacob King gestured for another card, then another. He turned his cards over. Twenty-two. The dealer raked in the chips.

  “Morris told me you might be coming in, Jake,” the dealer said quietly as he dealt out another hand.

  “What else did Morris tell you, Eddie?” Jacob King said.

  “He tells me I owe him one,” the dealer said. His name was Eddie Binhoff and like the late Philly Wexler he had known Jacob King most of his life. “He’s right. The genius of Morris Lefkowitz is, you always end up owing him one. You live to be a hundred and sixty-two years old, you get a call from Morris, he’s two hundred and ten years of age, he points out you still owe him one. So what are you here for, Jake?”

  “Blackjack,” Jacob King said.

  “Fuck you,” Eddie Binhoff said, paying nineteen. They talked softly, always playing, Jacob winning or losing, Eddie Binhoff raking in or paying out chips, the hundred-dollar game scaring off the casual players.

  “You’ve always been a very suspicious guy, Eddie, you know that?” He doubled down and let his eyes wander over the down-at-the-heels casino. “I figured out here, the sun shines, everybody says howdy, you’d loosen up, get less suspicious. But no. You’re the same coiled-up guy you were in Red Hook, we were kids, you know that?”

  “I been in the joint twice since I leave Red Hook. Nine years total. I even got a tattoo in the joint, it gave me something to do, a chick named Roxanne.

  “That’s her on my arm,” Eddie Binhoff said, showing Jacob the bottom of the tattoo. “Except I don’t know no Roxannes. What the hell. It helped pass the time.” He moved cards crisply out of the shoe, and flicked his over without looking. “The guy who give me the tattoo, he says I got to pay him in skull, so I broke his fucking skull is what I did. That’s the beauty of doing a guy in the joint. You’re already there, nobody gives a shit, it’s one less mouth the state has to feed.”

  “Hit me,” Jacob King said.

  “I get out last time, Morris makes some calls, sets me up, that’s how I get to owe him one,” Eddie Binhoff said. “Bingo, I’m a solid citizen. I even got this little bungalow with a porch out front. So I sit on my porch and read about you in the papers. I want to jerk off, it makes me so happy reading about you, a kid from the same neighborhood as me. You want to cut up old touches, we’ll cut up old touches.”

  Jacob turned around and watched the stage, where a woman singer wearing a Levi’s shirt missing two buttons and showing dark roots under her blond dye job was trying to lip-sync “Don’t Fence Me In,” mechanically snapping her microphone cord as if it was a lariat, and smiling in the direction of Eddie Binhoff’s table.

  “You banging her, Eddie?”

  “A couple of times. She’s a little stringy.”

  “So,” Jacob King said. He had a jack and a deuce showing. Eddie Binhoff slid him an eight of clubs. Twenty. “Lilo Kusack’s new place. La Casa Nevada. What do you hear about it?”

  “Jake. I don’t have three ears. I hear what everybody else hears. Lilo’s fronting it for Benny Draper, Benny’s pension fund’s putting up the construction costs. You know all that before you leave Penn Station.”

  “Grand Central. You been away from New York too long, Eddie. You take the Limited to Chicago from Grand Central, not Penn Station, get off at LaSalle Street in Chi, grab something to eat at the Pump Room, go over to Dearborn Street, pick up the Chief, George makes sure your grips are on the train.”

  Eddie Binhoff dealt himself a seven. Twenty-one. “Who the fuck is George?”

  “The colored guy on the train. All the colored guys on the train are called George. That way you don’t have to remember their colored names. I guess they didn’t teach you that at Attica.” Jacob King nodded for another game. “You pull into L.A., you get off at Pasadena. Stars get off at Pasadena. You ought to remember that, Eddie, you ever take the Chief to L.A., you’ll want people to think you’re a star.”

