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  A big husky guy, maybe in his late fifties, with a high-school football-player physique turning to tapioca, was losing at a craps table and letting everyone around him get a taste of his bad mood. He was making bigger bets than the other players, but Halliday’s was the only place in town where you’d find a craps player with five dollars’ worth of twenty-five-cent chips standing next to a Texan with five-hundred-dollar chips.

  “Fuckin’ downtown joint, I get comped at the Tropicana and come downtown just to slum,” came over the mike.

  “Keep on losing you, bastard,” the surveillant said, “when you’re through we’ll comp you a bus token back to the Strip.”

  My blood turned cold as I stared at the guy. I had seen him before, years ago.

  He was the guy who killed my mother.

  Part 2

  BETTY

  3

  Betty Riordan shifted in the backseat and hugged her baby tighter. She didn’t need a rap sheet to tell her that the two guys with her in the big Caddie were thugs. It was 1954 and Vegas was a small town even though there were a bunch of new casinos on the Strip since Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo: The Thunderbird, Desert Inn, Sands, and Sahara had risen in Siegel’s wake. And the place attracted gangsters from Chicago and the East Coast like the faithful to mecca. A funny thing about the town, something no one ever said much about: Everything that was illegal everywhere else—gambling, whoring, quickie divorces—was legal here. Nevada was a poor state, about the poorest anywhere, a place where nothing grew, where the desert was so ugly no one wanted to come and see it. When the silver mines played out, the State had to make a Faustian bargain and sell its soul, although some would argue that when the mines closed even that was long gone—it had been shipped East in the form of silver bars to enrich generations of absentee mine owners.

  Betty was being taken for a ride down to the Clark County Recorder’s office. To change the name of her three-month-old baby.

  She was twenty-two and had been on her own since she was sixteen. She knew how tough life was—and how much tougher it would get if you messed with guys like this; a couple of wops with short legs, thick necks, and big shoulders. She was just a lounge girl, a cocktail waitress in the bar at the Flamingo. Guys like these hurt people. Everyone knew who owned the town. The casinos each sent a messenger back East with a suitcase full of money every month. It all flowed through Meyer Lansky, and from him to the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses, Lucky Luciano, whom the feds had sent to prison and then deported to Italy but who still ruled the Syndicate.

  “You know why they still obey Luciano?” a bartender at the Flamingo asked her, a guy from Jersey who knew all about the mob. “Because he’s tough. He’s the only guy to ever survive a one-way ride. He was grabbed by four rodmen, taken out to a Staten Island beach, beaten, stomped, stabbed a dozen times with an ice pick, and had his throat slit ear to ear. They left him for dead on the sand. And he never fingered the guys for the job.” He laughed. “By the time he got through with them, they wished they were in the hands of the cops.”

  Yeah, Vegas was a dirty town and you had to be careful, that was for sure.

  Betty had no intention of giving the thugs any reason to hurt her. She accepted the fact that she had to change the baby’s name. In a way, it was a relief. She really didn’t like the name, Howard Hughes, Jr. Sure, he was a big shot and they said he was the richest man in the country, but she had discovered he wasn’t a nice guy. Not that his character traits mattered to the men who ran the town. They applied muscle to anyone who annoyed a big player. Howard Hughes only played nickel machines, but he was Hollywood and the boys like to rub shoulders with him.

  But she didn’t like having to list the name of the baby’s father as “Unknown.” Benny, Hughes’s man, told her she could make up a name for the father, but it didn’t seem right. Besides, someday she would tell her son that his father was Howard Hughes and he wouldn’t believe her if she put another name on the certificate of birth. She’d stick with “Unknown.”

