Playland (29 page)

Morris, Lilo said when he called Morris Lefkowitz back, adjusting his genitals inside his swimming trunks, Rita said you called, I’m sorry I was out, it’s been too long, Morris, we’ll take care of Jake, get him set up out here, have him meet a few people. I know a nice house, just the place, we’ll make him comfortable, let him see southern California hospitality up close, don’t you worry about a thing, Morris.

It was precisely when Lilo Kusack said not to worry that Jimmy Riordan, listening on the extension in Morris Lefkowitz’s office, began to worry, but he kept his own counsel, wondering to himself what was potentially more dangerous, Lilo Kusack underestimating Jacob King, or Jacob King underestimating Lilo Kusack, either eventuality a volatile prospect. He was also sure that Morris Lefkowitz was thinking along the same lines, Morris in his eighth decade as always immune to smooth talkers, which is one reason he had reached his eighth decade with so few scars, but he too kept his own counsel. It was in these pregnant silences that Jimmy Riordan and Morris Lefkowitz communicated.

According to both Chuckie O’Hara and Arthur French, it was also Rita Lewis who met Jacob King on the platform when the Super Chief pulled into Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. He was all in shades of beige, with no tie and a beige shirt that buttoned to the neck, and a beige jacket with no lapel, and brown-and-beige shoes, and in his hand he had a roll of bills
from which he was liberally distributing tips to the porters wrestling with his five suitcases and two wardrobe trunks.

“So, Rita,” Jacob King said when he spotted her leaning against a baggage truck the way minor contract actresses did when they were photographed at the beginning or end of a publicity junket.

“Lilo called that one right,” Rita Lewis said. “He said you’d get off the Chief flashing bills like a two-bit hood.”

“You got a funny way of saying hello, Rita,” Jacob King said. “How long’s it been?”

“Seven years,” Rita Lewis said. “Lillian got pissed off, remember? She didn’t think we should be fucking when she was pregnant. I can only say if she thought that, she didn’t know you very well.” She ran her fingers down the inside of his jacket. “Is this your idea of resort wear?”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“You don’t know, Jacob, then I can’t tell you. Another thing. Stars get off the Chief in Pasadena.”

“Why?”

“They do, that’s why. That’s why they’re stars, they know things like that. But if you’re going to get off the train looking like a Good Humor man, maybe it’s better you stayed on.” She looked at the pile of suitcases. “Planning on staying awhile?”

“Awhile,” Jacob King said pleasantly, staring past Rita at a large man in a dirty white linen suit across the platform who seemed to be watching him.

“Let me guess,” he said to the man in the white suit. “You’re a cop.”

“Frank Crotty, Mr. King,” he said, moving toward them. “Lieutenant Frank Crotty. Vice.”

It occurred to Rita that in all the years she had consorted with men of crime she had never really seen a policeman up close, except when one was giving her a traffic ticket. She liked to be out of town when bad things she thought might happen did happen. In another city. Or another state. Or another country. Switzerland was the country she liked best. Switzerland in the winter when the mountains were covered with snow. In Switzerland
she would hear about the blood she was escaping and imagine it making a scarlet pattern on the virgin ski trails. There were no Lieutenant Crottys in Davos or Klosters or Gstaad. Lieutenant Crotty looked like an overweight avuncular rattlesnake, his large belly stretching the buttons of his soiled double-breasted suit. She wondered who had tipped him off that Jacob would be arriving on the Chief, and that Jacob would not know enough to get off at Pasadena. She knew it was not Lilo. Lilo would never tip his hand, and he did not believe in vulgar intimidation. She wondered if she would tell Lilo that the policeman had met Jacob at Union Station, and decided he would already know, because it was the sort of thing he made it his business to know. Not to tell him would introduce another element of distrust in a relationship already complicated by the fact that Lilo was only a middleman who defined for his clients the frontiers between the legal and the illegal, and it had been Rita’s history since puberty that she was always attracted to those who had crossed the boundaries into the criminal without a passing thought, her current alliance with a coordinator like Lilo, a facilitator, a factor more of age and a concomitant instinct for survival than of the recklessness to which she had so often been prone.

“Is this an official welcome, Lieutenant Crotty?” Jacob King said.

“Unofficial,” Crotty said. “You’re planning to stay awhile, are you, Jake?”

“That’s funny, that’s exactly the question my friend here just asked.

“Lillian Aronow,” Jacob King said after a moment spent counting his bags, then nodding toward Rita, “this is Lieutenant Crotty from Vice, who starts off calling me Mr. King and now we’re such pals he calls me Jake.”

Crotty turned his rattlesnake eyes on Rita. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Lewis.”

Now she knew she would tell Lilo. It was dumb of the detective to show he knew her name, there was no advantage in it.

“The vice officers are very quick in Los Angeles, Rita,” Jacob said. “You forgot to tell me that.” He smiled at Crotty. “So, Lieutenant, what can I tell you you don’t already know, you’re so smart?”

