Playland (31 page)

Baruch Tyger refused to officiate at Jacob King’s funeral. Asked by the
Los Angeles Herald Express
if he had anything good to say about the deceased, Rabbi Tyger said, “He’s dead.”

Therefore:

Proceeding from guesswork, my sources at best tainted and working on agendas of their own, I have Jacob King driving fast across the desert, his destination some four hundred miles to the northeast—Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada. The urban sprawl that is Los Angeles County today would then have petered out long before the San Bernardino County line, and the ribbon of two-lane blacktop would not have been a modern freeway with parabolic exits and interchanges. He would have been behind the wheel of either the Cadillac convertible or the Lincoln Continental coupe that came with the house on St. Pierre Road; if the Cadillac, the top of course would have been down and the sun beating on his bare head, because the wind would certainly have sent a hat, had he been wearing one, bouncing across the desert sands.

I must assume that the Mojave was the first desert Jacob King had ever seen. It was the conceit of Raul Flaherty in
Jake: A Gangster’s Story
that he immediately perceived that the Mojave offered an even more advantageous body dump than Sheepshead Bay, where in the Flaherty version Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon had been deposited, that the blistering sun and the shifting sands would quickly erase all a body’s identifying characteristics, and what remained would be a meal for coyotes and snakes and vultures and scorpions and desert predators of all
sizes and shapes, an arm here, a leg there, even the head a moveable feast. Always shameless, Harold Pugh as Raul Flaherty further claimed that Jacob King used the desert as his own private outdoor cemetery on any number of occasions. It is a conceit I tend to doubt, because I suspect a boy born in Red Hook and accorded only a fifth-grade education would not be natural historian enough to be easily familiar with the flesh-eating habits of desert scavengers and carnivores, and furthermore he was practiced killer enough to realize that a drive of several hundred miles or more with a body going rank in the trunk, and with all the possibilities of vehicular malfunction as well as desert sheriffs who supported themselves with the income from speeding tickets, was a risk not worth taking.

Consider Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas that spring evening when Jacob King pulled into town. He would park his Lincoln Continental across the street from the Pioneer Club’s Vegas Vic cutout sign, its arms rocking against the night sky, its cigarette puffing and glowing. Correction: There was no “downtown” Las Vegas that season, there was just Las Vegas, a tired anything-goes honky-tonk for the construction workers who had worked on Boulder Dam and stayed on as maintenance personnel, small-time action and small-time whores and twenty-four-hour heat. Jacob King knew exactly where he wanted to go, a nondescript casino called the Bronco down the street from the Pioneer Club. He went inside, looked around to see who if anyone was looking either at him or consciously away from him, and then sat down at a blackjack table. The dealer seemed bored. He was a man about Jacob King’s age, with thinning black hair plastered to his skull, a short muscular body, expressionless eyes, and protruding from under the right cuff of his white shirt the bottom of a tattoo, what appeared to be the locks of a woman’s hair. The two other players at the table, turbine managers from the dam in cheap cotton pants, short-sleeved shirts, and straw cowboy hats, watched without comment as Jacob slid a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills at the dealer and asked for ten one-hundred-dollar chips. The
dealer shoveled the cash down the chute and stacked the hundred-dollar tokes in front of Jacob King.

“And another thousand in hundreds,” Jacob King said after a moment, passing the bills across to the dealer. The other two players looked at each other, then shook their heads. “Too rich for me,” one murmured as they gathered their chips and left Jacob King alone at the table. Jacob put five chips down.

The dealer dealt a hand to Jacob King and one to himself. “Dealer holds on seventeen,” he said.

Jacob King gestured for another card, then another. He turned his cards over. Twenty-two. The dealer raked in the chips.

“Morris told me you might be coming in, Jake,” the dealer said quietly as he dealt out another hand.

“What else did Morris tell you, Eddie?” Jacob King said.

