Black Money

26

It was still day, with a searchlight sun glinting along the sea, when the plane took off for Las Vegas. We flew away from the sun and came down into sudden purple dusk.

I took a cab to Fremont Street. The jostling neon colors of its signs made the few stars in the narrow sky look pale and embarrassed. The Scorpion Club was one of the larger casinos on the street, a two-story building with a three-story sign on which an electric scorpion twitched its tail.

The people at the slot machines inside seemed to work by similar mechanisms. They fed in their quarters and dollars with the left hands and pulled the levers with their right like assembly-line workers in a money factory. There were smudge-eyed boys so young that they hadn’t begun to shave yet, and women with workmen’s gloves on their lever hands, some of them so old and weary that they leaned on the machines to stay upright. The money factory was a hard place to work.

I worked my way through the early-evening crowd, past blackjack and roulette tables, and found a pit boss watching the crap tables at the rear of the big room. He was a quick-eyed man in an undertaker’s suit. I told him I wanted to see the boss.

“I’m the boss.”

“Don’t kid me.”

His glance darted up to the ceiling. “If you want to see Mr. Davis, you got to have a good reason. What’s your reason?”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Tell me.”

“Mr. Davis might not want me to.”

His gaze came to rest on my face. I could feel his dislike. “You want to see Mr. Davis, you got to tell me the nature of your business.”

I told him my name and occupation, and the fact that I was investigating two murders.

He didn’t change expression. “You think Mr. Davis can help you out?”

“I’d like to ask him.”

“Wait here.”

He disappeared behind a curtain. I heard him going upstairs. I stood by one of the green tables and watched a girl in a low-backed gown fling herself and the dice around. This was the creative end of the money factory, where you got a chance to finger the dice, and talk to them.

“They’re getting hot for me,” she said.

She was a nice looking-girl with a cultivated voice, and she reminded me of Ginny. The man who stood behind her and provided her with money wore furry black sideburns and dude clothes, including high-heeled boots. From time to time, when the girl won, he let out a synthetic vaquero whoop. His hand kept slipping lower on her back.

The pit boss came downstairs and jerked a thumb at me from the edge of the curtain. I followed him behind it. A second man loomed up behind the arras and went over me for iron. His head looked like a minor accident on top of his huge neck and shoulders.

“You can go on up.”

He followed me.

Mr. Davis was waiting at the head of the stairs. He was a smiling man with a politician’s malleable face and a lot of wavy mid gray hair. He wore a pin-striped gray suit with slanting pockets and pleated shoulders, for action. Mr. Davis hadn’t had much action lately. Even the careful tailoring of his suit couldn’t harden or conceal the huge soft egg of his belly.

“Mr. Archer?”

“Mr. Davis.”

He didn’t offer me his hand, which was just as well. I don’t like shaking hands with men wearing rings with stones in them.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Archer?”

“Give me a few minutes. We may be able to do something for each other.”

He looked dubiously at my plain old California suit, and at my shoes. Which needed polishing. “That I doubt. You mentioned murder downstairs. Anyone I know?”

“I think so. Francis Martel.”

He didn’t react to the name. I showed him the picture. He reacted to it. He snatched it out of my hand and hustled me into his office and closed the door.

“Where did you get hold of this?”

“In Montevista.”

“Was Leo there?”

“Not recently. This isn’t a recent picture.”

He took it to his desk to study it under the light. “No, I see it isn’t recent. Leo will never be that young again. Neither will Kitty.”

He seemed to take pleasure in this fact, as if it made him younger by comparison. “Who’s the character with the tray?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

He looked up at me. “It wouldn’t be Cervantes?”

“Feliz Cervantes, alias Francis Martel.” Alias Pedro Domingo. “He was shot today, on Sabado Avenue in Brentwood.”

Davis’s eyes went dead. I noticed that this kept happening. They would show a flicker of interest or curiosity, or even malice, then sink back into lifelessness.

“You want to tell me about the shooting?” he said.

“Not keenly, but I will.”

I gave him a short account of Martel’s death and what led up to it. “You can read the rest of it in the early-morning papers.”

“And the killer got the money, is that right?”

“Evidently. Whose money is it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said with sudden vagueness.

