Glitz

19

“IT’S LIKE YOU’RE IN A HOTEL in Star Trek,” Vincent said. “You know what I mean? It’s so modern you don’t know how to open anything or turn the lights on.”

Dixie said, “They comped you to a suite? Come on.”

“They like me,” Vincent said. “Or they want to keep an eye on me.”

He sat with the telephone in a corner of the gold sectional sofa, wrapped in a king-size gold towel. Dixie Davies was home in Brigantine, in the kitchen.

“Everything’s either green or gold.”

“The color of money. Keep you reminded.”

“With white walls, means they’re honest. I don’t know what the paintings mean. I’ve got a bar, stocked. I’ve got a phone in the bathroom. Three phones, one in each room. The bathtub, you could get four people in it. You walk down steps.”

“I’m about to eat supper,” Dixie said. “You want to know what we’re having? Meatloaf.”

“I got shot at,” Vincent said.

There was a slight pause. “I believe it. Ricky?”

“I was hoping, but it wasn’t.”

“Say you got good reason to think it was and I’ll get a warrant. Give me a chance to go through his house.”

Vincent told him about it and said, “Does that sound like those guys? It wasn’t set up right. One guy, takes a wild shot and runs. He didn’t even have a driver… You might check stolen vehicles for a yellow Monte Carlo at least five years old.”

“The hotel report it, the shooting?”

“Nobody heard a thing. I ran outside in my underwear, got my gun, I’m coming back in a drunk is standing there on the sidewalk looking at me, weaving. You know what he said?”

“Atlantic City, three o’clock in the morning,” Dixie said, “Resorts International across the street, he told you don’t do it, it ain’t worth it. Think of your wife and kids.”

“He said, ‘You should a bet your underwear. You never know when your luck’ll change.’ I checked out, I said I want to pay for the window too. They said, what window? Miami Beach, a hundred old ladies would’ve called it in, seen the whole thing.”

“I’d still like to pick up Ricky,” Dixie said.

“You could keep an eye on him,” Vincent said. “He’s supposed to meet me tomorrow, but it wouldn’t surprise me he’s gonna go see Frank Cingoro first. You know what I mean? Call Frank up and if there’s no answer he could be lying on the floor. The way those guys are doing each other-and I bet Ricky thinks he’s got every reason. Would you like to see that?”

Dixie said, “Would I like to see it, I’d buy tickets. You kidding? Jesus, bring Ricky up for doing the Ching and send his ass to Trenton. I’m getting excited thinking about it.”

“The thing is,” Vincent said, “I’m pretty sure none of those people had anything to do with Iris.”

“I have to agree with you,” Dixie said. “On the one hand it’s no help with the girl, but on the other… You never know, do you?”

“Wonderful things can happen,” Vincent said, “when you plant seeds of distrust in a garden of assholes.”

“Wait, I want to write that down.”

“I talked to Jackie Garbo. Very entertaining guy. I think he used to get beat up a lot when he was a kid. He’s on shaky ground, running games outside the casino. You can tell he’s nervous and you could use it to grab him by the balls. Except he doesn’t know anything. I mean about Iris. I’m pretty sure.” Vincent said, “This’s some town. You got a lot going.”

“You ever want to work here,” Dixie said, “I could probably fix it.”

“Leave my suite, my phones?… How about the autopsy report?”

“Be another week or so.”

“What’s the hurry, uh?”

“You want to complain, call Newark.”

“In the meantime,” Vincent said, “ask Jimmy Dunne about a delivery, some sandwiches…”

“From the White House Sub Shop. We checked,” Dixie said, “they don’t have a record of it. We talked to Jimmy again, he said it must’ve been from some other place.”

“He describe the delivery boy?”

“White male, thirties, blond hair, suede jacket. Could be anybody.”

When Linda came Vincent made drinks and they got in the bathtub and played.

“You realize,” he said, “you could get away with this for at least a month? Go from hotel to hotel, deposit the same twelve grand?” Linda smiling as she listened. “Soon as they find out you’re not gonna spend it you move on. Do all the hotels here and then go out to Las Vegas.”

“You’re in the wrong business,” Linda said. “You should be a crook. You are a crook.”

“I may gamble, if I have time.”

“When you’re not taking baths.”

She got out of the tub to make fresh drinks and light cigarettes. Vincent watched her-waited on by a good-looking naked woman he felt at home with in a $500-a-day hotel suite. She wasn’t the least bit self-conscious, looking at the bath oils and lotions on the marble vanity. She was the first woman he had ever seen without tan lines, her white skin making her appear more genuinely naked and appealing to him. He said, “What’re you doing? Get back in here.”

