He put his icy cold feet between her opened legs, pressing them against her naked crotch.
“Ahhh,” he purred, “that feels good.”
She came out of the cold water in a trance, oblivious to the cameras, the cast, and crew. She stood shivering on the riverbank, the oil on her skin faithfully beading the water. For a moment she froze as she came out of her trance, suddenly realizing that she was being watched by a hundred eyes. She felt that they had experienced her shame, the humiliation of having her female part being used as a foot warmer for an old man, and tears came down her eyes. She stared defiantly at the people and pulled back her shoulders, refusing to surrender to the emotional pain. She walked straight ahead and went directly to her dressing room. No one said a word or stepped in her way. She felt defeated. I’ve failed, she thought. She wanted to crawl the last few feet to the dressing room door. As she opened the door she heard her name called and turned around.
They all began to clap and she stared at them, confused. Then they began to whistle and cheer.
The director told her later, “You were magnificent. You could see those bastard bandits bruised your body but never touched your soul.”
58
LAS VEGAS, 1987
I sat in the club’s lounge and sipped a Jack Coke while I watched the Academy Awards. You didn’t find TVs in the bars of most casinos, but Halliday’s was never a typical gambling joint. We had locals who dropped in for a drink and a cheap lunch or used it as a watering hole for grabbing a couple beers after work. Few of them got away without paying their dues on the casino floor.
“Who’s winning?” Manny Stuber asked. Manny was the casino manager, a gal who went to UNLV during the day while working nights, going from a Halliday cocktail waitress to dealer and then pit boss. I made her casino manager two years ago and I never regretted the choice.
“The Yankees,” I joked. But the name of a few sports teams I heard thrown around was about all I knew of who played. And I hadn’t seen many movies since I groped Nadine in the backseat of my car at a drive-in theater a zillion years ago.
“Know why the man crossed the road?” Manny asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“He heard the chicken was a slut.”
Manny moved on, her eye catching everything. Sometimes she reminded me of myself, though no one in Vegas had an eye to catch a cold deck or a dealer-player going for the money like I did. Con Halliday could have done it, but we buried him over three years ago, a year after I took a .38 slug in my chest. I spent most of the first year after the shooting in bed, in therapy, or both. I was nearly thirty-four now, still young in an age where sixty-year-olds kicked up their heels and grandparents bragged about their sex lives, but I felt old. And looked it. I had some gray in my hair and lines on my face. People still said I could have doubled for Lee Marvin, but they no longer said a “young Lee Marvin.”
I had the casino off to a running start before I took the hit in the alley and Morgan had been smart enough to keep the ball rolling, though it had to be pushed uphill sometimes during that first year when I was recuperating. She had to deal with a tough pregnancy and the birth of our daughter while worrying about how much of me would recover.
Not all of me left that alley that day, but I was the only one who knew it. Besides the blood I left there, some part of me had spilled onto the pavement. I don’t know what it was, but Morgan said I lost some of my tolerance for the world after that, that I became more ruthless and single-minded. I died in that alley, got revived by paramedics, and died again in the emergency ward. What I learned most of all was how capricious the gods were, especially the Dark Sisters who determine our fate and cackle when it suits them to cut the thread of a life.
I had a list of things I needed to accomplish before I died. Getting shot brought home the fact that there was only so much time on earth allotted to each of us. So did seeing small children growing before my eyes. The kids brought home to me my own mortality. They were the future, but I wasn’t willing to give up my own wish list.
The only thing that mattered to me was to have the biggest casino in Vegas. Whatever got into my blood when I was twelve years old and saw the Strip for the first time was still there, an urgent need unsatisfied.
For me, Halliday’s was just a prick teaser rather than a good piece of ass.
“Here’s Chevy,” from someone imitating Ed McMahon, brought a laugh from the awards audience as Chevy Chase, hosting the program instead of the ubiquitous Johnny Carson, came back onstage to introduce the actor and actress who would announce the Best Actress winner.
It was unusual that one of the nominees was an actress in a foreign film with subtitles. A-Ma’s performance in White Flower, her third movie, had gotten universal acclaim. I wasn’t even aware she was an actress until I saw a newspaper article about White Flower. I was struck by her screen presence when I watched the movie. Every man in the audience that night could feel her body heat, her lush sensuality.
The most amazing part was that although she barely spoke in the movie, she was able to play her character with the sheer strength of her physical presence. Someone told me that when Alan Ladd came into the studio commissary for lunch and was asked how the morning shooting went, he said, “I got in one good look.” I guess he managed once that morning to get himself deep enough into the character to have an audience suspend disbelief that he was only “acting.” But Ladd lived during the golden age of movies, when actors were required to get deep into their character. Most actors today turn me off because they put on a thin façade and you know they’re acting. A-Ma’s role of a woman avenging her husband’s murder was amazing because her sorrow and quiet hate seemed to emanate from someplace deep within. She didn’t have to speak to the audience; she made you feel her pain and anger as if you were sharing her emotions.