  “You know something, Jake,” Eddie Binhoff said. He was never overly talkative, but if he did choose to speak, he always said what was on his mind, with no fancy elocution. “I’m beginning to think maybe you didn’t whack Philly Wexler, it was some other guy, it was a bad rap, even Morris is clean, he had nothing to do with that fucking poinsettia that blew Ruthie away.” He kept staring at Jacob King as he raked in four one-hundred-dollar chips and laid out the next hand. “A guy who tells me stars get off the train in Pasadena, I’d say that guy don’t have the temperament to be a hitter.”

  Jacob King cracked his knuckles, his olive-complected face darkening even more. Eddie Binhoff had seen the look before, and the mayhem that usually followed. There was a baseball bat under the table, but he knew that Morris Lefkowitz would not consider his using it to counter an assault by Jacob King as payment for the favor he already owed. Morris Lefkowitz would take it amiss, and Morris Lefkowitz did not let things he took amiss ride, even when there was twenty-five hundred miles between where he was and where what caused him offense had taken place. Jacob did not take his eyes off Eddie Binhoff. “You always did have a smart mouth, Eddie,” he said finally. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Then he smiled. “So what else you hear about Lilo’s place.”

  “It’s going to be a money machine with marble crappers,” Eddie Binhoff said, steadying the bat with his knee. Morris Lefkowitz or no Morris Lefkowitz, he knew he would not have let Jacob King come across the table. “Or so some people say. I don’t see it myself.”

  “Because you got no vision, Eddie. People saying anything else?”

  “Some people say Morris is blowing smoke up his ass, he think’s anybody’s going to cut him in.” Another player sat down at the table. “Beat it,” Eddie Binhoff said to the new player, and when the player made no move, he repeated the order, his voice barely a whisper. “I said beat it.”

  The player looked at Eddie Binhoff, then at Jacob King. “I want to play. I got the money.” He put a twenty on the table. “Give me some chips. Or get me the pit boss.”

  “Good, call the pit boss, that’s your right,” Jacob King said. “And when you do, I’ll take this cigarette here …” He flicked the ash into an ashtray, leaving a burning ember at the end of the butt. He pinched the cigarette and put the ember under the chin of the other man. “… and I’ll put it out in your eye.”

  “It’ll hurt,” Eddie Binhoff said.

  The player twirled in his chair and scurried away, leaving his twenty-dollar bill on the table. Jacob beckoned a drinks waitress, gave her the player’s twenty, and added a hundred. “Give it to that scared little guy over there looks like he’s going to wet his pants.” He took another bill from his roll. “And here’s a hundred for you, sweetheart.”

  “Thank you, Mr. King.” She smiled at Jacob. “I’m free later, you got nothing to do.”

  “Even in a shithole like this they know you, Jake,” Eddie Binhoff said.

  “Christ, most of the broads in this place are older than Morris,” Jacob King said, as if the waitress was not still at his elbow. She flounced off. “You got time to show me around, Eddie?”

  “I got twenty-four hours a day, it’s such an interesting place.”

  “I don’t have all that many guys from the neighborhood out here, Eddie.” It was as close as Jacob could come to admitting there were some hands he was not willing to play alone. “I need somebody to watch my back.”

  Eddie Binhoff clapped his hands to show the pit boss he was not palming any chips, then pulled off his apron. “You must be getting out of practice, Jake. There’s been two guys on your back from the moment you walked into this joint.”
>
  “So you like being back on the payroll, Eddie?”

  IV

  Just vamping now, I said to Chuckie O’Hara.

