“Want a cigar? Havanas. Two bucks a piece.”
“No thanks.”
He’d left the car running. He pulled out and headed up Fremont Street. Mixed in among the tourists, many of whom wore dude-ranch style Western clothes, were occasional real westerners: men with the weathered faces of the true rancher or ranch hand; an Indian woman with a baby cradled on her back; a toothless old prospector who made Gabby Hayes look like a Michigan Avenue playboy.
Beyond the casinos and clubs was a business district, Western-style souvenir shops and barbecue restaurants mingling with modern offices and the dime store chains.
“What do you think of our little town?” Sedway said, blowing smoke.
“It’s not Chicago,” I said.
Past the downtown was an unimpressive residential district; in fact some of it was downright shabby-trailers and cinder-block houses-distinguished only by tacky wedding chapels, often hooked up with motels, that lined the thoroughfare. Pastel stucco with neon wedding bells and hearts and such. The vows of a lifetime served up like a cheeseburger at a white-tile one-arm joint.
“Yeah,” Sedway said, his moist eyes dreamy, cigar between his fingers like Churchill, “ain’t Vegas the greatest place?”
I nodded, and looked back out the window, the sleazy landscape blurring when Sedway picked up speed as we passed the city limits.
“Ben didn’t say why he brought you out,” he said, smiling over at me. He was smiling too much; I wondered why.
“I’m going to give your security people the rundown on pickpockets,” I said.
He shrugged with his eyebrows. “We open day after Christmas, you know.”
“I know. Should be time enough.”
“How well do you know Ben?”
“I only met him once. He seems like a nice guy.”
“Oh he is,” Sedway said, quickly, almost defensively. “We go way back, Ben and me. I known him since we was kids on the Lower East Side.”
Fred Rubinski had told me about Little Moey Sedway. He had mentioned that Sedway and Siegel went “way back”-but he had also mentioned something Sedway neglected to.
“Little Moey only recently got back in his boss’s good graces,” Fred told me. “For almost three years, Moey was given jobs out of Siegel’s sight and told to stay away from the Bug or risk getting hit in the head.”
Seems Sedway, who’d never done too well for himself despite the constant help of his boyhood pal Ben (recent failures by Little Moey included botched bookmaking operations in both San Diego and L.A.), had become a big man in little Vegas. As Siegel’s on-site rep for the Trans-American race wire, Sedway wormed his way into part ownership of several Fremont Street casinos. He bought a nice house, a big car. He became chummy with the city fathers, dropping dough into charity and church hoppers. When a group of respectable citizens asked Mr. Sedway to run for city commissioner, he accepted.
And when his boss found out, the man who didn’t like to be called Bugsy went bugsy, and started slapping Little Moey around.
“We don’t run for office, you little schmuck!” Siegel had roared, slapping his stooge, whose name happened to be Moe, although he was getting slapped more like he was Larry or Shemp. “We
Moey had done his best to back out of the election, but his name was already on the ballot. Sedway became a laughingstock in mob circles, the butt of a much-repeated anecdote (attested to by Rubinski relating the story to me) as the only politician who ever had to spread the graft around to make sure he
All this was three years ago, more or less, and in recent months Ben Siegel had called upon his once trusted second-in-command to come back to his side.
“You ought to be warned,” Moe was saying, “that Ben’s a little on edge these days. Lots of pressure on the boss. Lots of pressure.”
“Why?”
“Well, you heard about the dough he’s laying out on this layout.”
“I heard over a million.”
“He’s
“So why’s he under pressure?”
“To open on time. I don’t think the hotel’s gonna be finished.”
“Then why open? What’s the rush?”
Sedway shrugged. “Ben don’t like to wait on nobody or nothing. Everything’s
Where we were was not the Flamingo, but the Hotel Last Frontier, or so said the horizontal sign, cartoon letters of crisscrossing logs outlined in neon, resting atop a short brick wall in the midst of a vast landscaped lawn. The Frontier, and the similar nearby El Rancho Vegas, were the only gambling resorts on the so-called Strip that was highway 91, the two-lane blacktop heading southwest to Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.
Sedway pulled in the drive of the sprawling, rustic hotel past a swimming pool near the highway, where a good number of bathers were sunning and splashing. He parked and got my bag out of the trunk and we walked up to the central thatch-roofed, whitewashed adobe building, which like the other buildings was low-slung and supported by rough wood beams, decorated by wagon wheels and steer horns and other dude-ranch touches. It was all about as authentic as a Gene Autry movie, maintaining the phony cowboy airs I’d witnessed in downtown Vegas, but admittedly establishing a friendly “come-as-you-are” atmosphere. Which only made me feel out of place in my gray suit and gray skin.
“That’s a nice car you got, Moe,” I said, as we moved away from it. “Is that yours, or one of Ben’s?”
“It’s mine,” Sedway said, with tight, quiet pride. “The race wire business pays good, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, resisting the urge to point out that an almost identical black Lincoln Continental had been driven by Jim Ragen a certain afternoon.
“Ben’ll get you some wheels while you’re here,” he said. “He’ll fix you up royal.”
I followed Sedway into the open-beamed lobby; the registration desk was at the left. The Western motif continued- wood-and-leather furniture, sandstone fireplaces, pony-express lanterns hanging from wagon wheels. The rough wood-paneled walls displayed mounted buffalo heads. Indian rugs and western prints, with the directions to the casino, dining room, showroom and coffee shop burned into the walls as if with a branding iron. The desk clerk wore a string tie and a plaid shirt. He was friendly, but stopped short of calling me “pod’ner.” Thank God for small favors.
If there were bellboys, I didn’t see any. Sedway was carrying my bag and I let him lead me down a hallway and up one flight of stairs to my room, 404. The numbering apparently had something to do with which wing you were in, because not only was I not on the fourth floor, there wasn’t any fourth floor.
My room was nice enough-not small, not large; modern furnishings and rustic walls and a print of an Indian chief. Sedway put my bag on a stand and I sat on the edge of the bed.
“What now?” I said.
“Ben may stop by and see you tonight,” he said, shrugging.
“Where is he now?”
“Up the road.”
“Up the road?”
“At the Flamingo. Working.”
“Doing what, exactly, Moe? This is Sunday.”
“Not at the Flamingo it ain’t. Workers are working damn near ’round the clock, up there. And Ben’s supervising. That’s his big problem, you know.”
“What is?”
“He wants to keep his eye on everything, his finger in all the pies. He’s hardly getting any sleep. Running himself ragged.” He made a
