Twenty minutes later, Hughes walked her to the door as Benny opened it.
Betty was in a daze. She had walked in speechless and was walking out in the same state. She struggled to say something, something that would add some meaning to what had just occurred but nothing came out. She had had sex before, for an unmarried woman of her day she was quite experienced, but she had never experienced it in such a bloodless and robotic fashion.
Wam-bam, thank you, ma'am
was how the joke went.
She stopped at the door and turned to Hughes, feeling awkward, and finally said, “IâI really admire you, Howie.” She leaned toward him to give him a kiss on the cheek but he stepped back and waved his hands as if she was a fly he was fending off.
“Get her out of here.”
Out in the hall, Benny was all business. He took her by the arm and marched her to the elevator. Another aide was standing by, holding the empty elevator open.
“Don't forget what you signed.”
“Signed?”
“The waiver, release, and confidentiality agreement. You are forbidden to mention to anyone what happened between you and Mr. Hughes. If one word of this ever appears in a tabloid, I guarantee you will be hunted down and punished. You are to forget what happened tonight. Period.” He led her into the elevator. “Understand?”
She had never seen Benny so officious before. He had always acted like an all-right guy. “I'm not going to tell anyone.”
Benny shoved a greenback down the front of her blouse, letting his hand slide over her breast as he did. “That's for being a good girl.”
When the elevator door closed, she pulled the bill outâa hundred dollars. She suddenly felt dirty. She wasn't a whore. A couple of times
she'd slept with a customer and let him tip her, but only when it was a guy she wanted to do it with and only when she was low on rent money. A hundred dollars was a lot of money. She made thirty dollars a week in wages and almost twice that in tips, but every spare cent went into the slots. But it still made her feel dirty. If Hughes had shown her one ounce of affection or interest, she wouldn't have minded. Instead he treated her like a bug.
But she soon shrugged off the feeling. My God, it was like sleeping with royalty.
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Betty knew something was wrong when she missed her next period. The baby came right on schedule. Howard Hughes, Jr., was three months old when Hughes came back into town, again staying at the Flamingo.
She had been through bad times, getting sick a lot during the pregnancy and being unable to work. Early on, a coworker told her that there was a place down in Tijuana where you could get rid of a pregnancy, but she had been too scared and too broke to try it. Everyone she talked to had heard about a girl who bled to death after the Mexican doctor got through slicing her up.
Once the baby was born, she had added expenses and had to pay a neighbor woman to baby-sit. The situation was ironic: Here she was dead broke and the guy who caused the problem was as rich as Midas.
She wasn't going to the hotel-casino to blackmail Hughes. All she wanted was a little help, maybe a few thousand or even a little house for her and the baby, nothing much, nothing that he couldn't give without even missing it. Besides, how could he refuse to help a woman who had had his child?
At the hotel, she was stopped by security at the elevators. Benny came down and stared at her like she was someone from the NAACP crashing a KKK party. He looked real unhappy at the bundle of joy in her arms.
She explained what she wanted with trembling lips. And showed him the baby's birth certificate. “I just need a little help. Just a few dollars until I can get on my feet.”
“Just a minute,” he told her. He whispered to the security guard and the man made a call on the in-house phone. Within a minute two security people came into the area, a man and a woman.
“Come with us,” the woman said.
“Where?”
“We're going to make you and the baby comfortable while arrangements are made.”
That sounded all right. They would need time to take her request to Hughes. She followed them to a room that was empty except for a small table and two chairs. It instantly struck her that it was a security interrogation room. Not that Vegas security people did much talking with their mouths. Anyone who tried to rip off a casinoâcheats or thievesâusually ended up in a shallow grave in the desert. The only guys who managed to rob a Strip casino pulled the stunt three years ago. They got thirty-five hundred dollars in cash from the Flamingo and a short lifeline when a mob enforcer caught up with them on Franklin Street in Hollywood and put four bullets into the back of their heads.
She was in the room for two hours, getting nervous all the time. After the first half an hour, she banged on the door. The security woman answered the door and Betty told her, “I have to go to my car and get a bottle of milk for my baby.”
“I'll get it for you.”
She gave the baby the bottle and rocked him to sleep. He cried a little, but he was pretty much a good kid.
After two hours, the door opened up and the two thugs came in. She knew who they were, she'd seen enough of them in her years as a lounge girl, gangster types that float around Vegas like scum sloshing in a tidal bay.
“Get up,” the one who talked told her, “you're paying a visit to the county to change a birth certificate.”
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She stared out the window of the Cadillac, watching people, stores, and streets roll by. They rolled by Zackery Street and she had an inspiration.
“Zackery, Zack Riordan.” She held the baby up and nuzzled her nose against his. “What do you think? Zack Riordan? Is that okay? I like Zackery Scott. Did you see him in
Flamingo Road
with Joan Crawford?”
“It's okay with me, girlie,” the thug said.
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After Howard Hughes, Jr., officially became Zackery Riordan, they drove her to the Greyhound bus depot.
“What'll it be, girlie?” The thug had gotten into the backseat with her.
“Reno,” she said.
She'd never been to Reno. It was actually a bigger and more important city than Vegas. Compared to it, Vegas was a one-horse town. There'd be more casinos and more jobs than Vegas.
They pulled up near the bus station and the driver went in to buy her a ticket. The man next to her took her left hand. She started to pull it away but he kept a tight grip on her small finger.
“You're getting two C-notes and a one-way ticket. Make sure you never come back this way.” He jerked back on her finger.
