“Whereas,” I said, “the classier Paddlewheel can be a Midwestern Las Vegas, where everybody wink-winks at the illegal side of it.”
“If Dickie has his way, with a new hotel, and beyond that plans to refurbish and reinvent downtown Haydee’s Port, we might see gambling become legal, in this county anyway…and it could truly become, as you say, a Midwestern Vegas.”
“What do you think of that plan?”
“I think it’s brilliant. I think I’ll be very wealthy in my golden years, and I’ll probably have a place to practice my art for as long as I want.”
“I wouldn’t think you’d need the Paddlewheel to have a singing career. Between your talent, and your daddy’s connections-”
She had stopped me with a raised palm. “No. I don’t want to travel, and I don’t want to be beholden to Papa.”
“You already are. Didn’t your Papa make the Paddlewheel possible?”
“Of course he did. But my talent, and Dickie’s business sense, and vision, have taken it to a whole new plateau.”
“Okay. But there’s a problem, right? Uncle Vince?”
She shrugged. “Hard to say whether it’s coming directly from Vince or if it’s the Lucky Devil crowd, causing trouble for Dickie, knowing they have the tacit approval of their Chicago backer.”
“Who are the Lucky Devil crowd?”
“The old man who owns virtually every bar, strip club and brothel downtown is Gigi Giovanni. He was thick with Uncle Vince back in the ’40s and ’50s, came with Vince’s blessing and backing to Haydee’s Port, in the early ’60s. He’s kind of a recluse, and has turned most of the responsibility over to his son, Jerry G. My guess would be, any trouble that’s been sent Dickie’s way, comes from Jerry G, not his father.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Jerry G is ambitious, and he’s a hothead. He’s a sadistic son of a bitch and he’s a goddamn cheat and he drinks and dopes more than any of his customers and breaks in all the young girls before putting them to work on their backs.”
“Any bad qualities?”
That made her smile. “Nothing much fazes you, does it?”
“No.”
“You’ve heard what you’ve gotten yourself into, and you don’t mind?”
“I won’t mind if the money is right. I’ll have to talk to your husband.”
“We keep referring to Dickie as my husband…and he is my husband. But we are separated.”
“Right.”
“You mind if I turn off the lights?”
“No.”
She rose, and went over and turned off the lights and I sat at the table and waited while she went into the bathroom and took her own shower. When the bathroom door opened, the light was behind her and the front of her was in blue-gray shadow. She was voluptuous and those breasts were full with nipples that were erect and thick and long and a deep pink against very pale flesh. Her pubic bush was thick and dark, her thighs a little fleshy. She was no kid.
But she knew what she was doing when she knelt in front of me, where I sat, and opened my trousers, unzipped me and got my already erect cock out to have a look at it.
“I want to thank you for what you did for my husband,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, and felt myself slip into the warmth of her mouth.
She brought me almost to climax and I swear I was cross-eyed when she took me by the hand like mommy leading baby, assuming baby had his trousers around his ankles, and all but shoved me onto the bed, where she climbed on top of me and took my dick up into a warm, tight place and ground her hips into me and ground them some more and I watched hypnotized by the swaying fruit of those breasts, reaching my mouth out to grab at them, like a child on a merry-go-round going for the brass ring, and when she came, she came so hard her eyes rolled back in her head.
I came so hard my eyes uncrossed.
She flopped off beside me, breathing hard. I was breathing hard, too.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
She nuzzled my neck, then got up and her round, dimpled bottom receded into the bathroom, where the door closed, and I was left in darkness, to ponder the character of a woman who didn’t want to divorce her cheating husband because she was Catholic, but was fine with covering up killings for him as well as fucking the help by way of showing her appreciation for a job well done.
But then I’d never really understood women.