“I have to go to work soon,” Linda said. “I’m opening tonight, kid, at Bally’s.” She threw her arms out and struck a pose. “Linda Moon, Now Appearing…”

“You sure are. But you didn’t tell me.”

She let her arms drop. “That’s what I’m doing, telling you. Why’re you so surprised?”

“I thought it was down the road, a couple weeks off if you got it.”

“I had to get it. Vincent, I work, I don’t sit around.”

“But right now…” He hesitated. “Whoever it was last night, he finds out you’re at Bally’s… I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

She stood at the edge of the recessed tub, hands on round white hips, looking down at him.

“Vincent, I spent half the day with the entertainment director… Where do you think I’ve been?”

“I knew where you were.” He was having trouble, looking up, keeping his eyes on her face.

“Yeah, but did you really care?”

“What’re you mad at?”

“I got the entertainment guy-I wouldn’t leave his office till he said, okay, I can play anything I want, my music, Vincent… Look at me. Quit staring at my crotch. I played a rehearsal set and he loved it-as much as those guys can love anything, but he said go ahead. That’s the thing, I can play what I want… Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“Well, look at me. Do you know what this means?”

“Yeah, I understand.”

“I’ve been working my ass off for a shot like this, Bally’s Park Place, my charts, and you want me to hide in a hotel room. You want to protect me, Vincent, then come sit in the audience.”

“What time are you on?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Okay. We’ll come back here after.”

“And take another bath,” Linda said.

The phone rang.

He met Nancy Donovan in the lounge: dark and quiet in here between sets. They’d have a drink first and then she would take him into the casino, show him around.

She told him if he didn’t like his rooms he could choose another suite. Or if there was anything at all he wanted… He said no, it was fine; green and gold were his high school colors. He liked the bathtub a lot; he said you could practically swim in it, do all kinds of things. He said he liked the view, he liked to watch the ocean when it was breaking in with a high surf. They covered the weather and beaches in New Jersey, Florida and Puerto Rico.

She was a much different type than Linda. Both were confident, looked right at you; but Nancy hung back, in no hurry, seemed to choose her words, while Linda came right at you and said what she felt. Sort of like Jackie Garbo, with class. He said, “I had a nice chat with Mr. Garbo. He’s a pretty hip little guy, isn’t he?”

“He hopes desperately you’ll think he is,” Nancy said.

“You don’t care for him too much.”

She said, “As long as he does his job,” and shrugged her shoulders, sitting in her fashion-model slouch. Nancy would model expensive clothes and have the walk down-whatever way the models were walking this year. Linda would model lipstick, her mouth partly open. He had wanted to bite her lower lip right off, without hurting her. They were about the same size, both slim; but he believed their bodies would look different side by side, naked. Linda pulled off her sweater and there were those white beauties with the pink tips looking right at you while her head was still in the sweater. He believed Nancy wore a bra and her breasts would be as tan as the rest of her body. He had never seen a deeply tanned ass. Just as Linda was the first woman he could remember without tan lines at all. Nancy said, “You’re deciding what you want to play.”

Vincent smiled. “How’d you know?”

“I’ll bet you like blackjack.”

“You’re pretty good.”

“Will you play with green chips or black?”

“Green are worth… twenty?”

“Twenty-five. Black a hundred.”

“You ever comp anybody who just plays the slots?”

Teddy walked through Bally’s, the Claridge and the Sands without seeing one lady who was his type. The girl of his dreams would be in the 58-to-65 range, not too big, with dyed hair or a wig and played the slots with a big cup full of coins and a drink on the counter in front of her. A cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth was a good sign, and if she was coarse in her speech, a kidder, that was the best sign of all she was the one for him. Close to eight, the casinos were filling up with the evening rush of greedy spenders and would be going strong with lights flashing and bells ringing for hours. He felt security people, with their name badges and walkie-talkies, looking him over. They weren’t, but that’s what he felt. Like driving and seeing a cop and getting nervous for no reason. He had reason last night to be nervous. Jesus, the way the hotel room door came open in his hand. Not expecting it-that’d scare the shit out of anybody. It was a good plan, it was just the cop had probably got up to take a leak and happened to hear the key turn. But the door had been double-locked so it wouldn’t have worked anyway… He had in mind now another plan. Follow the cop in his car, the Datsun. Pull up next to him at a light and let the cop get a look, surprise the hell out of him. Not wave or yoo-hoo at him, he’d have to be cool, but make sure the cop saw him. Then zip ahead and let the cop follow. Take him out Longport Boulevard and over the JFK Bridge, out in the marshland and pull off the road. The cop comes over to the car, looks in the window right at him, close, eye to eye. Pow pow pow… Soon as he got some money. Shit, he didn’t even have enough on him to buy gas.

