Playland (30 page)

“That’s what Capone had,” Rita said. “I told you that a long time ago.”

“I keep forgetting, Rita. Al was a special friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

It was a gibe she had heard too often to let it disturb her. “Capone doesn’t play out here, Jake. Neither does peach. Peach was last year.”

“So I’ll learn. You can teach me. You’ve come a long way, Rita. I hear that when you and Lilo give a party, out-of-work kings show up.”

Rita let the sheet fall away from her body, and as if by rote idly began flicking a thumb over the nipple of her left breast. “Just how much money did you put in that safe next door?”

“You saw that?”

“Money interests me. Especially in large amounts. So, yes, I did see that.”

“More than you ever carried for Al. Or Vinny D.” He checked the whiteness of his teeth in the mirror. “I always wanted a safe behind a cowboy picture. Class.”

“It’s a Remington, and it’s a fake.”

“You could’ve fooled me.”

Rita started to say, It’s not all that hard to do, but caught herself in time. She was careful about putting herself in a position that could result in her getting beaten up, the violence inherent in so many of her sexual partners a factor in their attractiveness to her, her talent for fellatio and the more exotic
forms of intercourse her primary means of keeping that violence under control. If she was beaten up, she was honest enough to apportion some of the blame to herself, both for a tongue quicker than it should be (in conversation if not in sodomy) and a failure to have a heavy object, a Steuben ashtray, say, within reach to balance the odds. Considering the men she had bedded, she thought herself fortunate to have been beaten up as few times as she had, and never once badly enough to be hospitalized, a black eye easily disguised by sunglasses and bruises fading with time. Further evening the odds was the fact that there were men who might have beaten her up in the past who would be quite willing to maim and perhaps even kill other men who would beat her up in the present, were she only to ask. If nothing else, Rita Lewis was a realist; it had been a half dozen years since she had last copulated with Jacob King, and she was not quite in touch with his current level of volatility. Not knowing exactly how far she could push, and having experience of his fists, she kept her tongue in check.

“So, Rita, if I want to get rid of that phoney what’s-his-name …”

“Remington.”

“… then how much does the real thing cost?”

“What you put into the safe.”

“I’ll keep the fake. Who the fuck’ll know?”

“I did. How are you fixed?”

“Lilo tell you to ask me that?”

“Sure. Just like Lilo told me to blow you. He’ll want me to tell him all about it.”

Jacob King ran his hand over his stomach, then pinched his waist looking for excess flesh. “I’m fixed okay,” he said when he had satisfied himself of his physical fitness. “The race wire pretty much runs itself. Only a fucking idiot would try to skim off the top, it’s a sure way to get capped.” Jacob snapped his fingers. “Except I’m not supposed to talk like that. It sends Jimmy Riordan right to the Pepto-Bismol bottle. And Morris owns a chain of laundries out here I’m supposed to look after. And a
linen business. Perfectly legitimate. All the nightclubs use it. There’s the, uh, the, uh … give me a little help, Rita …”

“The Trocadero. Ciro’s. The Mocambo.”

“That’s it. They all do business with me. If they know what’s good for them.” He took the cigarette from her hand and used it to light one of his own. “You know what I’m going to be, Rita?” He handed back her cigarette. “One of those millionaire sportsmen Winchell is always writing about.”

“Laundries and sportsmen don’t go together, Jacob. It’s not a good fit.”

Jacob King shrugged.

“Let me spell it out for you, Jake.” Rita got out of bed and stubbed out the cigarette. She stared for a moment at her reflection in the mirror. Her entire life she had liked to look at herself naked. She was an enthusiastic masturbator, and loved the perfect triangular thickness of her pubic hair, and that gravity had not yet worked its will on her breasts. “I’m not supposed to, but I will anyway. For old times’ sake, like you said before. Lilo says if you’re out here to make a case for Morris, you can save your breath, there’s no case to make, the desert is closed. No trespassing.”

He seemed elaborately disinterested in what she had to say. Few men and no women had ever been able to tell him how to run his life. “You had your jugs lifted?”

