“Jerk-off artists,” Eddie Binhoff repeated the next morning in the catwalk office occupied by Jacob King at the Acme Linen Supply Company, one of the businesses that Morris Lefkowitz owned in Los Angeles and that Jacob ostensibly ran. The noise outside the glassed-in aerie was deafening. A huge dryer tumbled table linens and an industrial pressing machine belched steam. On the floor shirtless workers yelled back and forth in Spanish. “They didn’t know what they were doing. You want to do the job right, they get you inside the garage, they close the door, then they drop you when you’re getting out of the car. A guy getting out of a car is helpless. You leave him by the front door, blood all over his suit, it makes a hell of picture in the paper the next morning.”
“You’re an artist, Eddie,” said Jacob King, who had left Philly Wexler by a mailbox in Washington Heights, making for a hell of a picture in the Daily News the next morning. “What’d you tell the people in the building about your car?”
“I said I had a load on, the attendant wasn’t there, I opened the door, and when I got back in the car, the chick with me, she put her foot on the accelerator, she was drunker than I was, I had to get her home, she was somebody’s wife, and that somebody wasn’t me. They love hearing that kind of shit.”
“What about the attendant, the one who’s usually there?”
“You know, I already thought about him, Jake, I thought about him a lot, even without your help.”
Jacob King smiled.
“His lucky night. His wife had a baby. Twelve-oh-one A.M., Queen of Angels Hospital, she went into labor at seven, he got the night off at seven-thirty, and yes, I did check out the hospital, Rosario Ynez Guttierez Cano, eight pounds thirteen ounces, the father was there.”
“Or you would’ve whacked him.”
Eddie Binhoff shrugged. Murder was his profession and he did not make jokes about it. “So we got a problem,” he said after a moment. He squeezed his cheek and pulled a shard of glass from it. “The problem’s name is Benny Draper. And the problem’s not going to go away until we take care of it.”
“Not by you, Eddie, and not by me.”
“Then who? The people in this town, they think you do a garage hit outside the garage. It’s the fucking sun is the reason, it bakes the brains out.”
Jacob King paused. “You remember Schlomo Buchalter?”
“Round-trip Buchalter, right? He started out with Morris. Christ, who didn’t start out with Morris? Jack the Ripper, maybe.”
“You wanted to take somebody out, it was the price of the hit, plus two round-trip tickets to Havana or someplace warm for Schlomo and a chick. You saw Schlomo at Hialeah, you knew somebody’d just been iced someplace cold.”
“Used to be Benny Draper’s shooter. I thought he was dead.”
“Dying. Cancer of the bowels. Poor bastard weighs about thirty-five pounds. He lives with his sister someplace out in the Valley.”
“What valley?”
“The San Fernando Valley, Eddie. If you’re going to live out here, you got to learn the geography. Think of it this way, the Valley’s like Queens, you know Queens, right?”
“Woodhaven Boulevard I know,” Eddie Binhoff said. He had done someone once on Woodhaven Boulevard, but it was so long ago he couldn’t remember the someone’s name, only the name of the street where he had done him, and how. The someone was in a gin mill on Woodhaven Boulevard and had left his car outside. A Hudson Terraplane. Eddie Binhoff remembered that, too. And he remembered it was raining. It was only the someone’s name he had trouble with. He had lifted up the Hudson’s hood, and yanked out its battery cables. Then he waited down the block in his own car. A long wait, but finally the someone comes out of the gin mill with a pretty good load on, and of course he can’t start his Terraplane. Eddie Binhoff drove over, got out of his car, and said, I got some jumper cables, you want some help? And the someone said sure. The last thing he expected to find on Woodhaven Boulevard at three o’clock in the morning in the rain was someone with a set of jumper cables, wanted to help him out. It made the someone feel good and not nervous. Exactly the way Eddie had planned it. Then he pulled out his piece, and said, Actually, I don’t have no jumper cables, and proceeded to shoot the someone a lot. Rocco, that was the someone’s name. Rocco … Rocco … Rocco … Mingus. Remembering Rocco Mingus’s name made Eddie Binhoff feel better. Like he wasn’t getting old. “So he lives in this valley, Schlomo. You checked him out already, didn’t you, Jake?”
