Playland (44 page)

The effort had weakened him, and his head rested on his chest. “The doctors, they say I got six weeks at the outside,” Schlomo Buchalter said. “I worry about Ada. She takes good care of me. I shit in a bag and Ada cleans it out, she never complains. The house is paid for and I got a little laid away for her, but not much.”

“Ada know how you made your living?” Eddie Binhoff said.

“Ada just wishes I got married,” Schlomo Buchalter said, not answering the question. “So I had kids or something she could take care of after I’m gone. That’s what Ada does best, she takes care of people. You take a look at Ada, you know why she never got married. A telephone pole is better-looking than she is.”

“I got a proposition, Schlomo,” Jacob King said.

“I didn’t think you brung me all the way out here just to show me the reservoir, Jake. I see you and Eddie come into the house wearing your yarmulkes, I think I’m going to get whacked, and Ada’s going to see it, I was wondering what I did to deserve that.”

“Benny Draper,” Jacob King said.

“You been giving him a lot of trouble, I hear. And I hear he used two fairies who tried to take you out, Eddie.”

Eddie Binhoff grunted.

“Benny’s a putz,” Schlomo Buchalter said presently. “I did a guy for him, some guy giving him static in the union, testified against him wearing a paper bag over his head. Benny says his name was Stivic, and he wanted me to hurt him. The claw hammer was his idea. I used a piano wire in my time, a regular screw driver, a Phillips screwdriver, a baseball bat, never a claw hammer until this time. Then Benny says put a bag over his head. I said fuck that, you put a bag over his head, everyone knows it’s Benny Draper that placed the order, they’re going to come after
Benny then, and Benny’s going to give me up, bet on it. I am very careful when I do somebody, that’s why it’s the cancer that’s going to get me, I’m going to die in bed. So I do the guy, and drop him in the desert, but I don’t put no bag over his head. The deal was five large and two tickets on the Lurline to Honolulu, me and Ada, it would give her something to remember. Benny comes up with three large and no tickets on the Lurline, he says I got cancer, what do I want to go Hawaii for, none of the pineapple whores’ll want to fuck some guy who shits in a bag.”

The unmistakable voice of Benny Draper. No one could ever make it up.

“Then you can’t get close to him?”

“Sure I can get close to him. I don’t get mad, I get even. I say, you’re right, Benny, you wanted a bag over his head, I don’t give you no bag, I don’t deserve no tickets on the Lurline, my motto was always if you do a guy, follow orders, do him right, and this time I fucked up. You ought to retire, he says, and I liked that, a guy in this line of work doesn’t get to retire much, so I retire. I see Benny, though. He goes to this joint in East L.A., Obregon’s, it’s called, every Monday night, and I go there sometimes, I like the Mexican food, and Benny, he does, too, when he sees me, he picks up the tab and sticks a fifty in my pocket, like I’m some kind of charity case. So, Jake, you want me to do Benny, I’ll be glad to do Benny, if that’s what you have in mind.

“Ada will piss and moan, and I’ll say I’m dying, let me do what I want, and what I want is some Mexican food, it gives you gas, Ada, I don’t like to watch someone eat Mexican it gives gas to. I’ll take a cab to Obregon’s, the cabdriver pushes me inside, I always have a table in the back by the kitchen, force of habit, I like to see who comes in, who goes out, and I can always scram out through the kitchen, I see something I don’t like. They know me there, they place my wheelchair so I can see all the action in the joint, and when Benny comes in, he’ll come over, he’ll tell Mama Obregon it’s on him, and when he sticks the
fifty in my pocket and leans over and pats me on the cheek, that’s when I’ll do him, I’ll have the piece in my lap under the blanket, I’ll get him right under the jaw, it’ll take off the back of his head.”

“You got a piece?” Eddie Binhoff said.

“You got a dick?” Schlomo Buchalter answered.

“Is it clean?”

“If what I think is going to happen does happen, it don’t matter if it’s clean or dirty, does it?”

“You know you got to get him with the first shot,” Jacob King said. “His people’ll take you out before you can get a second one in.”

