Neon Mirage

by Max Allan Collins

  Siegel gestured to the framed photos around him. “What about your buddies at MGM? Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, Spencer Tracy, Ronald Colman?”

  “Ben. Look. Old man Hearst passed the word around the studios. He’s against the whole idea of stars coming out here for this—everybody’s been told to stay away.”

  Siegel slammed a fist on his desk and his framed photos rattled. “That lousy cocksucker! What’s he got against me?”

  “I don’t know, Ben.”

  “It’s that fucking Louella Parsons. She’s always on my ass. Calls me a gangster, in print!”

  “What can I say? I’ll be there.”

  “Who else?”

  “Lon McAllister, Sonny Tufts, Charlie Coburn…a few others.”

  Siegel’s face had slowly gone from red to white. “I advertise Ava Gardner and instead give ’em Sonny Tufts, is that it?”

  “Hell, I think it’s white of Tufts to show, considering the pressure.”

  Siegel, calming, said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m not gonna take it out on the ones with stones enough to show. What about Jessel?”

  “He’s coming. He’s set to emcee.”

  “Yeah, he can deliver the fuckin’ eulogy.”

  “Ben, there’ll be enough stars to justify your advertising and everything. And Wilkerson says that all the reporters you invited are coming.”

  Siegel smirked humorlessly. “After the free ride I promised ’em, you can bet on it. I sent out cases of whiskey to a couple dozen of the bastards.” Abruptly he stood, looked sharply my way. “Have you seen Chick around?”

  Chick was Virginia Hill’s twenty-one-year-old brother, a nice enough kid, who was working as a robber, that is, one of the trusted hands who emptied the slot machines and hauled the bags of coin to the counting room.

  “Yeah,” I said, “he’s working. If he isn’t on the floor, he’s in the counting room.”

  “Get him, would you?”

  I didn’t much like playing gopher to Siegel, but I didn’t much feel like telling him to go fuck himself, either. I found Chick in the counting room and hauled the boy back.

  “What do you need, Ben?” he asked. He was wearing a white shirt and black pants—which was one of the two standard casino employee uniforms, the other and more common being a tux; even just the modified formal wear looked odd on Chick, who was a kid with dark blond hair, slicked back in the Raft manner, and pointed, callowly handsome features.

  Siegel, still standing, dug in his pants pocket; he withdrew a wad of bills and peeled off ten one-hundred dollar bills; he scattered them on his desk like more notes to himself.

  “There’s a grand,” he told the kid. “Take it and do some shopping in L.A. Get some nice presents for the reporters, the columnists. Neckties, shirts. Oh, hell, you know.”

  “Sure, Ben. Should I drive, or what?”

  “Naw, I want you back by tomorrow afternoon. Catch the first available flight.” He peeled off another hundred.

  Chick collected the money, smiled goofily like a teenager whose dad just handed him the keys to the new DeSoto. He stood there with the money in his hands for a few moments, until Siegel rather irritatedly waved him off, and the kid slipped out the door.

  “We’ll keep these reporters happy,” Siegel said. Then he put his cigar out in a tray and came out from behind the desk and Raft stood and the men went out into the lobby; I trailed behind, not having been dismissed yet.

  “Let me show you the pool,” Siegel said, his arm around Raft now.

  I was about to fall away, but then decided to go along. I wanted to see if Peggy was playing bathing beauty today.

  Turned out she wasn’t. Just a bevy of waitresses, cigarette girls and hookers, soaking up the winter sun.

  So was a guy in a tux, his tie loose around his neck.

  Siegel’s face reddened again.

  He broke away from Raft and went over and kicked the chaise longue, whose pale, round-faced, startled occupant sat up and looked at Siegel with wide, terror-filled eyes.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Siegel snarled.

  “Just—just s-sitting here…”

  “Get back to work, you bum, before I boot your ass out on the highway.”

  The round-faced man looked at me and then at Raft, whom he obviously recognized but was too bewildered by Siegel’s performance to be impressed by the presence of a mere movie star.

