Neon Mirage (13 page)

“I’d be glad to call over there and see if Ginny’s home,” he said.

“Better not,” I said. “I don’t know if Virginia Hill would consider me a friend. I better just go over there. Can you give directions?”

“Sure,” he said. “Or just buy a movie star map. It’s Valentino’s old mansion.”

“La Hill doesn’t go second class, does she?”

“She probably uses mink tampax,” Raft said. “Sometimes I don’t know what Ben sees in her—she’s a coarse broad. She swears like a fucking stevedore.”

“I know her,” I said. “Foul mouth or not, she’s a babe, or used to be.”

Raft smirked. “Take a look around you, Nate. Every street corner has the four most beautiful women you ever saw standing on it, and next to ’em are the four second most beautiful. Guy like Ben can pick and choose.”

“What’s the reason he keeps her around, then?”

“Could be business. She’s tied in with a lot of his friends back east. It’s a partnership. A sort of marriage. And, yeah, she is still a babe. I remember what Benny said, after that first night with her, up at the Chateau Marmont…”

Raft looked skyward, as if summoning a romantic memory floating on some cloud.

“…‘Georgie,’ Ben said to me, ‘she’s the best piece of ass I ever had.’”

Touched as I was by that, I managed to ask a question. “How long have you known Siegel?”

“Forever. Since he was a tough little kid on the Lower East Side—and I don’t mean of Beverly Hills. He was always gutty and ambitious. He came out here to Hollywood because he wanted to be somebody. And he made it. He was hardly out here a few months but that I was seeing him at the track or around town with big names, George Jessel, Cary Grant, Mark Hellinger, guys like that.”

“And you.”

“Hey, I figured if he was good enough for them he was good enough for me. I never knew anybody who doesn’t like him. He’s a great guy.” His expression turned sober. “Of course a lot of his friends deserted him, after he started getting bad press. Particularly after that son of a bitch Pegler took off after him, in his column. Ben had to drop out of the Hillcrest Country Club.” Shook his head sadly. “Giving up golf really killed Benny.”

“I’ve seen pictures of him in the papers. He looks like he could be a movie star himself.”

Raft grinned, showing his teeth, looking at me. “He’s a frustrated actor; he’d love to have a movie career.” He leaned forward, sharing a confidence. “He’s always coming around the set, standing on the sidelines, asking the technicians questions. He owns more cameras, projectors and other movie shit than half the studios on Poverty Row.”

“What for?”

“Homemade screen tests. He had me photograph him one day. I took some footage of him with his camera in my dressing room.” Raft smiled some more, and shook his head. “He re-did one of my scenes. Wanted to show me where I got it wrong.”

“He isn’t serious about acting…”

“Not anymore. This was years ago. But he showed some footage around. He let it be known he was available for parts. Nobody ever hired him. Not with his background. I’m no saint, but I don’t have no rape arrests on my rap sheet.”

“Is he as crazy as they say?”

“He’s got a streak. But that name he hates—Bugsy—he didn’t get that ’cause he’s bugs, you know. It comes from when a judge at a trial, years and years ago, real disgusted, called him and Meyer Lansky a couple of bugs.”

“But the name ‘Bugsy’ stuck, even though nobody uses it in front of him.”

“Nobody uses it in front of him for long,” Raft said, nodding slowly. “He’s got a bad temper, all right. Particularly if you insult him. He’s real vain. He dresses great. He works out every day at the Hollywood YMCA. Goes weekly to Drucker’s barber shop in Beverly Hills. He showers for hours, goes to bed early, hardly drinks at all. He’s real sensitive about his hair.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, when he was a kid it was nice and thick and curly. But he’s losing it, now. I tell you, I damn near bought it when I pulled a gag on him on his birthday last year. I sent over a gift-wrapped toup. Thinking he’d laugh. He drove over here pissed off as hell and it took me an hour to settle him down. Lucky I know what button to push with him.”

“What button is that, George?”

“Well, I just call him ‘baby blue eyes.’ It compliments him and calms him right down. I don’t think it’d work for anybody else, though.”

“He sounds like a real interesting fella. I’d like to meet him—no matter how things go for me with Virginia Hill.”

“How long will you be out here?”

“How long do I need to be out here?”

“Well, Ben’s not in town much these days. He’s in Vegas, most of the time.”

“Oh, because of that casino he’s building—”

“Yeah, only it’s more than just a casino—it’s a full-fledged resort. Hotel, restaurants, swimming pool. Gonna be a real class joint. He’s putting it up out on the strip of land between the airport and Vegas. Sinking a lot of dough into it.”