Rita tried again. “It’s not like New York. It’s not the Brooklyn docks. You don’t cap a bunch of people here no one cares about. Just because these people are smooth, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re not tough.”

Jacob let his towel drop and put his arms around Rita Lewis. His thick-veined cock rubbed slowly against her buttocks until it came to rest in her crack. “I bet Lilo never had a piece of ass like you.”

“Lilo used to be Joan Crawford’s lawyer,” Rita Lewis said. She made a perfunctory attempt to escape his grasp, then gave in to the inevitable and began to rotate her ass rhythmically against his member.

He walked her out onto the balcony over the rose arbor, the two of them naked in the warm afternoon sun, he already with another hard-on. Below, the gardener tending the tea roses pretended not to notice their pre-coital fondling. “God, I’m going to love this town,” Jacob King said.

T
he evidence is anecdotal, and when what happened actually did happen is subject to dispute, but there is reason to suggest that Jacob King, for whatever his motives (and it may have been as simple as taking him at his word when he said he was going to love this town), did heed, at least at the beginning, the advice of Jimmy Riordan to proceed slowly, to make nice, to avoid antagonisms, to turn the other cheek, as he had at Union Station when confronted by the police detective Crotty, who was probably Benny Draper’s man, as he had when he ignored Rita Lewis’s warning that there was no case for Morris Lefkowitz to be made, although it could be said that to have coitus with Lilo Kusack’s mistress three times the afternoon of his arrival might be construed as reckless behavior, a statement in itself. Whether it was by accident or design that Jacob met Blue Tyler again in Los Angeles depends on the teller, and whether he ran into her before or after he had reconnoitered the desert is also open to debate. I can only make what I will call an informed speculation, subject of course to my own prejudices, my main prejudice an allegiance to narrative, however fragmented.

I said earlier that there were two biographies of Jacob King,
equally mendacious. Both were also, it turned out, written (for two different publishers) by the same man, a true crime writer named Harold Pugh, who in the course of a given year would crank out a half dozen such criminal biographies under as many different pseudonyms; Raul Flaherty was the pen name he used on
Jake: A Gangster’s Story
, Waldo Kline on
Messenger of Death: The Life and Times of Jacob King
(its epigraph from Proverbs 16:14: “The wrath of a king is as messengers of death”). Such was the facility of Harold Pugh (sadly long since gone to his eternal reward), and his good-natured propensity for charlatanism, that he had Waldo Kline flatly contradict Raul Flaherty on a number of points, and then engage in a loud public dispute with him in the low press, alleging among other things plagiarism. It is instructive nevertheless to inspect these volumes, if only because they supply Jacob King with a personal style, however vulgar (because of course they are taken largely from the tabloids of the period), and offer a chronology of his later Hollywood years, both of which I can then amend on the basis of my conversations with Blue Tyler herself, and with Chuckie O’Hara and Arthur French, none of whom volunteered any insights to the pseudonymous Waldo Kline and Raul Flaherty, and who to me, it must be said, offered largely the stuff of lonely, restless, inventive, and self-absorbed minds.

There is Jacob the vain, who oiled his skin with lotions and potions and facial creams, and kept the line of his chiseled features intact by sleeping with an elastic chin strap attached to a black net nightcap. There was Jacob the vulgar, who put Carrara marble throughout his house on St. Pierre Road and concealed, for the benefit of his guests, a row of slot machines behind the sliding teak bookshelves in his library, slot machines with an automatic payoff he could control so that his friends would never go home without a nest egg of silver dollars. There is Jacob the arriviste, who learned to play polo and golf and tennis and joined Hillcrest, where every Saturday afternoon in the game room he played gin with Shelley Flynn and Moe French and Chuckie O’Hara. Jacob the gambler, who bet ten
thousand dollars on the turn of a card, and Jacob the philanthropist, who contributed to the United Jewish Appeal and the I Am an American Foundation, at whose dinner he was photographed with Rabbi Baruch Tyger and His Eminence Hugh Cardinal Danaher. What is interesting about this curriculum vitae is that it would seem to incorporate ten years of rich full living, when in fact, from the day Jacob King arrived at Union Station in Los Angeles to the day of his assassination, less than two years would transpire.

