Where the Truth Lies (13 page)

On a little Japanese-type bridge, you crossed a small pool filled with Maine lobsters. These Maine lobsters were flown in live from Miami each day. Don’t ask.

All right, since you asked, I’ll explain. See, the Versailles in Miami Beach (which was operated by the same people who operated the Casino del Mar) flew live lobsters from Maine down to Florida every day or two. The Blue Grotto planned to fly in lobsters from Maine as well. But when the Blue Grotto in New Jersey decided it would also fly in Florida stone crabs every day or two from the Versailles in Miami, they arranged for the Versailles to include some of the lobsters that had been flown in to them from Maine with the shipment of stone crabs being flown from the Versailles to the Blue Grotto. This saved the management a third flight from Maine to New Jersey each day, and that’s why live Maine lobsters packed in ice (along with stone crabs) were flown in fresh from Miami each day. Sorry you asked?

The Casino del Mar operation was run by one of the biggest of the Big Boys, a man named Sally Santoro. Now, I know that every time you see the name Sally after this, your first reflex will be that I’m talking about a girl, so keep in mind that Sally was a man. He had more balls hanging than Sandy Koufax in spring training, and unlike Sandy, he was very good with a baseball bat in his hands. Sally’s real name was Salvatore, but the only people who called him Salvatore were his mother and the politicians who accepted his donations but didn’t want to appear to be his buddy.

I wish I could tell you that Sally was a slim, six-foot-six guy who looked like David Niven with glasses and spoke with an English accent. Then I wouldn’t seem to be falling back on a stereotype. The trouble is, Sally was a respectable Italian gangster who looked and talked just like you’d expect from the movies. Maybe he’d seen those movies too and copied them. He was one of those cold sons o’ bitches: five-ten, jet-black hair, strong arms, strong chest, dark black eyes, thin lips always a little in a frown even when he laughed at my jokes, which he did. He laughed a lot. He was scary.

Sally Santoro ran the Versailles and a few small clubs down in Miami, some strip joints and a really fine whorehouse in Baltimore, and the soon-to-open Casino del Mar in Palisades Park, New Jersey. We had flown out from Hollywood to be at the dedication ceremony for the entire Casino del Mar complex three months before the place would actually open. Sally had invited us up to bring some name value to the ceremony. As a rule you accepted these invitations, unless you had a really good reason, like your mother and father had been killed in a car crash. Loss of one parent alone probably wouldn’t be enough.

After the dedication ceremony, which was also attended by Joni James, little Brenda Lee, Domenico Modugno, and actress Mara Corday, Vince and I were told to join Sally and his friends in his office, which was the first part of the new Casino del Mar to be completed. His friends were already sitting around this big, round table that went well with the Spanish Mediterranean decor. There was a lot of black velvet in the room. On the couches and chairs and in the draperies. A lot of the wall paintings were done on black velvet as well. A matador. A tastefully naked woman. A clown. There was a fantabulous view from a terrace of Manhattan, looking across the Hudson at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. I bet more than one person had seen that view upside down, while being hung by his ankles off the edge of that terrace.

We were shown seats and Sally said, “Vince, Lanny, I wanted you to meet my business partners here.” He gestured to the other men and introduced them, first names only, then said collectively to them, “Guys, these are my very good friends Mr. Vince Collins and his spastic retard Jew partner, Lenny Something.” I wondered what I’d done to make him angry. Then I saw him almost smiling and realized this was his brand of humor. Komedy for Killers. The Boys were making little laughing noises somewhere in their necks, so Vince and I laughed along. Hey, Sally, you’re funny.You should be the comedian. No, says Sally, I leave that horseshit to cocksuckers like you. Laff riot!

A gimpy kid named Frankie brought in sandwiches on a tray. Everyone was happy to see the sandwiches and then absolutely nothing was eaten. Maybe coffee would be poured and reluctantly sipped, but questions like “You want the egg salad, did they send us any Russian dressing, is this ham or tongue?” were topics of as little interest to these gangsters as they were the very center of the universe to Jews like me. In all my life I don’t think I’ve seen an Italian mobster eat a cold meal. Not a tuna-salad sandwich with lettuce, a BLT, or a hard-boiled egg. Okay, I lied: once I saw a mob boss eat a shrimp cocktail, but that took two minutes and then he was on to the fried calamari.

