by Bill Moody
“What’s up?”
“Sonny. Somebody dragged him from his storefront out to the desert and worked him over pretty good.”
“You were there?” Pappy asks.
“Right after,”
“Damn! Where is he?”
“They said UMC.”
Pappy nods. “Yeah, homeless motherfuckers go there.”
“Sonny got any relatives here?”
Pappy shakes his head. “He got a sister somewhere in L.A., but nobody here. Guess I’ll go by. You comin’ over?”
“Yeah, I’ll meet you.” Pappy nods and takes off as we’re engulfed in applause. Striding on stage to throw quips at the audience and introduce guitarist Kenny Burrell, Alan Grant is busy. That only leaves Natalie.
I stand at the entrance, and she comes out with the rest of the crowd as the lounge empties out.
“Where have you been?” she says. “I had a table inside.”
“Something came up.” I fill her in on Sonny. “I have to go over there,” I say.
“Can I come with you?”
“Sure.” Before we can leave, Alan Grant stops me.
“I didn’t see you inside,” he says. “Burrell can play, huh? Wait a minute.” He fumbles through his pockets and comes up with a scrap of paper. “Think I got a line on that woman’s daughter, the one who claims she’s a singer.”
“Rachel Cody?”
“I don’t know if that’s her name,” Grant says, “but she was at Pogo’s Friday night, least it sounded like her.” He hands me the scrap of paper with an address on it.
“Thanks, Alan.”
“Hey, you’re not going to stay for the second set?”
“Not tonight.”
Natalie and I drive over to UMC on West Charleston. When I inquire at the desk, we’re told Sonny is still being treated and we’ll have to wait. We find Pappy outside, pacing around smoking a cigar.
“Bad shit, man,” he says as he sees us. “This your lady?” He gives Natalie a cool appraisal.
“Not exactly.” I make the introductions, and we sit down on a bench. “Do you know how to contact Sonny’s sister?” I ask Pappy.
He shakes his head. “Sonny never talked about her much. I think she lives in Compton.”
A few minutes later a doctor comes out, carrying a clipboard. “I’m Dr. Straub. Are any of you relatives of”—he glances at the clipboard—”Mr. Wells?” It seems somehow strange to hear Sonny referred to as Mister.
“I’m his friend,” Pappy says, getting to his feet.
“And you are?” The doctor glances from Pappy to me.
“Evan Horne. I made the identification for the police.”
The doctor looks tired and as though he doesn’t want to hear the explanation or spend very much time on this, the last in what is probably a long line of beatings, stabbings, and shootings. “All right,” he says, making a snap decision. “I need to talk to you for a moment.”
I follow him down the hall to a small office. He motions me to a straight-backed chair and leans over the desk, reading off the clipboard. “Severe lacerations, considerable loss of blood, compound fractures of the right hand, which is also attached to an arm full of needle tracks.” Dr. Straub glances lip at me.
“This man is a drug addict, heroin is my guess as to what we’re going to find. This beating, combined with his extremely poor physical conditions—oh, did I mention the head wounds? Skull fracture, probably with a baseball bat. They seem to be popular these days. Jesus Christ!” He slams the clipboard down on the desk, kicks the door shut, opens a drawer in the desk, and takes out some cigarettes. “It’s like this every night.”
He lights us both cigarettes, takes a deep drag, and says, “He’s not going to make it.” He taps his ash in an empty soft-drink can. “What was it, robbery? Mugging? I don’t understand the broken hand. That was deliberate.”
“Like Chet Baker?”
“What?”
“Nothing. What happens now?”
The doctor shrugs and drops his cigarette in the can. It sizzles as it hits the liquid. “We’ll try to stabilize him, but his system is so weak, I don’t know. If there’s a next of kin they better get here fast.”
I leave him my number and promise to check back later. “Okay,” the doctor says. “I’m here all night.”
