As it was getting dark, Trillium finally showed up. “Please don’t get angry.”
“Haven’t been angry since what’s-his-name missed that foul shot.” He searched his memory. “Name escapes me, right off hand. . . . Oh well. Where’ve you been?” From the look on her face and the way she’d walked in—the self-conscious gait of a punk on an exercise yard—he had an idea.
“I know I should have told you, but I wanted to see him first. I had his phone number all the time—sorry—and just kept calling and calling till finally he answered.” She had showed up close to dawn at the address Puck gave her, an apartment over a garage in North Las Vegas, next to a vacant lot full of brittlebush. The boys were drinking beer and as usual discussing their machismo rankings, not to mention who’d sing melody and who harmony on “Wunderbar,” from Kiss Me, Kate.
Trillium either grew a little dim on the details or wasn’t into reminiscing, though Doc gathered that the reunion had gone on for some while, with Einar considerately stepping out at some point to make a beer run down the boulevard.
“You didn’t happen to mention to Puck I’m looking for a quick word, nothin like ’at?”
“In fact, I had to go through a lengthy routine to convince him you weren’t a hit man.”
“We can meet wherever he feels safe.”
“He suggested a casino in North Las Vegas called the Kismet Lounge. He and Einar don’t like to show up till after midnight.”
“You gonna be there, or . . .”
“Easier if I could take the car, actually. Run a few errands?”
Doc found a joint and lit it and called up Tito, who was just about to go to work. “You got time to run me up to North Vegas later tonight?”
“No prob-limo, as we say in the business—Inez likes to stay through the last show anyway. She can’t get enough of that Jonathan Frid.”
“What,” Doc blinking, “Barnabas? the vampire guy on Dark Shadows?”
“He’s got a lounge act right here on the Strip, Doc. Everybody in the business loves him—Frank, Dean, Sammy—at least one of them’s in the audience every night.”
“Ain’t just Inez,” Adolfo put in on the extension, “your kids carry lunch boxes with that guy’s face on ’em, too.”
“Gee, what kind of material’s he sing?” Doc wondered.
“Seems partial to Dietz & Schwartz,” Tito said. “His closing number is always ‘Haunted Heart.’”
“He also does Elvis,” added Adolfo, “singing ‘Viva Las Vegas.’”
“I gave him a ride once or twice, he tips good.”
Trillium sprang for dinner at one of the casino buffets over on the Strip—her idea of diplomacy, though she was clearly not in a mood to discuss anything with Doc, especially not Puck.
“You look totally gaga,” he told her anyway. She smiled vaguely and gestured silently for a minute and a half with a giant shrimp as if she were conducting a chamber orchestra. Doc cupped his hand next to his ear. “Do I hear . . . wedding bells?”
“I’ll be back.” She slipped out of the booth and headed for the ladies’ lounge, where Doc recalled there were at least as many pay phones as toilets. She was back within the hour. Doc had basically been eating. “Ever notice,” she said to nobody in particular, “how there’s something erotic about pay phones?”
“Why don’t you drop me off at the motel, maybe I’ll catch you later in North Vegas.” Or maybe not.
FOURTEEN
ACCORDING TO TITO, THE KISMET, BUILT JUST AFTER WWII, had represented something of a gamble that the city of North Las Vegas was about to be the wave of the future. Instead, everything moved southward, and Las Vegas Boulevard South entered legend as the Strip, and places like the Kismet languished.
Heading up North Las Vegas Boulevard, away from the unremitting storm of light, episodes of darkness began to occur at last, like night breezes off the desert. Parked trailers and little lumberyards and air-conditioning shops went drafting by. The glow in the sky over Las Vegas withdrew, as if into a separate “page right out of history,” as the Flintstones might say. Ahead presently at the roadside, much dimmer than anything to the south, a structure of lights appeared.
