Three for the Money Read online

  THREE

  FOR

  THE

  MONEY

  W.T. BALLARD

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  FRENCHY (ALEXIS) MELMAN—Gambling virtuoso and con man extraordinaire. Wind up the Frenchy doll and it will get married—but someone wound Frenchy up too tight.

  AL FREED—Brutal and brash, a Texan short on psychology and long on muscle.

  LT. MAX HUNTER—Until he gets emotionally involved, he demonstrates the delicate business of enforcing laws in a wild town where everyone comes to break them.

  CLAUDE BALDING—He gets his baptism of fire when Frenchy gets extreme unction.

  HARRY DANIELS—His touching loyalty to the syndicate fades under pressure like a desert sunset.

  BOYCE PANGUIN—The pit boss, who supervised the action for the suckers with eyes as unanimated as those of a long-dead fish.

  BOB ORTON—This undersheriff was all-cop and a jailyard wide.

  ROB HOBART—A small-time operator whose sortie into the big time makes heads roll.

  MIKE KOWSKI—A stickman whose opportunistic eaves-droppings brings the roof down on his head.

  DORA KOWSKI—Mike’s wife—a dark, vivacious come-on girl due for a clean bring-down.

  PINKY WHITE—A small, ebullient man whose hair is pink, but whose journalism is yellow.

  MRS. MELMAN, #1-NORDA—A sumptuous sexpot, whose violet eyes remind Max of shady nooks.

  JOE KANE—Homicide chief—the symphony of his marriage turned into a fugue, but an old-fashioned friend helped him face the music.

  MRS. MELMAN, #2-RUTH—A soignée member of the jet set who was mistress of a great deal more than the situation.

  MRS. MELMAN, #3-IRIS—Known as Iron Pants, whose devotion to Frenchy followed his murderer to the grave.

  KITTY KANE—Joe’s wife, who is haunted by the past and spooked by the present.

  CARL (DUTCH) DITMAR and OSCAR FRIEND—The boys from Boston whose infallible system for unloading marked bills from a million-dollar heist is disrupted by three murders.

  DR. BILL LYNN—With him, headshrinking becomes an art—he makes psychiatry so attractive, you’ll wish you needed it.

  HELEN ADAMS—This sleek green-eyed redhead gave up flying—by day.

  1

  IT IS AN ACCEPTED IRONY that no matter how great a bum a man is during his lifetime, he will be glorified by the mere fact of his death. Our habit of eulogizing every corpse runs deep into our social structure and probably has for its roots the ancestor worship of primitive man. Many people who shed tears openly at a funeral thoroughly detested the subject when he was alive. There is something firmly infixed in a burial service that brings out the mawkishness of the human race.

  Frenchy Melman’s funeral followed the general pattern, but on a mammoth scale. It developed into the largest in Las Vegas. Over three thousand tried to attend, but there was hardly a personal friend of his in the whole uproarious gathering.

  In Melman’s case, the compelling emotion was curiosity. Melman was one of the most highly publicized gamblers of our time. For over forty years, his comings and goings had been reported in the daily press with that slavish attention usually accorded only to movie stars and international playboys.

  He enjoyed a continuous limelight, so how he had managed to maintain privacy in his personal life was a valid mystery. He was small—a dark man with a pointed nose, a mouth so tight-lipped that it might have been sliced into his narrow face with a sharp razor stroke, and eyes black and expressionless, fixed, as if frozen, in their sockets. Where he acquired the nickname “Frenchy” was another minor mystery, for the strain which predominated in his blood was certainly not French. Rumor had it that he was born somewhere along the south shore of the Mediterranean, of mixed parentage, perhaps Greek or Egyptian. At one time, he had claimed to be the last legitimate descendant of the Pharaohs. But then, he had never been penurious with his claims.

