Sin City (12 page)

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Authors: Harold Robbins

BOOK: Sin City
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“You won't win all the time.”
“That's the beauty of it: We'll lose a lot, but over time, we'll make a killing.”
“I don't know …”
“Don't you see? No camera, no pit boss, no sky walker can see your palm when you're dealing. And everyone knows you wear that strange jewelry. It's your trademark; it won't trigger any suspicion. It's a sure thing.”
“How did you duplicate my jewelry?”
“Remember I took a picture of it so I could show it to a friend?”
“You bastard, you planned this without telling me.”
“I'm telling you now.”
“It won't work.”
“Why?”
“Because it just never does.”
“It doesn't work because people screw up and do stupid things. And the most stupid thing they do is get greedy. I'm not planning to break the bank. We do it in shifts, me for a couple hours, Windell the next day, we cut it for a couple of days, I figure we could take in a hundred grand from Halliday's before—”
“Halliday's! No way José. Con Halliday is old school. Maybe you better look at Embers's hands again.”
“He got it at Halliday's?”
“He got it from Con. The story is that Con used the butt end of that six-gun he packs to bust Embers's knuckles when he caught him cheating. A few years ago some mob-punk from Chicago walked into Halliday's and offered to sell Con ‘protection.' The skinny is that the guy was shipped back to the Windy City in a body bag with a slot machine handle up his ass. I swear, it's true—I used to ball the ambulance driver who took the punk to emergency.”
“It has to be Halliday's.”
“Get another dealer. Everyone in this town wants to go for the money.”
“You're the only one with the right jewelry. If someone comes in with strange new jewelry, security would be on to it. It has to be you and it has to be Halliday's.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck them, those two who treated us like trash tonight and everyone else in this town who thinks they're better than us because they have money. I'm going someplace, Janelle, and you can be in or out, up or down. How do you think a guy like Con Halliday got his own casino? He robbed, cheated, or made a deal with the devil. He did it with a gun, a pen, or a lie. Halliday, Rockefeller, the Wall Streeters—they're grifters like the rest of us. They're just bigger crooks than us, that's all.”
CON HALLIDAY, THE KING OF GLITTER GULCH
LAS VEGAS, 1942
“Why'd you leave Hot Springs?”
“Had a spot of trouble.” Con looked away from the owner of the club and stared at the neon sign behind the bar across the room. It advertised Halliday's Smooth Irish Whiskey. A leprechaun in green drunkenly rocked sideways every second or two. There was an expression of dazed satisfaction on the little guy's face, like he just belted down a quart of the Irish whiskey. The name of the saloon-casino in downtown Las Vegas was the Lucky Irishman Gambling Hall and the man he was talking to ran it. Con thought it was kind of funny that a Jew would be running a poker and red-eye whiskey joint. Howard Mintz was the first Jew he had met in his life. Where he came from, people thought Jews had horns.
“Got in a little hassle workin' for Arbe.” Jack Arbuckle ran the biggest gambling establishment in Hot Springs. The Arkansas town was wide open and illegal as hell. When the drought turned the middle part of the country into a dust bowl and the stock crash brought on the Great Depression, people got hungry enough in places like Hot Springs to become real tolerant about sin that created jobs and money.
Mintz picked his teeth with a gold toothpick. Con had never seen a gold toothpick before. He was twenty-two years old, born and raised in the Panhandle of Texas; the only part of the world he had any personal experience with was the parched Panhandle and the stretch of road from Hot Springs to Vegas.
“You know, Arbe and I go back a long time,” Mintz said. “We ran booze together, good Scotch and Irish whiskey from French Canucks in Quebec and ran it down through Hampshire to Boston. I came out West after Prohibition died and gambling got legal. That was in 'thirty-one. Arbe ended up running a joint in Hot Springs that Capone used to own. How's Arbe doing? Hear he's got a regular rug joint.”
The Lucky Irishman was on Fremont Street, the center of gambling
in Vegas. The clientele was mostly long-distance truck drivers, military personnel, women in town for a quickie divorce, and weekend gamblers from Los Angeles. The place was not a “gambling palace.” Like the other casinos in town, it was a sawdust joint. There were no rug joints, fancy places with carpeting, in Vegas. The rug joints were all back East and on the gambling ships that operated out of L.A., Jersey, and Miami.
“Yeah, it's got real carpeting made back East and glass chandeliers. Arbe said to say hello. He said you might be able to fix me up with a job.”
“What kind of work did you do for Arbe?”
“Different things. Made sure there was no trouble in the club. Watched the games for cheating.”
“You got a name?”
“Conway, but my friends call me Con.”
“What's your surname?”
“My what?”
“Your last name, family name.”
Con's eye went to the Irish whiskey sign. “Halliday, Con Halliday.”