  She was pretty much fatalistic about the whole thing. She never had really thought that Hughes would welcome her and her baby with open arms. Nothing ever went completely right for her, not for long at least, and she was used to moving on after life jerked the rug out from under her. Most of her income came from tips and she stuck most of those into the slots with the hope, but little conviction, that she’d be lucky enough to get a jackpot. When you fed the one-armed bandits your rent money, there was always the hope you’d double your money, but deep down she knew she’d walk away broke because she just wasn’t lucky. And that was pretty much how life went for her. Jobs, men, nothing ever worked out for long. Men would stick around until they got into her pants, and jobs would turn sour because the other waitresses would get jealous that the boss was giving her the best tables or the customers would ask to be seated in her area.

  The big man riding shotgun in the front passenger seat twisted around and looked back at her. “When we get through at the county, there are four roads leading out of town and a bus on each of them. You have to decide which one you’ll be on.”

  “Can’t I decide later?”

  “Yeah, you can decide when Russian Louie hits town. If we have to decide for you, there’ll be a piece of you on all four buses.”

  Betty pressed the baby closer to her chest and struggled to hold back tears. The joke about Russian Louie wasn’t lost on her. Louie won a bundle at cards from some Sicilians. Some people said he had too many aces. After the game, they took him for a ride out in the desert and no one had seen him since. His disappearance became a standard joke in town: If you owed someone money, you’d say, “Yeah, okay, I’ll pay you when Russian Louie hits town.” Bastards. And Hughes was the biggest bastard of all. One thing was for certain, she wouldn’t head back the way she had originally come to Vegas, by way of San Bernardino and L.A.

  San Bernardino, a dusty little town where you taste dirt in your mouth even after you have a drink of water, had no good memories for her. The town was on the way to Las Vegas and Palm Springs, but it was nowhere, just a pit stop for gas and a piss. To her it was being a teenager trapped in an eight-by-forty travel trailer with her mother and younger sister, living at a rundown trailer court where dogs barked and seasonal farm workers with straw cowboy hats drank beer and played penny-ante poker under the shade of an oak tree, where men living lives of indifferent desperation got drunk on Saturday night in bars with dirt floors and came home to beat their wife and kids.

  Her mother had been a waitress, too, but rather than gambling away her tips, she’d paved her way to hell with booze. Her mother had been pretty, at least until the liquor and hard living had wrinkled her face and deadened her eyes. But she had not been as pretty as Betty. Her mom claimed to be Irish and Italian, but an Indian woman told Betty her mother was a half-breed and she looked it, with her braised-copper skin and dark eyes. Betty had gotten her mother’s shaded complexion, but gray eyes and dishwater blond hair from her father. She never met her old man, but her mother claimed that it hadn’t been a one-night stand, but a loving relationship until the guy, a soldier stationed at Riverside Army Depot, got transferred and she never heard from him again. That happened right after Betty was born. Her mom claimed the guy took a walk because he was Jewish and wanted her to convert, but Betty never saw any religious leaning in her mother one way or another and figured her mother would have converted to Satanism if the devil had made the offer with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red in his hand. A lot of the kids Betty was raised with either never knew their fathers or wished they hadn’t, and Betty never gave much thought about hers.

  Her mom had been a waitress in greasy spoons and Betty had learned waitressing early. By thirteen, fully developed and looking older than her age, she was working weekends at a restaurant. Taking a taxi home one night, she had her first sexual experience at fourteen, when the cabby turned off onto a dirt road and stopped the car. He climbed into the backseat with her and raped her, giv
ing her one hell of a beating when she tried to stop him. Her mom called the cops, but nothing much ever came out of it. The guy left town and a cop warned her she should be more careful and not lead a man on.

  “You’re attractive to men,” her mother told her. “And once in a while they’re going to get rough and take what they want. You have to get used to it because that’s how life works.”

  When she was sixteen, she ran away from home after her mother brought a man home, a mechanic who had gotten her car started after it broke down. The guy moved in, making things even more crowded for Betty and her little sister, who was five years younger. Betty didn’t care for the guy—he would sit and drink beer and just stare stupidly at her, like she was a piece of meat he wanted to squeeze. Sixteen was the right age, too, for leaving home. Almost all the girls around her by sixteen were pregnant, shacked up, or working. She got on a Greyhound bus for the hour-long drive to L.A. and roomed with two girls who were ushers at the Egyptian movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard. Waitressing paid more than ushering, so she lied about her age and easily got jobs because of her looks. Customers would always tell her that she should be in movies, but she didn’t consider herself that pretty.

