She laughed and ran her hand up my arm. Her fingernails were painted the same scarlet as her lips.
“Well, maybe when you’re done chasin’ Carla you could come back.”
“Maybe I could,” I agreed. “When was the last time you saw Lou around here?”
“Earlier today.”
“And you wouldn’t happen to have an address for Carla, would you?”
“Actually, I do,” she said. “I don’t have much use for her, but her roommate and I are friends.” She gave me an address of an apartment complex that was off the strip. “In fact,” she added, “a few of the girls live there.”
“Like you?” I asked, because it was expected of me.
“No,” she said, “I have my own place somewhere a little more private. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll see it some day.”
“Hey,” I said, “this is Vegas. It’s all about luck. Thanks for talking to me, Honey.”
“My pleasure, handsome,” she said. “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Eddie,” I said, “Eddie Gianelli.”
“Well, Eddie Gianelli,” she said, “see you around.”
“Yeah,” I said, “see you.”
Her perfume had started to get a little too heavy for me, and followed me outside like a cloud. Once I was in the Riviera parking lot, though, it dispelled and I was able to breath again. I took a few deep breaths, not only to get rid of the fragrance, but also the euphoria showgirls seemed to cause in men. It was something I certainly was not immune to, even after all these years in Vegas.
Twenty-one
I walked back past Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn-Louie Prima and Keely Smith on the marquee-and collected the Caddy from behind the Sands. In the car I wondered if I wasn’t going off on a tangent, somehow? Why was I chasing down Carla to find Lou when I didn’t even know if Lou could help me? Was it because I couldn’t think of anything else to do? And if that was the case what kind of real help could I be to Frank and Dean, who both apparently felt they could count on me?
Low-income housing had gone up all around the strip for the dancers and dealers and hotel employees, what I called the “non-rollers” of Vegas, who worked their asses off every day and never got to roll the dice, looking for their own luck. The complex where Carla and some of the other girls lived was just such a place. It was set up like a motel court, with a pool in the center that was designed to make you think you had a place to lounge and meet people.
As I entered the court I saw that the pool was so dirty nobody would be lounging there for a long time. The surface was covered with black and green areas of dirt and algae combining to form a condition most egghead professors try to create in beakers.
I wondered if Carla had even headed home when she ran out theback door of the Riv? Was she running or hiding from me, or from who she thought I might be?
Her apartment was on the second level so I climbed the stairs and started looking for her number. When I reached the door I saw that it was ajar. Maybe she had run back here, packed quickly and left so fast she didn’t lock the door behind her. Still thinking this was all some misunderstanding, and that all I needed to do to straighten it out was talk to her, I went to the door and knocked.
“Hello? Carla? Anybody?”
I opened the door slowly and peered in. The place was in a shambles. For a moment I thought it had been burglars, but looking closer it resembled the scene of a fight. I’d seen some of the rooms in the Sands left this way after a fight had broken out between friends, usually fueled by the fact they were both losing.
I wondered if the police or sheriff had been called, but I didn’t hear any sirens in the distance. The place had two bedrooms, a living-room area and a kitchenette. I stepped into the kitchen and saw that the fight-if that’s what it had been-had not extended into there. It was not a place where anyone who cooked frequently lived. The tables and chairs were perfectly in place. On the counter was a cutting board with a variety of different-sized knives next to it. They were lined up by size, all neat and clean. None were missing.
I looked into both bedrooms. One was made up, the other a mess. However, the second room just looked lived-in to me, so apparently the fight-again, if that’s what it had been-had been confined in the living room.
The sofa was askew, and the two armchairs had been overturned. The flimsy coffee table was in splinters, as was the single end table. I was no detective, but even I could see the grooves in the deep piled carpet where someone’s heels had dug in while they were being dragged.
I went outside, looked back and forth and then, when I could put it off no longer, looked down. From this vantage point I could see there was a place where the dirt and algae in the pool had been disturbed, a place where someone might have gone into the pool. I continued to stare until I thought I could see a body at the bottom of the pool, but I was going to leave it to the police to find out for sure.
Twenty-two
I watched from the balcony outside her room as two sheriff’s deputies brought Carla DeLucca up from the bottom of the pool.
“Those guys are gonna have to be decontaminated,” someone next to me said.
I turned my head and found myself looking at a tall, slender man in a lightweight gray sports jacket, gray slacks and a felt fedora.
“My name’s Detective Hargrove,” he said. “I’m with the Las Vegas P.D. And you are?”
“Gianelli,” I said, “Ed Gianelli.”
“And you’re the one who called this in, Mr. Gianelli?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
I caught something on his breath, the unmistakable smell of Sen-Sen. He either thought he was going to meet some showgirls here, or like most cops he drank and was trying to cover the smell of booze. Since he was in his forties, with a busted blood vessel or two around his nose, I opted for the second.
He leaned his elbows on the railing right next to me and stared down at the pool.
“There’s a job I wouldn’t want to have.”
“Shouldn’t you be down there?”