  The man could only stutter: “B-but I’m a ga-ga-ga…”

  “Spit it out!”

  “Guest!”

  “What?” Siegel said. Taken aback.

  “I don’t work here…I’m a guest.”

  Raft covered his mouth but I didn’t bother. My hand wouldn’t have been big enough to hide the grin.

  Siegel, very embarrassed, started brushing off the shoulders of the guy’s tux, as if it had gotten dirty, which it hadn’t. He did his best to make it up to the guy, handing him one of the same courtesy cards the newspapermen got, giving him a free ride on everything except gambling itself.

  We walked back into the casino and Siegel said, “Brother, is my face red.”

  Frequently.

  “I guess I oughta watch my fuckin’ temper…shit! Do you see who that is?”

  A tall, slightly heavy-set man in a pinstripe suit, with satanically shaggy eyebrows, was standing at a slot machine, studying it like a sociologist might a pygmy hut.

  Raft said nothing, but the mask of his face was grim.

  “Pegler,” I said.

  Siegler looked at me with a vicious, self-satisfied smile. “Westbrook Pegler is right.”

  I shrugged. “Well, you wanted to attract newspapermen.”

  “That bastard’s been cutting me up. Called me a hoodlum and carpetbagger. Called me Bugsy. In syndication.”

  I could see Siegel’s shoulders tensing; his hands were fists.

  Raft put a hand on Siegel’s arm. “Ben—he’s been cutting me up in his column, too. Ever since that gambling bust, but so what? That’s his racket. Live and let live.”

  “I’m going to kill him,” Siegel said, quietly, smiling, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him.”

  It was times like these I wished I’d taken my father’s advice and finished college.

  “You’re not killing anybody,” Raft said. “You’re going to ruin it for yourself, if you do. Get a grip, baby-blue eyes.”

  Siegel visibly softened.

  But he walked over to Pegler, who had inserted a quarter into the slot machine and was yanking back the arm.

  Raft and I followed; we seemed to be backing Siegel up, but in reality we were poised to grab and brace him, if necessary. Pegler, who I’d had a run-in with in Chicago back in ’39, looked right at me and didn’t recognize me. Like him, I was older and heavier, now.

  “Mr. Pegler,” Siegel said.

  “Yes?” Pegler said, losing his quarter, turning his gaze on Siegel, eyebrows raised, voice patrician. Pegler was one of those columnists who made a big deal about being for the common man while at the same time considering himself above just about everybody.

  “My name is Ben Siegel.”

  Pegler began to smile; he was searching for the right pithy comment, when Siegel stopped him.

  With Pegler’s own weapon, words: “This is my casino. If you’re not out of here in five minutes, I’m going to take you out. Personally.”

  Pegler’s smile wilted. He looked at Siegel carefully, slowly. Siegel’s back was to me, so I don’t know what expression he was showing Pegler. Whatever it was, it was enough to make the powerful columnist swallow thickly, tuck tail between his legs and go.

  Siegel turned to us and opened his two hands like a magician displaying something that had disappeared. “See? I can control my temper when I want to.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because it’s time you knew something.”

  “What’s that?”

  I turned to Raft. “Why don’t you park yourself at a blackjack table or something
, for a while? Your face attracts too much attention. We need to be a little less conspicuous for a few minutes.”

  Raft shrugged. “I’ll try the chemin-de-fer room.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  Then he moved off, and I took Siegel by the arm. “What do you have in mind,” I asked him, “where these gambling losses are concerned?”

  “In mind?”

  “What do you intend to do about it?”

  He shrugged facially. “Well, we’re switching dice more frequent. Cards, too. Tonight I’m gonna move dealers from table to table…”

  “Some of your dealers need to be moved farther away than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you patted them down on their way out the door, you’d find subs full of chips.” A “sub” was a hidden pocket.

  His eyes tensed. “You’ve seen this?”

  “Have you got your temper in check?”

  “Nate, I’m cool as a cucumber.”