“I think we go see Schlomo,” Jacob King said.
Schlomo Buchalter was sitting in a wheelchair in the sitting room of his small but immaculate Pacoima bungalow, a lap robe over his knees. His sister, Ada Buchalter, sorrow etched into her long plain face, hovered nearby, constantly wiping her hands on her apron. “It won’t be long now,” she mouthed to Jacob King, who had told her his name was Shimon Solomon, from the Temple Emmanu-El in Van Nuys. Both Jacob and Eddie Binhoff, who Jacob introduced as Leo Rivkin from Reseda, wore yarmulkes. What he and Leo wished to do, Shimon Solomon told Ada Buchalter, was to take Mr. Buchalter out for a ride, let him get a little sun, see some sights outside the home, they understood he rarely left the house, and such a pleasant house it was, too, Mr. Buchalter was fortunate to have so devoted a sister. They were not in the burial plot business, they assured her, they understood that the plans for his funeral service and interment had already been provided for by his layaway plan, and they would of course be available to fill out a minyan if the need arose. It was just they had both once heard the famous Rabbi Baruch Tyger say, when he was the guest rebbe at Temple Emmanu-El, that the younger healthier members of any congregation owed an obligation toward the elderly, the frail, and the less fortunate, a reaching out. As proof of their good intentions Jacob King gave Ada Buchalter the autographed copy of The Collected Sermons of Barry Tyger that he had bought with a fifty-dollar bill, keep the change, from the pile on sale in the lobby at the “I Am an American” dinner at the Ambassador Hotel.
They parked on a hill overlooking the Pacoima Reservoir. Eddie Binhoff retrieved the wheelchair from the trunk of Jacob King’s Cadillac convertible, then lifted Schlomo Buchalter from the open back seat, and placed him gently in it. Jacob pushed Schlomo to the top of the hill.
“I pushed a guy off a hill once,” Schlomo Buchalter said, staring down past the scrub at the placid waters of the reservoir. His voice was raspy and weak. “A very high hill. Outside Salt Lake City, in a state called Utah. You know what I remember about Utah? They shoot you there, you get the death penalty. That’s the only state they do that in. I done people in states where they got the electric chair, where they got the gas chamber, and where they hang you. I was very interested in Utah. What they do is, they tie you to a chair, they put a blindfold on and then a target over your heart and then they shoot you. You’re dead before you ever hear the shot. I like that. You got to go, then I think I like the way they do it in Utah best.”
The effort had weakened him, and his head rested on his chest. “The doctors, they say I got six weeks at the outside,” Schlomo Buchalter said. “I worry about Ada. She takes good care of me. I shit in a bag and Ada cleans it out, she never complains. The house is paid for and I got a little laid away for her, but not much.”
“Ada know how you made your living?” Eddie Binhoff said.
“Ada just wishes I got married,” Schlomo Buchalter said, not answering the question. “So I had kids or something she could take care of after I’m gone. That’s what Ada does best, she takes care of people. You take a look at Ada, you know why she never got married. A telephone pole is better-looking than she is.”
“I got a proposition, Schlomo,” Jacob King said.
“I didn’t think you brung me all the way out here just to show me the reservoir, Jake. I see you and Eddie come into the house wearing your yarmulkes, I think I’m going to get whacked, and Ada’s going to see it, I was wondering what I did to deserve that.”
“Benny Draper,” Jacob King said.
“You been giving him a lot of trouble, I hear. And I hear he used two fairies who tried to take you out, Eddie.”
Eddie Binhoff grunted.
