David Bishop - Matt Kile 04 - Find My Little Sister

by David Bishop

  Tony would launch the Rex in early May. The opening date was supposed to be May third, and he was swamped with the fussing which accompanies the details. He would own the Rex totally. He intended it to be the brightest star in Los Angeles entertainment. Patrons would dine, drink, dance, and gamble under the stars, all moving with a cradle-like sway freely provided by the waters of Santa Monica Bay. For the cost of a quarter, water taxis would ferry passengers and gamblers back and forth twenty-four hours a day. The Rex would be anchored just beyond the three-mile limit that ended California’s jurisdiction. That was the interpretation held by the owners and operators of the gambling ships. Between three and twelve miles was Federal waters, and the U.S. government had no restrictions on gambling on land or sea.

  I had known Tony Cornero since early 1924. We met quite by accident, some might say by fate. He was twenty-five years old, one year younger than I. I was walking late down near the produce district below Spring Street where I saw a man being beaten by three men. I stepped in. We fought them to enough of a draw that they took flight. We didn’t give chase. They had us outnumbered and had been getting the best of us, but we were giving them more hurt than they wanted. Over the coming weeks Tony and I became friends and that friendship endured and deepened over the past fourteen years. Tony was a man you sometimes wanted to kill and other times were ready to die for. He was my best contact in the underworld, and a crook I trusted, an oxymoron I suppose, but I did.

  I wanted his take on the attempted murder, by car bomb, of Harry Raymond. Tony always insisted he was a law-abiding citizen because he operated gambling ships off the Santa Monica and Long Beach harbors, out just beyond the three-mile limit. “There’s no federal, state, county, or city law that makes my gambling business illegal,” is how I’d many times heard Tony say it.

  Before opening his floating gambling business, Tony had stopped driving a cab and started smuggling scotch whiskey during prohibition into California from Canada and rum from Mexico. At one time the estimates said he brought in about a third of all Scotch brought to the California coast. In 1923, I think it was, he bought a merchant ship, the S.S. Lily. He loaded the Lily with four-thousand cases of the best booze available, easily avoided the understaffed Coast Guard, and ran it into Los Angeles under cover of moonlight.

  In 1926, the law caught up with Tony returning from Mexico with an estimated one-thousand cases of rum. After a speedy trial, while being transported by rail to prison, Tony escaped by jumping from the train and fleeing from America. In 1929, he returned to the U.S., to California, and gave himself up.

  I regularly visited Tony while he was up the river, as he called it.

  In 1931, shortly after getting out of prison, Tony Cornero established the Ken Tar Insulation Company in the greater Los Angeles area. The federal authorities raided Ken Tar after they discovered Tony used it as a front for bootlegging. Tony moved his operation to Culver City, California, where he was soon producing five-thousand gallons of alcohol a day. The Feds again raided him but found no proof of bootlegging. Tony had somehow been warned ahead of the raid.

  When prohibition ended, Tony moved into gambling in Las Vegas. He and his two brothers opened The Green Meadows, one of the earliest roadside casino/hotels in Vegas, [fifteen years before Bugsy Siegel opened The Flamingo].

  The Meadows, a translation from Spanish of Las Vegas, was positioned on a road traveled by the workers from the Boulders Dam [later changed to Hoover Dam]. The Meadows offered food, lodging, and live entertainment, including a group of three female singers known as the Gumm Sisters. [The most talented of the Gumm sisters, Baby Frances Gumm, later changed her name to Judy Garland.]

  Tony’s success drew the attention of Lucky Luciano, Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, and Meyer Lansky from New York. The Bug and Meyer mob, as they were sometimes called, demanded a percentage of The Meadows gambling profits. Tony refused to pay and one night The Meadows burned to the ground. The Las Vegas Fire Department would not respond to a call for the fire. Technically, The Meadows was outside city limits and the county had no fire department.

