The Monet Murders (13 page)

I missed Perry's seven o'clock run, but I caught up with him at nine. I gave him a wink as I stepped aboard and joined a couple dozen eager gamblers. Perry acted as though he'd never laid eyes on me, and we shoved off for the
Lucky Lady
.

It took about fifteen minutes to cover the three miles to where the ship was anchored, fore and aft, as Perry would no doubt say. We could have gone faster, but there was a choppy sea that would have sprayed the gamblers despite the canvas coverings. The
Lucky Lady
was lighted up like the proverbial Christmas tree. The ship had started life as a four-masted
merchantman, but the gambling investors had torn away all the masts and superstructure and replaced them with a three-hundred-foot deckhouse—not that they did the work themselves. It took several months in the shipyard. They also widened the main deck by building platforms all around the ship, so that sports could walk around the outside of the deckhouse, bemoaning their luck or getting some fresh air or thinking about putting an end to it all. With its rounded roof, the deckhouse itself looked like an airplane hangar. The name
LUCKY LADY
was on the side facing the beach, in neon red. There was a row of lifeboats hanging from davits, and it occurred to me that there weren't nearly enough of them to accommodate a capacity crowd. And three miles is a long swim, especially when the tide's going out.

The upper deckhouse had eleven roulette wheels, eight craps tables, and a dozen or so blackjack, faro, and chuck-a-luck tables. Chuck-a-luck was a dice game in which three dice were rotated in an hourglass-shaped wire cage. It was almost impossible to win, but it was easy to understand and bet—a real sucker play. You had to pick the correct sequence of three dice. You figure the odds.

There was a long bar at one end of the room and slot machines, a hundred and fifty of them, along the other. Off to one side was a dining room complete with dance floor and seven-piece band. The dining room was packed. The twenty-five-cent taxi fare also bought you a free meal, as long as you ordered turkey. If you wanted something else, it cost extra, and there were more than a few down-and-almost-outers who came there solely for the free food, although inevitably many of them were drawn to the slots or the card tables even though they couldn't afford it.

For those who could afford it, there was a private card room for high rollers. A lot of Hollywood big shots were in that room each night, and no doubt those were the people Manny Stairs was worried about: he did not want them to know about his obsession for Catherine Moore.

When the investors remodeled the ship, they had also cleared out the lower deck and put in a bingo parlor that could seat five hundred. You wouldn't think there'd be five hundred people in the entire city who were so starved for entertainment that they'd turn to bingo, but you'd be wrong.

All told, the
Lucky Lady
was quite an operation and could accommodate up to two thousand losers at a time. And there must have been almost that many there that night. There were three hundred and fifty employees, including waiters, musicians, dealers, bartenders, bouncers, and, yes, cigarette girls. Since the
Lucky Lady
was open for business twenty-four hours a day, they needed that many employees to work the various shifts. Almost all of these except the crewmen who operated the ship's power plant commuted to shore after their shift, although Tony Scungilli and a platoon of goombahs stayed aboard most of the time. There was too much money on board at any one time to take any chances. They made daily runs to the bank, of course, but when you're running a twenty-four-hour operation, the money keeps flowing in like water through a leak. The ship had no engines—they'd been removed—but it had gasoline-powered generators that provided light and electricity.

Presiding over this floating empire was Tony the Snail Scungilli. Behind him were the investors. It was no surprise that they were also experienced bootleggers. That was convenient, because they had well-established sources of
supply. They ran supply ships down from Vancouver, where they bought liquor from a consortium of distilleries. Booze and gambling made a combination that would attract any enterprising mobster. All that seemed to be lacking to make a perfect trifecta was prostitution, but, as Perry told me, there were lots of cabins on the lower decks of that ship. No doubt things could be arranged. Loans could also be arranged for the unlucky, and the word was that the ship's cash room had a safe filled with expensive watches and jewelry that had been turned in by people who were positive the next card would win them a fortune, and were wrong. There was also plenty of cheap stuff that any hock shop would be pleased to put in their dusty display cases. Whether this sort of business fell into the loan-sharking category, I didn't know, but I had a pretty good guess. So there in the shape of one former merchantman, you had the essence of gangster enterprise—gambling, loan-sharking, booze, and prostitution, the latter being informally organized.

All of this sinful fun was highly exasperating to the local keepers of city morality—Methodist preachers and some of their congregations, ladies' temperance groups, and assorted politicians and officials—the ones who weren't taking bribes, which probably put them in the minority. Every once in a while they tried to interrupt the action. The cops had no jurisdiction on the high seas, so they hassled the water taxis, but since those taxis had long been a staple of the various communities, taking people from town to town or to places like Catalina Island, they provided a legal and useful service. As a result, the hassles didn't last long enough to interrupt the mostly one-way flow of money from the gamblers to the gambling ship operators. Most of
the cops didn't have their hearts in it anyway. A lot of them were on Tony's payroll.

There were a few decent-looking women on the ride out there. One or two fluttered their eyes at me—I don't mean to be egotistical, just honest. But the guys they were with pulled on their elbows and looked peeved. They shot a few glances at me, but I ignored them.

Perry pulled alongside the
Lucky Lady
's landing platform, and two greeters helped the sports off the taxi and made sure they were able to climb the stairway to the main deck without falling overboard.

I was the last one off.

“See you later, Perry.”

“Good luck,” he said.

When I walked into the main salon, the air was heavy with cigarette smoke and the noise. It was a cacophony of screams of joy and groans and laughter—roulette dealers saying “place your bets,” and craps players shouting orders to the dice, and other people yelling drink orders to the wandering waitresses, and the orchestra playing and a girl singer warbling into the stand-up microphone, while a hundred or so diners scraped plates and clinked glasses, and at the far end the sound of a hundred and fifty slot-machine arms being cranked and occasionally paying off with a cascade of coins, mostly nickels. It was an unholy din. Only the blackjack players were quiet, being satisfied with a tap on the cards to substitute for “hit me.”

Contrary to what Della had implied, the gamblers there were not particularly stylish. There were very few tuxedos in evidence, and ninety-five percent of the women were not in evening gowns. It was more like an Elks convention
than a night at the Trocadero. Most of the men were wearing hats, straws, fedoras, flat cloth caps. There were quite a few sailors scattered around—up from the base at Long Beach. Apparently Tony Scungilli was smart enough to realize that a more relaxed atmosphere would attract a wider audience, and if the swells resented mixing with the hoi polloi, they had very little in the way of alternative places to gamble and drink. There were several other ships out there, but they too followed Tony's lead in encouraging a come-one, come-all style. Besides, most of the swells in that town were in the movie business and had started life in very different circumstances, whether in the garment district of New York or the farms in Kansas and such places. Even the smattering of actors with British accents sprang from vaudeville or the circus. There wasn't enough blue blood in Hollywood to fill a milk jug, so there was surprisingly little snobbery, even among the newly rich—which covered just about everyone with money in that town. Oh, some of the women, wives or actresses, would swank around and call each other “dahling,” but deep down they didn't have the self-confidence to be real snobs. They were all “nouveau,” and those who weren't yet “riche” were trying like hell to get there.

At first I thought it might be hard to find Catherine Moore in such a place, but the main salon was really just one gigantic room, as long as a football field. I didn't think she'd be hanging around the bingo parlor, so I stayed in the main room, walking around and keeping my eyes open. There were cigarette girls here, there, and everywhere. They wore short, satiny dresses with plunging necklines, and fishnet stockings, and they walked through the crowds with smiles pasted on their faces, carrying their trays before them and
singing their mantra—“Cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos.” Needless to say, they were all good-looking women, although they wore too much makeup, and most of them had a shade of hair color unknown in nature. I thought about asking one of them if she knew Catherine but decided against it. I felt sure that Tony had the whole crew on a pretty short leash, and any one of them would be pleased to tell the boss that someone—“that guy over there”—was asking about his new girlfriend. Anonymity was the better part of valor.

