Neon Mirage (17 page)

The coroner’s initial report barely mentioned the mercury poisoning, attributing Ragen’s death to “hypotensive heart disease and nephritis complicated by gunshot wounds.” There were “traces of mercury found in a qualitative analysis.” And that was that.

But it wasn’t. Lt. Drury made the point to Coroner Brodie that an important legal question needed to be definitively answered: namely, whether Ragen died due to the gunshot wounds, making for a murder case against the gunmen in the green truck; or heart disease, making it death by natural causes, reducing the charge against the gunmen to attempted murder; or nephritis brought on by mercury poisoning, making for a
different
murder case, against person or persons yet unknown.

About this time, Coroner Brodie received several threatening phone calls that he and his family were in danger unless he “minded his own fucking business” where the Ragen matter was concerned. Brodie moved to a secret office and ordered police guards put on his home, and on the vault at Mt. Olivet, too, where Jim Ragen had been recently interred, the cops protecting the vault till Brodie could receive the permission of the court and Mrs. Ragen to perform a second autopsy.

Mrs. Ragen did object, but the courts overrode it, and it turned out Jim had enough mercury in him to kill three men.

The affidavits? Ragen’s so-called insurance policy? It must have lapsed, because via the family lawyer, Ellen Ragen told the press the affidavits would not be released to the authorities or anyone else. They could not, the lawyer claimed, be found.

An investigation into the hospital staff (not led by Drury, by the way) turned up nothing. Several promising leads fizzled, particularly the revelation that a tube had been inserted in Ragen’s stomach to relieve gas, the night before he died, a tube containing mercury. But the mercury was a different kind than that found in Ragen’s liver and kidneys, a liquid mercury that passes right through the system and can’t be absorbed.

By the end of August two things were obvious: Jim died due to mercury poisoning; and the killer would never be found.

Predictably, Peggy couldn’t accept that. She came storming into my inner office, on the last Saturday in August, and said, “What are you going to do about it?”

I gestured to the client’s chair across from my desk and she sat. She was wearing a simple black suit with pearls and black gloves; she’d either worn black or at least an arm band every day since Jim died.

“About what?” I ventured.

“Mickey McBride just bought out Continental!”

“Really?” Actually, I knew all about it. Jim, Jr., had asked my opinion and I had told him to do what he thought was right.

The violet eyes flashed with anger. “After everything my uncle did, after all his suffering, his family sells him out! How can they be such
weasels
!”

“Peg, your uncle was murdered because
he
wouldn’t sell out. Nobody else in the family, except maybe you, is dedicated to the racing wire business. It’s not like it’s a noble profession or anything. It’s a racket.”

“It’s legal!”

“For the moment, and barely. This is a rough time for your aunt and her children. I don’t happen to think some of ’em have a hell of a lot of backbone, myself, but young Jim seems like a good man, and I think he’s worried about his mother’s health. I don’t think he wants to lose another parent.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying cut ’em some slack.”

“But they sold Continental! Lock, stock and barrel!”

“Yeah, to Mickey McBride. Not to Jake Guzik.”

“What’s to stop Mickey McBride from selling to Guzik?”

“Nothing.”

“Goddamnit, Nate—you’re
impossible
!”

I gestured with two open hands. “Look, it’s not going to happen right away. Even the Outfit knows if they move in on Continental now, on the heels of your uncle’s murder, the roof’ll come crashing down on ’em. They may cut a backroom deal with McBride, but what the hell—McBride and your uncle were business partners for years. You should be able to accept whatever avenue he decides to take the business. And you should be able to accept him as your new boss.”

She folded her arms tightly across her chest. “I wouldn’t work for that company now. Not in a million years. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

“Well, why don’t you take your uncle’s advice, then?”

“What?”

“And marry me. Go the picket fence route. Make little Hellers.”

“Nathan, your timing doesn’t exactly rival Fred Astaire.”

“Sorry. So what now?”

She sighed heavily. “What’s happening where those West Side gunmen are concerned?”

“Drury’s case is progressing pretty well, considering he lost a witness. The other witnesses haven’t backed out, amazingly enough. He’s i.d. ’ed the driver, another West Side bookie—who incidentally was just caught dumping something in Douglas Park Lagoon, which turned out to be a sawed-off shotgun barrel.”

She sat up. “When was this?”

“Last night. Drury called me this morning about it. Don’t say I never have any good news for you. Anyway, Drury’s going to have no trouble getting a grand jury indictment, now.”

I expected that to improve her disposition.

It didn’t.

“But those men didn’t kill my uncle. They tried to, but they didn’t. What about whoever
did
? What about whoever
poisoned
him?”

“The cops are looking into that. You know that.”

“Why don’t you look into it?”

