Neon Mirage

by Max Allan Collins

  He nodded that he understood, said, “But I’d be very disappointed if you didn’t stick around.”

  At least there was no menace in the voice.

  I said, “I’d have Fred Rubinski send somebody top-notch to replace me.”

  “You’re who I want, Nate.”

  I waved it off. “It probably won’t happen, but I just wanted to be up-front with you, Ben.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said, and he finally began to eat his steak, which was surely cold by now.

  After dinner, he painted a picture of the gala opening he was planning, including dozens of Hollywood stars that George Raft and Billy Wilkerson were lining up for him. He had Jimmy Durante and Xavier Cugat booked in as the floor show.

  He was still holding court, the little group drinking cocktails, when at a few minutes after ten I stood and excused myself.

  “Where you headed?” Siegel wondered.

  “To my room,” I said. “Train travel tires me out.”

  “I’ll walk you there,” he said, and he did.

  As we ambled down the hallway to 404, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I wanted to ask you something in private, Nate. Something personal.”

  “Sure, Ben.”

  “Did you take this job to get near Peggy Hogan again?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “I wouldn’t stand between you two, if…”

  “There’s nothing between us anymore,” I said. That, I feared, was no lie.

  He took his hand off my shoulder. He seemed almost embarrassed as he said, “I figured maybe this afternoon you might run into her, and sort the thing out…”

  Had he planned it?

  I said, “I did run into her. But like I said, there’s nothing between us, now.”

  “Maybe you still got feelings that she doesn’t.” He made a clicking sound in his cheek. “That kind of thing can be rough. I figured maybe that was why you said something about going back to Chicago. Maybe the situation was making you uncomfortable…”

  “I thought Virginia Hill was your girl, Ben.”

  He shrugged, smiled his usual dazzling smile. “She is. And she’s a lot of girl. A lot of woman. Ain’t she a handful? She’d tell the Pope to go to hell.”

  “What about Peggy?”

  He shook his head no, the smile gone. “There’s nothing between her and me, either—strictly business.” And the smile reappeared, but a modified, only moderately dazzling version. “I think maybe she’s kind of sweet on me, but I’m not gonna take advantage of that, cute kid though she is. She’s gonna go far with my organization, if she wants to. Normally, I’m not much on career girls, but she’s got a good business head. Maybe it’s because she’s got Jim Ragen’s blood in her.”

  “I can remember having Jim Ragen’s blood on me.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that, Nate?”

  “Nothing. I just…I’m just not crazy about getting involved in your business, Ben. Even though you are legit, these days. I’d like to shake this rep I have of being a mob hanger-on. Doing work for you isn’t going to help that.”

  He was looking at me carefully, like a bug collector studying a specimen. “You did come out here to take her home, didn’t you? And you found out she doesn’t want to go back with you, and now you want to run out on me?”

  I let out a sigh that must’ve betrayed how weary I was. “I don’t know, Ben. It wasn’t exactly like that. But it wasn’t exactly not like that, either.”

  “Stick around, Nate. Time is short, and I need your help—a couple ways. There’s ten grand in it, if you stick it out till after the opening.”

  That was a lot of money. Normally, I would’ve done jumping jacks in the nude in Marshall Field’s window, for dough like that. But in my present mood I didn’t much give a shit.

  I said, “I’ll give you my decision first thing tomorrow morning, Ben.”

  “I’ll respect what you decide, whatever it is. I like you, Nate. I think we could work well together.” He extended a hand, and smiled again, and we shook hands, and I found a smile to give him back. He walked back down the hall—swaggered, actually—and I shook my head and went into my room.

  I sat on the edge of the bed; the Indian chief on the wall was staring at my balefully. Peggy wasn’t what was bothering me. Siegel himself was. He’d bitten off too much, here. Like all bad executives, he wanted to run his whole operation; thought he had to do every little job himself; thought only he was up to the job, any job, every job. For a smart guy, it was a stupid way to do things. And it would kill him.