  She didn’t like L.A. It didn’t seem like a real town, just endless streets and rows of houses. She also didn’t like it because she never learned how to drive a car and public transportation was horrible. Everything was a bus ride or two away. After a couple of years, she moved on to Vegas because she heard waitresses got paid more there and the living was cheaper. She left nothing behind in L.A. The two girls she originally moved in with had long since left to shack up with men. One of them married, and she never bothered to make other female friends. She found she could relate better with men, for a while at least. But at some point, when she got tired of buying their cigarettes and beer and taking care of their food tab where she worked, there would be an argument, sometimes they’d knock her around a bit and then she’d quit her job and move on.

  There were plenty of jobs in Vegas for waitresses, that’s what everyone said. The Flamingo had opened the year before, quickly followed by Bugsy’s violent demise, and more big clubs went up. And there were restaurants, bars, and half a dozen clubs downtown, and plenty of truck stops along the highway.

  When her ID showed her at twenty-one and was no longer phony, she got jobs on the Strip. She was working the lounge at the Flamingo when she first heard about Howard Hughes staying at the hotel-casino. He was staying in a penthouse on the top floor and she saw him one day walking across the gaming room. He was a tall, slender man, with a thin mustache. Physically, he looked rather like the movie stereotype of a lounge lizard, one of those manicured gents who service rich women for a price. But his body language was more that of an absentminded scientist, looking at people and things as if he were staring at them from the other end of a microscope. And maybe poking them with a sterile instrument to see what makes them tick.

  Benny, one of his assistants, a Mormon-type who ordered real ice tea, instead of the Long Island kind, would come into the lounge and jazz her about Hughes.

  “Howie has seen you,” Benny said. “He thinks you’re a real fox.”

  “Yeah, like I’m going to believe that.”

  She wasn’t born yesterday. But you could never tell, could you? It’s happened before. A rich guy spots a girl and bingo!

  Benny grinned. “He said that when he saw you, the earth shook under his feet, he heard Gypsy violins and time stood still.”

  She giggled. That was real Hollywood stuff, what they called a “cute meet.”

  “Oh, you’re full of bull,” she told Benny.

  But what if …

  A girl has to dream. That’s why she hated San Bernardino so much. People didn’t dream there. But Vegas was different. It was like a Hollywood set, a place where dreams came true. Not for everyone, but once in a while someone threw down a bet or pulled a slot handle and won a big jackpot.

  “No, kidding, Betty. Howie really flipped when he saw you. Maybe he wants to put you in movies. He made Jane Russell and Jean Harlow into stars. He could do it for you.”

  “Sure. And maybe I’ll pick a perfect fifteen spot in keno and end up owning the casino.”

  But what if …

  She knew that they were putting her on. If you sat her down under one of those naked lightbulbs the cops used for third-degree questioning in Jimmy Cagney movies, she’d tell you that Benny was pulling her leg, that all “Howie” wanted from her or any other cocktail waitress was a piece of ass. But somewhere along the line, her own emotional needs bought into it. What girl hadn’t dreamt of a rich guy like Howard Hughes sweeping her off her feet and riding off into the sunset with her in his arms? She had grown up during the Great Depression and its aftermath and had been nurtured on movies in which poor shopgirls like Diana Durbin meet rich playboys who fall in love with them.

  “You got to meet Howie,” Benny told her, “before he leaves.”

  “He’s leaving?”

  “Yeah, but he comes back every few months. He likes the place because it’s more private than L.A. or New York. Vegas takes care of its own. He says that some day he’s coming back to buy up the whole town. Can you imagine that? A guy owning a whole town.”

  The kidding went on for a couple of days and then Benny came into the lounge in the middle of her shift looking real serious.