“Place is a dump, man.” Tito wheeled into the entrance and under a weathered porte cochere. Nobody was there to notice let alone greet them, in the reduced light. Once there must have been thousands of lights, incandescent, neon and fluorescent, all over the place, but these days only a few of them were lit, because the present owners couldn’t afford the electric bills anymore, several amateur gaffers, sad to say, having already been fulminated trying to bootleg power in off the municipal lines.
“We’ll be back in a couple hours,” Tito said. “Try not to get your ass shot at too much, okay? You bring enough to play with? Here, Adolfo, give him a black.”
“That’s a hundred dollars, I can’t—”
“Please,” Tito said. “I’ll get a secondhand kick.”
Adolfo handed over a chip. “It’s what they tip with here,” he shrugged. “We don’t even know how many of these we got by now. It’s fuckin crazy.”
Doc got out and strolled under a Byzantine archway and into the seedy vastness of the main gaming floor, dominated by a ruinous chandelier draped above the tables and cages and pits, disintegrating, ghostly, huge, and, if it had feelings, likely resentful—its lightbulbs long burned out and unreplaced, crystal lusters falling off unexpectedly into cowboy hatbrims, people’s drinks, and spinning roulette wheels, where they bounced with a hard-edged jingling through their own dramas of luck and loss. Everything in the room was lopsided one way or another. The ancient bearings on the roulette wheels made them spin erratically faster and slower. The classic three-reel slots, set long ago to payout percentages unknown south of Bonanza Road and perhaps to the world, had since each drifted in its own way, like small-town businessfolks, toward openhanded generosity or tightfisted meanness. The carpets, deep royal purple, had been retextured over the years with a million cigarette burns, each fusing the synthetic nap to a single tiny smear of plastic. The allover effect was of wind on the surface of a lake. The level of the main floor was ten feet below that of the desert outside, providing natural insulation, so the chill in this vast indeterminate space wasn’t all from air-conditioning, which had been set on low in any case to save current.
Grill cooks, tire salesmen, house framers, eye doctors, stickmen and change girls and other black-and-whites off shift from ritzier rooms where they weren’t allowed to play, old horsemen fallen on faster and more crowded times, their feelings of custody now transferred to F-100s and Chevy Apaches, were ranged sparsely in the softly shadowed light, weaving in place as if trying to stay alert. Drinks here weren’t free, but by way of real-life neighborhood civility they were cheap enough.
Doc had a grapefruit margarita and then, dropping into mental cruising gear, began to drift through the immense casino, scanning for Puck and Einar. At some point a presentable young lady in a paisley Qiana minidress and white plastic boots came up and introduced herself as Lark.
“And without meanin to pry or nothin, I notice you’re not playing, just sort of wandering around, meanin you’re either some deep guy, mysterious master of intrigue, or one more jaded sharp looking for a bargain.”
“Hey, maybe I’m the Mob.”
“Wrong shoes. Give me some credit, for goodness’ sakes. I’d say L.A., and like every other tripper in from L.A., all you think you want to do is bet the Mickey book.”
“The, uh . . . ?”
Lark explained that the Kismet offered a kind of sports book where you could bet on the news of the day, such as the recent mysterious disappearance of construction mogul Mickey Wolfmann. “Mickey enjoys some name recognition in this town, so for a limited time we’ve been offering even money on Dead or Alive or, as we like to call it, Pass or Don’t Pass
.”
Doc shrugged. “Readin me like the Herald-Examiner, Lark. There just comes a time for the dedicated player when the NCAA don’t quite do it no more.”
“Come on.” Motioning with her head. “I bring you back there as a guest, I get a commission.”
The Kismet race and sports-book area had its own cocktail lounge, furnished in shades of purple Formica that glittered with metal-flake accents and made Doc feel right at home. They found a table and ordered frozen mai tais.
