Playland (21 page)

“I’ve got a pretty face, Morris,” Jacob King said.

“You get your face in the newspaper nuzzling too many broads not named Lillian.”

“You don’t think they got newspapers out there in California?” Jacob King said. “You think they don’t got broads? You think it’s all avocados out there?”

Lillian King toyed with the paper umbrella in her empty glass and pretended not to hear, her whole married life an exercise in not hearing or, if she did hear, forgetting quickly. Helen O’Connell was singing “Love Is Just Around the Corner,” and
Lillian King, with no one at the table paying any attention to her, mouthed the lyrics in perfect sync, it being her fantasy, when she fingered herself on those all-too-frequent nights when Jacob did not come home, that one day she would head the bill at the Copa.

A waiter set down a fresh round of drinks, a club soda for Morris Lefkowitz, a Rob Roy for Jimmy Riordan, a White Horse and soda for Jacob King, nothing for Lillian. “I ordered a Scotch sour,” Lillian King said.

“You already had a Scotch sour, Lillian,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “In fact you had three.” He turned to Jacob and without a pause said, “I hope you appreciate this is a ground-floor opportunity I’m handing you in California. A major assignment. I look at the state of Nevada, the silver state, and you know what I see—”

Lillian King interrupted, her voice louder than it should have been, “What am I, a little girl, Morris Lefkowitz counts my drinks now?”

A waiter and a captain were hovering near the table, Joe Romagnola’s orders, a perquisite that accrued naturally to Morris Lefkowitz. Jacob King raised his arm and both the captain and the waiter sprang to his side. “A Scotch sour for Mrs. King,” he said, and then to Morris Lefkowitz, “You look at Nevada and you see someplace that’s not the
schmata
business.”

“All gold is what I see,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “A gold mine in the goddamn desert.” His scalp glistened with sweat, as it often did when he talked about money, and his voice lowered.

“Jimmy …”

“Morris …”

“The name of the place they’re going to build out there?”

“La Casa Nevada. They begin pouring the foundations the first of next month.”

“La Casa Nevada. A nice name. Italian, Jimmy?”

“Spanish.”

“What does it mean, this Spanish?”

“Nevada House, Morris.”

“I like La Casa Nevada better,” Morris Lefkowitz said. He leaned close to Jacob King. “Expansion, Jacob. We have to go national.”

“You going to let the California boys move into New York then, Morris?” Jacob King said. If he was an unlettered man of violent urges, he was also not without irony, a rare combination in a gangster.

Morris Lefkowitz had an old man’s laugh, more cough than laugh. His face would redden, and if he did not get his handkerchief to his mouth, he would spray mucus indiscriminately. Now he laughed and sprayed.

“Morris, you hit me with a clam,” Lillian King said.

Morris Lefkowitz ignored her. “That’s why I love this boy like the son I never had, Jimmy. Always kidding. Jacob, I know you since you were, what …”

“Since he was fifteen years of age,” Jimmy Riordan said.

“… fifteen years of age and you come around telling me what you could do for me. I laughed. I admit it. I laughed. Then I saw. Some of what you said you could do”—Morris Lefkowitz shrugged expressively—“you could do.” Another shrug, as if to shake away the bodies that were the by-product of Jacob King doing what he could do. He patted Jacob on the cheek. “This little
boychik
, Jimmy …”

