Las Vegas Writes | Restless City – Chapter 5 by John L. Smith

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Back at his apartment complex, Brady knocked on the door of his neighbor, Helen McGreevey. She was eighty, had worked at the original El Rancho Vegas for Belden Katleman in the early ‘50s. She broke in as an underage shill at the El Cortez when Benny Siegel took over the race wire there. At the El Rancho, she fell in love with Irish Charlie McGreevey, a skilled casino man killed by Johnny Marshall, who was of course never prosecuted for the crime. Helen was known as the first female floorman in Las Vegas. She was tougher than Tyson on cheaters and would point out card counters by ridiculing their arithmetic. “What are you, counting with your fingers and toes?” she’d roar in her cigarette-scarred voice for everyone in the blackjack pit to hear.

Helen’s eyesight was nearly gone, but she heard everything. She answered Brady’s knock with “I wondered when you’d come to your senses and start courting an old broad.”

Brady had to laugh. Before he could respond, she said, “But don’t start trying to charm me at this late date. I know what you want. You want to know if you’ve had any recent visitors, and the answer is yes. Two fellows claiming to be from the telephone company were at your door this morning. And they entered your apartment.”

“Thanks, Helen,” Brady said. “I think I need a favor.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

She welcomed him in and returned a moment later with a set of car keys.

“I haven’t driven the Cadillac since my last eye surgery, but I start it regularly and play the radio and pretend I’m going out on the town. Oh, this place used to be so glamorous. It was really something when the mob ran it. Except for that nasty bastard Johnny Marshall, may his soul burn in hell.”

Brady had heard the story of her husband’s violent death many times, but he listened patiently. Then he borrowed the old woman’s phone, leaving a $100 bill on the kitchen counter where even a nearly blind woman would find it.

“What do you have for me?” Brady asked his power company pal Roy Harris.

“You’re lucky. The Budget Hacienda Apartments rent by the month. And it’s not two apartments they’ve got, but three. Leased for six months to Desert Mirage Productions. Power was turned on four weeks ago. One apartment uses almost no electricity. The other two use more.”

Brady thanked his friend, assured him they’d get together soon. After thanking Helen McGreevey for her assistance, he dashed across the hall to his apartment and unlocked the door quickly, the .32 in his pocket. The blinking light of his message phone pierced the shadow: two calls.

Call one:

“Brady. It’s Smith. Call me, man. I have something hot for you.”

Call two:

“What’d you do with my car, asshole?” a drunk woman’s voice snarled. It was the woman who called herself Jill. “I heard from Ilene. She’s in trouble and needs your help. Call Samuels right away. And give me my car back, will you?”

Brady went to his closet and quickly picked up his surveillance bag, which held electronics equipment he used in his P.I. job, and hurried back out the door. In the covered parking area, he started the root beer-colored ’85 Eldorado, its interior reeking of cigarettes and the fine dust of neglect and fading memories.

As he was pulling out, a black-and-white with what appeared to be two Metro officers pulled up to the curb. He wrote down its license plate, then watched the blue uniforms go upstairs out of the rearview mirror. Whoever had visited his apartment earlier that day had wired it with a motion detector. And Metro officers wear tan uniforms.

Brady motored back across the valley through the darkness and the overheated traffic. The Cadillac’s big V-8 would cost a fortune to run every day, but Brady noticed the twenty-five-year-old yacht had 19,250 miles on it and purred in a double baritone reminiscent of the late Vegas jazz singer Joe Williams.

He made a call from the laborer’s cell phone to Dominic “Sonny” Paduano.

“You’re a funny guy, Brady, you know that? I love you, baby, but you’re a funny guy. That car guy says your jalopy’s worth maybe eighty large.”

“I’ve never had extravagant tastes,” Brady said.

“It’s probably worth another five Gs with all that added-in stuff, he tells me. Very sophisticated. Two cameras, four microphones, a GPS tracking system. Everything but Panavision and Cinemascope. My car guy says how much you want for the whole deal?”

“I want the bugging equipment. He can keep the car. He needs to drown the GPS pronto. Tell him he can owe me.”

“Done and done,” Sonny Paduano said.

On his way over to Sonny’s Southside, Brady placed a call to John L. Smith, the Review-Journal newspaper columnist.

“Brady?” Smith laughed. “Glad you got the message. Your phone was making crazy noises earlier today. I almost decided you’d gone on a bender and busted out.”

“I’m still here; for how much longer is the question.”

“Well, you’re no doubt feeling better than Fat Andy Sachman. Or should I say Fried Andy. Metro hasn’t officially I.D.‘d the body, but I’ve got a back-channel canary who confirms it’s Fat Andy. Body is missing its hands. He must have really pissed somebody off. The body was dumped off State Route 157 three miles up from the highway. ‘The Happy Dumping Ground,’ as an old Paiute Indian once called it. Anyway, you got a comment for Nevada’s largest daily?”

“Tell your readers I’m seeking grief counseling,” Brady said, playing his cards carefully with the newspaperman. “Meanwhile, I have a special request. I need everything you can dig up on Joe Don Walker.”

“There’s a blast from the past. Haven’t heard a word from him since he caught that break and got six months of halfway house time on those union corruption charges. He should have been hit with ten years. Instead, he got a wrist slap. What’s he up to nowadays?”

“That’s what this inquiring mind wants to know.”

“I’ll float a note in the Friday column. It’s better than fishing. And I’ll take a look at the clip file. It’s been a slow day. Not a single county commissioner has been indicted.”

Brady thanked his friend as he was pulling into Sonny’s Southside. After an exchange of pleasantries, Brady received a cheese pizza and a paper sack to go. The sack contained a Diet Coke and the pinhole cameras that had been taken out of the actress’s car. He was so-so with electronics, but he knew top-of-the-line spyware when he saw it.