I go back out to Natalie and Pappy and give them the news. Pappy says he’ll try and find someone who knows Sonny’s sister. “That boy never hurt nobody,” Pappy says. “He just wanted to play his horn ever since—” Pappy stops, catches me watching him closely. He ambles out of the hospital just as another emergency vehicle arrives with another casualty.
I take Natalie back to her hotel, and we go to the coffee shop, an open-air affair that faces the pool. We order coffee and watch the waterfall in the swimming pool for a few minutes before Natalie breaks the silence.
“Evan,” she begins, “I don’t want to push this, but Tony Gallio has lunch and joins us for a drink yesterday at Spago, and today Sonny Wells is found in the desert. Isn’t that—?”
“Just how Wardell Gray was found.” I nod. “Might even be the same place, unless it’s a shopping center or a parking lot by now. And yes, it’s more than coincidence. On top of everything else, Sonny’s right hand was broken.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Let me tell you about Anthony Gallio,” Coop says. “His nickname is Tony the Tiger. You know how he got that?”
“No.” I look from Coop to John Trask. The Metro detective is content to let Coop talk. We’re sitting in Trask’s office.
“Somebody didn’t pay off on time, gambling, drugs, tried to stiff Gallio, take your pick. So Tony and couple of friends took this guy out on some deserted road. Tony siphoned gas out of his car, poured it on the guy, and set him on fire. That’s the guy you were having lunch with at Spago.”
I shift in my chair and look through the window around the squad room. “I didn’t have lunch with him. He just came over and sat down at our table.”
Ringing phones and clacking typewriters cause Coop to talk louder. “Hey, he knows who you are. That’s enough.”
Trask has been listening silently through Coop’s lecture. He opens a file on his desk, skims over it, and adds his own part. “Gallio was cut loose by the Chicago mob some years ago when he was involved in a skimming operation, so he’s tried to go respectable now—several business holdings in Las Vegas, real estate, that kind of thing, but he’s still connected, and there was some talk he was trying to get in with the UNLV basketball team, get an inside line on the games. Provided he doesn’t embarrass anybody back East, he’s on his own. Sometimes he’s a loose cannon.”
Trask flips through the pages of the file. “As for the two visitors you had at the Hob Nob, the ponytail is Gallio’s nephew Tony. The other one is Karl Kramer, played a little pro football once, knew Tony in college. He’s straight muscle and dumb as dirt.”
Coop’s eyes are still on me. “You get the picture now, sport?”
Not quite. I’d only been in Trask’s office twenty minutes when Coop walked in and, I think, was pleased by the surprised look on my face. I wonder if he’s come back for Natalie. We still have that to sort out. I’d only just begun to give my statement about Sonny Wells, such as it was, and now I was getting a lecture on organized crime figures.
“Let’s go over this again,” Trask says. “You’ve only seen Wells three times, is that right?”
“If you count last night in the desert.”
“And how do you know him?”
I sigh and reach for cigarettes.
“No smoking in here,” Trask says.
“Right. I told you, I’m helping a friend at UNLV do some research on the Moulin Rouge and the musician I told you about the other night, the one who was found in the desert.”
“Wardell Gray, right? When was this again?” Trask has his pencil poised over a yellow legal pad.
“1955. Don’t you already know this?” I look to Coop for conf
irmation. This is old ground.
“Humor me,” Trask says. He throws down the pencil and leans back in his chair, rubs his face with both hands. “Maybe it’s too early,” he says. He looks at Coop as if to say, this guy is your friend? “1955? Who put you on to Wells?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“I’d rather you did.” Trask’s gaze and tone are firm.
I look to Coop but he just shrugs. “I don’t have any jurisdiction here, sport.”
“Look,” I say, “he’s a musician, an old friend of Sonny’s, but he didn’t have anything to do with this. He was just helping me. If you guys start pressing him, he’ll know it came from me.”
“You’ve been seeing too many cop shows, Horne. Nobody is pressing anybody. I just don’t like the connections you seem to have with a guy found busted up in the desert and an organized crime figure like Anthony Gallio.”