Jimmy Riordan nodded, all the while playing with a gold pencil. He rarely spoke unless it was necessary. Listening was what he did best, next to remembering, his Irish welterweight’s face as always impassive. The criminal bar had never attracted him. Too many elements over which he had no control. Wild cards. He hated wild cards. A jury was the wild card he hated most. He did however vet the attorneys who appeared for members of the Lefkowitz enterprises when they were caught up in criminal proceedings. He favored Jews and Irishmen who had sharpened their courtroom skills in a district attorney’s office of any of the five boroughs or for the U.S. attorney in the southern district, men, now private practitioners, who knew their opposite numbers at the prosecutors’ table, knew the judges and the
political clubs and what markers might be called in at what courthouses, men absent social advantages and with limited educational credentials who had not been recruited by the Wall Street law firms, class resentment being, to Jimmy Riordan, an essential element for success in the makeup of a criminal lawyer. Meyer Feiffer and Brendan Kean, out of the Bronx and Inwood respectively, City College for one, St. John’s for the other, each a former Queens chief deputy D.A. specializing in the more difficult homicide cases, both with top conviction rates, had defended Jacob King. If they had qualms about the coincidences attendant to the deaths of Ruth Wexler and the corner man at Sunnyside Arena, they kept their own counsel, the single exception Meyer Feiffer’s spontaneous spasm of distaste when he learned of Ruth Wexler’s demise. This was a lapse suggesting to Jimmy Riordan, with his compulsive attention to detail and his ability to anticipate the possibility of future problems, such as some later onset of virtue, that Meyer Feiffer’s services not be required in any future cases alleging criminality in the Lefkowitz domain. It is needless to say that Meyer Feiffer and Brendan Kean were not included in the party at the Copa. They were hired help, well-paid help, but help nonetheless.

“I’ll call some people out there, Jacob,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “Lilo Kusack. Rita Lewis. She’ll show you around. You remember Rita.”

“One of my husband’s whores,” Lillian King said to no one in particular, just loud enough so that Jacob and Jimmy Riordan and Morris Lefkowitz could hear, but not so loud they had to acknowledge what they had heard. Her Scotch sour arrived and she sucked on an orange slice.

“You think the L.A. guys don’t know what they got in Nevada, Morris?” Jacob said, ignoring his wife. “You think they’re just waiting for someone to come out from New York so they can cut him in?”

“That’s what I’m sending you out there for, Jacob. To convince them.” Morris Lefkowitz turned to Lillian King. “Lillian, you should order something to eat, you just eat the fruit in the
Scotch sours you like so much, the orange slices and the maraschino cherries, you’ll starve. The shellfish is good here, they tell me. And the creamed spinach is a treat. Waiter,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “A plate of spinach for Mrs. King.”

“Who’re you, Popeye, Morris?” Lillian King said.

But Morris Lefkowitz had expended all the attention he intended to expend on Lillian King. The spinach was his way of telling her to shut up. Morris Lefkowitz did not so much talk as send out signals, and not to pick up his signals was to make the kind of mistake Philly Wexler had made. Lillian King heard the signal and said, “I hate spinach, I’ll have a steak instead. Well done. And a shrimp cocktail with the mustard and mayonnaise dressing, and not the red cocktail sauce. And a baked potato with sour cream and chives.” She could not resist one last sally. “Is that all right, Morris?”

“That’s nice, Lillian,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “Jimmy, tell Jacob what we’re offering the people in California.”

“National management,” Jimmy Riordan said. “We’ll help them maximize their profit potential.” James Francis Riordan, attorney at law, of counsel to Morris Lefkowitz and the Lefkowitz enterprises for twenty years and more, had grown up in Yorkville, on streets where words like
cocksucker
and
motherfucker
were the currency of communication, and he had once fought Golden Gloves, which accounted for his flattened pug’s nose. He thought the ring would be his ticket out of Yorkville, as dancing had been his pal Jim Cagney’s ticket out, but he couldn’t hit a lick, a welterweight with knuckles like potato chips, and he stayed in parochial school and mastered the multiplication and logarithmic tables and sines and cosines and dollar signs and won scholarships to Regis Prep and then to Fordham and Fordham Law and now he talked about maximizing profit potential for Morris Lefkowitz, a man James Francis Riordan, had he remained a pug in Yorkville, would have called a sheeny cocksucker, he cuts the tip off his prick, the Jew bastid.

“One plus one equals twenty-one,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “Blackjack. Everybody a winner.”

“It’s just a question of calibrating the terms,” Jimmy Riordan said carefully, his tone implying what in truth he actually thought, that Jacob King was perhaps not the most effective of calibrators, his handling of the Philly Wexler situation the only example he needed to make his case.

Jacob King picked up the hint of reservation in Jimmy Riordan’s voice. “Sure. Just like buying Manhattan Island from the Indians.” He did not mask the taunt. It was the eternal struggle between the man of action and the numbers cruncher. “I offer twenty-four dollars, throw in a couple of beads, we close the deal …”

But Jimmy Riordan was rising from his chair, not paying attention. “Walter,” he said, “what takes you out of the Cub Room on a cold night in January?”

