JC2 The Raiders (9 page)

"You hired her, then," said Chandler.

"We'll talk about that later."

He put down the phone and looked up to see her frowning at him, her
chin high.

"That's how you do things, I imagine,"
she said. "Quick decisions. The only thing is, now I owe
you
four hundred and thirty-five dollars. That's how
I
do
things."

Jonas grinned. "I guess I
have
to hire
you, then. Otherwise, you can't pay me."

"Well ... You're not a Las Vegas casino. You don't hold people
prisoner until they pay off their chits. Do you? You don't break legs
either, I imagine."

"You think Chandler would do that?" he asked.

She shrugged. "He's
your
friend."

"Do you know why I'm here?"

She nodded. "I also know if I told anybody
you're here, I'd be lucky if all I wound up with is
two
broken
legs."

"I don't do business that way, Mrs. Wyatt," said Jonas
coldly.

"No. I don't suppose you do. But Chandler does. Why do you think
he trusted me, telling me who was up here and sending me up?"

"Maybe I'm an innocent," he said.

"Maybe you are. Were you ever in Vegas when Bugsy Siegel was
running the Flamingo?"

"No, as a matter of fact, I never was."

She nodded. "I was. I've always liked to come
here. My husband brought me here and introduced me to gambling. Bugsy
was dangerous. Bugsy killed people. The town has changed since they
got rid of Bugsy Siegel. They
had
to kill him. He was bad for
business. But only because he was too public. It wasn't that he beat
up on people and killed them — or had them killed — that
got him his death sentence. It was that he did it too openly. When
it's done now, it's done quietly."

Jonas shook his head. "I can't think Morris Chandler — "
He stopped. What he had in mind was that he couldn't believe a man
Nevada Smith trusted could be what she suggested.

"He doesn't make all the decisions here," she said. "He's
a partner, not the sole owner." She sighed. "I'm being
stupid. You want a secretary that won't blab everything she knows,
and here I am doing it."

"You're not Chandler's confidential secretary," said Jonas.

"I won't kid you. I'd like to be yours. Uh ... Chandler spoke of
... other requirements."

Jonas smiled. "Well. Let's say what he mentioned isn't required.
It would be appreciated."

She stared at him evenly for half a minute, a quizzical smile on her
face. Her tongue flicked out between her lips. "Would you want
me to live here?" she asked.

"I have two bedrooms."

She grinned. "Yeah. You have a certain reputation, Mr. Cord."

"The job is yours," he said. "I'll appreciate your
calling me Mr. Cord when others are with us. When we're alone ...
Jonas."

"My name is Angie," she said.

ANGIE MOVED INTO THE SUITE THE AFTERNOON AFTER her interview. She
slept in the second bedroom that night. The next night she slept with
Jonas.

That the new executive secretary was an exceptionally attractive
woman and lived in the suite with Mr. Cord came as no surprise to the
four young executives who arrived in Las Vegas within the week. As
Angie had said, Jonas had a certain reputation.

Making all the arrangements took some time, but by the end of his
second week in Las Vegas Jonas was firmly in control of all his
businesses. He called his companies on the scrambler telephones. The
four young executives could go anywhere any time as couriers, flying
the De Havilland junket flight to Mexico City and catching flights
from there to anywhere Jonas wanted them to go.

He was not the subject of an FBI manhunt. He was
just a missing witness in an investigation few in Congress or in the
press thought was very important. Such newspapers as did run stories
about his disappearance treated it as a joke on the Senate. One
page-five headline read, cord strings out senate snoops.

Another read, noah in de ark, jonas in de whale?

He could not even be held in contempt of Congress, since he had never
received a subpoena.

Angie first saw the newspaper report that Monica had filed for
divorce.

She and Jonas were sitting at breakfast, he
following his lifelong habit of eating a hearty breakfast, she
contenting herself with juice, coffee, and a Danish. She did not have
any provocative nightgowns or peignoirs, and they slept nude. She
came out to breakfast in her white nylon panties, he in his boxer
shorts. He was reading
The New York Times
, she the
Los
Angeles Times
.

