Playland (54 page)

Of course Blue liked the round bed, it was her first time in that configuration, “Let’s box the compass,” she said.

“What does that mean?” Jacob King said. He was brushing his damp hair with the pair of silver brushes she had brought with her from Los Angeles, a peace offering. “For afterwards,” she said. A cigarette hung from his lips.

“I don’t know.” She yawned and stretched, and rolled away from the wet spot, then back on top of it. His spunk made her feel closer to him. She did not want to take a shower, she liked the smell of his come on her. “I heard it in that Erroll Flynn
picture Mike Curtiz directed at Warner’s. The one about the pirate. Captain Something.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“I bet you never even saw a picture of mine before you met me.”

Jacob sat beside her on the bed. “You could make money on that bet,” he said, smiling.

Blue took the cigarette from his lips and drew on it. She let her head and shoulders hang over the edge of the bed and began to blow smoke rings, knees raised, legs apart, her buttocks providing purchase. Her breasts flattened out against her chest until only her nipples seemed to protrude. Jacob leaned over and removed the cigarette from her mouth, then crushed it out in an ashtray. “The first time I ever saw you, Arthur took a butt out of your mouth. At the Copa. He didn’t want you photographed smoking.”

“You remember that?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever think we’d end up this way?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“I remember, too.”

“What do you remember?”

“That you knew this was what I looked like with my clothes off.”

Jacob King smiled. “Well, I wasn’t surprised.”

“Jacob, I never want to get old.”

A shadow passed over his face, a shadow he hoped she did not see.
Morris wants you to be old, too. I want you to be old. Believe me
. “Yes, you do.”

“Will you get old with me, then?”

How could he promise that? “I am old.”

“No, you’re not.” She heaved herself upright, in perfect shape, a dancer’s motion, as if she was doing a sit-up.

“Twice as old as you are. And more.”

“Well, you act young.”

He stacked the brushes and put them on the bed.

“Are you still lucky, Jacob?”

“I hope as lucky as you are,” he said quietly. “I think about that plane a lot lately. And you missing it.”

She wondered if she should tell him. She hated secrets, she could never keep them, as much as she always promised she would, but this was one she had kept for more than five years. It made her feel guilty sometimes that she had lived and Carole and the others had died, but there it was. “Jacob,” she said. Her voice was grave. “It wasn’t just luck.”

He heard the hesitant note and said nothing. Better not to ask questions. Questions might make her retreat. Nor did he touch her. She was naked on his bed, and she smelled of him, and there might be a moment to reach for her, but that moment was not now.

“Actually, how I happened to miss the plane was because I was with Mr. French.” She took a deep breath. “Moe.” There. It was out. She had thought that if she ever told, the words would come bursting forth, and that she would cry as she did when she was younger and had thought about it, but she held back. She was an actress after all, nineteen now and not fourteen, a fourteen-year-old would behave differently. “He’d been getting some kind of award in Chicago, from the B’nai B’rith, I think, and he’d stopped off here in Vegas on the way home. He came here to gamble sometimes. He’d checked the studio to see where I was, and when he found out our plane was stopping over here, he left me a message at the airport to meet him at the Fremont, and so I went into town.” She looked directly at Jacob. “He made me go down on him.” It was the first time she had ever performed fellatio, but she saw no reason to mention that. Or that it was easy to learn. Or that she called him Mr. French throughout, and Moe called her “little girl, nice little girl,” and had not removed his trousers, that was later, when they were in bed, listening to the radio, KVEG, the voice of southern Nevada, music and news. Vaughn Monroe was singing “Racing to the Moon,” when there was an interruption for a news bulletin, a plane carrying Carole Lombard and Blue Tyler
had crashed outside Las Vegas, and there appeared to be no survivors. Blue began to cry and then to scream. J. F. French slapped her hard across the face and said if she screamed once more she would never work for Cosmo again, and except for intermittent sobs, she stopped crying. As Moe quickly got dressed, she noticed how old he seemed and how the fleshy folds and wrinkles in his stomach made him look like a melting candle. He would die before she did, and that was a comforting thought. Wait here, he said, don’t move, don’t make a sound, then he went down to the lobby and reserved a room for “Wanda Nash,” the name she was always registered as when she was on location or doing P.A.s, and it was to Wanda Nash’s room in the Fremont that she was hustled the night Carole Lombard’s flight flew into Potosi Mountain near Table Rock, Nevada. “That’s how come I missed the plane.”

Jacob held her close. I’ll kill him, she thought he said, but she wasn’t sure, it sounded like a line in a picture, not real life. He held her so tight she thought he would crush her shoulders. Oh, God, she thought he said, but again she wasn’t sure, she was only sure he understood.