  “The boss wants you to join him upstairs.”

  “I don’t get off until—”

  “It’s all arranged. You’re off now. Come on, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  She didn’t know what to say and just followed along like a calf with a rope around its neck. Inside the hotel wing elevator, Benny pulled out a piece of paper and a fountain pen.

  “Sign this.”

  “What is it?”

  “A release from liability. The boss is a rich man, he doesn’t want anyone claiming he made promises he never kept. It says you’re seeing him just for social purposes and that you will never be paid anything for any reason.”

  “I wouldn’t ask for any of his money.”

  “Then you won’t have any problem signing the release.”

  Benny paused at the suite door.

  “You ever been sick, Betty?”

  “Sick? No, I never get sick. I haven’t had a cold in years.”

  “How about personal stuff. You ever got anything from a guy?”

  She turned red. “Of course not. What kind of girl do you think I am?”

  He knocked and then opened the suite door with a key, and stood back and let her enter.

  She walked in and stopped dead in her tracks. He was sitting in a stuffed chair, in his bathrobe, the richest man in the world, a guy who owned airlines, movie studios, defense plants, and tool factories.

  He was reading a financial report and he looked up from it. He stared at her for a moment. His expression, as though peering through the microscope at a bug, never changed.

  She didn’t know what to say. She shifted on her feet and smiled but her lips trembled. It was so unreal. Just like in a movie.

  He nodded at Benny who quickly backed out of the door and closed it behind him.

  Hughes stood up and tossed the papers aside. He undid his robe and cupped his penis in his right hand. He began to massage it.

  4

  Twenty minutes later, Hughes walked her to the door as Benny opened it.

  Betty was in a daze. She had walked in speechless and was walking out in the same state. She struggled to say something, something that would add some meaning to what had just occurred but nothing came out. She had had sex before, for an unmarried woman of her day she was quite experienced, but she had never experienced it in such a bloodless and robotic fashion. Wam-bam, thank you, ma’am was how the joke went.

  She stopped at the door and turned to Hughes, feeling awkward, and finally said, “I—I really admire you, Howie.” She leaned toward him to give him a kiss on the cheek but he stepped back a
nd waved his hands as if she was a fly he was fending off.

  “Get her out of here.”

  Out in the hall, Benny was all business. He took her by the arm and marched her to the elevator. Another aide was standing by, holding the empty elevator open.

  “Don’t forget what you signed.”

  “Signed?”

  “The waiver, release, and confidentiality agreement. You are forbidden to mention to anyone what happened between you and Mr. Hughes. If one word of this ever appears in a tabloid, I guarantee you will be hunted down and punished. You are to forget what happened tonight. Period.” He led her into the elevator. “Understand?”

  She had never seen Benny so officious before. He had always acted like an all-right guy. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  Benny shoved a greenback down the front of her blouse, letting his hand slide over her breast as he did. “That’s for being a good girl.”

  When the elevator door closed, she pulled the bill out—a hundred dollars. She suddenly felt dirty. She wasn’t a whore. A couple of times she’d slept with a customer and let him tip her, but only when it was a guy she wanted to do it with and only when she was low on rent money. A hundred dollars was a lot of money. She made thirty dollars a week in wages and almost twice that in tips, but every spare cent went into the slots. But it still made her feel dirty. If Hughes had shown her one ounce of affection or interest, she wouldn’t have minded. Instead he treated her like a bug.

  But she soon shrugged off the feeling. My God, it was like sleeping with royalty.

  Betty knew something was wrong when she missed her next period. The baby came right on schedule. Howard Hughes, Jr., was three months old when Hughes came back into town, again staying at the Flamingo.

  She had been through bad times, getting sick a lot during the pregnancy and being unable to work. Early on, a coworker told her that there was a place down in Tijuana where you could get rid of a pregnancy, but she had been too scared and too broke to try it. Everyone she talked to had heard about a girl who bled to death after the Mexican doctor got through slicing her up.