Playland (34 page)

I
t was a sunday when I heard that Jake King was in Vegas, Arthur French said.

How can you be sure it was a Sunday, Arthur?

Because we played polo on Sunday. At Will Rogers’s place. And I remember I was playing polo when I heard. So it had to be a Sunday. J.F. told me Lilo was upset. He—Lilo, not J.F.—had this man in Vegas, I think it was the sheriff …

Matty Cassady …

I can’t remember his name. He was on some sort of retainer to Benny Draper …

The U.S. attorney called it a bribe.

Jack, I’m not interested in details like that, you can find that in the newspapers, it was, what, forty-five years ago? You said you wanted ambiance, the
mise-en-scène
.

I would say polo was a definite
mise-en-scène
, Arthur. Polo. At Will Rogers’s. Who else played?

Tracy. Zanuck. Howard Hawks. Everyone was there. It was what we did on Sunday. J.F. Chuckie. Blue. Lilo and Rita. Jack Ford sometimes. Mitch Leisen. Kate, if Spencer was playing. Charlie Feldman. Jean Howard. Jean’s got some wonderful pictures of those polo Sundays, you should call her. David and
Jennifer. One Sunday after polo, we were having lunch—Nancy and Eddie Clanahan always catered—and Jennifer led a conga line into the pool. All of us with our clothes on. Even J.F. Jean has the photograph in her book.

Okay. Now how does Matty Cassady figure in this?

Matty who?

The Clark County sheriff Benny Draper had on retainer.

Oh, yes. Well, apparently this Matty called Lilo that Sunday, and he said the Jake was over in Vegas spreading some money around. For what reason we didn’t know. Although we found out soon enough. And Lilo was upset. It was just another problem he didn’t need. Benny Draper was also there that Sunday. Benny and J.F. were having a fight over whether the OMPCE would strike Cosmo or not, and J.F. thought Benny was becoming too expensive a proposition …

“Since when are you a lawyer, Matty?” Lilo Kusack said into the telephone. He and Benny Draper were sitting at a glass-topped table under a peppermint-striped umbrella. At the next table, J. F. French, in an oversized Panama hat, sat next to Blue Tyler, who was wearing a sleeveless dirndl dress and ostentatiously chewing gum, pretending to watch the match but more intent on checking out who was looking at her. She waved at Chuckie O’Hara and Shelley Flynn and belatedly joined the smattering of applause as Arthur French backhanded his mallet and sent the ball bouncing away from his goal. “You’re just a cop …”

“A cop I buy, remind him,” Benny Draper said to Lilo. He caught Blue’s eye and lewdly flicked his tongue over his lips.

“Don’t spout the law at me, Matty,” Lilo said into the telephone. “I know Nevada’s a state, I know Nevada is part of the United States, I know being in Nevada is not a chargeable offense, and I know anyone can go there, even Jake King.” He listened for a moment, then said, “All right, okay, he belches, I want to know what he had for dinner. Okay? I’m interested, Benny Draper’s interested, Benny’s right here, he wants me to remind you he wants something for the money he pays you, you got that?” He listened. “We understand each other then.”

“I remember the days when you bought a cop, he stayed bought,” Benny Draper said when Lilo hung up the telephone. “Now you rent them by the day, like nigger help.” He pointed to the polo teams galloping up the field. “You know what that is out there? It’s baseball, on a horse. A slow horse. I like my horses faster. I like them to run around this way”—he traced a track in the air—“and I like to know who’s going to win before I put a bet down.”

“You want to hear about Jake King?” Lilo Kusack said.

“So he’s in Nevada, so what?” Benny Draper said.

“Jake King in Nevada means Morris Lefkowitz wants in,” Lilo said.

“Morris Lefkowitz comes into Nevada, even the whooores won’t work for him,” Benny Draper said. “He’s yesterday’s newspaper, an old man who can’t get it up anymore. You know how he does it now? He puts on a fur coat and watches girls do it.” He looked up as Rita Lewis sat down at the table with a plate full of food. “The one here,” he said, nodding in Rita’s direction, “is the last one he boffed, right, sweetheart? You were Morris’s last fuck, when was it, twenty years ago?”