Teddy left the Sands and headed for Spade’s Boardwalk, next stop in his quest for the ideal old lady.

Leaving the lounge Nancy held onto his arm, guided him through the lobby to the familiar gold elevators. Vincent said he thought she was going to show him the casino.

“I am, but a way few people ever see it.”

She brought him along the executive hall to the surveillance room: to the bank of monitors, twenty movies playing at one time: deadpan characters suspended, waiting for the turn of a card; the slot players, the “high pullers” at the dollar machines; only the crapshooters animated. Vincent said, “I could spend some time here.” Nancy said, “You haven’t seen anything yet.” She introduced him to Frances Mullen who glanced up from a monitor off to the side. Frances said, “Be with you in a minute.”

“She’s watching the soft-count room,” Nancy said and pointed to the dropboxes that were brought in from the tables at the end of each shift, the money taken out and counted by employees in coveralls, no pockets, then transferred to the main cage. When Frances turned to them she said, “Well, here’s a familiar face. You were playing blackjack the other night-” Vincent saw her expression change as her eyes moved from him briefly and back again, a glance at Nancy close behind him shutting her up.

“I won four hundred seventy bucks,” Vincent said, imagining himself on one of the screens, “and I swear I didn’t cheat.” He was sure Nancy had a picture of him.

She said, “They would’ve caught you if you tried. If the dealer or the pit boss didn’t spot you Frances would. Come on, I want to show you something else.”

He followed Nancy along the hall, through a door and down a metal stairway, a ship’s ladder, into a dark area that resembled the rafters of a building, the crawl space above the ceiling. Except that here you could stand upright, follow a wide catwalk with handrails, and from both sides of it look down through one-way smoked glass at the casino floor: at the tables, the slot machines, the mass of players and strollers less than ten feet below.

“The Eye in the Sky,” Nancy said.

Teddy had read somewhere they had over sixteen hundred slots here at Spade’s. He wouldn’t want to count them; though he could, moving up one row and down another, looking for the girl of his dreams. Jesus, but dollar slot made a racket, those big slugs clanging in the tray. He liked the sound of quarter-slot payoffs better; it sounded more like real money, the coins chinging down on top of one another. Half-dollar payoffs were somewhere in between, a hefty sound and real too.

He’d stop and play a quarter slot every once in a while. Won four bucks, lost it, won five, moved on with his green paper cup and lo, look-it there… a woman playing two machines at once, her territory staked out with a drink, two cups of coins and her purse there on the counter. Look at her, no wasted motions. She’d insert a coin, give the handle a yank and step to the other machine as the first one spun. A payoff less than a big one not even making her pause to look. Back and forth feeding half-dollars like she was working on a factory line. Letting up, but only to get out a cigarette. Now there’s a cute woman, Teddy thought. Right around sixty, hair a pretty henna color that went with her gray knit pants suit and pink blouse. Her glasses flashed as she looked at a big heavy woman who stopped by her and said, “Marie, we’re going over the deli get a bite t’eat.” Marie lit her cigarette, blew smoke at the woman and said, “Go ahead.” Independent little woman, wasn’t she?

Teddy said, God, let her win. She deserves it.

Vincent stood with his hands on the metal rail looking straight down through the angled pane of glass at a blackjack table where two men and a woman were playing with green chips; he could read their cards. “It’s so close to everything.”

“But when you’re down there you don’t notice it,” Nancy said. “We’re part of the sparkling decor. No one looks up anyway.”

“Covers the whole floor?”

She nodded, indicating the length of the catwalk. “Goes all the way to the end, over to the other side of the room and comes back.”

“You have people in here?”

“Sometimes, or if they spot something on the monitors, a dealer slipping a chip behind his tie. Or a player they think is cheating, like trying to double his bet after the dealer shows his cards.” Nancy had moved close to him, their arms touching. “At the moment we’re alone.”