“Hey, I don’t have any connection with Gallio.”
“No? Then why is he leaning on you—and that’s what it was—to stop digging up the past? There’s definitely some connection there.”
“I have no idea what he has to do with the Moulin Rouge or Wardell Gray.”
“Wardell Gray again. For a guy who’s been dead for thirty-seven years, his name keeps popping up an awful lot.”
“Yes, it does,” Coop chimes in.
Before anyone can say anything else, the phone on Trask’s desk rings. He nods a couple of times after answering and writes something on his pad. “Okay, thanks.” He hangs up the phone and looks at me.
“Now we’re really going to have to talk. That was UMC. Sonny Wells died twenty minutes ago.”
I sigh and stare at the floor.
“What did I tell you?” Coop says. “Leave the past alone.”
I answer the rest of Trask’s questions. He doesn’t ask about Louise Cody, and I don’t volunteer her name or her daughter’s. Trask promises not to contact Pappy Dean unless he lets me know first. That, I know, is simply a concession and courtesy to Coop if he keeps his promise. I also know I’ll hear about it from Coop later.
Coop and I leave Metro and walk over to the Four Queens. “C’mon, sport,” he says, “you can buy me breakfast.”
We settle in the coffee shop. While Coop wolfs down hotcakes, I bring him up to date, with more details than I gave Trask, but avoid mentioning Natalie.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Coop says between bites of hotcakes.
“Really.”
“Really,” Coop says. “Two things. First, you think I don’t care or I’m being too casual about Sonny Wells’s death. Well, I’m not. Homicide is my job. That may sound like a line from a TV show, but it’s true. I didn’t know Wells, neither did you.”
“Coop, he died after I—”
“Wait a minute. I’m not finished. Second, and more important, Wells’s beef could have been over something else. He was an addict. Drug dealers get pissed when they don’t get paid.” He shrugs. “Sometimes they kill people.”
“And sometimes they kill people to silence them.”
“True,” Coop says, “but you don’t know that yet.”
I know Coop is trying to make me feel better, but I’m just irritated. “What are you doing back here anyway?” I ask him.
Coop mops up the last of his hotcakes in a puddle of syrup and shoves his plate aside. “She called me.”
“Who?”
He looks at me like I’m stupid. “Natalie, who else? That’s one sharp lady, and by the way if you’re worried that I’m mad about that situation, I am. Not about her or you, about me.”
“I don’t understand.”
Coop signals the waitress for more coffee. “I knew the second or third date we weren’t connecting. Besides, I can’t go out with someone who likes jazz.”
I know this is as close as Coop is going to get to letting me off the hook, so I don’t press it.
“Just for the record, we had separate rooms.”
“What?” It didn’t register at the time, but I remember now Natalie telling me on the phone. Rooms, she’d said.
Coop looks away, then picks up a spoon and points it at me. “That’s the only way she’d come. If you ever let that out I’ll have you arrested.” He pauses, looking at the Keno board. “My numbers. I should have played.” Still looking at the board, he says, “She thinks a lot of you already, sport, and she thinks you’re in over your head. Gallio scared the shit out of her.” Coop turns his attention back to me. “This is Vegas, man. There are high stakes here, and all you’ve ever seen of this town is the view from the stage. These guys can play rough, as you’ve already seen with Sonny Wells.”
“You think Gallio did that?”
“I’m not saying that,” Coop says. “He might have had Tony and Karl rough him up, it got out of hand, who knows, but doesn’t it strike you as some kind of warning for you to back off?”
That’s exactly how it strikes me, but now it’s personal. Sonny never hurt anyone, and now, maybe because he talked to me, he’s dead.
“So, what are you saying?”
“My advice, which I know you won’t take, is do just that. Back off. Let your professor friend do his research in the library, and you just play the piano for the shopping crowd. Better yet, let the gig go and take the next flight back to L.A. with me. Of course I know you’re not going to do that.”
Coop was right. I wasn’t going to do that. “I can’t, Coop, not yet.” Our waitress brings the check.