  Maybe literally, considering the people backing him. Six million bucks was a lot to spend pursuing a pipe dream, particularly when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing where making it a reality is concerned. I’d seen first hand that the Last Frontier, while doing okay, was not exactly attracting land-office business. Siegel looked at the stretch of desert that was highway 91 and saw some vision of the future, a neon mirage that might or might not turn real someday. Whichever, I had a very strong feeling that this fabulous arena Siegel was erecting was nowhere I wanted to perform.

  Peggy was a lost cause. And Siegel was playing a losing game.

  There was no reason for me to get caught up in any of it.

  I nodded, stood, and began to pack my bag. There was a midnight train back to L.A., where I could touch base with Fred, get a replacement lined up for Siegel, and fly home.

  I had just latched my suitcase when somebody knocked at my door.

  I answered it, wondering who the hell it could be.

  And who the hell else could it be, the way this day had gone, but Virginia Hill.

  She was a little swacked, but what else is new? She looked sexily zoftig in her halter top and slacks, her pale, slightly plump tummy pulsing.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, and did.

  I shut the door.

  “I hope you came out here to take that little cunt back home with you,” she said, leaning against the door.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about that fucking little Irish slut. If you still care about her, take her home, get her the fuck out of here.”

  “That isn’t up to me, Ginny.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you this, pal: if she’s banging Ben, I’m gonna bang her.”

  And, with a sneer as nasty as she was drunk, she raised her hand and made a gun of it and shot at me, saying, “Bang. She’s fucking dead.”

  She went to the door, opened it, looked back over her shoulder at me, like a parody of a pin-up pose, and said, “Word to the wise.”

  And she shut the door. Hard.

  I stood looking at it.

  Then I unpacked.

  The sign said

  F

  L

  A

  M

  I

  N

  G

  O, and poised above it as if considering flight was a neon-outlined caricature of that unlikely long-legged bird that so embodies both awkwardness and grace. Its pleasure palace namesake had neither of these, but did manage to marry two contrary qualities: stark lines and soft pastels.

  A ghostly olive-green structure in the modern geometric mode, the Flamingo sprawled across a stretch of sandy nothing along a blacktop road to nowhere, a.k.a. Los Angeles. It was on the left, several miles beyond the Vegas city limits, its Frank Lloyd Wrightish lines an aberration against the timelessness of the desert and the purpleness of Black Mountain shimmering aginst the morning sky, a morning that was blowing some, sending sand and stones and sagebrush skittering across the highway, some of the gritty tumbleweeds piling up in balls against the Flamingo’s foundation, as if nature were trying, without much luck, to topple the structure. Nature simply didn’t have the determination of Benjamin Siegel.

  Off to the right was a lot where I parked the used Buick I’d been provided. Not surprisingly, that lot was fairly empty, but for a few pick-up trucks and other vehicles that probably belong
ed to those few workers within who were local. Siegel was putting his mostly imported workers up at motels and rooming houses in town, and bringing them in to his forty-acre playground by bus and truckload each morning.

  Past an imposing stone waterfall and under a flamingo canopy, the fancy brick front entry led into a lobby lined with slot machines; a small check-in counter for hotel guests was at left, but at right, going down five steps, was the vast casino, with its various tables (21, roulette and craps), its plush carpeting and green leather walls, looking, in this somber unoccupied state, like a museum of gambling. There was no whir of the roulette wheel, no metallic ka-chunk from the one-armed bandits, no silver-dollar clink, no businesslike dealer voices calling out, “Are your bets down? The number is—,” and no crowd noise, winners and losers mixing together like equals in the din. Nothing but the echo of hammering from some other part of the building, as workmen tried to pound Bugsy’s dream into reality.

  I found him behind the dining room beyond the casino, in the kitchen, which was a good-size, modern affair, blinding white formica here, shining stainless steel there, and not a chef in the place.

  Unless you counted Ben Siegel, who was wearing a snappy gray suit and dark blue tie and pale blue shirt.

  I was wearing a suit and tie, too, by the way—though hardly as natty an ensemble as Siegel; but I couldn’t get into the “Come as you are, pod’ner” swing, either. I was working.