  Vamp, Chuckie said. We were sitting in the beamed two-story living room at his house in Carmel Highlands, with the ocean crashing against the rocks below. Occasionally I heard a noise from the study next door, and when I turned to look, I could see the wraithlike figure of Vera O’Hara, Chuckie’s mother, trying to hide behind the huge oaken door, afraid she might be caught eavesdropping. She was over ninety, and so deaf that had we had put our conversation on loudspeakers she could not have heard it, but it still did not stop her from trying to listen. She had loved Blue Tyler. Charlton should have married Blue, Vera O’Hara yelled at me when Chuckie told her I had seen Blue in Hamtramck, they would have made such a perfect couple, and I would be a grandmother and even a great-grandmother today. It’s true that Charlton was a little older, but he was exactly what Blue needed, a stabilizing influence, the loss of his leg would not have made any difference at all to her, she was so adorable, but Charlton just preferred those men friends of his, Charlton, I have never understood you, you were the catch of Hollywood, not to mention the women here in Carmel, but they’re just fortune hunters up here, and I don’t know what you ever saw in that Johnny person anyway.

  Gianni Pontecorvo, Chuckie said to me in a conversational tone, confident his mother could not hear a word he said. And then to Vera, enunciating every word carefully, Because Gianni had a palace in Venice and the most beautiful boys I have ever seen, dozens of them.

  Well, then, Vera O’Hara said, he had children and you didn’t, that’s one good thing you can say about him, and I never even thought he liked pussy.

  The word caught me by surprise.

  She does that, Chuckie O’Hara said. It’s hilarious. Her mind. Slips in and out. I didn’t even know she knew those words until she was eighty-six. I bet she’s a tomb of dirty stories. Then loudly to Vera, Aren’t you, Mother? And I want to hear every single dirty one.

  What? Vera O’Hara said, but it was time for her nap and a nurse took her away.

  Vamp, Chuckie repeated.

  All right, I said. This is tricky, because no one really knows what happened. Jacob is in Las Vegas, checking out La Casa Nevada. That we have to assume. And that’s where Morris arranges for him to find Eddie Binhoff …

  A wonderful character, Eddie Binhoff, Chuckie said.

  Absolutely. A find.

  Real?

  Absolutely. In the essentials.

  A composite.

  Well, I said, you look at the clips, and Jacob seems not to have known anyone except the women he was fucking, and Morris Lefkowitz and Jimmy Riordan, who were back in New York, and the people who didn’t want him out on the Coast …

  Moe and Lilo and Benny Draper, Chuckie said.

  And there had to be someone he could trust, someone he could talk to …

  The Walter Brennan part, Chuckie said. Someone he could bounce ideas off of …

  His muscle …

  I understand. Perfect …

  … and there was this guy named Eddie Binhoff who had done some work for Morris …

  In Nevada?

  I would think so. Probably. Yes. In Nevada. And other places.

  (In fact, I had found Eddie Binhoff’s name in The Index of American Crime and Criminals, cross-referenced both to Jacob King and to Morris Lefkowitz. The authorities claimed he had hit Rocco Mingus and Dominic Conti, among others, for Morris Lefkowitz, and had served two terms at Attica State Penitentiary in New York for manslaughter and aggravated assault. He seemed to have known Jacob in Brooklyn, and on one of her tapes, Blue had mentioned an Eddie, although she couldn’t remember his last name. That Eddie person, she called him, I think he was Jacob’s shooter, he was always around, he gave me the creeps. There was no Eddie Binhoff in either the Raul Flaherty or the Waldo Kline biography. The records of the Nevada Gaming Commission, however, indicated that an “Eddie Binyon,” sometimes known as “Allie Lazar,” formerly a blackjack dealer at the Bronco Club in Las Vegas, had been sought for questioning in connection with Jacob King’s death, but he had not come forward voluntarily and his whereabouts were never discovered.)

  I have no problem with Eddie Binhoff, Chuckie O’Hara said. I think we go with him. There was some strong, silent, dangerous type always with Jake, his name could have been Eddie, I can’t remember, and you’ve fleshed him out. It’s an under-the-title part anyway.

  (I could not help noticing that he was now talking in the first person plural, as in “We go with him.” Directors never change.)

  We’d only be taking a few liberties, Chuckie said. It’s the inner truth that matters. After all, Cary did play Cole Porter. And she played her butch, my dear.

