Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (22 page)

I hustled back to the dressing room and studied the tenor sax charts for the midnight show. Nothing looked especially complicated. Ten minutes before show time, Monroe came into the room and threw his arm around me.

“I really appreciate this,” he said in that luscious baritone. Listening to him was like slipping into a hot bath.

“Hey, it’s my pleasure, Vaughn … and I can always use a job, however brief.”

“Who’ve you played with, Charlie?” he asked.

“A whole shitload of hotel bands in the Catskills,” I told him. “Lew Brown, for one.”

“How is Lew?” Monroe asked.

“The usual,” I said.

Monroe chuckled. “Still cranky as hell?”

“Maybe more so.” I was shameless. Once I started lying, it was like running red lights—go through one, might as well go through them all.

“Who else?” the singer continued. He wasn’t letting me off the hook so easy.

“Some other smaller bands,” I vamped. “Sy Glotzer, Irv Tapp … house bands in the mountains.”

“Don’t know them.” He looked into my eyes for a scary moment. “But I’m sure you’ll be fine. Any screwups, the boys’ll cover for you.” He started picking through the charts. “We’ll start with ‘Let It Snow.’”

“Sure.” I nodded.

“Then go to ‘Ballerina.’ I like to start with the
very
familiar. Particularly with these yokels. Then we’ll do ‘Trolley Song,’ ‘Tallahassee,’ and ‘Haunted Heart.’”

“Great,” I mumbled, and jotted the titles down on a slip of paper.

“Then I just bullshit for a couple of minutes, tell some lousy jokes, kiss the audience’s butt, tell them they’re the greatest crowd I’ve ever played for.” Monroe smiled. “Actually, the audiences here are pretty damn good. Love almost everything; I think half of them never saw a live band before.”

“Lot of shitkickers out there,” I said.

“Mucho shitkickers, but hey, that’s not their fault. Gotta play like you’re playing for the king of England.” I liked this guy; he had very little pretension to him, show biz or otherwise, and after the collection of assassins and con artists I had run with for the past week, he seemed as honest and pure as Gary Cooper in a mountain stream yammering about the Spanish Civil War.

“Then I finally stop my spiel,” Monroe continued, “and we do “Racing with the Moon,’ and ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady.’ I introduce the Moonbeams individually, pretend to look down their dresses; that kills a couple of minutes. Then we finish with ‘Riders in the Sky’ and ‘Mule Train.’ Then I come back and do ‘Ballerina.’”

“Again?”

“Again. And they go apeshit. This is the Wild West, Charlie. It’s all news to them.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Thanks again.” He turned and walked out of the room, as square-shouldered and upright as a general. I was ready to marry the guy.

The show went without a hitch, and it was just as the crooner had predicted. When he did the encore on ‘Ballerina,’ the yokels were jumping out of their chairs with delight and a couple of fortyish women rushed the stage. I played my charts and only got lost once, during a key change on “Haunted Heart.” Otherwise, I admirably faked my way through the set and Monroe smiled at me a couple of times and even gave me a thumbs-up during a little run on “Let It Snow.” It was oddly therapeutic; for the hour or so that the show lasted, I was lost in the music, blissfully ignorant of the increasingly bizarre and perplexing mission that had brought me to Vegas in the first place. The show ended to a standing ovation, the first one I had received since my bar mitzvah. I bowed with the rest of the band, keeping a steadying hand on my toup, and walked off the stage and out of my brief but exhilarating show biz career.

Backstage, I changed out of my show clothes and into my new blue blazer and slacks, received profuse thanks and twenty-five dollars from the band manager, then walked out the stage entrance and into the swarming hive that was the Flamingo casino. At one-thirty in the morning, the place was as overrun and noisy as Times Square at noon. I gazed over the rabble but saw none of my playmates, so I turned and headed in the general direction of the elevators. I was eager to give Barbara a ring, but loath to dial Hilde Sterns number at four-thirty in the morning East Coast time.

