But then the trend slowed.
And reversed.
Organizers of gambling tours, lifeblood of the successful hotel-casino operation, discovered that their erstwhile eastern high rollers were gradually drifting back toward Nevada. Proximity and easy access notwithstanding, Atlantic City simply did not have and could not seem to acquire the glitzy ambience to which the game-seeking junketeers had become accustomed.
They wanted to go back to the Strip...and there, in ever greater numbers, they went.
Las Vegas showrooms that had been on hold, offering cheaply produced revues and “dinner theater” to avoid having to close up entirely, suddenly found themselves able to afford the likes of Johnny Carson and Bill Cosby and Danny DiMarco again...and local real-estate operators took their first deep breath in a year or more.
The place had always been boom or bust.
The first real settlers, Mormons sent there by Brigham Young, stayed only a couple of years before they were called north again to help defend Deseret from the US Army. The Nevada legislature legalized gambling in Las Vegas and elsewhere throughout the state in 1931, but this only gave official sanction to a known and notorious situation—gaming casinos had been part of the scene ever since the Mormons departed—and the place went almost unmarked until 1905 when the railroad finally deigned to put in a stop there on its line from Salt Lake to Los Angeles. And even then the town had to wait another quarter-century for its first real boom.
In the early 1930s, construction workers from the nearby Boulder Dam project needed a place where they could raise hell on the weekends, and Las Vegas obligingly transformed the area surrounding the railroad station into a town-sized gambling hall-cum-whorehouse that kept right on growing after the dam was finished.
A highway had been built by then, and Hollywood notables were quick to discover the joys of boozing and gambling in a warm and dry climate where almost anything could be delivered to poolside for a price.
At the end of World War II, eastern hoodlum Benjamin (“Don’t call him Bugsy—he goes bughouse!”) Siegel used stolen materials and mob money to build the first really plush casino on a part of Highway 91 that would become the Strip. But he had only about six months to enjoy it before his partners got tired of his blatant embezzlement and blew him away. Yet he had set a pattern.
From that time forward—state gaming commissions and federal tax investigators and Chamber of Commerce protestations notwithstanding—the mob was in control, and God help anyone who objected.
Not that many did. When the Blanc family set up the Monte Carlo Casino in 1863, they made a deal with the ruling prince that no citizen of Monaco would be allowed to gamble there. With good reason. Any gaming casino that allows local residents to patronize its tables will eventually absorb so much of the local capital that the town will have to find new sources or be pauperized, and the Blancs had been driven from their former lodgment at Bad Homburg, Bavaria, by an aroused citizenry that regarded them as a race of vampires.
But there was no such protective covenant in Las Vegas, and the need for infusions of outside capital was an accepted and ever–increasing factor in all local planning.
Syndicate money flowed.
New hotels—each with its attached casino—sprang up as quickly as occasional death threats to the suppliers of building materials and wholesale bribery of union officers could manage.
No federal or state tax accountant was ever able to penetrate the casino counting rooms, which made Las Vegas a prime source of the kind of funds that leave no paper trail, and public image became so important to those who held real power that for nearly two decades almost no one was actually murdered inside the sacred precincts of Clark County...though there were occasional unexplained disappearances among the locally prominent, and the circling of buzzards at remote points in the desert did not always indicate the final resting place of a jackrabbit.
All the same, records of the state gaming commission indicated an era of rare purity.
Applicants for casino licenses and point-owners in the hotels came under microscopic scrutiny; conviction for any crime more serious than reckless driving was grounds for rejection (unless the offense was related to gambling; fun is fun, but let’s not get unreal), and major crime figures were even barred from entering the hotel-casinos on pain of license revocation.
It looked good.
Some people—an investigating senator or two over the years, and one incredible director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—may even have believed it. But casino and hotel points did seem to wind up in the unlikeliest hands at times.
A doctor living in Beverly Hills and a lawyer with offices in San Francisco might not seem too far outside the realm of probability; even a movie star or two could be accepted as genuine. But casino points (each point represents one percent of ownership) are worth millions, and even the veriest country cousin might find it difficult to believe that two or three such shares could really be owned by the proprietor of a dress shop in the hotel’s shopping mall or the manager of a semi-prosperous secretarial service on the mezzanine.
The gaming commission professed to believe it, though, and has continued to treat such patent nonsense as gospel to the present day.
Some things are just too too profitable to change.
Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes stirred the locals up more than a little when he moved to town and acquired a clutch of hotel-casinos in the name of his Summa Corporation during the 1960s. A few people saw it as the beginning of a new and semi-legitimate era in Las Vegas’s history. But even the most powerful magnates age and go senile and die, and their holdings are administered by mere mortals. And mortals can be had. The good old game of skim-the-take, with its tolerance for “inside” and “outside” casino points, goes on as before, and the gradual evaporation of the eastern threat has brought back the aura of boomtown.
