I parked the Sunbird on the street between a pick-up truck and a row of Harleys. It was eight p.m. in beautiful downtown Haydee’s Port, and not really hopping yet, though the seven or eight bars on one side of the street and the eight or nine bars on the other were spilling red and blue and green and yellow neon onto the sidewalks along with loud music from country to heavy metal, frat rock to New Wave. The neon spillage made a sort of blurry melted rainbow but the melding of popular music was just plain noise.
Smoke and beer smell issued from every entryway, both invitation and threat, though it was too early for the bouquet of puke. Guys in groups of two or three or four swaggered along the sidewalk, window-shopping for just the right bar, but no similar groups of women were on the prowl.
I’d been told that early evening in Haydee’s Port was slow, but that it picked up from ten till maybe one and then stayed steady, although the crowd gradually shifted from those looking for wide-open fun to seekers of a bar that served alcohol after one a.m., closing time across the river.
The Lucky Devil was no classier than any other dive along Main Street, just bigger, taking up three storefronts, the right and left ones with front windows painted black. The center storefront allowed you to see into a dingy bar, and the only promise of something special were two signs in the window-one a big, bold red-and-black cartoon outlined in red neon of a grinning, winking devil’s head, right down to the regulation pointy mustache and beard; the other a red cursive blinking neon spelling out the establishment’s name.
I went through double-push doors into a space about the size of a high-school cafeteria and every bit as inviting. The front half of the smoky chamber was a drab collection of red-plastic-covered tables with old-fashioned wooden chairs, and (at the bar itself) stools whose red seat cushions were bursting. Behind the bartender, shelves of booze were back-lit red, but then the whole room was dimly lit and red-tinged, with beer-sign halos spotted around. The lighting was better at the rear, where up a few steps behind pipe railing, four pool tables under Schlitz chandeliers were all in use by guys in plaid shirts with rolled-up sleeves open to either white t-shirts or bare chests. They were either hicks or gay. Or gay hicks.
The joint was encased in the cheapest paneling known to God or man or even your Uncle Phil, beautified by black-marker graffiti that made dating and other suggestions. Right now the tables were about half full, and the bar about the same. The clientele appeared to be blue-collar or below, displaying lots of frayed, faded jeans, a look courtesy of factory work, not factory fabrication. One corner had been taken over by bikers in well-worn leathers-the bikers were pretty well-worn themselves, in their thirties or forties. Marlon Brando in The Wild One had been a long fucking time ago.
I was overdressed in my navy t-shirt and black jeans and running shoes, but nobody seemed to notice. I took one of the open stools at the bar and ordered whatever was on tap, and asked a few questions of the bartender, a guy in a blue-striped white shirt with rolled-up sleeves over a black t-shirt; he had black wavy hair and a thick black mustache, and looked a little like Tom Selleck’s dumber, not-so-good-looking brother.
“So where’s all this famous action I keep hearing about?” I asked pleasantly.
“What kind you looking for?”
“I keep an open mind.”
He leaned an elbow against the bar. “The girls over at those tables have trailers either side of the parking lot.”
Four girls in lots of makeup and with a plentitude of high feathered hair and a modicum of spandex dress were at a table smoking and staring at nothing, unless maybe they were playing invisible cards. They had drinks in tumblers that might have been whiskey but probably were tea. They looked like prom queens, if this were prom night in Hades, which it kind of was.
“Trailers out back, huh? What does twenty-five bucks get you?”
“Their attention. Now, if you’re interested in a game of chance, you’ll want to head that-a-way.”
The bartender gestured to a doorless doorway to the right of where the pool table level rose, presumably providing passage to the adjacent storefront. A brawny black guy in a black polo with a red cursive Lucky Devil on the breast and black jeans was seated on a wooden chair on a boxy platform, like a low-riding life-guard station. Or maybe he was just waiting for the right white guy to come along to give him a shoeshine. In any case, he was keeping watch on the bar and standing guard on that door, his arms folded like a genie; somehow I didn’t think he was granting wishes.