As I was calculating how many hours would have to pass before I would feel comfortable placing the call to New York, I passed a particularly boisterous crap table. The excited shouts of the gamblers slowed me down to a curious crawl and finally I just stopped in my tracks to watch the game. I instantly noticed a sober and bespectacled gentleman with graying hair and a salt-and-pepper beard who sat quietly placing bets and stacking chips. The bearded gentleman was conspicuous for two reasons: One, he was the only person at the table not screaming at the top of his lungs, and two, he was Lucky Luciano.

The beard was Lucky’s cover, but I hoped my toupee worked better as concealing foliage, because the instant I laid eyes on him, my middle-aged heart started pounding like the beat-beat-beat of the tom-tom. There was no mistaking the steel in those brown eyes, the arch of those furry eyebrows, the Roman in that nose, or the meat in those lips. It was Charlie Lucky, live and in person, and it took all of the restraint I could muster to continue on and walk past his table without giving him a second glance. If anyone had staked a valid claim to paranoia, it would be Lucky, given his status as a government-certified deportee whose mere presence in Vegas would be enough to send a battalion of immigration officers marching into the Flamingo. It was therefore more than a little startling to see him not only in the United States, but hanging out so brazenly in a Vegas casino.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been: Lucky had recently been earning a reputation for world-class chutzpah. The rumors had been all over New York that while residing illegally in Havana, he had been very much out and about and in the public eye, with the eager and most certainly well-paid cooperation of the local authorities. I would wager that he had greased more than a few outstretched palms in Las Vegas; still, it seemed wildly audacious of Lucky to be shooting craps out in the open at one-thirty in the morning.

And it was now impossible for me to leave the casino. There was no way that Luciano’s presence in Vegas was unconnected to the Toscanini snatch. The way this case was going, I half expected the shade of Mussolini to come waltzing through the front doors.

There was nothing for me to do but hang around, so I sauntered over to a neighboring crap table and converted my recently acquired twenty-five bucks into chips. Keeping one eye on Lucky’s table, I started rolling dice for the first time since the war, and within half an hour—to my amazement and in proof of the oft-disproved dictum that God protects the ignorant—I had turned my meager opening stake into five hundred American dollars. I did fairly well when I held the bones in my own sweaty paws, but earned most of my winnings during a logic-defying run by a four-hundred-pound crapshooter whom everyone called Sonny. Attired in a Hawaiian shirt and size-ninety shorts, a rum crook jutting out of the slit that was his mouth, the gigantic Sonny enjoyed fifteen breathtaking minutes before inevitably crapping out. When he was done, I pocketed most of my chips and bet very lightly for the next few games, not wanting to erode my earnings but unwilling to exit the casino so long as Lucky still graced the tables. I started to get bored, so I arose and walked over to the roulette tables, staying even on red and black bets until I turned and saw Lucky pick up his modest stack of chips and slowly make his way toward the cashiers window. He was unaccompanied—no muscle, no gunsel, no anybody; just a modest Italian gentleman finishing up an evening’s entertainment.

I carried my chips to a neighboring window, cashed them out for a grand total of four hundred and seventy-five dollars, and then strolled ever so nonchalantly behind Lucky as he made his unhurried exit from the casino tables. I stayed back about thirty feet; Lucky pushed his way through the glass doors and out of the hotel and I did the same, lighting up a smoke to look ever so disinterested. The desert air assaulted me once again; even though it was now just past two in the morning, the temperature still stood in the mid-eighties. Fortunately, the wind had faded to a mere breeze, which was extremely good news for my hairpiece.

As quickly as if Lucky had rubbed a magic lamp, a black sedan pulled up scant moments after he emerged from the Flamingo. The passenger’s-side door swung open and Lucky ducked inside; the door slammed shut and the car pulled away. As casually as I could, I waved my hand in the direction of a battered lime-green taxi that stood at the head of a short line of hacks. Producing a foul eruption of oil smoke, the cab lurched in my direction. When it stopped in front of me, I climbed inside and sank deeply and uncomfortably into the chewed-up backseat.

“Just follow that dark sedan, please,” I said to the back of the driver’s head. “And don’t get too close.”

The driver whirled around. He was a painfully thin man of about fifty, with prematurely white hair, rheumy blue eyes, and a purple and red explosion that passed for a nose. The odds were that he could be talked into having a drink just about any old time.

“Playing cops and robbers?” he asked with immediate suspicion.