“Benny’s a putz,” Schlomo Buchalter said presently. “I did a guy for him, some guy giving him static in the union, testified against him wearing a paper bag over his head. Benny says his name was Stivic, and he wanted me to hurt him. The claw hammer was his idea. I used a piano wire in my time, a regular screw driver, a Phillips screwdriver, a baseball bat, never a claw hammer until this time. Then Benny says put a bag over his head. I said fuck that, you put a bag over his head, everyone knows it’s Benny Draper that placed the order, they’re going to come after Benny then, and Benny’s going to give me up, bet on it. I am very careful when I do somebody, that’s why it’s the cancer that’s going to get me, I’m going to die in bed. So I do the guy, and drop him in the desert, but I don’t put no bag over his head. The deal was five large and two tickets on the Lurline to Honolulu, me and Ada, it would give her something to remember. Benny comes up with three large and no tickets on the Lurline, he says I got cancer, what do I want to go Hawaii for, none of the pineapple whores’ll want to fuck some guy who shits in a bag.”
The unmistakable voice of Benny Draper. No one could ever make it up.
“Then you can’t get close to him?”
“Sure I can get close to him. I don’t get mad, I get even. I say, you’re right, Benny, you wanted a bag over his head, I don’t give you no bag, I don’t deserve no tickets on the Lurline, my motto was always if you do a guy, follow orders, do him right, and this time I fucked up. You ought to retire, he says, and I liked that, a guy in this line of work doesn’t get to retire much, so I retire. I see Benny, though. He goes to this joint in East L.A., Obregon’s, it’s called, every Monday night, and I go there sometimes, I like the Mexican food, and Benny, he does, too, when he sees me, he picks up the tab and sticks a fifty in my pocket, like I’m some kind of charity case. So, Jake, you want me to do Benny, I’ll be glad to do Benny, if that’s what you have in mind.
“Ada will piss and moan, and I’ll say I’m dying, let me do what I want, and what I want is some Mexican food, it gives you gas, Ada, I don’t like to watch someone eat Mexican it gives gas to. I’ll take a cab to Obregon’s, the cabdriver pushes me inside, I always have a table in the back by the kitchen, force of habit, I like to see who comes in, who goes out, and I can always scram out through the kitchen, I see something I don’t like. They know me there, they place my wheelchair so I can see all the action in the joint, and when Benny comes in, he’ll come over, he’ll tell Mama Obregon it’s on him, and when he sticks the fifty in my pocket and leans over and pats me on the cheek, that’s when I’ll do him, I’ll have the piece in my lap under the blanket, I’ll get him right under the jaw, it’ll take off the back of his head.”
“You got a piece?” Eddie Binhoff said.
“You got a dick?” Schlomo Buchalter answered.
“Is it clean?”
“If what I think is going to happen does happen, it don’t matter if it’s clean or dirty, does it?”
“You know you got to get him with the first shot,” Jacob King said. “His people’ll take you out before you can get a second one in.”
“I figure it’ll be like Utah, Jake, better than in a hospital with tubes up your nose, and one of those catheter things in your dick,” Schlomo Buchalter said. “I got some numbers in mind.”
Schlomo Buchalter said he wanted ten thousand dollars, in advance and all cash, small bills, and he would put the money in a safety deposit box he had taken out in Ada Buchalter’s name at Federal Savings, the Glendale Branch. Ada was also to receive two round-trip tickets to Hawaii on the Lurline. “Is Morris still in the fur business, Jake?”
Jacob King nodded.
“She always wanted a beaver coat, Ada. I don’t know why, it’s hotter than shit out here, but I see her looking at the Life magazine, at the model wearing a beaver coat, and I think she’d like one.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem, Schlomo.”
“I think I better go home now, Jake. It’s been a nice day, a nice outing, but I’m getting a little tired.”
Schlomo Buchalter was silent as Jacob King wheeled him back down the hill to the parked convertible. Eddie Binhoff picked him up from the wheelchair and deposited him in the back seat, then replaced the chair in the trunk.
“How about a week from Monday?” Jacob King said. “I was thinking I’d go out and pay the Valiant a visit that night.”
Schlomo Buchalter’s head bobbed up and down. “One thing I should ask you,” he said as Jacob started the engine. “What happens if I lose my nerve?”
“Eddie’ll whack you,” Jacob King said without hesitating. “If you’re in the hospital with tubes up your nose, then he’ll whack you there.”