Wan had been listed as executive producer in the credits, so I knew the yellow spider was still in her life. As I watched the movie, I realized that Wan could hold her prisoner but would never dominate her. She was too ethereal, too other-worldly for anyone to own.
She wasn’t at the awards. The director of the movie was there to accept the award in case she won. She didn’t. Cher took the Best Actress award for Moonstruck. It was just too much of a stretch for the American Academy members to give the Oscar to a woman who barely spoke in a Chinese movie shown only in art houses and with subtitles. I read in the papers A-Ma wouldn’t attend the awards because she said she didn’t speak English. That was a lie, of course; her English was excellent.
I hadn’t seen either Wan or A-Ma since I left Macao over four years ago and took off to become a “globetrotter” and checked out other gambling venues. Wan had been indicted in absentia in New York for illegal money transactions in the States. The long arm of the feds didn’t reach to the Far East, so it was a standoff: He stayed away and they left him alone.
A security officer appeared at my side. “Mrs. Halliday and Bic are ready for you.” Morgan had kept her last name. I didn’t mind that except when people inadvertently called me Mr. Halliday. Like Ben Siegel, I was touchy about what people called me.
I left the lounge for my office upstairs. Making an appointment to see my wife is what our married life had come down to. I couldn’t get back into the domestic shoe after dying twice in an alley from a gunshot wound. I moved into the room I kept at the club and led a life separate from Morgan’s. The distemper in our relationship was entirely due to me. After the shooting occurred, in addition to running the casino during her pregnancy, when the police failed to find the shooter, she hired a former L.A. homicide dick to track him down, but nothing came of it. My suspicion was that Bic’s buddy Bronco had a dirty hand in it. I would have gone after Bronco myself when I was back on my feet, but he apparently ran for Tijuana soon after the shooting. Morgan’s detective believed he was MIA when a drug purchase down there went bad. Hopefully he was lying on his back in a shallow grave with a mouthful of dirt somewhere under the Baja desert. I figured Bic
was too stupid and indecisive to have engineered the shooting, but I wouldn’t have put it past him to have financed a hit on me. That brooding suspicion about her brother, and my physical retreat from her following the shooting, terminated anything left in our marriage. Of late, Morgan had been quietly seeing a UNLV history professor who was leaving a teaching career to write. Her plans were to take the kids and move to Martha’s Vineyard with him. I said nothing about the move. There was only one thing I wanted—the Strip. And that’s what our meeting today was about.
I walked into my office and my past hit me with a shock. Janelle was there.
“What are you doing in here? You’re banned from Halliday’s.” I hadn’t seen her since she did time for the quarter scam.
“Janelle’s with me,” Bic said. “She’s allowed where I go and I own a third of this club—an honest third.”
“What is—” Morgan started.
“She’s a thief whose been barred by the gaming board. Your rocket scientist brother is still trying to get our license pulled.”
Bic jumped out of his chair. “Janelle was set up by you and your pal.”
I laughed. “I heard about her act in court. Don’t forget, I know her. Get her ass out of here or I’ll call security.”
“Fuck you, you asshole.”
Bic came at me ready to swing but Morgan put herself between us. “Stop it! Bic, is it true, is she barred from here?”
He didn’t bother answering her but grabbed Janelle’s arm. “Let’s get out of here! I’ll sell my goddamn interest in the club and get my own place.”
Janelle gave me a smirk as she went out the door. But her eyes weren’t smiling. There was a hardness to her, like the look a woman gets when she’s been knocked around too much.
“What is going on here?” Morgan was near tears.
“Sit down and I’ll explain.”
I told her about Janelle, starting with how I met her, leaving out the intimate parts. She bent over and buried her head in her hands and cried. I couldn’t move three feet to comfort her. I didn’t have that sort of feeling anymore for anyone. Not even myself.
“I just don’t understand,” she said. “If she’s barred, why would Bic bring her in here?”
“He’s been trying to sabotage the place for years.”
“Does he hate you that much? And what about me? Would he hurt himself and me to harm you?”
“I’ve been getting a bum rap from you about Bic almost from the day we met. Bic was a grown man when I came on the scene. He was fucked up then. He’s a creature of your old man, not me. He’s self-destructive and a loser and he directs his hate at me so he doesn’t have to face himself.”
I thought for a moment about Bic’s threat to sell his share of the club. The threat was meaningless. His share went into a family trust that Con set up, and Morgan controlled the trust.
She blew her nose. “I’ve got to get away from here, out of Vegas. I can’t stand it anymore. It’s affected my father, my brother, and now you. I’m moving back East, you know that.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m taking the kids, of course.”
That went without saying, but she said it anyway, to get a response from me, some sort of fatherly comment, like “I’ll miss them.” But there was no emotion in me and I couldn’t cross the gap between us to make a polite listening response about losing my son and daughter.
“You’ve changed, Zack.” She had said that a hundred times ever since the day I stared at her from a recuperation bed. And each time she looked at me it was as if she was trying to find the man she used to know.