  Tony moved back to Los Angeles. There, as Tony put it, he went legit. My friend was, on many fronts, an amazing man. A gambler and adventurer, Tony snubbed his nose at both big-time organized crime and the political machine. He chose his own way, picking venues where the heavyweight mob didn’t operate or where they had a smaller presence. This meant he stayed out of New York and Chicago in particular.

  Tony intended the S. S. Rex to be the flagship gambling barge. The Rex would operate twenty-four hours a day catering to somewhere between one to three thousand gamblers at any given moment. Players would be able to choose slots, craps, blackjack, faro, or roulette, not counting a few other minor games. The Rex would provide music and food, while scantily-clad cigarette and cocktail girls set the atmosphere. An adequate team of armed seafaring bouncers would be hired to keep misbehaving to a minimum, as well as to assure safety of the vessel. Other gambling ships had been raided by pirates. Tony did not intend for that to happen to the Rex.

  Tony knew I didn’t like what he did. He also knew I would never print anything he told me without him giving the okay. It was an odd friendship, but a solid one. I had no one closer. We just agreed to disagree about how he made his living. From his point of view, reporters were no more reputable than the men who traded in gambling and booze. About that, I sometimes thought he might be correct.

  A thousand times I heard The Hat say, “Just wait my naïve friend, the politicians will make what we do legal. All of it, booze, gambling, broads, running numbers, even smoking weed. Once they see the money in it, they’ll want a slice all legal like, instead of under the table like they get it now. The numbers they’ll turn into a government owned or controlled business—you watch and see if they don’t. Weed and prosties may take decades, maybe into the next century, but they’ll legalize that stuff too, maybe through taxes and fees rather than taking direct control like they will of the numbers. Anything that makes big money, the swells will eventually make legit so they can take their cut while hanging onto their respectability.”

  Right then, Pug, a well-known local presence who steered his watercraft around the harbor like Astaire steered Ginger Rogers around a dance floor, bumped his water taxi up against the receiving platform of the S.S. Tango. The bump brought me back from my thoughts.

  I found Tony in the coffee shop on the Tango, a bright room with black-and-white checkerboard asphalt flooring and red tablecloths. He was sitting at the corner table reserved for the owners, which technically no longer included Tony.

  “Hi ya Admiral,” I said. The Admiral was another of his nicknames. He liked it, but I rarely used it.

  Tony smiled and pointed his index finger at me. “Well, look at here, the Walter Winchell of the West Coast. I told ya to knock off that Admiral bit.” He poked himself in the chest with his thumb. “I’m Tony to my friends,” and pointed at me. “Now what do you want?”

  “Can’t I just come by? I gotta have some ulterior motive?”

  “You usually have a reason.”

  “Well, if you lived on land like other animals that walk on two legs, it would be easier to stop by.”

  Tony laughed. “How ‘bout some breakfast? You need some money? What?”

  “Tony. Tony. I ain’t no mooch. How about a cup of coffee, some toast, maybe a little information? To start with, what the hell are those two guys over there doing sitting on your floor?”

  “Something I never envisioned when I put that pattern in the flooring. I never saw it as a giant checkerboard. The guy wearing the hat is Donald Diggers, a retired banker. The other guy is called Slim, that’s the only name I know for him.”

  Diggers was a spare man with sharp eyes and tight lips. As for Slim, guys called Slim were either exactly that or enormous. This fella had folds of excess belly large enough for him to wear a barrel without straps over his shoulders. Still, his manner was affable and his smile quick. Perhaps from the lingering me
mories of his last million meals.

  “They’re playing two-row checkers,” Tony explained as we watched them for a moment or so.

  “What’s two-row checkers?”

  “Same as regular four-row checkers, only they use ten rather than twenty checkers.”

  “But there are no checkers. I only see some mugs of beer and shot glasses of whiskey scattered around on the floor.”

  “Look closely, Scribe. From here they may look random, but look at them like checkers and you’ll see.”

  “Yeah,” I squinted. “Okay. Sure.”

