Sin City

by Harold Robbins

  The kids stared at me shyly. I was a stranger to them and they were strangers to me. I realized I didn’t even know their ages. William—aka Zack, Jr.—I guessed to be about seven and the girl, Monica, a couple years younger. I didn’t dare expose my ignorance by asking their ages.

  Morgan asked, “Trying to figure out their names? How old they are? Whether they’re yours?”

  I grinned as I opened the limo door for her. “All of the above. Monica’s as gorgeous as her mother and William is a chip off the old block.”

  I instructed the driver to take us to the country club house.

  “Is there any more word from your detective or the police?”

  “Janelle hasn’t been arrested yet, but it’s just a matter of time. Moody’s put together a pretty good circumstantial-evidence case against Janelle and a guy who supplies her drugs. The DA is reviewing the evidence to see if there’s enough to bring a murder charge. Moody says that when the case gets to court, the DA will waver between murder and manslaughter because Janelle’s pretty whacked out on drugs.”

  “Why manslaughter? She killed him.”

  “They’re afraid she might prove it was an accident and that her brains are so fried, she didn’t know what she was doing. A manslaughter rap would get her put away for years, but I’m pushing for a murder charge.”

  “Will she be at the funeral? I don’t think I could stomach that.”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it. She was his wife, although we’ve got a handwriting expert to question how the signature was obtained.”

  “Forgery?”

  “No, it’s Bic’s signature, but the expert thinks it was made under the influence of drugs and while Bic was lying down. Gives us an argument that he didn’t know what he was signing. She’s made a demand for a hundred million dollars.”

  “My brother’s been dead for a few days and she’s already demanding money?”

  “Moody tells me she’s high twenty-four hours a day. He says she’s been running around the ranch with a metal detector looking for buried treasure and acting nuts. Look, it’s not all as bad as it sounds. Moody thinks the minister who did the marriage and notaries may not have even been licensed in Nevada. That alone would blow her out of the water.”

  “How could she be that stupid?”

  “Janelle’s not stupid, but she’s been on drugs for so long she doesn’t know what side is up. People who push drugs and use them have their own sense of reality. A little thing like being properly licensed doesn’t enter into their worldview when their brains are baked.”

  “This is all insane.” Her look told me that she blamed me and I got hot fast.

  “Look, I hadn’t seen Janelle in a million years before she hooked up with Bic. And your brother was deep into drugs and trouble before I showed up at Halliday’s.”

  “I’m not blaming you for anything.”

  Like hell she wasn’t, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “I saw your casino from the air.”

  “Our casino.”

  “Your casino. Very impressive, more than twice the size of anything else on the Strip. You finally got what you always wanted.”

  “Not yet, the doors aren’t open yet. As we get closer to opening day, the fires I have to spend my day stamping out get bigger. When the doors open, I want the kids there.”

  The statement surprised me as much as it did her. Seeing William and Monica had affected me. They weren’t babies anymore, but little people, with inquiring eyes and personalities.

  “It’s going to be an historic event,” I said. “Every major player in town has plans for super casinos being drawn up. They’re not even going to wait to see if I draw a Bugsy bad-luck hand and it rains on my parade. They know the super casino is the thing of the future.”

  I didn’t verbalize it, but suddenly I had a fear that my kids might someday see me being carried on a stretcher out the back of the casino as Morgan predicted. I realized Morgan had been right when she said I had no role model for being in a family. Betty hadn’t been a family, nor were the trailer-court trash who raised her.

  “Congratulations. No, I’m not being sarcastic,” she said. “I didn’t comprehend the size of your accomplishment until I saw it from the air and realized there was nothing that could come anywhere near matching your club, either in size or style. My father was a great man in his own way, the King of Glitter Gulch and a real Vegas gem and character, but he never had your ambitions. Neither did I. I think I wanted to run Halliday’s more to step on your toes than any other reason.”

  I thought about her confession for a minute. “I really got you that mad at me?”