  “Much better,” Siegel was saying, to nobody in particular, hands on his hips, beaming, basking in the glow of the spotless kitchen.

  “Ben?” I said.

  He looked at me and grinned and waved me over. “Look at this,” he said. He was pointing to two facing walls of ovens. “Plenty of room there, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Sure.”

  “Before I had ’em do it over, these ovens opened right onto each other. What kinda layout is that? I’m not paying the top chefs in the business so they can fry their asses off!”

  “What did this little remodeling job cost?”

  “Thirty grand,” he shrugged. He looked tan and fit, but his eyes were bloodshot as well as bagged. “Come on, you need to meet somebody.”

  He led me out through the restaurant area, where the smell of paste was in the air, half a dozen wallpaperers in white coveralls and painters’ caps at work, dealing with heavy brocade material that had to be tricky as hell. The plush carpet was covered by tarps; nonetheless, Siegel stopped in mid-track and bent and flicked at several spent cigarette butts, like Sherlock Holmes examining a muddy footprint.

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  The men, several of whom were up on ladders, stopped their work at once; turned in the direction of what by now was surely a familiar voice.

  Siegel stood, having scraped the butts and ashes into his palm. “I’d like to catch the dirty pig who dropped these,” he snarled. Then he wadded the butts in his fist and walked over to a waste barrel and dumped them in.

  The men exchanged looks and one of them, presumably the foreman, muttered, “Yes, Mr. Siegel,” and they turned back to their struggle.

  Immediately pleasant again, he led me through a corridor of slot machines, saying, “The dining room is very important, you know. You can’t hope to make a profit on it—it’s a come-on. Food service has got to be tops for the high rollers, but at the same time the prices can’t scare away the two-dollar customers, either.”

  “Keep an eye on your chefs,” I said.

  “Why’s that?” he said.

  “A chef can steal from you a hundred different ways. Kickbacks from suppliers. Selling prime cuts of meat as scrap. Lots of ways.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, giving me a pleased, appraising look. “You do know your stuff.”

  “Security’s my racket. I can tell you right now that you need more people under you—people you can trust. Or everybody and his dog is going to steal you blind.”

  He nodded. “And I’m gonna do that, Nate—down the road. Come on out and see the pool.”

  We walked out onto an immense patio that led to a luxurious Olympic-size pool, the edges of which had a scalloped design; below the blue ripples of sun-reflecting water you could make out a mosaic pink flamingo. This patio was an oasis in the midst of a vast well-trodden expanse of barren desert real estate. Over to the right of the aridness, as I stood with the casino and restaurant complex behind me, was a rambling modern building which here was two-stories, there three-stories, and in the middle four, making it the tallest structure on the grounds. A crew of trowel-wielding plasterers on scaffolding was giving the massive building a skin of stucco, which clung to wire mesh covering the building’s cement surface.

  A small fat man in an Hawaiian swim suit was sitting under an umbrella beside the pool; he had a bottle of beer on the table next to him and he was wearing sunglasses. He was as brown as a berry. His body was round and hairless, a beach ball with legs. And he had the face of a self-satisfied bulldog.

  “This hardworking gentleman,” Siegel said good-naturedly, “is Bud Quinn, formerly of the LAPD.”

  “Don’t get up,” I said.

  Quinn smiled widely, making his cheeks tight, and it should have been a jolly smile, but it wasn’t really a smile at all. It was an expression the hard fat little man had adopted to use at appropriate times, to affect humanity.

  “You’d be Nate Heller,” he said, removing the sunglasses, thrusting a pudgy hand forward.

  Reluctantly I took it. Shook it. It was as moist as Sedway’s, and even more repellent.

  “I didn’t know you were working for Ben,” I said. “Let alone his top security man.”

  Piggy eyes narrowed in pouches of fat. “Have we met?”

  “No. I’ve just heard about you.” I turned to Siegel. “I take it you haven’t mentioned to Fred Rubinski that Quinn’s in your employ.”