She stared through the glass at the floor below, letting him look at her and feel her close and get the scent of her perfume-more subtle than Linda’s, more expensive. Linda would have said, “We’re alone,” and rolled her eyes at him or given him a vampy look as she reached for his fly; and he’d jump. But it could work either way. Nancy’s method, stagey-serious, must be working because he felt a clear urge to make the next move. Grade it later, what it meant. They were fooling around, that’s all, flirting a little. It didn’t have anything to do with Linda. Except that Linda did appear in his mind and he had to say to her, in there, What am I doing? I’m not doing anything. It was his having been raised a good boy that was trying to hook him with guilt, ruin his chances here. Hell, Linda was a friend, her life was music…

Nancy said, “Tommy’s down there, somewhere. With another one of our big spenders.” She gave Vincent a nudge.

“I still haven’t met him.”

“Do you want to?” Her voice very quiet.

He could hear a hum of sound from the floor. “It’s not important. I don’t think he knows anything about Iris, what happened to her.”

“You’re being kind,” Nancy said. “He knows very little about anything that happens around here.”

Vincent kept quiet.

“He’s drunk most of the time.”

She was telling him to make the move, it was okay.

“I’ve always thought I was a fairly good judge of character. At least had an eye for typecasting. But I really blew it with Tommy. I married him on impulse, much too quickly.”

She was saying, come on, let’s go. What’re you waiting for?

“We talk about business, but it’s been months… Well, never mind.”

And you say, Vincent thought. “What has?”

“Since we’ve slept together.”

Do it, will you? Go ahead. He couldn’t think of anything to say, which was just as well. It was time, very quiet, the urge, the tender feeling there. Tender enough. He turned her face to his with his hand, gently; their mouths came together, he felt her tongue… and heard bells ringing, like a fire alarm, from somewhere almost directly below them. Their faces still close, her nice brown eyes smiling at him, she said, “Jackpot.” Now Vincent smiled. Why not? And closed his eyes again as she closed hers, going for those slightly parted lips.

Well, Marie had quit working her two machines now with the bell ringing and those fifty-cent pieces still coming out, letting up for a few seconds then pouring out again, some spilling on the floor there were so many. Teddy grabbed an empty cup and got down there to pick them up. He set the cup next to her purse saying, “ ‘Ey, you won four hundred dollars. Not too shabby. I just hit two hundred bucks myself over to the Sands. It’s nice, ‘ey?”

Marie raised her eyebrows, proud of herself. She looked at him through smudged glasses; the frames were gray, with sequins. “Them others go and eat all the time. I tell ’em you got to play if you expect to win.”

“That’s the truth,” Teddy said. “And you got to know which slots to play, the ones timed to go off.”

Marie turned back to her scooping, but then looked at him over her shoulder. “I heard it pays it don’t empty. They’s always money in it.”

“That’s right,” Teddy said, “but you heard of frequency modulation? See, the big jackpots are timed to pay off at certain times or frequencies, when there’s lots a people around.”

Marie said she never heard of such a thing.

Teddy looked at his watch. “Well, I got, let’s see, about twenty-five minutes to get back to the Sands where I’m pretty sure a couple half-dollar slots’re gonna pay off. I been watching ’em all day. See, I live right here.”

“You wouldn’t kid me,” Marie said.

“Come on, you don’t believe me. I been studying slots since they opened Resorts, the first one. I don’t even have to work.” He took a quarter out of his pocket and held it up. “See this? Got nineteen seventy-eight on it?”

Marie said, “So?”

“I been playing this quarter for six years. I never lost with it. I hold this quarter over the slot? I know when it’s gonna pay and when it ain’t.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I still have it, don’t I?… You coming or not?”

“I just might. Sands the next one up?”

“Take us fifteen minutes.”

“I got to cash in first.”

“Well, hurry up, will you?”

Act like her kid. If she had one it would seem natural to her if he was grouchy. Marie did; she had three grown sons. She had come on a bus from Harrisburg where she was a checkout girl in a supermarket; they were going home at nine. Out on the Boardwalk Teddy told her she just had time to win another pot. Wasn’t it a beautiful night after all that rain? He told her when he was little they used to go under the Boardwalk and look up through the cracks at girls in dresses. They called it stargazing.

Marie said, “You were a little dickens, weren’t you?”

Teddy said, “ ‘Ey, look. There a bunch a stars out tonight.”

Marie looked up.

And Teddy said, “Oh, no!” He sunk to his hands and knees, got down close to a space between the boards. “I dropped my lucky quarter!”

Marie bent over. “You see it?”

“It fell down underneath. I got a find it.” He worked his face into a frown. “God, wouldn’t you know?… I’m sure it’s right down there, right below us.” He looked at Marie. “You got a lighter, haven’t you?”

She said, “Yeah, but…”

“Come on, we can find it. I know we can.”