“A girl was murdered?” Jeff said. He glared at Jerry. “When? Where? Why didn’t you tell me to call the police right away?” He put his arm around Brenda’s shoulder.
Rosa, having heard the commotion, walked from the dessert table, carrying a chocolate cream pie, which she shoved into Jerry’s face. “Don’t you dare talk to Charlie like that. I love him. We’re going to get married. You leave him alone, you creep.”
Then Rosa picked up the phone from Charlie’s workstation and called the police herself.
Charlie looked at Jeff. “Did you win a lot of money in the casino?” he asked.
Jeff squeezed Brenda’s shoulder. He shook his head. “No. Of course not. Why?”
“Because if you did, that may be why your daughter has disappeared. The other girl, Amy, was kidnapped because her father won a jackpot.”
“Oh, Jeff. I’m so scared,” Brenda said.
Jeff’s hands dropped to his side. He couldn’t look Brenda in the eyes. He looked sheepish as he muttered, “Well, uh, I did win a thousand dollars. I didn’t want to tell you. I thought you’d be mad at me.”
“Playing nickels and dimes?” Brenda asked. “A thousand dollars, playing nickels and dimes?”
“Well, no,” Jeff said. “I played silver dollars.”
Brenda stopped crying. “You bastard,” she said. She slapped Jeff across his face. She wiped her eyes with the side of her hand. She sniffled.
Ken reached into his pocket and handed Brenda a handkerchief.
Brenda wiped her nose.
Laura sneezed.
Brenda handed Laura the handkerchief. Laura blew her nose. She sneezed again and again.
The handkerchief smelled of lavender.
Laura looked at the handkerchief. It was small and one corner of it was embroidered with violets. It was Julie’s handkerchief.
Laura pointed to Ken. “He’s the one. He’s the one who kidnapped Julie.” She sneezed again. “This is Julie’s handkerchief, the one that Grandma Helen gave her, the last time she visited. Mine had pansies on it.”
Ken dropped his hold on Jerry. He started to run.
Jerry, his face covered with chocolate cream pie, turned and ran after Ken.
He tackled him, just as the police marched in.
After questioning Ken, the police located Julie tied to a chair in small shed behind the hotel. It wasn’t air-conditioned. Julie was all sweaty and had wet her pants. Her hands were tied behind her back and she had a red bandana wrapped around her mouth. When the policeman removed it, she began to sob.
They brought Julie to her parents who were waiting in the lobby. Brenda rushed up to Julie, gathered her in her arms, hugged her, held her close and rocked her. Julie began to cry.
“I’m the one that found out that Ken was the killer,” Laura said.
“Who found out, not, that found out,” Brenda said.
“Killer? Who did he kill?” Julie asked, and began to cry harder.
“We’re going to have to take you down to police headquarters,” one of the policemen said. “But you’d all better get dressed first.”
Julie snuggled against Brenda’s breast.
Jeff patted Laura on the head. “I’ m very proud of you,” he said.
After a long afternoon at police headquarters, they returned to the hotel. The management offered them a free dinner and refused to charge them for their room. The police said they could leave Las Vegas, but that Julie would have to return to testify when Ken went to trial.
Brenda and Jeff decided to leave Las Vegas the next morning, but to continue on their trip to Los Angeles. They wanted to make life for Julie seem as normal as possible. They left Las Vegas early and spent two days at Disneyland before visiting Uncle Phil and Aunt Miriam. Uncle Phil and Aunt Miriam had a dog, a golden retriever named Harley. At first Laura was apprehensive, but when Harley put his head on her lap, she pet his soft fur and her eyes didn’t itch and she didn’t sneeze. “I don’t think I’m allergic to dogs,” she said. “Just to cats.”
Julie ended up returning to Las Vegas, way before she was an adult. She had to testify at Ken’s trial. Jeff took time off from his job to be with her. Neither of them had any desire to gamble. When they got home, Julie read all of Laura’s hand-me-down Nancy Drew books. And Brenda bought Julie a dog, a female basset hound that they named Lavender.