"Oh, Jonas!"

"What?"

She handed over the newspaper, pointing at the story.

CORD DIVORCE Mrs. Jonas Cord Files for Divorce

Mrs. Jonas Cord, nee Monica Winthrop, has filed an action in Los
Angeles Superior Court, asking for a divorce. Alleging adultery,
cruelty, and abandonment, Mrs. Cord asks for a decree of divorce,
child custody, division of California property, and alimony.

Mr. Cord's whereabouts are unknown. He left his Bel Air home shortly
before United States marshals arrived to serve on him a summons to
testify before a Senate subcommittee investigating airline operations
and has not been seen since. He is believed to be living in the
vicinity of Mexico City. Jerry Geisler, Mrs. Cord's attorney, said
there would be no problem about obtaining jurisdiction over Mr. Cord,
since under California law he can be served his summons by
publication.

Jonas shrugged and handed the newspaper back to Angie. "
'Adultery, cruelty, and abandonment,' " he muttered. "She
can't prove any one of them."

Angie put her hand on his. "I'll swear under oath that we've
never slept together," she said.

He smiled wanly. "You won't have to do that, Angie. It's good of
you — and loyal — but you won't have to do it. My lawyers
will negotiate a settlement. Monica knows better than to demand too
much. She'll be reasonable."

"Did you love her ... ever?"

Jonas nodded. "Twice. I married her twice."

Angie frowned and nodded at the newspaper. "It's none of my
business. I shouldn't ask you questions. But — It mentions
child custody."

"Monica doesn't need to demand child custody. The girl will be
eighteen years old soon. Anyway, I wouldn't demand she come to live
with me. I want her to visit me — that is, if she wants to, but
only if she wants to."

He glanced over the newspaper story again, frowning, then laid the
paper aside. His lips were tight.

"I'm sorry, Jonas," Angie whispered.

"If you want to be sorry the marriage has broken up, okay, be
sorry. If you want to be sorry for me, don't. If you want to be sorry
for her, don't."

Angie blinked, squeezing tears from her eyes. "I shouldn't ask
you personal questions," she said. "I'm happy to be with
you, whatever the answers are."

He stood, walked behind her, lifted one of her breasts in each hand,
and nuzzled her alongside the throat. "You ask me anything you
want. If I don't want to answer, I won't."

Angie looked up and grinned. "Or lie," she said. "Or
lie," he agreed, chuckling.

Sure. Lying was an alternative. It was one he sometimes took. He did
not want to know everything about Angie. He put through some
inquiries and found out that the life story she had given him was not
the truth. He didn't condemn her for that. He could understand why
she didn't want to tell the truth. He was confident that he could
trust her. Nevada thought so, too, and that counted for a lot.

Edgar Burns died of shrapnel wounds at Chateau-Thierry on June 6,
1918, two weeks after his daughter Angela was born and twenty-six
years to the day before her first husband would die on Omaha Beach.
Her young mother remarried, and Angie was twelve years old before
they told her about her real father. In school she was Angie Damone.
She never used the name Burns.

Damone was a bootlegger, operating in Yonkers and sanctioned by no
less a figure than Arnold Rothstein. When Rothstein was killed,
Damone was sanctioned by a don of the Castellamarese group, and he
continued to distill gin until the repeal of Prohibition. After
Repeal, the don gave him a share of the bookmaking in Yonkers. Angie
grew up understanding that her family lived just as well as the
families of the lawyer, the dentist, and the real estate agent who
were their neighbors on a tree-lined residential street in White
Plains. Her father — stepfather, as she came to understand —
was in the import-export business. So she believed. So the neighbors
believed.

Angie was seventeen when Damone was arrested and the newspapers
revealed the true nature of his business. The charges were dropped,
but Angie was so humiliated that she never went back to school. She
asked Damone to give her a job with a bookie, but he adamantly
refused. For a year she did nothing. She avoided her old friends and
made a group of new ones among the unemployed and malcontented
element of the young people of White Plains.

