“Glad you could stop by,” George Raft said to me, flatly, in his remote way.
I felt overdresed in my brown suit. I felt like I should loosen my tie or take my hat off or something, but I didn’t, and anyway my hand was filled with the glass of iced tea that Raft’s big lumbering bodyguard, “Killer,” who’d met me at the front door, had brought me. Killer, who was sort of a cross between a butler and Leo Gorcey, wore a blue polo shirt and white slacks and still managed to look like a guy called Killer, at least in California.
Me, I didn’t want to give in to California. It was a foreign place to me. There was just no excuse for this many palm trees and this much stucco being gathered anywhere, and certainly not within the borders of these United States. The weather out here was an incentive to doing nothing. It made me want to go door to door telling people about humidity.
“That’s white of you, George,” I said. “It’s been a long time. I hoped my name would ring a bell.”
His thin line of a smile increased its curvature. “How could I forget that piece of business-though it woulda been healthy to.”
What he and I were referring to was a job he had hired me to do, years ago, in 1933, to be exact. Only it wasn’t a job I did for him, really: it was a job I did for Al Capone, who was in the Atlanta pen at the time. Raft had only acted as the go-between, a role he was as used to as his tough-guy screen persona.
It was no secret Raft had been a bootlegger, that his gangster friend Owney Madden had sent him west, pulling strings to get him going in the movies. Not that former pickpocket Raft was bereft of show business experience: he worked a Charleston act in vaudeville, and a specialty tap act at Texas Guinan’s El Fay. Of course, he’d still been doing a little bootlegging for Madden on the side, as well.
“You say you’d like to meet Ben,” Raft said. “I think I could arrange that. But it’d be nice to know what it’s about, first.”
“Actually,” I said, sipping my minty ice tea, “it’s personal. I’m out here on business, but that business has nothing to do with Ben Siegel. The personal matter does, though.”
“Yeah?”
“I got a girl name of Peggy Hogan who came out here a little over a week ago. She and Siegel have some mutual friends. Have you heard of her, George? Met her? Has she been around?”
Raft took his eyes off the nude vision in the pool and looked at me, perhaps to let me know he wasn’t lying.
“Never heard of her,” he said with flat believability.
“I have reason to think she’s gotten herself tied up with Virginia Hill.”
Raft smiled a little. “Ginny attracts all sorts of people to her.”
“And she’s Ben Siegel’s girl?”
“She thinks she is.”
“Meaning?”
“Ben always has more than one woman in his life.”
“Well, that stands to reason, doesn’t it? He’s married, isn’t he?”
“Divorced,” Raft shrugged. “From Whitey Krakower’s sister. God rest his soul.”
Whitey Krakower, in addition to being Siegel’s brother-in-law, had been a sometime Siegel accomplice, according to the indictment in the Harry “Big Greenie” Greenburg murder, anyway. Whitey got bumped off in July 1940 in New York, after word got out he was talking. It was a hit Siegel had supposedly approved. Even arranged. Which would, I suppose, have put a certain strain on his marriage.
I was damn near a Siegel expert now. I’d been filled in by Fred Rubinski, an ex-cop from Chicago who had a small agency out here; he also owned a major piece of a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. One of my reasons for coming west was to talk to Fred about linking our two agencies; it was something I’d been thinking about for a while. Fred had an office in the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway in downtown L.A. We were old acquaintances, if not quite friends, and he’d picked me up last night at Union Air Terminal in Burbank shortly after nine o’clock, the end of an all-day long, puddle-jumping flight that had begun at eight that morning at Midway back home.
We’d spent this morning in his office at the Bradbury, a truly weird turn-of-the-century building with wrought-iron stairwells, ornamental balconies, caged elevators and a skylight that bounced an eerie white light off the glazed brick floor of its huge central court. Fred, who was in his late forties and a hard round bald ball of a man, shared an outer office with an answering service overseen by a ditsy blonde, and the inner office was his alone. He had four ops in an adjoining office, and his business was going good. We’d discussed merging our operations once before, last year, when he came home to Chicago to visit family and friends for the High Holidays; and this morning we’d bounced it around more seriously.
But mostly I’d pumped Fred about Siegel, for whom he’d done some collecting.
“Bad checks,” Fred explained. “He’s got a piece of the Clover Club, you know.”
“What’s that, a nightclub?”
“Yeah, with gambling upstairs. It’s the stars’ favorite place to lose their money. He owns part of a Tijuana race track, too, and has interests in half a dozen joints in Las Vegas.”
“What else is Siegel into, besides gambling?”
Fred shrugged. “Narcotics, prostitution, diamond fencing, perfume smuggling, you name it. They say Luciano sent him out here, in the mid-thirties, to make sure the Chicago interests didn’t take over.”
I nodded. “That must’ve been shortly after Nitti sent Bioff and Browne out here, selling strike prevention insurance to the movie moguls.”
“Right,” Fred said, nodding back. “And word is Benny stepped in and took over where Bioff and Browne left off, after the feds busted their racket up.”
“How so?”
“Bioff and Browne had hold of the stagehands’ union, right? Well, Benny has control of the movie extras.”
“I didn’t know Siegel was so powerful. All I knew was he was running the West Coast end of Trans-American, the mob’s race wire.”
“Well, he’s doing that, too. And building some goddamn gambling casino in the desert. Near Vegas. Pipedream, if you ask me.”
I shook my head wonderingly. “I guess I just don’t know much about Siegel-mostly just what I’ve read in the papers. If he’s thick with Raft, like they say, I may have an in. I did a job for George, once.”
“Raft’s real thick with Ben. They’re close pals.”
Last year, it seemed, Raft had gone to bat for Siegel in court, when Siegel and his crony Allen Smiley were arrested for bookmaking. Raft had been present, but wasn’t arrested, and later insisted on the witness stand that the three men, together in a hotel room, had merely been placing bets on the phone for themselves. Raft had behaved like a movie tough guy on the stand, barely skirting contempt (“Don’t I even have the right of free speech?” he demanded of the judge) and attracting headlines, which came back to me as Fred filled me in.
“Why would Raft put his nuts on the line for a guy like Siegel?” I wondered aloud.