  He had been known as a colorful character, and he made headlines during the early days of prohibition along with others of his ilk, such as Nick the Greek, Titanic Thompson and Arnold Rothstein. It was said that he had once won half a million dollars from Rothstein in a single night of play, but the story is not too credible. People who won money from Arnold seldom reached old age as Frenchy had.

  These gamblers were pictured as reckless plungers, willing to bet thousands on the turn of a single card, the outcome of a fight or ball game or the flight of a bird. In actuality, they were sure-thing players. They seldom used their own money and never risked a dime on anything unless the game was rigged. Publicity was their stock in trade. It helped them in finding otherwise shrewd businessmen to grubstake their expensive gambling sorties.

  In the thirties, one of the richest and sharpest movie producers backed Frenchy in his asserted attempts to break the faro bank on one of the gambling hulks which, despite the law, lay at anchor off the coast of southern California. What this cost the producer, who was in his own right one of the greatest thieves ever to invade Hollywood, is not a matter of record.

  That Frenchy lost a fortune is a foregone conclusion, just as it was obvious to many people that the president of a steel corporation would lose when he staked Frenchy for an elaborate system supposed to beat the races. But there is enough larceny in most humans that they cannot resist the vision of getting something for nothing.

  Frenchy was an old man when he finally reached Las Vegas. He must have been in his late seventies, although we were never able to turn up a birth certificate. Yet age did not prevent him from standing for hours at a crap table, losing and, sometimes, winning remarkable sums of money. His appearance in any one of the Vegas hotels tended to attract a large crowd. His drawing power seemed to be on a par with that of Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr. Where Melman got the cash he so lavishly gambled with was a further mystery, for our office had quietly checked on him when he first arrived, and found him broke. The whisper circuit had it that he was there as a supershill—being paid a salary and using house money to gain publicity for the games.

  The sheriff’s office did not look with great favor on Frenchy’s presence in Nevada. He was still one of the most accomplished con artists in the business, and the frailty of human nature gave him a fertile field in which to work.

  The desire to get something for nothing has turned Vegas from a dusty, sleepy desert railroad town into one of the glittering entertainment capitals of the world. The millions of tourists we receive each year are lured across the sandy wastes by their conviction that they can overcome the laws of probability, succeed when so many others have failed and beat the games.

  This, then, was a society tailored to order for a man of Frenchy’s talents, and we were certain that he had taken more than one mark during his three years among us, but no complaints had been filed against him. It was not surprising. Few victims of a swindler like to air their gullibility before the hooting world, and many a man has taken his loss in smoldering silence rather than let his friends or employers know that he has made a damned fool of himself.

  So it was with real relief that we heard of Frenchy’s demise.

  From the law-enforcement point of view, Vegas is a powder keg. Ours is a preventive police effort. We try to stop crimes before they take place rather than solve them after they have been committed. It is our business to protect the thousands of visitors, to make them feel secure even while they are indulging in excesses which they would not think of countenancing in others in their own home towns.

  I was one of the first to hear that Frenchy was dead, and, as I said, my reaction was one of relief. I did not realize then that he was to cause me far more trouble dead than he ever had alive.

  It was a hot night in July, about a week after the Fourth, an
d the town was just recovering from the visiting horde that had chosen to spend its national holiday in Las Vegas. I was riding one of our prowl cars. Al Freed was driving when we got the flash from the dispatcher.

  Each hotel has a color code name to prevent anyone who happens to have a radio tuned to our band from racing to a trouble spot and adding to the confusion. The flash was for red. The Florentine Hotel, one of the new and extravagant establishments on the Strip.

  We were headed northeast, coming into town from the airport. Al made a U-turn at the next crossover of the double highway and we pulled into the parking lot, then on to the hotel entrance within four minutes of receiving the word.

  I picked up the car phone as we stopped.

  “Max Hunter and Al Freed at the Florentine.”

  Jackson, the dispatcher, said, “It’s Frenchy Melman. He’s had a heart attack.”

  “Dead?”

  “I don’t know. Balding didn’t say.”