“Naw,” he said. “I’m pretty sure she’s dead.”
“Maybe,” I said, “she fell.”
“Nope,” he said. “If she’d just fallen over the edge she would have hit the tiles. No, somebody picked her up and pitched her off. That’s how she hit the pool.”
“Wouldn’t she have made a big splash?”
“Probably,” he said.
“Somebody would have heard it, wouldn’t they?”
“That’s what we’re gonna find out,” Hargrove said. “We’ll go around door to door, asking people what they heard. And do you know what they’ll say?”
“What?”
“They didn’t hear a thing, didn’t see a thing.”
Unfortunately I knew just what he was talking about. After all, I was from New York.
“So,” he said, then, “tell me what you saw?”
Briefly, I told him about finding the door open and what I’d found inside.
“You didn’t see her in the pool and then go inside?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I said. “I didn’t look into the pool until after I saw the inside of the apartment.”
“And what made you look into the pool then, Mr. Gianelli?”
“I–I’m not sure,” I said, truthfully. “To me the place looked like there’d been a fight. I came outside, leaned on the railing. I guess I was wondering what to do next when I looked down.”
“Back up a moment, Mr. Gianelli,” he said. “What do you mean, you ‘were wondering what to do next?’ Why wouldn’t you just call the police?”
“I–I was trying to decide whether to go back inside and use the phone, or go to the office.”
“And what did you decide, sir?”
“I went to the office,” I said. “I told the desk clerk what happened and asked if I could use his phone.”
“Did you know the deceased?” Hargrove asked.
“Never met her.”
“Who
lives here, Mr. Gianelli?” he asked.
“A girl named Carla DeLucca lives here with her roommate.”
“And what’s the roommate’s name?”
“That I don’t know.”
He returned to face me, still leaning on the railing. Below me they were laying the body out on the tiles next to the pool.
“Why were you lookin’ for her?”
I decided to tell the truth. There was no harm in it that I could see. The only thing I knew I wasn’t going to mention to the police were the names Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.
I explained how I’d gone to the Riviera looking for Lou Terazzo, and had been told by someone that Carla might know where he was.
“The Riviera,” Hargrove said. “Buddy Hackett’s playin’ there, ain’t he?”
I was about to say I didn’t know when I realized he was right. I guess I had glanced at the marquee on my way into the Riv and now it sprang into my head with Buddy Hackett’s name on it.
“Yes, I think he is.”
“I love that guy,” he said, “but you know who I really think is funny?”
I was afraid he was going to say me. Was he not believing what I was telling him. It was true, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to haul me in.
“Who?” I asked.
“Redd Foxx,” he said. “That guy cracks me up. Is he in town, anywhere?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you work for a casino, Mr. Gianelli?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m a pit boss at the Sands.”
“The Sands,” he said. “Frank Costello’s got a piece of that place, hasn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just a pit boss there.”
“But you know Jack Entratter, right?”
“Of course,” I said, “he’s my boss.”
“Yeah.”
Maybe he’d wanted to see if I’d lie about knowing Jack.
“Lou Terazzo works for Eddie Torres,” Hargrove said.
“You know Lou?”
“I know all the mob guys in Vegas, Mr. Gianelli,” he said. “That surprise you, to hear that Lou’s mobbed up?”
“Lieutenant-” I said.
“Detective,” he said, “just detective.”
“Detective Hargrove,” I said, “I’m not naive. I know the mob is in Vegas.”
“That’s an understatement, Mr. Gianelli,” he said, cutting me off. “The mob is Vegas. You work in a casino, you work for the mob. That’s just how it is.”
Yeah, I wanted to say, and all the cops in Vegas are on the take. Hargrove looked down towards the pool, nodded and waved to somebody.
“My partner is downstairs, Mr. Gianelli,” he said. “He wants you to take a look at the body. Maybe you can identify it.”
“I probably can’t,” I argued. “I never saw Carla DeLucca, I just heard about her.”
“Well, maybe you’d be kind enough to take a look, anyway.”
I was going to argue and ask why they didn’t get the desk clerk to do it when I looked down. The girl was lying on her back, her showgirl’s body looking curiously sunken. Her wet hair was plastered to her head, but even though it was wet I could see one thing clearly.
“That’s not Carla DeLucca,” I said. “I don’t know who it is, but it’s not her.”
“You’ve gone from not knowing her to bein’ able to I.D. her from up here?”
“I don’t know her,” I said, “but I know that she’s a brunette, and that girl-” I pointed down, “-is definitely a blonde.”
Twenty-three
They asked me a few more questions and then let me go. Hargrove’s partner, a Negro detective named Smith, wanted to take me in, but Hargrove overruled him.
“He’s a good citizen, Jake,” he told his partner. “He called it in as soon as he found the girl. ’Course, he thought it was the wrong girl.”
True, I had given Carla’s name when I called. I didn’t have any reason to think she wasn’t the girl at the bottom of the pool, but then again I didn’t have good reason to think she was. How was I supposed to know it was her roommate? In fact, it could have been anyone.
