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  "You think Chandler would do that?" he asked.

  She shrugged. "He's your friend."

  "Do you know why I'm here?"

  She nodded. "I also know if I told anybody you're here, I'd be lucky if all I wound up with is two broken legs."

  "I don't do business that way, Mrs. Wyatt," said Jonas coldly.

  "No. I don't suppose you do. But Chandler does. Why do you think he trusted me, telling me who was up here and sending me up?"

  "Maybe I'm an innocent," he said.

  "Maybe you are. Were you ever in Vegas when Bugsy Siegel was running the Flamingo?"

  "No, as a matter of fact, I never was."

  She nodded. "I was. I've always liked to come here. My husband brought me here and introduced me to gambling. Bugsy was dangerous. Bugsy killed people. The town has changed since they got rid of Bugsy Siegel. They had to kill him. He was bad for business. But only because he was too public. It wasn't that he beat up on people and killed them — or had them killed — that got him his death sentence. It was that he did it too openly. When it's done now, it's done quietly."

  Jonas shook his head. "I can't think Morris Chandler — " He stopped. What he had in mind was that he couldn't believe a man Nevada Smith trusted could be what she suggested.

  "He doesn't make all the decisions here," she said. "He's a partner, not the sole owner." She sighed. "I'm being stupid. You want a secretary that won't blab everything she knows, and here I am doing it."

  "You're not Chandler's confidential secretary," said Jonas.

  "I won't kid you. I'd like to be yours. Uh ... Chandler spoke of ... other requirements."

  Jonas smiled. "Well. Let's say what he mentioned isn't required. It would be appreciated."

  She stared at him evenly for half a minute, a quizzical smile on her face. Her tongue flicked out between her lips. "Would you want me to live here?" she asked.

  "I have two bedrooms."

  She grinned. "Yeah. You have a certain reputation, Mr. Cord."

  "The job is yours," he said. "I'll appreciate your calling me Mr. Cord when others are with us. When we're alone ... Jonas."

  "My name is Angie," she said.

  6

  1

  ANGIE MOVED INTO THE SUITE THE AFTERNOON AFTER her interview. She slept in the second bedroom that night. The next night she slept with Jonas.

  That the new executive secretary was an exceptionally attractive woman and lived in the suite with Mr. Cord came as no surprise to the four young executives who arrived in Las Vegas within the week. As Angie had said, Jonas had a certain reputation.

  Making all the arrangements took some time, but by the end of his second week in Las Vegas Jonas was firmly in control of all his businesses. He called his companies on the scrambler telephones. The four young executives could go anywhere any time as couriers, flying the De Havilland junket flight to Mexico City and catching flights from there to anywhere Jonas wanted them to go.

  He was not the subject of an FBI manhunt. He was just a missing witness in an investigation few in Congress or in the press thought was very important. Such newspapers as did run stories about his disappearance treated it as a joke on the Senate. One page-five headline read, cord strings out senate snoops.

  Another read, noah in de ark, jonas in de whale?

  He could not even be held in contempt of Congress, since he had never received a subpoena.

  Angie first saw the newspaper report that Monica had filed for divorce.

  She and Jonas were sitting at breakfast, he following his lifelong habit of eating a hearty breakfast, she contenting herself with juice, coffee, and a Danish. She did not have any provocative nightgowns or peignoirs, and they slept nude. She came out to breakfast in her white nylon panties, he in his boxer shorts. He was reading The New York Times, she the Los Angeles Times.

  "Oh, Jonas!"

  "What?"

  She handed over the newspaper, pointing at the story.

  CORD DIVORCE Mrs. Jonas Cord Files for Divorce

  Mrs. Jonas Cord, nee Monica Winthrop, has filed an action in Los Angeles Superior Court, asking for a divorce. Alleging adultery, cruelty, and abandonment, Mrs. Cord asks for a decree of divorce, child custody, division of California property, and alimony.

