were local. Siegel was putting his mostly imported workers up at motels and rooming houses in town, and bringing them in to his forty-acre playground by bus and truckload each morning.
Past an imposing stone waterfall and under a
I found him behind the dining room beyond the casino, in the kitchen, which was a good-size, modern affair, blinding white formica here, shining stainless steel there, and not a chef in the place.
Unless you counted Ben Siegel, who was wearing a snappy gray suit and dark blue tie and pale blue shirt.
I was wearing a suit and tie, too, by the way-though hardly as natty an ensemble as Siegel; but I couldn’t get into the “Come as you are, pod’ner” swing, either. I was working.
“Much better,” Siegel was saying, to nobody in particular, hands on his hips, beaming, basking in the glow of the spotless kitchen.
“Ben?” I said.
He looked at me and grinned and waved me over. “Look at this,” he said. He was pointing to two facing walls of ovens. “Plenty of room there, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure.”
“Before I had ’em do it over, these ovens opened right onto each other. What kinda layout is that? I’m not paying the top chefs in the business so they can fry their asses off!”
“What did this little remodeling job cost?”
“Thirty grand,” he shrugged. He looked tan and fit, but his eyes were bloodshot as well as bagged. “Come on, you need to meet somebody.”
He led me out through the restaurant area, where the smell of paste was in the air, half a dozen wallpaperers in white coveralls and painters’ caps at work, dealing with heavy brocade material that had to be tricky as hell. The plush carpet was covered by tarps; nonetheless, Siegel stopped in mid-track and bent and flicked at several spent cigarette butts, like Sherlock Holmes examining a muddy footprint.
“Hey!” he yelled.
The men, several of whom were up on ladders, stopped their work at once; turned in the direction of what by now was surely a familiar voice.
Siegel stood, having scraped the butts and ashes into his palm. “I’d like to catch the dirty pig who dropped these,” he snarled. Then he wadded the butts in his fist and walked over to a waste barrel and dumped them in.
The men exchanged looks and one of them, presumably the foreman, muttered, “Yes, Mr. Siegel,” and they turned back to their struggle.
Immediately pleasant again, he led me through a corridor of slot machines, saying, “The dining room is very important, you know. You can’t hope to make a profit on it-it’s a come-on. Food service has got to be tops for the high rollers, but at the same time the prices can’t scare away the two-dollar customers, either.”
“Keep an eye on your chefs,” I said.
“Why’s that?” he said.
“A chef can steal from you a hundred different ways. Kickbacks from suppliers. Selling prime cuts of meat as scrap. Lots of ways.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, giving me a pleased, appraising look. “You do know your stuff.”
“Security’s my racket. I can tell you right now that you need more people under you-people you can trust. Or everybody and his dog is going to steal you blind.”
He nodded. “And I’m gonna do that, Nate-down the road. Come on out and see the pool.”
We walked out onto an immense patio that led to a luxurious Olympic-size pool, the edges of which had a scalloped design; below the blue ripples of sun-reflecting water you could make out a mosaic pink flamingo. This patio was an oasis in the midst of a vast well-trodden expanse of barren desert real estate. Over to the right of the aridness, as I stood with the casino and restaurant complex behind me, was a rambling modern building which here was two-stories, there three-stories, and in the middle four, making it the tallest structure on the grounds. A crew of trowel-wielding plasterers on scaffolding was giving the massive building a skin of stucco, which clung to wire mesh covering the building’s cement surface.
A small fat man in an Hawaiian swim suit was sitting under an umbrella beside the pool; he had a bottle of beer on the table next to him and he was wearing sunglasses. He was as brown as a berry. His body was round and hairless, a beach ball with legs. And he had the face of a self-satisfied bulldog.
“This hardworking gentleman,” Siegel said good-naturedly, “is Bud Quinn, formerly of the LAPD.”
“Don’t get up,” I said.
Quinn smiled widely, making his cheeks tight, and it should have been a jolly smile, but it wasn’t really a smile at all. It was an expression the hard fat little man had adopted to use at appropriate times, to affect humanity.
“You’d be Nate Heller,” he said, removing the sunglasses, thrusting a pudgy hand forward.
Reluctantly I took it. Shook it. It was as moist as Sedway’s, and even more repellent.
“I didn’t know you were working for Ben,” I said. “Let alone his top security man.”
Piggy eyes narrowed in pouches of fat. “Have we met?”
“No. I’ve just heard about you.” I turned to Siegel. “I take it you haven’t mentioned to Fred Rubinski that Quinn’s in your employ.”
“Why, no,” Siegel said. Then with a little edge in his voice he added: “I didn’t know I needed to clear my staff with Fred.”
I shrugged. “It’s just that Fred’s late partner and Lt. Quinn had their share of run-ins.”
Quinn grinned yellowly. “Jake took a likin’ to my rubber hose. I never knew a boy who took to the goldfish like Jake.”
I pointed a finger at him. “Have some respect for the dead. You’re going to be that way yourself some day.”
“No disrespect meant,” Quinn said, standing now, gesturing with both hands, trying to smile away my ill will. “I liked Jake. He was a good boy. He put money in my pocket, time to time.”
Siegel, frowning slightly, said, “Is it going to be a problem, you fellas working together? I had no idea there was bad blood…”
“There’s no bad blood,” I said. “We don’t even know each other. Forget I said anything.”
Quinn smiled magnanimously. “No hard feelings, Nate. Mind if I call you Nate?”
I did, but said, “Not at all, Bud. We’ll get along fine, you and me.”
“Good,” Siegel said, putting a hand on either of our shoulders. “Bud isn’t working today, but I asked him to stop by so you two could get acquainted-set up a time to work with his people.”
“I hear you’re gonna teach us all about pickpockets,” Quinn said, in a sing-songey way. Pretending to be friendly but reeking condescension.
“Just a few pointers. Is this afternoon too soon?”
“Not at all,” Quinn said. “I got a few boys on the grounds, keeping an eye on the hired help and the delivery people. Can’t be too careful-pilferage can be a problem, you know, with all this building material here, in such short supply elsewhere.”
“Right,” I said. “What about the rest of your staff?”
“They’ve all settled in,” he said. “Found apartments and homes. Regular Las Vegas residents, now, looking forward to a long and happy association with the fine, fabulous Flamingo club.”
“Hotel,” Siegel corrected.
“Hotel,” Quinn amended.
“Why don’t you call ’em all in so we can meet here around one-thirty,” I said. “In the casino-it’s not being