Blue Tyler said Jacob King did not play polo, it was Arthur who played polo, Jacob just liked to wear boots and jodhpurs, he thought he looked good in them, he’d wear them to the polo matches and watch Arthur and Spencer Tracy and D.Z. play, and he had begun taking riding lessons shortly before the accident (she always called his murder “the accident”), he said if Arthur could ride a horse so could he. She said she could not remember if he wore a chin strap or a nightcap to bed, but she tended to doubt it because he liked to fuck in the middle of the night, if he got up to pee he couldn’t go back to sleep without a fuck, and she would remember going down on anyone wearing a chin strap and a nightcap, she thought it would make her lose the urge to help him get it up.

Blue said Eddie Schmidt did Jacob King’s clothes. Who was Eddie Schmidt, I said. Tailor to the stars, Blue said, without a hint of irony.

Arthur said it was Willingham, his father’s house on Angelo Drive that had the black Carrara marble, not Jacob King’s. Chuckie said every Industry house on the west side of Los Angeles had black marble, and naturally he called it Crakow chic.

Real estate records show that Jacob King bought the house on St. Pierre Road the week after his arrival. The deed was in the name of JFR, Ltd., a subsidiary of Lefko Enterprises. JFR was James Francis Riordan. Lefko was Morris Lefkowitz.

Chuckie O’Hara said that Jacob had plans drawn for the slot machines he wanted installed behind sliding teak bookshelves at
the house on St. Pierre Road. He died before the slots could be installed.

Arthur French said Jacob King was not a member of Hillcrest. He said he would have blackballed him.

Au contraire
, Chuckie O’Hara said. Every Saturday when he wasn’t shooting he would play gin at Hillcrest with Jacob and Shelley Flynn and J. F. French.

Moe French wouldn’t have let Arthur blackball Jacob, Chuckie O’Hara went on. Moe would say Jump, and Arthur would say How high. I thought you liked Arthur, I said. Moe’s errand boy, Chuckie said. Take away Moe and what do you think Arthur would have been?

The records made available to me by Hillcrest’s resident manager (at Arthur French’s request) resolved the dispute over Jacob King’s club membership by showing he had a permanent guest card; his sponsor was Shelley Flynn and his seconder was Chuckie O’Hara. Chuckie claimed (and as in most matters he put a pederast’s spin on his motives) that he only wanted to be available in the locker or steam rooms in the event Jacob ever lapsed from the theology of heterosexuality.

It is also true that Jacob King did try to insinuate himself into the community. Went to temple. Met and embraced Barry Tyger with an open checkbook. A total of forty-two thousand dollars, according to the audit the Internal Revenue Service conducted of Jacob King’s tangled finances after his murder. Rabbi Tyger was an artifact of the times, one who saw himself less a spiritual leader than an envoy to the
goyim
and a high priest of secularism. He took voice lessons and sold religion the way his flock sold their motion pictures, avoiding piety as if it were a sin, even offering absolution to the moguls for their sexual transgressions. Having intercourse with a shiksa was a lesser transgression than traffic in the ideas of “Reds, pinks, and pseudo-liberals” (the words taken from
The Collected Sermons of Barry Tyger
, with a jacket photo of the author in a double-breasted blazer, open-necked shirt, and foulard ascot). He believed nothing was served by invoking the ghettos of Eastern
Europe from whence so many of his congregation came. “What’s so great about Minsk or Pinsk?” he asked an interviewer. “What virtue is there in ethnic emphasis? We have beautiful Jews and we have stinkers, and so does everybody else. This roots, roots, roots, it’s all baloney.” Except on the Sabbath, he was a regular at the high-stakes gin games at Hillcrest, in effect his second synagogue, where Jacob King, Chuckie O’Hara said, saw to it that he was a regular winner.