But the fact remained the dead girl was named Misty Rose-or Mary Reed, from some of the I.D. they found in the apartment. “Misty Rose” was her stage name, the name she danced under at the Riviera. I didn’t know her; hell before today I had never heard of Carla DeLucca. I suggested that the detectives talk to Verna Ross at the Riviera. She was, I told them, the choreographer who also doubled as the girls’ den mother.
So they let me go and I drove back to the Sands in a haze, wondering why Carla DeLucca had run out the back door rather than talk to me? And where was she now? Where was Lou? And how could this possibly have anything to do with what I was doing for Frank and Dean? The simplest answer was, it couldn’t ….
Me finding a dead body was a coincidence, and not one that I ever wanted to repeat.
“A dead broad?” Jack Entratter repeated, staring at me from behind his desk? “Some little piece of trim who worked at the Riviera? Why you tellin’ me about this, Eddie?”
“You told me to check in with you at the end of every day, Jack,” I said. “This is what happened today.”
“It ain’t the end of the day, Eddie, and you been here twice already, today.”
“It’s after six, Jack,” I argued. “That’s the end of your work day.”
He took his cigar out of his mouth.
“If you think my work day ever ends, kid, you’re livin’ in a dream.”
“Believe me, Jack, I’m not livin’ in a dream.”
“Okay,’ he said,”okay, so tell me, you think this dead broad’s got anything to do with the threats bein’ made to Dino?”
“No,” I said, “it’s got to be a total coincidence. I mean … I go looking for Lou Terazzo to ask if he knows anything about two guys who worked me over in my house because I was trying to do Dean Martin a favor. I end up looking for a girl named Carla DeLucca and finding her roommate, Misty Rose, at the bottom of a pool. Gotta be total coincidence, Jack.”
“Then what are you worried about?”
“I don’t like finding dead bodies, Jack.”
“You ever found one before?”
“No, but-”
“Chalk this one up to experience, and keep workin’ on the Dino thing.”
I rubbed my face with both hands. He was right. I’d walked into something today that was none of my business. And I still had some work to do for Frank and Dean.
“What’d you tell the cops, Ed?” he asked.
“I told them the truth.”
“You tell ’em why you were looking for Unlucky Lou Terazzo?”
“Well …. I told them he owed the casino money.”
“That was good thinkin’.”
I had had to lie about that because I hadn’t wanted to bring any other names into it. The last thing Sinatra and Martin needed was the cops asking them about some girl they never heard of.
“Okay, kid?” Jack asked.
“Sure,” I said, “sure.”
I got up and headed for the door.
“You got my number in my suite,” Entratter told me. “Use it if you have to.”
“Okay, Jack.”
I contemplated my next move over a drink in the Sands lounge. In a few hours Alan King would be cracking them up in there, but at the moment it was half empty and most of the people who were drinking there looked shell-shocked. It was a common look in Vegas. You saw it on the face of the woman who brought twenty dollars with her to gamble on the slots and lost it in the first machine she played. You saw it on the face of the guy who brought ten grand with him and he don’t know what happened, but it’s all gone the first day. What’s she gonna tell her husband? What’s he gonna tell his wife? Their problems are the same, just on different levels. And it was a toss up as to who was gonna be the maddest, her husband or his wife.
“Rough day, Eddie?”
Bev had come up next to me and
startled me.
“Yeah,” I said, “the roughest. I found a dead girl today.”
“What?” She put her hand on my arm. “Oh, Eddie, I’m so sorry. That must have been terrible for you. Was she, uh, a friend of yours?”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t even know her. I just … stumbled onto the body.”
“Still, it must have been a shock.”
“And then the cops questioned me, almost like I was a suspect.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They’re cops,” I said, “it’s their job.”
She ordered some drinks from the bartender and put her tray on the bar so he could weight it down.
“Gee, I’m sorry you had such a bad day, Eddie.”
“Ah,” I said, “I’m sorry I dumped it on you, Bev.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
She picked up the heavy tray with grace and surprising strength. I thought I would have staggered under the weight.
“If you want to talk later, Eddie,” she said, “I’m a real good listener. Just give me a call.”
“I might do that, Bev,” I said, “I might just do that.”
Twenty-four
For Vegas anytime was the shank of the evening. If I’d been on the clock I would have been in my pit, trying to keep high rollers happy while at the same time trying to keep the casino from losing too much money. It’s a delicate balancing act, and I believed that one day it would be two very specific jobs in Vegas casinos. Let the pit guy concentrate on the game, and let someone else keep the gambler happy.
I decided to go and take a look at my pit and see what was going on. The blackjack tables were full, with only an occasional empty seat. A couple of my big-money guys were there, which meant their wives would be on a slot machine somewhere.
Pete Dawson played a hundred dollars a hand minimum, often bumped it up to five hundred. But there was never any rhyme or reason that I could see when he would bump up the bet. It seemed to take place on a whim. It used to drive me crazy until I found his wife at a slot one day and decided to ask her about it ….
Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime rp-1 Page 8
