Playland (43 page)

ALSO SEE
, DRAPER, B
ENJAMIN
; BUCHALTER, L
OUIS
(“L
EPKE
”)

The Index of American Crime and Criminals

The fate of Benny Draper was sealed two weeks before the wrap party, and the night after the OMPCE had backed Jackie Heller’s proposals both to strip Benny of his plenipotentiary powers and to seek a new three-year agreement with the motion picture studios. It was a defeat that Benny could not afford to take without a response, especially considering his failure to take action after La Casa Nevada burned down. If he was a figure of fear to many in the Los Angeles community, Benny was still responsible to his masters in Chicago, who had an investment to protect, and in Benny a kind of colonial governor who kept his position as long as he was able to maintain order, and profitability. This Lilo Kusack implicitly understood, and so to a lesser extent did J. F. French, and certainly Morris Lefkowitz and Jimmy Riordan, men of business all. However satisfying Benny Draper might have thought it to take out Jacob King as the source of all his difficulties, and however many exquisite tortures he might be contemplating for him, the powers in Chicago would never take kindly to any homicide that focused the glare of attention so directly on Benny, and ultimately onto themselves. But move he thought he must, if only to reestablish his reputation for retribution, and if he could not move against Jacob King, there appeared to be no cordon sanitaire around Eddie Binhoff. He came within the rules of engagement. The man watching Jacob King’s back had no one in turn watching his back. Hitting Eddie Binhoff would be a statement. A discreet announcement that Benny Draper was still a player.

“They were amateurs, jerk-off artists,” Eddie Binhoff said contemptuously of the two men with shotguns who tried to kill him outside the underground garage of the residential hotel in Hollywood
where he had taken an efficiency apartment. It was after midnight when he had pulled up to the garage. His gun was out of its holster and resting in his lap, just in case, considering the situation. He honked his horn, saw the small window in the door open and close as he was checked out, and then the main door slide up on its rollers. But instead of the attendant usually on duty, there were the two men with shotguns who moved toward the Studebaker Jacob King had given him from his own motor pool of four cars, blasting away at the windshield. Eddie Binhoff resisted the temptation to duck and shoot, and instead hunched low over the wheel and floored the accelerator. The Studebaker rocketed forward, sending the two men flying like ten pins. One lost his shotgun and ran, while the other took off, skipping and jumping on a bad leg as the Studebaker crashed into the far wall of the garage, and began spitting rust-colored water from its radiator. Gun in hand, Eddie Binhoff rolled out of the car, into the patchy grease on the floor, but the men were gone. His suit was covered with muck, there were pieces of windshield glass in his forehead and eyelid, and his chest hurt from where he had been pinned by the steering wheel. He picked the shotgun up from the driveway and closed the garage door.

“Jerk-off artists,” Eddie Binhoff repeated the next morning in the catwalk office occupied by Jacob King at the Acme Linen Supply Company, one of the businesses that Morris Lefkowitz owned in Los Angeles and that Jacob ostensibly ran. The noise outside the glassed-in aerie was deafening. A huge dryer tumbled table linens and an industrial pressing machine belched steam. On the floor shirtless workers yelled back and forth in Spanish. “They didn’t know what they were doing. You want to do the job right, they get you inside the garage, they close the door, then they drop you when you’re getting out of the car. A guy getting out of a car is helpless. You leave him by the front door, blood all over his suit, it makes a hell of picture in the paper the next morning.”

“You’re an artist, Eddie,” said Jacob King, who had left Philly Wexler by a mailbox in Washington Heights, making for a
hell of a picture in the
Daily News
the next morning. “What’d you tell the people in the building about your car?”

“I said I had a load on, the attendant wasn’t there, I opened the door, and when I got back in the car, the chick with me, she put her foot on the accelerator, she was drunker than I was, I had to get her home, she was somebody’s wife, and that somebody wasn’t me. They love hearing that kind of shit.”

“What about the attendant, the one who’s usually there?”

“You know, I already thought about him, Jake, I thought about him a lot, even without your help.”

Jacob King smiled.

“His lucky night. His wife had a baby. Twelve-oh-one
A.M
., Queen of Angels Hospital, she went into labor at seven, he got the night off at seven-thirty, and yes, I did check out the hospital, Rosario Ynez Guttierez Cano, eight pounds thirteen ounces, the father was there.”

“Or you would’ve whacked him.”

Eddie Binhoff shrugged. Murder was his profession and he did not make jokes about it. “So we got a problem,” he said after a moment. He squeezed his cheek and pulled a shard of glass from it. “The problem’s name is Benny Draper. And the problem’s not going to go away until we take care of it.”

“Not by you, Eddie, and not by me.”