  “You really got under my skin. I loved you from the first moment I saw you, a cocky punk straight off the streets.”

  “Morgan—”

  “It’s okay, I’m long over it. Loving you has been my addiction. I finally went through withdrawals and shook the habit.”

  “I was that bad?”

  “Worse. You used me as a stepping stone. And kicked me aside when you didn’t need me anymore. And you cast aside your own children to make your own dream come true. Look at them, Zack, can you see yourself in their faces? You have a habit of pulling your ear when you’re thinking—William does the same thing. They’re your blood and flesh, too. You’re an unfaithful husband, no father at all, and a ruthless bastard in general.” She paused. “By the way—great suit.”

  I grinned. “Maybe you can bury me in it someday.”

  “I used to think I would have to hire professional mourners to attend your funeral, Zack. From what I’ve heard about the savage way you’ve handled yourself building your dream, I don’t have that fear anymore. People are going to come to your funeral just to make sure you’re dead.”

  75

  Bic was carried to his grave on a horse-drawn wagon escorted by the sheriffs posse—nice touch. Really a hell of a turnout. My arm-twisting got results. I saw wet-eyed people who didn’t even know who the hell Bic was, some of them straight from the Salvation Army soup line who would pick up a bottle of Wild Irish Rose after the funeral.

  “I didn’t know so many people liked Bic,” Morgan said as we pulled up in the limo.

  “Life’s a mystery,” I murmured.

  “I hope that bitch has enough sense to have stayed home.”

  “Don’t count on it. I called the DA this morning. He said he’d be here today and talk to me about the case they’re building against Janelle.

  I was sure Janelle would be there. Moody and his cop friends had been dogging her heels, letting her know they knew she was guilty and she was going to be busted. “Try to get her to run,” Moody said. “There’s an instruction that juries get when they’re deciding criminal cases, it literally says flight is a confession of guilt.” Moody said Janelle was really whacked out. Police surveillants have seen her wandering around the property with a metal detector. “Acting strange, muttering, and cursing,” Moody said. “I saw the surveillance films: She’s acting real nuts, talking to herself, and to some guy named Diego, who we think was her drug supplier.”

  Moody’s opinion was that she had sampled some of the pure stuff she had knocked off Bic with. “Pure stuff is irresistible to an addict. They use a little more and more and inevitably cross the line and either ice themselves or fry some of their brain connectors. You see them down at the skid-row missions, people you went to high school with are now wide-eyed zombies. The worse ones are the paranoid schizos, the kind who see snakes crawling up their legs and who chop up mama and papa when the folks won’t hand over the money for another hit.”

  When her lawyer made a demand for millions, I sent back a message that I’d buy her cigarettes when she was in jail. But so far, so good. I hadn’t spotted Janelle.

  As a sheriffs honor guard carried the coffin up to the grave site, a Bourbon Street jazz band played “Summertime.”

  “That was Bic’s favorite song,” Morgan said.

  “And his favorite group. They insisted up
on coming all the way from New Orleans to attend the funeral.”

  Teary-eyed, Morgan squeezed my hand. “Thanks.”

  I got kind of teary-eyed myself. Sending Bic off in style had cost plenty, including the jazz band.

  Hearing the preacher talk about Bic’s golden path to heaven, Bic’s old high school phys ed teacher talk about what a great sportsman Bic was, almost put me to sleep on my feet.

  My mind roamed and I thought about A-Ma. I didn’t introduce her to Morgan; neither woman seemed eager for an introduction. A-Ma had been unusually quiet since I told her Morgan was coming. Considering that she was normally private to the point of sub rosa, more silence was hard to notice. “You are busy with your family,” she said, when I asked her why she seemed to be avoiding me. My family. The phrase had a strange ring to my ear ever since Morgan and the kids stepped off the plane. I was really puzzled by my feelings. There was no doubt that I loved A-Ma. But like the woman herself, my love for her had an almost unreal feel to it, like loving a ghost. A-Ma was lushly sensual, but sometimes she seemed illusive, as if she wasn’t of this world.

