Say good-bye to all that? Who did I think I was fooling? I was made for it, built for it, dipped in flashy gold and ready for plucking.
I wanted more.
“I’m your girl,” I said.
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“Megan Abbott [is] poised to ascend to the top rung of crime writing and quite possibly something beyond.”
—James Ellroy, author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential
Turn the page to read the short story that inspired Queenpin by noir maven
MEGAN ABBOTT
INTRODUCTION
Queenpin began as a short story, “Policy,” which appeared in the 2007 Edgar®-nominated Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir edited by crime novelist Duane Swierczynski.
The inspiration for the story and the novel was the dazzling life of mob queen, courier and muse Virginia Hill, née Onie Hill, a.k.a. Virginia Norma Hall, a.k.a. Virginia Herman, a.k.a. Virginia Oney d’Algy, a.k.a. Virginia Gonzalez, a.k.a. the Flamingo (in fact, mobster Bugsy Siegel, her lover, named the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas after her). During her heyday in the 1940s, the mob entrusted her to move money and jewels, to travel to Switzerland and open bank accounts. She had tremendous power. “I work where I want and when I want,” she once said, “I don’t dance for nobody.” And she was as steely as they came. When reporters tracked her down in Paris to inform her that Bugsy Siegel had been murdered in the home he bought for her, she told them, “It looks so bad to have a thing like that happen in your house.”
The book’s greatest debt is owed to David Thompson, the beloved founder of Busted Flush Press, stalwart publicity manager of Houston’s Murder by the Book and dear friend of crime writers across the globe.
—Megan Abbott
2012
POLICY
I want the legs.
That’s the first thing I think. The legs are the legs of a twenty-year-old Vegas showgirl, a hundred feet long and with just enough curve and give and promise. Sure, there was no hiding the ropy blue veins in her hands or the tugs of leathery skin framing the bones in her face. But the legs, they lasted, I tell you. They endured. Forty years her junior, my skinny matchsticks were no competition.
In the casinos, she could pass for forty five. The low lighting, her glossy auburn hair, legs swinging, tapping the bottom rim of the tall bettor stools. At the track, she looked her age. The sunglasses, the wide-brimmed hat, the bright gloves, sure, but then there was the merciless sunshine, the glare off the grandstand. It hardly mattered, though. She was legend.
I never knew what she saw in me. You looked like you knew a thing or two, she told me later. But were ready to learn a lot more. It was a soft sell, a long sell. I never knew what she had in mind until I’d already had such a taste I thought my tongue would never stop buzzing. Meaning, she got me in, she got me jobs, she got me fat stacks of cash too thick to wedge down my cleavage. She got me in with the hard boys and I couldn’t get enough. I wanted more. Give me more.
It was so easy. I did the books at Club Tee Hee, a rinky-dink joint owned by a friend of my old man. Straight out of Dolores Grey Business School, but I could make those digits fall in line and my fingers danced on the adding machine and when the manager, Jerome, asked me to cook the books, I did it. When he asked me to make him a fake numbers book for his single-action game, I did that too.
That was where I first saw her, heard all the stories told behind hands as she walked into the place. About the big gees and button men she’d tossed with back in the day, everyone from Dutch Schultz to Joey Adonis and Lucky himself.
She came every few weeks, sipping a club soda with a twist and counting Jerome’s vig before she drove off in her Alpine White El Dorado to kick it upstairs. I figure she must’ve heard about the way I could work things, work things and keep my mouth shut about it. She knew everybody and everybody knew her and she plucked me out of that two-bit hootchy cooch and put me on the big stage, footlights up my dress.
I wanted more.
You gotta look the part, she said, surveying me up and down, my off-the-rack acid-green rayon number, shiny with wear. You can’t look like a kid eating dinner off a hotplate. You can’t look like a table-hopping pickup either. We gotta believe there’s nothing funny about big money in your hand.
She showed me how to look like I belonged, tasteful picture hats, spare makeup. She took me to the big department store downtown, the one with all the mirrors and deep carpets. Bought me three fine suits—cream, oyster white, periwinkle blue. Skirts hit below the knee but still fit snug in the right places, because she was no fool. You had to play that angle too, get a second glance from the high rollers. Honey, I got the legs, but your ass is your ticket. And that rack won’t hurt either.
She told me that my sugar-blonde dye job had to go. Don’t want to stand out too much, don’t want to be picked out in a big crowd. She came over one night, near one o’ clock, to give me my first job, a run to the track the next day. Too late to go to the hairdresser, she did me herself, peeling off her doeskin gloves. I sat in a chair in front of the kitchen sink, leaned my head back far and she plunged her jagged-emerald-covered hands through my hair again and again, turning ratted blonde into smooth honey brown. I remember looking up at her, into her eyes, husk of creased skin hanging over them. Heavy lidded like a snake. She’s figuring something now, I thought. She never stops running the odds.