Hughes’s place in the town’s mythos, once considered unique, was handily refilled with the arrival of San Francisco inventor–financier–movie magnate Francis Carrington Shaw. His apparent retirement from the financial wars of California—and subsequent entry into the battle pit of real-estate and hotel manipulations around the world’s favorite Sin City—added just the yeast of moneyed mystery and madness needed to keep the losers interested.
Not that I object.
People need to live their own lives and are responsible for themselves. Having a gourmand’s gobble of the craziness confined to one spot in the desert is a definite advantage for a man who makes his living by playing money games with hopeful lunatics.
I don’t make the rules.
For me, it’s enough just to figure out what they are this week...
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Yet the words of the Psalm have meaning for us; they are an echo, not of things past but of things to come. Sudden and violent death was a constant of that long-vanished world, as in our own. And so it was of death that the Psalmist sang...
FOUR
But the great zap is always waiting.
Rules, games, and mythology all dissolved into their cobweb components as I surveyed the general disaster that had overtaken the Scheherazade’s most luxurious accommodation. There is no gainsaying a submachine gun.
The decorator would have wept.
Random bullet patterns are purely hell on plaster-and-flocking walls, and imitation Empire furniture is seldom improved by the kind of massive force that can be exerted by a falling human body. All this, however, seemed almost to take on an air of raffish chic in keeping with the room’s new color scheme. A spatter pattern of blood had been added to the puce elegance of upholstery, while larger accents in the same vivid hue now adorned the deep pile carpeting.
Three of the poker players were sprawled nearby. But the blood had come from only two of them.
The Voice of Heaven on Earth was unhurt.
He had missed all the fun. Flat on his back, lids still aflutter over uprolled eyes, he had spent the
frantic minutes in shock country, well removed from the line of fire, and I found myself stuck with the depressing thought that he might really have the PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP with the Almighty that he claimed, after all. Philosophies have been built on far flimsier foundations, and less credulous minds than mine have embraced them. This could be a sign.
If so, then God was either a fool or an impostor.
And the hell with him...
The two men lying near him had been less fortunate, however.
And they were going to make headlines.
Closer to me, and to the door where the hit men had entered, was a Face Known to Millions.
Looking at it now, seeing the jaw agape and sightless eyes staring, I felt a small sense of shock to realize what a formidable job of assembly he had represented. It was like seeing a once-beautiful woman without her wig, makeup, and upper plate.
Surveying the remains of the great—and now very late—Danny “Dimples” DiMarco, I realized that the poor bastard had been wearing a full hairpiece, tinted contacts, false teeth, and an elastic jowl lifter, which was glued to his temples. An autopsy attendant, I suspected, would soon find himself struggling with an industrial-strength girdle built into the stylish pleated trousers and a shoulder brace concealed inside the dinner jacket. But none of these deceptions would be visible in the photographs that would fill newspaper pages and we-interrupt-this-program telecasts for at least a day to come, because the news media are oddly sensitive about publishing pictures of dead bodies. Something about reality being in bad taste, I think. Instead, they would use publicity stills from their libraries—and for once I had to agree with their policy.
Even close friends and associates might have had trouble identifying the husk left behind by the Uzi bullets.
Danny DiMarco had been the bankable King of Comedy for longer than most people could remember, and it was a success that seemed to translate with hardly a lost syllable from the nightclubs where he had started to radio and then to television and finally into musical films that led, amazingly, into a whole new career as a recording artist.
Danny hadn’t exactly been a singer; the whiskey-soft voice was too far gone by the time he first tried. But there had been a lilt and a gift of phrasing that seemed to lend a kind of poignancy to the most banal lyric, and the Hollywood youth revolution that had left many another aging luminary dimmed and wandering in the wilderness seemed to touch him lightly—and even then with its customary Midas caress. Paired on film with a nymphet ingenue just under the age of consent, he had turned in a performance that lent believability and even magic to hackneyed nonsense concerning an affair between an adolescent girl and her girlfriend’s grand-father...and climaxed the wrap party with what turned out, seven months later, to have been a shotgun wedding.
Great for both their careers.
But the mother-nymphet was a widow now, and I wondered what the lawyers and accountants managing her claims on the estate would make of the last thing her randy husband had done in life. Just a dozen or so hours before he sat down for our poker game, the State Gaming Commission had confirmed Danny DiMarco as the new owner and casino licensee of the hotel where he had died.
Now he would never know the joys and sorrows of working the dealer’s side of the table.
Just as well, perhaps.
He didn’t need the money, and the customers could try the patience of a saint.
One detail caught my eye before I turned away, however; something for the reporters and photographers if they had the nerve—and knowledge—to get it into the record.
Cards and chips had been scattered to every corner of the room when I knocked the green-faced poker table out of the way, but one combination had remained intact. The poker hand that had so impressed the Voice of Heaven appeared to have obeyed Newton’s law of gravity, remaining at rest for a brief moment after the surface beneath it was swept away, then falling intact, to land on the Dimpled One’s chest where the cards waited face up to proclaim the triumph of omen and totem and taboo:
Aces and eights.
