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Authors: Harold Robbins

BOOK: Sin City
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LAS VEGAS, 1975
I met Janelle at a lap-dance club. I had just turned twenty-one, my phony license said I was twenty-three, and I could pass for twenty-five. Sometimes even I forgot how old I really was.
The last several years had gone by as if I was operating at jetsetter speed. My bagman job with Morty Lardino lasted until a drug dealer high on his own supply pulled a Saturday night special on me when I asked for Morty's cut. I was out of the North Las Vegas alley and halfway to the Strip before he got it cocked and locked. I don't know what happened to the guy—the word on the street was that Morty cut off his balls, stuffed them in his mouth, then buried him up to his neck in an ant hill out in the desert.
Facing a gun in the hands of a crazy was bad enough—Vegas and the mob had taken a backslide that made it unhealthy to be associated with guys like Morty. Since the mob discovered Vegas back in the forties, the town had been neutral territory, like seeking sanctuary in a church back in the days of the king's men. There were hits, but never in town. The designated target was taken far out into the desert and simply disappeared, or followed home to Chicago or Jersey and hit. But after the boss of bosses, Vito Genovese, died in prison in '69, and guys like Tony Spilotro, the mob's Chicago enforcer who took out Sam Giancana, came to Vegas to fill the void created when Howard Hughes left with his billion-dollar checkbook, mob disputes—some of them acted out in Vegas, even one in the parking lot of a big club on the Strip—erupted. The War of the Godfathers was no place for a kid who was getting paid chump change to do Morty Lardino's dirty work.
Soon after I left Morty's employment, the fat man died scarfing down a plate of spaghetti. I heard that he suffered a café coronary from gulping down a sausage too fast. I also heard he choked to death when a couple of Jersey thugs stuffed his cloth napkin down his throat. Tony disappeared from the streets, too, DOA. He caught a college
student flirting with his girlfriend and scattered the guy's brains with his baseball bat. While he was in the state slammer, another con—a guy who had to eat his shit on the streets of Vegas when Uncle Morty was alive—gutted him in the prison yard with a homemade shank.
 
Windell Palmer, a nerdy jerk I did some street deals with, picked me and George Leroy Smith up at Embers's house. Leroy was a pimp from L.A. Windell was a world-class twerp, the prototype of the skinny kid with Coke-bottle eyeglasses who got sand kicked in his face at the beach but still never redeemed himself by eating Wheaties. Next to him, Woody Allen was Dirty Harry.
I met Windell when I spotted him using quarter-size metal slugs to get a free Coke at a gas station. Turns out he stamped out the slugs with a machine he put together with scarps and a sewing machine motor. I had him stamp them out by the thousands and put them into the paper rolls that held ten dollars worth of quarters and sold them for five dollars a pop. They worked fine in quarter slots, but the casinos were on to it real fast and we stopped selling them. Most casinos considered it a capital offense to rip them off. Thugs who earned their living in every kind of known racket reacted with the violent indignation of a religious fanatic if someone took them for a buck.
Leroy brought me into another racket—pimping—but I never considered myself a contender for a shot at the title. There are some things you need to be born to do well. Kids who learn how to stand up on skis at three years old become good skiers, but they have to be born with the knack to ski good enough for the Olympics. I learned that lesson first when Embers tried to make me into a world-class card shark—I learned all the moves, I could spot a false shuffle, a bottom deal, a marked deck, the whole nine yards, but no matter how many hours I spent in front of a mirror watching my own hands, I didn't have the speed and finesse that Embers had before his accident. Pimping was something else I only had amateur standing at.
“You're a thug,” Embers said, disgusted at my assertive approach to playing poker and my lack of finesse in handling a deck. “You have no patience, no timing, you're always risking everything for the big pot. Poker is an introspective game, like chess, but you treat it like a fist fight. It's a game of strategy and math, but you refuse to deal with
the science of the game. You make blind bets, relying on luck. You draw on inside straights no matter how many times I tell you no poker player does. You chase Lady Luck, but she's a prick teaser who flashes her snatch but crosses her legs when you try to stick it in.”
“I take chances because I want to be somebody, Embers, and I don't have the rest of my life to wait.”
He taught me to spend as much time watching a player's eyes as his hands. “Persian rug dealers know you expose your desires with your eyes. When they lay out the carpets, they watch your eyes and know the carpet you want by the way your pupils dilate. Once they know you want it, they have you by the balls.”
He was wrong about one thing—I did catch the math about casinos. No matter who's playing, the casinos ultimately win because they play strictly by the odds. “The stars may lie,” Embers said, “but the numbers never do.”
 