Ken was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing Amy, and to twenty additional years for kidnapping Julie.
Now, while remembering the names of Uncle Phil and Aunt Miriam and the cousins Jon and Karen is not important to the story, I thought you might want to know what happened to the rest of the cast, over the years.
Jerry left his job at the hotel and became chief of security at a house of prostitution. He married a five-foot-eleven, dark-haired prostitute who kind of looked like a much taller version of Rosa and had been a showgirl when she was younger.
Rosa did not marry, or even date, Charlie but ended up marrying one of the cops who had rescued Julie. She had five children a year apart, and ended up fat, just like her mother and her aunts. She started a business baking chocolate cream pies and raisin oatmeal cookies and distributing them to the hotel buffets.
Charlie became a headwaiter at one of the dinner restaurants and married a croupier from one of the casinos. He never did become the next Sinatra or even make it as a singer in one of the smaller hotel lounges.
Laura became a psychiatric social worker. She and Julie and their parents had needed a number of years of therapy after they returned from Las Vegas and Laura had felt helped by it. But she never mentioned to anyone that she always slept with a small brown teddy bear with a blue ribbon around its neck.
Ironically Julie was the one who became a writer. She wrote mysteries. She was never compared to Agatha Christie, though. Her books were very dark and brooding, and bad things always happened to small children. She never returned to Las Vegas, after the trial, and won’t go anywhere near a slot machine.
Brenda insisted that Jeff put the one thousand dollars that he won toward the kids’ college accounts. After the girls finished college, Brenda and Jeff divorced.
“It was bound to happen,” Laura said. “I’m surprised they waited this long.”
“I feel kind of guilty, that it was all my fault,” Julie said. “I never should have sneaked off and gone to those slot machines by myself.”
“It wasn’t you. It started before you ever bet anything. It was the thousand dollars that Daddy won,” Laura said. “They had an agreement to play only nickels and dimes and he sneaked back to the hotel and broke it. And then he hid the money and didn’t even tell Mommy that he had it. And I don’t believe, if you hadn’t been kidnapped, that he would have told her either. Even when Charlie asked if he had won any money in the casino, he lied. Mommy could never really trust him again. He should have stuck to nickels and dimes.”
“Yeah, nickels and dimes,” Julie said. “Only nickels and dimes.”
EVEN GAMBLERS HAVE TO EAT
RUTH CAVIN
It was a local scandal—the kind exciting enough that the neighborhood women kept making some excuse to run to the grocery store to discuss a new twist of the plot with their friends. First, Aaron Plotkin was leaving Akron and his good job at Topnotch Tire for some deserted place in the West. And why? As he put it, to “change his life for the better.”
“What could be so better?” inquired the women of one another. The rest of his life, he could stay at Topnotch Tire—he’s their genius, no? Could they make tires without him? Who else can add and subtract like Aaron Plotkin? [The speaker’s knowledge of accounting skills was not extensive.] “And in this Depression yet, where college graduates are selling apples on the sidewalk! And what about Molly? She’s supposed to go out to the middle of the desert with him? Thank God they aren’t already married! It’s meshuggah! Crazy!”
The desert wasn’t in Molly’s future. She flatly refused to go. “Leave Mr. MacReady in the lurch?” Molly felt the
weight of her position; she was Vice President MacReady’s private secretary. (The women speculated, possibly unfairly, just what that word “private” signified, in this case.) “Give up my own job?” Molly told Aaron scathingly. “Uh-uh! I stay here!”
But Aaron went. Leaving Molly, both parents and six siblings back in Akron, he followed his dream. The gossip chorus would really have sizzled if the women had got wind of that tidbit. Because Aaron’s almost lifelong dream was to cook for a living.
The bug had bit him as he watched his mother, who cooked for her brood with love and grumbles. But men didn’t cook—not unless they were paid for it, not unless it was their job, not unless they could be called “chefs.” Aaron wanted to be a professional chef. Reading in the newspaper about job opportunities in the West, he saw his chance. He’d live simply and work until he had enough saved to open a restaurant. A small one. No fancy stuff. Good home cooking. To start, at least. Later on—who knows?
