On a small antiqued gold-and-light-pink table just inside the door a few things had been deposited-rental-car keys, sunglasses in a soft case, a pack of Marlboros, and a room key. I put myself between him and the little table.
“It’s just…I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you,” I said. “After yesterday morning. I couldn’t help but think you were…that you might be interested in me.”
This wild speculation was based upon him dropping his robe and waving his hard-on at me.
He shrugged. “You aren’t wrong. I felt a real connection between us yesterday. I’d love to get together.”
“Great.”
Now the eagerness went out of his expression as something occurred to him. “But, Jack-this is awkward. Not a good time. I could get called down to the set any second now, and well…I am seeing somebody right now, and while it’s more an understanding than a relationship, I just can’t…Let’s just say I have a date tonight and leave it at that.”
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “But there’s weeks to go on this shoot, and you’ll be around that whole time, right?”
“Right,” I lied.
“I promise you we’ll get together.” He leaned in and gave me a tender kiss on the lips. “I promise, Jack.”
I touched his face and smiled. “You just name the time.”
And he let me out.
In the hall I pocketed the room key I’d lifted.
After the film crew had wrapped for the day (the last shot being called the “martini,” why the fuck I have no idea), Tiffany made a beeline for Licata, and the couple caught the elevator arm in arm. Again, the elegant mobster was making zero effort to avoid anyone’s eyes, although the media was gone now and unapproved cameras were a nono, as more than occasional signs with big screaming letters informed the tourists who were the casino’s customer base.
The Four Jacks had a steak house, Bronco’s, that was as close to fine dining as the resort offered. The only dress code was that men had to wear jackets and women dresses. I was fine with the male requirement, because the nine millimeter was in my waistband now.
It was early enough to get right in, and I dined alone, at a corner table, and ate light-a salad and steak sandwich. I drank Coke on ice, no beer or mixed drink.
The decor was again San Francisco Whorehouse, lots of red-and-gold brocade wallpaper, only with brass trimmings and smoky etched glass panels. I was playing a hunch-call it a small hunch inside a larger one-and the smaller one paid off just about when I had given up on it.
Licata, still in the white sport coat, black t-shirt and white slacks, strolled into the restaurant with Tiffany on his sleeve. Despite a number of parties who were ahead of them, they were immediately swept to a private booth. Tiffany was in a low-cut black mini-dress, similar to the white Marilyn one but much shorter, and couldn’t have displayed her Playboy credentials more openly unless she’d been nude with staples.
Since they were just getting here and I’d already had my meal, I ordered some cherry cheesecake and poked at it endlessly, irritating people waiting for a table. Thankfully Tiff and Lou did not linger over dinner, and when (forty minutes later) they left, I left, too, signing my dinner to Eric Conrad’s room.
Surreptitiously, I watched them step into the elevator, and then I moved back into the casino where I bumped into Ginger.
“Hi Jack,” the little redhead said. She had nice blue eyes that went well with the freckles. “We’re torn down and ready to go. Some of us are going out to a little blues bar tonight. You wanna join the fun?”
“Prior commitment, Ginger,” I said. “Rain check?”
“Sure,” she said. She looked a little disappointed. It was one of those moments when I wished I was someone else.
I took a few minutes to watch her go, because that well-shaped behind in a pair of jeans was enough to make me believe in God again. For a few seconds, anyway. Then I found my way to a poker machine that had an angled view on the elevators. I wasn’t really expecting to see a familiar face, but my hunch was just a hunch, and any intel at all that I could gather might prove helpful.
About half an hour later, Tiffany exited the elevator. Alone. She was very much dressed down-white hair ponytailed back, zip make-up, a loose yellow blouse that downplayed her formidable chest, and jeans that weren’t loose but neither did they allow bystanders to make a visual gynecological exam, like other jeans I’d seen her in.
This provided just enough corroborating evidence to make me feel like I was on to something. Another twenty minutes should do it, and it was a good thing I waited, because just when I was getting ready to ditch the poker machine and head upstairs, I hit a royal flush and made $85.
By the time I’d cashed in my quarters for folding money, half an hour had passed since Tiffany exited that elevator and gone wherever the hell she’d gone. Maybe to join Ginger and the gang at the blues club.
Half an hour passing might be just fine for my sketchy purposes. This was something of a crapshoot, but what the hell? It was a casino wasn’t it?
I took the elevator up to the twelfth floor, Top of the Mark where the Four Jacks was concerned, and took out the key to Eric Conrad’s room and got the nine millimeter into my hand-my left hand, while with my right I worked the key in the lock, quietly-and I slipped into the Presidential Suite.
Nobody was in the living room with its red plush sofa and red-and-gold drapes, but sound was coming from the ajar door to the bedroom. Make that sounds: two voices, both grunting, but in different ways. One grunting forcefully, the other mingling pleasure and pain.
Here’s the funny part. Funny ironic, I mean.
Eric was up on the brass bed on his hands and knees facing me, and Licata was behind him, delivering the male shall we say, both naked, their position a direct echo of that moment when I entered Joni’s bedroom back in La Mirada and found her getting her bottom pounded by that mechanic, Williams.
There was no significance to the similarity, just an odd resonance. I guess I’m not experienced enough to know whether that’s standard for rear-entry fun-and-games, but in my experience, my partners and I (females all, I’ll have you know) were on the bed facing the headboard. But Joni and Williams, and now Eric and Licata, had their backs to the headboard, conveniently facing the doorway.
Which was fine with me, because I would rather look them in the eye, anyway.
Both froze, Licata in mid-thrust.
Eric’s shocked expression was almost comical, but there was nothing funny about the sneering anger on the mobster’s face.
Then, when I raised the hand with the nine millimeter in it, letting it point at them like a scolding finger, their expressions changed respectively to abject fear and cold hatred.
“Fellas,” I said, “disengage.”
They did so and the actor, as chagrined as he was frightened, scrambled back and got the covers over him with just his handsome head popping up. Licata, his chest black with hair, remained on his knees, as defiant as his erect member.
“Let’s get something straight,” I said, and immediately regretted putting it that way, “I don’t give a fuck what you boys do to each other. You are neither one of you in danger.”
Licata, despite having a gun on him, said, “You are.”
But his dick had started to wilt.
I said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Eric, you just stay here in the bedroom and relax. Don’t use that phone. Don’t call for security or anybody else-just think how embarrassing this could be. How damaging.”
Eric nodded. In fact, he nodded about half a dozen times.
“Lou,” I said to the proud little mobster, “I need a word with you in the other room. This gun is no threat to you as long as you cooperate. I’m only holding it on you for my protection, because I understand that you’re a