The last thing Sonny Paduano had said to him was, “The GPS is now tracking an eighteen-wheeler somewhere south of Barstow.”

One more call to Roy Harris.

“Any chance those apartments can be without power for a couple hours?”

“You don’t ask for much, my man.”

“It’s important.”

Harris hesitated.

“It must be,” he said.

In thirty minutes, Brady had positioned the Cadillac in the parking lot of the apartment complex. The night swelter was almost unbearable inside the Eldorado. He cracked a window and waited. Somewhere in the night, storm clouds were rolling in.

He watched as the lights went out. In short order, four people came outside. Two lit cigarettes while two others shouted into their cell phones. In a moment, the woman who had been playing Ilene’s sister, Juliet, emerged from the apartment, interrupted Creamer the lawyer, and in a moment they locked an apartment and left. An hour later, the sun had finished bleeding behind the Spring Mountains and the night got slightly cooler. Brady waited and fielded a phone call from Harris.

“I’m handling this call personally. It’s overtime. But I can’t stall it all night. I can give you two hours.”

In twenty minutes, Brady’s patience paid off. The three men left the other apartments. He grabbed his bag, passed the trashed apartment 211, moved to the second.

In the movies, the private investigator is also a master locksmith. In reality, a pry bar and a rubber mallet are faster and more effective entry tools. The technique is called peeling a lock. Just place the blade of the bar into the jamb and pound it until the lock breaks or you generate enough leverage to pop the door open. Same for a Kmart dead bolt. Just pound it and peel it. Cheap apartment doors are easier to open than a can of sardines if you don’t mind leaving a mess.

Once inside, he saw the glow of three laptop computers running on their batteries. He flipped on his flashlight and saw a small mainframe on rollers in the corner. This was much more upscale than the average porn shoot. There were enough cameras and editing equipment to produce a made-for-TV movie.

He spent the next thirty minutes concealing the pinhole cameras, and another twenty scouring the laptops and collecting disks. When he found the laptop that controlled the pinhole cameras, he closed it and placed it in his bag.

Door No. 3.

The flashlight illuminated a garbage-strewn living room with rented furniture. The bedroom door was closed, and Brady set down his bag and pulled out the .32. Cutting the flashlight, he opened the door slowly, taking care to stay to the side and out of a direct line of fire. Sweat dripped from his forehead and neck.

When he flipped the light back on, “Sonofabitch” was all he could muster.

It was a frail Ilene and the animal, Axel, bound and gagged on a sagging double bed like a reality show version of Beauty and the Beast.

After they caught their breath and used the bathroom, Brady told them, “There isn’t much time. They’ll be coming back soon. You need to keep a very low profile until you hear from me.”

“Ain’t exactly my style,” Axel said, rubbing his wrists.

“Neither is burying your girlfriend here,” Brady said.

Brady ushered them out the door and down to the parking lot. Once they were back in the Cadillac and on the road, Brady said, “Get her to a safe place. If you’ve got cell phones, trash them.” He gave them his number, told them to contact him when they were safe, and dropped them at a place on the Boulder Highway that rents dented automobiles cheap to college kids determined to party and drive in Vegas.

Brady still had work to do. It was late when he reached Helen McGreevey’s apartment. She was still awake.

“I need a favor, Helen,” Brady said.

“Use the spare bedroom,” the elderly woman replied.

For the next three hours Brady pored over the disks he’d removed from the apartment. They were copies and mostly unedited material and each was labeled “Eye in the Sky.” He saw himself in several of them.

He also saw Fat Andy Sachman, pleading for his life, crying like a baby, and getting shot right in the face before the camera went dark.

He found no sign of Lillian. But there were two scenes featuring Tom the Binion’s bartender in different roles.

And there was a disk devoted to the funeral of Colleen Winters Depeau. Ilene Davies was there with Axel at her side. A handful of strangers was present. And Jeremy Boozer, the burned-out comedian who was having trouble keeping a lounge gig in Laughlin.

No Quinton Samuels. He claimed she was his last, lost love, but he didn’t bother to attend her funeral.

The images flicked by so quickly that Brady had to reverse the disk several times before capturing the moment. It was an older, grayer and chubbier version of Joe Don Walker, the union thumper. He was seated next to two older men. One Brady recognized as Carl Pistel, the old-school pornographer he was certain would come back as the owner of record of Desert Mirage Productions. The distinguished man next to him was white-haired and impeccably dressed. His face was as slim as a blade. He could have been Gregory Peck’s brother, but it wasn’t.

It was Francis Xavier O’Connor, aide de camp, lifelong friend, and personal spokesman for Nick Nazarian, owner of the second-largest casino company in the world with its flagship, the Desert Paradise. Nazarian is almost ninety. He’s the recluse the business writers call “The Ancient Mariner.” He’s one of a few remaining Nevada gaming licensees whose careers began when Benny Siegel was still building the Flamingo. Bugsy, Gus Greenbaum, Moe Dalitz, Benny Binion, and Kirk Kerkorian. Nazarian had outlived them all. He still golfed every morning, still kept a runway model around his mansion.

Brady said to himself, “When the rich have everything, they will find ways to amuse themselves.”

If Nazarian was behind this, it wouldn’t end well. He was known to keep sheriffs and former FBI men in his pocket. He was also known as a man who was willing to gamble, but he hated to be cheated.

There was one way to find out whether Nick Nazarian was the man behind the curtain. Get to his assistant, Frankie O’Connor.

Author Bio

A fourth-generation Nevadan, John L. Smith is an award-winning columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the author of 11 nonfiction books, including Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn, No Limit: The Rise and Fall of Bob Stupak and Las Vegas’ Stratosphere Tower, and Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman’s Life from Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas.