“Where does Stern keep the gun?”
“In a safe-deposit box. I found out that much, but I couldn’t get to it. He was carrying it with him last night, though, in the car. He showed it to me.” His dull eyes brightened yellowly. “You know, Lew, I’m authorized to pay a hundred grand for that little gun. You’re a strong, smart boy. Can you get it away from Stern?”
“Somebody already has. Stern got his throat cut in the course of the night. Or maybe you know that, Frost.”
“No. I didn’t know it. If it’s true, it changes things.”
“Not for you.”
We went outside. Below, the valley floor shimmered in its own white heat. The jet trail which slashed the sky was blurring out. In this anti-human place, the Cadillac on the road looked as irrelevant as a space-ship stalled on the mountains of the moon. Rina stood at the foot of the slope, her face upturned and blank. It was heavy news I carried down to her.
Chapter 29
MUCH LATER, on the sunset plane, we were able to talk about it. Leroy Frost, denying and protesting and calling for lawyers and doctors, had been deposited with Marfeld and Lashman in the security ward of the hospital. The remains of Hester Campbell were in the basement of the same building, awaiting autopsy. I told the sheriff and the district attorney enough to have Frost and his men held for possible extradition on suspicion of murder. I didn’t expect it to stick. The final moves in the case would have to be made in California.
The DC-6 left the runway and climbed the blue ramp of air. There were only a dozen other passengers, and Rina and I had the front end of the plane to ourselves. When the NO SMOKING sign went out, she crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. Without looking at me directly, she said in a brittle voice: “I suppose I owe you my life, as they say in books. I don’t know what I can do to repay you. No doubt I should offer to go to bed with you. Would you like that?”
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ve had a rough time and made a mistake, and I’ve been involved in it. But you don’t have to take it out on me.”
“I didn’t mean to be snide,” she said, a little snidely. “I was making a serious offer of my body. Having nothing better to offer.”
“Rina, come off it.”
“I’m not attractive enough, is that what you mean?”
“You’re talking nonsense. I don’t blame you. You’ve had a bad scare.”
She sulked for a while, looking down at the Chinese Wall of mountains we were crossing. Finally she said in a chastened tone: “You’re perfectly right. I was scared, really scared, for the first time in my life. It does funny things to a girl. It made me feel – well, almost like a whore – as though I wasn’t worth anything to myself.”
“That’s the way the jerks want you to feel. If everybody felt like a zombie, we’d all be on the same level. And the jerks could get away with the things jerks want to get away with. They’re not, though. Jerkiness isn’t as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A. Which is why they had to build Vegas.”
She didn’t smile. “Is it such a terrible place?”
“It depends on who you pick for your playmates. You picked the worst ones you could find.”
“I didn’t pick them, and they’re not my playmates. They never were. I despise them. I warned Hester years ago that Lance was poison for her. And I told Carl Stern what I thought of him to his face.”
“When was this? Last night?”
“Several weeks ago. I went out on a double date with Lance and Hester. Perhaps it was a foolish thing to do, but I wanted to find out what was going on. Hester brought Carl Stern for me, can you imagine? He’s supposed to be a millionaire, and Hester always believed that money was the important thing. She couldn’t see, even at that late date, why I wouldn’t play up to Stern.
“Not that it would have done me any good,” she added wryly. “He was no more interested in me than I was in him. He spent the evening in various nightclubs playing footsie with Lance under the table. Hester didn’t notice, or maybe she didn’t care. She could be very dense about certain things. I cared, though, for her sake. Finally I told them off and walked out on the three of them.”
“What did you say to them?”
“Just the plain unvarnished truth. That Carl Stern was a pederast and probably much worse, and Hester was crazy to fool around with him and his pretty-boy.”
“Did you mention blackmail?”
“Yes. I told them I suspected it.”
“That was a dangerous thing to do. It gave Stern a reason to want you dead. I’m pretty sure he meant to kill you last night. Lucky for you he died first.”
“Really? I can’t believe–” But she believed it. Her dry throat refused to function. She sat swallowing. “Just because I – because I suspected something?”
“Suspected him of blackmail, and called him a fag. Killing always came easy to Stern. I went over his rap sheet this afternoon – the Nevada authorities have a full file on him. No wonder he couldn’t get a gambling license in his own name. Back in the thirties he was one of Anastasia’s boys, suspected of implication in over thirty killings.”
“Why wasn’t he arrested?”
“He was, but they couldn’t convict him. Don’t ask me why. Ask the politicians that ran the cops in New York and Jersey and Cleveland and the other places. Ask the people that voted for the politicians. Stern ended up in Vegas, but he belonged to the whole country. He worked for Lepke, for Game Boy Miller in Cleveland, for Lefty Clark in Detroit, for the Trans America gang in L.A. He finished his apprenticeship under Siegel, and after Siegel got it he went into business for himself.”
“What sort of business?”
“Wire service for bookies, narcotics, prostitution, anything with a fast and dirty buck in it. He was a millionaire, all right, several times over. He sank a million in the Casbah alone.”
“I don’t understand why he would go in for blackmail. He didn’t need the money.”
“He was Syndicate-trained, and blackmail’s been one of their main sources of power ever since Maffia days. No, it wasn’t money he needed. It was status. Simon Graff’s name gave him his chance to go legit, to really build himself into the countryside.”
“And I helped him.” The bones had come out in her face so that it was almost ugly. “I made it possible. I could bite my tongue out.”
“Before you do, I wish you’d explain what you mean.”
She drew in her breath sharply. “Well, in the first place, I’m a psychiatric nurse.”
She fell silent. It was hard for her to get started.
“So your mother told me,” I said.
She gave me a sidelong glance. “When did you run into Mother?”
“Yesterday.”
“What did you think of her?”
“I liked her.”
“Really?”
“I like women in general, and I’m not hypercritical.”
“I am,” Rina said. “I’ve always been suspicious of Mother and her little airs and graces and her big ideas. And it was mutual. Hester was her favorite, her little pal. Or she was Hester’s little pal. She spoiled my sister rotten, at the same time made terrible demands on her: all she wanted was for Hester to be great.
“I sat on the side lines for fifteen years and watched the two girls play emotional ping-pong. Or pong-ping. I was the not-so-innocent bystander, the third one that made the crowd, the one that wasn’t simpatico.” It sounded like a speech she’d rehearsed to herself many times. There was bitterness in her voice, tempered with resignation. “I broke it up as soon as Mother would let me, as soon as I finished high school. I went into nurse’s training in Santa Barbara, and took my P.G. work at Camarillo.”