  Mr. Cord's whereabouts are unknown. He left his Bel Air home shortly before United States marshals arrived to serve on him a summons to testify before a Senate subcommittee investigating airline operations and has not been seen since. He is believed to be living in the vicinity of Mexico City. Jerry Geisler, Mrs. Cord's attorney, said there would be no problem about obtaining jurisdiction over Mr. Cord, since under California law he can be served his summons by publication.

  Jonas shrugged and handed the newspaper back to Angie. " 'Adultery, cruelty, and abandonment,' " he muttered. "She can't prove any one of them."

  Angie put her hand on his. "I'll swear under oath that we've never slept together," she said.

  He smiled wanly. "You won't have to do that, Angie. It's good of you — and loyal — but you won't have to do it. My lawyers will negotiate a settlement. Monica knows better than to demand too much. She'll be reasonable."

  "Did you love her ... ever?"

  Jonas nodded. "Twice. I married her twice."

  Angie frowned and nodded at the newspaper. "It's none of my business. I shouldn't ask you questions. But — It mentions child custody."

  "Monica doesn't need to demand child custody. The girl will be eighteen years old soon. Anyway, I wouldn't demand she come to live with me. I want her to visit me — that is, if she wants to, but only if she wants to."

  He glanced over the newspaper story again, frowning, then laid the paper aside. His lips were tight.

  "I'm sorry, Jonas," Angie whispered.

  "If you want to be sorry the marriage has broken up, okay, be sorry. If you want to be sorry for me, don't. If you want to be sorry for her, don't."

  Angie blinked, squeezing tears from her eyes. "I shouldn't ask you personal questions," she said. "I'm happy to be with you, whatever the answers are."

  He stood, walked behind her, lifted one of her breasts in each hand, and nuzzled her alongside the throat. "You ask me anything you want. If I don't want to answer, I won't."

  Angie looked up and grinned. "Or lie," she said. "Or lie," he agreed, chuckling.

  2

  Sure. Lying was an alternative. It was one he sometimes took. He did not want to know everything about Angie. He put through some inquiries and found out that the life story she had given him was not the truth. He didn't condemn her for that. He could understand why she didn't want to tell the truth. He was confident that he could trust her. Nevada thought so, too, and that counted for a lot.

  Edgar Burns died of shrapnel wounds at Chateau-Thierry on June 6, 1918, two weeks after his daughter Angela was born and twenty-six years to the day before her first husband would die on Omaha Beach. Her young mother remarried, and Angie was twelve years old before they told her about her real father. In school she was Angie Damone. She never used the name Burns.

  Damone was a bootlegger, operating in Yonkers and sanctioned by no less a figure than Arnold Rothstein. When Rothstein was killed, Damone was sanctioned by a don of the Castellamarese group, and he continued to distill gin until the repeal of Prohibition. After Repeal, the don gave him a share of the bookmaking in Yonkers. Angie grew up understanding that her family lived just as well as the families of the lawyer, the dentist, and the real estate agent who were their neighbors on a tree-lined residential street in White Plains. Her father — stepfather, as she came to understand — was in the import-export business. So she believed. So the neighbors believed.

  Angie was seventeen when Damone was arrested and the newspapers revealed the true nature of his business. The charges were dropped, but Angie was so humiliated that she never went back to school. She asked Damone to give her a job with a bookie, but he adamantly refused. For a year she did nothing. She avoided her old friends and made a grou
p of new ones among the unemployed and malcontented element of the young people of White Plains.

  One of them was a young man named Jerome Latham. Considered handsome, he had a square face with a long, strong jaw, heavy-lidded eyes, and slicked-down hair usually covered with a snap-brim hat. He always had money to spend, and no one was sure how he got it, which lent him a dim aura of mystery and glamour. Angie fell in love with him; and, since she was by far the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, Jerry — She couldn't say Jerry fell in love with her. She was an ornament to him, or a trophy. But they became a pair. They were seen everywhere together. He spent money on her. He bought her clothes.

  Her mother and stepfather did not like Jerry Latham. Damone called him a hoodlum, to which Angie replied angrily that Damone was an odd man to be calling another man a hoodlum. That exchange soured the relationship between her and her mother, as well as that between her and her stepfather. She went to Jerry and told him she wanted to live with him.