Chapter Six
I parked the Sunbird on the street between a pick-up truck and a row of Harleys. It was eight p.m. in beautiful downtown Haydee’s Port, and not really hopping yet, though the seven or eight bars on one side of the street and the eight or nine bars on the other were spilling red and blue and green and yellow neon onto the sidewalks along with loud music from country to heavy metal, frat rock to New Wave. The neon spillage made a sort of blurry melted rainbow but the melding of popular music was just plain noise.
Smoke and beer smell issued from every entryway, both invitation and threat, though it was too early for the bouquet of puke. Guys in groups of two or three or four swaggered along the sidewalk, window-shopping for just the right bar, but no similar groups of women were on the prowl.
I’d been told that early evening in Haydee’s Port was slow, but that it picked up from ten till maybe one and then stayed steady, although the crowd gradually shifted from those looking for wide-open fun to seekers of a bar that served alcohol after one a.m., closing time across the river.
The Lucky Devil was no classier than any other dive along Main Street, just bigger, taking up three storefronts, the right and left ones with front windows painted black. The center storefront allowed you to see into a dingy bar, and the only promise of something special were two signs in the window-one a big, bold red-and-black cartoon outlined in red neon of a grinning, winking devil’s head, right down to the regulation pointy mustache and beard; the other a red cursive blinking neon spelling out the establishment’s name.
I went through double-push doors into a space about the size of a high-school cafeteria and every bit as inviting. The front half of the smoky chamber was a drab collection of red-plastic-covered tables with old-fashioned wooden chairs, and (at the bar itself) stools whose red seat cushions were bursting. Behind the bartender, shelves of booze were back-lit red, but then the whole room was dimly lit and red-tinged, with beer-sign halos spotted around. The lighting was better at the rear, where up a few steps behind pipe railing, four pool tables under Schlitz chandeliers were all in use by guys in plaid shirts with rolled-up sleeves open to either white t-shirts or bare chests. They were either hicks or gay. Or gay hicks.
The joint was encased in the cheapest paneling known to God or man or even your Uncle Phil, beautified by black-marker graffiti that made dating and other suggestions. Right now the tables were about half full, and the bar about the same. The clientele appeared to be blue-collar or below, displaying lots of frayed, faded jeans, a look courtesy of factory work, not factory fabrication. One corner had been taken over by bikers in well-worn leathers-the bikers were pretty well-worn themselves, in their thirties or forties. Marlon Brando in The Wild One had been a long fucking time ago.
I was overdressed in my navy t-shirt and black jeans and running shoes, but nobody seemed to notice. I took one of the open stools at the bar and ordered whatever was on tap, and asked a few questions of the bartender, a guy in a blue-striped white shirt with rolled-up sleeves over a black t-shirt; he had black wavy hair and a thick black mustache, and looked a little like Tom Selleck’s dumber, not-so-good-looking brother.
“So where’s all this famous action I keep hearing about?” I asked pleasantly.
“What kind you looking for?”
“I keep an open mind.”
He leaned an elbow against the bar. “The girls over at those tables have trailers either side of the parking lot.”
Four girls in lots of makeup and with a plentitude of high feathered hair and a modicum of spandex dress were at a table smoking and stari
ng at nothing, unless maybe they were playing invisible cards. They had drinks in tumblers that might have been whiskey but probably were tea. They looked like prom queens, if this were prom night in Hades, which it kind of was.
“Trailers out back, huh? What does twenty-five bucks get you?”
“Their attention. Now, if you’re interested in a game of chance, you’ll want to head that-a-way.”
The bartender gestured to a doorless doorway to the right of where the pool table level rose, presumably providing passage to the adjacent storefront. A brawny black guy in a black polo with a red cursive Lucky Devil on the breast and black jeans was seated on a wooden chair on a boxy platform, like a low-riding life-guard station. Or maybe he was just waiting for the right white guy to come along to give him a shoeshine. In any case, he was keeping watch on the bar and standing guard on that door, his arms folded like a genie; somehow I didn’t think he was granting wishes.
I finished my beer and wandered over there. I paused in front of the big black lifeguard and looked up at him, and asked, “Okay I go on in?”