And that’s how it worked out. He got a job. He rented a tiny room in a town called “Las Vegas.” A Mexican on his shift said the words meant “The Meadows.” Some “meadows” in the middle of the desert!
Aaron missed his family terribly, even Max, his wild younger brother. (Molly hardly at all). But his dream restaurant was taking shape in his mind. Las Vegas would grow from its present size—one church, a few rackety bars and the only store, selling whatever was available, to a place sought by tourists. Meanwhile, he worked, slept and saved.
He had made casual friends with a few of his coworkers, all men. He knew no women—the women in Las Vegas were either married or questionable. The few entertainers arriving with the new hotels, could, of course, have been from another planet as far as Aaron was concerned. And the “ladies of the night”—he found it embarrassing just to walk by the building near his rooming house where they held forth. He did invite Molly to come “just for a visit,” but her answer—“Not on your life!”—didn’t upset him the way he would have expected. Aaron was much more interested in his kitchen than his bedroom. Much as he’d like to see her, he would have had to step away from his stove and look after her. In spite of a rapidly growing influx of tourists, Las Vegas was still a gritty town. Fistfights were a regular feature of barroom evenings. Visitors and some residents had been knocked out and robbed after midnight on the night streets, and the few respectable women in Vegas never went out unaccompanied after dark. There had been some shootouts, and there was talk of clandestine meetings of the Ku Klux Klan. Vegas kept the sheriff on his toes.
Now, with the horizon bright with the imminent repeal of the gambling ban, bad boys from the East were hurrying into the town. They were bad boys with money and visions of casinos as cornucopias overflowing with the gambling dollars of tourists from Los Angeles and other lucrative settlements as far as the Pacific Coast and—who knows?—the Atlantic Coast as well. But they were hardly making the town respectable; gangsters didn’t miraculously turn into gentlemen when they stepped off the train in Nevada.
There were plenty of rumors that some of the men paying visits to the new hotels on the street that had been named the Strip were bootleggers from the East, trying to set up moneymaking gambling deals. Only half believing it, Aaron stepped carefully when the new people were around.
From the start, Aaron’s Eats picked up a customer base. Well, it was the only real restaurant in town.
The day before the celebration of “One Year Anniversary of Aaron’s Eats,” Aaron was up on a ladder hanging crepe paper ribbons above the tables when he heard someone open the street door. A little nervously, he turned and was amazed to see his youngest brother, Max, standing in the middle of the floor.
“Max!” he cried, hastily climbing down from the ladder. “What in God’s name are you doing here?” The fervor of his greeting had an undertone of something different. You couldn’t help loving Max, but their grandfather had rightly always called him Der kleine Tyvel—the little devil—and it was only partly from affection. Max was not always in trouble, but then again, he wasn’t always out of it either.
“You’ll be glad I came,” Max said.
“Of course I’m glad you came.”
“I’ve got a great deal for you.”
“Yeah? I can’t wait to hear it. But sit down. I’ve got some cold beer.” And he established his brother at one of the oil-cloth covered tables while he went to the kitchen for the bottles.
“Now,” Aaron said. “What’ve you got yourself into now?”
“Into is right,” Max told him. “I’m right in there with a really smart bunch of fellows. From the old neighborhood.”
“From Akron!” Aaron was dubious.
“Akron, hell. These guys are from a real place—Brooklyn, New York!”
“You were in Brooklyn?”
“Jeez, Ary, don’t you read the papers?”
“The only papers we’ve got don’t write about Brooklyn, New York.”
“Naw! I met these fellas at home, our own home, Akron. See, you don’t even know nothing out here. The tire factory had a big strike. And these guys brought a bunch of people to work in the factories instead of those Bolsheviks, and see, they had to protect them, so they had their guys patrolling the buildings, making sure they were ok, and that the Bolshies didn’t do no damage. You should thank me, too. Molly was right there in the middle of it, but they knew that all they had to do is bother her one little bit and they’d have to deal with me!”
“Molly! My God! Are you sure she’s all right?”
