Ironic to think of him reduced to such straits by a simple and mass-produced weapon like the Uzi. He would probably get a huge laugh out of it. If he lived.
“Ambulance and paramedics on the way,” Judge Apodaca said, putting down the phone.
He looked consideringly at the other two men still on their feet in the room and pointed at them individually to be sure he had their attention. “You and you,” he said. “Get the hell out of here.”
He paused to let the words sink in, and then went on. “Neither of you was up here last night or this morning,” he said. “And neither was that one—” he jerked a contemptuous thumb in the direction of the Voice of Heaven, who was finally beginning to show signs of rejoining the party—“so take him with you.”
His tone allowed no room for argument, but there was a moment of hesitation all the same.
The men he was talking to were accustomed to giving orders, not taking them, and I found myself awaiting their reactions with real interest. At least one of them, I knew, hadn’t been spoken to in that tone for at least twenty years.
He was an old friend. Or acquaintance. Or contact. Or something.
I had met Manny Temple (né Manfred Tannenfisch), sometime New Jersey mob boss and muscle merchant, on my very first visit to Las Vegas more than a decade ago. Apprenticeship is expensive in the poker trade, and on that occasion it had taken me just four hours and twenty-two minutes to get broke in a $100 buy-in hold ’em game at the Mint casino downtown. Manny had been watching. Friendly, affable, and apparently a bit drunk, he offered to stake me to a second shot at the game and was, I think, shocked almost sober when I turned him down with thanks and the explanation that I was just buying experience.
That called for explanation, and we talked for an hour or so and had been friends—or whatever it was—ever since.
He was, I discovered, a man whose offhand hard-boy manner masked a genuinely warm personality carefully directed by a core of practical intelligence capable of assessing risk, greed, and machismo at their true weight and coming up with a useful balance often enough to remain alive, affluent, and at liberty in a world where just two out of three is considered the measure of true success.
Manny’s departure from the East Coast had come in stages, beginning with the issuance of a state grand jury subpoena and progressing step by step through an elaborate “kidnapping” charade, from which he emerged after more than a year with the explanation that the ransom had been difficult to raise. By that time the grand jury had long since lost interest in any questions it might once have wanted to ask him, and most of his numbers, sports-booking, and loan-sharking operations had been quietly but firmly co-opted by minions of the Gihardinelli family who had been given the commission’s blessing for a general takeover.
He had departed for the Far West with a smile and, some said, a few odd “sweetener” millions in his pocket to ensure domestic tranquillity.
His reputation in Las Vegas, however, rested less on past laurels than on his covert but generally recognized position as underworld channel and occasional problem-solver for the elusive Francis Carrington Shaw.
How the Temple-Shaw connection had been established and how it had come to endure were questions I would not have cared to ask—and answers I would not have allowed myself to hear. But connected they surely were, and the arrangement appeared to provide long-term satisfaction for both parties.
I was a bit surprised, therefore, to hear Judge Apodaca address him in what was unmistakably a voice of command.
But the judge seemed to take obedience for granted. And so, after a thoughtful moment, did Manny.
The other man, however, took a little longer to make up his mind.
Bearded and bearlike, he stood poised but immobile amid the wreckage of the suite, surveying the damage with a kind of cool self-possession that spoke hard-nosed volumes on the subjects of violence past and violence present.
We were strangers. When I arrived by appointment the night before, I was surprised to discover that I knew all the other players (even the Voice of Heaven on Earth, though he obviously didn’t recognize or remember his former schoolmate) with the single exception of the one introduced to me as “Colonel David Connor. From Florida.” We had exchanged a sentence or two; the usual guarded and ever-so-slightly-distant pleasantries that nonacquaintances will utter in the moments before they begin an adversarial relationship across a gaming table.
I got the impression of considerable personal force held carefully in reserve—and a feeling that the military title, while perhaps genuine, might not have been one conferred by the armed forces of the United States.
But poker professionals, if they hope to eat regularly, quickly learn to make their character assessments on the basis of a player’s approach to the game rather than on anything he might do or say elsewhere. It is a kind of analytical shorthand; instant penetration guaranteed. Just add money and stir...
The “Colonel Connor” I encountered during the few hours of our seven card stud confrontation at the Scheherazade, however, was more elusive than most. Knowledgeable but conservative, he had early demonstrated the kind of discipline and patience that are the basic equipment of successful players, and gone on to display both courage and conviction when challenged for pots he thought he could win. Once committed, he was hard to dislodge—but willing to settle for an early call rather than the high-rolling raise that might have tempted a more flamboyant gamester.
Yet there was something missing, something concealed and nurtured in seclusion.
Turning my own center quiet and open, I had gone probing for a sense of his emotional condition and found myself reaching repeatedly and fruitlessly into a carefully tended void that was coupled somehow with a peculiar reluctance, masquerading as inability, to communicate in the silent tongue that is the form and fabric of high-stakes poker.
Yet I was sure he spoke the language.
Time after time, as the hours passed, I saw him deep in the give-and-take of communication with other players. Silence, it appeared, he reserved for me alone.