“You free, white and twenty-one, ain’t you?”
I decided this was a rhetorical question, and went on through. I expected to find the casino, but did not-this was another bar, but with a big hardwood dance floor, lightly sawdusted, with a stage that butted up where the front window was blacked out. Under hot colored lights, four guys in cowboy hats and tattered t-shirts and jeans and boots were getting ready to play. The tables were only maybe a third full. It was so early the males and females were still in their own little enclaves.
This seemed a different clientele than next door, and was not that different from the dance crowd at the Paddlewheel Lounge. The age was twenties and early thirties, the male attire running from denim jackets to Hawaiian shirts, parachute pants to designer jeans, the female attire from leopard print tops to vests over tube tops, miniskirts to short shorts. A girl of maybe twenty-five in a black-and-yellow backless minidress, with high heels and a yard-in-all-directions of frizzy blonde hair twitched her taut tail as she headed from the ladies’ room back to her hive of half a dozen honeys.
I bought another beer and sat at the bar and watched as the band began to play Southern Rock at ear-bleed level, and waitresses in low-cut spandex minidresses took orders and not very discreetly dealt drugs. This section of the Lucky Devil had the same shitty wall paneling, but framed Patrick Nagel beauties and movie posters (Flashdance, For Your Eyes Only) indicated a vague sense of purpose if not style.
At the rear another bouncer perched on a lifeguard stand, a white guy this time, also in a Lucky Devil polo shirt-a bruiser with a nose that had been broken so many times you couldn’t really call it a nose anymore, and eyes that weren’t missing anything. Next to him were push-through doors, and patrons of various stripes had been cutting through to those doors, opening them to reveal glimpses of a bustling casino beyond.
I watched as the males and females began to intermingle-when they weren’t going off independently for a toot or what-have-you in the can, anyway-and took in the bar band’s respectable covers of ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and 38 Special, and made the beer last a good hour. This bartender was a skinny good-natured kid with thinning hair, a wispy mustache and a khaki shirt over an Alabama tee.
“Seems pretty tame,” I said, between songs. “I heard this place ran wild.”
“Wild enough. More flavors of sin than Baskin Robbins got ice cream.”
“I dunno. Nobody seems that frisky.”
He shrugged. “We have some heavy-duty bouncers, dude. Fights don’t last long in the Lucky.”
“Is the casino a key club or something? Or can any fool go back there?”
“Anybody with a few bucks and a ball or two is welcome.”
So I went back there. The casino took up only the back half of that one storefront-not a particularly impressive layout, drab and piddling and bare bones, compared to the Paddlewheel’s operation.
Overseen by two more bouncers at stubby lifeguard stands, the smoke-swirled room, with the same crummy wood paneling, had a craps table, a roulette wheel, two blackjack stations, and its own small bar, from which the waitresses in black spandex minidresses picked up their trays of free drinks for the suckers. Along two walls were slot machines, old ones, those squat metal numbers that dated back to the ’40s and ’50s-no video poker, and no flashy electronic modern numbers. Strictly old-fashioned one-armed bandits.
If the Paddlewheel was today, the Lucky Devil sure seemed like yesterday. The best I could say for them was they were catering to a younger crowd, with their Southern Rock and hot-and-cold running drugs. Otherwise this was pretty sad, as casinos went.
The patrons did not seem particularly well-heeled, at least not at this time of night, which was approaching ten. I saw everybody from farmers to factory workers to college kids, and in that sense the Lucky Devil gambling layout was democracy in action, bib-overalls, plaid shirts and Members Only jackets all voting with their money.
So far, I had seen nobody at the Lucky Devil who looked even vaguely like management. And I’d had a good description from Richard Cornell of both the old man, Gigi, and his son Jerry G.
“Odds of you seeing the old man,” Cornell had told me this afternoon, in his smaller, more businesslike second-floor office at the Paddlewheel, “are next to nil. He lives on the third floor of the building, and since his wife died ten years ago, he’s a goddamned hermit.”
