“I’ll walk you there,” he said, and he did.
As we ambled down the hallway to 404, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I wanted to ask you something in private, Nate. Something personal.”
“Sure, Ben.”
“Did you take this job to get near Peggy Hogan again?”
“No,” I lied.
“I wouldn’t stand between you two, if…”
“There’s nothing between us anymore,” I said. That, I feared, was no lie.
He took his hand off my shoulder. He seemed almost embarrassed as he said, “I figured maybe this afternoon you might run into her, and sort the thing out…”
Had he planned it?
I said, “I did run into her. But like I said, there’s nothing between us, now.”
“Maybe you still got feelings that she doesn’t.” He made a clicking sound in his cheek. “That kind of thing can be rough. I figured maybe that was why you said something about going back to Chicago. Maybe the situation was making you uncomfortable…”
“I thought Virginia Hill was your girl, Ben.”
He shrugged, smiled his usual dazzling smile. “She is. And she’s a lot of girl. A lot of woman. Ain’t she a handful? She’d tell the Pope to go to hell.”
“What about Peggy?”
He shook his head no, the smile gone. “There’s nothing between her and me, either-strictly business.” And the smile reappeared, but a modified, only moderately dazzling version. “I think maybe she’s kind of sweet on me, but I’m not gonna take advantage of that, cute kid though she is. She’s gonna go far with my organization, if she wants to. Normally, I’m not much on career girls, but she’s got a good business head. Maybe it’s because she’s got Jim Ragen’s blood in her.”
“I can remember having Jim Ragen’s blood
His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that, Nate?”
“Nothing. I just…I’m just not crazy about getting involved in your business, Ben. Even though you are legit, these days. I’d like to shake this rep I have of being a mob hanger-on. Doing work for you isn’t going to help that.”
He was looking at me carefully, like a bug collector studying a specimen. “You did come out here to take her home, didn’t you? And you found out she doesn’t want to go back with you, and now you want to run out on me?”
I let out a sigh that must’ve betrayed how weary I was. “I don’t know, Ben. It wasn’t exactly like that. But it wasn’t exactly not like that, either.”
“Stick around, Nate. Time is short, and I need your help-a couple ways. There’s ten grand in it, if you stick it out till after the opening.”
That was a lot of money. Normally, I would’ve done jumping jacks in the nude in Marshall Field’s window, for dough like that. But in my present mood I didn’t much give a shit.
I said, “I’ll give you my decision first thing tomorrow morning, Ben.”
“I’ll respect what you decide, whatever it is. I like you, Nate. I think we could work well together.” He extended a hand, and smiled again, and we shook hands, and I found a smile to give him back. He walked back down the hall-swaggered, actually-and I shook my head and went into my room.
I sat on the edge of the bed; the Indian chief on the wall was staring at my balefully. Peggy wasn’t what was bothering me. Siegel himself was. He’d bitten off too much, here. Like all bad executives, he wanted to run his whole operation; thought he had to do every little job himself; thought only he was up to the job, any job, every job. For a smart guy, it was a stupid way to do things. And it would kill him.
Maybe literally, considering the people backing him. Six million bucks was a lot to spend pursuing a pipe dream, particularly when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing where making it a reality is concerned. I’d seen first hand that the Last Frontier, while doing okay, was not exactly attracting land-office business. Siegel looked at the stretch of desert that was highway 91 and saw some vision of the future, a neon mirage that might or might not turn real someday. Whichever, I had a very strong feeling that this fabulous arena Siegel was erecting was nowhere I wanted to perform.
Peggy was a lost cause. And Siegel was playing a losing game.
There was no reason for me to get caught up in any of it.
I nodded, stood, and began to pack my bag. There was a midnight train back to L.A., where I could touch base with Fred, get a replacement lined up for Siegel, and fly home.
I had just latched my suitcase when somebody knocked at my door.
I answered it, wondering who the hell it could be.
And who the hell else could it be, the way this day had gone, but Virginia Hill.
She was a little swacked, but what else is new? She looked sexily zoftig in her halter top and slacks, her pale, slightly plump tummy pulsing.
“Can I come in?” she asked, and did.
I shut the door.
“I hope you came out here to take that little cunt back home with you,” she said, leaning against the door.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about that fucking little Irish slut. If you still care about her, take her home, get her the fuck out of here.”
“That isn’t up to me, Ginny.”
“Well, I’ll tell you this, pal: if she’s banging Ben, I’m gonna bang her.”
And, with a sneer as nasty as she was drunk, she raised her hand and made a gun of it and shot at me, saying, “Bang. She’s fucking dead.”
She went to the door, opened it, looked back over her shoulder at me, like a parody of a pin-up pose, and said, “Word to the wise.”
And she shut the door. Hard.
I stood looking at it.
Then I unpacked.
The sign said
F
L
A
M
I
N
G
O, and poised above it as if considering flight was a neon-outlined caricature of that unlikely long-legged bird that so embodies both awkwardness and grace. Its pleasure palace namesake had neither of these, but did manage to marry two contrary qualities: stark lines and soft pastels.
A ghostly olive-green structure in the modern geometric mode, the Flamingo sprawled across a stretch of sandy nothing along a blacktop road to nowhere, a.k.a. Los Angeles. It was on the left, several miles beyond the Vegas city limits, its Frank Lloyd Wrightish lines an aberration against the timelessness of the desert and the purpleness of Black Mountain shimmering aginst the morning sky, a morning that was blowing some, sending sand and stones and sagebrush skittering across the highway, some of the gritty tumbleweeds piling up in balls against the Flamingo’s foundation, as if nature were trying, without much luck, to topple the structure. Nature simply didn’t have the determination of Benjamin Siegel.
Off to the right was a lot where I parked the used Buick I’d been provided. Not surprisingly, that lot was fairly empty, but for a few pick-up trucks and other vehicles that probably belonged to those few workers within who