  Forbidden City was nearly complete. The grand opening was in a few weeks and I had the finishing-touches crews working twenty-four hours a day. Everything went to hell in a hand basket on a daily basis, of course. Everybody who had anything to do with the project said I was crazy. There was no longer any pretense of love between me and the bankers—my lawyer and PR people kept them away from me because I was in no mood to deal gently with them. The standing joke was that they were looking for the guy who punched Bugsy’s ticket after Bugsy went overbudget on the Flamingo—to give the shooter a contract on me. I didn’t give a damn. They had too much money in the project to bail out and it was late in the game for them to fight me for control. Their leverage went out the door when the gaming board granted me a license. They had to after reviewing the Ricketts tapes. Ricketts fled the state for parts unknown, so he wasn’t available even to defend himself. Besides, the casino hotel was booked solid for opening day and the next three months, and that helped the bankers justify the overages.

  I was running through everything I had to do as soon as the funeral was over, when Morgan gasped beside me. Janelle came into the clearing created around the grave site, pushing her way through the crowd. “Get the fuck out of the way,” she told someone.

  It wasn’t the Janelle I had known. My first thought was that Morgan was right. She was crazy. She had that mission-house hollowed-eye look. Her clothes were disheveled; her hair unkempt and stringy. She looked like she had just crawled out of bed after a serious drinking bout. She stood in the clearing in front of the grave, her hands in the pockets of a scroungy black leather motorcycle jacket.

  “Get her out of here,” Morgan whispered.

  For Morgan’s sake, the last thing I wanted was to turn her brother’s funeral into a can of worms. If the cops tried to take her away, she was going to get nasty, so I stepped in to try to convince her to leave quietly. As soon as she saw me, something stirred in her dull eyes. For a moment I thought it was simply recognition. As soon as she saw me, her face twisted into an ugly grimace. I realized it was pure hate. Moody and his cop buddy Nick were moving through the crowd toward her. I stopped, figuring it was best to let them handle her; all I would do was cause a bigger scene.

  I saw the gun when her hand came out of her pocket. Déjà vu. It was the second time in my life I had faced a gun. Nothing about having taken a slug in my chest once before had made me any better prepared to be murdered. I watched the action, as if in slow motion, and saw the gun come out of the pocket and point at me. It was a small gun, a woman’s purse gun, probably .25 caliber. My feet turned to cement and froze in place. The grimace on Janelle’s face twisted into a sneer as her arm extended out and she pointed the gun point blank at my face. Her hand tightened on the trigger and I heard the telltale click of the gun’s slide coming forward, carrying the firing pin to the bullet. And then a dull click.

  A moment frozen in time passed. Then Moody’s cop buddy grabbed Janelle and jerked the gun out of her hand. She was on the ground being cuffed in a flash.

  Moody came up to me, a quizzical look on his face.

  “You are the luckiest guy alive.”

  Alive—a nice word. Morgan was at my side. William and Monica were there, too, Monica crying and holding on to me. Morgan felt me like she wondered if I was real.

  “Are you okay?”

  My knees were water, but I was too macho to show it. “Sure. Nothing like a gun jamming to make my day.”

  76

  “Congratulations. You have fallen in love with your wife.”

  “A-Ma—”

  “No, Zack, there is no need to apologize. I am the other woman. If my friend Wang Su was directing our scenes, he would insist that I cry. Do you see my tears, Zack? Am I not a good actress to be able to produce tears on command?”

  “You’re overreacting, A-Ma. I told you I wanted to go to Disneyland weeks ago, to feel the magic and reassure myself that Forbidden City had the same touch.”

  “Now you are taking your wife and children. How … middle class.”

  That one got me laughing. “Christ, now you sound like Chenza. Look, I’m taking the kids because they’ve never been there, but this is a business trip.”

  “Look me in the eye, Zack, and tell me that you don’t love your wife.”