“Why should I?”

“Why don’t you just go up to Jake Guzik and shoot him in his fat head?”

“That’s a swell idea. Then the prison chaplain can marry you and me while I’m walking down that long, long hall. I hope you like weird haircuts.”

“I don’t think you’re funny.”

“I don’t find any of this funny. There are things in this world you can’t do a fucking thing about, Peggy. There are battles that can’t be won. Sometimes you just got to be happy to be able to hang on to your life, for a while.”

“That’s you, all right. Nate Heller. You’re a real survivor.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

She stood. “Well, maybe I want more out of a man. Maybe I want more out of life.”

“And where are you going to find
that
? Las Vegas?”

She lifted her chin and looked down her nose at me; sooner or later every woman I know does that to me. “Maybe I will. I don’t like this town. I don’t think I can live here anymore.”

“Peg. Why don’t you just sit back down…we’ll talk a little more and…”

“I’m sick of you. I’m sick of my family. I’m sick of Chicago.”

And she went out the door.

I thought about going after her, but I just kept my seat. She was as stubborn as her uncle, after all. And I’d had my fill of hopeless cases for one year.

But I did stand, to look out the window and watch her catch a cab. Wondering if she’d really do it. Really go running to Vegas and Siegel and that lunatic Virginia Hill, as if that were really an alternative to the madhouse of Chicago.

No
, I thought.
No way in hell.

She took the morning flight out.

I got on the train at Union Station on Alameda Boulevard at a quarter to seven that Sunday morning, and promptly fell asleep in my seat. When I woke up mid-morning and looked out the window, I found Los Angeles, and civilization (not that those terms necessarily have anything to do with each other), long gone. In their place was desolation, the literal kind, as opposed to the spiritual brand the City of Angels breeds. I spent the rest of the morning watching the desert roll by my window like a bleached tan carpet covering the world. I kept trying to picture somebody putting up a casino in the middle of all that sand and sagebrush, and couldn’t manage it.

It was after two when the train rolled into the modern, many-windowed Union Pacific Station at the west end of Fremont Street, and I soon found myself standing, single bag in hand, in a restful shaded park, enjoying a very dry breeze, looking down a busy street lined with wide-open casinos: the Las Vegas Club, the Monte Carlo, the Pioneer, the Boulder, the Golden Nugget. Despite the slight shock of seeing casinos sprawled over two very American blocks, I felt vaguely disappointed. While the Sunday afternoon crowds filled the sidewalks and kept Fremont’s two modest lanes hopping with traffic, it nonetheless looked a little shabby, not at all glamorous. A small boy’s idea of a sinful good time, complete with Hollywood-style frontier trimmings. Maybe at night, when neon lit up Glitter Gulch, I’d revise my jaded Chicagoan’s opinion.

Shortly before two-thirty, a black Lincoln Continental glided up to the curb. Out of it scrambled a balding, rodent-like man in a three-hundred-dollar black silk suit. His tie was wide and red and his face was oblong and pale.

“Nate Heller?” he said, with a sideways smile, thrusting a hand forward.

I nodded, took the hand, shook it, found it moist, let go of it and, trying not to call attention to the act, wiped the moisture from my palm on my pant leg.

“Moe Sedway,” he said, jerking a thumb to his chest, smiling nervously, his tiny, close-set eyes as moist as his handshake, his nose a big lumpy thing like a wad of modeling clay stuck there by some kid.

He took my bag and walked around to the rear of the Lincoln; I followed him there. He put the bag in the car’s trunk, which was bigger than some coldwater flats I’ve seen. “How was L.A.?” he asked.

“Swell,” I said.

“So you’re a pal of Fred Rubinski’s, huh?”

“Yeah. Business partners, actually.”

“You say that like it’s two different things. Where I come from business partners can be pals, too. In fact they
should
be.”

I shrugged at this piece of curbside philosophy. He shut the trunk. With nervous energy to spare, he moved around me and opened the car door on the rider’s side. He gestured for me to get in, smiling nervously.

I got in. He went around and got behind the wheel. “Ever been to Vegas before?” he said, lighting up a long, thick cigar that was much too big for his face.

“No,” I said.

“Want a cigar? Havanas. Two bucks a piece.”

“No thanks.”

He’d left the car running. He pulled out and headed up Fremont Street. Mixed in among the tourists, many of whom wore dude-ranch style Western clothes, were occasional real westerners: men with the weathered faces of the true rancher or ranch hand; an Indian woman with a baby cradled on her back; a toothless old prospector who made Gabby Hayes look like a Michigan Avenue playboy.

Beyond the casinos and clubs was a business district, Western-style souvenir shops and barbecue restaurants mingling with modern offices and the dime store chains.