I finished my beer and wandered over there. I paused in front of the big black lifeguard and looked up at him, and asked, “Okay I go on in?”
“You free, white and twenty-one, ain’t you?”
I decided this was a rhetorical question, and went on through. I expected to find the casino, but did not-this was another bar, but with a big hardwood dance floor, lightly sawdusted, with a stage that butted up where the front window was blacked out. Under hot colored lights, four guys in cowboy hats and tattered t-shirts and jeans and boots were getting ready to play. The tables were only maybe a third full. It was so early the males and females were still in their own little enclaves.
This seemed a different clientele than next door, and was not that different from the dance crowd at the Paddlewheel Lounge. The age was twenties and early thirties, the male attire running from denim jackets to Hawaiian shirts, parachute pants to designer jeans, the female attire from leopard print tops to vests over tube tops, miniskirts to short shorts. A girl of maybe twenty-five in a black-and-yellow backless minidress, with high heels and a yard-in-all-directions of frizzy blonde hair twitched her taut tail as she headed from the ladies’ room back to her hive of half a dozen honeys.
I bought another beer and sat at the bar and watched as the band began to play Southern Rock at ear-bleed level, and waitresses in low-cut spandex minidresses took orders and not very discreetly dealt drugs. This section of the Lucky Devil had the same shitty wall paneling, but framed Patrick Nagel beauties and movie posters (Flashdance, For Your Eyes Only) indicated a vague sense of purpose if not style.
At the rear another bouncer perched on a lifeguard stand, a white guy this time, also in a Lucky Devil polo shirt-a bruiser with a nose that had been broken so many times you couldn’t really call it a nose anymore, and eyes that weren’t missing anything. Next to him were push-through doors, and patrons of various stripes had been cutting through to those doors, opening them to reveal glimpses of a bustling casino beyond.
I watched as the males and females began to intermingle-when they weren’t going off independently for a toot or what-have-you in the can, anyway-and took in the bar band’s respectable covers of ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and 38 Special, and made the beer last a good hour. This bartender was a skinny good-natured kid with thinning hair, a wispy mustache and a khaki shirt over an Alabama tee.
“Seems pretty tame,” I said, between songs. “I heard this place ran wild.”
“Wild enough. More flavors of sin than Baskin Robbins got ice cream.”
“I dunno. Nobody seems that frisky.”
He shrugged. “We have some heavy-duty bouncers, dude. Fights don’t last long in the Lucky.”
“Is the casino a key club or something? Or can any fool go back there?”
“Anybody with a few bucks and a ball or two is welcome.”
So I went back there. The casino took up only the back half of that one storefront-not a particularly impressive layout, drab and piddling and bare bones, compared to the Paddlewheel’s operation.
Overseen by two more bouncers at stubby lifeguard stands, the smoke-swirled room, with the same crummy wood paneling, had a craps table, a roulette wheel, two blackjack stations, and its own small bar, from which the waitresses in black spandex minidresses picked up their trays of free drinks for the suckers. Along two walls were slot machines, old ones, those squat metal numbers that dated back to the ’40s and ’50s-no video poker, and no flashy electronic modern numbers. Strictly old-fashioned one-armed bandits.
If the Paddlewheel was today, the Lucky Devil sure seemed like yesterday. The best I could say for them was they were catering to a younger crowd, with their Southern Rock and hot-and-cold running drugs. Otherwise this was pretty sad, as casinos went.
The patrons did not seem particularly well-heeled, at least not at this time of night, which was approaching ten. I saw everybody from farmers to factory workers to college kids, and in that sense the Lucky Devil gambling layout was democracy in action, bib-overalls, plaid shirts and Members Only jackets all voting with their money.
So far, I had seen nobody at the Lucky Devil who looked even vaguely like management. And I’d had a good description from Richard Cornell of both the old man, Gigi, and his son Jerry G.
