Last Call (Last Call 1)

But I haven't lost everything, he told himself for the thousandth time. Siegel did, but I haven't. Even though I no longer have quite all the guts I used to.

"Holler if I jiggle you," said Abrams.

"You're driving fine," Leon said.

In his role as Fisher King, the supernatural king of the land and its fertility, Ben Siegel had among other things cultivated a rose garden on the grounds of the Flamingo. Roses were a potent symbol of the transitory nature of life, and Siegel had thought that by keeping a tamed plot of them he could thus symbolically tame death. The flowers had eventually become routine to him, not requiring the kind of psychic attention of which, as the Fisher King, he was capable.

Leon had heard that they had bloomed wildly in June of 1947 before he had killed Siegel, throwing their red petals out across the poolside walkway and even thrusting up sprouts through the cracks between the concrete blocks.

Still living in Los Angeles, Leon had been whittling away at Siegel's remaining vulnerabilities, the aspects of his life that had not been withdrawn behind the walls of the castle in the desert.

These vulnerabilities were two: the Trans-America wire service and the woman Siegel had secretly married in the fall of '46.

Bookmaking couldn't go on without a wire service to communicate race results instantly across the country, and Siegel, as a representative of the Capone Mob, had introduced Trans-America to the American west as a rival to the previous monopoly, James Regan's Chicago-based Continental Press Service.

Trans-America had prospered, and Siegel had made a lot of money … until Georges Leon had visited Chicago in June of '46 and killed James Regan. The Capone Mob had quickly assumed Continental from Regan's people, and then Trans-America was superfluous. The Capone Mob expected Siegel to transfer all his clients to Continental and then fold Trans-America, but Leon managed to see to it that the order was delivered in the most arrogant terms possible. As Leon had hoped, Siegel refused to abandon his wire service, and instead told the board of directors of the Combination that they would have to buy it from him for two million dollars.

The Flamingo was already under construction, and Siegel was bucking the still-effective wartime building restrictions and material priorities. Leon had known that Siegel needed the income from Trans-America.

And Leon had managed to meet Virginia Hill, who still frequently visited Los Angeles, where she maintained a mansion in Beverly Hills. She was ostensibly Siegel's girl friend, but Leon had seen the ring she wore, and had seen how dogs howled when she was around them, and had noticed that she stayed out at parties all night when the full moon hung in the sky, and he had guessed that she was secretly Siegel's wife.

Leon had forced himself not to let show the excitement he had felt at the possibility; like a player who tilts up the corners of his cards and sees a pat Straight Flush, he had changed nothing in his day-to-day behavior.

But if he was right about Virginia Hill, he had caught Siegel in a strategic error.

A girl friend would have been of little value, present or absent, but if the King had been foolish and sentimental enough to split his power by voluntarily taking a wife and could then be deprived of that corresponding part of his power—if she could be separated from him by water, a lot of it—he'd be seriously weakened.

And so Leon had conveyed to Virginia Hill the idea that Lucky Luciano intended to have Siegel killed—which was true—and that she might be able to prevent it by appealing to Luciano in person in Paris. Hill had flown to Paris in early June of 1947.

Leon had cashed in some real estate and some favors and some threats, and arranged matters so that the Trans-America wire service showed serious problems in its books and personnel.

And late on the night of June 13 Siegel had flown from Las Vegas to Los Angeles to investigate the wire service's apparent problems.

Siegel's private plane touched down on the runway at Glendale airport at two in the morning on June 14.

Georges Leon couldn't act until the twentieth, so for several days he parked at the curb across the street from Virginia Hill's house on North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills and watched the place. As Leon had hoped, Siegel was staying in town, sleeping at Virginia Hill's mansion.

On the afternoon of the twentieth, Leon drove through the hot, palm-shaded streets of Los Angeles to a drugstore telephone booth to deliver the required final challenge.

Siegel answered the phone. "Hello?"

"Hi, Ben. Get a chance to do much fishing out there in the desert?"

After a pause, "Oh," Siegel said impatiently, "it's you."

"Right. I've just got to tell you—you know I have to—that I'm going to assume the Flamingo."

"You son of a bitch," said Siegel in a sort of tired rage. "Over my dead body you will! You haven't got the guts."

Leon had chuckled and hung up.