  I took her face in my hands and pulled her to me, looking her in the eye without flinching. I studied her eyes, deep pools of mystery and sensuality. “I love you, A-Ma. From the first moment I saw you, when you were just a twerpy, flat-chested little monkey hiding in the bushes and spying on me.” I kissed her. I hadn’t lied. But I hadn’t told her the whole truth, either.

  She put her head against my chest and her arms around me and squeezed tight. “I believe you. But you never answered my question, did you? You are a tricky bastard.”

  I took Morgan and the kids to Disneyland in Anaheim. We flew in the corporate jet and I had a limo pick us up at the airport. It felt great to be really rich—or at least to act that way.

  I didn’t know what to expect, taking Morgan and the kids to a place like Disneyland. I had made a trip there by myself when I first started the project, to get the feel of the most magical place on earth. Forbidden City wasn’t an amusement park, but I wanted not only the best that gambling had to offer on the Strip, but also the best family entertainment I could provide. And there was nothing better than Disneyland on the face of the earth. The place was packed with eye-pleasing things everywhere one turned. What was really fascinating was how so many things in Disneyland were in motion. Walt didn’t just paint characters onto walls or create plastic models of them. Every time you turned around, Mickey was prancing around, Donald wisecracking with his nasal voice, Goofy playing dumb, Tinker Bell flying overhead, and a riverboat sounding its horn while bears on the bank waved at the boat.

  Morgan asked me why I was so fascinated with Disneyland and I gave her the bottom line: You can’t knock success.

  “Disney was a builder. Nowadays you hear about corporate raiders and junk-bond kings who take over companies and make a fortune firing thousands of employees and cheating them out of their retirement. Those people are nothing but scabs on the face of the earth. It’s the people who built dams and pyramids and the Great Wall who count, not the new corporate types who are destroyers.”

  Every inch of Disneyland was thought out and planned by a man with talent, drive, and a dream. That’s what it took.

  “It’s got to be the real McCoy,” I told Morgan, as we walked behind the kids. “You can’t foist off an imitation on people; they’ll see through it. It’s like your old man. Con was genuine, a real cowboy who got transplanted to Vegas. I’d be laughable if I put on a cowboy hat and tried to act like a cowboy. Con acted like a man who was used to manure on his cowboy boots and people instinctively knew it. Walt Disney had that kind of innate shtick. He knew how to get your attention and keep it. E
verywhere you turn in this place, there is something you could stop and stare at, but you don’t. Everything is so well designed, so cleverly presented, you don’t see a bunch of parts; instead you always see the whole.

  “That’s what I want to happen when people walk into Forbidden City. I don’t want something to attract their attention; I want them to feel like they’re welcome guests in the emperor’s palace.”

  Morgan gave me a look and shook her head. “That sounds like something from a press release.”

  “It is. Pretty good, huh?”

  “Wonderful. What did your cop friend tell you about Janelle? You got a call this morning when I was getting the kids ready.”

  “She confessed that she killed Bic. And the friend who helped her, a guy named Diego.” I didn’t tell her the cops found Diego in a shallow grave on the ranch with his penis stuffed in his mouth.

  “Is she going to get out of it because she’s crazy?”

  “I asked that question. I think she’s nuts, but the law has a different definition. Moody says she isn’t legally crazy and wasn’t crazy when she killed Bic.”

  “I know she killed my brother, but, I don’t know, I kind of feel sorry for her. From what you told me, she never had a chance in life.”

  I let that one slide.

  “You’re getting bored being here with the kids.”

  It was an accusation, not a statement.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes it is, I can see it on your face. You needed to come to Disneyland and spend ten minutes walking down Main Street, USA, to get the feel again. Now you’re ready to get back to work.”

  “I want the kids to enjoy themselves.”

  “Go back to the hotel and get on the phone and drive everyone in Vegas nuts. I’ll give the kids another couple of hours and we can return to Vegas.”