Doc knew the lilt and tessitura of most every sad song in the profession but still liked to take a glance at the sheet music. Seems Lark had grown up in La Vergne, Tennessee, outside Nashville. Besides having the same initials, La Vergne was also at the exact same latitude as Las Vegas. “Well actually the same as Henderson, but that’s where I live now anyway, me and my boyfriend. He’s a professor at UNLV? And he says when Americans move any distance, they stick to lines of latitude. So it was like fate for me, I was always supposed to head due west. The second I saw Hoover Dam, I knew for the first time that I was really home.”
“Ever done any pickin or singin, Lark?”
“You mean living that close to Nashville why didn’t I want to go into music. You try it, darlin. Your feet’ll get mighty tired waitin in that line.” But Doc noted an evasive sparkle in her eyes.
“Not another assassination trifecta, I hope.” This gent looked like a banker in an old movie, wearing a bespoke suit with one button open on each sleeve just to let you know it. Lark introduced him as Fabian Fazzo.
“Lady tells me I can bet straight up or down about whether Mickey Wolfmann is still alive.”
“Yes and if your interests run to the more exotic,” replied Fabian, “may I suggest an Aimee Semple McPherson–type bet, which assumes that Mickey staged his own kidnapping.”
“How would a person ever prove something like that?”
Fabian shrugged. “No ransom note and he shows up alive? allegations of amnesia? Police Chief Ed Davis doesn’t hold a press conference? If Mickey had himself snatched, even money—if he didn’t, a hundred to one. More depending how many zeros in the ransom note, if and when one shows up. We can put it all in writing, with anything we forget to write down considered a push, money back and no hard feelings.”
Well, said Doc to himself, well, well. The smart money—here came a brief visual of a hundred-dollar bill wearing horn-rim glasses and reading a book about statistics—for its own excellent reasons, which he would have to look into, was expecting Mickey to stage a headline-grabbing return from an exile of his own invention. For these wise folk, it was all but a sure thing. Fuck them, however. Doc found Tito’s black chip in his pocket. “Here you go, Mr. Fazzo, I kind of like that long shot.”
In the business Doc had learned to live with some contemptuous looks, but the one Fabian threw his way now was almost hurtful. “I’ll go write this up, won’t be long.” Exited shaking his head.
“You must know better’n ’at,” Lark fiddling with the umbrella on her drink.
“Oh, just one these naïve hippies, Lark, can’t be cynical about nothin, not even the motives of a L.A. land developer. . . .”
Fabian was back shortly, with a new attitude. “You mind stepping upstairs to my office for a minute? Just one or two details.”
Doc wiggled his foot discreetly. Yep the little Smith was still there in its ankle rig. “See you, Lark.”
“You go careful, darlin.”
Fabian Fazzo’s office turned out to be as cheerful as Doc had expected it to be sinister. Framed kindergarten art on the walls, an avocado tree Fabian had planted as a pit in an institutional-size lima-bean can back in 1959 and been tending ever since, and a long photomural of Fabian flanked by the entire Rat Pack plus a number of other faces Doc could nearly recall from all-night movies on the tube. Frank Sinatra was playfully attempting to stuff a huge Cuban corona into Fabian’s not-altogether-unwilling face. Sammy Davis Jr. was joking delightedly with somebody just out of the frame. Attached to the lower lip of Dean Martin, who was also brandishing a bottle of Dom Pérignon, smoldered what Doc could’ve sworn was a hastily rolled joint.
Fabian put Doc’s hundred-dollar chip on the desk. “No offense, but you have the look of a private gumshoe, or do I mean gumsandal. As a professional courtesy, I’m offering you a chance to rethink your bet on Mickey Wolfmann, and I figured we’d have a little more privacy here, ’cause right at the moment there’s FBI in the building.”
“What’s that to me? I’m just in town on a quick matrimonial, no interest in gambling license irregularities, improper casino ownership, none of them what Marty Robbins’d call foul evil deeds.”
Fabian shrugged elaborately. “It’s what feds do in Las Vegas I guess, this big master plan to get the casinos away from the Mob. Been going on ever since Howard Hughes bought the Desert Inn. But I’m just middle management here, nobody tells me anything.”
