Playland (45 page)

“Partners,” Jimmy Riordan continued. “No more rough stuff. All we ever wanted out there was a deal. Now we’ve got the deal we wanted in the first place.”

The deal we should have had in the first place was what Jimmy Riordan actually meant, and Jacob did not miss the implicit rebuke. “Rough stuff got us this far.”

He was like a victorious general who, having won a war, discovered he had no aptitude for peace, Jimmy Riordan thought. “Perhaps,” he said.

“Fuck perhaps,” Jacob said, “it’s not going to work, this partners thing.”

“It’s your job to make it work, Jake.” The quietness of Jimmy Riordan’s voice did not mask the warning in his words.

“There’s no way I go to Lilo with my hat in my hand,” Jacob said truculently. Or if he did, there would be a gun in his other hand.

“Of course not.” The smooth Jimmy Riordan. “You have a free hand.” He paused. “Within reason.”

“What’s within reason?”

“Morris decides.” Two words that ended argument. Morris was like Moses, inventing commandments as he went along. Even sitting at Morris’s right hand as he had these many years, Jimmy Riordan still did not fully comprehend how Morris Lefkowitz computed all the factors by which he arrived at a decision. “You know there’s a built-in flexibility in every budget, Jake. For the unexpected contingency.” Jimmy was careful not to define the extent of the flexibility, or what might be construed as an unexpected contingency. Give him something else to think about. “By the way, I’m coming out for the groundbreaking.”

“It’s a long fucking way to come just to see a steam shovel pick up some dirt,” Jacob King said. But of course he knew why Jimmy Riordan was coming, and it did not improve his disposition. To dot the
is
and cross the
t
s. Blessed are the peacemakers.

“Morris thinks a New York presence would be advantageous,” Jimmy Riordan explained. A thought Jimmy had impressed on Morris. To let the locals know, and Jacob King as well, that for all his laurels, Jacob was just a consul, not a monarch. Jimmy could still hear the rhythmic banging,
thwonk, thwonk
, behind Jacob King. It offered an opportunity to change the subject. “What’s that noise I keep hearing, Jake?”

“A ball,” Jacob King said.

“Against a backboard?”

“Yes.”

He had a sense that Jacob was being evasive. Even in middle age with a daily trim and a weekly manicure, Jimmy Riordan still had the soul of the prosecutor he had years before left Yorkville for Fordham to become. His ability to cross-examine once he smelled evasiveness or sensed a flawed argument, a failed excuse, was one of the things that made him so valuable to Morris
Lefkowitz. Another
thwonk
, and another. It was suddenly important to him to identify the sound positively, if only to keep his talents in shape. “Stickball?”

“No.”

“Someone’s playing catch?”

“Tennis,” Jacob said after a moment.

“You play tennis?”

“I’m having a lesson.”

About the groundbreaking ceremony for Playland, there was little I could find on file in the newspaper microfilm rooms, and if Melba Mae Toolate’s memories were vague, Arthur French’s were opaque. Melba Mae remembered that it was boiling hot, and that Shelley Flynn was funny, he was wearing a midnight-blue tuxedo even though it was the middle of the day, but she could not recall anything he had said, it was, she said, the usual Shelley nightclub shit. She also remembered that it was the first time she had been to Las Vegas since Carole Lombard died. Arthur French had refused to drive over, one of his few acts of rebellion against his father, Arthur could be such a pill sometimes, Melba Mae said, but Arthur’s story was that he was supervising Chuckie O’Hara’s director’s cut of
Red River Rosie
so that it could meet its release date. Melba remembered that Jacob King wore a new white suit, the color of milk, sewn up especially for the occasion by Eddie Schmidt, tailor to the stars, and that he had wanted to wear a black silk shirt and a white silk four-in-hand with it, but Rita Lewis, that cunt (Melba’s words), said it made Jacob look like a gangster, it wasn’t the image he was trying to project. The gossip columnist in the Hollywood
Reporter
itemed that Blue Tyler would attend the groundbreaking in the company of “mysterious Manhattan Hotel Investor Jacob King,” and in his column Jimmy Fidler wrote, “Manhattan Hotel Investor Jacob King (the big bux behind new Nevada hotspot Playland, breaking ground today) is burning to branch into pic biz with his True Blue!!!!!” In the Los Angeles
Express
, there was a photo of Blue showing more leg and bum than the studio usually let photographers shoot, a shot that to J. F.
French’s consternation went out over the wires, after which J. F. French fired the entire publicity department. The Las Vegas
Review-Journal
featured two full pages of Blue Tyler photographs and one picture, on page seven, of Clark County Supervisor Lyle Ledbetter digging up a shovelful of desert sand. Jacob King appeared in just a single photo, a group shot with Blue, Shelley Flynn (in a dinner jacket, as Melba had remembered), and Lyle Ledbetter, but the picture was cropped in such a way that only Jacob’s white-sleeved left arm and a quarter of his face showed. In the caption he was identified as “Manhattan Hotel Investor Jacob King, who put together the financing for this new enterprise in association with L.A. Attorney Lilo Kusack.”