She talked to me, low and cool, for hours, never losing her ramrod posture, never raising her voice above her near-whisper. She told me all I had to do was go down to the bullring and place dime bets on a few choice horses. Taking out the Racing Form, she went through the races and wrote “place” next to some horses and “show” next to others. You don’t want to hurt the odds, so never bet to win, she said. You spread the money around and bet to place and show and you get a return on investment at least 70 percent of the time . That’s the stuff. More important, the dough gets cleaned and the tax men only see racetrack winnings. She explained it all and made me tell it back to her to see if I understood. Oh did I.
From then on, I did whatever she told me. I knew if it wasn’t for her, I’d be shaking my ass for more coin at the Tee Hee or still stuck with my head over the ledger, postponing the inevitable roll in the sack with the manager for a shot at a bigger paycheck. She saved me from all that. She turned me out and you never forget the one who turned you out.
But it wasn’t made for forever. I didn’t have her stuff.
Sometimes as we sat in her plush pink and gray living room I’d look at her under the milky cast of the brass wall sconces, look at her while she passed on words of wisdom (You always want to know the strategy behind it, honey. You do things for them without knowing why, there’s nothing in it for you.) and I’d see what she must have been like back in 1929, bright-eyed, dewy-cheeked, slinging those gorgeous stems one across the other and making hay while times were good.
I’d look at her and I’d think about all the stories I’d heard. About how she carried a long-handled pair of bejeweled scissors in her purse when she collected in the rough parts of town, about the time an angry wife tried to run her over in her Cadillac outside her husband’s betting parlor, about a stripper named Candy Annie who crossed her on some deal but, when Annie walked into the Ladies Room at the Breakwater Hotel in Miami three months later, she got her revenge with a straight-edge razor, gutting the stripper like a fish.
The favorite tale among the boys at Club Tee Hee was about a New Year’s Eve party back in the Thirties wher
e she shimmied with every hood in the place until one of them asked her to put her money where her mouth was. Story was, she threw her head back and laughed, saying, “I’ll put my mouth where the money is,” and made her way to every man in the room, on her knees. On her knees. Later, when one of the wives came up to her and called her a whore, she slapped the wife around, grabbed her by the hair and tugged her against her chest, asserting, “I’m the best damn cocksucker in this burg, and I got the rocks to prove it. Your knees have rubbed plenty of carpets, you rotten bitch. Where are your diamonds? Where are they?”
Later, when we were close like we were, when we could talk about these things, I asked her about the story and she looked at me like I was a goddamned fool. That was Virginia Hill, she said, stubbing out her cigarette. Hillbilly tramp. I got better things to do with my mouth.
And it was hard to imagine that much hot blood running through her. If she had a man in her life, I never heard tell. The job was the life. Four decades of carrying money, getting high rollers to place sucker bets, moving swag across state lines and adjusting odds for the boys working the policy racket all through the east side. Butter and eggs lottery, she called it, shaking her head. She herself was proud to say she’d never in her life laid down a bet on her own nickel. I’m no chump. I know the odds. I make them.
So, I wore the clothes, I did the jobs, I followed orders. All business. And no matter how many shiny-haired swains pressed against me, I never played around. When it paid, I went on dates with the high-stakes gees but never laid for one. Be the lady, she told me. They beat their wives, they beat their whores. I never took more than three socks from one of these goons in all my years. That’s why. Be the lady.
But didn’t you ever fall for one? I asked once, sucking on a swizzle stick and hoping for some sign of soft in the old lady, something beating under the finely pressed shantung suit. Sure, kid, she said, eyelashes grazing her cheeks. There were a few. I lived this life, you know. But I watched myself and I never mixed business with anything else. There were men, but not these men. No. Straight men. Straight enough. Men who may not have lived by the book but lived by some book. In this life, she said, crossing these glorious gams, shimmering in the low light of the lounge, you can’t let your guard down. If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else.
But then there he was, as if on cue.
Before him, I’d never fallen for one before. Never bothered to look up for one that wasn’t just a money clip to me. In all my girl years, I’d only rolled pro forma with high school boys, office boys, head knocking on adam’s apples in backseats, mouth dry and raw. They never made me want more.
But he was the one. All black Mick hair and sorrowful eyes and sharkskin suits cut razor sharp. I could feel the way it was going the minute I saw him losing his shirt at blackjack. My palms itching, I rubbed them together. I could feel it everywhere, something sharp pulsing under my skin. I’ll crawl hands and knees for this one, I thought. I can feel I’m going to be on my hands and knees for this one. He saw it on me too. He figured fast he had the upperhand. Things got awfully crazy right off. I couldn’t help myself. I let him do whatever he wanted. Who was I to say no. There was nothing he could do that I didn’t want. Not even that.
Never fuck up, she told me once. That’s the only rule.
You’ve never made a mistake, not one, in all these years, I asked. Mixing up numbers, late to the track, one drink too many and you start talking too much to the wrong fellas?