Mintz didn't bother looking at the neon whiskey sign; he hadn't expected the truth from a man who left Arkansas in a race with the sheriff for the state line. He picked his teeth as he studied the young man in front of him. Con looked like dirt cowboy, boots worn at the heels, straw cowboy hat frayed along the brim, faded shirt and pants—the kind of poor Westerner created by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The war was supposed to fix the economy for everyone, but the little Arkie and Texas towns that had their asses kicked by the dry years were still down for the count.
Mintz decided Con could handle himself. Along with his big six-one, six-two frame, packing maybe 210 or 220 pounds, he noticed the widespread hands, scarred and knuckle-split, and palms that were rope burned. His hair was bleached blond from the sun and his face a healthy red even before he took a drink. He could have played a man-to-ride-the-river-with in a John Ford western.
“What kind of trouble did you have?”
“Caught a man cheatin'.” Con spread his big hands. “There was an argument, a knife …”
Mintz raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Doesn't sound like that
much trouble for Hot Springs. The sheriff declares it self-defense and Arbe sweetens the sheriffs envelope for the month and pays for the deceased's pine box.”
“It was the sheriffs cousin.”
“Ahhh.” Mintz worked his tongue and the gold toothpick back to a socket left over from his yanked wisdom teeth. “You ever kill anyone else?”
Con shook his head. “A nigger once.”
“How come you're not in the army? We got a war going, you know.”
“Punctured an eardrum when I was a kid.” Con wished he was in the army. Stories about Japs throwing American babies up in the air and catching them on their bayonets inflamed him.
“You from Arkansas?”
“Texas Panhandle.”
“Why'd you leave?”
“Nothing left for me there. My ma died when I was little. Lived with my pa and worked our little ranch until the wind and dust came and the cattle started dying 'cause they couldn't eat dirt.”
“Where's your father?”
“Dead. Killed himself after we lost the ranch.”
“Too bad, but I hear there's a lot of that happening. The banks are bastards.”
“The town, too. No one helped, they didn't like my pa ‘cause he enjoyed a little gamblin' and drinkin'. Bunch of holier-than-thou barn Baptists treated us lower than dirt.”
“Well, I guess you aren't going back there.”
“Can't. I burned it before I left.”
“The ranch?”
“The town.”
THREE YEARS LATER
Con came down the stairs of the Lucky Irishman. He had been standing at the railing on the second-floor landing watching the action at one of the poker tables. He was the unofficial casino manager. Mintz was involved in offshore gambling out of San Pedro, L.A.'s port, and spent half his time keeping the ship afloat out beyond the twelve-mile limit and the Coast Guard off his back. That left Con running the Lucky Irishman. Cheating was the biggest problem—by the customers, by the hired help. A casino was a bank with loose money lying everywhere in sight and reach and there was always someone who couldn't resist the temptation.
At the bottom of the stairs, he nodded at the ladderman who was sitting on a tall stool smoking a cigar as he kept an eye on the tables. “The punk wearing the zoot suit at table three.”
A punk to Con was a guy who thought he was tough but wasn't. Guys like the one wearing the zoot suit ran small-time rackets, backroom dice or cards in places like L.A. or Kansas City. When they came to Vegas they thought the odds casinos used to relieve suckers of their money weren't meant to apply to them and they expected to walk away with a killing. Sometimes they cheated.
To Con, a zoot suit, with its wide-shouldered, six-button, double-breasted jacket and high-waisted pants was the mark of a city guy who didn't know what tough really was. Three years in Vegas had rubbed some of the corn off of Con, but he wasn't that far from the days when he roped cattle and wrestled them to the ground to cut their balls off. He still wore a cowboy hat and boots, but the hat was now a Stetson and the boots handmade in Mexico. They complemented his Mississippi riverboat gambler's pinstriped suit and fancy red-silk vest. He packed a long-barreled Colt .44 with the holster tied down to his right leg and a long-handled boot knife.
“What's the gaff?” The ladderman snicked cigar ash onto the sawdust floor. His job was to sit on the elevated stand and spot cheats
and skimming, but he had learned long ago that Con could smell them when they walked through the door.
“Lap cards.”
An old technique, tried and true: A player drops a high card or two, an ace or king in his lap, and switches when he needs to improve a hand. The zoot suit, with its oversized, bulky jacket and pants, was perfect for hiding cards.
“I'm going to take him out back,” Con said. “I'll have Benny make sure no one follows us out. Let me have your cigar.”
Benny was the relief bartender, floor sweeper, and bouncer. He was at the row of nickel grinders playing his favorite slot machine, screen stars. The machine had only one reel and it paid off on some stars, nothing on others. Humphery Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Ronald Coleman paid off. Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Zachery Scott were losers. The big payoff was twenty nickels for Betty Grable, the actress who had her legs insured for a million bucks and was the GIs' most popular pinup girl. It was the only honest slot in the house. Mintz kept it honest because Betty Grable was his favorite star.
