Sin City by Harold Robbins Page B

cut, and the hotel representative suddenly realized they probably were Secret Service agents and that the train did carry the president.
    One of the men approached him and the rep said, “I’m from the Desert Inn.”
    â€œFine. Just stay out of the way.”
    The men fanned out, checking the perimeters. Once the “all clear” was yelled a van backed up near the Pullman train car. The back doors of the van opened and he saw oxygen tanks, medical apparatus, and a white uniformed attendant. A moment later a stretcher was carried down from the train. The stretcher had a back on it so the occupant could sit up and be carried like an Oriental potentate on a litter.
    He had been told not to speak or even make eye contact with the man, but no one said he couldn’t stare. The man was fragile-looking, thin and gaunt, almost emaciated. His expression was self-possessed with an edge of grimness.
    He was a living legend. If not the richest man in the world, probably the richest in America. He had been orphaned at seventeen and immediately took control of his deceased’s father’s tool company, which made a drill bit that the petroleum-hungry world lusted after. During his career of the past thirty years, he had started an airplane manufacturing company; set the coast-to-coast air speed record; had a ticker-tape parade down Broadway when he set an around-the-world record; built the world’s largest airplane (which flew only once and then for just a mile); founded TWA; owned two movie studios; launched the career of stars like Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, and Jean Harlow; had romantic interludes with Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, and Yvonne De Carlo; married beautiful Jean Peters; and worked hand in glove with the CIA on international intrigue.
    Now a month short of his sixty-first birthday, he was becoming a different kind of legend. His nervous system was polluted with codeine
and Valium. His mind was torn by obsessive-compulsive fears and paranoia.
    Over the next four years, he would set out to buy up the poorest state in the nation, owning seven casinos and vast land holdings, accounting for nearly one out of every five tax dollars collected by the state. He singlehandedly did what the federal and state government could not do: drive much of the mob from Vegas. He did it not with a stick, but a checkbook. He simply bought them out.
    He did all of this while sitting in a leather chair in a black-curtained penthouse, naked, refusing to see anyone but a few Mormon aides, paranoid, drugged, sick, and wasted. He peed into bottles he stored in the closet, kept a diary of his bowel movements and enemas, and had such a morbid fear of germs that he would not touch anything without handling it with a piece of tissue paper.
    Howard Hughes had arrived in Las Vegas.

9
    LAS VEGAS, 1970
    â€œHey, Lucky, am I working today?”
    The kid asking me the question was my age, sixteen, a kid from the same high school class I was in, but I didn’t know him well because I didn’t go to school much. I ran a rag delivery service, hiring kids to pass out advertisements on the Strip and in Glitter Gulch, the downtown gambling area. Everything from jewelry stores advertising wedding rings to escort services wanted handouts distributed to people on the streets, mostly to men. (“It’s legal in Nevada,” the escort service handout said, but didn’t define what was legal.)
    Because I needed people over eighteen for the more racy stuff, I tried to use the winos who hung around the downtown soup kitchens, but they were unreliable, so I was always on the lookout for older-looking kids. Besides, even the massage parlors—aka whorehouses—didn’t like seedy-looking characters handing out their stuff.
    The truant officer used to bug Betty about me hooking, but since I had turned sixteen, there was no more flack. I would just quit school and no one could make me go back. But I kept up my school