Whose idea was “Hotel Investor?” I asked Melba Mae.

Chuckie’s, Melba Mae said.

Well, yes, of course, it was my idea, Chuckie O’Hara said. I thought it had a certain panache. Like “actress-model” for hooker.

“I see the sun, a great blistering orb,” Sydney Allen said. “Space. Panorama. Kitsch. Giant earthmovers gouging out the landscape. Ecological murder in the service of corrupt mammon. Let your imagination run riot, Jack.”

I refrained from saying that ecological murder was not the direction in which my imagination ran riot.

“One other thing. I want Jacob in that white suit with the black shirt and the white tie.”

EXT. PLAYLAND CONSTRUCTION SITE DAY

LYLE LEDBETTER
the Clark County supervisor, holding a shovel in his hands on a makeshift stage, is making a speech in the blinding midday sun.

It is the dialogue from his grand jury testimony when he recalled
JACOB KING
trying successfully to bribe him.

ANOTHER ANGLE—AN ARCHITECTURAL RENDERING
of Playland resting on an easel next to Lyle Ledbetter. It is a modernistic building surrounded by grass and palm trees, and shows tennis courts and swimming pools.

ANGLE ON JACOB KING
He stands with Jimmy Riordan, Lilo Kusack, Rita Lewis, and Blue Tyler. The presence of Lilo Kusack and Jimmy Riordan, both wearing ties and silk suits, seals the armistice between the two factions.

ANOTHER ANGLE
Red ribbon surrounding the building site.

ANOTHER ANGLE
A sign that says:

PLAYLAND
WHERE THE FUTURE IS NOW

ANOTHER ANGLE
Earthmoving equipment in the distance ready to move in and begin work.

ANOTHER ANGLE
Reporters taking notes.

ANGLE ON BLUE TYLER
posing for photographers more intent on snapping her picture than Lyle Ledbetter’s or Jacob King’s. Blue wets her lips, arches
her neck, lifts her skirts, all the poses of a star doing a day’s work.

ANOTHER ANGLE—SHELLEY FLYNN
in full evening dress—tuxedo, ruffled shirt, patent-leather pumps in spite of its being high noon. With a buck-and-wing, he bounces to stage center, elbows Leo Ledbetter aside, and takes the shovel from his hand.

ANGLE ON JACOB KING
who acknowledges the smattering of applause.

ANGLE ON LILO KUSACK

LILO KUSACK

(quietly)
We
are going to build …

ANGLE ON JIMMY RIORDAN
who looks at Lilo but makes no response.

ANGLE ON JACOB KING
who winks almost imperceptibly at Rita Lewis.

ANGLE ON SHELLEY FLYNN

LYLE LEDBETTER

seems slightly discomfited. This is not the churches-and-schools line he had hoped Jacob King would take.

ANGLE ON LILO KUSACK

ANGLE ON JIMMY RIORDAN
who again does not respond.

ANGLE ON JACOB KING
focusing on Shelley Flynn as if Lilo had not spoken.

SHELLEY FLYNN

 … class games. Crap tables, sure, but baccarat …

ANGLE ON BLUE TYLER
now bored, stifles a yawn and looks at her watch. She flashes a smile at Jacob King, then leans toward Lilo Kusack.