“Then who? The people in this town, they think you do a garage hit outside the garage. It’s the fucking sun is the reason, it bakes the brains out.”

Jacob King paused. “You remember Schlomo Buchalter?”

“Round-trip Buchalter, right? He started out with Morris. Christ, who didn’t start out with Morris? Jack the Ripper, maybe.”

“You wanted to take somebody out, it was the price of the hit, plus two round-trip tickets to Havana or someplace warm for Schlomo and a chick. You saw Schlomo at Hialeah, you knew somebody’d just been iced someplace cold.”

“Used to be Benny Draper’s shooter. I thought he was dead.”

“Dying. Cancer of the bowels. Poor bastard weighs about
thirty-five pounds. He lives with his sister someplace out in the Valley.”

“What valley?”

“The San Fernando Valley, Eddie. If you’re going to live out here, you got to learn the geography. Think of it this way, the Valley’s like Queens, you know Queens, right?”

“Woodhaven Boulevard I know,” Eddie Binhoff said. He had done someone once on Woodhaven Boulevard, but it was so long ago he couldn’t remember the someone’s name, only the name of the street where he had done him, and how. The someone was in a gin mill on Woodhaven Boulevard and had left his car outside. A Hudson Terraplane. Eddie Binhoff remembered that, too. And he remembered it was raining. It was only the someone’s name he had trouble with. He had lifted up the Hudson’s hood, and yanked out its battery cables. Then he waited down the block in his own car. A long wait, but finally the someone comes out of the gin mill with a pretty good load on, and of course he can’t start his Terraplane. Eddie Binhoff drove over, got out of his car, and said, I got some jumper cables, you want some help? And the someone said sure. The last thing he expected to find on Woodhaven Boulevard at three o’clock in the morning in the rain was someone with a set of jumper cables, wanted to help him out. It made the someone feel good and not nervous. Exactly the way Eddie had planned it. Then he pulled out his piece, and said, Actually, I don’t have no jumper cables, and proceeded to shoot the someone a lot. Rocco, that was the someone’s name. Rocco … Rocco … Rocco … Mingus. Remembering Rocco Mingus’s name made Eddie Binhoff feel better. Like he wasn’t getting old. “So he lives in this valley, Schlomo. You checked him out already, didn’t you, Jake?”

“I think we go see Schlomo,” Jacob King said.

Schlomo Buchalter was sitting in a wheelchair in the sitting room of his small but immaculate Pacoima bungalow, a lap robe over his knees. His sister, Ada Buchalter, sorrow etched into her long plain face, hovered nearby, constantly wiping her hands on
her apron. “It won’t be long now,” she mouthed to Jacob King, who had told her his name was Shimon Solomon, from the Temple Emmanu-El in Van Nuys. Both Jacob and Eddie Binhoff, who Jacob introduced as Leo Rivkin from Reseda, wore yarmulkes. What he and Leo wished to do, Shimon Solomon told Ada Buchalter, was to take Mr. Buchalter out for a ride, let him get a little sun, see some sights outside the home, they understood he rarely left the house, and such a pleasant house it was, too, Mr. Buchalter was fortunate to have so devoted a sister. They were not in the burial plot business, they assured her, they understood that the plans for his funeral service and interment had already been provided for by his layaway plan, and they would of course be available to fill out a minyan if the need arose. It was just they had both once heard the famous Rabbi Baruch Tyger say, when he was the guest rebbe at Temple Emmanu-El, that the younger healthier members of any congregation owed an obligation toward the elderly, the frail, and the less fortunate, a reaching out. As proof of their good intentions Jacob King gave Ada Buchalter the autographed copy of
The Collected Sermons of Barry Tyger
that he had bought with a fifty-dollar bill, keep the change, from the pile on sale in the lobby at the “I Am an American” dinner at the Ambassador Hotel.

They parked on a hill overlooking the Pacoima Reservoir. Eddie Binhoff retrieved the wheelchair from the trunk of Jacob King’s Cadillac convertible, then lifted Schlomo Buchalter from the open back seat, and placed him gently in it. Jacob pushed Schlomo to the top of the hill.

“I pushed a guy off a hill once,” Schlomo Buchalter said, staring down past the scrub at the placid waters of the reservoir. His voice was raspy and weak. “A very high hill. Outside Salt Lake City, in a state called Utah. You know what I remember about Utah? They shoot you there, you get the death penalty. That’s the only state they do that in. I done people in states where they got the electric chair, where they got the gas chamber,
and where they hang you. I was very interested in Utah. What they do is, they tie you to a chair, they put a blindfold on and then a target over your heart and then they shoot you. You’re dead before you ever hear the shot. I like that. You got to go, then I think I like the way they do it in Utah best.”