  Jerry took her in. He lived in a room, just one room, but shortly he rented a small apartment, and in July of 1937, when she was nineteen years old, they married.

  She learned how Jerry made the money he was never without. He was a distributor of counterfeit money. He bought the money from a counterfeiter in New Rochelle, paying him eight dollars apiece for twenty-dollar bills. Then he traveled throughout the New York metropolitan area, making small purchases and tendering counterfeit twenties, in a typical transaction he would buy five dollars' worth of something, hand over a twenty, get fifteen in change, and make seven dollars profit. He would ride a bus, say to Paterson, New Jersey, pass half a dozen twenties in the course of an afternoon, and come home fifty dollars richer. He might make more if he could sell the merchandise he bought. Often he hocked it and never redeemed it.

  He was never caught. The secret was that he wasn't greedy. In 1938 a family could live quite comfortably on a hundred fifty a month. He went out no more than once a week. Also, he kept careful track of where he went. He never returned to the same merchant, usually not even to the same block.

  The ease with which her husband got money fascinated Angie. She suggested he let her try it. She went with him a few times, then went out on her own. She was useful to him. She could go back to stores where he had been, where he wouldn't return, and take the same business for another hit.

  In February of 1940 something terrible happened. Treasury agents raided the New Rochelle print shop. Their counterfeiter went off to federal prison.

  Jerry had to find a new racket. He began to loot mailboxes. She helped him. They poured bags of mail out on their kitchen table, sometimes finding cash, sometimes checks, sometimes money orders, occasionally a stock certificate or a bond. He was an artistic forger, too. When he found a good-sized check, made out to, say, Arthur Schultz, he would forge a driver's license in the name of Arthur Schultz, and use it as identification as he offered the check at a bank. If the check was made out to a woman, Angie cashed it.

  The Selective Service law went into effect on September 10, 1940. Jerry Latham had one of the first numbers picked. Before the year ended, he was at Fort Dix, undergoing basic infantry training.

  Angie was desperate. She had no real idea how to make a living, except by doing the kind of thing Jerry had done. On March 11, 1941, federal agents entered her apartment, arrested her, and seized more than four hundred pieces of mail. They found driver's license blanks and even a few counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. On June 20 she entered the federal reformatory for women at Alderson, West Virginia.

  They brought the telegram to her cell. Sergeant Jerome Latham had been killed in action on June 6, 1944. She received her parole in September.

  During her three years in prison she had learned to take shorthand and to type.

  She never worked for Boise-Cascade or for the California state auditor. Her parole officer helped her obtain a job as secretary to the War Ration Board in White Plains. Before long she met the man who was to become her second husband, Ted Wyatt. He was exactly the kind of man Jerry Latham had been: a grifter whose specialty was counterfeit ration stamps. As a secretary to the board, she could learn what stamps would be authorized for use next month, which was useful information for a man who needed to know what stamps to print.

  Her term of parole ended in September 1945. She married Ted Wyatt, and they set out for California, where both of them hoped to be free from the reputations they had made in the New York area. He did introduce her to gambling, as she had told Jonas. He took her to Reno, then to Las Vegas, and when casinos like the Flamingo and The Seven Voyages opened, they were familiar figures in the gaming rooms.

  Wyatt lost money. Too much money. He disappeared. She was not sure if he'd been taken out in the desert and killed or if he had run. Either way he was gone, and she divorced him on the grounds of abandonment.

  She got a job as a secretary in a Las Vegas automobile agency. She became the officer manager. Nights, she picked up extra money as a shill in the casinos. She was never a B-girl. Ten men a week propositioned her and offered everything from straight cash to European vacations, but she never accepted.

  Two years ago Morris Chandler had offered her a job as his secretary, and she had left the automobile agency, for more money. What Chandler had done was send up his own secretary to become Jonas's. Of course she did not owe him five hundred dollars on a gambling chit. Chandler had been surprised when Jonas called and told him to put Mrs. Wyatt's account on his bill. He went along, amused. He did not suggest to her that she act as a spy. He only suggested, diffidently, that she might find out something it would be to their mutual benefit to know.

