[Rat Pack 02] - Luck Be a Lady, Don't Die Page 22

  “Where?”

  “At the Sands Hotel.”

  “When?”

  “Well ... today.”

  “She’s at the Sands now?” Hargrove asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “She’s safe?” Frank asked. “Unhurt?”

  “Yeah, Frank, she’s fine.” She killed two men and helped her sister steal a hundred grand of mob money, I thought, but she’s fine. Hargrove looked at Frank.

  “You got any objection to us going to the Sands and questioning her?”

  “Would it matter if I did?” Frank asked.

  “No.”

  “But you’ll stick to your word. This won’t get into the papers.”

  “I said I wouldn’t leak it to the papers,” Hargrove reminded him. “I can’t vouch for everyone in this building. Somebody had to recognize you.”

  “I understand.”

  “Let’s go, Eddie,” Hargrove said.

  “Where?” I wondered if he was gonna put me in a cell for some reason.

  “We’re going to the Sands. You’re going to show me this girl.”

  “I’m comin’ along,” Frank said.

  “And so is Jerry,” I added.

  “Yeah, fine,” Hargrove said. “We’ll all go. We’ll have a fuckin’ party.”

  * * *

  Jerry and I drove in the Caddy, but Hargrove insisted Frank go with him and his partner in their unmarked car. Maybe he wanted to question Frank more along the way.

  “Mr. S. came to the rescue, huh?” Jerry asked as he drove.

  “Looks like it.”

  “You gonna tell him what his girl and her sister were doin’?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “He thinks she’s such a sweet broad, huh?”

  “She had him fooled, all right.”

  Jerry hesitated, then said, “It ain’t gonna make him happy to know that she conned him.”

  I had already thought of that.

  When we got to the hotel we parked out front and all stormed through the lobby together, trying to keep up with Hargrove. Finally, he realized he didn’t know where he was going, and he stopped to wait for me.

  “Where the hell is she?”

  At that moment Danny Bardini came walking across the lobby towards us. I’d managed to call him from the theater after all, but he didn’t look like he had good news.

  “What’s he doing here?” Hargrove demanded.

  “I asked him to watch the girl for me.”

  “Where is she?” he demanded again.

  “I stashed her in one of the backstage dressing rooms and had one of the girls watching her.”

  Danny reached us and gave me a helpless look.

  “Tell it,” I said.

  “She was gone when I got here.”

  “She was here,” I said to Hargrove. “I swear.”

  “Mona said she slipped out when she went on stage,” Danny added.

  “She was supposed to watch her, or have somebody watch her.”

  Danny shrugged. “Whoever she gave that job to fucked it up.”

  “Did she have a suitcase?” Hargrove asked.

  “No.”

  “A bag of any kind?”

  “Just her purse.”

  “And what was in the purse?”

  “The usual stuff, I guess,” I said, “although she did hold onto it pretty tight.”

  Hargrove looked at Gorman, who just shrugged, then looked at Frank, who gave him nothing.

  “You let her get away,” Hargrove said to me.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to hold her,” I said. “Is she a suspect, or a victim?”

  “That’s a damn good question,” Hargrove said, “and one I’m going to ask her when I find her.” He pointed his finger at me. “You hear from her again you call me. Got it?”

  “Oh, I got it.”

  He turned to leave and ran smack into Jerry, who didn’t budge. Hargrove angrily went around him and left, followed by Gorman. That left me in the lobby with Frank, Jerry and Danny, and people around us, staring.

  “Where is she, Eddie?” Frank asked.

  “I swear, Frank,” I said, “she was here.”

  “Why didn’t you let me know?”

  Well, for one, I thought, she didn’t want me to.

  “I didn’t have time,” I said. “Look, Frank, the girl is in trouble, and I don’t think she wants to get you involved.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The kind you don’t want any part of, Mr. S.,” Jerry said.

  Frank looked at both of us, back and forth, a couple of times, then folded his arms.

  “I’ve got Juliet Prowse waitin’ for me in my room, fellas, but I think somebody better tell me what’s been goin’ on.”

  So I told him. . . .

  Epilogue

  May 20, 1998

  THEY LOWERED FRANK SINATRA into the ground.