One of them was a young man named Jerome Latham. Considered handsome,
he had a square face with a long, strong jaw, heavy-lidded eyes, and
slicked-down hair usually covered with a snap-brim hat. He always had
money to spend, and no one was sure how he got it, which lent him a
dim aura of mystery and glamour. Angie fell in love with him; and,
since she was by far the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, Jerry
— She couldn't say Jerry fell in love with her. She was an
ornament to him, or a trophy. But they became a pair. They were seen
everywhere together. He spent money on her. He bought her clothes.

Her mother and stepfather did not like Jerry Latham. Damone called
him a hoodlum, to which Angie replied angrily that Damone was an odd
man to be calling another man a hoodlum. That exchange soured the
relationship between her and her mother, as well as that between her
and her stepfather. She went to Jerry and told him she wanted to live
with him.

Jerry took her in. He lived in a room, just one room, but shortly he
rented a small apartment, and in July of 1937, when she was nineteen
years old, they married.

She learned how Jerry made the money he was never without. He was a
distributor of counterfeit money. He bought the money from a
counterfeiter in New Rochelle, paying him eight dollars apiece for
twenty-dollar bills. Then he traveled throughout the New York
metropolitan area, making small purchases and tendering counterfeit
twenties, in a typical transaction he would buy five dollars' worth
of something, hand over a twenty, get fifteen in change, and make
seven dollars profit. He would ride a bus, say to Paterson, New
Jersey, pass half a dozen twenties in the course of an afternoon, and
come home fifty dollars richer. He might make more if he could sell
the merchandise he bought. Often he hocked it and never redeemed it.

He was never caught. The secret was that he wasn't greedy. In 1938 a
family could live quite comfortably on a hundred fifty a month. He
went out no more than once a week. Also, he kept careful track of
where he went. He never returned to the same merchant, usually not
even to the same block.

The ease with which her husband got money fascinated Angie. She
suggested he let her try it. She went with him a few times, then went
out on her own. She was useful to him. She could go back to stores
where he had been, where he wouldn't return, and take the same
business for another hit.

In February of 1940 something terrible happened. Treasury agents
raided the New Rochelle print shop. Their counterfeiter went off to
federal prison.

Jerry had to find a new racket. He began to loot mailboxes. She
helped him. They poured bags of mail out on their kitchen table,
sometimes finding cash, sometimes checks, sometimes money orders,
occasionally a stock certificate or a bond. He was an artistic
forger, too. When he found a good-sized check, made out to, say,
Arthur Schultz, he would forge a driver's license in the name of
Arthur Schultz, and use it as identification as he offered the check
at a bank. If the check was made out to a woman, Angie cashed it.

The Selective Service law went into effect on September 10, 1940.
Jerry Latham had one of the first numbers picked. Before the year
ended, he was at Fort Dix, undergoing basic infantry training.

Angie was desperate. She had no real idea how to make a living,
except by doing the kind of thing Jerry had done. On March 11, 1941,
federal agents entered her apartment, arrested her, and seized more
than four hundred pieces of mail. They found driver's license blanks
and even a few counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. On June 20 she
entered the federal reformatory for women at Alderson, West Virginia.

They brought the telegram to her cell. Sergeant Jerome Latham had
been killed in action on June 6, 1944. She received her parole in
September.

During her three years in prison she had learned to take shorthand
and to type.

She never worked for Boise-Cascade or for the California state
auditor. Her parole officer helped her obtain a job as secretary to
the War Ration Board in White Plains. Before long she met the man who
was to become her second husband, Ted Wyatt. He was exactly the kind
of man Jerry Latham had been: a grifter whose specialty was
counterfeit ration stamps. As a secretary to the board, she could
learn what stamps would be authorized for use next month, which was
useful information for a man who needed to know what stamps to print.

Her term of parole ended in September 1945. She married Ted Wyatt,
and they set out for California, where both of them hoped to be free
from the reputations they had made in the New York area. He did
introduce her to gambling, as she had told Jonas. He took her to
Reno, then to Las Vegas, and when casinos like the Flamingo and The
Seven Voyages opened, they were familiar figures in the gaming rooms.