“Maybe what’re you going to be doing here, with all these grips?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business, but I want to be a good citizen my first day in Los Angeles. I used to say Los Angle-us, but then a lady I met said it’s An-juh-lus, so that’s how I say it now. Los An-juh-lus. So how about this? I’m an investor. I believe in the accumulation and utilization of capital. I’m looking for investment possibilities.” He leaned close to Crotty. “I’m an easy guy to make friends with. I’m interested in everybody I meet. I notice little things about them.” He picked at the buttonholes in the sleeve of Crotty’s linen jacket. “For example, your suit. It needs dry cleaning, it looks like soy sauce here, maybe moo shu pork, anyway you should use a napkin when you eat. But I also notice it’s custom-tailored. That interests me. Most police officers get their suits off the pipe, two pairs of pants and free alterations.

“This is quality goods,” he said as Crotty brushed at a spot on his sleeve.

“Sydney Greenstreet wore it in
Across the Pacific
,” Crotty said, explaining when he did not have to, as Jacob knew he would. “I know a guy at Warner’s, he gets me all Sydney’s suits.”

“I had a custom-made vicuña coat, I gave it to the Pullman porter on the train. George his name was. A colored.” Jacob smiled. His tabloid smile. The smile Rita Lewis had so often seen when he was setting someone up. “I knew you were in the market for secondhand clothes, Lieutenant, I would’ve saved it for you. I think it’s probably wasted on a
schwartze
.”

I wonder if he smiles when he does a hit, Rita Lewis thought.

“But then I didn’t know I was going to be met by a welcoming committee, my mistake, I’m sorry, what’re you going to do? Your bad luck.”

Over the public-address system, there was a trumpet fanfare, and then the station announcer called all aboard for the Del Mar Special, departing at eleven-fifteen, track fourteen, post time for the first race at one-thirty, all aboard, please.

Crotty waited until the announcement was finished. “If you want to make friends here, Jake,” he said carefully as the porters wrestled the suitcases and the two trunks onto the baggage truck, “you got to remember to show respect for other people’s interests. People here, they’ve got various interests. Of a business nature. They don’t like other people butting in. You should remember that.”

Jacob nodded, as if taking the words to heart. “Frank … It is Frank, isn’t it?”

Crotty nodded.

“That’s good advice, Frank. I’ll try to remember that.” He peeled a hundred-dollar bill from his roll. “You want to help the red cap with the bags?”

Crotty shrugged, then turned and walked up the platform toward the waiting room.

Jacob King watched him for a moment. “Who sent the flat-foot, Rita?”

It was the kind of question that for most of her life she had conditioned herself never to answer, nor even to surmise a possible answer. It was an article of faith with her that what she did not know, or claimed not to know, would not hurt her, while at the same time in the more realistic lobe of her brain she understood this to be a comforting fantasy rather than an empirical fact. “Who do think I am, the Answer Man?”

“For old times’ sake,” Jacob King said.

She felt herself weakening. “I had to make a guess, I’d say it was Benny Draper, it’s his kind of dumb play.”

“So, Rita. You missed me?” Jacob King said.

You have to realize, Chuckie O’Hara said, that Jacob just took to this place as if he had been born to it, that was one thing Lilo was dead-on about. He loved that house in Bel Air, he loved the
gates and the cars and the servants and the swimming pool. He made Rita take him all around the grounds. He said he’d learn how to play tennis, he’d hire the best coaches to teach him, and that croquet was just stickball with a mallet, and this is the real scream, the pièce de résistance: Rita is showing him through the house and they run into the butler. He’s in his daytime livery, black-and-yellow stripes, polishing silver or something, and Jacob grabs him by the neck and throws him up against the wall and puts a gun against his head. Who the fuck are you? he says. How’d you get in here?

I’m the butler, sir, the butler says with that kind of piss-elegant butler savoir faire, as if he’d picked up his manners buttling for C. Aubrey Smith.

Needless to say, Jacob was terribly embarrassed. Oh, I’m Jake King, he says. What’s your name?

Woodson, sir, the butler says.

I mean, your first fucking name, Jacob says.

And Rita said, You don’t call a butler by his first name, Jake. He’s just Woodson.

And Jacob said, Well, beat it, Woody.

Chuckie waited for my reaction. I’m not sure that plays, I said after a moment.

Why not?

Well, let’s say Jacob arrived at the house with Rita. And he had all these bags and the two trunks. So obviously there must have been servants around to take the bags inside and upstairs to unpack them. One would just have to assume that Woodson, if that was the butler’s name, would have been there to supervise, and Jacob would have had to have seen him.

You can be such a bore, Jack.

But I’m right. Right?

It ruins the scene, Chuckie O’Hara said.

“I see you still take a shower after you do it,” Rita Lewis said when Jacob King emerged from the bathroom into the master bedroom of the house on St. Pierre Road, a towel around his
waist, slicking his hair back. She was smoking a cigarette and wondering exactly how much money it was he had taken from his briefcase and put in the wall safe behind the fake Remington in the sitting room next door.

“So I smell like a baby the next time,” Jacob said. He went to the open French doors and waved at the Japanese gardener in the rose arbor below. “You know what I’m going do? I’m going to repaint this room in peach. I hear that’s the color this year. Then I’m going to hire a guy. All he’s going to do is play the piano.”