Then Sally and his associates had one of these amazing Mafia nonconversations. They sat there like the place was a steam room. They soaked up the silence, let it settle into their bones.

Finally, Sally started up. “So what’s with our friend?” And after about four bars of nothing, one of the others tried back:

“You mean Joey.”

Two-beat rest.

“Yeah.”

Three-beat rest.

“Joey from Dallas?”

“Joey fromus. ”

“Joey with the, yeah, Joey.”

“He’s okay with that? Because I wouldn’t want it to be that he’s sayin’, you know—”

“No, he’s okay.”

Intermission.

“And his cousin. Tilio?”

“Yeah, I’m taking care of that. It’s done, to be honest.”

“So we’re over, that’s what you’re saying.”

“Yeah, Sally.”

This is exactly how these nonconversations would go. Vince and I heard them many times. Maybe they did it for our benefit. Maybe when there was no else in the room, they talked like the Rotary Club.

There was another forty-five seconds of silence and then everybody but Sally stood, like some floor director had given some invisible cue. Tilio, in leaving, addressed us for the first time. “I saw you guys with Ed Sullivan last Sunday,” he said. “That Ed Sullivan is some cold fish, huh?”

I answered, “Yeah, when we met I said, ‘Gee, Ed, you look almost exactly like you did when you were alive.’”

Happy laughter.

Tilio nodded. “I love that thing you do walking on your ankles. Do that for me.” I did it for him. He loved it. “That’s great. Hey, one thing, though: every time I see you guys, Vince here tries to sing a song, he’s just getting started, and you come out and interrupt him.”

Well, of course, that was the whole departure point of our act, and I laughed at Tilio’s joke. Then I saw he was serious. It was like complaining that inRhapsody in Blue, the piano keeps coming in and drowning out the orchestra. “I’ll watch it from now on,” I nodded with a serious expression.

Tilio nodded back. “You should. Vince is a great singer and a good-looking guy too. Someday he may want to go out on his own, and then where would you be?”

I tried hard not to smile, for Vince’s sake. For over a year now, columnists like Jack O’Brien, Moe Cohn, and Earl Wilson had raised the exact same point, only their argument was reversed: what would happen to poor Vince Collins if Lanny Morris ever left him high and dry? It was something we never talked about.

“Next time he cuts into your song, Vince,” advised Tilio, “take my advice: just keep singing. The audience will tell him to get his loudmouth Jewish ass right off the stage.”

I liked that Tilio was now in show business. Especially since I’d been told that the only time he’d ever killed an audience was when he’d shot a passerby who’d witnessed a rub-out.

Vince, for his part, had been playing it very cool, simply smiling away in no general direction. His attitude, and I can’t tell you he was wrong, was that you don’t win an argument with these guys, so you smile and agree and hope that the next day it’s all blown over.

But for me, I was getting a little annoyed. “What is this, the Italian Penny-Ante Defamation League? Keep in mind, Jesus was a Jew.”

The Boys turned into a snapshot.

Big John asked very slowly, “What thefuck are you saying?”

It was as if one of their wives had said she’d given Sidney Poitier a blow job. They couldn’t make sense of the statement, they couldn’t envision it, maybe it was some sort of a joke that they just weren’t getting. I tried to backpedal. “I’m not saying anything. It’s just that Jesus and his family were all Jews who traveled to the, to the Holy Land.” I saw their reaction and added, “From Naples, it’s now believed.”

Tilio didn’t know if he should kill me or if he was just talking to the dumbest asshole on the face of the planet. He explained to me, like I was a baby: “Listen, if Jesus Christ wasn’t a Christian, where do you think the wordChristian comes from? The Holy Mother gave him that name.”

“Sure, I was just saying that before there was a Christian religion, that Jesus was a Jew. Mary was a Jew too.” Whoa.Big problem here. Lots of grunting noises from the Boys like I’d gone too far. I bailed: “Only in that there was no Christian Church until Jesus was born. There couldn’t be. So Mary had to fall back on whatever religion that was around that was, you know, looking forward a lot to being Catholic.”

I heard a chorus of grunts agreeing with this. Sally acted as Dag Hammarskjöld. “Tilio, hey, come on, Vince and Lanny here are comedians, you know? They say whatever they want and the crowd loves them for it. You’ll see the show the boys are putting on tonight for the groundbreaking ceremony. You’ll sit at my table.”