“Odds of you seeing the old man,” Cornell had told me this afternoon, in his smaller, more businesslike second-floor office at the Paddlewheel, “are next to nil. He lives on the third floor of the building, and since his wife died ten years ago, he’s a goddamned hermit.”
“Why the Howard Hughes routine?”
I was sitting across from him. Cornell, in a yellow sport jacket and orange turtleneck, was seated behind a big black metal desk in the surprisingly functional office. He was drinking coffee and I had a can of Diet Coke.
“It may be sorrow for the loss of Mrs. Giovanni,” Cornell said, “but I doubt it, since he’s always been a womanizing son of a bitch. He has everything he wants up there, it’s a lavishly appointed apartment, I understand. He’s in his seventies and they send up girls when he’s so inclined, and he has a full-time chef. There’s a satellite dish near the parking lot, so he can watch sports and naked women and anything he likes. Why leave?”
“What about Jerry G?”
“Young Jerry is fairly hands-on. He also has an apartment spanning the second floor over several of the dives. You should see him on the floor of the casino, however, and possibly elsewhere at the Lucky Devil, unless he’s in one of his poker games.”
“Tell me about those.”
“There’s a very high-stakes game in a room in back-not part of the casino, if you can call that hellhole a casino. It’s not every night-depends on Jerry’s whim, and the availability of players who can afford it. You see, it’s strictly for the big boys-buy-in is a grand. You don’t have ten grand to throw around, don’t bother sitting down.”
“Crooked?”
“I don’t think so. Not that Jerry G isn’t a confirmed cheater, as a casino manager-I think you’ll find the gaming rigged for the house. But Jerry G takes pride in his poker playing. He thinks he’s a world-class player. And he’s done well in Vegas competitions, truth be told.”
“You wouldn’t have ten grand in cash around, would you?”
The aqua eyes in the heavily tanned face regarded me coldly, though he was working the smile on me, by way of distraction. “I already wired twenty thousand to your Cayman Islands account,” he said. “Would this be an advance, or…?”
“It would be your money. If I lose it, it’s gone.”
“And if you win?”
“You get the ten grand back.”
He chuckled. “And doesn’t that sound fair? Mr. Quarry, you are a cheeky devil. A regular card.”
“Cards sound like they may be the best way in for me, with Jerry G.” I shifted in my chair. “We haven’t talked about exactly what you want done.”
“No we haven’t.”
“You’d like me to remove whoever it was that hired that contract on you.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re convinced it’s either the father, Gigi Giovanni, or the son, Jerry G.”
He nodded. “Or possibly both. In concert.”
“So, do you want me to determine which it was?”
“Could you do that?”
“Possibly. Could be tricky. But might be possible.”
“What’s the alternative?”
I shrugged. “Just take them both out.”
“What would that cost me?”
“Well…double.”
“Forty thousand.”
“I was thinking fifty.”
He blinked. Stop the presses. “What’s the extra ten for?”
“For killing mob guys. Consider it hazardous duty pay.”
“And it’s twenty-five if you determine which G hired the hit, and take care of only him.”
“Yes. And that might prove a bargain, as it’s maybe the harder job. I have to play undercover cop and snoop around and not get killed doing it. Just popping them both, if I could stage-manage the right circumstances, could be relatively simple. In and out.”
The leather of his forehead grew grooves. “The Giovannis have a small army at the Lucky, you know. Bouncers and strongarms. No shortage of muscles and guns. You don’t expect me to pay for anybody else you have to take care of along the way.”
“What, collateral damage? No. That’s my problem. I don’t charge for soldiers, only generals.”
This he found amusing, the leathery flesh around the eyes crinkling with glee. His big white smile seemed genuine. Nice to know he had a sense of humor.
“Dickie,” I said, “you’re tied in with your wife’s father, back in Chicago-Tony Giardelli. I need to know if you’ve consulted him about this.”
He shook his head. “Uncle Tony expects me to take care of my own problems.”