After Morty Lardino choked to death eating his napkin, and Tony ran into an old friend's homemade shiv in the state pen, I had gone back into the rag business, working the streets distributing pamphlets for massage parlors and escort services. The cops had gotten wise to the racket and required a license, forbidding minors from passing out racy stuff, so I got the license in Embers's name and hired guys from a revolving pool of mission puppies—derelicts who didn't smell and look so bad that they scared off the customers. Advancing from passing out pamphlets to soliciting business was a natural step, and pretty soon I was ferrying guys to the parlors and making “dates” for the escort services. The next step was having my own stable of girls and that's where Leroy came in. He was a bona fide pimp from L.A. who ran girls on Sunset Boulevard. He came to Vegas to open a “branch office” but ran into trouble with the guy who controlled most of the street action and who had a lock on the best spots.
With my tourist contacts generated by the handouts, I was a natural for teaming up with Leroy—I provided the johns and he provided the whores. The girls turned the tricks in hotel rooms rented downtown and in North Las Vegas, but they never walked the streets.
“Consider yourself part of a franchise like Kentucky Fried Chicken—we even serve white and dark meat,” Leroy said.
I was paid twenty-five bucks for every john my guys brought in.
From that amount, I had to give the guy who copped the deal five and the driver five, and Nike Monte, Morty Lardino's replacement as street boss, too five plus a piece of Leroy's action. That left me with ten bucks. I wasn't getting rich, but with my other action, it helped keep me from having to do honest work. I could have cut Leroy from the deal and run girls myself, but I didn't have the balls to be a true pimp. It took a real prick to manage whores.
“The greatest pimp in the world was Iceberg Slim,” Leroy told me. “He said a pimp is the loneliest bastard on earth, a guy who's gotta know his whores but who can never let them know him. He's gotta be God to the bitches. Is that shit profound or what?”
When Windell picked us up at Embers's, he was driving a brand-new Plymouth Fury.
“Where the hell's that tin can you drive?” I asked the nerd. His usual transportation was one of those minicars that Honda put out, hardly bigger than motorcycles and looked like they were built from recycled pea cans.
“This is a loaner,” he told us as we cruised toward the Strip. The car had a new-car smell and the dealer's price sticker was still on the side window.
“They give you a loaner when they repair that piece of junk you drive? Bullshit.”
“Naw, it's not that kind of loaner. I did a favor for a guy and he loaned me the car. He borrowed it from the dealer.”
I looked back at Leroy just as a cop car drove by and both of us froze.
“Windell,” I said, keeping the murderous rage out of my voice, “is this car hot?”
“Call it borrowed.”
“Bullshit.”
“Would I lie to you, man?”
“Do chickens have lips?”
“Okay, it was borrowed but the dealership don't know it.”
“Stop this car, you little fucker, and let us out!”
The three of us made the ride to the Strip in Embers's station wagon. On the way, Windell explained to us how his friend copped the cars.
“He goes into a dealership and test drives the car. When they park it back on the lot after the drive, he does a key switch, slipping a dummy key for the brand of car onto the ring and takes the real key off. Then he comes back during the night and drives it away.”
Leroy and me debated investing in the scheme all the way to the Pussy Kat Dance Club.
The Pussy Kat was a takeoff on the old taxi dance places of the twenties and thirties where you paid a dime to dance with a girl. Only in this case, the girl stripped in front of you for a hell of a lot more than a dime.
Sure, I could've gotten a girl to strip for me without paying, but somehow paying a woman to take off her clothes appealed to me. And of course not just any woman could get my juices flowing—like Philip Marlowe said in
Farewell, My Lovely:
“I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”
He would have loved Janelle.
With all the free pussy Leroy and I could get, we still ended up at the Pussy Kat with Windell when we were carousing the Strip area. We paid the ten-dollar admission fee and got the usual entrance admonishment.
“Dances are twenty dollars, plus gratuity. Drinks are five. You have to order two drinks. Don't touch the girls, their hair, their ass, their little toe, nada. You touch and he will escort you out.”
The bouncer was a guy with cannonball biceps, pects like hubcaps, and no neck.
These lap joints weren't kidding when they said hands off. Not that they gave a damn about what customers did with the girls later—most of the girls could be “dated” on the side. But to appease the city's self-appointed moral busybodies who were down on anything sexual because they weren't getting any themselves, the clubs strictly followed the rules to keep their licenses.
We took a table and ordered the mandatory watered-down drinks. There were mostly young guys in the club, a bunch of frats from USC, a rich kid's school in a L.A. slum. There were several lap dancers doing their thing when a carrot-top with freckles came over. She sized us up to see who was the big spender and made a beeline for Leroy. Smart girl. I had just paid him the five hundred I owed him, which left me with fifty bucks. Windell probably had a pocketful of the quarter slugs he stamped out.
“May I dance for you?” she asked Leroy.
“Give me the treatment, Red. I've been stranded on a desert island for ten years and you're the first woman I've seen.”
“Well, honey, you've just been rescued.”
She started gyrating to the beat of the music, slowly twisting, teasing. It didn't interest me much even though she was only a couple feet from my table. Lap dancing was personal. The guy who paid for the dance got the heat.
A girl entered the room and my eye caught hers and she came to the table. She was platinum blonde, so silvery that her hair looked like freshly minted silver. Her pale hair and pale skin made her hot red lips stand out even more. It was love at first sight for me. Well, if not love, then at least lust.
She smiled. “I'm Janelle. May I dance for you?”
“Please,” I said, a little too eagerly.
When she started moving her body to the beat of the music, everything faded around me in the club, except her. I felt like someone had turned off the lights and shut down the noise, leaving only a bright spotlight on her. The redhead taking it off for Leroy moved in jerky movements with the disco music. But Ms. Platinum moved fluidly, seductively, like a queen cobra slithering to the subtle tone of a flute. She stripped down to her scarlet brassiere and panties. Her nipples were ready to jut out of the thin silk bra. She removed the brassiere slowly to reveal a cornucopia of succulent flesh, firm but lush, not too big but more than a mouthful. Her green eyes teased me as she got closer and closer. I felt the heat surging in my loins. Then she stepped out of her sheer silk panties to reveal the soft, fleshy mound that had been shaved. There was something wetly erotic about a shaved pubis. I always wondered why statues of men and women never showed pubic hair. I figured it was because bodies were so much more sensual when the groin was naked.
I looked into those laughing green eyes and wanted to taste those red lips so bad—both sets—I was ready to spread her onto the hard knob throbbing between my legs.
You know, I could have gone over and got it off with one of Leroy's girls, or gone to one of the legit houses beyond the county line, even just hung around one of the clubs and picked up a female tourist hoping to get laid at least once during her three days in town, but it wasn't the same. This girl, Janelle, didn't just get my testosterone pumping, she got under my skin and into my head.
She took it all off, naked, down to red nail polish and unusual jewelry—rings
on every finger, including one on her middle finger with a chain that looped back to a bracelet.
When she finished dancing, I pulled the fifty bucks out of my pocket and handed them to her.
“Over here, Janelle.” The call came from a frat jock.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Current customers have the option for another dance.”
“Yeah, I—shit!” I realized I had given her my last money. Leroy and the redhead were gone, probably out to my car, where Leroy was getting his tires rotated. I leaned across and whispered to Windell. “You got any money?”
“Twenty slug quarters.”
I turned around to her, oozing with charm. “My buddy went someplace with the redhead. He's holding my money, he'll be back in a minute.”
She smiled like a loan officer who just discovered that the applicant had neither job nor collateral. “Enjoy your drink.”
Her voice sent shivers up my spine. I went after her, grabbing her arm. “Hey, I'm not kidding, my buddy's got the money.”
“Hey, beat it, she's going to dance for me,” the frat said.
“Piss off—”
Someone behind me clamped a hand on my arm and I turned to look up at the bouncer. I swear the ape's hand circumnavigated my arm.
“You were told no touching.”
I got one backward glance at Janelle as the bouncer escorted me out. Contempt, that's what she had for me, contempt because I didn't have the price of a dance. Which only served to turn me on. I'd be hemorrhaging lust until I had this ruthless bitch. The next night I went back with money in my pocket but was told she was on “sabbatical” for a week.
 