  Claude Balding was our undercover man assigned to the Florentine that night. We try to keep one in each casino, but we’re shorthanded, as most police departments and sheriff’s offices are.

  “Must be,” I said, “or they wouldn’t be calling for us.”

  I replaced the phone and got out as the white-jacketed parking attendant came running up.

  “Leave it where it is.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant.” He was a nice looking, redheaded kid with a quick smile. I did not know his name.

  Al Freed and I went through the glass doors and wormed our way across the crowded lobby. Freed is from Texas—a slight, sandy man with a deceptively mild manner and a drawl that he uses to good effect—one of the best men we have. The place was, as usual, mobbed and noisy. The roar from the big gambling room came in waves, blurred intermittently by the whir of the slot machines and the singing of Ben Short’s trio behind the bar in the cocktail lounge.

  I pushed through to the desk where three clerks were busy registering new arrivals.

  “Where’s Daniels?”

  The clerk I addressed turned impatiently, then, recognizing me, he changed his manner.

  “In his office, Lieutenant.”

  I went down the short hall to the door, Al Freed at my heels.

  Harry Daniels and Boyce Panguin were standing beside Daniels’ desk, talking to Claude Balding. They turned as we came in and Balding showed obvious relief. He had only been transferred to plain-clothes a week before and did not yet feel at ease in his new job.

  “Here’s the Lieutenant now.”

  Daniels nodded. He was a big, florid man in his early forties with a suave manner and a layer of fat which was not unbecoming. Panguin was the exact opposite. He was the pit boss and ran the gambling at the hotel. He was small in stature and his body looked shrunken; it looked as if it were supported by his expensive, finely tailored suit. His face was thin, his skull had a leaden brownness, and his eyes held all the animation of a long-dead fish.

  I reviewed his dossier mentally. Fifty-eight years old. Came to Vegas three years before to take over the new operation at the Florentine. Before that he had run gambling casinos for years in Jefferson Parish. A highly trained house operator. He had no criminal record, but the gambling places where he had worked had been owned by racket money from the North and I had no doubt that his former employers held points in the Florentine, no matter how carefully their ownership was camouflaged.

  His voice was high with almost a childish note. “This is a tough break, Lieutenant. I had nothing against Frenchy, but I wish he’d played at one of the other clubs tonight.”

  I looked at him. His face showed no emotion, neither did his tone, but I sensed that he was angry about something, deeply angry. I shrugged.

  “He’s dead, is he?”

  Panguin nodded.

  “What did he die of?”

  Balding’s tone was disapproving, almost shocked. “He fainted—at the crap table.”

  “Heart, you said?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Can’t the doctor make a guess?”

  “No doctor saw him.”

  I showed my surprise. “No doctor?… What time did he faint?”

  “About seven.” Balding’s tone was tense, as if he were trying to get some message across to me.

  “Seven o’clock?” I glanced at my watch automatically. It was now twenty after twelve. I looked at Daniels. “How come it took you so long to report it?”

  Daniels had lost his suavity. He had begun to sweat although the air conditioning kept the room at a comfortable temperature.

  “He didn’t die then, Max.”

  “When did he die?” My voice was cold.

  “Now wait a minute. Don’t get any screwy ideas, Max. We’ve always cooperated with your office… always.”

  I said, “I don’t get ideas, Harry. I’m just trying to find out what happened.”

  “It wasn’t much—” He was sweating more now. “I didn’t give it a second thought.”

  “A Frenchy Melman faints at your table and you don’t give it enough of a thought to call a doctor?”

  He pulled an expensive handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped at his forehead. Panguin watched us with no change of expression. He might have been stone-deaf for all the interest he showed.

  Daniels went on, sounding put upon. “You’re making a big deal out of nothing, Max. Frenchy was the greatest ham in the country. He was putting on an act most of the time. He’d do anything for attention. I figured he was drunk and clowning it up, so I had him put in one of the empty rooms to sleep it off.”