“You can give that to him,” Coop says. “He’s kindly offered to treat me.”
I lay a ten on the tray and wait for her to walk away. “How long are you going to be here?”
“I’m going back this afternoon,” Coop says.
“And Natalie?”
“I gather she’s staying around for a while.” Coop allows himself a grin. “Says she’s met some piano player. She put in for some leave time. Don’t jump her for calling me. She at least has some sense.”
I nod. “Tell her not to worry.”
“Tell her yourself, sport.”
I promise to take Coop to the airport later. I drop him back at Metro to attend to whatever police business has brought him back to Las Vegas, and I head Home to change clothes and look up the address of the Musicians Union.
The old building on Duke Ellington Way near the Tropicana is gone, as is the bar and rehearsal hall that was the site of many late-night kicks bands. Musicians who were weary of constricting gigs like Wayne Newton or Robert Goulet. At the union they could let it all hang out after-hours and forget for a few hours they were playing in hotel house bands to pay mortgages and keep up with payments on cars, boats, and credit cards.
The entertainment changes in Las Vegas have hit the union hard. Lot of members dropping out, the dissolving of hotel house bands replaced by tapes, and a couple of strikes have all taken their toll on this once-powerful organization.
They operate now out of an office on Sahara. I call first and get an appointment with a business agent, Larry Jenkins, a former trumpet player who’s been in Las Vegas since the ’60s. I tell him what I’m looking for, and he agrees to see me within the hour.
The lunchtime traffic crawls down Sahara, and the heat is relentless. Back in the VW, I miss the Jeep and wonder how people survived before air-conditioning. I finally make it to Credit Union Plaza and find Jenkins waiting for me inside.
He’s a short, slim man with a shock of white hair, a gray suit, and an easy manner. We sit opposite each other in his small office. “I’ve already done a little checking for what you want,” Jenkins says. “We have records going back to the ’60s, but the other stuff is archived and in boxes in a storage warehouse.”
What I want is a look at Benny Carter’s Moulin Rouge contract, which would have to have been filed with the union. The contract would include the amount the band was contracted for, which I didn’t care about, and would list the musicians Carter brought with him from Los Angeles, which I cared about a lot. I k
new Wardell Gray would be on that list, but I wanted to see if there were any other familiar names.
“Is there any way those records can be checked?” I ask Jenkins. “It’s for legitimate research. You can check with the university on that. I’m just doing legwork for a friend over there.”
“I’m sure it is,” Jenkins says. “That’s not the problem. If we still have those contracts, the trick will be finding them, digging them out. We could draw a blank. Things were a lot different in the ’50s.”
“What do you mean?”
Jenkins shrugs. “There were a lot more under-the-table gigs then. Contracts weren’t always filed, there were a lot of ringers from other locals coming through. This is a right-to-work state, so the musicians could have been nonunion guys.”
Jenkins pauses and looks at a photo on the wall. It’s a shot of a big band with Frank Sinatra standing in front of it, a mike in one hand, a drink and cigarette in the other. “I worked at the Sands all during the Rat Pack era. Man, that was a swinging time,” Jenkins says.
“You weren’t by chance around here during the Moulin Rouge period?”
Jenkins shakes his head. “No, I didn’t settle here till the ’60s, after a lot of road time with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. There are some musicians still around who were here then. Somebody might remember who was on that band. That might be a better bet.”
“There is one musician I wanted to check on. Ever heard of Sonny Wells, plays tenor?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but let me check.” He picks up the phone and punches a button. “Pat? Check out member locator for a Sonny Wells, saxophonist. Yeah, I’ll hold.” Jenkins puts his hand over the receiver. “You know if Sonny was a nickname?”
I shake my head. Jenkins drums his fingers on the desk. “Pat? Yeah, okay, thanks.” He hangs up the phone. “No record of Sonny Wells as current member, but that doesn’t mean much. Since the last strike a lot of guys dropped their membership. The hotels got us by the balls on the last contract.”