  Tears rolled down my face the way they had when I’d stood at Dean Martin’s gravesite three years earlier. Dean had died on Christmas Day, 1995. Sammy died of cancer in 1990. Peter had drunk himself to death by 1984.

  And now Frank.

  I looked over at Joey Bishop, who looked haggard and shrunken. He was eighty years old, his usually neat and close-cut black hair now a tangled mess of steel wool gray, blowing slightly in the breeze.

  With family members standing around me, sniffling and mourning, I thought back ...

  * * *

  Frank was apparently satisfied that I had seen Mary Clarke and she was all right. However, hearing that she had been a party to her sister’s stealing mob money he relieved me of any further obligation to find her.

  “You did what I asked you to do, Eddie,” he’d said. “Now forget it.” And he went to his suite, where Juliet Prowse was waiting for him....

  Forget it? Two sisters rip off a mob bookkeeper, who thinks he’s a wise guy and hires cheap talent to hunt them down. They all end up dead. The cheap talent, Capistrano and Favazza; Vito Balducci, the bookkeeper, who nobody ever saw again after I left him with MoMo Giancana that night in the El Cortez coffee shop; and both Lily and her sister, Mary Clarke. And there was an unnamed accomplice, a woman who had pretended to be Lily D’Angelo speaking to me on the phone from Chicago. It was probably some innocent friend Lily had stuck by the phone, who didn’t know what she was getting involved in. Maybe she never found out.

  I say two dead women because not only was Lily dead, but Mary Clarke’s body was found several months later in a shallow desert grave. No one knew what became of the money she and Lily had stolen from Vito, but since all three were dead, the assumption was that the money had gone back where it belonged.

  And so the dead were forgotten.

  Over the years Frank Sinatra never mentioned Mary Clarke to me again. He also never married Juliet Prowse. He did marry Mia Farrow but that didn’t last, and finally married Barbara, who was now his widow. However, people who knew him well—better than I did—still insisted that Ava Gardner was the love of his life—and vice versa. But Ava was gone, too.

  As the small crowd began to disperse and move away from the grave I drifted along with them. Joey had an assistant who walked along with him, holding him by the elbow. The halcyon days were gone, for the boys, for him, and for me, too.

  I was flattered that I had been included with Joey and the family as the only ones to accompany the coffin from Los Angeles to the Cathedral City grave site. The family didn’t pay me much mind, except for a nod and a smile from Barbara at the service. The others probably didn’t know me. I was only there because Frank had invited me—but that’s another story.

  I walked to my rental car. My suitcase was in the trunk. One night in a hotel was enough. I had a plane back to Vegas in two hours.

  * * *

  Where else would I live, even though the casinos had no use for me now? I had been an honest dealer for years, and then a straight pit boss for many more years. When the Sands was torn down, so wa
s I. I was done working Vegas. Now I just lived there, sustained by my savings, and my memories.

  Memories . . . driving to the airport I had nothing to do but sift through my Rat Pack memories, and I remembered Barney Crane. He was the dealer I’d had my buddy Jerry Epstein stare at back in 1960. I’d hoped the attention would stop Barney doing what he was doing. I’d noticed that he was working with a partner, cheating the Sands out of chips at a nonlethal pace. Nonlethal because the Sands wouldn’t go broke from what Barney and his cohort were stealing, but Barney would be pocketing some walking-around money.

  As I’ve said before, I hated when players tried to cheat at one of my tables. Arms and legs had been broken in the effort to dissuade them from coming back. But what I hated even more was a dealer, or pit boss, who cheated. And it was a lot easier for a dealer to cheat when he had a pit boss working with him.

  After the whole Mary Clarke debacle I’d gone back to work and the first thing I did was turn Barney and his dealer buddy in to Jack Entratter. Jack told me he’d take care of it.

  “You want me to sit in?” I’d asked. Remember, Jack liked his people to follow through on these things.

  “Not this time, Eddie,” he’d said. “Why don’t you just stay clean on this one?”

  I never saw Barney Crane or that dealer again. Two more victims of that summer of Ocean’s 11

  Author’s Note

  Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

  There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs — commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

  Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?— Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster — tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

  But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

  Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

  But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

  Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,--though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board--yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.

  No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just pr
evious to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

  What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

  Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

  Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this: