“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Siegel snarled.
“Just-just s-sitting here…”
“Get back to work, you bum, before I boot your ass out on the highway.”
The round-faced man looked at me and then at Raft, whom he obviously recognized but was too bewildered by Siegel’s performance to be impressed by the presence of a mere movie star.
The man could only stutter: “B-but I’m a ga-ga-ga…”
“Spit it out!”
“Guest!”
“What?” Siegel said. Taken aback.
“I don’t work here…I’m a guest.”
Raft covered his mouth but I didn’t bother. My hand wouldn’t have been big enough to hide the grin.
Siegel, very embarrassed, started brushing off the shoulders of the guy’s tux, as if it had gotten dirty, which it hadn’t. He did his best to make it up to the guy, handing him one of the same courtesy cards the newspapermen got, giving him a free ride on everything except gambling itself.
We walked back into the casino and Siegel said, “Brother, is my face red.”
Frequently.
“I guess I oughta watch my fuckin’ temper…shit! Do you see who that is?”
A tall, slightly heavy-set man in a pinstripe suit, with satanically shaggy eyebrows, was standing at a slot machine, studying it like a sociologist might a pygmy hut.
Raft said nothing, but the mask of his face was grim.
“Pegler,” I said.
Siegler looked at me with a vicious, self-satisfied smile. “Westbrook Pegler is right.”
I shrugged. “Well, you wanted to attract newspapermen.”
“That bastard’s been cutting me up. Called me a hoodlum and carpetbagger. Called me Bugsy. In syndication.”
I could see Siegel’s shoulders tensing; his hands were fists.
Raft put a hand on Siegel’s arm. “Ben-he’s been cutting me up in his column, too. Ever since that gambling bust, but so what? That’s his racket. Live and let live.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Siegel said, quietly, smiling, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him.”
It was times like these I wished I’d taken my father’s advice and finished college.
“You’re not killing anybody,” Raft said. “You’re going to ruin it for yourself, if you do. Get a grip, baby-blue eyes.”
Siegel visibly softened.
But he walked over to Pegler, who had inserted a quarter into the slot machine and was yanking back the arm.
Raft and I followed; we seemed to be backing Siegel up, but in reality we were poised to grab and brace him, if necessary. Pegler, who I’d had a run-in with in Chicago back in ’39, looked right at me and didn’t recognize me. Like him, I was older and heavier, now.
“Mr. Pegler,” Siegel said.
“Yes?” Pegler said, losing his quarter, turning his gaze on Siegel, eyebrows raised, voice patrician. Pegler was one of those columnists who made a big deal about being for the common man while at the same time considering himself above just about everybody.
“My name is Ben Siegel.”
Pegler began to smile; he was searching for the right pithy comment, when Siegel stopped him.
With Pegler’s own weapon, words: “This is my casino. If you’re not out of here in five minutes, I’m going to take you out. Personally.”
Pegler’s smile wilted. He looked at Siegel carefully, slowly. Siegel’s back was to me, so I don’t know what expression he was showing Pegler. Whatever it was, it was enough to make the powerful columnist swallow thickly, tuck tail between his legs and go.
Siegel turned to us and opened his two hands like a magician displaying something that had disappeared. “See? I can control my temper when I want to.”
“Good,” I said. “Because it’s time you knew something.”
“What’s that?”
I turned to Raft. “Why don’t you park yourself at a blackjack table or something, for a while? Your face attracts too much attention. We need to be a little less conspicuous for a few minutes.”
Raft shrugged. “I’ll try the chemin-de-fer room.”
“Good idea,” I said.
Then he moved off, and I took Siegel by the arm. “What do you have in mind,” I asked him, “where these gambling losses are concerned?”
“In mind?”
“What do you intend to do about it?”
He shrugged facially. “Well, we’re switching dice more frequent. Cards, too. Tonight I’m gonna move dealers from table to table…”
“Some of your dealers need to be moved farther away than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you patted them down on their way out the door, you’d find subs full of chips.” A “sub” was a hidden pocket.
His eyes tensed. “You’ve seen this?”
“Have you got your temper in check?”
“Nate, I’m cool as a cucumber.”
“Good, because the answer is yes. I’ve seen half a dozen dealers sweeping chips into subs.”
“Christ, I interviewed them all myself!”
“Never mind that. Just take a look there.”
I nudged his attention to the roulette table where I’d been leading him; we were now about five feet away from it, behind and to one side of the croupier, a thin, hawk-faced man who was pushing chips across the table to a pockmarked heavy-set gentleman in a brown suit. The problem was, the pockmarked heavy-set gentleman who was having chips pushed his way was not winning.
“That guy isn’t hitting any winning numbers,” Siegel whispered harshly to me, after a while, his eyes large.
“Right,” I said. I nodded toward the croupier. “You get the pit boss to take him off the table. I’ll handle the phony player.”
Siegel, eyes narrowing, nodded. He turned away.
I walked up to the pockmarked player, thinking Siegel was off getting the pit boss.
But the Bug had changed his mind, because he was standing right behind the hawk-faced croupier.
“I oughta kill you, you son of a bitch!” he said, and punted the croupier’s ass.
It lifted the man off the floor and sent him skidding across the table, chips scattering. When he came to a stop, his hawkish nose pointed to the double-00 on the numbered felt.
“You lose,” Siegel said, and reached over and picked him up like baggage and hurled him into the aisle.
Without looking back, the ex-croupier picked himself up and ran. The astonished onlookers-and the very pleased Ben Siegel-watched the guy hurtle up into the lobby and out the front doors.
Siegel gestured big with his hands, like a ringmaster. “No cover charge folks!” he said, letting loose his dazzler of a smile.
And people, smiling too, if not dazzlingly, shaking their heads, chattering amongst themselves, turned back to their gambling.
Siegel came over to me and slipped his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go have a talk.”
We walked across the terraced green grounds that not so long ago had been barren, and he walked me across the painted, carpeted lobby of the unfinished hotel and took me up the elevator to the penthouse suite.
We sat on the chintz-covered sofa. He was drinking tonic water; I had some rum on ice.
He was shaking his head. “I hired those guys myself, Nate.”
He meant the dealers and other casino floor people.
“Most of them local?” I asked.
“Right. I screened them all personally.”
“After Sedway thinned the pack, you did.”
“Right.” His eyes slitted. “What are you saying?”
“I think there’s widespread cheating going on out there. And I don’t think it’s random.”
“You mean, it’s organized?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Moey?”
“Who else?”
“What about Quinn?”
I shook my head no. “He’s not smart enough, and besides, I put him on notice. He’s too scared of you to pull anything. He’s even scared of me. Moey? Moey resents you, and that breeds a kind of bravery.”
“Moey resents me?”
“I think it goes back to that scuffle you had over politics.”
He sat and thought about that.
I went on: “I think he’s angling to take over. My guess is he’s trying to make you look bad to your friends back east.”