And that was more than a little strange, for I couldn’t shake the sense of having known him somewhere, somehow, in time past...but not long past. It was there on the table. Anyone who plays poker more than once or twice a year—anyone with an eye and a memory—knows that every player has his personal tics and quirks; a man’s poker style is as distinctive as his taste in clothes or automobiles or women, and I was certain I had come across the colonel’s style somewhere before.
His habit of seeing another player’s raise on a concealed pair, but straddling—doubling the amount of the bet—on a concealed king-queen or even a queen-jack was familiar; dovetailed with a tendency to stay for the last card on any hand where he’d followed the action to the third round of betting, it added up to someone I knew or ought to know. Or had known.
Someone memorable.
But not named anything like David Connor...
Waiting for him to decide whether or not to follow Judge Apodaca’s orders, I had a feeling that he might be getting ready to tell the little barrister to go peddle his writs. But then he turned his gaze in my direction.
“How about it?” he said.
That shook me a little—not just because near-strangers seldom ask my advice on whether or not to enter into criminal conspiracies that could send us both to prison, but because there was, once again and more powerfully than before, a sense of the familiar. The phrasing was known to me, the turn of head well recognized...but still just outside the perimeter of recall. A taste, but not a swallow.
Exasperating.
But there would be time enough to unravel minor mysteries later; perhaps when the world slowed down again. When Sam Goines was safely in the hospital and the police had come and gone.
“Better do it,” I said. “Over the years, the judge has guessed right oftener than he’s guessed wrong.”
Those seemed to be the right words. I got a grunt of comprehension and acquiesc
ence, and the colonel’s mustache dragged one side of the bushy beard up in what was probably intended as a grin.
“Fair enough,” he said.
The Voice of Heaven was stirring and trying to sit up now, but Manny and the colonel didn’t stand on formalities. Before the Leader of a Million Glory-Bound could get his eyes working together or give voice to what I was willing to bet would be the first of several hundred inane questions, they had him off the floor, on his feet, and stumbling blindly in the direction of the door.
The judge followed, issuing final instructions. “Use the service elevator,” he said. “Don’t stop till you get to the ground; then find the Jesus Jammer’s limousine if it’s still down there and see to it the driver can keep his fool head shut. Or if the damn thing’s gone—I think I remember him sending it home last night—get a car, do your own driving, and take him back to that Christforsaken prison camp he lives in, and make sure he gets through the front gate.”
They were in the hall now, and the acoustics there were designed to mute all sound, so the judge had to raise his voice a decibel or two for the parting shot. “Then each of you go find a hole,” he said. “Pull it in after you and stay there till someone tells you different!”
Manny’s voice made some reply, but I didn’t catch it, and the judge gave back a grunt that sounded like assent and then he came back into the room and leaned wearily against the remains of a handsome étagère.
“Christ,” he said, “on a crutch.”
It seemed as fair and logical a comment as any. I looked down at Sam Goines again and carefully removed the pillow-compress for a look at the damaged area. Blood was still welling out with each beat of his heart, and his chest was still moving regularly, but it seemed to me that both actions were a little slower than before. Weaker. A bit less sure. I put the pillow back in place and looked down at my friend’s torn and battered face. The skin was ashen and shocky-looking under what looked like a sunburn masquerading as a healthy tan. Odd, I thought, for a man who spent most of his days—if you could believe press and news-magazine reports—basking in the expensive rays that fall on the principality of Monaco.
Not that it mattered.
Where the hell was that ambulance...?
“Way we’ll tell this,” Judge Apodaca said, moving across the room to seat himself carefully on one of the undamaged chairs, “we played us a little game of poker earlier in the night. Four-handed. Just us old friends—you, me, Sam Goines, and Danny DiMarco. No one else.” He paused to make sure I heard the words and understood them.
I returned his gaze without comment.
“By the time the gunsels busted in,” he continued, “the game had stopped and we were just talking. A little business. Nothing important. We got no idea what they wanted or who they were. Any problem with that?”
I thought it over. Except for the subtraction of three people and the addition of the business discussion, what he was asking me to do was tell the truth. Or was it? Item by item, I went back over the events of the night and tried to put them into some order that would punch holes in the story.
But couldn’t come up with anything.
I could see why he wanted to tell it without Manny or the Voice of Heaven, but what was it about the colonel that would make it worthwhile to subtract him from the story, too?
I wanted to ask about that. But that question would lead to other questions—a lot of them, maybe—and there just wasn’t time for a lot of questions. I gave him a shrug in lieu of an answer and added the silent hope that he knew what he was doing, because I certainly didn’t.
“You think anyone’ll buy it that way?” I said.
The judge tried to smile, but it was uphill work, and the result was a bit wrinkled at the edges.
“Shit-a-mighty boy,” he said with sour wisdom, “this is Las Vegas...”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
In his epistle to the Romans, chapter six, verse twenty-three, Paul the Apostle would warn a later world that “The wages of sin is death.” And many accepted this as a kind of restatement of King David’s observation on misuse of power...