  “When did he die?”

  “I just don’t know—”

  Impatience rode through my tone. “When did you find out that he was dead?”

  Daniels seemed to relax a little. “Just a few minutes ago. The people who had the room reserved came in on the eleven-thirty plane. The desk sent the bell captain to wake him and move him out. The boy couldn’t rouse him, so they called me and I told Balding.”

  “All right,” I said. “Where is he?”

  Panguin moved his shoulders as if to loosen the tension in them. “I’ve got to get back to the casino. If you need me I’ll be there.”

  I got the impression that he was very glad to get away, to avoid having to go to see Frenchy.

  The hotel is built in the form of a giant rectangle enclosing a pool-studded patio. It rises six stories above the surrounding flat desert and contains eight hundred rooms. We left the office, crossed the lobby, moved down the ground floor southwest corridor to the turn, rounded it, passed an elevator and paused at the door of the first room beyond.

  Daniels knocked. The door was opened by one of the uniformed casino guards. He nodded when he recognized me and stood aside for us to enter. I followed Daniels; Balding and Freed brought up the rear.

  Frenchy Melman lay on the bed in the center of the room. Someone had thrown a blanket over him. I crossed and pulled it back far enough to look at his face, then I walked to the room phone and called the office.

  We sat down to wait for the coroner. No one said anything. We were quiet, reserved, in the presence of Frenchy Melman’s death.

  2

  BOB ORTON was in his office when I got back to the courthouse. The hands of the clock on the desk indicated that it was a quarter after three.

  I was tired and it must have showed, for Bob pushed the buzzer and, when the man from the receiving desk appeared, he told him to bring some coffee. I settled into a seat and lit a cigarette.

  Bob said, “So what’s the story?”

  Bob is undersheriff and the question was in reality an order to report.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know very much more than I told you over the phone. Frenchy showed up at the table about six-ten, as nearly as we can pinpoint it. He bought a thousand dollars worth of chips, the slotman remembers, and started placing numbers bets. He lost his first and second thousand before he started to win. Then he had a run of luck. Some guy held the dice for
thirty rolls and he got back what he’d lost plus a thousand more. He was picking up the dice to shoot for himself when he suddenly turned away from the table and began pushing through the crowd. Then he went down.”

  “Been drinking?”

  “Frenchy always drank, from what I can find out, but we’ll know more about it when they finish the autopsy. A heart attack seems the logical answer, maybe an embolism… the coroner’s man is doing the autopsy now.” I glanced at my watch, forgetting the clock on the desk. “He said he should be through between three-thirty and four.”

  “What happened to the money he had on the table?”

  “The slotman impounded it.”

  The deputy came with the coffee and we drank it in silence. I was very tired. I’d been on duty since noon. I would have liked to go home and sack out, but I didn’t want to leave Orton stuck with the windup on Frenchy.

  I like Orton. He’s young, a big, good-looking man who once played professional football and still water-skis with the best of them. But there’s a tough streak in him, a cold streak that never lets you get too close to him. I met him in FBI police school. He’s a good cop. He’s all cop. That’s why I came to Las Vegas when he asked me.

  “There’s one thing,” he said wryly. “Not many people are going to regret Frenchy’s passing too much. I doubt if there’s a single person left in the world who really cared anything about him.”

  “But there are plenty who must have hated him,” I said. “Imagine letting him lie around five hours like that without calling a doctor. If it was a heart attack, Harry Daniels is as guilty of murder as if he had shot him.”

  Orton’s voice was dry. “Unfortunately, our laws don’t cover such neglect very well. But why should Daniels want Frenchy dead?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t say he did. I’m not inferring that he did it deliberately. The old guy was pretty much of a nuisance and Harry probably got busy and forgot him. But it’s still a kind of cold-blooded way to act.”

  Bob grunted. “I never thought Harry Daniels was exactly overflowing with the milk of human kindness.”