“But would he back you up, after the fact?”
“Oh yes. He knows very well what’s at stake.”
“What is at stake?”
That stopped him, and he thought for several long moments, then got up and gestured me to follow him.
Soon we were in his third-floor office-cum-apartment. The little blonde, Chrissy, was in sheer panties and an athletic-style t-shirt with her bottom on the brown leather couch and her bare feet on the coffee table. She was watching The $25,000 Pyramid, or anyway it was on-she was lacquering her fingernails, a joint making its musky fragrance known, smoldering in an ashtray, while on the big screen, Dick Clark loomed like an Easter Island statue.
Cornell did not speak to the girl as he led me past the viewing area into the bedroom, where a big round bed was unmade; a mirror was on the ceiling-it would be. The river view from here would have been magnificent, but black curtains blotted it out. He ushered me to a big glass table with black metal legs and gestured to an elaborate architectural model.
“ That’s the future, Mr. Quarry,” he said.
And it was, the future of Haydee’s Port, anyway. The downtown buildings were intact, but remodeled into a quaint, family-friendly assembly of projected shops, an almost Disneyfied downtown out of the ’20s or ’30s with a drugstore, ice-cream emporium, movie house, antique shops, restaurants and more. The Lucky Devil and all the other fallen angels were out of business, in this particular future-only the Casey’s General Store survived.
And the Paddlewheel, on its part of the mini-overview, now included a five-story hotel where the blond kid’s farmhouse currently stood, and a riverboat sat next to the Paddlewheel on the blue strip on the model representing the Mississippi.
“We are very close to legal gambling in Illinois,” Cornell said, “a few years away at most. It will likely require that the gambling take place on a state-sanctioned riverboat. And my operation will be ready, with a top-flight resort where couples and families and respectable folks of all sorts can come enjoy the quaint little river town of Haydee’s Port.”
“You really think you can turn hell into paradise?”
“Haydee’s Port wasn’t always a den of sin. You know, it was named for fur trader Robert A. Haydee, who established a trading post on the land under us right now, back in 1827.”
Somehow I didn’t imagine Robert A. had cohabited with a coke-snorting vixen, but then I’m not that up on my history.
But Cornell went on with his sales pitch, letting me know that Haydee’s Port had once been a thriving city, home to five thousand God-fearing residents, a port serving the surrounding farming community. God, unimpressed, had sent a flood in 1912 that wiped the town out, and the businesses that were able relocated across the river. What had grown up in its place was the mini-Sin City we all knew and loved, a population of less than two hundred with a dozen bars and two casinos.
I asked him, “You really think the Illinois state government is going to get in bed with the mob?”
“Are you kidding?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. That was pretty dumb.”
He beamed down at his little play town. “My wife’s father will think I’m the New Improved Jesus if I can find a way to put the Giovannis out of business in Haydee’s Port.”
“What will Tony’s brother Vincent think?”
Cornell shrugged dismissively. “He’ll have to go along. The mob backs a winner.”
“My understanding is that Tony and Vincent Giardelli are rivals-two godfathers, each looking for a way to topple the other.”
“Yes, but they can’t go after each other frontally. They’re brothers — one family member, that high up in That Thing of Theirs, murder the other? No. They can pretend to peacefully co-exist, while trying to undermine each other, yes. But murdering your own blood…that just isn’t done.”
“That must be those family values I keep hearing about.”
He gestured to his toy town. “You have to understand, Mr. Quarry-Haydee’s Port is a microcosm of the situation in Chicago.”
“What’s a microcosm?”
“In this case, it’s a big struggle reduced to one small battlefield. If I triumph here, Tony’s stock rises in Chicago.”
“Okay,” I said, not giving a shit. “What do you want done?”
“Why don’t we start with me giving you ten grand to play in that poker game?”
“What did you say the buy-in was?”
“A thousand.”
“I can probably get by on five.”
“Good. I have that in my office safe downstairs. Go get the lay of the land, Mr. Quarry, and come back to me with a recommendation.”
