The wedding was no big dealâliterally. Con had made Morgan's last wedding a Vegas event. This time there would be just family and a few friends with a quiet dinner after tying the knot in a private ceremony. I had no family and no friends, so that made my guest list real simple.
Dinner was at Le Grill, of course. I had to admit that having been raised on hamburgers, getting into frog food was not easy for me. The French stuff tasted good, but there was never enough to get a man full. My plans for the restaurant were to close it ASAP and convert it into an all-you-can-eat buffet with lots of fatty ham, greasy burger patties, mashed potatoes and gravy that tasted like wallpaper paste, a salad bar, and other good old American delicacies that the weekenders loved.
Marcel, le Chef, knew my feelings toward him. As soon as I sat down, he was at our table with a bottle of champagne. He poured himself a glass and toasted us as he stood by the table. “A Monsieur et Madame
Halliday.”
I took the slam without batting an eye.
“Good champagne,” I told Marcel. As Morgan spoke to a pit boss who offered her congratulations, I gestured at Marcel to lean down so I could whisper something to him. As he leaned close, I reached over and got a handful of his cajones and squeezed. He gaped at me with wide eyes.
“Be out of here by tomorrow morning. You're fired,” I whispered.
He hurried away and I toasted Morgan with my champagne glass.
“Isn't that sweet,” she said, “Marcel looked teary eyed. I didn't realize he's so emotionally connected to us.”
“He obviously had a lot of feeling deep down.”
Bic came over to kiss Morgan and shake hands with me. He was only a couple years older than me but looked much older. He was
Morgan's half-brother and there was little family resemblance between them. Bic looked like a pasty-faced, shallow reflection of his father. He had Con's raw-boned frame, but lacked Con's hardness.
“Welcome to the family,” Bic said, not meaning a word of it.
“Thanks, Bic,” I said, wishing he'd drop dead.
He introduced the two people with him. “This is Sugar Kelly and my pal Bronco.”
Sugar had “slut” written all over her body. She was a stripper at a Glitter Gulch joint that was tacky even by downtown standards. Her tits were vast plastic mounds, her lips collagen balloons. Morgan rarely said anything bad about anyone, except me, but she hated Sugar.
Sugar and Bic both looked airborne.
His other friend I had never seen before but I knew exactly who and what he was. In the days when I was a bagman for Morty Lardino, I had to collect a cut from drug dealers. Bronco fit the mold perfectly: pale, acne-scarred face, straggly dirty hair. He was the kind of street trash who'd sell crank to kids with diseased needles as a bonus giveaway.
Morgan smiled radiantly when they left. “I'm so glad you and Bic finally will have a chance to get to know each other. I know you'll like him when you know him better.”
I smiled politely and watched Bronco out of the corner of my eye. He had turned back and looked at me as they were walking away. It fanned the short hairs on the back of my neck. He spelled trouble with a capital T.
Our honeymoon was to bury myself in work at the club to reverse everything Morgan and Wonder Boy had done. First thing I did was get on the phone and call dozens of employees who had left, asking them to come back and help make the club a success. I ran ads in the L.A. and San Diego papers announcing that Halliday's was back being the best bargain with the loosest slots in town. I offered comps for just spitting on the sidewalk in front of the place. I ran a million-dollar slot machine tournament, a million-dollar poker championship that was carried on national TV, and offered single-deck blackjack.
“Great buffet,” Con told me, walking back to his table with a plate heaped high with ham, potatoes, and corn bread. We also had a ninety-nine-cent breakfast buffet and had free coffee and donuts anytime.
It wasn't a class act, but mama and papa started coming back to the club, parking out back in their campers or staying in one of our bargain rooms. The smartest thing I did was get to the tour operators and bribe them to bring junkets in by the busload.
In a month I had the place humming. Morgan worked with me, keeping Con out of my way, getting him to wander around the club entertaining the gamblers with his stories of the old days and country-fried charm.