“What do you think of our little town?” Sedway said, blowing smoke.

“It’s not Chicago,” I said.

Past the downtown was an unimpressive residential district; in fact some of it was downright shabby—trailers and cinder-block houses—distinguished only by tacky wedding chapels, often hooked up with motels, that lined the thoroughfare. Pastel stucco with neon wedding bells and hearts and such. The vows of a lifetime served up like a cheeseburger at a white-tile one-arm joint.

“Yeah,” Sedway said, his moist eyes dreamy, cigar between his fingers like Churchill, “ain’t Vegas the greatest place?”

I nodded, and looked back out the window, the sleazy landscape blurring when Sedway picked up speed as we passed the city limits.

“Ben didn’t say why he brought you out,” he said, smiling over at me. He was smiling too much; I wondered why.

“I’m going to give your security people the rundown on pickpockets,” I said.

He shrugged with his eyebrows. “We open day after Christmas, you know.”

“I know. Should be time enough.”

“How well do you know Ben?”

“I only met him once. He seems like a nice guy.”

“Oh he is,” Sedway said, quickly, almost defensively. “We go way back, Ben and me. I known him since we was kids on the Lower East Side.”

Fred Rubinski had told me about Little Moey Sedway. He had mentioned that Sedway and Siegel went “way back”—but he had also mentioned something Sedway neglected to.

“Little Moey only recently got back in his boss’s good graces,” Fred told me. “For almost three years, Moey was given jobs out of Siegel’s sight and told to stay away from the Bug or risk getting hit in the head.”

Seems Sedway, who’d never done too well for himself despite the constant help of his boyhood pal Ben (recent failures by Little Moey included botched bookmaking operations in both San Diego and L.A.), had become a big man in little Vegas. As Siegel’s on-site rep for the Trans-American race wire, Sedway wormed his way into part ownership of several Fremont Street casinos. He bought a nice house, a big car. He became chummy with the city fathers, dropping dough into charity and church hoppers. When a group of respectable citizens asked Mr. Sedway to run for city commissioner, he accepted.

And when his boss found out, the man who didn’t like to be called Bugsy went bugsy, and started slapping Little Moey around.

“We don’t run for office, you little schmuck!” Siegel had roared, slapping his stooge, whose name happened to be Moe, although he was getting slapped more like he was Larry or Shemp. “We
own
the politicians, you dumbass cocksucker!”

Moey had done his best to back out of the election, but his name was already on the ballot. Sedway became a laughingstock in mob circles, the butt of a much-repeated anecdote (attested to by Rubinski relating the story to me) as the only politician who ever had to spread the graft around to make sure he
didn’t
get elected.

All this was three years ago, more or less, and in recent months Ben Siegel had called upon his once trusted second-in-command to come back to his side.

“You ought to be warned,” Moe was saying, “that Ben’s a little on edge these days. Lots of pressure on the boss. Lots of pressure.”

“Why?”

“Well, you heard about the dough he’s laying out on this layout.”

“I heard over a million.”

“He’s
spilled
more than a million. I tell you, though, it’s gonna be a fabulous place, this Flamingo.”

“So why’s he under pressure?”

“To open on time. I don’t think the hotel’s gonna be finished.”

“Then why open? What’s the rush?”

Sedway shrugged. “Ben don’t like to wait on nobody or nothing. Everything’s
now
with him. Here we are.”

Where we were was not the Flamingo, but the Hotel Last Frontier, or so said the horizontal sign, cartoon letters of crisscrossing logs outlined in neon, resting atop a short brick wall in the midst of a vast landscaped lawn. The Frontier, and the similar nearby El Rancho Vegas, were the only gambling resorts on the so-called Strip that was highway 91, the two-lane blacktop heading southwest to Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

Sedway pulled in the drive of the sprawling, rustic hotel past a swimming pool near the highway, where a good number of bathers were sunning and splashing. He parked and got my bag out of the trunk and we walked up to the central thatch-roofed, whitewashed adobe building, which like the other buildings was low-slung and supported by rough wood beams, decorated by wagon wheels and steer horns and other dude-ranch touches. It was all about as authentic as a Gene Autry movie, maintaining the phony cowboy airs I’d witnessed in downtown Vegas, but admittedly establishing a friendly “come-as-you-are” atmosphere. Which only made me feel out of place in my gray suit and gray skin.

“That’s a nice car you got, Moe,” I said, as we moved away from it. “Is that yours, or one of Ben’s?”

“It’s mine,” Sedway said, with tight, quiet pride. “The race wire business pays good, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, resisting the urge to point out that an almost identical black Lincoln Continental had been driven by Jim Ragen a certain afternoon.

“Ben’ll get you some wheels while you’re here,” he said. “He’ll fix you up royal.”