“His own?”

“His own and everybody else he knows. Me included. Mostly guys back east, I think; and guys from your neck of the woods. Ben says it’s gonna be so fabulous it’ll make DeMille look like a piker.”

“I didn’t know DeMille was in the gambling business.”

“You don’t think the movie business is a gamble? Nate, you don’t get where I am unless the dice has been good to you.”

Killer came out and refilled our iced tea glasses from a sweating glass pitcher. Raft asked him if he’d got a cab for the girl and the Killer said yes, then went back into the house.

I sipped my tea. “Why isn’t Virginia Hill out in Vegas with him?”

“She is part of the time. But she comes back here a lot.”

“Why?”

“She hates the desert.”

“I hope she’s not a typical customer. So, I have to go to Vegas if I want to meet Ben Siegel?”

“No, he’s going to be back in town this weekend. Friday night. It’s the grand opening of the S.S. Lux.”

“What’s that?”

“Tony Cornero’s new gambling ship. Ben was one of Tony’s partners on the old S.S. Rex. You want to go? You can go with me, if you want.”

“That’d be swell.”

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” Raft said, standing, tightening the sash of his robe over an expansive gut, “I want to catch a nap. I got a date tonight.”

Beverly Hills wasn’t always a big deal. The Hollywood hills were where movie actors, denied access to the country clubs and social circles of Los Angeles, fled, building fabulous mansions, riding their money past stuffy respectability into cheerful decadence. One of the first of those mansions was the sixteen-room Falcon’s Lair, Rudolph Valentino’s home for the year or so before his death.

Perched on a Benedict Canyon hillside, on Bella Drive, the place was impressive in size but otherwise looked just like another of these overinflated mud huts to me, bleached white with scalloped burnt-red clay tile roof; it was two stories with occasional dips to a single floor, and lavishly landscaped, lots of trees doing their best to shield the mansion, but not obscuring the hilltop view of Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and even Catalina Island on this clear, pleasantly warm July afternoon. The panoramic view stretched before me like a not quite convincing miniature in a movie. That was California for you—almost like real life.

I left Rubinski’s ’41 Ford in the open cement area before the mission-like front of the place. No other cars were around, but a stable converted to a garage was nearby. You walked through an archway to get to the front entry, a big dark double door, a pair of Mediterranean slabs you could break your knuckles on, knocking. Which is why they invented doorbells, I guess, and Falcon’s Lair had one and I rang it.

And I rang it.

Raft had called ahead for me, and Virginia Hill was supposed to be home, and she supposedly knew I was coming. It had been less than fifteen minutes since Raft’s call, and yet nobody was answering the door.

I rang again, the church bell-like chimes of it mellow and muffled behind the massive doors.

Which finally swung open, and there she was, poised within their V, fingers with red-painted nails caressing either door, a wry one-sided smile cracking her cool deadpan face, framed by flowing shoulder-length hair that was redder than it used to be, and green-gray eyes that laughed. Well, they didn’t say ha ha ha or anything, but you get the idea.

And did I mention she was naked?

Well, she was. I was starting to feel like a private eye in a quarter pocketbook. This made two naked babes today and it wasn’t even dark yet. Or maybe that was just what they were wearing in California this year. Nothing.

“Hiya, Heller. Long time no see. Come on in.”

Her Alabama accent was still there, but it seemed less lilting than I remembered it. A harshness had crept into the voice, giving it a smokiness that was not altogether unappealing, though she was slurring her words a little. If calling her drunk was less than fair, calling her sober was less than accurate.

I followed her through a high-ceilinged entryway that you could’ve put my Morrison suite in and still had room to hold a cotillion. The place was lavish, tapestries and armor, wrought-iron wall hangings; but it was pretty much a blur to me. I was following a naked woman whose flesh was as creamy white as a carved ivory statuette, a few of which graced an occasional table here in Rudy’s shack.

Jiggling a bit, not being actual ivory, she led me into a big living room where she walked to a Hoover plugged in the wall on a long cord and began sweeping. The sound of it was fairly loud, but she managed to bray above it: “Sorry I didn’t hear you ring the doorbell, Heller!”

“That’s okay!” I yelled back.

She kept at it, sweeping an oriental carpet that extended out before a white marble fire place and its Tara-like pillars like a multi-colored lawn. Over the fireplace hung a dark murky painting with an Old Dutch Master look to it. By which I mean it was like a Rembrandt seen through a lot of cigar smoke.

