“How’s Augusta?” June asked, the name unfamiliar on her lips.
“Not very well,” he said, in a clipped way that hurt June. After that first day, when Del had sobbed against her, he had not shared his feelings about Ray. It was as if he were angry at her for not caring in the way he cared, though she had done everything she could: sent flowers, attended the funeral, dressed Marshall in a navy-blue suit though the church was small and hot, and he had struggled fiercely to get out of her arms.
Ray’s oldest child, a girl, had jumped into Del’s embrace after the funeral. This startled June, and Marshall had burst into tears, so June had walked away to console him without learning the little girl’s name, without getting a chance to talk to Ray’s wife. She wondered if this is what had made Del angry.
If it wasn’t a drifter, who was it?
Who would kill Ray Jackson? Who would kill anyone associated with Hugh?
Hugh had put up the money for the El Capitan. He lived in LA and didn’t come to Las Vegas because there had been some problem in the past; some reason he couldn’t return to Nevada. Ray handled things with Hugh.
June didn’t like Hugh, and she had been grateful that it was Ray who took care of what the man needed, and she wondered whether Del would now be the one to go back and forth to LA to see him.
She wanted to ask her husband about this—to ask Del what Hugh knew of Ray’s death, to ask him what Hugh might do in response—but Del was closed and angry these days, and she didn’t dare. He had asked her to stay home with Marshall for a few weeks until things quieted down—whatever that meant—and working at home, doing the books while the new maid, Binnie, made Marshall’s lunch or set him down for a nap, June wondered about Hugh.
Eddie had once asked Del about him. They’d all been drinking—even Del was a little in his cups—and Eddie asked how Del and Ray had ended up working with Hugh. June was surprised when Del answered. He never talked about Hugh, and sometimes he didn’t even acknowledge that he knew him when his name came up in conversation.
Del told Eddie that it started when he and Ray were just kids, maybe twelve. Hugh had come to the casino where they worked. He was in his midtwenties, and he’d been on his own awhile. He already had a reputation.
“How much this place pay you?” Hugh said to Ray.
“Thirty cents an hour.”
“And him?”
“Forty.”
Hugh looked from Ray to Del and back to Ray again.
“You’re bigger than your friend. How come you making thirty cents?”
Ray didn’t say anything. Kept his head down.
“Shut up, Hugh,” said Del.
“Shut up? You telling me to shut up?”
“Yeah. Shut up.”
“Those are dangerous words, Skinny.” Hugh moved closer to Del, near enough to speak in his ear. “You think you’re safe ’cause of your friend? Your friend who isn’t making as much money as you are?”
“Ray and I split our pay.”
Hugh whistled. “Is that so?”
Neither Del nor Ray said a word.
“That true, Ray? He give you a nickel for every hour he works?”
“Yup.”
Del stepped away from Hugh, then leaned down to pick up another crate and go back to work.
“Well, that’s another thing altogether.”
Ray joined Del. Hugh didn’t move, just watched the two boys.
“How’d you guys like to make a dollar an hour? Each?”
“Yeah, right. You gonna pay us a dollar an hour, Hugh?” Del was mad. He didn’t want any trouble with Hugh, and his grandmother would take a belt to his backside just for talking to him.
“I might. If you’re up to it.”
“What we got to do?” said Ray.
“Collect some tickets. That’s all. Just the tickets. No money.”
And June gathered that that was how it all started. Del and Ray collected the slips of paper on which people wrote down their bets, and dropped them off with Hugh at night. Somebody else collected the money. It wasn’t until Del got a lot older that he ever collected any money.
By the time Vegas got too risky for Hugh—by the time he was well known for a short and dangerous fuse—he and Ray and Del had been working together for more than fifteen years. Hugh was making a lot of money, running a lot of games. But the county and the state were cracking down. They wanted to keep the feds out of Nevada, and guys like Hugh made that tougher. It was Hugh who figured out that the real money was going to be in the legal casinos; that Del should get one of the new gaming licenses, that he was the only one of the three who could.
So Del had applied for the license, and eventually Hugh put up the money for the El Capitan. Mostly he stayed in California, where he was safe from the Nevada authorities, and it was Ray who attended to whatever Hugh wanted done. For years, June had seen Hugh only in the middle of the night, in their living room, and always with a couple of men standing bodyguard.
Very early on, though, she’d met Hugh in more ordinary circumstances. He’d come to a show when she and Del were dating, and after they said their good-byes, just as he started down the street, Hugh turned and called, “You bet, Del. She’s perfect. She’s gonna be just perfect!”
It irritated her to remember this. The way he’d spoken as if she weren’t there. Who was Hugh to say something about who Del was dating? And why had Del let him?
“I don’t like Hugh,” she had told Del that night. “I don’t like him at all.”
“Well, that’s good. He’s not someone you should like. But don’t worry about it. You’re not gonna have to worry about Hugh, darlin’.”
She had liked the way Del said “darlin’.”
6
At lunch, Shirley said that it was nice how colored people could sing and all, but that didn’t make it right that white and colored should mix in a restaurant. Nancy said that nobody did anything when Harry Belafonte swam in the Thunderbird pool, but that the Flamingo had burned Lena Horne’s sheets after letting her stay in a room. Shirley said it all came back to money: that the casinos made so much money on the colored performers, they would let them do anything. Sleep in the hotels, play at the tables; Lena Horne’s kids swam in the pool all day long. Colored entertainers used to always stay in one of the rooming houses on the Westside, and then some of them had refused. They brought in so much money, what could the casino hosts do?
And there was going to be trouble, Nancy said, now there was that colored dentist saying he was the head of the N-A-A-C-P in Las Vegas. She drew out the offending letters slowly, enunciating each one, and hitting the final two sounds slightly harder.
June was silent. She was silent more and more now. Now that Del had made it clear he wasn’t going to hire any Negroes for the front of the house. Del said he couldn’t. It was wrong, but he couldn’t fight every battle. He had to keep the El Capitan going. A lot of people’s jobs were at stake. And what about all of the people that worked in the back of the house? June wouldn’t be doing much for them if people stopped coming to the El Capitan.