She looked at me in that icy way of hers. Then, in a flash of the hand, she tugged open her crêpe de chine jacket, buttons popping. There, on her pale, filmy skin, skeined over with thready wrinkles, I saw the burn marks, long, jagged, slipping behind her bra clasp, slithering down her sternum.
How, I started, my mouth a dry socket. A state trooper pulled me over for speeding downstate, she said, palm flat on her chest, patting it lightly. Made me open the trunk, tapped the false bottom and found 60K in hot rocks, each one a fingerprint.
But that wasn’t your fault, I said. I should have been more careful, she said. I learned the hard way. The boss then, the big one, he watched while one of his boys did it. Pressed me against a radiator until the smell made us all sick.
I learned the hard way, she said, Now you’ve learned it easier. You don’t need this on your fine chest, she said, fastening the mother-of-pearl buttons. So don’t fuck up, baby.
I won’t, I said. I won’t. And I meant it.
I never let her see me with him those first weeks that it went on, hotter and crazier every night. I saw him after I finished every run, after I helped her look for hits, envelopes from all over the city spread across her glass coffee table. She always wore her gloves when she did it, not to hide her worn hands, not from me, but because she knew where the betting slips had been, grimy candy stores, shylock newsstands, back kitchens and bowling alleys. Her gloves, in one of a dozen shades of white, rose, pale yellow, danced along the envelopes, flipping over the slips, looking for the matches. She was so fast, and I was getting fast too. And I never told her about him. I knew what she would say. You lost it, you little bitch. You lost it. You can’t control yourself, you’re of no use to me.
One night, he ripped my $350 faille day suit from collar to skirt hem in one long tear. Fuck me, I was in love.
I didn’t want her to know I’d lost it, all of it. I didn’t want her to know I’d gone so crazy, and all for a sharpie, a piker racking up big losses every day, even when I told him how it worked, how he’d never make it that way, loading it all on one horse, one race. And how no one won on policy games for long. That’s why they call it a racket. But he kept dumping it all, on overhead tips, bad tips, tips everyone knew were fixes. I dropped those tips. It was my job. They were all junk.
And I did everything to make sure she never saw him. I knew if she saw him, she would know I’d gone for him. I felt like it was all over me, all over my face, a spreading stain. The closest she got was an eyeful of the bruises on my thigh, an oval for each finger. Sliding across the bench seat of her El Dorado, my skirt rode up and she saw them through my stocking. She saw the bruises dotting my outer thigh in a perfect radial pattern.
Green, violet, raw, hot to the touch. My palms itched every time I looked at them.
Who did it, she said, tongue darting. Who did it to you.
I got caught in a turnstile, I said, shaking my head, tugging my skirt down.
She looked at me, flinty, hard. I found myself counting the faint lines crimping her deep crimson mouth. A line for every lie told to her by a two-faced shill like me.
I knew she didn’t believe me. She knew how to read everybody, most of all me, who she’d made from scratch. She’d given me my poker face, molded it herself, so she knew it when she saw it.
Listen, baby doll, somebody hurts you and they don’t get a second chance, she said, putting one gloved finger on my thigh until I winced. You’re mine. Roughing you up is roughing me up. And I don’t let anyone rough me up. You’re mine and someone puts his dirty paws on you they might as well be on me. You’re my girl. I won’t think twice.
And I knew she meant it.
He and I, we’d been at it for a month or so when he threw me the curve. Guess I knew it was coming, could feel it in my gut even if I didn’t let myself think it outloud. He knew what I did, he knew my job. He knew there was big green to be had if you were willing to veer from the script. He wanted me to veer, hard. He owed 75 Gs with a vig to send your eyeballs back into your head and he needed me bad.
His hands on me, what could I do. I wanted more.
Some tout passed him a tip and, as tips go, it didn’t look half bad. Could be smart money. But what good did it do him with only two-hundred clams to stake. I’d give him all I had, but that still wouldn’t get him the big pot he needed. Not even close.
Don’t you see, he said. You’re carrying a fat handbag to the track that day. Can the dime bets and let it all ride on Rum Tum Tiger in the third.
>
It was crazy and I let him know it. She’d have my neck for it and who knew what might happen to her.
So you don’t do it, he said. Supposing, baby doll, you get mugged on your way to the track. It ain’t no one’s fault. Could happen to any slip of a girl who makes her way among sharpers and trouble boys.
His hand on my hip bone, my hip fast on the mattress. Fuck me, who knew I was so easy? Easy and a chump.
The next day, the big day, I started to lose my nerve. She’ll never buy it, baby, I said. I wouldn’t. But he said he had it all figured out. If I wanted, he could knock me one, make it look good. This sounded right.
You’re going to have to put me in the hospital, I said.
He didn’t pause a second before his fist came at me, a hard belt to the jaw that snapped my head back against the wall with an awful pop. I saw stars. Then, before I knew it, his left came at me, swiveling my head the other way, cheekbone cracking against the metal door frame. I thought I would be sick. I held my stomach with both hands.