Last Call (Last Call 1)

DEDICATION

For Gloria Batsford: With heartfelt thanks for more than a decade's worth of help and advice and great dinners and sociable friendship; may we all have many decades more.

And with thanks, too, to Chris and Theresa Arena, Mike Autrey, Beth Bailey, Louigi Baker, Jim Blaylock, Lou and Myrna Donato, Don Ellison, Mike Gaddy, Russ Galen, Keith Holmberg, Don Johnson, Mike Kelley, Dorothea Kenney, Dana Kunkel, Scott Landre, Jeff Levin, Mark Lipinski, Joe Machuga, Tim Mc-Namara, Steve and Tammie Malk, Dennis Meyer, Phil Pace, Richard Powers, Serena Powers, Randal Robb, Betty Schlossberg, Ed Silberstang, Carlton Smith, Ed and Pat Thomas, and Marv and Carol and Rex Torrez.

PROLOGUE: 1948: A Castle In The Wasteland

In March of 1951, testifying before the Kefauver Senate Crime Investigating Committee, Virginia Hill stated that Siegel had told her the Flamingo Hotel was "upside down"—though she was able to cast no light on what he might have meant by that statement.

—Colin Lepovre, Siegel Agonistes

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Son, I have seen the good ship sail

Keel upward, and mast downward, in the heavens,

And solid turrets topsy-turvy in air …

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

CHAPTER 1: "I'll Still Have You, Sonny Boy"

Georges Leon held his little boy's hand too tightly and stared up from under his hatbrim at the unnaturally dark noon sky.

He knew that out over the desert, visible to any motorists along the lonelier stretches of Boulder Highway, the rain would be twisting in tall, ragged funnels under the clouds; already some flooding had probably crept across the two lanes of Highway 91, islanding the Flamingo Hotel outside town. And on the other side of the earth, under his feet, was the full moon.

The Moon and the Fool, he thought desperately. Not good—but I can't stop now.

A dog was barking a block or two away, in one of these alleys or parking lots. In spite of himself, Leon thought about the dog that appeared on the Fool card in the Tarot deck and the dogs that in Greek mythology accompanied Artemis, the goddess of the moon. And of course, the picture on the Moon card generally showed rain falling. He wished he were allowed to get drunk.

"We'd better be heading for home, Scotty," he told the boy, keeping the urgency out of his voice only with some effort. Get this done, he thought.

Palm fronds rattled overhead and threw big drops down onto the pavement.

"Home?" protested Scotty. "No, you said—"

Guilt made Leon gruff. "You got a fancy breakfast and lunch, and you've got a pocketful of punched chips and flattened pennies." They took a few more steps along the puddled pavement toward Center Street, where they'd be turning right toward the bungalow. The wet street smelled like dry white wine. "I'll tell you what, though," he said, despising himself for making an empty promise, "tonight after dinner this storm will have cleared up, and we can drive out of town with the telescope and look at the stars."

The boy sighed. "Okay," he said, trotting along to keep up with his father, his free hand rattling the defaced chips and pennies in his pocket. "But it's gonna be a full moon. That'll wash everything else out, won't it?"

God, shut up, Leon thought. "No," he said, as though the universe might be listening and might do what he said. "No, it won't change a thing."

Leon had wanted an excuse to stop by the Flamingo Hotel, seven miles outside of town on 91, so he had taken Scott there for breakfast.

The Flamingo was a wide three-story hotel with a fourth-floor penthouse, incongruously green against the tan desert that surrounded it. Palm trees had been trucked in to stand around the building, and this morning the sun had been glaring down from a clear sky, giving the vivid green lawn a look of defiance.

Leon had let a valet park the car, and he and Scott had walked hand in hand along the strip of pavement to the front steps that led up to the casino door.

Below the steps on the left side, behind a bush, Leon had long ago punched a hole in the stucco and scratched some symbols around it; this morning he crouched at the foot of the steps to tie his shoe, and he took a package from his coat pocket and leaned forward and pitched it into the hole.

"Another thing that might hurt you, Daddy?" Scott asked in a whisper. The boy was peering over his shoulder at the crude rayed suns and stick figures that grooved the stucco and flaked the green paint.