  (I wondered how he had gone from Eddie Binhoff to Cole Porter, but didn’t press it.)

  I see them, Jake and Eddie, Chuckie said, going out to the site of La Casa Nevada. It’s night, of course. Wonderful images, night shooting in the desert. And we have those people who are following Jake, we mustn’t forget them. And Jake has to be formulating a plan …

  Jacob King peered through the darkness beyond the chain-link construction fence. Instinctively he wiped the dust from his shoes against his trouser legs, as if there in the sand he could maintain their gloss. Caught in the high beam of the Continental’s headlights, he could make out the outlines of a complex in the initial stages of construction. The contractor’s sign read:

  LA CASA NEVADA

  GRAND OPENING DECEMBER 31ST

  HEADLINING SHELLEY FLYNN IN THE MOJAVE ROOM

  HAPPY NEW YEAR

  Eddie Binhoff had positioned himself behind the open door on the passenger’s side of the Continental, the door offering a shield of sorts. He tensed as a car sped by, and then another, but neither one slowed down. A white Cadillac convertible had followed them from the Bronco to the city limits, then had turned off. A dumb fucking car to use as a tail. Maybe they just wanted Jacob to know they were there. As if Jacob would give a fuck. That was one thing that hadn’t changed. He had never given a fuck about anything. Behind him he heard Jacob King curse, and when he turned he saw Jacob at the top of the chain-link fence, examining a rip in his pants. Eddie Binhoff smiled. Jacob hated any imperfection in his wardrobe, and even claimed that an allergy to dry cleaning fluid justified his endless purchases of new clothing. As Eddie watched, Jacob jumped from the top of the fence and disappeared into the darkness.

  The night was turning cold. There were few things that frightened Eddie Binhoff, but the outdoors was one of them. He hated the desert, hated its vast emptiness and the creatures he imagined populating it. Of all the places where Morris Lefkowitz might have exiled him, he could not think of a worse place than Nevada. He heard the sound of another car and felt reassured. He was comforted by the weapon in his belt, comforted as well by his ability to inflict pain without remorse. He almost wished the car would stop, offering him an opportunity to threaten and cause hurt, but like the others it did not even slow down. Somehow it reminded him of the night he did Dominic Conti over in Jersey. On the spur of the moment, before he buried Dominic in a lime pit in Essex County, he cut his hands off and threw them in the trunk of his car. When he got back to Brooklyn, he wrapped up the hands and put them on ice at Curly Aderholt’s delicatessen in Brighton Beach. Curly was too scared to complain. Then when he did Albert Torrio, who had taken out Jack Caplan and had to be whacked, he placed the prints from Dominic Conti’s gun hand on the piece he left at the scene. The Mirror said that its police sources had privately indicated that Dominic Conti was a prime suspect in the murder of Jack Caplan. And all that was left of Dominic was in a lime pit in Essex County, New Jersey. It was nice the way things worked out sometimes.

  A noise behind him, and then Jacob King was scrambling back over the fence. More cursing as he once more tore his trousers. Then he was at Eddie Binhoff’s side. “The place is nothing. Unless you’re a fucking rattlesnake.”
>
  “Nothing?” Eddie Binhoff said, yanking his thumb back toward the construction site. “I’ve been in penitentiaries smaller than that.”

  “That’s what it looks like. Exactly. A fucking pen. It’s got no pools. It’s got no golf course. It’s got no tennis courts. It’s nothing.”

  “Jake, the game out here isn’t fun in the sun. The game is gambling.”

  “I told you, you don’t have any vision, Eddie,” Jacob King said, again examining his trousers. They were so torn that his undershorts were showing. He suddenly turned and kicked the fence, as if it was responsible for tearing his pants. The display of temper seemed to calm him. “Say you wanted to talk to the union guys on this,” he asked deliberately, “who would you talk to?”

  “You know who you see. You see Lilo. In L.A. And Lilo sees Benny Draper.”