“That’s what I thought,” Schlomo Buchalter said. “I always liked to know all the angles.” He seemed to be counting the utility poles as they sped by. “You remember Leo Spain, Jake? Got his tongue cut out in a whorehouse on Fort Washington Avenue?”
Jacob King shook his head.
“You always got credit for that one, but it was me.”
DISPUTE OVER MONEY LEADS TO MOB SHOOTOUT
LOS ANGELES—(AP)—The bloodbath shootout Monday in an East Los Angeles restaurant that led to the deaths of labor leader Benjamin Draper and reputed Mob murderer Schlomo Buchalter was said to be the result of a dispute over money Draper had not paid to Buchalter for the alleged murder two years ago of Matthew Stivic, a dissident member of the Organization of Motion Picture Craft Employees. Buchalter, who county medical examiners say was terminally ill with …
XI
Of course i read the newspapers, Jimmy,” Morris Lefkowitz said into the telephone, folding that afternoon’s Journal-American over to a photograph of Jacob King, in black tie, entering the Ambassador Hotel for the Academy Awards dinner arm in arm with Blue Tyler, who was to present the best-picture Oscar. A dark-haired model in a floor-length red fox coat pirouetted before his desk, swishing the fur as if it were a tail. “And I see Jacob with this Blue or this Green. What kind of name is that for a girl?”
“It’s not a name like Lillian is the kind of name it’s not, Morris,” Jimmy Riordan said. “I go to see Lillian in Bay Ridge Tuesday, and when I’m there, Matthew comes in—”
“Who is this Matthew?” Morris Lefkowitz said. The model began untying the belt on the coat.
“Matthew is your godson, Morris. Matthew King, son of Jacob King and the former Lillian Aronow …”
Morris Lefkowitz was silent. He had little appreciation of sarcasm, and none when it was directed at him.
“… and Matthew asks his mother if they were millionaires,” Jimmy Riordan said, instantly translating the disapproval in Morris’s silence and reducing the level of his sarcasm. He hated having to invoke Lillian King. She was a chronic complainer, but via Lillian perhaps he could rein in Jacob. “And Lillian says why do you say that. And Matthew says because the Mirror is calling Papa a millionaire sportsman. And he shows Lillian the picture of Jake with this girl.”
“Jimmy, stop talking like a priest,” Morris Lefkowitz said, as he switched the telephone from one ear to the other. “So he’s sticking it into this Blue or Green, he also stuck it into Benny Draper. Next week he breaks ground in Nevada. And that is the point, that is why we sent Jacob out there in the first place.”
“Agreed, Morris, agreed. But he’s calling this place Playland, he never checked that out with us.” A pause. “Morris.” Jimmy Riordan tried to control his voice. It was beginning to rise, as it never had before when he talked to Morris Lefkowitz. It was Lilo Kusack who had let him know what Jacob was proposing to call the new hotel in the desert. Lilo Kusack who called Jimmy Riordan every day or so now. Jimmy did not trust Lilo Kusack any more than Lilo trusted him, but with Benny Draper’s timely demise and with Benny’s successor, Jackie Heller, indebted both to Morris Lefkowitz and to Jacob King, Lilo Ku
sack did not have too many ears into which he could whisper anymore, and whispering was his key to the kingdom. “It’s like he’s a lone wolf out there. He could’ve used Lilo’s plans for La Casa Nevada, we could’ve worked it out, Lilo was willing, but no, Jake’s got to get a new architect, he says Lilo’s hotel was going to look like Attica, you don’t want a hotel looks like a pen, he says, you want a joint people will feel comfortable in. Well, you don’t call a place in the goddamn desert Playland either.” Lilo Kusack’s opinion, passed on to Morris as Jimmy’s own. “You call it Eldorado. You call it Rancho Diablo, the Pyramid. Playland sounds like Seventh Avenue.”
“I am Seventh Avenue, Jimmy,” Morris Lefkowitz said. He motioned the model to the side of his desk, then reached up and finished untying her belt. “That’s Jacob’s little joke. He knows I’d understand.”
The model let the red fox fall from her shoulders. She was naked underneath it.
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