Chicago Confidential

from the vivid blue Pacific to crash on enormous ragged rocks.

We’d arrived after the daily siesta, just in time for cocktail hour. We didn’t even change our clothes—the atmosphere was almost pretentiously casual; resorts like this, after all, were where the international set came to lounge in open-neck shirts and shorts and sandals. There wasn’t a coat or tie to be seen in the entire Mirador bar.

Which, as bars went, was an unusual one, hewed in the side of a cliff. We sat in our booth, as if in an opera box in a theater, watching the stage the lack of a wall presented, providing a full view of the setting sun using its entire paintbox to color the sky as waves dashed against the rocks a hundred and fifty feet below.

Vera had a coco loco (coconut milk, gin, and ice) and I sipped rum out of hollowed- out pineapple, a treat called a pie-eye. We also both popped quinine capsules, as a precaution against malaria…a real must in my case, since I still had recurrences from Guadalcanal.

Vera’s face had a wide-eyed, youthful innocence, as she drank in not only the gin but the magnificent sunset, and I dared to hope the almost Miss California’s ambition to make it in show business wouldn’t destroy her, as it had the late Miss Chicago.

Throughout, I’d been wearing my sunglasses, but soon my doing so would seem affected and might attract attention—the opposite of my intention. The blond hair, the dark glasses, the typically touristy clothing, and the context of La Mirador and Acapulco itself would keep me—I hoped—from being made by Charley and Rocco Fischetti, who were also staying in this hotel.

In fact, they too were in the Mirador bar, at this very moment, sharing a booth with two Latin dolls who I figured to be showgirls in the hotel’s nightclub, La Perla. In short-sleeve linen sportshirts, slacks, and the tans they’d developed, the two brothers were ignoring the dying sunset and the twinkling harbor lights coming alive. Charley, smoking a cigarette in a holder (like his adversary Lee Mortimer!), seemed to be enjoying himself, chatting up his date; Rocco sat sullenly, a cigar going, the smoke bothering the girl beside him, not that he gave a shit.

The way the booths angled around, I had a good view of them from across the room—and my dark glasses allowed me to gawk without seeming to. Neither Charley nor Rocco (nor their showgirls, for that matter) seemed ever to glance at us, which meant they’d been distracted when we came in, because every other normal man in the bar had noticed bosomy Vera.

Which was another reason to slip out of there.

I drove her over to La Riviera Hotel, a newer hotel with a nice layout, all roof garden and terrace; the food was a fancied-up but tasty version of Mexican, and—despite the business nature of our trip—we found ourselves flirting and acting like honeymooners. Vera could do that to you.

When we got back, I checked the bar and the Fischettis were not present—which was no surprise. They would almost certainly be in the nightclub, which provided a great view of the Mirador’s main attraction: the famed local boys who took heroic dives into the shallow inlet from the hotel’s high rocky cliff, risking their lives—nightly…four shows.

Vera and I caught the ten-fifteen show from a little spot of our own on the rocky hillside, below the balustrade that was down several sets of steps from the parking lot. We sat on the grass, hand in hand, watching as the boy —bearing a torch, and guided by newspapers set afire and adrift below—hurled himself forty feet into a breaker. Then he climbed the opposite, higher cliff, diving a good hundred feet into a narrow ravine lined with jagged rocks.

This went on for a while, and later the boys came around up on the balustrade, where tourists were watching, to collect coins and sometimes even paper money. Vera urged me to go up there and give them something, which I did—a buck—and Vera squealed at my generosity and gave me a big kiss.

She had her hand in my hair, looking at me like I was as beautiful a man as she was a woman—deluded girl— and she said, “I think I like you blond.”

“Thanks. Maybe you oughta try it.”

“Like Jean Harlow?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Maybe I will.”

We necked there on the hillside for quite a while; it was overwhelmingly romantic—I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, not the glimmering ocean in the moonlight, the crashing waves against the jagged rocks, or that incredible blow job.

That night we had room service bring us several coco locos and pie- eyes, and in our simply but nicely appointed room, the drapes to the pool area shut tight thank you, we drank and played pretend honeymoon and when we woke up the next morning, it was approaching eleven. Both of us felt remarkably good, considering how much we’d had to drink last night. We showered—one at time, which I feel showed remarkable restraint—and I got dressed in another aloha shirt, shorts, and my sandals, getting the Speed Graphic out of my suitcase.

“How do I look?” Vera asked, spreading her arms.

She was in a bikini, a couple of blue scraps that together might have comprised a decent handkerchief.

“Even my tongue is stiff,” I said.

That made her ooze delight, and she came over and hugged me and kissed me and put her Pepsodenty tongue in my mouth.

“Not now,” I said, incredibly enough. “We have work to do.”

I was registered under the name Joe Samuels. The hotel management had been alerted to the fact that I was a pinup photographer, and (we’d been told ahead of time) they had no objection to my taking photographs of my model, around the pool, down on the beach, anywhere around the hotel, in fact.

“You really think my picture will be in the papers?” she asked, batting her lashes over those big hazel orbs.

“Oh yeah. This will make Miss California look like a footnote in your portfolio.”

“You know, I can splash around in the pool, and lose my top. I can make it seem real natural.”