FIVE
The judge was right, of course.
For the next hour or two, it was a matter of first things first: Paramedics arrived to take over the job of trying to keep some portion of Sam Goines’s blood inside him long enough to move him to an emergency ward, and a whole phalanx of police vehicles were right behind. The city of Las Vegas maintains a special squad for just such situations as the one at the top of the Scheherazade, and they made a quiet and efficient business of taking control, sealing off the VIP floor by blocking access to its single key-operated passenger elevator and stairwell, guarding the hotel switchboard to make sure no unauthorized calls went in or out, and answering no questions whatsoever.
It took them less than three minutes to isolate the trouble spot. And then the investigation began...Las Vegas style.
The Clark County medical examiner’s office took a little longer putting in an appearance, so all that was mortal of Danny DiMarco lay cooling and stiffening in full view as Judge Apodaca and I delivered our (somewhat edited) accounts of the machine-gun assault. Alternatives were available. We could have been taken into side rooms or into a vacant room elsewhere in the building. But the decision to proceed on the spot didn’t surprise me and I was reminded, not irrelevantly, of the time a gambler-hoodlum named Tony Comero Stralla died of a heart attack during a craps game at the hotel on the strip. Tony was a nice enough little guy—if you didn’t cross him—and he had a lot of friends in Las Vegas. But one of the players in the game had been on a hot roll, so the pit boss helped shove Tony’s body under the craps table to await later disposal, and the action went on without further interruption.
Tony would have understood.
In the present instance, I was forced to admit to myself that, on balance, the presence of the Dimpled One’s remains seemed to have a certain positive effect: It kept things more or less in perspective. Otherwise, I think it might have been all too easy to find the whole day slipping over the edge into never-never land.
Police forces are as diverse as the communities they serve.
It’s only natural. The concerns of a community such as Beverly Hills (maximum protection of all kinds for people who live in expensive houses) would have little relationship to those of a city like Miami (preventing newly drug-rich smugglers from murdering one another in such a way as to endanger peaceable citizens). And neither would have much in common with some Indiana railroad town where the worst law-enforcement problem is the care and handling of half-drunk kids who want to cruise around and race their cars on Saturday night.
Police officers are, after all, simply a class of civil service employee hired and armed to execute the perceived will of the body politic. Anything else, while excellent high-protein fodder for movies and television, is really window dressing, and a police chief’s true measure of success is the balance he is able to maintain between the prime directive of carrying out public policy and the unspoken demand that he mask it all in a patina of “equal laws, equally applied.” Moreover, he must do it at a price. Police budgets rarely reap the benefit of good times in the supporting community, but they inevitably become the first candidates for the administrative paring knife when local economics go awry.
There are social and regional differences, too.
Small-town lawmen tend to be overarmed and undertrained, while those who serve in major cities find themselves confronted more and more frequently by situations in which the best police academy or FBI training is put to naught by the disparity between the .38-caliber revolvers they carry and the M16, Kalishnakov, Uzi, Thompson, and even BAR submachine guns that face them in the street.
Southern cops tend, by and large, to overcompensate—if unintentionally—for the image of big-bellied violence and bigotry they gained via television coverage during the 1950s and 1960s, while their northern cousins fight an ongoing battle against the co
rruption and multilevel bureaucratic incompetence that have tarnished the image of their profession in such places as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Even in such company, however, the Las Vegas Police Department is a standout.
One of a kind.
The homicide detectives who interrogated us probably knew their jobs and would have been good at them anywhere else on earth.
But they knew the town they worked for, too, so instead of splitting us up for questioning as would be standard in any legitimate investigation, they elected to conduct the interviews team-style in the living room, where there would be less chance for us to get mixed up and start making mutually contradictory statements. They were determined to get it just right—just the way the management of the hotel and the city’s all-year tourist bureau would want it—and I must say I felt a certain left-handed sense of gratitude under the circumstances. The abbreviated story the judge wanted to tell, with three players omitted from the cast, and other little twists in the basic plot line, was just the kind of tale that could generate a wealth of inconvenient detail, leading to later embarrassment. And I always hate to embarrass a police officer.
So I sat quietly, listening and nodding occasional idiot-corroboration while the judge told his version, and then obliged in turn with a slightly less detailed account that went full strength into the detectives’ tape recorders and notebooks. Cross-questioning was minimal, and I was just beginning to breathe without difficulty when the dignified susurrus of the passenger elevator door in the hallway announced the arrival of someone with enough authority to get past the police cleanup squad, and I was not much surprised to see that the chief investigator from the Clark County district attorney’s office—a cadaverous shamble of surprises known as Corner Pocket—had decided to interest himself in the case.
I had been expecting him.
Corner Pocket and I had known each other for a year or two, and in that time I had found him to be a decent, energetic, competent, and even reasonably intelligent man with a quiet and slightly bizarre sense of humor and some rather clear notions about right and wrong and the responsibilities of the individual in a world that values neither individuals nor responsibility.
Aces and Eights Page 5