Doc taking an educated leap, “Mickey Wolfmann—he’s another big spender with a history here, isn’t he? I heard someplace he met his future bride when she was working in Vegas as a showgirl?”
“Mickey dated a lot of showgirls in his day, loved the town, old Vegas dog from way back, built a house out by Red Rock. Also had this dream about putting up a whole city from scratch someday, out in the desert.” Fabian took off his reading glasses and threw Doc a thoughtful squint. “Suggest anything to you?”
“Mickey’s in the market for a casino too?”
“Folks in the Justice Department would love to see that happen.”
“And the Kismet here’s on the list?”
“You’ve seen this place. They’re desperate for somebody non-Mob to come in and spring for the renovation. They keep bringing around their own blueprints, everything state of the art—all these old three-reel slots? forget ’em, what Uncle Sam wants is video screens, every time you play a machine, you get a little animated picture of reels spinning, something coming up on the payline. But it’s all electronic, see. Plus controlled from someplace else. Old-school slot hustlers will all be shit out of luck.”
“You sound a little bitter, Mr. Fazzo, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“I do mind, but I’m pissed off about everything these days. I try to find out what’s going on, everybody clams up. You tell me. All I know is, is it was all over by ’65, and it’ll never be like that again. The half-dollar coin, right? ’sucker used to be ninety percent silver, in ’65 they reduced that to forty percent, and now this year no more silver at all. Copper, nickel, what next, aluminum foil, see what I’m saying? Looks like a half-dollar, but it’s really only pretending to be one. Just like those video slots. It’s what they’ve got planned for this whole town, a big Disneyland imitation of itself. Wholesome family fun, kiddies in the casinos, Go Fish with a table limit of ten cents, Pat Boone for a headliner, nonunion actors playing funny mafiosi, driving funny old-fashioned cars, making believe rub each other out, blam, blam, ha, ha, ha. LasfuckinVegasland.”
“So maybe you can appreciate the old-school appeal of a long-shot bet on Mickey.”
Fabian smiled tightly and not for long. “Spend enough time here, you get these vibes. Look. What if Mickey’s not as missing as we think?”
“That case I’m contributing to your renovation fund. You can name a dealer’s shoe after me, put a li’l plaque down on the side.”
Fabian seemed to be waiting for Doc to say something else, but finally, with a palms-up shrug he arose and escorted Doc along a corridor and around a few corners. “Right through there ought to get you where you’re going.” For a brief brainpulse, Doc was reminded of the acid trip he’d been put on by Vehi and Sortilège, trying to find his way through a labyrinth that was slowly sinking into the ocean. Here it was all dry desert and scuffed beaverboard, but Doc had the same sense of a rising flood, a need at all costs not to panic. He heard music som
eplace ahead, not the smoothly arranged sound of a showroom band, more like the ragged start-and-stop of musicians on their own time. He found what once might have been an intimate little lounge, thick with weed and tobacco smoke. There in a tiny amber spot which was sharing a few scrounged-up watts with a pedal steel while the rest of the band played acoustic, stood Lark, her bearing lively despite all the time on her feet through the shift she’d just come off of, singing a country swing number that went,
Full moon in Pisces,
Dang’rous dreams ahead,
If you’re out there cruisin,
If you’re home in bed,
Keep a six-pack icy,
Make sure your hat’s on right,
Full moon in Pisces,
And it’s a Saturday night . . .
There goes my ex–best fella,
Got on his Frankenstein shoes,
There’s my girlfriend Ella,
She’s got the werewolf blues,
When she hits ’em high C’s,
She’s gettin ready to bite,
(Look out!)
Full moon in Pisces,
Another Saturday night.
That hometown
Vampire gang’s all
Flashin their fangs, it can
Do funny thangs, to your brain—and so
What if it feels,
A little head over heels,
No big deal, you’re not real-
-ly insane—
It’s just some local folks trippin,
Never lasts that long,
Good-time minutes go slippin,
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