“I told you. Sure she’s all right, with me taking care of her.”
“She never told me.”
“She’s pretty mad at you.” Max leaned over until he was right in his brother’s face. “Listen, Ary,” he said. “Little brother has gotten to know some people who will make you so rich, as soon as Molly hears about it she’s on the train to Nevada. So listen good.” He favored Aaron with the grin that his family—and a score of young women—found hard to resist.
“What people?” Aaron asked. “Who are they?”
“They’re businessmen. They’ve got piles of money to invest, Ary. And would you believe it? One of them took me out to lunch, and we talked about you. You’re in clover!”
“You and this businessman talked about me?”
“About your restaurant. You wait. He’s coming out here and he told me he’d be sure to get in touch. His name is Golding, Lucky Golding.”
Aaron couldn’t guess what Max was talking about, but he felt he didn’t need to take it seriously. It was just Maxie being Maxie.
Max, though, kept waiting anxiously for word from the “big businessman” from Brooklyn, New York. But in vain.
Until one evening, after about a month had gone by. Max, who was waiting tables, came running into the kitchen. He grabbed Aaron by the arm, nearly upsetting the stew his brother was stirring, and gasped “He’s here! He’s out at a table! He’s here!”
Aaron sighed, put down his spoon, untied his apron and went out into the public dining room. Going up to the man sitting alone with a highball glass and a cigar, he said, “My brother says you spoke to him in Akron.”
The man stood—he was really very small, and very slight, except for a pot belly. He put down his cigar and shook Aaron’s hand vigorously. “Golding. Lucky Golding. D’lighted to meetcha. Yeah, sure, I remember the kid. He told me what a great cook you are, and this meal sure proves it. You got a future here. You wait and see. As soon as that law goes out, there are going to be a lot more people coming here to gamble without having to worry that the state is gonna step in and take twice as much of what you win in fines. Listen, I’ll give you five to one we’ll even get soma these Mormons slipping over from Utah, pretending they’re just here to see the mountains. But you and I know different, no?
“Listen; we can’t talk business here. Come up to the Golden Gate—that’s where I’m stayin’. Gotta suite there. Little place, but wait till my hotel is done. Have dinner with me t’night?”
> “My restaurant is open for dinner and I’m the only one cooking.”
“Okay, okay. Tomorrow, then. Come when you close. Close early, huh? Gotta talk.” He picked up his beer glass and drained it, and went out into the sun.
“Well, he sure means business, doesn’t he?” Max asked.
“Maybe, but not with me.”
But when the tables had been cleared and set up for the next day and the dishes washed and on the racks drying, Max begged Aaron to “at least talk to the guy, please, Ary.”
There was fear in his voice.
“What are you afraid of, little brother?” Aaron asked gently.
Max actually gulped. “He’s an important guy, Ary. He—he has ways of getting what he wants.”
Aaron sighed. “Well, let’s find out what he wants first, OK? Don’t worry, Maxele. I’ll be careful what I say.”
Aaron had never been in a hotel dining room. He was impressed by its size, by the huge vases of artificial flowers here and there around the room. He was struck to see that each table had a “tablecloth” actually made of cloth. But when the dinner was set before them, he couldn’t help comparing it to how he would have made it. He certainly wouldn’t have so disastrously overcooked the lamb shanks, for instance, nor let them swim in such a tasteless, watery sauce. There were never such lumps in his mashed potatoes, and he’d have handed in his apron before he’d serve a pie with so soggy a crust. But of course, he wasn’t there to criticize the food.
He took a big breath. “You know, Mr. Golding, when my brother came here—that is, he thought—he hoped you could find some kind of job for him. At your hotel, I mean,” he added hurriedly.
Golding nodded. “Sure, sure. The hotel ain’t finished, but when it is—sure; don’t you worry; we’ll find something for him. Always something for a smart young guy to do. Open a new hotel in a new town—there’s lots of jobs. Tell him not to worry; we’ll get to him.” All of which sounded to Aaron what it was—a put-off. Max would be lucky if he ended up a bellboy.