  “Diggers and Slim come out once or twice a week. They gamble all night without drinking a drop. When the sun comes up, they cash in whatever chips they got and come in here for breakfast. After that they get on the floor and play two-row. The bartender sets it up for them as soon as they finish breakfast. Diggers drinks beer so Slim uses beers for his checkers on the white squares. Slim drinks shots of bourbon so Diggers uses them for his pieces on the black squares.”

  “The purpose of the game being?”

  “When they jump the other guy’s checker … glass, they drink it. One game is played, only one, for the bill for breakfast and the booze. Then they go home. I tell ya, that New York writer Damon Runyon has nothing on the real life characters that live out here. Every now and then we get an honest to goodness prospector whose been working the hills outside L.A. When one or two of ‘em put together enough yellow dust for a stake, they head out here. They live it up till their wallets go hungry. Free men, guided by their guile and choices.”

  “You think Diggers and Slim would mind if I used them in one of my columns? It’d also plug your business.”

  “Okay by me, but you oughta check with Diggers and Slim. I’ll run interference for you. It shouldn’t be a problem. Hey, I caught your radio show the other night. The first time I’ve listened in. You do a solid job. Your delivery has a sense of urgency or something like that. It’s very engaging. You touch all the bases, crime, politics, and entertainment.”

  “Thanks, Tony. Coming from you that means a lot. I like doing it. Radio’s right now. I can get late-breaking news and faster commentary out quicker than through the newspaper. I sometimes think about dropping the column someday and going with a nightly radio show.”

  “Why haven’t you done it?”

  “Not enough listeners at this point. It’s pretty new, someday, maybe.”

  “Okay, scribe, let’s get down to business. I know you came here to tap my knowledge of what really goes on in that big city of yours. What is it you need?”

  Tony complained about my asking him these kinds of things, but he also was proud of how effectively his pipeline reported the doings at City Hall and in the LAPD. Also the gang leaders on the mainland: primarily the gunsels and grifters who take orders from and pay homage to Ben, “Bugsy” Siegel, or Mickey Cohen, or Jack Dragna, the head of the local Italian mob. That is if you don’t toss the politicians and coppers into the gangster count. Tony also liked helping me and he knew I would never write anything in a way that brought him up short.

  “Just cut out them words like ‘mooch,’ ” he said. You’re supposed to be raising my standards, not letting me pull yours down.” Tony waved a certain way at one of the girls. I didn’t understand the wave. She did. A minute later we had coffee and the fixings along with some toast and pastries.

  “You know,” Tony said, “Mickey Cohen eats pastries with every meal, morning, noon and night, also ice cream. But you didn’t come to talk about the Mickster, did you?”

  “No. Well, I don’t think so anyway. Let’s talk about Harry Raymond. What’ve ya heard?”

  “It’s no secret, Scribe. Raymond had squeezed too many squealers and stoolies, called in too many old markers. That kinda action gets around. He got the goods on the police squad the business community uses as union busters and to control the races in their attempt to keep L.A. white and nonunion. Hell, the L.A. cops and politicians don’t just sell protection to the mob, in many ways they manage the underworld. Hollywood, of course, is a little different. Tinseltown is in the county not the city, so out there the mob mostly buys what they need from the sheriff’s office.”

  “Who you figure installed the bomb in Raymond’s car?”

  “You wanna guess?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Raymond was only indirectly coming at the underground. His prime target was the cops and the boys at City Hall. To find the who and why, look there.”

  I took a drink of coffee. “Politicians don’t hook up bombs.”

  Tony laughed. “The cops do. That’s where I’d lay my bet. Besides, if the mob had set up the bomb Raymond wouldn’t have survived. If a copper fouls up that kind of assignment a letter of reprimand might find its way into their file. If a button man botches a job like that for one of the bosses, the next bomb goes in his car.”

  Over the past few years, the slur for police officers had begun to be shortened from coppers to cops. Most people opined that the reference to copper came from the fact that early New York officers wore badges made of copper. The more intellectual who delve into such things say the word copper came from anglicizing the Latin word, capere which means to grab or hold. Some others arguing that instead capere was the source of the street term, caper, which is slang for the grab and hold within a robbery or burglary.