“He tells me I owe him one,” the dealer said. His name was Eddie Binhoff and like the late Philly Wexler he had known Jacob King most of his life. “He’s right. The genius of Morris Lefkowitz is, you always end up owing him one. You live to be a hundred and sixty-two years old, you get a call from Morris, he’s two hundred and ten years of age, he points out you still owe him one. So what are you here for, Jake?”

“Blackjack,” Jacob King said.

“Fuck you,” Eddie Binhoff said, paying nineteen. They talked softly, always playing, Jacob winning or losing, Eddie Binhoff raking in or paying out chips, the hundred-dollar game scaring off the casual players.

“You’ve always been a very suspicious guy, Eddie, you know that?” He doubled down and let his eyes wander over the down-at-the-heels casino. “I figured out here, the sun shines, everybody says howdy, you’d loosen up, get less suspicious. But no. You’re the same coiled-up guy you were in Red Hook, we were kids, you know that?”

“I been in the joint twice since I leave Red Hook. Nine years total. I even got a tattoo in the joint, it gave me something to do, a chick named Roxanne.

“That’s her on my arm,” Eddie Binhoff said, showing Jacob
the bottom of the tattoo. “Except I don’t know no Roxannes. What the hell. It helped pass the time.” He moved cards crisply out of the shoe, and flicked his over without looking. “The guy who give me the tattoo, he says I got to pay him in skull, so I broke his fucking skull is what I did. That’s the beauty of doing a guy in the joint. You’re already there, nobody gives a shit, it’s one less mouth the state has to feed.”

“Hit me,” Jacob King said.

“I get out last time, Morris makes some calls, sets me up, that’s how I get to owe him one,” Eddie Binhoff said. “Bingo, I’m a solid citizen. I even got this little bungalow with a porch out front. So I sit on my porch and read about you in the papers. I want to jerk off, it makes me so happy reading about you, a kid from the same neighborhood as me. You want to cut up old touches, we’ll cut up old touches.”

Jacob turned around and watched the stage, where a woman singer wearing a Levi’s shirt missing two buttons and showing dark roots under her blond dye job was trying to lip-sync “Don’t Fence Me In,” mechanically snapping her microphone cord as if it was a lariat, and smiling in the direction of Eddie Binhoff’s table.

“You banging her, Eddie?”

“A couple of times. She’s a little stringy.”

“So,” Jacob King said. He had a jack and a deuce showing. Eddie Binhoff slid him an eight of clubs. Twenty. “Lilo Kusack’s new place. La Casa Nevada. What do you hear about it?”

“Jake. I don’t have three ears. I hear what everybody else hears. Lilo’s fronting it for Benny Draper, Benny’s pension fund’s putting up the construction costs. You know all that before you leave Penn Station.”

“Grand Central. You been away from New York too long, Eddie. You take the Limited to Chicago from Grand Central, not Penn Station, get off at LaSalle Street in Chi, grab something to eat at the Pump Room, go over to Dearborn Street, pick up the Chief, George makes sure your grips are on the train.”

Eddie Binhoff dealt himself a seven. Twenty-one. “Who the fuck is George?”

“The colored guy on the train. All the colored guys on the train are called George. That way you don’t have to remember their colored names. I guess they didn’t teach you that at Attica.” Jacob King nodded for another game. “You pull into L.A., you get off at Pasadena. Stars get off at Pasadena. You ought to remember that, Eddie, you ever take the Chief to L.A., you’ll want people to think you’re a star.”

“You know something, Jake,” Eddie Binhoff said. He was never overly talkative, but if he did choose to speak, he always said what was on his mind, with no fancy elocution. “I’m beginning to think maybe you didn’t whack Philly Wexler, it was some other guy, it was a bad rap, even Morris is clean, he had nothing to do with that fucking poinsettia that blew Ruthie away.” He kept staring at Jacob King as he raked in four one-hundred-dollar chips and laid out the next hand. “A guy who tells me stars get off the train in Pasadena, I’d say that guy don’t have the temperament to be a hitter.”