I followed Sedway into the open-beamed lobby; the registration desk was at the left. The Western motif continued— wood-and-leather furniture, sandstone fireplaces, pony-express lanterns hanging from wagon wheels. The rough wood-paneled walls displayed mounted buffalo heads. Indian rugs and western prints, with the directions to the casino, dining room, showroom and coffee shop burned into the walls as if with a branding iron. The desk clerk wore a string tie and a plaid shirt. He was friendly, but stopped short of calling me “pod’ner.” Thank God for small favors.

If there were bellboys, I didn’t see any. Sedway was carrying my bag and I let him lead me down a hallway and up one flight of stairs to my room, 404. The numbering apparently had something to do with which wing you were in, because not only was I not on the fourth floor, there wasn’t any fourth floor.

My room was nice enough—not small, not large; modern furnishings and rustic walls and a print of an Indian chief. Sedway put my bag on a stand and I sat on the edge of the bed.

“What now?” I said.

“Ben may stop by and see you tonight,” he said, shrugging.

“Where is he now?”

“Up the road.”

“Up the road?”

“At the Flamingo. Working.”

“Doing what, exactly, Moe? This is Sunday.”

“Not at the Flamingo it ain’t. Workers are working damn near ’round the clock, up there. And Ben’s supervising. That’s his big problem, you know.”

“What is?”

“He wants to keep his eye on everything, his finger in all the pies. He’s hardly getting any sleep. Running himself ragged.” He made a
tch-tch
sound, and shook his head, trying to convince me he cared deeply about his boss’s health. Sure.

“And you think he ought to delegate authority, more,” I said.

“What?”

“He ought to trust the people around him. Give them some responsibility.”

“Yeah,” Moey said, smiling, nodding. “He ought to do that.”

“Don’t you still handle the local end of Trans-American for him?”

“Sure. He gets out of my way on that. It’s just the Flamingo he don’t want anybody touching. You’d think he was a goddamn artist. You’d think it was a goddamn picture he was painting.”

“Maybe to him it is.”

Sedway shrugged. “Maybe. But it ain’t his
paint,
entirely.”

By that I took him to mean the money Siegel was spending was mostly that of the boys back east. Lansky and Costello and Adonis and Luciano—although Luciano wasn’t back east, anymore, unless you viewed Sicily as east of New York, which I guessed it was. Whatever the case, the deported “Charlie Lucky” was said to still be running things, albeit at a distance.

“What am I supposed to do till Ben comes around?”

“Have some fun. You can run a tab on anything except gambling. Food’s good here. Hit the bar. Ride a horse. Have a swim.”

“I didn’t bring bathing trunks. Never occurred to me.” Back in Chicago, there was snow on the ground. A lot of it.

Sedway was turning to go. “You can get a suit in the gift shop. I got to hook back up with Ben. I’ll leave you to it.”

“Why don’t I just come with you…?”

He stopped and turned and looked at me. “Look, Nate. You better get this straight right now. You do things Ben’s way when you’re in Ben’s world, which is where you are. Ben wanted you to relax after your long train ride. So that’s what you’re going to do. Is relax.”

He pointed a finger at me and went out.

I slept for an hour, in my clothes, and then got up and undressed and showered and unpacked and put on a sportshirt and slacks and prowled the place. I had a rum cocktail in a replica of a forty-niner saloon, complete with bullet-scarred mahogany bar and saddle-shaped leather bar stools; then I rode on into the main casino, where the ceiling was covered with pony hide and the walls ornately papered and peppered with bawdy house nudes in heavy gold-gilt frames. Despite these distractions, I played blackjack for a couple hours and ended up ahead a few bucks. I bought a swimming suit in the gift shop, or rather charged it to my room, where I went back to put the thing on, feeling somehow foolish to be wandering across a landscaped lawn with a towel around my waist in the middle of December.

But the pleasantly warm desert air took that thought away, and for a moment I wondered if I was still asleep, as this seemed nicer than real life; when I dove into the blue pool, the cool water refreshed and awoke me, making me realize I was not dreaming. I was in fact in a desert oasis, getting paid for this.

I stretched out on a deck chair on the sandstone apron by the pool and let the sun have at me. It was getting late in the afternoon, but I could feel the warmth on me, like a soothing blanket. Maybe my Chicago pallor would go away. I would walk into the A-l office a bronze god, and sweep that pretty secretary of mine off her feet. Fat chance.

I was sleeping again. It was my third nap of the day. But then for months now I’d been sleeping more than usual. My habit was to sleep six hours or so each night, especially since the war, after which I’d started having cold-sweat nightmares. Actually, immediately after I got back from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, I’d had mostly sleepless nights. It had taken a good long time to work up to six hours per.