Danny DiMarco had checked out lying flat under the dead man’s hand.
The other man on the floor was Sam Goines, and at first glance I thought—with a rush of loss and rage and frustration far stronger than expected—that he was dead, too. The idea evoked a well of bitterness that filled the world with mocking laughter. Such a stupid way for Sam to die.
Not exactly unpredictable, perhaps.
But stupid all the same...
And then the chest contracted to draw a single convulsive, rattling breath. Sam was still with us, though the condition didn’t look at all permanent. I grabbed an absorbent-looking pillow from the couch and dropped to my knees beside him.
One Uzi bullet had torn away part of his left cheek, laying the bone bare and removing enough of the lower lid to keep that eye open while the other was closed. Another slug had taken him in the right shoulder, leaving through-and-through entry and exit wounds that looked both neat and unthreatening.
But a third bullet—perhaps from the other gunner—had caught him squarely in the ten-ring, clipping the inverted V of the rib cage and hammering on into the moist and vital darkness beyond. Most of the blood on the rug seemed to be his personal property, and I could see that more was welling out of him with each beat of the heart.
That, at least, was encouraging.
Whatever other damage had been done, the pump seemed to be intact. Not much. But far better than whatever was in second place. When the pillow-compress was as tight as I could get it against the trouble spot, I looked up in the hope of finding someone who could call for an ambulance. But there was no need. Our eldest player, tough and stringy old Judge Happy Apodaca, was already talking to the hotel telephone operator, issuing clear and cogent instructions about who was to be called for what...and in exactly what order.
No wonder he had lived so many lives.
And prospered in all of them.
The old bastard was one of a kind, a gimlet-eyed survivor of purest ray serene. But the man whose blood I was trying to keep inside him was not your average Rotarian, either.
Samuel Clemens Goines and I had known each other since the day I woke up in the weird ward of an army hospital after my second tour of duty in ’Nam. In semi-criminal conspiracy with a semi-crazed wardmate named Dee Tee Price, we had for a time established what amounted to a reign of terror among the hospital’s professional staff—and a wave of prosperity those several corpsmen, aides, and orderlies who could be persuaded, for a price, to obtain certain necessities of life that were flatly forbidden by hospital regulations.
Like everyone else in that ward, Sam was a poor boy in those days. Rich boys did not go to Vietnam as grunts, and there were no officers in the vicinity. But he and Dee Tee were full of plans for world conquest to be undertaken on release, and each had not only attained but far exceeded the goals we discussed during those long days and longer nights of recuperation.
Within a year of his discharge, Dee Tee Price had made his first million in the commodities market, accumulating the bankroll and seeking out the associates he needed to become a feared and respected player in the game of corporate takeover. Nowadays, word that he had become interested in the stock of any company was information of rare worth and salability while it remained private, and a signal for shark warnings up and down the Texas oil coast when it came to general public notice.
Sam Goines’s ambition had taken a slightly different turn.
Poker had not yet become my steady occupation in those days, and the penny-ante games on the ward tended to be wild and wonderful. Sam was a willing and competent player—despite a strong tendency to bluff really impossible hands—and for a while I marked him as a possible ally or competitor in my own postward plans. But he needed faster action, and found it.
The mustering-out pay that was probably the most money he’d had all at once in a lifetime went into a high-rolling crap game he had located, and I went along to guard his
back or lend bus fare.
As it turned out, neither was needed.
Sam won nearly $50,000 in less than an hour, and the single effort that was made to take the bankroll from him by force ended with the would-be bandit flat on his back and unconscious from a shattered jaw before I could get close enough to take a hand. Sam’s reflexes had always been quick.
The money went temporarily into an account at a discreet and enterprising bank in the Caribbean, while Sam flew on to Belgium, where he said there was something he wanted to buy. I drove him to the airport for the first leg of his journey and didn’t see him again for nearly a year—by which time he was a part of the world’s rising phalanx of twilight-legal dealers in military hardware.
Somehow—Sam had always been wary of identifying his contacts—he had discovered that the Belgian army was about to be rearmed with NATO weapons and was trying to find a buyer for its entire store of semi-automatic rifles.
Using as collateral part of the money he had won (and more, I suspect, to purchase the cooperation of one or more loan officers), he had obtained the Caribbean bank’s backing to purchase the entire Belgian arsenal. He then resold half the rifles to a starveling backwater dictatorship in southern Asia, and the remainder in less than a week to an emerging African nation with designs on its neighbors’ territory.
Sam never told me how much he made on that first deal, and I didn’t ask—never crowd a known bluffer unless you’re ready to call, and we were playing in different games now—but it must have been enough to give him a useful reputation, for he became in the years that followed a steady and well-financed competitor in the always volatile arena of international arms sales. His off-the-shelf catalog, I was told, might not have the detailed solidity of Interarmco, but he was known for special expertise in high-tech weaponry, a man who was willing and able to satisfy even the most exotic taste in lethal gewgaws.
Aces and Eights Page 4