She shut the vacuum cleaner off, kicking the button savagely with her bare foot, her long auburn hair swinging in arcs, her teeth bared in a snarl. “I hate this fucking place,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, glancing around at the smooth pastel walls and heavy dark Mediterranean furniture, sitting on a red brocade couch that was as comfortable as a guaranteed income. “It’s a real dump, all right.”

She made a face as if she were about to spit on the carpet. The floor on the outer edges of the carpet was polished to a gloss you could ice skate on. The room was immaculately clean and everything seemed to be in its place. The only jarring item, in fact, was the nude woman with the vacuum cleaner.

“I told that bitch I’d shoot her,” she said, pushing the Hoover to one side, going over to a heavy low-slung coffee table that ran damn near the length of the couch before me. She stood right across from where I sat and she lit up a cigarette, taken from a silver jade-inlaid box, firing it up with a silver-and-jade lighter. I could have stared right at her reddish pubic patch, which was trimmed into the shape of a heart, if I were that sort of guy, which of course I was.

She bent over, considerable breasts swaying, and poured, over somewhat melted ice, what was not her first tall glass from a soon-to-be-empty bottle of crème de menthe on the coffee table. Then she put the bottle back on the table next to a floral arrangement and a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver.

She threw back her head, and the glass too, and most of the green stuff was gone when her head and the glass returned; she filled the glass back up and killed the bottle. She looked at me curiously.

“Want something to drink?” she said.

“Sure.”

“What?”

“Rum.”

“Over ice?”

“Why not.”

She walked to a liquor cabinet against a far wall; she moved like sex on springs. I didn’t like this girl much as a human being, but I began to see how she’d gotten where she was today—even if, at age thirty or so, she was starting to show some wear and tear. Her body was holding up great, but then most women’s bodies are at least five years younger than their faces.

And Virginia Hill’s face, pretty as it was, was much older than the last time I’d seen it, back around ’38. Her eyes were a little baggy, the laugh lines turning into plain old fashioned wrinkles, and the hard lines around her mouth marked her as a dame who had her sour moments.

But that milky body, those gravity-defying breasts and that well-tended, trimmed, hennaed valentine between her legs, could make for some sweet moments.

On the other hand, there
was
that Smith and Wesson on the table before me, like a party favor courtesy of a demented host.

Hostess.

She handed me a short fat glass with rum and ice across the coffee table.

“Bottoms up and live, pal,” she said, hoisting her replenished tall glass of crème de menthe. “Tomorrow never comes and, anyway, if it does, you may be dead.”

I made a “salute” gesture with my glass, saying nothing, knowing I couldn’t top her cheerful toast, and sipped the rum and it was smooth, expensive stuff.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, gesturing to her nude self. Her nipples were dark, not erect, and about as big around as half dollars, but worth considerably more. “It’s a little warm today and we’re not air conditioned.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I said, thinking it was fairly cool in here, a whisper of a breeze blowing in from somewhere. “I just feel a little overdressed.”

She smiled over the rim of her tall green glass. “Maybe we can do something about that.”

“I thought you were Ben Siegel’s girl.”

“I am. He’d kill you if he found out.” She said this with a smile that made it clear she found that concept very amusing and a little exciting.

“Well, I’ll just keep my clothes on for right now. What’s the gun for?”

“The gun?” Her eyes followed my finger as it pointed to the .38. “Oh, that. I was going to kill that bitch.”

“Which bitch is that, Ginny?”

She squinted. “My housekeeper. Mexican girl. She doesn’t clean worth a shit. I have to do it over, after she does, just to make sure it’s right. Besides, I think she’s stealing from me.” She came around the table and sat next to me. Put her feet up on the coffee table. Her toenails were painted red.

“I may not look it,” she said, with some defensive pride, “but I can run a household. I raised my brothers and sisters, didn’t I?”

“Big family?”

“Ten of us kids and no money. You ever wake up in the middle of the night ’cause of a bad dream, Heller?”

“Sure. I have malaria flare-ups now and then, from the war. I have some doozies where nightmares are concerned.”

“Yeah, well I only have one nightmare. And it’s always the same. I’m locked in a cell for a life term. The outside of the place is a prison. But inside the bars it’s my shabby little house in Lipscomb, Alabama.
That
was a prison. My folks fought, mom ran off ’cause pa beat on her.” She made a face and drank some crème de menthe.

This sure was a different story than she’d given the columnists. Actually, she’d given the columnists a variety of stories of her early life, over the years, but they always added up to her being some Southern heiress of the sort café society ate up in the ’30s.

“My grandmother was chopping cotton for a living in Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, when she was eighty. I swore that would never happen to me.”

