Max Collins - Neon Mirage

Peggy was a lost cause. And Siegel was playing a losing game.

There was no reason for me to get caught up in any of it.

I nodded, stood, and began to pack my bag. There was a midnight train back to L.A., where I could touch base with Fred, get a replacement lined up for Siegel, and fly home.

I had just latched my suitcase when somebody knocked at my door.

I answered it, wondering who the hell it could be.

And who the hell else could it be, the way this day had gone, but Virginia Hill.

She was a little swacked, but what else is new? She looked sexily zoftig in her halter top and slacks, her pale, slightly plump tummy pulsing.

“Can I come in?” she asked, and did.

I shut the door.

“I hope you came out here to take that little cunt back home with you,” she said, leaning against the door.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about that fucking little Irish slut. If you still care about her, take her home, get her the fuck out of here.”

“That isn’t up to me, Ginny.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this, pal: if she’s banging Ben, I’m gonna bang her.”

And, with a sneer as nasty as she was drunk, she raised her hand and made a gun of it and shot at me, saying, “Bang. She’s fucking dead.”

She went to the door, opened it, looked back over her shoulder at me, like a parody of a pin-up pose, and said, “Word to the wise.”

And she shut the door. Hard.

I stood looking at it.

Then I unpacked.

The sign said

F

L

A

M

I

N

G

O, and poised above it as if considering flight was a neon-outlined caricature of that unlikely long-legged bird that so embodies both awkwardness and grace. Its pleasure palace namesake had neither of these, but did manage to marry two contrary qualities: stark lines and soft pastels.

A ghostly olive-green structure in the modern geometric mode, the Flamingo sprawled across a stretch of sandy nothing along a blacktop road to nowhere, a.k.a. Los Angeles. It was on the left, several miles beyond the Vegas city limits, its Frank Lloyd Wrightish lines an aberration against the timelessness of the desert and the purpleness of Black Mountain shimmering aginst the morning sky, a morning that was blowing some, sending sand and stones and sagebrush skittering across the highway, some of the gritty tumbleweeds piling up in balls against the Flamingo’s foundation, as if nature were trying, without much luck, to topple the structure. Nature simply didn’t have the determination of Benjamin Siegel.

Off to the right was a lot where I parked the used Buick I’d been provided. Not surprisingly, that lot was fairly empty, but for a few pick-up trucks and other vehicles that probably belonged to those few workers within who were local. Siegel was putting his mostly imported workers up at motels and rooming houses in town, and bringing them in to his forty-acre playground by bus and truckload each morning.

Past an imposing stone waterfall and under a flamingo canopy, the fancy brick front entry led into a lobby lined with slot machines; a small check-in counter for hotel guests was at left, but at right, going down five steps, was the vast casino, with its various tables (21, roulette and craps), its plush carpeting and green leather walls, looking, in this somber unoccupied state, like a museum of gambling. There was no whir of the roulette wheel, no metallic ka-chunk from the one-armed bandits, no silver-dollar clink, no businesslike dealer voices calling out, “Are your bets down? The number is-,” and no crowd noise, winners and losers mixing together like equals in the din. Nothing but the echo of hammering from some other part of the building, as workmen tried to pound Bugsy’s dream into reality.

I found him behind the dining room beyond the casino, in the kitchen, which was a good-size, modern affair, blinding white formica here, shining stainless steel there, and not a chef in the place.

Unless you counted Ben Siegel, who was wearing a snappy gray suit and dark blue tie and pale blue shirt.

I was wearing a suit and tie, too, by the way-though hardly as natty an ensemble as Siegel; but I couldn’t get into the “Come as you are, pod’ner” swing, either. I was working.

“Much better,” Siegel was saying, to nobody in particular, hands on his hips, beaming, basking in the glow of the spotless kitchen.

“Ben?” I said.

He looked at me and grinned and waved me over. “Look at this,” he said. He was pointing to two facing walls of ovens. “Plenty of room there, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sure.”

“Before I had ’em do it over, these ovens opened right onto each other. What kinda layout is that? I’m not paying the top chefs in the business so they can fry their asses off!”

“What did this little remodeling job cost?”

“Thirty grand,” he shrugged. He looked tan and fit, but his eyes were bloodshot as well as bagged. “Come on, you need to meet somebody.”

He led me out through the restaurant area, where the smell of paste was in the air, half a dozen wallpaperers in white coveralls and painters’ caps at work, dealing with heavy brocade material that had to be tricky as hell. The plush carpet was covered by tarps; nonetheless, Siegel stopped in mid-track and bent and flicked at several spent cigarette butts, like Sherlock Holmes examining a muddy footprint.

“Hey!” he yelled.

The men, several of whom were up on ladders, stopped their work at once; turned in the direction of what by now was surely a familiar voice.

Siegel stood, having scraped the butts and ashes into his palm. “I’d like to catch the dirty pig who dropped these,” he snarled. Then he wadded the butts in his fist and walked over to a waste barrel and dumped them in.

The men exchanged looks and one of them, presumably the foreman, muttered, “Yes, Mr. Siegel,” and they turned back to their struggle.

Immediately pleasant again, he led me through a corridor of slot machines, saying, “The dining room is very important, you know. You can’t hope to make a profit on it-it’s a come-on. Food service has got to be tops for the high rollers, but at the same time the prices can’t scare away the two-dollar customers, either.”

“Keep an eye on your chefs,” I said.

“Why’s that?” he said.

“A chef can steal from you a hundred different ways. Kickbacks from suppliers. Selling prime cuts of meat as scrap. Lots of ways.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, giving me a pleased, appraising look. “You do know your stuff.”

“Security’s my racket. I can tell you right now that you need more people under you-people you can trust. Or everybody and his dog is going to steal you blind.”

He nodded. “And I’m gonna do that, Nate-down the road. Come on out and see the pool.”

We walked out onto an immense patio that led to a luxurious Olympic-size pool, the edges of which had a scalloped design; below the blue ripples of sun-reflecting water you could make out a mosaic pink flamingo. This patio was an oasis in the midst of a vast well-trodden expanse of barren desert real estate. Over to the right of the aridness, as I stood with the casino and restaurant complex behind me, was a rambling modern building which here was two-stories, there three-stories, and in the middle four, making it the tallest structure on the grounds. A crew of trowel-wielding plasterers on scaffolding was giving the massive building a skin of stucco, which clung to wire mesh covering the building’s cement surface.

A small fat man in an Hawaiian swim suit was sitting under an umbrella beside the pool; he had a bottle of beer on the table next to him and he was wearing sunglasses. He was as brown as a berry. His body was round and hairless, a beach ball with legs. And he had the face of a self-satisfied bulldog.