“I figure it’ll be like Utah, Jake, better than in a hospital with tubes up your nose, and one of those catheter things in your dick,” Schlomo Buchalter said. “I got some numbers in mind.”

Schlomo Buchalter said he wanted ten thousand dollars, in advance and all cash, small bills, and he would put the money in a safety deposit box he had taken out in Ada Buchalter’s name at Federal Savings, the Glendale Branch. Ada was also to receive two round-trip tickets to Hawaii on the Lurline. “Is Morris still in the fur business, Jake?”

Jacob King nodded.

“She always wanted a beaver coat, Ada. I don’t know why, it’s hotter than shit out here, but I see her looking at the
Life
magazine, at the model wearing a beaver coat, and I think she’d like one.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem, Schlomo.”

“I think I better go home now, Jake. It’s been a nice day, a nice outing, but I’m getting a little tired.”

Schlomo Buchalter was silent as Jacob King wheeled him back down the hill to the parked convertible. Eddie Binhoff picked him up from the wheelchair and deposited him in the back seat, then replaced the chair in the trunk.

“How about a week from Monday?” Jacob King said. “I was thinking I’d go out and pay the
Valiant
a visit that night.”

Schlomo Buchalter’s head bobbed up and down. “One thing
I should ask you,” he said as Jacob started the engine. “What happens if I lose my nerve?”

“Eddie’ll whack you,” Jacob King said without hesitating. “If you’re in the hospital with tubes up your nose, then he’ll whack you there.”

“That’s what I thought,” Schlomo Buchalter said. “I always liked to know all the angles.” He seemed to be counting the utility poles as they sped by. “You remember Leo Spain, Jake? Got his tongue cut out in a whorehouse on Fort Washington Avenue?”

Jacob King shook his head.

“You always got credit for that one, but it was me.”

O
f course i read the newspapers, Jimmy,” Morris Lefkowitz said into the telephone, folding that afternoon’s
Journal-American
over to a photograph of Jacob King, in black tie, entering the Ambassador Hotel for the Academy Awards dinner arm in arm with Blue Tyler, who was to present the best-picture Oscar. A dark-haired model in a floor-length red fox coat pirouetted before his desk, swishing the fur as if it were a tail. “And I see Jacob with this Blue or this Green. What kind of name is that for a girl?”

“It’s not a name like Lillian is the kind of name it’s not, Morris,” Jimmy Riordan said. “I go to see Lillian in Bay Ridge Tuesday, and when I’m there, Matthew comes in—”

“Who is this Matthew?” Morris Lefkowitz said. The model began untying the belt on the coat.

“Matthew is your godson, Morris. Matthew King, son of Jacob King and the former Lillian Aronow …”

Morris Lefkowitz was silent. He had little appreciation of sarcasm, and none when it was directed at him.

“… and Matthew asks his mother if they were millionaires,” Jimmy Riordan said, instantly translating the disapproval in Morris’s silence and reducing the level of his sarcasm. He
hated having to invoke Lillian King. She was a chronic complainer, but via Lillian perhaps he could rein in Jacob. “And Lillian says why do you say that. And Matthew says because the
Mirror
is calling Papa a millionaire sportsman. And he shows Lillian the picture of Jake with this girl.”

“Jimmy, stop talking like a priest,” Morris Lefkowitz said, as he switched the telephone from one ear to the other. “So he’s sticking it into this Blue or Green, he also stuck it into Benny Draper. Next week he breaks ground in Nevada. And that is the point, that is why we sent Jacob out there in the first place.”