  “Good, because the answer is yes. I’ve seen half a dozen dealers sweeping chips into subs.”

  “Christ, I interviewed them all myself!”

  “Never mind that. Just take a look there.”

  I nudged his attention to the roulette table where I’d been leading him; we were now about five feet away from it, behind and to one side of the croupier, a thin, hawk-faced man who was pushing chips across the table to a pockmarked heavy-set gentleman in a brown suit. The problem was, the pockmarked heavy-set gentleman who was having chips pushed his way was not winning.

  “That guy isn’t hitting any winning numbers,” Siegel whispered harshly to me, after a while, his eyes large.

  “Right,” I said. I nodded toward the croupier. “You get the pit boss to take him off the table. I’ll handle the phony player.”

  Siegel, eyes narrowing, nodded. He turned away.

  I walked up to the pockmarked player, thinking Siegel was off getting the pit boss.

  But the Bug had changed his mind, because he was standing right behind the hawk-faced croupier.

  “I oughta kill you, you son of a bitch!” he said, and punted the croupier’s ass.

  It lifted the man off the floor and sent him skidding across the table, chips scattering. When he came to a stop, his hawkish nose pointed to the double-00 on the numbered felt.

  “You lose,” Siegel said, and reached over and picked him up like baggage and hurled him into the aisle.

  Without looking back, the ex-croupier picked himself up and ran. The astonished onlookers—and the very pleased Ben Siegel—watched the guy hurtle up into the lobby and out the front doors.

  Siegel gestured big with his hands, like a ringmaster. “No cover charge folks!” he said, letting loose his dazzler of a smile.

  And people, smiling too, if not dazzlingly, shaking their heads, chattering amongst themselves, turned back to their gambling.

  Siegel came over to me and slipped his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go have a talk.”

  We walked across the terraced green grounds that not so long ago had been barren, and he walked me across the painted, carpeted lobby of the unfinished hotel and took me up the elevator to the penthouse suite.

  We sat on the chintz-covered sofa. He was drinking tonic water; I had some rum on ice.

  He was shaking his head. “I hired those guys myself, Nate.”

  He meant the dealers and other casino floor people.

  “Most of them local?” I asked.

  “Right. I screened them all personally.”

  “After Sedway thinned the pack, you did.”

  “Right.” His eyes slitted. “What are you saying?”

  “I think there’s widespread cheating going on out there. And I don’t think it’s random.”

  “You mean, it’s organized?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Moey?”

  “Who else?”

  “What about Quinn?”

  I shook my head no. “He’s not smart enough, and besides, I put him on notice. He’s too scared of you to pull anything. He’s even scared of me. Moey? Moey resents you, and that breeds a kind of bravery.”

  “Moey resents me?”

  “I think it goes back to that scuffle you had over politics.”

  He sat and thought about that.

  I went on: “I think he’s angling to take over. My guess is he’s trying to make you look bad to your friends back east.”

  Siegel’s face tensed with thought. “And if he convinces them I’m a bad manager, they’ll ask him to step in?”

  “Yeah. He seems to be in pretty thick with Lansky.”

  Siegel nodded. “He is at that. You know what Meyer said to me last night? He said, ‘Ben, you’re a smart dreamer, but a lousy engineer.’ Can you imagine?”

  “Ben, none of this is my business…I’ve told you what I know, and what I think.” I was getting uncomfortable being privy to Siegel’s inside thoughts.

  But he pressed on: “He just got back, Meyer did, from Havana. They just had a big meeting down there, with Charlie Lucky.”

  Luciano. A big secret syndicate confab in Havana, and I knew about it. Great.

  I rose. “Ben, you’re getting into areas…”

  “Sit down, Nate. I trust you.”

  “That isn’t the point…”

  “Sit down, Nate.”

  I sat.

  “Meyer said the boys aren’t happy with me, the money I spent, here. They want me to bring in a top hotel man. They want to hire somebody from one of the downtown joints to run my casino.” He grinned but there was desperation in it. “You know what else?”

  I said nothing.

