“I think so, too. But Meyer’s putting the pressure on me. Something else they heard was I got half a million stashed away in Switzerland. I sent Tabby to Zurich to pick out some furniture for the hotel rooms and from that they figure I’m stuffing their dough in a numbered account. Jesus!”
“What pressure are they putting on you?”
He sipped his tonic water, shrugged. “They expect me to make a good showing, quick.”
I smiled thinly. “That seals it. Sedway.”
He looked at me and slowly began to nod. “Sure. He’s sabotaging my casino-that’s where I gotta make it to make it.”
“Right.”
Siegel stood and walked to the window, surveyed his kingdom with a smile. “I’m gonna fool the bastards. I’m gonna pull it off.”
I stood. “I hope you do. Look, I’m going to go back to the casino and keep an eye on the security staff.”
He turned back to me. “Nate, I was serious about giving you a permanent position, here.”
“Well, uh, I was serious when I said I was flattered…”
“I know, I know, but you don’t want to work under Quinn. Well hell, I plan to fire the fat little crooked son of a bitch, anyway. You think I don’t know how you managed to stop the pilferage so goddamn fast? You weren’t here five minutes before you spotted the problem.”
“You would’ve, too, if you weren’t trying to do so much.”
“I know, I know. And I will hire some of those people the boys want me to hire, hotel man, casino manager, down the road. I’ll start hiring now, right this minute. How’s this for openers? Stay on and be my security chief, Nate. It’ll pay you sixty grand a year and fringes. You can live right here at the Flamingo.”
“That’s good money. That’s attractive. But I have my own business.”
He shrugged. “You could keep it going. Own it, keep an eye on it, but put somebody you trust in charge. Like Fred’s going to run your west coast office.”
“Fred’s a partner. That’s different.”
He patted the air with one hand, setting his tonic water on the bar. “Just think about it. For the time being, let’s go back to the casino and see if there’s anymore dishonest dealers who need a kick in the ass.”
I laughed. “I imagine the cheating’s been cut way back since that little scene.”
“It’s what the cops call a deterrent, right?”
“Right.”
Siegel laughed and we went out a side exit that led down a slanted ramp-like passageway that opened at the side of the hotel nearest the main building. We walked back toward the pool.
Sedway was standing near one of the youngest-looking of the bathing beauties, a little busty blonde number, coming on to her as subtly as a safe falling out a window; but then she could see it coming and didn’t seem to be moving out of the way, so what the hell. He was wearing a white jacket with a red carnation, similar to Ben’s apparel of the evening before; but a weasel in a dinner jacket is still a weasel.
“Moe!” Siegel called out.
Moey looked over at Siegel and gave him a slippery sideways smile and reluctantly left his quiff and trotted over.
“Yes, Ben?”
Siegel put a hand on the little man’s shoulder. “What’s the idea badmouthing me to Meyer?”
Moey’s eyes began to move back and forth. “What do you mean, Ben?”
“Don’t shit me. You think Meyer would keep something like that from me? You know how far back Meyer and me go? They used to call
“Ben, I don’t know what to say.”
Siegel’s hand began to squeeze the shoulder, like an orange you want to turn into a glass of juice. Pulp and all.
“Tell me, Moey. I already know, but I wanna hear it from you.”
The rat-faced little man swallowed and said, “I just told ’em the truth. That I thought you were dangerous to their interests.”
“Really. Because I ain’t up to running a big place like this, is that it?”
“Well, I think you need more help, anyway. I don’t mean any offense.”
He didn’t let up the pressure on Moe’s shoulder. “You don’t mean any offense. Going to Meyer and Christ knows who else behind my back. They were voting down there whether to have me hit or not, Moey. Down in Havana? Bet you didn’t tell ’em you were fixing my casino room so I’d lose, did ya? Or that you were setting me up with crooked dealers?”
Moey’s face fell; he tried to move back.
Siegel said, “Goodbye, Moey. If you ever set foot at the Flamingo again, I’m gonna break the rules. There’s gonna be a killing in Vegas, and you’re the guy that’s gonna get killed, and I’m the guy that’s gonna do the killing.”
He let go of Moey’s shoulder and Moey turned and moved quickly away, disappearing into the casino.
Siegel sighed, looked at me, shaking his head. “It ain’t easy being an executive,” he said.
And we walked back inside the fabulous Flamingo.
Even with Sedway’s absence, the Flamingo’s losing streak rolled on. And I knew why: the dealers, alerted by the literal booting out of one of their own, not to mention the ousting of Sedway himself, would only do their cheating all the more carefully now; and members of the security staff, whose attention I’d called to the problem and who were supposedly keeping an eye out, might well be in on the scam. In the case of either or both, Siegel was flat out screwed. Short of firing everybody on his casino crew and closing down and starting over after rehiring-which Siegel of course could (or anyway, would) not do-there was no way around it. Friday night the house didn’t lose as badly as it had Thursday, but it did lose. To the tune of fifteen thousand dollars.
On the surface, at least, the evening’s “Hollywood Premiere,” which of course was the grand finale of Ben’s gala opening, was going well. Newspaper, magazine and freelance photographers converged en masse, snapping leg art of the girls around the pool (Peggy not among them). Columnists and other newshounds were on hand to do write-ups and interviews, giving rave reviews to an especially demented Jimmy Durante, who hurled into a stunned and delighted audience beat-up old hats, a perplexed Cugat’s sheet music, and bits and pieces of a piano he was seemingly dismantling, only to be topped by the former child-star Rose Marie, looking a glamorous young woman now, nonetheless doing an uncanny showstopping imitation of the Schnoz.
A few more of Raft’s Hollywood friends showed than had been anticipated; not the glittering array Siegel had been promised-and had promised his patrons. But the respectable likes of George Sanders, Vivian Blaine and Eleanor Parker, as well as the expected Sonny Tufts, Lon McAllister and Charles Coburn, and a few others.
And the place was packed, with Hollywood industry figures like Jesse Lasky and Sid Grauman scattered amongst a crowd that mingled rank and file with Los Angeles society types. Siegel had instructed the security staff to enforce a dress code of sorts; it was vague-one of the few specifics was that men had to check their hats, which annoyed the natives who were used to wearing their Stetsons just about everywhere, bed and bathtub too I suspected-but it was working to the extent that the majority of patrons tonight were in formal wear.
Even I was in a rented tux, provided by Siegel, and I was determined that this would be my last night in his service. I’d trained his people and otherwise helped him. If nothing else, spotting the cheating on the floor, and helping him zero in on Sedway as his betrayer, had earned me my paycheck.
But I wasn’t confident that Siegel could keep his head-not to mention his temper-in the face of the pressures ahead, not the least of which was his conflict with the boys back east. Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and the rest obviously wanted three things from Ben and the Flamingo: fast results on their investment; a slowdown on spending; and no more embarrassing publicity. They also wanted him to shitcan Trans-American, which had after all been intended as merely a stopgap measure till Ragen’s Continental could be bought out or taken over.
I wasn’t convinced Ben Siegel could deliver on any of those things. And I knew he was dreaming a bigger dream than the Flamingo itself in thinking the Combination would buy him out of their own race wire for two million. One determined man standing up against his old mob cronies who, past friendships or not, wanted him to hand over his race wire, well-that was where I came in. I wished him luck, but didn’t want to be around when, inevitably, the