“Just cops,” I told him.

The driver shook his skinny head. “Nix, buddy. I don’t get involved in that shit.”

I shoved a ten-dollar bill at him and he stopped talking.

“What the hell,” he said, and stepped on the gas. “But any rough stuff …”

“You’ve seen too many movies,” I told him. “Just follow the car. When it stops, you stop. Simple as that. And stay at least a hundred feet in back of him.”

“I know how to do it,” he mumbled.

“Glad to hear it,” I told him, trying to find a way to sit without getting a spring up my ass. “This is some swell car. My compliments.”

“You don’t like it, go fuck yourself.”

“Fair enough.”

Lucky’s car pulled out onto Las Vegas Boulevard and after all of three or four long desert blocks, it hung a right and passed through the entrance to a glittering new edifice called the Desert Inn. I peered out through the filthy passengers window.

“Pretty swank,” I said. “Much as I can make out through this window.”

“Oh, it’s swank, all right,” the driver said. “You’re new in town, right?”

“You can tell.”

“I can tell a lot of things,” he said with very little conviction. This guy spoke like a B-actor. “Desert Inn opened up early this year. Hottest joint in town.”

“Wish I would’ve known,” I told him. “Maybe I’ll switch hotels.”

“No chance. It’s sold out almost all the time. The high rollers, they want to stay only there.”

“You drive a lot of high rollers in this junk heap?”

The driver had no nifty reply, so he just stuck his thumb into his ruin of a nose and rummaged around for artifacts. As he did so, I watched Lucky’s sedan pull up to the front of the Desert Inn, stopping under a huge overhang that displayed enough wattage to light up the Polo Grounds. The back door of the sedan opened up and Lucky got out. He was still flying solo.

“Stop here,” I told my driver, and handed him another five. The fare on the meter was a dollar twenty-five.

“I don’t have change,” he lied, but I was already out the door and walking toward the Desert Inn. Lucky disappeared inside the hotel and I picked up my pace.

The Desert Inn made the Flamingo look like a Bowery flophouse. It was ultra-deluxe, with a multichandeliered ceiling, thick burgundy carpeting, and first-class appointments all the way around. A jazz combo noodled tastefully from an open lounge in the rear of the casino. Where the Flamingo was raucous and jangly, the Desert Inn had more the ambience of an ocean liner and consequently appeared to draw a more affluent crowd than Bugsy’s place. There were fewer hayseeds and rodeo clowns, fewer fat ladies in funny hats. The tables were surrounded by manicured guys with expensive haircuts and well-tailored suits, accompanied by women who looked like they commanded top dollar for the privilege of their brief but intense company. I took an instantaneous liking to the place; it seemed to be several expensive cuts above the rest of this raw and incomplete city. I could understand why it drew Lucky’s attention and patronage.

However, it looked like Luciano had completed his gaming for the evening. He was walking toward the front desk with the slumped and red-eyed look of a man ready to call it a night. I circled the other way, then turned and walked past the desk as if I were coming back from the elevators.

And then I had a stroke of very good fortune.

As I sauntered by the front desk, a dark-skinned room clerk with the taut cheekbones and piercing eyes of a full-blooded Navajo uttered the following words to Lucky: “Have a good evening, Dr. Horowitz.” Lucky grunted in reply and then walked away toward the elevators, yawning prodigiously. Even gangsters got sleepy. I walked back across the casino, keeping on eye on Lucky as he waited for a free elevator. He rubbed his eyes and checked his watch. An elevator opened its doors and Lucky got in. I proceeded to recross the casino and walk oh-so-casually past the elevators, noticing that Lucky had stopped at the fourth floor, which, at this low-slung resort, was the top floor.

I walked back around the casino, past the front desk, and toward the coffee shop, at which point it occurred to me that I was as hungry as an escaped prisoner. The coffee shop, according to a sign hanging on its perfectly washed window, was open twenty-four hours, which was the best news I had gotten in the last two days. A twenty-four-hour coffee shop is like a surrogate mother, a warm-hearted source of nourishment attentive to your every whim. I was starting to like this town very much, which goes to show how much of a pushover I really am—make me an omelet at two-thirty in the morning and I’m yours forever.