“Maybe I haven’t changed. Maybe this has been me all the time and the only thing that has changed is taking off the mask I wore.”
“You’re so damn grim. There isn’t an ounce of humor in you. You used to be funny. But you don’t smile anymore. And your eyes are as dead as that girl that just left.”
I shook my head. “I can’t give you whatever it is that you want from me. It’s not in me.”
“No, but you want something from me, don’t you.”
“I’m not asking you for charity. We still have Halliday’s, thanks to me, and something worth almost as much as the club.”
The valuable “something” was linked back to Windell. Yeah, Windell, the nerd who could hack his way into the Pentagon or the Soviet Command Center but couldn’t figure out how to get laid. The clever bastard had finally come up with a good one. He had contacted me two years ago with a new electronic concept for random-number generation. The random generation of numbers was what made a slot machine tick. If it worked right, a casino was guaranteed the exact return it programmed its slots for. The problem was it never worked exactly right—until Windell figured out a way to do it. I bought the rights, gave Windell a good financial package that guaranteed him a return for the next twenty years, and started a company that provided the technology to casinos all over the world. Windell “retired” to Grand Cayman and the only connection with Nevada, other than a monthly check, was a chicken ranch near Reno that sent him a prostitute each month.
“Between what I can raise mortgaging Halliday’s and selling the random-generator company, there’ll be enough to exercise the option on the Condor.”
The Condor was an enormous, rundown budget motel complex on the Strip. It was an eyesore that needed to be torn down. Jack Evans had built it back in the early fifties. Somewhere along the line Con had acquired an option to buy the place, most likely during a poker game between the two Vegas old-timers. He never exercised the option, probably because he had to pay “current market value,” the value of Strip property being too rich for his blood. The option had laid dormant until Evans died and a property title search found it during probate. The option was in the name of the Halliday Corporation and could still be exercised. Since Morgan and I each owned a third interest in the corporation, as long as she sided with me, Bic was powerless to stop me from using the club to raise the money to exercise the option.
“Even with the club and your company,” she said, “you’re not going to have enough money to build a Strip club. You’d have to raise two or three times more money.”
“Try ten times more.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not going to build just an ordinary casino. There’s already enough competition out there for the weekend crowd and people from back East. I’m going to build a casino that draws people from all over the country, like Disneyland and the Universal Studio tour.”
“Are you serious? Zack, those are family places, for mom and dad and the kids. Vegas is for adult gamblers. The only place that even comes close to being user friendly to families are the circus acts at Circus-Circus.”
“Why can’t mom and dad come here and gamble while the kids are enjoying a theme park with rides and games? Don’t you see, by not opening the door to families, we’re turning away most people. There’s no reason Vegas can’t be a family vacation spot. I’m going to build a theme casino that the whole family can enjoy. You don’t remember, but Circus-Circus was not designed for family entertainment. When it first opened, kids weren’t allowed. You played slots with an elephant walking around but it was all for adults. It was the right idea to open the doors to children but the circus acts are not enough. Kids need something to do while their parents are making their contribution at the slots and tables. I’m going to build a super casino that has something for everyone.”
“Zack, you’re asking me to risk everything we have—and Bic has—to give you a shot at the Strip.”
“I’m going to make you and that jerk richer than you’ve ever dreamed.”
“I don’t care about the money. What I care about is that I just told you I’m taking our kids three thousand miles away and you don’t give a damn.” She got up and started for the door. “All right, I’ll sign for your dream. If you’ll do one thing.”
“Which is?”
“Give away all parental rights to the children. I’m
going to marry Todd after we get settled back East. He’ll adopt the children and they’ll bear his last name. You’ll never see the children again.”
I didn’t hesitate for even a moment.
She shook her head. “I should hate you, but I don’t. I feel sorry for you. You never had a mother, father, brother, sister. You’re worse than an only child who doesn’t know how to share—you don’t know how a family functions. You don’t know what you’re supposed to do with a home and kids.” She stared at me for a moment, hoping for some answer from me. “You’re going to end up like the father you never knew. I’m taking our children out of this town so they won’t have to see a sick stranger carried out of the back of a hotel someday and realize that it was their father.”
59
LAS VEGAS, 1967
Bic Halliday was fifteen years old when Con took him out to a chicken ranch to get “the velvet rubbed off his cock,” Con said. The night Con decreed the boy was to lose his virginity, two of Con’s old friends from Texas had shown up in Vegas for “a little shit kicking and pussy poking.”
After several hours of hard drinking and carousing, Con loaded his buddies and his son into his 1942 Packard and headed down the road for Sally’s Ranch across the county line. Clarke County, where Vegas was located, didn’t have legalized prostitution, but the county next door did.
Bic sat in the front seat dreading the ordeal ahead of him. He had done heavy petting with girls and heavy “petting” on himself in his own bed at night, but he had never gone all the way with a girl. His fear was that he would fail and be humiliated.
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