  “You’ll get a kick out of this, being Ragen’s pal and all. They want me to fold Trans-American up. Guzik has control of Continental now, through that McBride character. I told Meyer, sure—just buy me out.”

  My mouth was dry. Nonetheless, I managed to ask, “How much did you ask?”

  “Two million.”

  Jesus.

  “I’m pulling in twenty-five grand a week,” he said. “Why should I give it up, otherwise? They’ll make their money back in less than two years. It’s a fair offer.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I need the money,” he said. “This place eats money.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Moey, huh?” he said. Then, reflective, he went on: “Meyer said they heard bad things about me. Some of the boys said they heard I was skimming off the top of the construction money. Jeez!” He shook his head, gestured toward the two picture windows, out of which the terraced lawn and the scalloped-edged pool could be seen. “Those wop bastards, don’t they know I put every available penny into this place, including my own? And my heart and my fuckin’ soul? This is my…what, monument, the thing that’ll be around when I’m gone that’ll make people know I was here.”

  “When you get the kinks ironed out,” I said, carefully, “it’ll be a great success, I think.”

  “I think so, too. But Meyer’s putting the pressure on me. Something else they heard was I got half a million stashed away in Switzerland. I sent Tabby to Zurich to pick out some furniture for the hotel rooms and from that they figure I’m stuffing their dough in a numbered account. Jesus!”

  “What pressure are they putting on you?”

  He sipped his tonic water, shrugged. “They expect me to make a good showing, quick.”

  I smiled thinly. “That seals it. Sedway.”

  He looked at me and slowly began to nod. “Sure. He’s sabotaging my casino—that’s where I gotta make it to make it.”

  “Right.”

  Siegel stood and walked to the window, surveyed his kingdom with a smile. “I’m gonna fool the bastards. I’m gonna pull it off.”

  I stood. “I hope you do. Look, I’m going to go back to the casino and keep an eye on the security staff.”

  He turned back to me. “Nate, I was serious about giving you a permanent position, here.”
/>   “Well, uh, I was serious when I said I was flattered…”

  “I know, I know, but you don’t want to work under Quinn. Well hell, I plan to fire the fat little crooked son of a bitch, anyway. You think I don’t know how you managed to stop the pilferage so goddamn fast? You weren’t here five minutes before you spotted the problem.”

  “You would’ve, too, if you weren’t trying to do so much.”

  “I know, I know. And I will hire some of those people the boys want me to hire, hotel man, casino manager, down the road. I’ll start hiring now, right this minute. How’s this for openers? Stay on and be my security chief, Nate. It’ll pay you sixty grand a year and fringes. You can live right here at the Flamingo.”

  “That’s good money. That’s attractive. But I have my own business.”

  He shrugged. “You could keep it going. Own it, keep an eye on it, but put somebody you trust in charge. Like Fred’s going to run your west coast office.”

  “Fred’s a partner. That’s different.”

  He patted the air with one hand, setting his tonic water on the bar. “Just think about it. For the time being, let’s go back to the casino and see if there’s anymore dishonest dealers who need a kick in the ass.”

  I laughed. “I imagine the cheating’s been cut way back since that little scene.”

  “It’s what the cops call a deterrent, right?”

  “Right.”

  Siegel laughed and we went out a side exit that led down a slanted ramp-like passageway that opened at the side of the hotel nearest the main building. We walked back toward the pool.

  Sedway was standing near one of the youngest-looking of the bathing beauties, a little busty blonde number, coming on to her as subtly as a safe falling out a window; but then she could see it coming and didn’t seem to be moving out of the way, so what the hell. He was wearing a white jacket with a red carnation, similar to Ben’s apparel of the evening before; but a weasel in a dinner jacket is still a weasel.

  “Moe!” Siegel called out.

  Moey looked over at Siegel and gave him a slippery sideways smile and reluctantly left his quiff and trotted over.

  “Yes, Ben?”

  Siegel put a hand on the little man’s shoulder. “What’s the idea badmouthing me to Meyer?”