“I never told Arthur.” She burrowed her face into Jacob’s shoulder. No tears, it was just such a relief to tell someone. She had never done it with him again, she wasn’t after all one of the French Fillies, who could be fired and not missed, she was Blue Tyler, she was only fourteen years old, but the failure or success of Cosmo’s entire slate of pictures depended on her, Mr. French knew that and she knew that, and what happened at the Fremont gave her an edge that she never intended to lose, and from that day on she always called him Moe.

“I want you to go back to town first thing in the morning,” Jacob said suddenly.

“Don’t you want me anymore?”

“I’ll rent a plane.”

“I don’t see why I have to go back.”

“Just try doing what I say for a change.”

“I don’t have to shoot for another three weeks. You just don’t want me anymore.”

He had run all her pictures in the screening room at St. Pierre Road, and he knew she was doing what Chuckie called her patented pout. He wanted to say, I want you for the rest of my life, but it didn’t sound like him. Some other time, perhaps. Not now. “Listen. Blue. What I do … you think it’s glamorous.” He paused.
The fact you’re a gangster is what gives her the goose
. “It’s not. Sometimes it’s dangerous.”

“Jacob. You think I don’t know that.”

Not some other time. Now. “I want you for the rest of my life.”

The plane was ready at dawn, idling on the tarmac, a single-engine Cessna four-seater. Blue rummaged through her shoulder bag for a bandanna as Eddie Binhoff took her bags from the trunk of Jacob’s Continental. Jacob walked over to the mechanic who was inspecting the aircraft. The pilot was already inside, looking at his charts.

“All set, Mr. King,” the mechanic said. “It’s clean.”

“For your sake I hope it is,” Jacob said. “Because you’re going with her.”

“I said it was clean, didn’t I?”

“I always like to make sure.”

“Hey, wait a minute …”

“Maybe you want to talk it over with my friend Eddie over there?” Jacob said.

The mechanic shuddered. He had heard about Eddie around town, and he had heard what talking anything over with him involved. He wiped his hands on his coveralls. “I guess I go to L.A.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

The mechanic took Blue’s bags from Eddie Binhoff and put them into the Cessna’s luggage compartment. Blue knotted the bandanna, and then clung to Jacob.

“You know something? I’m not afraid to fly anymore. That’s one thing you did for me.”

“So call me.”

“So maybe I will.”

He kissed her, held her tight for a moment, then released her. She reached the door of the plane and looked back, one renegade to another, a melancholy joke between them.

“Big bad gangster,” Blue Tyler said.

It’s funny what you remember, Melba Mae Toolate said. Do you know what I remember about that day?

What?

I remember that the fender on the Continental, you know, the one I sideswiped the day he hit Lilo, I remember it still wasn’t fixed. That wasn’t like Jake. He always wanted everything just right.

Do you think he knew …

About what was going to happen?

I nodded.

I think he knew.

And that’s why he sent you back?

I think he decided when I told him about Mr. French.

Why?

You’d have to ask him.

You mean, it was about rules he didn’t understand.

You’d have to ask him.

Did you call him?

Every night.

Even
The New York Times
put it on the front page:

And Winchell: “Is Blue blue??????… And didja hear what they’re calling that portrait Jake King’s brains were splattered all over?… Modern art, geddit?… Jakey was wearing jodhpurs in his pitcha … Jodhpur Jakey better be riding a fast horse to get out of where he’s going …”

Jacob walked through the empty casino, spinning the roulette wheels and checking the quality of the felt on the crap tables. The clocks. He should get rid of the clocks. There should be no clocks in a casino, time for a gambler should stand still. He would do the kitchen tomorrow, too. A chef had told him he had found evidence of rat shit, it was that way in every new building, no big problem, just drop a little something on the inspector from the Department of Health, otherwise an exterminator would have to be called in. Exterminator, Jacob wrote on the leather-bound notepad he always carried now. Another gift from Blue. From a place in Paris. He would go there with Blue one day. It made him smile that he would call the exterminator rather than pay off the health inspector. Bribery had always been second nature to him, anyone can be bought, an article of faith learned from Morris, but Playland was going to be on the square. He pushed the elevator button, and when the light did not immediately come on, made another note to have an electrician check it out tomorrow. In the elevator he noticed some barely perceptible chipped paint. Still another note. So
many details. The paint in the corridors. The brass numbers on the room doors. Jackie Heller. Jackie was playing footsie with Lilo again. Rita said she had seen them at Hillcrest. Jackie had forgotten to tell him he had gone to L.A. What else had Jackie forgotten to tell him? Eddie could handle that. When things slowed down. Where was Eddie anyway? He checked his watch. Blue would call at ten. He walked down the hall and opened the door to his suite.