“He loves white bread,” Mintz's accountant, Sol, told him many times.
Con had long ago figured out that the reason Mintz made so many trips to L.A. wasn't only for business. Sol confirmed his suspicion that Mintz had a girl stashed away in a pad off of Sunset Boulevard.
“A bottle blonde with big cans. I met her when I dropped off some folding money when Mintz was back East.”
“How's he handle his marriage?” Con asked.
“He married a woman for her money. To him, that's all she has, money. At first he took an extra drink at night to handle it. Now he porks any babe that will stand still long enough.”
 
“I'm taking someone outside,” Con told the husky bartender. “Watch the door.”
Nickels were dropping into the coin tray of the slot. “Hey, I just won ten on Gary Cooper. He's my favorite actor, you know, the strong silent type, doesn't say much. Did you see him in
Along Came Jones?
Laughed my ass off when he got mistaken for outlaw Dan Duryea. I heard he can take John Wayne with his dukes.”
“Don't bet on it. The Duke would wipe the shit off his boots with that skinny drink of water.”
Con casually moseyed over to the poker table where zoot suit had the biggest pile of cards. As he went across the room, the gritty throaty voice of Fran, one of the two B-girls Mintz kept at the joint, could be heard singing from the bar, where she was entertaining a couple of soldiers from Camp Roberts sent out to practice desert maneuvers during the atomic blasts in the desert. “
You're in the army now / you're not behind a plow / you're digging a ditch / you son-of-a-bitch / you're in the army now!
”
The last few years had been good for the club and Vegas. The war had brought the army—air force and the atomic bomb to the desert, along with soldiers with money in their pockets. Mintz was pleased to help the war effort by relieving soldiers of their money at the gambling tables and providing an even more intimate form of relief—two rooms upstairs were used by house girls for “entertaining” when they weren't hustling the customers for drinks.
The club had six poker and two blackjack tables, a layout for New York craps, and a dense pall of tobacco smoke. Only the poker tables and smoke went full time. The club also took bets on national sporting events and got the scores in from telephone calls from the East and Chicago. A single row of four nickel machines and one quarter slot machine were against the wall that led down the hallway to the bathrooms. Mintz made little money off the slots and only kept them to amuse the wives waiting for their husbands to finish playing cards or craps, but increased his take by using ten-stop machines—slots that had only ten symbols that could appear on the pay line on each of the three reels that spun, instead of the standard twenty. There were still twenty symbols on each reel—cherries, oranges, yellow bells, black jackpot bars—but half of them never made it to the pay line because the spinning wheels had a gearwheel that only allowed them to stop at every other symbol.
Cheating was frowned upon by the casinos only when they lost money at it.
Four other players were at the poker table when Con approached. He recognized three of them as regulars, one a local, and quickly eliminated the fourth as a possible backup to the punk. Some of the punks brought a buddy along packing heat in case things went to hell. He deliberately avoided looking at the punk as he came up to the table.
“Throw me some luck, Con. I've lost my shirt and I'm down to my short hairs,” the local player said.
“Sometimes luck isn't a lady but a real bitch,” Con said. As he spoke, he “accidentally” dropped the cigar into the punk's lap.
The guy shot up from his chair, brushing his expensive suit. “Fuck!” The cigar flew out of his lap. So did an ace of diamonds.
The local stared at the card on the floor like it was a snake. “Holy shit.”
Con took the punk's arm and led him away from the table. He had four inches and fifty pounds on the guy. The fingers of his big hand completely engulfed the punk's arm.
“We need to have a little talk,” Con said.
He led the guy into an alley at the back of the club. When they got outside, the punk jerked his arm loose and faced Con.
“Listen, pal, I've got friends in town—”
“Not in my place you don't.”
“Let's make a deal. You keep the chips on the table and I'll give you a hundred-dollar watch—” His hand went in under his coat where the long gold chain of a pocket watch hung down the front of his baggy pants.
Con moved with the speed of a striking rattler. He clamped his big hand over the man's gunhand, and twisted his arm into a hammerlock. He took away the gun, shoved the punk's face up against the building, and held him there while he shook the bullets from the five-shot .38 onto the pavement.
“I admire a good card mechanic,” Con said, “a guy who's so smooth with his hands that you can't see him ripping off a card from the bottom, or a good number-two man who can deal seconds. If I think he's really good, I even invite 'em to sit down and show me his stuff.”
“You're in deep shit, pal, I'm going to—”
Con hit him in the small of the back, then the kidneys. He slammed the guy's head against the brick wall. The punk dropped to his knees.
“But you're not a mechanic,
pal
, you're just a chippy,” Con said.
The ladderman came out of the back of the club. “Benny's watching the door. I didn't spot a backup.”
“Let him know he's not welcome back here,” Con said.
As he went back inside, the ladderman pulled a sap from his coat pocket and brought it down on the man's jaw as he looked up.

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