She screamed.
“You broke it!”
“Your friend don't want to hear from you again, no how, capiche?”
She sobbed, dizzy, ready to pass out.
“Now when I say no how, he don't want to hear from any lawyer, either. You capiche that?”
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Reno was 442 miles north of Vegas and the trip up Highway 95 took ten hours. There was little to see and few places to stop in between. The whole Nevada basin was one big sand box created by mountain ranges on each side that blocked out most rainfall. If you liked sunshine and dirt, Nevada was the place for you. But you had to share it with the lizards, snakes, and scorpions because they were the only other takers.
Two hours up the road she got off the bus at Beatty and found a medical doctor-veterinarian in a flat-top adobe near a weathered, bullet-holed sign that said GATEWAY TO DEATH VALLEY.
“I slammed a car door on my finger,” Betty told him. Her hand was swollen. He gave her a curious look, but didn't ask questions as he set and bandaged her hand and gave her a couple of pain pills.
She caught the next bus heading for Reno. An old prospector, too old to work in the mines, too poor to live in a town, sat next to her all the way to Tonopah. Like everyone else in Nevada, he was looking for pay dirt.
“It's all free,” he said, gesturing out the bus window at the endless sagebrush desert. “The federal government owns ninety percent of the
state and they don't even want it, 'cept for a little piece to test their bombs on. The rest is up for grabs. You can fence in a thousand acres and nobody would notice.”
He smelled like many old men who spent their last years walking across the desert to the mountains in search of a mother lode, the smell of Prince Albert pipe tobacco, dust, and dried sweat. His salt-and-pepper beard was nicotine stained around the lips and down one side from chewing tobacco. The old-timers smoked Prince Albert because the slender red tin can fit in their shirt pocket and could be used to stake out a mining claim. When a prospector was sure that the mother lode was under his feet, he'd fill out a claim form, stick it in the tobacco can, and bury it under a pile of rocks on the spot.
“What do you do with a thousand acres of dirt?” she asked, knowing the answer. “You can't grow nothing on it.”
“When I hit it, I'm going to build me a house out here just like the Taj Mahal in India, close enough to the road so everyone can see it when they drive by. I'm going to build you and that little fella there a house, too.”
She slipped him twenty dollars and told him her name when he left the bus at Goldfield. Who knows? Maybe he would find a vein of silver as big as a house. And then her and Zack would be on easy street. She'd heard about a waitress who had that exact thing happen.
Whenever the bus made a stop along the wayâplaces like Goldfield, Tonopah, Mina, Hawthorne, each a dusty little desert town with Highway 95 as its main streetâBetty slipped off the bus to try her luck at the three or four slot machines found in every bus waiting room. Her hand hurt like hell.
By the time the bus rolled down Reno's Virginia Street and under the big lighted sign that announced “The Biggest Little City in the World,” the two hundred dollars the thug gave her was almost gone. She was down to twelve dollars. Leaving the bus depot, she hoofed it with Zack in arms to the most famous gambling casino in the world, Harold's Club. Not far away was the spot where new divorcees stood at a bridge over the Truckee River and threw their wedding rings into the river for good luck. With only twelve dollars in her pocket, she could use some of those rings and a pawnshop. She was hungry and hadn't eaten anything since morning in Las Vegas. But a dollar for
food meant a dollar less to feed the slots and that much less chance of hitting a big one.
She couldn't take the baby in, so she sat him down against the wall next to an open door where he'd be in view while she played the nearby slot machines. It was common knowledge that the clubs liked to put their loosest slots near the entry doors so people walking by would be lured in by the sweet music of jackpots. She never had had any better luck with those machines than any other player but she believed in the rumor and always went to slots at entryways when she was getting low on money.
The quarter slot she started feeding had a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar grand payoff for hitting three jokers, a pot so big it had to be paid by the house because there weren't enough coins in the machine. Most quarter machines only paid off twenty-five-dollar jackpots. When you hit a jackpot, you could see the coins gushing down on the other side of the glass plate that covered the coin holder. She bought a ten-dollar roll of quarters and busted the paper wrapping by knocking it against the payoff tray. She stuck the quarters in her side pocket and pulled them out one at a time. They lasted longer when she kept them in her pocket. When she pulled the handle, she tried different body English to make the tumblers hit pay dirt, jerking the handle real hard and fast at first, then moving it gently, pulling it down so slow the tumblers started moving one at a time. She could hear coins dropping in payoff trays all around her but all she got was two quarters several times for a cherry and ten for three yellow bells.
In twenty minutes she was down to her last two dollars.
A blackjack dealer playing a machine nearby said, “Not hitting it today?”
“Not hitting it any day.”
“Cute kid you got there. You and your husband must be proud.”
She hesitated. He was nice looking. Kind of cute really, with black curly hair that went with the black pants, white Western shirt, and black string tie of a dealer. She could tell he was sizing her up. She had had a wedding band, but had sold it for five dollars a month ago.
“My husband's, uh, dead.” She wished the bastard was dead.
She left her seat and got eight quarters for her two dollars from a change girl. When she got back, the dealer was kneeling down, talking to Zack.
“How you doing there, young fellow?” He held out his hand for Zack to latch onto. “Hey, he's already got a grip.”
She played the quarters with desperation. Every one knew you should never play when you're desperate because it killed your luck, but she couldn't help it. When she was down to her last quarter, she stopped and looked back to where the dealer was kneeling by Zack.