“The chance to see Philly Wexler’s best boyhood pal,” Walter Winchell said.

“Philly Wexler was a deviate,” Jimmy Riordan said, for the record. It was the first time that any principal in the Lefkowitz organization had ever been known to take a moral position. “You know Lillian King, Morris Lefkowitz, Jacob I know you know, we’ve been saving a seat for you, Walter, it’s our press seat …”

Walter Winchell pulled back the chair and sat down. “I know your father,” he said to Lillian King. “Mendy Aronow, right? The accountant for the Keith circuit. Could multiply three-four-digit numbers in his head like it was two times six equals twelve. Carried a torch for Gina Hennessy that was in the Follies and married Fergus Choate, the elevator company Choates, he was a homo.”

Lillian King preened. Her pedigree was not a public record written on yellow sheets, as was her husband’s, and no interest in it had ever before been publicly expressed. That Walter Winchell was aware of her family tree, and had spun from it an urban parable in four sentences, was a bonus she had not been expecting on that evening when her husband was celebrating his acquittal of murder in the first degree, and it revived her spirits.
“That was my late Uncle Mendel. He was my late father’s brother. My father was—”

“Whatever,” Walter Winchell said. “So, Jake, something nice happened to you today.” His eyes were constantly on the move, checking to see who got what table, who was coming, who was going. “I bet Billingsley a fin you wouldn’t go to Ossining when it came out about Philly and his sister. The pervert got what perverts deserve.”

Jacob King offered no opinion on Philly Wexler’s sexual culpability. “You sure you want to sit down with a small-time shooter, Walter?”

“It wasn’t me that said that, Jake. I was just quoting one of my sources.”

“Unnamed. You want to give me his name, Walter, I’d really appreciate it.”

Even Morris Lefkowitz laughed.

“So you’re a big-time shooter,” Walter Winchell said. “I protect my sources. Like I’m entitled in the United States of America. Which is why the United States of America is the greatest country in the world. And why we got to get rid of the swishes and degenerates like Philly Wexler and the pinko-stinkos to keep it that way.” Without missing a beat, he leaned toward Morris Lefkowitz. “So how’s the fur business, Morris?”

“Legitimate,” Morris Lefkowitz said.

As if he were broadcasting to Mr. and Mrs. United States and all the ships at sea, Walter Winchell said, “And that’s how Morris Lefkowitz has stayed out of jail for fifty years.”

A look of pain crossed Morris Lefkowitz’s countenance. “I’m just a simple furrier,” he said.

Winchell was not listening. He focused on the stage, where Helen O’Connell was finishing her set. “Whatta set of pipes on Miss Helen O’Connell,” he said to no one in particular, as if composing an item for his column. “Every note a treat. Swellegant. The stems aren’t bad either.” On the back of an envelope he jotted the words
pipes
and
stems
and
swellegant
, then turned back to Morris Lefkowitz as the stage curtain rose and the
house band arrived on a turntable, playing a routine with a Latin beat. “The scoop is you’re sending Jake out West, Morris. You trying to keep him on ice. Out of the newspapers for a while. Or does he just need a little sun after his stay in the Tombs?”

Morris Lefkowitz turned his dead, deadly eyes on Winchell. “You want a little Russian sable, Walter? For you I can get it wholesale.”

“What would G-man Hoover say if I did that, Morris?” Walter Winchell said, his furtive gaze now moving to a commotion at the maître d’s station. Flashbulbs popped. “Blue …” Winchell was on his feet, and he was gone, pushing past the adjoining tables, the gel in the stage lights catching his bald spot, making it gleam blue and then pink, Morris Lefkowitz left behind, just another old Jew at a ringside table who tipped too much. “You finished the picture, I hear it’s phantabulous,” Winchell shouted, and then to a man blocking his view, “Who let you in here, get out of the way,” clearing a path by elbowing the man onto his wife’s lap, and then again solicitous, “When are you and Arthur middle-aisling it …”

“I should worry, I should care,” Blue Tyler half sang, half whispered, “I should marry a millionaire … Arthur, do you qualify?”