Morgan went home to the kid every night, but I often hung around the club, watching it twenty-four hours a day, getting shut-eye in one of our hotel rooms, but waking up every couple of hours and checking out the action to make sure everything was okay.
I was shooting the bull with a pit boss when Bic, Sugar, Bronco, and a woman I recognized as a prostitute came in. They went directly to the lounge. They were loud and high, and not on life. Now they were going to add booze.
“Take some deep breaths, count to ten, and then go take a nap,”
the pit boss told me. She was one of the returnees who left the Stardust to come back to work at Halliday's.
A burst of coarse laugher and “Take it off!” came from the lounge. An elderly couple came out, shaking their heads.
“That's it. They're driving out my customers,” I said.
In the lounge, Sugar was grinding and bumping to the music. Her blouse was unbuttoned and pulled down off her shoulders so her naked breasts jiggled openly. “You move like thisâand thisâand thisâ” People were staring open-mouthed at the stripping lesson she was giving the whore.
“Pull your blouse up and get your ass out of here,” I said. I met Bic's eye. “All of you. And don't come back in here again. You're eighty-sixed.”
Bronco grabbed my left arm. “Hey, pal, you don't know who you're dealing with.”
That's when I lost it. From pure reflex action, my right elbow came around and smashed his nose. I felt the sickening crunch of cartilage under my forearm. He flew backward, blood spattering everywhere.
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“It wasn't my fault,” I told Morgan.
I sighed and stared out at the ninth hole. I had stayed the night at the club and came over to have breakfast with her and the kid and confess my sins.
“Do you think he'll sue?”
“Sue? I'm not worrying about him suing. This is Vegas, the system's stacked in our favor. I'm worried about your reaction.”
“My reaction? I'm sorry that Bic brought his friends to the club and caused trouble. He knows better. Or maybe he doesn't. I'm worried about him. He's losing weight and looks like roadkill. I can't talk to him anymore. He needs to be in rehab, but he won't listen to anyone. I asked Dad to cut off his money but I think he's squirreled away a load of money that he skimmed from the club. It's probably the only smart thing he ever did.”
I was relieved that Morgan was getting more insight into Bic's problems.
“I have some other news,” Morgan said.
“Yeah?”
“I missed my period.”
“You did? Think you should see a doctor?”
“You're not getting it.”
“Getting what?”
“You're trying to avoid it.”
“How the hell could you be pregnant?” I groaned.
“We've been married two months.”
“Aren't you on the pill?”
“I wasn't the night you raped me.”
“Morganâ”
“Don't even think about it. I'm having the baby.”
Jesus. For a guy who never had a family, I was making up for it quick. I had a father-in-law who thought he was Wyatt Earp, a brother-in-law who was a crackhead, a wife who had threatened to kill herself at the thought of marrying me, and a kid who had another man's name. Now I was going to be a father again. It scared the hell out of me.
My karma had more twists than a licorice stick.
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A hectic week passed at the club while I worked day and night to make a success of a million-dollar poker playoff. It was late, after midnight: I was dead tired and heading for my room to sack out when a cocktail waitress stopped me.
“Zack,” she whispered, “a guy just told me that he knows someone who's cheating in the tournament.”
That's all I needed, a cheating scandal just when I had the club back on its feet.
“He said he'd wait for you out back.”
“Call Cross,” I told her, referring to the shift supervisor for security. “Tell him to meet me out back.”
Things like this were bound to pop up. Probably just someone with an axe to grind, but better he informed me than calling the news people or the gaming board. I was so tired and rummy, not even the adrenaline pumped out by the allegation perked me up.
I went out the back door and looked for the man who wanted to ruin a good night. He had his back to me.
“What's the deal, guy?” I asked, coming up behind him.
If I hadn't been so rummy, I never would have walked out the back by myselfâit wasn't something I even permitted my security people to do.
As he turned around, I saw the gun jump in the man's hand and a powerful blow struck my chest. Then there was nothing.
HONG KONG, 1985
Lin Piao stood in a circle of people watching Jackie Chan direct himself as he performed a stunt on the back lot of a Hong Kong studio compound. Chan defied the laws of gravity as he crawled up a wall like a spider.