“You mean, whether to pop pop, or his kid, or both?”
“You are a man of quiet eloquence, Mr. Quarry.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
So now I was in the dreary Lucky Devil casino, where I lost twenty bucks playing craps but won fifty at blackjack, the dealer of which was a redheaded gal with short permed hair and a trowel of well-arranged makeup on her almost pretty face.
“Is there any poker here?” I asked. I had her to myself at the moment.
She wore a black vest over a white shirt with a black string tie. “There’s a private game. Strictly for high rollers.”
I decided not to be a jerk and point out that there was no “rolling” in poker, high or low or otherwise, and said, “How much is the buy-in?”
She confirmed it as a thousand and I said, “I can make that happen. How do you make the game happen?”
“Doesn’t start till one. Goes all night.”
“Define ‘all night.’ ”
“Dawn or so. Usually breaks up around six.”
“Just one table?”
“Yeah. The boss himself deals.”
“Just deals?”
“No, he plays, too. He says the house always has an advantage, and his advantage is, he always deals.”
“But does he always win?”
“No. It’s a straight game. Would I lie to you?”
I showed her a hundred. “Would you?”
She took it. “No. What’s your name?”
“Jack Gibson.”
“In five minutes, I take a break. You’re lucky-Wednesday’s the only weeknight there’s a game. I’ll put your name in then, if there’s an opening. I’ll let you know.”
I played an ancient slot till she came over and said, “You’re in,” giving me a white chip with a magic-marker checkmark on it. “Go in at quarter till.” She nodded toward a door next to one of the lifeguard-stand bouncers.
This meant I had around two hours to kill, and I wanted to relax, so I wandered back through the Southern Rock dance club into the center bar and on through another set of double doors into the Lucky Devil’s strip club.
It was pretty basic-the music here, courtesy of an idiot DJ in a booth who was also flashing disco lights over the stage, consisted of relatively current hits-“Talking in Your Sleep” by the Romantics was going right now, and the short busty brunette in a cowboy hat and fringed vest and g-string was into it, working one of two poles on the single long narrow stage around which all the chairs were taken. Males of every variety, except gay, were seated there-young, old, blue-collar, college-kid, bank president, janitor, middle-aged, geezer, you name it, each with dollar in hand, eager for a stripper to come over, rub her tits in his face, and let him deposit the buck in her g-string.
I had no trouble finding a table toward the back. The room was lined in mirrors, which made it seem bigger and also put naked dancing female flesh everywhere, even though there was only one girl on stage at a time. Strippers in g-strings and pasties and feather boas and heels were trolling for guys to give table dances to, but not always succeeding, since that was five bucks not a single.
The girls were all under thirty, most closer to twenty, and seemed a mix of locals (possibly more of that community college talent) and gals on the circuit. I can’t explain how I knew this, other than to say about half of the dancers were breast-enhanced, and the others weren’t. Obviously, the road girls had the fake tits and the locals what God have given them. Most of the customers hooted and hollered and even invested in table dances, when the girls had big enough fake tits.
I had zero interest in fake tits, but to each his own. The girl I did find of interest, which is to say who hard-ened my dick, was clearly local-she was very pretty, blue-eyed, pouty of mouth, with straight blonde, seemingly natural hair, modified by a Farrah Fawcett flip that was a decade or so out of date. She had a pert dimpled ass that defied gravity, and wonderful pale creamy flesh, but her boobs were too small for the room.
They were just right for me. They perched on her rib cage with tip-tilting authority, perfect handfuls that these other cretins couldn’t appreciate. This cretin and his throbbing dick were most appreciative. I was on my third beer, by the way.
And in fact, I had just gotten rid of it or anyway its predecessors and was heading back from the john for my table when I felt a hand on my arm, and turned to look right into the little stripper’s big blue eyes.
“Can you do me a favor?”
