Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (23 page)

The coffee shop was enormous but quiet as a tomb; there were maybe twenty people spread out across a hundred tables and booths, in varying states of anticipation or digestion, so conversation was at a bare minimum. If the customers had lost at the tables, they were naturally apt to be quiet. If they had won big, the odds were they would either be at the bar feeling expansive, or in their rooms with some hookers feeling whatever they had paid to feel.

I wanted to blend into the woodwork as much as possible, so I took a booth near the back. A mid-fortyish blond waitress with dark roots and a name tag identifying her as Charlene came over at once and asked if I wanted some coffee.

“I need all the coffee you have,” I told her. Charlene nodded and strolled toward the coffee station, while I scanned the multipaged plastic menu, nearly drooling all over it. I was ravenous. Another fifteen minutes and I’d be getting the shakes.

“You ready to order?” Charlene asked, pouring my coffee.

“Here’s how hungry I am,” I began.

“How hungry, darlin’?” asked Charlene. Her accent was Georgia or northern Florida.

“If you can get a salami omelet with hash browns and two orders of
very
buttered toast to this table in under five minutes, I’ll give you ten smackers.”

She smiled. “You’re going to lose that money.”

“And rolls now, please, or I’ll pass out right here on the floor.”

She smiled. “You’re scarin’ me, darlin’.”

Five minutes later, I was scarfing down my food like a hobo let into the kitchen of the rich folks’ house. I couldn’t remember anything ever tasting as good as that salami omelet. The salami had been cut into perfect cubes, the onions were sliced to mere gossamer clippings and perfectly browned, and the hash browns were enough to make a grown man cry. If I was on death row, this might be the way to go out.

Charlene came over and surveyed the ruins of my meal.

“You just get off the chain gang?”

“That was scary, it was so delicious.”

“The night chef’s the best, I swear. And I recommend the rhubarb pie. And of course you want more coffee, don’t you, honey?”

“Any chance of you adopting me?” I asked Charlene.

“None,” Charlene said, and laughed. “Got two already.” She picked up my plate and looked at it and her smile turned a little thin. “Plus a third, my oldest, William, lost him on D-Day.”

“I’m very, very sorry,” I told her.

“Yes sir. Nineteen years of age. Believed in what he was fighting for and that’s the important thing, I suppose.”

“It certainly is, ma’am. What he was doing on that day couldn’t have been more important to the world.”

“Yes sir.” She nodded. “I’ll get you that pie.” She started away, then turned back to me. “Could I say something to you, mister?”

“Sure. Anything.”

“It’s sort of personal.”

“Go ahead. I can take it.”

“Okay. It’s just … you have a real good face. You’d look a whole lot better without that toupee.”

I left the coffee shop, a toothpick stuck in my mouth, and walked toward the house phones, my eyes still peeled for Lansky or LaMarca or anyone who looked like they could be their playmates. All I saw were happy gamblers.

The house phones were white and they were located on a marble table across from a row of unoccupied pay booths. I picked up a phone and an operator instantly answered.

“Desert Inn. Good morning,” she said huskily. “How can I help you?”

“I need Dr. Horowitz in room 204, please?”

There was a pause.

“There is no Dr. Horowitz in room 204. There’s a Dr. Murray Horowitz registered in room 401.”

“That’s him. Could you ring me through, please?”

She paused again. I heard a sheet of paper rustle on her end.

“I’m sorry, but there’s a ‘do not disturb’ on that line.”

“No problem. Thanks for your time.” I hung up and hustled over to the elevator bank, just as an elevator opened its doors. A gray-haired man rolled out in a wheelchair pushed by a painfully thin Pakistani wearing a turban. The gray-haired man held a silver walking stick across his lap and was puffing on a meerschaum pipe. You had to love this town. I slipped into the car as soon as the duo wheeled out of the way and banged the button for four, keeping a finger on the
DOOR CLOSE
button. I didn’t want company. The elevator crept to the fourth floor. Its doors opened noisily. I got out and followed the arrows toward rooms 400–410. The corridors were relatively short, making a complete circuit of the floor in a series of angles. When I passed room 405, I made a left into another short corridor. At the end of it, I observed a folding chair set up directly across from what had to be Lucky’s room. Next to the chair was a table holding a radio, a thermos, and a paper bag; perched on the chair and eating a sandwich was a young red-haired man who was as tall seated as I was standing.

He looked up at me with no particular curiosity.

“Room 415?” I asked him.

The giant pointed past me and waved his hand, signaling that I should turn and walk the other way. He probably didn’t want to speak with his mouth full. I thanked him profusely and started back around the other way, circling back down the short corridors until I turned the final corner and reached the elevator once again.

The giant was standing in front of me.

When he was upright, I saw that he wasn’t exactly a giant. He stood about six-foot-four and wasn’t all that much wider than a brownstone. I guessed him to be about twenty-five.

“You got here pretty quickly,” I told him. “You ever play football?”

“High school,” he said. “Guard.”

“You go to high school out here?”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowing. “Near here. Elko.”

“Really. And now you’re working for Dr. Horowitz?”

He didn’t know quite what to do with that. The kid was just local talent, subcontracted out to work the night shift. Lucky was getting very casual in his old age; one would have thought he’d have brought his own muscle from Naples or New York. Maybe he was saving on air fare.

“This is a VIP floor,” the red-haired kid said with all the importance he could muster. “What are you doing here?”

“I guess I got lost. How do you like that for an answer?”

“Not very much,” he said, and he blinked a couple of times, kind of a nervous tic, the kind that made me think physical violence was not all that far away.

