Max Collins - Quarry in the middle

This seemed a different clientele than next door, and was not that different from the dance crowd at the Paddlewheel Lounge. The age was twenties and early thirties, the male attire running from denim jackets to Hawaiian shirts, parachute pants to designer jeans, the female attire from leopard print tops to vests over tube tops, miniskirts to short shorts. A girl of maybe twenty-five in a black-and-yellow backless minidress, with high heels and a yard-in-all-directions of frizzy blonde hair twitched her taut tail as she headed from the ladies’ room back to her hive of half a dozen honeys.

I bought another beer and sat at the bar and watched as the band began to play Southern Rock at ear-bleed level, and waitresses in low-cut spandex minidresses took orders and not very discreetly dealt drugs. This section of the Lucky Devil had the same shitty wall paneling, but framed Patrick Nagel beauties and movie posters (Flashdance, For Your Eyes Only) indicated a vague sense of purpose if not style.

At the rear another bouncer perched on a lifeguard stand, a white guy this time, also in a Lucky Devil polo shirt-a bruiser with a nose that had been broken so many times you couldn’t really call it a nose anymore, and eyes that weren’t missing anything. Next to him were push-through doors, and patrons of various stripes had been cutting through to those doors, opening them to reveal glimpses of a bustling casino beyond.

I watched as the males and females began to intermingle-when they weren’t going off independently for a toot or what-have-you in the can, anyway-and took in the bar band’s respectable covers of ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and 38 Special, and made the beer last a good hour. This bartender was a skinny good-natured kid with thinning hair, a wispy mustache and a khaki shirt over an Alabama tee.

“Seems pretty tame,” I said, between songs. “I heard this place ran wild.”

“Wild enough. More flavors of sin than Baskin Robbins got ice cream.”

“I dunno. Nobody seems that frisky.”

He shrugged. “We have some heavy-duty bouncers, dude. Fights don’t last long in the Lucky.”

“Is the casino a key club or something? Or can any fool go back there?”

“Anybody with a few bucks and a ball or two is welcome.”

So I went back there. The casino took up only the back half of that one storefront-not a particularly impressive layout, drab and piddling and bare bones, compared to the Paddlewheel’s operation.

Overseen by two more bouncers at stubby lifeguard stands, the smoke-swirled room, with the same crummy wood paneling, had a craps table, a roulette wheel, two blackjack stations, and its own small bar, from which the waitresses in black spandex minidresses picked up their trays of free drinks for the suckers. Along two walls were slot machines, old ones, those squat metal numbers that dated back to the ’40s and ’50s-no video poker, and no flashy electronic modern numbers. Strictly old-fashioned one-armed bandits.

If the Paddlewheel was today, the Lucky Devil sure seemed like yesterday. The best I could say for them was they were catering to a younger crowd, with their Southern Rock and hot-and-cold running drugs. Otherwise this was pretty sad, as casinos went.

The patrons did not seem particularly well-heeled, at least not at this time of night, which was approaching ten. I saw everybody from farmers to factory workers to college kids, and in that sense the Lucky Devil gambling layout was democracy in action, bib-overalls, plaid shirts and Members Only jackets all voting with their money.

So far, I had seen nobody at the Lucky Devil who looked even vaguely like management. And I’d had a good description from Richard Cornell of both the old man, Gigi, and his son Jerry G.

“Odds of you seeing the old man,” Cornell had told me this afternoon, in his smaller, more businesslike second-floor office at the Paddlewheel, “are next to nil. He lives on the third floor of the building, and since his wife died ten years ago, he’s a goddamned hermit.”

“Why the Howard Hughes routine?”

I was sitting across from him. Cornell, in a yellow sport jacket and orange turtleneck, was seated behind a big black metal desk in the surprisingly functional office. He was drinking coffee and I had a can of Diet Coke.

“It may be sorrow for the loss of Mrs. Giovanni,” Cornell said, “but I doubt it, since he’s always been a womanizing son of a bitch. He has everything he wants up there, it’s a lavishly appointed apartment, I understand. He’s in his seventies and they send up girls when he’s so inclined, and he has a full-time chef. There’s a satellite dish near the parking lot, so he can watch sports and naked women and anything he likes. Why leave?”

“What about Jerry G?”

“Young Jerry is fairly hands-on. He also has an apartment spanning the second floor over several of the dives. You should see him on the floor of the casino, however, and possibly elsewhere at the Lucky Devil, unless he’s in one of his poker games.”

“Tell me about those.”

“There’s a very high-stakes game in a room in back-not part of the casino, if you can call that hellhole a casino. It’s not every night-depends on Jerry’s whim, and the availability of players who can afford it. You see, it’s strictly for the big boys-buy-in is a grand. You don’t have ten grand to throw around, don’t bother sitting down.”

“Crooked?”

“I don’t think so. Not that Jerry G isn’t a confirmed cheater, as a casino manager-I think you’ll find the gaming rigged for the house. But Jerry G takes pride in his poker playing. He thinks he’s a world-class player. And he’s done well in Vegas competitions, truth be told.”

“You wouldn’t have ten grand in cash around, would you?”

The aqua eyes in the heavily tanned face regarded me coldly, though he was working the smile on me, by way of distraction. “I already wired twenty thousand to your Cayman Islands account,” he said. “Would this be an advance, or…?”

“It would be your money. If I lose it, it’s gone.”

“And if you win?”

“You get the ten grand back.”

He chuckled. “And doesn’t that sound fair? Mr. Quarry, you are a cheeky devil. A regular card.”

“Cards sound like they may be the best way in for me, with Jerry G.” I shifted in my chair. “We haven’t talked about exactly what you want done.”

“No we haven’t.”

“You’d like me to remove whoever it was that hired that contract on you.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re convinced it’s either the father, Gigi Giovanni, or the son, Jerry G.”

He nodded. “Or possibly both. In concert.”

“So, do you want me to determine which it was?”

“Could you do that?”

“Possibly. Could be tricky. But might be possible.”

“What’s the alternative?”

I shrugged. “Just take them both out.”

“What would that cost me?”

“Well…double.”

“Forty thousand.”

“I was thinking fifty.”

He blinked. Stop the presses. “What’s the extra ten for?”

“For killing mob guys. Consider it hazardous duty pay.”

“And it’s twenty-five if you determine which G hired the hit, and take care of only him.”

“Yes. And that might prove a bargain, as it’s maybe the harder job. I have to play undercover cop and snoop around and not get killed doing it. Just popping them both, if I could stage-manage the right circumstances, could be relatively simple. In and out.”

The leather of his forehead grew grooves. “The Giovannis have a small army at the Lucky, you know. Bouncers and strongarms. No shortage of muscles and guns. You don’t expect me to pay for anybody else you have to take care of along the way.”