“Did you hear about Tony?” he asked me, the smile settling in one corner of his mouth.
“Tony?” I asked.
“Cornero,” he said, as if I should’ve known. “The Coast Guard shut the Lux down a couple weeks after she launched.”
“You had a hunch that would happen,” I said.
“Yeah, those gambling ship days are over. You’re sitting in the middle of legal gambling in America. Say, uh, I’m very sorry about your friend Ragen.”
I nodded my thanks. Peggy lowered her eyes.
“That’s that bastard Guzik for you,” he said.
I said nothing.
He clapped his hands, dismissing that subject. “Ready to get to work?” he asked. “You only have ten days to whip my little police force in shape.”
“It won’t take me long,” I shrugged. “I assume there’s not much for them to do till you open-that I can have their full attention for a while.”
“Whatever you need.”
“Should be no big deal. They’re ex-cops, aren’t they? They should pick up fast on this stuff. They probably had some pickpocket training already.”
“They’re good boys,” Siegel said, nodding. “They’ve been on my payroll for years.”
“Anybody mind if I eat?” Virginia Hill asked, with poor grace.
“Feel free to feed your face, Tab,” Siegel said, just a little snidely.
“Just be more of me to love,” she said, and rose.
Siegel and I stayed behind, as the rest of his party went to the chuck wagon buffet. Siegel ordered off the menu-a steak, medium rare, and a salad; he was drinking a single glass of white wine. “Tabby,” as he referred to Miss Hill, had already run through her first two stingers.
“I may have some other work for you, Nate,” Siegel said, now that we were for the moment alone.
“Oh?”
“I may have a little security problem that can best be served by somebody from the outside-somebody like you.”
“I don’t understand. You said the boys on your security staff are longtime, trusted employees…”
“I don’t remember saying I trusted them. These are ex-cops, remember. They’re tied to me by the juice I spread around when they carried badges. These boys are, remember, what washed ashore after the shake-up in L.A. when his honor Mayor Shaw got booted the hell out. The rest are vets of a similar house-cleaning in Beverly Hills.”
“What sort of security problem are we talking?”
He sighed, sipped his wine, shrugged with his eyes. “Priorities,” he said, disgustedly, shaking his head. “Trying to put up the Taj Mahal in a fucking desert in eight months is enough of job, let alone having to goddamn do it whilst dancing around postwar priorities. Building materials and labor…both in short supply.” He shrugged with his shoulders this time. “But I’m getting the job done just the same.”
“How?”
“How do you think? Pulling strings. Paying top dollar. You know who Billy Wilkerson is?”
I nodded. He was the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter and the restaurateur behind Ciro’s and the Trocadero. I’d seen the little man in the latter nitery, a few years back, kissing the collective ass of Willie Bioff and George Browne, Frank Nitti’s Hollywood union bosses.
“Wilkerson’s one of my investors,” Siegel said. “He’s got influence on the movie execs. He got me lumber, cement, pipe, and you wouldn’t believe what all, right off the studio lots. And I got enough political clout in this state to get me steel girders, copper tubing, fixtures, tile and so on.”
“Sounds like you got it dicked.”
He sighed. “It takes dough, but yes, I do. And Moe’s been on my case because the community’s unhappy-VFW here held protest meetings, ’cause they couldn’t get materials for their new homes when I could for the Flamingo. I tell Moe, let ’em thank me for the money I’m gonna be pumping into the town. But some people can’t see something that’s right in front of them, let alone the future. Anyway, thanks to those protests I ended up having to do some dealing with fucking lowlifes to get materials.”
“Black marketeers, you mean.”
He nodded, frowning. “And I’m getting suspicious.”
“Of?”
“Of why I’m spending so goddamn much money on materials.”
“You think maybe you’re paying for the same materials twice.”
He leaned forward, cocked his head. “A truck pulls up, and it’s full of lumber, and I pay for it. How am I to know where they got it? They could’ve got it the night before from our own construction site.”
“It’s a common enough scam,” I granted him. “Who’s in charge of purchasing and receiving?”
“Me. I am.”
The others were returning now, plates of food in hand. Both girls had modest platefuls; my guess was Virginia Hill’s added weight came from drinking. They all took their places, the conversation going on, as if Siegel and I were still alone.
I sipped my iced tea. “Handling the purchasing and receiving yourself…don’t you have bigger fish to fry?”
His smile was disarming but also, I thought, mildly crazed. “Nate, I fry all the fish at the Flamingo. I’m where the buck starts and stops. When we’re up and running, well, sure I’ll hire some people to take care of the day-to-day proceedings. Down the road, I will. But this is my dream, and it’s up to me to make it come true. It’s up to me to supervise the kitchen crew, hire the big name entertainers, appoint the pit bosses, choose the decor for the hotel rooms…not a single employee is getting hired without my personal approval.”
“You’ve hired a hotel manager, and a casino manager, I assume…”
“No. That I’ll get around to. Down the road. For the time being, I’m it.”
“You have an accountant, for Christ’s sake…”
He smiled over at Peggy and she smiled briefly, nervously, back. Virginia Hill smirked and sipped her latest stinger.
“Miss Hogan is helping me look after the books,” he said, toasting her with his wine glass. “She’s got a background in that area. Down the road, we’ll hire somebody, or maybe I’ll put Peg in charge and get myself another secretary. But right now I need to have my finger on the pulse, so to speak.”
I sighed. Said, “Look. Mr. Siegel. No offense meant…”
“Keep it Ben, and speak your mind, Nate.”
Sedway, concentrating on his food (or pretending to), lifted an eyebrow and put it down.
“You can’t handle a job this size by yourself,” I said, “and expect not to get taken advantage of. How much have you spent so far?”
A waiter put Siegel’s salad in front of him. “Well over five at this point,” he said, picking at the lettuce with his fork.
“Five? Million?”
“Million,” he said with some condescension. “You don’t build palaces for peanuts, you know.”
“Where has it gone?”
“Where hasn’t it gone? Hell, I spent a million bucks on plumbing alone.”
“Plumbing?”
He grinned, flushed with pride. “Sure. Every one of my two hundred and eighty hotel rooms has its own private sewer system, its own private septic tank.”
“Ben,” I said, trying to keep my jaw from scraping the floor. “The best hotels in Chicago don’t have that.”
“That’s good enough for Chicago, maybe, but not the Flamingo,” Siegel said, flatly confident, eating his salad. “That place is going to stand forever. No goddamn wind or earthquake is going to blow that place away. I built the walls out of concrete-double thick.”
What particular advantage that would be in a climate this mild, where chicken wire and plaster would suffice, I couldn’t guess. But I didn’t say anything. I’d been in this conversation long enough to know that disagreeing with Bugsy was like arguing with, well, with a cement wall. A double-thick one.
A waiter removed Siegel’s half-eaten and pushed-aside salad and put the steak before him. “You wouldn’t believe what I been through here,” Siegel said, ignoring the steak. “Everything went wrong…take the other day, the fuckin’ drapes. Turns out they’re highly flammable and got to be shipped back to L.A. for chemical treatment. Then they install the air-conditioning system with intakes but no outlets and that all has to be ripped out and re-done. And when the heating equipment shows up, the concrete housing in the boiler room turned out to be too goddamn small and had to be built over. Jesus, there’s no end to it. I been paying fifty bucks a day to carpenters, bricklayers, tinsmiths, steel workers. Twelve hour days, seven days a week. With this labor shortage, I have to fly most of ’em in, from all over the country. That means paying bonuses, providing living quarters…” He was working himself up into a lather, and sensed it apparently, because he backed off, shrugging “…but the job’s getting done, that’s the important thing.”