There was going to be a little show that evening in the temporary lobby of the hotel. We were going to perform a song or two. We were the guests of honor, which meant we were working for free.

Sally moved the guys out the door, explaining that he had some business to discuss with us. We wondered what we had done wrong, but what we had done was done good. He sat us down and said he’d always liked us, liked the business we’d done at the old nightclub; he thought we were “a good fit” with his crowd, meaning we brought in an audience that was hip (or thought they were), meaning heavy drinkers, adulterers, and gamblers.

“Thanks for the compliment, Sally,” I said.

He said we brought in people who liked to laugh, and people who like to laugh are more inclined to laugh off their losses.

“That’s us,” I said. “We got them laughing all the way to your bank.”

Sally said I was fucking funny. “So what we want is for you guys to come back here three months from now and open our new showroom for us. A two-week, exclusive, limited engagement that we want you to give us for six weeks.”

God help you when a killer takes a real shine to you. He’ll move the earth over you. I looked at Vince and scratched my nose, which meant our strongest no.

Vince smiled warmly at Sally. “Sally, that’s a very great honor.”

“You damn fucking straight it is,” he agreed.

“Only we’ve been really trying to cut down on the nightclub work. We just turned down the Sands so we could do a TV special. The only reason we still work the Versailles is out of friendship for you.”

Sally just looked at him.

Vince asked, “What dates are we talking about?”

Sally named the date.

I smiled regretfully. “Sally, any other time and we’d be here in a flash. But that’s the day we finish the next polio telethon, and we always take off two weeks after that, simply to recover.”

Sally didn’t even blink. He said he knew that, that he’d intentionally planned our first promotional appearance for the day after we finished our third annual polio telethon, which we’d be doing live from Miami. When it was over, and we were near dead, we were to fly up from Miami that same day, hold a press conference all haggard and hoarse so that people would know what great guys and heroes we were … and then we were just going to flatten out for three days of R&R. Which stood for Roche and Rorer, as far as Vince and I were concerned. “Look, boys, I know it’s a big favor, but this one is for me, okay?”

I tried to figure out which of the big favors we’d done him in the past werenot for him. The thing with a gangster is, give him an inch, he’ll take a foot and cut it off you and stuff it in your mouth and then ask you if you understand better now that it’s been explained to you. Sally’s motto was “If you can’t beat them, beat them.”

He tried to soften the blow. “Look, when you’re here, you’ll have the run of the hotel. I’ll keep a suite with the best hookers I got on your floor, your own personal cathouse—you like young girls? I mean like teenagers, of course. None of that degenerate stuff. Or how about a belly dancer? A real one, not a stripper.”

I said, “My partner likes girls who majored in bobbing for apples in a barrel. Girls with really big ears. What do you call their ears, Vince?”

“Handles,” smiled Vince.

Sally laughed that soundless laugh. “You fucking crack me up.”

Vince said, “Thanks for the offer, but generally speaking we like to find our own talent. You know. The thrill of the chase.”

Sally shrugged. “Tell you what, I’ll give you your own masseuse, then. And I’ll throw in five hundred dollars in chips for each of you every night, they’ll be waiting inside the you know …”

Of course he couldn’t say “casino.” Therewas no casino at the Casino del Mar, right? This gift was an old trick they used with entertainers in Vegas and Reno, offering to pay them more if they’d take their salary nightly in chips. The entertainer would start to gamble, get into hock his first night out, and have to pay down his debt by working on a regular basis at the casino in return for just room and board. Sammy Davis was once booked for a long weekend that turned into three years that way.

“… and I’ll have them send you up here your own shipment of lobsters and stone crabs from the Versailles. You like lobster?”

We said we did, because we really did.

“And a case of these grapefruits I get special down there, you never tasted such a thing in your life, you need a towel when you’re done eating them. You like Cuban cigars?”

We said we did. Sally frowned at Vince. “You, with your voice! I’ll ship up some Cohibas and Saint Louis Reys, they’re what Frank smokes, we’ll ship those up here for you too. You’ll thank me ’cause we don’t know what the fuck is going to happen with this Castro guy taking over. Oh, and you like waffle irons, and cameras that take three-D pictures?”