  After that, Tony and I gabbed about the events of the day: Hitler’s speech in support of Jewish emigration to Palestine. Tony even said he had heard a rumor that Time Magazine would likely name Adolph Hitler as its 1938 Time’s Man of the Year. [In December 1938, Time Magazine did name Adolph Hitler its Man of the Year.] Tony also said the talk in Northern Italy where he was born was that Mussolini was following Hitler’s lead. And that Germany was building an army too big for anything but invading its neighbors.

  Chapter Five

  That evening, while pounding out my column on the attempted murder of Harry Raymond, a little Hollywood gossip and the coming local appearance of Fats Waller, a woman knocked on my office door. The knock’s detectible combination of firm and soft, along with the silhouette I could see through the obscure glass inset of the door, left the unmistakable impression of a woman.

  I tossed my porkpie onto one of the hat tree hooks in the corner beside my desk. “It’s open,” I said loudly enough.

  She twisted the knob and pushed the door, letting it swing open, but she didn’t come right in. I turned. It was she, my princess, framed in the doorway. Her legs spread just enough to bring the skirt of her dress taut against her thighs, her skin a blossom of tan silk.

  “Hello,” I said, rising but not approaching the door. “Please come in.”

  Her right leg led. She wore open-toed heels, but they fit her. Women often intentionally wore shoes one size too small, leaving their toes to hang out the opening at the front of the shoe. Think of a dog panting with its tongue lolling beyond the end of its mouth. My princess had no panting toes. The only thing panting in this entire scene was me, but I need to leave that thought behind and get back to the story.

  “I need your help, Mr. Kile,” she said. “Please. I can pay you. My father and I are not wealthy, but I wouldn’t expect you to work for nothing.”

  Her voice was warm and gooey—like high marshmallows caressed by a reaching campfire.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” I cleared my throat with the hope this would stop my voice from cracking. “Please come in. Tell me about what you need. You realize I’m a journalist, not an investigator.”

  “I read you used to be a police detective.”

  “Long time ago. Now I jockey a column. It pays better and an unhappy reader generally does nothing more vicious than use my column to line their birdcage.” I grinned but the humor slid by without touching her.

  She sat down on the leather couch along the side wall. The leather releasing a sigh of pleasant surprise upon realizing the current impression had not again been my rump. That being the place where I s
lept at least one night a week when it was too late to bother going home, or, living alone, nights when I’d drank too much Irish and didn’t feel capable of driving home.

  In a manner of speaking, while my princess and I had only just met, I already had her in my sometimes bed. Great progress, eh? Okay, some progress. At least concede me that little.

  “Can I get you anything? Well, not anything. I can offer a Coke, or a gin and tonic, or a little Irish whiskey.”

  “Whatever you’re having is fine for me.”

  I poured us each several swallows of Tullamore Dew in glasses I wish I had washed more recently. She took one, held it up against the light from the gooseneck lamp on my desk, turning it slightly to highlight the smudges. Not judgmentally, but she looked nonetheless. Woman often claim they can tell a lot about a man by how he keeps house. If she so believed, my odds were not getting better.

  Her face was too honest to hide the troubles she had carried into what she would likely call my small, somewhat tawdry private office. What I called my cozy, intimate space. I spent too many hours here to think of it in drab terms.

  “I saw you last night,” she said, sliding her skirt down over her knee. “You were standing outside the doorway to your building. I thought you might be a masher. Still, I wondered who you were. I checked the building registry earlier this morning and deduced you were Matt Kile, the columnist. That’s when I decided to come and see you.”

  “I hope my watching didn’t upset you. You were beautiful walking in the night, through the fog. The color from the neon lights, smeared in the damp air, gave the effect you were crossing in front of a painter’s backdrop.”

  “You are a writer, aren’t you? You have a way with words.”

  Her bone colored high heel with a side bow the color of her skin, slid free to dangle off the back of her foot. The way extra glaze forms sugar tears under a wire rack of warm doughnuts.