Jacob King cracked his knuckles, his olive-complected face darkening even more. Eddie Binhoff had seen the look before, and the mayhem that usually followed. There was a baseball bat under the table, but he knew that Morris Lefkowitz would not consider his using it to counter an assault by Jacob King as payment for the favor he already owed. Morris Lefkowitz would take it amiss, and Morris Lefkowitz did not let things he took amiss ride, even when there was twenty-five hundred miles between where he was and where what caused him offense had taken place. Jacob did not take his eyes off Eddie Binhoff. “You always did have a smart mouth, Eddie,” he said finally. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Then he smiled. “So what else you hear about Lilo’s place.”

“It’s going to be a money machine with marble crappers,” Eddie Binhoff said, steadying the bat with his knee. Morris Lefkowitz or no Morris Lefkowitz, he knew he would not have let Jacob King come across the table. “Or so some people say. I don’t see it myself.”

“Because you got no vision, Eddie. People saying anything else?”

“Some people say Morris is blowing smoke up his ass, he think’s anybody’s going to cut him in.” Another player sat down at the table. “Beat it,” Eddie Binhoff said to the new player, and when the player made no move, he repeated the order, his voice barely a whisper. “I said beat it.”

The player looked at Eddie Binhoff, then at Jacob King. “I want to play. I got the money.” He put a twenty on the table. “Give me some chips. Or get me the pit boss.”

“Good, call the pit boss, that’s your right,” Jacob King said. “And when you do, I’ll take this cigarette here …” He flicked the ash into an ashtray, leaving a burning ember at the end of the butt. He pinched the cigarette and put the ember under the chin of the other man. “… and I’ll put it out in your eye.”

“It’ll hurt,” Eddie Binhoff said.

The player twirled in his chair and scurried away, leaving his twenty-dollar bill on the table. Jacob beckoned a drinks waitress, gave her the player’s twenty, and added a hundred. “Give it to that scared little guy over there looks like he’s going to wet his pants.” He took another bill from his roll. “And here’s a hundred for you, sweetheart.”

“Thank you, Mr. King.” She smiled at Jacob. “I’m free later, you got nothing to do.”

“Even in a shithole like this they know you, Jake,” Eddie Binhoff said.

“Christ, most of the broads in this place are older than Morris,” Jacob King said, as if the waitress was not still at his elbow. She flounced off. “You got time to show me around, Eddie?”

“I got twenty-four hours a day, it’s such an interesting place.”

“I don’t have all that many guys from the neighborhood out here, Eddie.” It was as close as Jacob could come to admitting there were some hands he was not willing to play alone. “I need somebody to watch my back.”

Eddie Binhoff clapped his hands to show the pit boss he was not palming any chips, then pulled off his apron. “You must be getting out of practice, Jake. There’s been two guys on your back from the moment you walked into this joint.”

“So you like being back on the payroll, Eddie?”

J
ust vamping now, I said to Chuckie O’Hara.

Vamp, Chuckie said. We were sitting in the beamed two-story living room at his house in Carmel Highlands, with the ocean crashing against the rocks below. Occasionally I heard a noise from the study next door, and when I turned to look, I could see the wraithlike figure of Vera O’Hara, Chuckie’s mother, trying to hide behind the huge oaken door, afraid she might be caught eavesdropping. She was over ninety, and so deaf that had we had put our conversation on loudspeakers she could not have heard it, but it still did not stop her from trying to listen. She had loved Blue Tyler. Charlton should have married Blue, Vera O’Hara yelled at me when Chuckie told her I had seen Blue in Hamtramck, they would have made such a perfect couple, and I would be a grandmother and even a great-grandmother today. It’s true that Charlton was a little older, but he was exactly what Blue needed, a stabilizing influence, the loss of his leg would not have made any difference at all to her, she was so adorable, but Charlton just preferred those men friends of his, Charlton, I have never understood you, you were the catch of Hollywood, not to mention the women here in
Carmel, but they’re just fortune hunters up here, and I don’t know what you ever saw in that Johnny person anyway.