Lilo Kusack watched Rita, ready to mediate in case she decided to pour her glass of wine into Benny Draper’s lap, and follow it with the plate of pasta. Putting up with Benny, he always told her, was the price of doing business with him, but putting up with anybody or anything was not something that came naturally to Rita Lewis.

“Was that before Capone, Rita, or after?” Benny Draper said.

Rita picked up her plate and her glass of wine. For an instant, Lilo thought everything was going to land on Benny, but then Rita smiled. Her killer smile, Lilo Kusack thought. Her one-day-I’ll-get-even smile. “It’s always a pleasure seeing you, Benny.”

“Hey, Rita,” Benny Draper said to Rita’s back as she moved toward Blue Tyler’s table, “you remember what Al died of?”

He punched Lilo Kusack on the arm and then exploded into a fit of giggles. “The syph.”

“Who’s this Al with the syph, Rita?” Blue Tyler asked as Rita
sat down, Blue’s hormonal antennae as always quivering at the faintest signal of sexual indiscretion.

“A mensch,” Rita Lewis said. She unfolded her napkin and drained her wineglass, then amended her answer. “Compared to Benny.”

“Benny’s just been sitting there looking at my boobs all afternoon,” Blue said. She lifted her hair and turned around so that the back of her dress faced Rita Lewis. “Fix my bra, would you, Rita? I think the strap in the back’s all tangled up, that must be why the wire in the cup’s so tight, and I don’t want to get cancer of the tits or anything like that, Lou Lerner, the doctor at the studio, he says I got to watch out for my titties all the time.”

“Call wardrobe, you want your fucking bra fixed,” Rita Lewis said, taking another glass of wine from a waiter. She put up with Blue for Lilo’s sake, and then only reluctantly. Rita had little tolerance for being patronized, and condescension was second nature to Blue, a perquisite of a box office deity, one adopted automatically for dealings with lesser mortals in the universe of film.

“What’re you so pissed off at?” Blue Tyler said, one hand reaching into the back of her dress as she tried to straighten the strap, bewildered and angry that Rita should take offense at what seemed to her only a reasonable request of her lawyer’s aging mistress. “I can’t help it if your friend Al had the syph, does Lilo know?”

More or less to herself, Rita said, “Afternoons like this, even Morris’s showroom looks good.”

“Morris?” Blue Tyler said, her inquisitiveness overriding her anger. “You mean that old man in New York Moe says I’m not supposed to mention.”

J. F. French roused himself. “Shhhh. Watch the polo.”

“Moe,” Blue said, “you ever heard of the Pledge of Allegiance?”

“Why you ask?” J. F. French said, alert and suddenly suspicious. If ever he thought his loyalty to his adopted country was under question, or his knowledge of its institutions less than
perfect, his grammar became uncertain and the accent he had tried so hard to lose more pronounced.

“I got to say it, that’s why. At the I Am an American dinner next week at the Ambassador you said I had to go and introduce that Congressman What’s-his-name, and now Barry Tyger thinks it’d be great if I lead the audience in this pledge. I hear it’s long. Do I have to memorize it? Or can I have cue cards?”

“It’s easy,” J. F. French said. He seemed visibly relieved, as if a challenge to his patriotism had been successfully met. “ ‘God bless America’ is how it begins.”

“Oh. Like the song that fat lady sings,” Blue Tyler said. “That’s cinchy.”

J. F. French stood and clapped as Arthur galloped down the field and pounded a loose ball into the goal.

“Look at Moe,” Benny Draper said at the adjoining table. “When his name was Moses Frankel, horse was something he ate. If he was flush.” He whistled to get J. F. French’s attention. “Hey, Moe, you know what they say? Poland to polo in one generation.”

J. F. French turned and whispered something to Blue, then moved over to Lilo’s table and sat down next to Benny Draper.

“So, Benny,” J. F. French said, removing his Panama hat and wiping the sweat from his brow. “We got a deal?”

“What Benny was just explaining to me, Moe,” Lilo Kusack said, “is that the offer on the table is not currently acceptable.”

“Lilo,” J. F. French said. “Tell Benny bribing him is becoming a fucking luxury.”

“Lilo,” Benny Draper said, “tell Moe to take a strike then. Either way he pays, and my way is cheaper. Easier to explain to his board in New York, too. And I hear he’s already in enough trouble there, with all those Red Communists he’s got under contract.”

“Listen, you fuck …” J. F. French said, his face turning purple.

“Moe, Benny,” Lilo Kusack said soothingly. “The Bolsheviks aren’t the issue here.”

“Lilo, what can I do?” Benny Draper said. “My people want
a strike. The cost of living is going up, I’m having a hard time keeping them in line, with this penny-ante offer Moe and the other studios are making.”

J. F. French started to answer, then thought better of it. “Lilo, you take care of this,” he said, getting up, “I want to watch the polo.”

Lilo fiddled with his fountain pen until J. F. French was out of earshot. “No strike for the life of the contract,” he said, “what’s it going to cost?”

“You deaf? You got wax in your ears? I keep telling you, two million. In cash.” Benny Draper watched J. F. French take a seat beside Blue Tyler. “Maybe a million if …”

Lilo waited for the other shoe to drop.

Benny Draper pointed to Blue Tyler. “If Moe lets her sit on my face.”

“I think Moe might think that’s a little steep.”

Benny Draper got to his feet. “You tell Moe, steep is when he can’t sleep at night because he don’t know who I’m going to pull out in the morning.” He perused Blue Tyler. “On second thought, it’s still two million. That one don’t look like she’d be all that hard to get to know.”

There was a gasp from the crowd as Arthur was thrown from his horse, and applause when he got up immediately and captured the horse’s reins.

“He rides like he’s still in Poland,” Benny Draper said.

“I’ll talk to Moe,” Lilo said. “We’ll get together.”

“You want to get hold of me, I’ll be at Santa Anita,” Benny Draper said. “Watching midgets who know how to stay on a horse.”

I
have always been partial to what Oliver Goldsmith called the “Advertisement” he placed at the beginning of
The Vicar of Wakefield
. “There are an hundred faults in this Thing,” he wrote, the Thing being his novel, “and an hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.” Without wishing to compare myself to Oliver Goldsmith, I can only say there are a hundred faults in this Thing, and numerous errors and absurdities.

To wit:

To the best of my knowledge, Jacob King perpetrated no act of violence resulting in loss of life during his initial foray into the Nevada desert. This opinion, and it is no more than that, is based on a close reading of the Nevada newspapers and law enforcement case files during the period when Jacob King was first said to have been in Las Vegas, as well as the period immediately thereafter. In this time frame, there were five deaths classified by municipal and Clark County authorities as homicides, all of which resulted in arrests, with the accused then taken to trial and in every case convicted; three of those convicted were
subsequently executed in the gas chamber at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. The other two victims were a murder-suicide (a pit boss at the Fremont who shot and killed the keno girl with whom he was living because she had taken up with a cocktail waitress at the hotel, and then killed himself by firing into his mouth the Smith & Wesson .38-caliber pistol he used to kill the keno waitress, severing his medulla oblongata). Even the fecund Harold Pugh (in either his Raul Flaherty or Waldo Kline manifestations) could find no evidence of a homicide that might have been attributed to Jacob King. There were also a half dozen deaths in the surrounding desert that the authorities categorized as suspicious, but one was a snake bite and a second a fall down the shaft of an abandoned talc mine and a third a hit-and-run victim and a fourth a driver with a blown tire who waited in his car with the engine on to keep warm in the frigid night air and was asphyxiated; and there were two gunshot suicides, one with a note, the other a woman with a history of mental instability.