She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa-not entirely due to the pregnancy, I gathered. “We, uh… have borrowed quite enough from them, getting Bobby bailed out.”
“Okay, then. A C-note it is.”
She raised a red-nailed finger. “And none of us can be quoted-not in print, not in private to the police. We’ll help you gather some facts, but that’s all.”
“All right,” I said. “Can Bobby talk now?”
“If you’re going to be a wise-ass,” she said coolly, “it’s going to cost you more.”
I raised my hands in surrender-this was no average housewife-then got out my billfold and handed her two twenties and a ten.
“That’s fifty dollars, Mr. Heller,” she said, handing the money to her husband, who folded it and slipped it in a trouser pocket.
“Fifty more after we’ve talked-after I know it’s worth fifty more. Fair enough?”
She gave it a moment of thought, nodded.
“So, Bobby,” I said, “who was it offered you twenty-five hundred to bump off Mickey Cohen?”
His wife answered, green eyes flashing. “That son of a bitch Jack Dragna!”
I said to her husband, “Jack Dragna personally? What, did he come here to the house?”
Which was about as likely as Louis B. Mayer dropping a film print off at a theater.
“It wasn’t Dragna hisself,” Savarino said. He had a husky, medium-pitched voice. When he spoke, he emphasized points with wags and nods of his head, making his curly hair bounce. “Three guys I never seen before come around, it was three weeks ago last night, Thursday night… I know ’cause we was listening to Burns and Allen. Henry and Helen and Arnie here was over, having beers and just listening to that daffy dame on the radio.”
“That Gracie Allen kills me,” Hassau said, smiling absently.
The blonde he was married to sipped her beer.
Taking no time to reflect on this cozy evening at home among felons, I asked Savarino, “And you never saw these guys before?”
“Don’t look so surprised. We’re not local. We come out from the East Coast, been here less than a year, knocking over scores. These guys offered me twenty-five hundred to take Cohen out.”
“You’re no torpedo, Bobby-why you?”
He shrugged, sighed, holding on to his wife’s hand; the beautiful redhead was gazing at him supportively. “I was pals with Benny Gamson, you know-the Meatball.”
So-called because he was shaped like a meatball, his legs like toothpicks stuck in it.
“When I knew Gamson in Chicago,” I said, “he and Cohen were buddies-the Meatball was a card mechanic in Cohen’s bust-out joint.”
Savarino was shaking his head. “They weren’t buddies out here. Cohen gets something like two-fifty a week protection payoff, each, from all the other bookies in town… only the Meatball tells him to go stuff hisself.”
Gamson had been shot to death in October.
“How did you and Gamson get friendly?” I asked him.
“He was my bookie. He was willing to extend credit, no strongarm stuff, no leg-breaking. Hell of a nice guy. But I didn’t love him-I wouldn’t whack Mickey Cohen over him, even for that kind of money.”
His wife said, rather proudly, “My Bobby’s not a killer.”
From the other room Hassau said, in his thin high-pitched voice, “These guys Dragna sent, they knew we was associated with Al Green, and that Al was pals with Benny Siegel, and that meant we had easy entree to Cohen, who is also pals with Siegel.”
Apparently bored with this criminal flow chart, Hassau’s wife got up to go into the nearby kitchen.
“Incidentally,” I said to Hassau, “did your friends the Ringgolds bail out Green and that other guy from your string?”
“Marty?” Hassau said. “Marty Abrams? Naw, him and Al can afford their own bail. The Ringgolds was helping us out, so that Al didn’t have, you know, the whole financial burden.”
The blonde in the angora sweater returned with a fresh glass of beer. She said to her husband, “Tell ’em about what happened after you turned those bastards down.”
But it was Savarino who picked up on the story. “A couple days later, Patsy answers the door, and they push right past her-Christ, her pregnant like that, they coulda hurt her or the baby or something, just bulled right in.”
“We were playin’ cards,” Hassau said, “with the girls.”
Savarino, trembling with the memory, said, “They were big wops, three of ’em… One held a rod on us, and the other two started beating the shit out of us, one at time.”
His wife was running her fingers through his curly hair, soothing him, settling him.
“Fuckers,” Hassau said. “In front of our wives!”
Helen Hassau, unimpressed, sipped her beer, leaning so far over the table, her angora-clad breasts flattened out.
“They used a rubber hose on me,” Savarino said, “and pistol-whipped poor Henry, there.”
“I had a goose egg for a week,” Hassau said, with the expression of a kid who had a bully steal his prize marble.
“They didn’t want you to squeal to Cohen,” I said.
“No,” Savarino said, shaking his head. “See, Jack Dragna acts like he gets along with Cohen, but really he hates that little Jew like poison. Cohen and Siegel got shoved down Dragna’s throat by the East Coast Combination.”
“So you didn’t warn Cohen about the hit?” I said.
“Hell no. Anyway, they musta called the thing off, ’cause nobody’s thrown any bullets at Mickey, lately.”
“I’d like to get my hands on those guys what roughed us up,” Hassau whined.
His blonde wife was gulping her beer. She was the kind of broad you’d kill for to get in bed, and die if you woke up next to.
“Are you sure these goons were Dragna’s?” I asked. “Cohen has other enemies, particularly among bookies he’s muscled.”
Wilson, who had just been sitting quietly smoking, said, “I checked around on these guys… Dragna and this lieutenant of his, Jimmy Utley, have lunch every day at Lucey’s.”
I knew Lucey’s-it was a movie-industry hangout on Melrose across from Paramount Studios.
Wilson was saying, “Two of the three guys who come here, and made that twenty-five-hundred-buck offer-I saw ’em walkin’ Dragna outa the restaurant, after lunch.”
“Bodyguards,” I said.
Wilson nodded and winked, an action that made his gaunt face cartoonish.
“Tell me, Bobby,” I said, turning to the hang-dog Savarino, “what made you decide to share this little episode with the cops?”
“I was tryin’ to cut a deal-I figure, I give ’em a big fish like Dragna, they’ll let me and my friends swim away.”
“As in, they swam and they swam all over the dam?” I asked, referring to the hit parade’s “Three Little Fishies.”
“Somethin’ like that,” Savarino said, glumly.
“Only now you’re wise to the fact that the LAPD is in Dragna’s pocket,” I said.
“Not all of ’em are!” Savarino said, somewhat indignantly. “Take that guy Hansen, f’r instance-he’d love to get Dragna by the short and curlies… and the papers, they’d eat it up, right?”
“Maybe.” I said to the redhead, “After your hubby started squealing, did those three Dragna thugs come around again?”
She shook her head. “No, but we got all these threatening phone calls, both Helen and me, terrible, foul, frightening, awful…” She covered her mouth, her eyes moistening.
Finally the blonde perked up. From the dining room, she said, “We got a threatening note in the mail, too-one of them cut-and-paste jobs.”
“Not in the mail,” Mrs. Savarino said, “the mail- box — somebody just walked right up and stuck that foul