“Why the Howard Hughes routine?”
I was sitting across from him. Cornell, in a yellow sport jacket and orange turtleneck, was seated behind a big black metal desk in the surprisingly functional office. He was drinking coffee and I had a can of Diet Coke.
“It may be sorrow for the loss of Mrs. Giovanni,” Cornell said, “but I doubt it, since he’s always been a womanizing son of a bitch. He has everything he wants up there, it’s a lavishly appointed apartment, I understand. He’s in his seventies and they send up girls when he’s so inclined, and he has a full-time chef. There’s a satellite dish near the parking lot, so he can watch sports and naked women and anything he likes. Why leave?”
“What about Jerry G?”
“Young Jerry is fairly hands-on. He also has an apartment spanning the second floor over several of the dives. You should see him on the floor of the casino, however, and possibly elsewhere at the Lucky Devil, unless he’s in one of his poker games.”
“Tell me about those.”
“There’s a very high-stakes game in a room in back-not part of the casino, if you can call that hellhole a casino. It’s not every night-depends on Jerry’s whim, and the availability of players who can afford it. You see, it’s strictly for the big boys-buy-in is a grand. You don’t have ten grand to throw around, don’t bother sitting down.”
“Crooked?”
“I don’t think so. Not that Jerry G isn’t a confirmed cheater, as a casino manager-I think you’ll find the gaming rigged for the house. But Jerry G takes pride in his poker playing. He thinks he’s a world-class player. And he’s done well in Vegas competitions, truth be told.”
“You wouldn’t have ten grand in cash around, would you?”
The aqua eyes in the heavily tanned face regarded me coldly, though he was working the smile on me, by way of distraction. “I already wired twenty thousand to your Cayman Islands account,” he said. “Would this be an advance, or…?”
“It would be your money. If I lose it, it’s gone.”
“And if you win?”
“You get the ten grand back.”
He chuckled. “And doesn’t that sound fair? Mr. Quarry, you are a cheeky devil. A regular card.”
“Cards sound like they may be the best way in for me, with Jerry G.” I shifted in my chair. “We haven’t talked about exactly what you want done.”
“No we haven’t.”
“You’d like me to remove whoever it was that hired that contract on you.”
“Yes.”
“And you�
��re convinced it’s either the father, Gigi Giovanni, or the son, Jerry G.”
He nodded. “Or possibly both. In concert.”
“So, do you want me to determine which it was?”
“Could you do that?”
“Possibly. Could be tricky. But might be possible.”
“What’s the alternative?”
I shrugged. “Just take them both out.”
“What would that cost me?”
“Well…double.”
“Forty thousand.”
“I was thinking fifty.”
He blinked. Stop the presses. “What’s the extra ten for?”
“For killing mob guys. Consider it hazardous duty pay.”
“And it’s twenty-five if you determine which G hired the hit, and take care of only him.”
“Yes. And that might prove a bargain, as it’s maybe the harder job. I have to play undercover cop and snoop around and not get killed doing it. Just popping them both, if I could stage-manage the right circumstances, could be relatively simple. In and out.”
The leather of his forehead grew grooves. “The Giovannis have a small army at the Lucky, you know. Bouncers and strongarms. No shortage of muscles and guns. You don’t expect me to pay for anybody else you have to take care of along the way.”
“What, collateral damage? No. That’s my problem. I don’t charge for soldiers, only generals.”
This he found amusing, the leathery flesh around the eyes crinkling with glee. His big white smile seemed genuine. Nice to know he had a sense of humor.
“Dickie,” I said, “you’re tied in with your wife’s father, back in Chicago-Tony Giardelli. I need to know if you’ve consulted him about this.”
He shook his head. “Uncle Tony expects me to take care of my own problems.”
“But would he back you up, after the fact?”
“Oh yes. He knows very well what’s at stake.”
“What is at stake?”
That stopped him, and he thought for several long moments, then got up and gestured me to follow him.
Quarry in the middle q-8 Page 7