“At this point,” I said, looking at her long legs, pleasantly plump in a Petty Girl way, stretched out before me resting on the coffee table, feet near the gun, “I would think your cotton picking days are behind you.”

“They better be.”

“You weren’t really going to shoot your housekeeper,” I said. Making it sound like a statement not a question.

“Probably not,” she admitted. She seemed to be sobering up just a trifle, despite the crème de menthe she was putting away. Talking about her past had done it. “Look, why don’t I put something on. I’m just in an ornery mood. Looking for somebody to fuck, or fuck with.”

“Why don’t you put on some clothes,” I agreed. “You’re a great-looking woman, but I came around to get my girl back, not to bang her boss.”

She looked at me sideways; her smile was wide and white and appealing—a little like Peggy’s smile, actually.

“You’re pretty cute, Heller,” she said. “I think Peggy should’ve stayed in Chicago and married you or something.”

“Or something,” I conceded.

“But you can’t hold back an ambitious kid like her.”

“Ambitious kid?”

“Yeah, Peggy’s got a head on her shoulders. And I’m not just talking blowjobs.”

“Miss Hill, you have such a classy way of putting things.”

She stood and said, huffily, “Well, excuse my fucking French,” and flounced out. I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. Either way, she had a great ass.

But I must’ve really been in love with Peggy Hogan, because I’d just told Virginia Hill to put on her clothes despite my having the erection of a lifetime.

Which had fortunately wilted by the time she came in, in a white two-piece outfit, halter top and shorts, like Lana Turner in
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Remembering how that movie came out was an incentive toward keeping my pants on and my dick limp.

“You want some more rum?” she asked.

“I’m not quite through with this, thanks,” I said, gesturing with glass in hand, rum swirling, ice clinking.

She still had some crème de menthe left. “I was thinking about killing my Chinese butler, too.”

“Oh? Where is he?”

“He left with the housekeeper and cook when I got the gun out.” She laughed; it was almost a snort. “Chickenshits. I didn’t even fire a shot.” She looked around the room. “I hate this fucking place.”

“Why?”

“It looks like a pimp’s idea of a palace.”

“Why don’t you redecorate? You got dough, I hear. That big handbag you lug around is usually packed with money, if the stories are true.”

“They’re true, all right. But I’m no fucking whore, Heller. I never asked a man for money in my life. Never had to. They just hand the green stuff over without me ever even asking.”

“That beats whoring all hollow.”

“I think so,” she said, with no sense of irony whatever. “But I can’t redecorate. Juan would kill me.”

“Who is Juan?”

She shrugged; her hair shimmered, tickling her shoulders. She smelled good—a combination of crème de menthe and, my detective’s nose deduced, Ivory soap. “He’s my agent. He used to be a dancer and made all the premieres, first nights, parties, all the big shit events. So he ended up turning theatrical agent, and publicity man, too. This is his place.”

“Does he live here?”

“Sometimes. Not right now. Anyway, he fancies himself the Latin lover type.” She laughed again. “Latin lovers, you can have ’em. Who was that girl that wrote that book?
Latins Are Lousy Lovers?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even read
Forever Amber
yet.”

“Well, she was right. Those fucking Italians. Peacocks, all of ’em. Needle dicks, to a man. I never knew a guy in the rackets who was well hung till I ran into Benny, and he’s a Jew! Aren’t you a Jew, Heller?”

“Half of me. But I got a hunch it’s the top half.”

“We could check that out. You don’t have to be a fucking detective to tell a Jewish dick when you see one.”

“Miss Hill, please. Take your hand off my zipper. I’ve been circumcised, if that answers your question.”

“It doesn’t, really,” she said, absently, looking away from me, glancing about the high-ceilinged room again. “This place looks like a fucking whorehouse, don’t you think? Juan, Latin lover, hah—he sleeps with the gardener, if that tells you what kind of Latin lover he is—anyway, Juan has this thing about Valentino. This was the great Sheik’s flop, you know. ’Cause he died after he built the joint, this castle’s supposed to be jinxed. Sat empty for years. Anyway, Juan decided to restore it—did his best to furnish and decorate it like it was when Rudy lived here. Yecch.”

“I kind of like it.”

“Then
you
live here. I swear. I gotta find a decent place to live.”

“Well, isn’t Ben Siegel building you a place?”

“Oh, there’s another dopey dream castle for you. The Flamingo. That’s what he’s calling it, you know. Named after those goddamn birds down at Hialeah. Except lately he’s been calling
me
his pretty little Flamingo. I ask you. Does this frame remind you of one of them spindly-ass birds?”