Max Collins - Neon Mirage

Me he’d left pretty much alone, to do my job. Right now I was keeping an eye on the security people, seeing if my training over the past ten days or so had done any good. It was crowded enough tonight to make pickpocket control difficult, which would be a nice final exam for my ex-cop students. Some of them were posted here and there, others were mingling. All wore tuxes-all of Siegel’s staff did. Siegel himself had interviewed and hired, after Sedway thinned the pack, the eighty-five dealers, eighteen pit bosses and box men, and three slot-machine supervisors. All of whom, if you asked me, looked uncomfortable in their monkey suits.

Former LAPD lieutenant Quinn, looking in his tux like a tan but sickly penguin, came up to me and smiled and asked how I was doing. He’d been trying to be friendly ever since we tangled. I hadn’t gotten rough with him again, because I was pretty sure the pilferage had stopped. My spot checks of boxes I marked (and I’d marked some every day) indicated such, anyway.

Quinn assayed the casino. “Think my boys’ll find any dips workin’ the room?”

“If they can’t, they couldn’t find their ass with two hands.”

He couldn’t resist some sarcasm. “You really think there’s gonna be a ‘whiz team’ in the woodpile?”

“That’s the surest bet you could make here tonight.”

And I moved away from him. I don’t mind your average crooked cop; I used to be one myself. But a guy like Quinn gives corruption a bad name.

I walked out on the patio, which was lit in a soft-focus way by more red and blue spots spotted around. Around the pool, as if sunning in the moonlight, were various young women, all of them lovely, shapely, in bathing suits, mostly two-piece, lounging on the chaises. These women were in Siegel’s employ, although in what capacity exactly I couldn’t say. They’d been posing around the pool all week, for cheesecake photos for the wire-service boys. I knew some of these bathing beauties doubled as cigarette and change girls. Only a few were waitresses, from the lounge; the dining room was served exclusively by waiters, in tuxes, natch. (Siegel had drilled the waiters himself, until they worked with the precision of a Marine platoon.)

One of these women sunning in the moonlight, one who had not done any cheesecake posing earlier in the week, worked as Siegel’s confidential secretary.

“You look like a movie star,” I told Peggy.

She was wearing a dark blue two-piece.

“Thanks,” she said. Her reply was a little chilly. But then so was the air; it wasn’t cold out, but if I had a quarter for every erect nipple around this pool, I could’ve fed a slot machine till midnight.

I got down on my haunches next to her. “But isn’t this a little beneath a businesswoman like you?”

She looked down her nose at me, smiling with no warmth. “I don’t think so. Ben wanted some pretty girls to sit around the pool tonight, and I think I qualify, thank you.”

I pulled up a lounge chair. “Sure you do. I just thought you might have played a slightly more conspicuous, more important role in this grand event.”

She seemed to be studying the red and blue lights as they shimmered on the water in the pool.

“Certain parties wouldn’t have liked that,” she said.

“And yet, at the same time, by sitting here in your near altogether, you’re sort of thumbing your nose at ‘certain parties.’ I like that. You still got some of that Chicago fuck-you spirit. The desert air hasn’t dried you out entirely.”

Sadness tightened her eyes. “You hate me now, don’t you?”

I shook my head, smiled a little. “No. Are you still angry with me?”

She gave me a quick, burning look. “I should be. You had no right getting…” I think she was about to say “so personal,” but reconsidered, since that was absurd on the face of it. She just let her thought trail off and looked out at the pool again.

She was referring to a short conversation we’d had, in a Last Frontier hallway the second day of my stay, in which I had said to her as follows: “I don’t know if you’re sleeping with Siegel or not-but if you are, take my advice: don’t, at least not when ‘Tabby’ is in town.”

“Is that right?” she’d coldly said.

“That’s right. But if you can’t help yourself, do it on the sly, and be goddamn careful.”

“Really?” Anger bubbling.

“Really. That cunt is capable of murder, you know.”

For a moment I’d thought she was going to slap me; but she just glared at me, tightly, and stalked off. We hadn’t talked since, except occasional polite, meaningless dinner table conversation, when Siegel held court nightly at the Last Frontier’s restaurant and, in these last pre-opening days, at the Flamingo dining room, where we had a few trial meals. Pretty good, too. Siegel’s French chef knew his stuff.

“Look,” I said. “I know it hasn’t been easy having me around. Anyway, I know it hasn’t been easy for me to be around…”

She looked at me and her expression softened; I could see in it the ghost of her love for me. And I wondered if it haunted her like it did me, at all.

“I’ll be going home soon,” I said. “Probably Monday, after this grand opening weekend’s dead and gone.”

“Why did you take the job, Nate?”

“Money.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Come on, baby. You know me better than that. Name something that matters to me more than money.”

She turned away and looked out at the pool. I thought maybe her lower lip was quivering. Maybe not.

I stood.

I was just going when she said, “I think you stayed to keep an eye on me.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You…you think you’re protecting me, don’t you?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You’ve been keeping an eye on me. I know you have.”

I didn’t say anything.

She looked at me. “You really think Ginny’s dangerous, don’t you?”

“Don’t you?”

“No. She’s all mouth. Big mouth. Ben can’t stand her.”

“Oh, really?”

“He’s just putting up with her.”

“Why’s he doing that?”

“She has her hooks into him. Monetarily. She has money in this place, you know.”

“So does George Raft, but Siegel isn’t sleeping with him.”

She looked away again. At the pool. “You know how tight she is with Ben’s people back East.”

“You mean gangsters? Is that what you think, he’s putting up with her, because she’s the darling of the syndicate? Maybe he keeps her around because he knows that she’s spying on him for them-and that lets him control what she reports back.”

“Well, doesn’t that make sense?”

“It’s bullshit. She was a courier for those guys; they trusted her. And they used to lay her, most of them, but now she’s Ben’s girl, and that’s all she is. You’re kidding yourself. Why don’t you go back to Chicago where you got family and friends?”

“Nate. Don’t…”

“I’m not talking about us. I’m talking about you. About putting a life together for yourself, a real life that isn’t the ersatz Hollywood your dreamboat’s trying to turn this desert into.”

She gestured around us with one hand, smiling wryly. “I think he’s done pretty well.”

“Tonight it looks like it. Looking at these palms and terraces and this swimming pool, sure. But you know better than I how wrong this is going.”

She swallowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

I pointed over to the hotel building. “He didn’t make it, did he? His personal deadline. That hotel isn’t going to be open for weeks-maybe months. He had to book rooms at hotels all over town, when people called for reservations.”