Windell was always coming up with harebrained schemes and I got busy trying to figure out a way to make his latest one work. He had an idea about bribing an engraver at the Mexican company that manufactured most of the playing cards for Vegas to mark aces and ten-point cards.
“We'd only need it one night,” he said, “and we could rack up millions.”
Yeah, and spend it on new arms and legs after the casino bosses amputated ours and left us lying out in the desert as coyote bait. But the idea was intriguing. Everyone was always trying to beat blackjack using a count system or by positioning someone to see what the dealers dealt themselves. In Vegas, they called it “going for the money.” Every few months a scheme by players or players-and-dealers hit the papers. Then people like Windell and me who dreamt of breaking the bank at a casino—illegally, of course—would get their adrenaline up and lie awake nights trying to figure out the perfect way to pull it off.
A couple of weeks after being put down by Janelle, I was cruising down Fremont Street in Glitter Gulch, rolling around my head a going-for-the-money idea, when I saw Janelle walk into the Golden Gate. I parked and found her inside the club, methodically losing money at a quarter machine. She reminded me of the way Betty used to play the slots, as if she was there to make a contribution rather than having any real hope of winning. I slipped onto the stool next to her.
“Long time no see.”
She glanced at me. Not a real look, just a sideways glance. She wore a tank top that displayed her nipples.
“It's the big spender.”
I grinned. “You're making a mistake. You don't know who you're talking to. I'm Big Zack Riordan, the guy who runs this town. If you're real nice to me, I'll buy you a fur coat to warm up that cold personality of yours.”
She made a little sound deep in her throat like she was going to be sick. “What'd you buy it with, sport, those slugs your friend had? Go jack off, will ya?”
I always carried a handful of Windell's metal babies with me and I pulled one out and flipped it up and caught it. I dropped it in a slot and pulled the handle.
“Women usually come crawling to me after—”
I looked as the tumblers stopped on a jackpot emblem, then a second one, and a third. A light flashed above the machine and a fog horn went off. I stared stupidly at the three medallions on the pay line and the list of winning combinations.
I had just won my first jackpot since I was three months old—five hundred dollars. From a quarter slug.
Janelle leaned over and her hot, wet tongue licked my ear. “Wanna fuck?”

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