  Morris Chandler did not suspect that she saw in this job with Jonas Cord a chance, not just to do something better with her life at long last, but to do it with a man any woman could be glad to be with.

  3

  One more thing about Angie pleased Jonas immensely. Over the years he had found he most appreciated women who would give him oral sex. It was not only that he enjoyed the act — which he most assuredly did — but he had found, too, that women who were willing to do it were bold and playful not just in bed but in their approach to life in general. They were the kind of women he most liked and was most ready to respect.

  "Say, Angie," he whispered to her one night during their second week together. "You're great in bed, but — "

  "But?"

  "No, not 'but.' You're great. I wondered, though, if you ... if you'd take me into your mouth."

  She lifted herself up on one elbow. "Seriously? I don't know. I don't really know. I've never done it." She reached down and lifted his penis in her hand. "I could never get all that in. I'd gag."

  "Getting it all in is not the point," he said.

  "What is the point? How would I do it?"

  "Like eating a lollipop," he said.

  She laughed. "Like eating a lollipop! Well ... Is it a big deal for you?"

  He drew a deep breath. "I'd like it. I don't demand it."

  She stared at his crotch for a few seconds. "Will you wash it first?"

  "For sure."

  "Well, then ... I'll try."

  She was telling the truth. She had never done it. She had heard it called ugly names, heard women who did it called ugly names. But — He was worth it.

  When he came back from the bathroom he smelled of soap and of shaving lotion he had splashed on his upper body. He plumped up pillows and put them against the headboard of the bed, then sat and leaned back against them — and waited.

  She took a moment to firm up her courage. She smiled at him, then lowered her face, opened her mouth wide, and sucked his throbbing organ into her mouth. She held it there and massaged his puckered foreskin with the tip of her tongue. Then she pulled back, seized the thick stalk in her left hand, and began to lick it, taking long strokes from the base up to the tip. He whispered a suggestion that she lick what was below, too: his dark, wrinkled pouch the size of two fists. She did that for a moment and returned
to it briefly now and again, but mostly she alternated between holding the upper half of his penis in her mouth, manipulating his foreskin with her tongue and lips, and pulling it out and licking its full length.

  He began to gasp and moan. She was giving him ecstasy. She was surprised; she hadn't imagined a man would experience utter bliss under such ministration. So ... He would love her for it. Well — not love. He would treasure her for it. She had heard women denounce it as debasing, abnegating. They might consider that she was in control of this, as she was never in control when a man was on top of her, pounding himself into her in his final stage. Of this, she was the manager and could bring him along or slow him down, as she wished. No way at all did she feel degraded.

  She found nothing unpleasant about it, though she was nervous about his ejaculation, wondering what she would do with his fluid, wondering if it was nasty-tasting stuff. She worked to bring it, but it took some time, five or six minutes anyway. When the abrupt gush came, she discovered it had almost no taste at all. Certainly it was nothing offensive. The word for this was sucking, so she guessed she was supposed to suck when he climaxed, so she closed her lips around his shaft and drew the stuff from him. Some of it went down her throat. She swallowed. Some accumulated in her mouth. She swallowed that, too.

  "Oh god, Angie!"

  She smiled gently. Some of his ejaculate gleamed on her chin. "You like that, huh?" she whispered.

  He reached for her and drew her into his arms.

  4

  Nevada and Angie gaped at Jonas. They laughed, and yet they knew he was serious.

  Clint McClintock, on a trip to Los Angeles, had gone as ordered to a costume shop in Culver City and had come back with a number of items Jonas had specified. One was a gray, almost white toupee. Another was a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses, with ordinary glass, not lenses, in the round frames. Another was a can of wax an actor could mold by hand into the desired shape and then work into place in the mouth between gums and cheeks, shoving out the cheeks and making a man's face look fatter, even jowly.