It wasn't hard to spot the security guys who were stationed strategically by the doors that led out to the main deck. Others mingled with the crowd. They were conspicuous by design. They were all bulky guys with serious, self-important expressions, and they were constantly surveilling the room. There was obviously a lot of money on board, most of it being transferred from the gamblers to the
Lucky Lady
, and Tony was taking no chances. You'd have to be an idiot to try to pull a heist on board, but the world was full of idiots and what with the Depression in full swing, the economy was bad everywhere except on board the gambling ships, especially the
Lucky Lady
. A lot of people were desperate. It only took one to try it.

I bought some chips at the cashier's cage and then circled around the outside of the action, trying to look like a rube in search of a likely-looking table, one that looked ready to pay off. I was three quarters around the room when I saw her. She was sitting alone at a blackjack table—alone except for the dealer. Apparently, she was doing double duty as a shill—as well as Tony's girlfriend.

She must have just sat down, because otherwise she would have been surrounded by men eager to impress her with the
size of their bankrolls. She was of a quality to attract men the way a bitch in heat starts a fight between otherwise well-mannered dogs. Not that she gave off the impression of being in heat. Quite the contrary: she looked like an ice princess in a sequined gown whose idea of a good time was being left alone. The platinum hair added to the image. It would take a confident man to approach her with any hope of success.

Even so, she wouldn't be alone long. Already I noticed men at other tables glancing in her direction. I'd have to make my case, or Manny's, quickly. What's the line? “If t'were done, t'were well t'were done quickly.” But there was the problem of the dealer. He'd no doubt be standing there with his ears flapping, eager to gain points with the boss afterward by telling him about the encounter. The situation didn't look promising for doing a John Alden routine. On the other hand, she was beautiful, and I didn't see any harm in sitting down next to her. It was only a five-dollar table, so I figured I could risk a little of Manny's money just to make contact with her for a few minutes, if nothing else.

“Anyone sitting here?” I asked with as charming a smile as I could muster.

She looked at me with a bored expression. Her look didn't dent my ego too badly. I'd already been in bed that day with two startling-looking women, so I could ride out a mild wave of indifference.

“You see anyone?” she asked.

I didn't, so I sat down next to her. She smelled of expensive perfume and champagne. At least I think it was champagne. She also had a Camel going, and that didn't add to the quality of the air. Almost everyone smoked, but I didn't care for the
scent of it on a woman. It was hard to escape, though, in a casino.

“What'll it be, sport?” This from the dealer.

“This is called blackjack, right?”

“That's right.”

“Remind me of the rules. I don't gamble often.” That was true enough, but not because I didn't know how things worked, but because I did.

“Twenty-one is the highest score. Closest one to that wins. Dealer has to hold at seventeen. A player can take as many cards as he wants, but if you go over twenty-one you lose.”

“Seems simple enough.”

“It is.” He smiled insincerely.

“How have you been doing?” I asked Catherine.

“I just got here.” She smoked languidly and gazed off into the middle distance, as though to give new meaning to ennui.

“Aren't you playing?” I asked.

“I guess.” She tossed a chip and so did I, and the dealer slid two cards to each of us. I had two threes, called for another and got a ten, called for another and busted out with a seven. Catherine won with two kings. I assumed this was part of the shill, showing gamblers that it was actually possible to win now and then. She didn't seem surprised.

This was going nowhere. Luckily, we were very close to the long bar.

“Would you care for a drink?”

“No, thanks.” If she had, she wouldn't have needed ice, although I guess I'm pushing the frosty theme too far.

I got up and went to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. While the bartender was fixing it, I got out one of my business cards and wrote on the back: “I represent a well-known
producer. He has seen you here and would like to discuss a possible screen test. Call me for further details.”