“Amazing,” Lin said to a script supervisor of the Chinese-language film. Lin was not producing this movie, but his mouth watered at the idea of casting a major star like Jackie Chan in the low-budget action films his company was cranking out.
During a break in the shooting, Mr. Wan entered the studio. The crew had been informed that he would be visiting the set and several of them took covert looks at the man who was notorious in the British and Portuguese colonies. In the Far East, a figure like Wan received the same cautious respect that a Mafia don received in America. His shadow, Ling, and companion, A-Ma, trailed behind him.
“Mr. Wan, so good to see you,” Lin said. It had taken a great deal of manipulation to get the famous man to the set. Now that he was there, Lin was a little nervous. He was playing the game of puffing up his small production company with potential backers, but one could not sell too much “air” to Wan. “Is this one of your movies?” Wan asked.
“No, not this one, I just dropped by to talk to Jackie about another project I have under development.” He had deliberately set up this meeting with Wan to leave the impression he used actors of Chan's caliber. Actually he was struggling to put together his third low-budget film. Neither of his first two films had received any critical acclaim or captured any significant box office reward. But making movies was like a treasure huntâyou never knew what would happen when you turned over the next rock.
Lin noticed A-Ma for the first time. “Who is this beautiful woman?”
“My secretary,” Wan said.
Lin immediately understood that Wan's “secretary” performed more than dictation. He was so busy staring at her, he didn't hear Wan speaking to him. “Sorry, I am captivated by your secretary. She should have a screen test.”
Wan raised his eyebrows to A-Ma. “Are you interested in becoming an actress?”
“I have no talent for acting.”
Wan shrugged. “You see? Young people today think they have to be born with talent. In my day we knew that talent came from hard work.”
Wan was considered a potential “angel” who could finance movies and A-Ma was obviously one of his stable of women, so the idea of a screen test was not taken seriously by anyone but Lin himself. He was struck by an essence emanating from the young woman, different from the raw sex portrayed so often it became shopworn from overuse and abuse. A-Ma radiated something more sensuous and exotic. But people often appeared different on film than in person. The camera had a love affair with a truly charismatic movie star, reproducing not just a naked reflection of the person on the screen but also some of the essence that made them charismatic.
During their break, Lin escorted Wan over to meet Jackie Chan. While Wan talked to the always smiling, amiable actor, Lin slipped over to a cameraman who had the job of shooting the production on video so the director had an instant replay of filmed scenes.
“See the young woman over there,” he indicated A-Ma, “shoot her for me.”
“Doing what?”
“Just shoot her as she's standing there. It's an impromptu screen test.”
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That night Lin played the video to an up-and-coming director and a Hong Kong rep for an international film distributor.
“Look at this girl, she's only about eighteen or nineteen, but she has an ageless quality to her. And she has a great screen presence. The moment I saw her I realized she was something special.”
“She's looks wonderful,” the director said. “At least on video. But we'll have to shoot her in 35mm to get a true reflection of her camera quality. She has that agonizingly unattainable look. It's something the
great stars have, a mystery about them that you can't grasp. Charismatic women aren't just pretty objects. They've got something that we can feel but just can't define.”
“This is Wan's girlie?” the distributor asked.
“Yes,” Lin said.
“What makes you think he'd let her star in a movie?” the director asked. “I'm not so sure he wants to share her with the world. Wan is not a person you want to antagonize by taking away his girlfriend.”
Lin rubbed his fingers together in the universal gesture indicating money. “He'll not only let her play, he'll
pay
. Wan's heart ticks with the same rhythm as the money press at the government mint. With the Reds breathing down our necks, he's always looking for ways to get money out of Hong Kong and Macao. A movie brings in money all over the world and his share can stay in the countries where it's earned.”
“But can she act?” the distributor asked.
“She has to pretend to like that old lizard, doesn't she? That has to be worth an Academy Award all by itself.”