I glanced over the redhead’s right shoulder and nodded at an invisible stranger. It’s an ancient ploy, taken from
Captain Jack’s Big Book of Detective Tricks,
but the kid went for it just long enough to throw a glance over his shoulder, at which point I jerked my knee directly into his crotch. He groaned and bent over in pain; I raised both my arms and smashed the meaty portion of my right hand directly onto the bridge of his nose, breaking it immediately. Blood sprayed across his face like water from a busted pipe, and the kid instinctively raised both his hands to cover the wound. As he did so, I ran out the fire door and started hustling down the stairs. I have to admit that I felt badly for the kid. Not terrible, but pretty bad.

I took the fire stairs two at a time. The kid began lumbering after me, but that knee to his crotch had taken most of the spring out of his step. When I ran out of stairs, I pushed open the fire door and walked out into the never-ending din of the casino. A new combo was playing in the lounge and new suckers were hitting the tables. Lansky was right on target—this was the dawn of a new era, the creation of the most perfect machine ever designed for the continuous extraction of money. Adjusting my toup, I crossed the floor with all deliberate speed, keeping my eyes fixed on the front doors.

I exited the Desert Inn into the relative stillness of the night. It was just past three in the morning, but the heat never quit in this town. Maybe this was what hell was like—twenty-four hours of flames and lounge comedians. I took a deep breath to slow the pounding of my heart and scanned a line of cabs that stood in front of the hotel. At the head of the line was a candy-apple-red Chevrolet in considerably better shape than the junker I had arrived in. Its driver waved at me to get in.

I slid into the front seat and closed the door behind me. The cabby turned around.

“Where are we going?” she asked. I had never seen a woman cabby before, but the smoky register of her voice, as well as the sinuous musculature of her upper arms, indicated that she was just a chromosome or two away from switching teams. Her brown hair was combed back over her ears and she wore no makeup around her bright blue eyes. All in all, she was pretty hot stuff.

“I guess we’re going to the Flamingo,” I told her.

“You guess?”

I looked out the window. Lucky’s night watchman was stumbling out through the Desert Inn’s front doors, his right hand pressed to his still-gushing nose.

“Yeah. Let’s move, sweetheart.”

The driver accelerated.

“My name’s Kim,” she informed me. “That guy with the busted beak, he a friend of yours?”

“He’s my son. I cut his allowance and he got mad.”

Kim laughed. “You gotta be strict with kids these days,” she said. “Actually, I know that guy.”

“My son?”

“Yeah, your son. Be careful, mister. At first you might think he’s just a garden-variety nitwit, but the fact is he’s pretty much of a psycho. He started coming on to me one night at the bar over by the Thunderbird, obviously not clued in to the fairly obvious fact that I’m a devout lesbian. Or that my friend was, Cheryl, who dances in the show there. She’s less butch than I am, so she can pass. Not that I’m
all
that butch, really. I’m not shocking you, am I?” She glanced up into her rearview mirror. “I just guess that you have a certain amount of sophistication, given that you came waltzing so casually out of the Inn having turned Wally’s nose into chitlins.”

“You’re not shocking me,” I told her truthfully, “although I can’t say I’m used to people being so forthcoming.”

“Well, that’s who I am. Also a motormouth, but you probably figured that out already. We still going to the Flamingo, by the way? You seemed unsure.”

“We’re going there, but take your time. I’ll pay for it.” My head felt sweaty under the toupee. “Wally, that’s his name?”

“That’s what he told us. He’s like a freelance goon; I’ve heard rumors that he strangled a couple of girls out here.”

“On whose behalf?”

“On behalf of whoever paid him, I guess. That part’s not so clear,” Kim said. She stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit up with one hand; this girl was like a lesbian Dead End Kid. “Maybe people who thought they might get shaken down. Some of the hookers out here are seriously brain-impaired, stupid enough to try a little amateur blackmail on the wrong people.”

“Were those killings investigated?”

“Not in what I would call a terribly rigorous fashion. There’s a certain Wild West quality to life here. Dodge City with slot machines. So if a couple of working girls disappear it’s not exactly a cause for civic alarm.”

I settled back in my seat as she cruised down Las Vegas Boulevard. “How long you been driving here?”

“Since the war. I was stationed in South Carolina as a WAC, which was pretty much heaven for an eager little girl of my persuasion. Lot of wonderful women, many of them straight, who just figured, what the hell, it’s wartime, let’s give girls a try. Then their fellas came back.” She shook her head. “But they’ll still have their memories, right?”

“I’m sure they will. Those humid nights down South.”

“Way down South. God, don’t get me started.” She laughed. “Anyhow, that ended and I went back to LA, which I never really cared for terribly much. Too heartless by half. So I figured I’ll start fresh and you can’t start fresher than Vegas. This place is a blank page. Gets a little more filled in every day.”

“You know pretty much everybody here?”

She again looked up at the rearview mirror; this time she made eye contact.

“You a private dick? Somehow I get that feeling.”

“Yeah.”

“New Yorker?”

“Right again.” I lit up a Lucky. “I get a feeling, too. That I can trust you.”

“’Cause I’m a dyke?”

“No, because you strike me as both intelligent and ethical. God knows I’ve dealt with enough lesbians in New York, and some of them were totally disreputable.”

“Tell me about it.” Kim blew a cloud of smoke out her window. “That’s what I love about Cheryl, actually: her honesty. That and her tits.” Kim laughed loudly.

“Well, that’s two major attributes.”

“Yes sir. You want me to double back to the airport while you decide where you actually want to go?”

“Sure.”

“Somebody waiting for you at the Flamingo that you don’t particularly want to see?” Kim asked, half turning around. “Pardon my curiosity, but that rug you’re wearing looks like a very temporary measure.”

“It’s still alive,” I told her. “I can feel its little heartbeat.”

Kim laughed again. “You’re funny, pal. Really. Very.”

“Call me Buddy.”