Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [29]
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,