“Agreed, Morris, agreed. But he’s calling this place Playland, he never checked that out with us.” A pause. “Morris.” Jimmy Riordan tried to control his voice. It was beginning to rise, as it never had before when he talked to Morris Lefkowitz. It was Lilo Kusack who had let him know what Jacob was proposing to call the new hotel in the desert. Lilo Kusack who called Jimmy Riordan every day or so now. Jimmy did not trust Lilo Kusack any more than Lilo trusted him, but with Benny Draper’s timely demise and with Benny’s successor, Jackie Heller, indebted both to Morris Lefkowitz and to Jacob King, Lilo Kusack did not have too many ears into which he could whisper anymore, and whispering was his key to the kingdom. “It’s like he’s a lone wolf out there. He could’ve used Lilo’s plans for La Casa Nevada, we could’ve worked it out, Lilo was willing, but no, Jake’s got to get a new architect, he says Lilo’s hotel was going to look like Attica, you don’t want a hotel looks like a pen, he says, you want a joint people will feel comfortable in. Well, you don’t call a place in the goddamn desert Playland either.” Lilo Kusack’s opinion, passed on to Morris as Jimmy’s own. “You call it Eldorado. You call it Rancho Diablo, the Pyramid. Playland sounds like Seventh Avenue.”

“I am Seventh Avenue, Jimmy,” Morris Lefkowitz said. He motioned the model to the side of his desk, then reached up and finished untying her belt. “That’s Jacob’s little joke. He knows I’d understand.”

The model let the red fox fall from her shoulders. She was naked underneath it.

“We will talk, Jimmy. Playland. I like the sound of that.”

Morris Lefkowitz hung up the telephone and examined the naked young woman. “The secret of being a successful showroom model,” he said, “is posture.”

“Yes, Mr. Lefkowitz.”

“You got to remember that. Posture.”

“Yes, Mr. Lefkowitz.”

“In fur, tits are secondary,” Morris Lefkowitz said.

“I talked to Morris,” Jimmy Riordan said over the telephone to Jacob King in Los Angeles. “He likes the name you picked out for this place.”

“Playland, Jimmy,” Jacob King said. “Say it. It comes out easy, you won’t choke on it. It’ll grow on you.”

Jacob’s pushing, Jimmy Riordan thought. When there was no need to push. It was his history. Success in itself was never enough to satisfy him. He always wanted more. Toward those he conquered Jacob was never benevolent. That yesterday’s enemy could be tomorrow’s ally was a concept he could never comprehend. Take no prisoners, sack the villages, kill the women and children. These were the rules under which he operated. It was time to let him know the new guidelines. “I’ve been talking to Lilo,” Jimmy Riordan said.

Jacob took his time answering. “You been talking to who?”

“Lilo,” Jimmy Riordan said. “Morris asked me to.” A minor prevarication. In fact it was he who had suggested it to Morris, when Morris was enjoying the fruits of Jacob’s triumphs in an almost unseemly way. He could read Morris, he had spent most of a professional lifetime reading Morris Lefkowitz, and Morris was what Jacob was not, benign in victory. “Lilo and I reached an understanding—”

“Lilo and you? You making Morris’s decisions for him now, you telling me Morris is an old man, can’t think for himself anymore?”

“Lilo and Morris,” Jimmy Riordan said quietly, correcting himself. It was a tactical mistake of the kind he rarely made. In the background he could hear a rhythmic sound that was familiar
but that he could not quite place. “Morris is cutting Lilo and his people out there in. You run the operation, California takes part of it.”

How large that part was, and the form it was to take, Jimmy Riordan deliberately neglected to say. The concept of oversight, insofar as it meant control over the purse, was not one to which Jacob King would ever agree willingly. He would accept, if grudgingly, Morris Lefkowitz controlling the purse, but he had a history with Morris, a history that had added significantly to Morris’s power and profit. Oversight from Lilo Kusack was something else again, even though Lilo would only have the power to recommend, not the power to order. Whatever fealty Jacob King felt he owed Morris Lefkowitz, whatever his sense of obligation to him, he would never accept orders from Lilo. Even Jimmy recognized that, and he hoped Lilo did, too. Jimmy liked Jacob, even trusted him to a point, as a staff officer must trust a commander in the field or fire him, and he neither liked nor trusted Lilo Kusack. Yet he wondered, if push came to shove, whether he would back Jacob or Lilo, then banished the thought as idle speculation. Speculation, however, and thinking the unthinkable, were what Morris Lefkowitz paid him handsomely for. Morris would as always be the court of last resort, and he retained the absolute power to overrule Lilo, and anyone else in the deal.