  “Why, no,” Siegel said. Then with a little edge in his voice he added: “I didn’t know I needed to clear my staff with Fred.”

  I shrugged. “It’s just that Fred’s late partner and Lt. Quinn had their share of run-ins.”

  Quinn grinned yellowly. “Jake took a likin’ to my rubber hose. I never knew a boy who took to the goldfish like Jake.”

  I pointed a finger at him. “Have some respect for the dead. You’re going to be that way yourself some day.”

  “No disrespect meant,” Quinn said, standing now, gesturing with both hands, trying to smile away my ill will. “I liked Jake. He was a good boy. He put money in my pocket, time to time.”

  Siegel, frowning slightly, said, “Is it going to be a problem, you fellas working together? I had no idea there was bad blood…”

  “There’s no bad blood,” I said. “We don’t even know each other. Forget I said anything.”

  Quinn smiled magnanimously. “No hard feelings, Nate. Mind if I call you Nate?”

  I did, but said, “Not at all, Bud. We’ll get along fine, you and me.”

  “Good,” Siegel said, putting a hand on either of our shoulders. “Bud isn’t working today, but I asked him to stop by so you two could get acquainted—set up a time to work with his people.”

  “I hear you’re gonna teach us all about pickpockets,” Quinn said, in a sing-songey way. Pretending to be friendly but reeking condescension.

  “Just a few pointers. Is this afternoon too soon?”

  “Not at all,” Quinn said. “I got a few boys on the grounds, keeping an eye on the hired help and the delivery people. Can’t be too careful—pilferage can be a problem, you know, with all this building material here, in such short supply elsewhere.”

  “Right,” I said. “What about the rest of your staff?”

  “They’ve all settled in,” he said. “Found apartments and homes. Regular Las Vegas residents, now, looking forward to a long and happy association with the fine, fabulous Flamingo club.”

  “Hotel,” Siegel corrected.

  “Hotel,” Quinn amended.

  “Why don’t you cal
l ’em all in so we can meet here around one-thirty,” I said. “In the casino—it’s not being used for anything, and the construction there seems complete.”

  “Nothing left but to put the new fireproofed curtains up,” Siegel said, smirking to himself.

  “Casino’ll be just dandy, Nate,” Quinn said, putting his dark glasses back on. “Looky here, I’m sorry about your friend Fred’s partner. No offense meant. Got run down by a car, didn’t he?”

  “Well, Fred’s more than a friend, Bud. He’s vice-president of my detective agency, and that makes his late partner an associate of mine, even though we never met.”

  “That don’t make sense to me,” Quinn said, thoroughly puzzled, and a little disgusted.

  “It does to me,” I said. “That’s what counts.”

  Siegel was watching me warily, and then said, “You want to come along with me, Nate? I can show you around a bit.”

  He took me across the stretch of scalp-like ground to the building where the plasterers on scaffolding hovered like a dozen Harold Lloyds as directed by Busby Berkeley. We went inside, where a carpet layer was at work in the small lobby; the ceiling rose through the floor above, creating a circular balcony, making room for a fancy chandelier. The sounds of carpentry echoed down, making the chandelier’s crystal shake and shiver. The carpet layer, on his hands and knees, looked up at Siegel and smiled and nodded, saying “Mr. Siegel.”

  “What the hell is this?” Siegel snapped.

  “Pardon?” The man had to work to get his voice over the hammering coming from above.

  “Are you responsible for this?” He was pointing to a sooty palm-print on an as-yet-to-be-painted plaster wall.

  “No, Mr. Siegel.”

  “You tell your foreman for me that I’ll kick his ass back to Salt Lake City if I see that sort of thing again. What, do you people think you’re working in a cheap bar somewhere? This is the Flamingo—and don’t fuckin’ well forget it!”

  He stalked up the nearby stairway. I shrugged at the kneeling carpet layer and he shrugged back and returned to his work and I followed our mutual boss up the stairs.

  “What is this building, Ben?”

  “The hotel. The check-in’s in the main building, but all the rooms are here.”