He got up and walked away from me the length of the long office, surveying the desert photo-murals on the walls. His footsteps were silent on the desert-colored rug. There was something a little female about his movements, and more than a little ominous, as if his huge belly was pregnant with death.

“It wouldn’t be your money, would it, Mr. Davis?”

He turned and opened his mouth as it to yell, but produced no sound. Soundlessly he walked toward me, making a little sideways dance-step as he passed the horseshoe desk.

“No,” he whispered into my face. “It wouldn’t be my money and I had nothing to do with knocking him off.”

He smiled and nudged me as if he was going to tell me a joke, but there was no humor in his smile. “In fact I don’t know why you come to me with this spiel of yours.”

“You’re Leo’s partner, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“And Cervantes was his boy.”

“How do you mean, his boy?” Davis nudged me again. His pleated shoulders opened and closed with the gesture, making it obscene.

“I thought you’d be able to tell me, Mr. Davis.”

“Think again. I only saw Cervantes once in my life, and that was last year when he came here with Leo. I don’t know what the deal was. Whatever it was, I don’t want any part of it. I’m a legitimate businessman conducting a legal business, and incidentally Leo is not my partner. There’s nothing on the record that says he owns any part of this casino. As for me, I want no part of him.”

It was a bold statement. Davis didn’t quite strike me as a bold man. I was beginning to wonder if Leo Spillman was dead, too.

“Where can I find Leo?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You send him money, don’t you?”

“He should send me money.”

“How so?”

“You ask too many question. Beat it now, before you make me nervous.”

“I think I’ll stick around. I need help with an income tax problem. Not mine, Leo’s. And maybe yours.”

Davis leaned on the wall, sighing. “Why didn’t you tell me you were Internal Revenue?”

“I’m not.”

“Then you misrepresented yourself just now.”

“The hell I did. You can talk about income tax without working for the federal government.”

“Not to me you can’t. You can’t con your way into my office masquerading as a federal agent.”

He knew I hadn’t, but he needed some point of focus for his anger. He seemed to have no focal point in himself. I’d known other front men like him in Vegas and Reno; barroom glad-handers who had lost their gladness, smilers who gradually realized that they were fronting for death and belonged to it.

“The feds are looking for Leo. I guess you know that,” I said.

“I guess I do.”

“Why can’t they find him? Is he dead?”

“I wish he was.”

He snickered.

“Did you have Cervantes shot?”

“Me? I’m a legitimate businessman.”

“So you were telling me. It doesn’t answer the question.”

“It wasn’t a good question.”

“I’ll see if I can frame a better one – the hypothetical kind they ask the experts in court.”

“I’m no expert, and we’re not in court.”

“Just in case you ever are, it will be good practice for you.”

He didn’t feel the needle, which probably meant he was feeling deeper pains. “How much black money did Leo siphon out of your counting room?”

He answered blandly. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Naturally you wouldn’t know about it. You’re too legitimate.”

“Watch it,” he said. “I’ve taken as much from you as I’ve ever taken from anybody.”

“Did he make discount deals with the big losers and use Cervantes to collect and stash the money?”

Davis looked at me carefully. His eyes were dead but unquiet. “You ask the kind of questions that answer themselves. You don’t need me.”

“We need each other,” I said. “I want Leo Spillman, and you want the money he milked out of the business.”

“If you’re talking about that money in L.A., it’s gone. There’s no way for me to get it back. Anyway, it’s nickels and dimes. Our counting room handles more than that every day of the year.”

“So you have no problem.”

“None that you can help me with.”

Davis took another of his walks to the end of the room and back. He moved warily, with a kind of female stealth, as if his desert-colored office was actual desert, with rattlesnakes under the rug.

“If you do catch up with Leo,” he said, “you might let me know. I’m willing to pay you for the information. Say five grand, if it’s exclusive.”

“I wasn’t planning to hire myself out as a finger.”

“Weren’t you?”

He took another good look at my suit. “Anyway, the offer stands, bud.”

He opened the door for me. The man with the wide shoulders and narrow head was waiting to accompany me downstairs. The girl who reminded me of Ginny was at one of the crap tables with a different escort. Everything that happened in Vegas seemed to be a repetition of something that had happened before.

I caught a plane back to Los Angeles and slept in my own bed.