She was either actually asking for a favor, or damn good. No, I didn’t think she was in love with me…
“See that guy over there-stuffing a dollar into Heather’s g-string? Be subtle.”
I flicked a glance at a beefy, make that fat, biker with a leather cap and more facial hair than two Grateful Dead band members-kind of an awful hair color, too, a yellow that tried to be red but didn’t make it.
“He’ll want a table dance,” she said. “I have to work the room or get fired, so I can’t, you know, turn him down or just disappear.”
“You want me to buy a table dance, I’ll buy a table dance.”
This was not nearly as hard as she was making it. Not that she wasn’t making it hard…
“He’s been here before,” she said. “He’s persistent. He puts his hand down in my front. I don’t do that. I’m not that kind of dancer.”
This was interesting to hear, since the Lucky Devil’s strip club was raunchy indeed-the girls took off their pasties and g-strings at the end of their first song. And they danced to three songs…
“How can I help?”
“We have a V.I.P. room. We can go in there and stay for a while, and maybe he’ll go away or settle for some-body else or something.”
“I do want to help, but what’s the V.I.P. room cost?”
“I’m not going to charge you anything! You’re helping me.”
So I helped her.
She took me into the back room, which was a bunch of easy chairs in open cubicles. No fucking was going on or anything overt; this was not about blow jobs or even hand jobs. This was good, clean, all-American fun, like the so-called dry humps healthy teens used to have under the bleachers at ball games. And I presume they still do, if they have a lick of sense.
The girls kept their pasties on and their g-strings, in the V.I.P. room, but otherwise were naked, and danced for a guy for a song (ten bucks for one, I gathered, twenty-five for three), most of it grinding in his lap or shoving her fake titties in his face and rubbing and rubbing and rubbing some more.
My little blonde did rub her cupcakes in my face a couple times, but mostly she just danced, or straddled my lap and didn’t really grind. We just talked. Here’s some of it, shouted over loud piped-in music:
“What’s your name?”
“Candy.”
Bow Wow Wow was doing “I Want Candy.” I swear.
“Stage name?”
“Real. Candace.”
“You go to school, Candace?”
“I wish. I wanna go to beauty college, but it’s expensive.”
“You local or on the road?”
“Local. Can’t travel. I got a kid.”
“Really?”
“Uh huh. Little boy.”
“What’s his name?”
“Sam. He’s five. He goes to kindergarten next year.”
“His daddy looking after him?”
“He doesn’t have one. A girl who works days, at the grain elevator? She sits with Sam till she goes to work.”
“You don’t look old enough to have a five-year-old.”
“I was fifteen.”
“Makes you twenty?”
“I’m twenty. You’re nice.”
“You’re nice, too, Candace.”
There was quite a bit more, but that’s as interesting as it got, and anyway you get the drift.
She smelled good-most of the dancers were doused in what used to be called dimestore perfume, but she had on Giorgio, or a reasonable facsimile. She had the usual heavy makeup, clownish cheeks, blue eyeshadow, pink lip gloss, but that was par for the course these days even for non-stripper girls. Even though she didn’t grind, I had a raging hard-on. My shorts were in ruins.
Another stripper, a skinny brunette with big but real breasts, came over and whispered in Candace’s ear, then went away.
Candace beamed at me. “Lover boy’s picked somebody else out! He’s on his second table dance already. I think I’m in the clear. You’re very sweet, Jack.”
I had told her my name was Jack.
Then she gave me a kiss.
Long and kind of real.
After that, she gave me a more legit V.I.P. room treatment for the rest of the song (“Hit Me with Your Best Shot”), and then led me back into the strip club. I tried to give her a twenty but I swear (unbelievable, but it happened) she wouldn’t take it.
I probably could have bought a legit table dance from her at that point, but I’d had all I could take. I went and sat in the rear of the smoky, mirrored room, focused on fake tits and disco lights until my erection went down, then wandered back into the middle bar. No more beer for me. I asked for and got a Diet Coke.
It was almost one, and I had a game to play.