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said.
    “Winnie’s wife. Winnie was the Husband of the Century.”
    “Is she dead?”
    “I have no idea, dear. It would be a misery if she weren’t. She had advanced senile dementia, got it very young and had it forever. Practically the only thing she remembered, poor thing, was that her older sister had died of scarlet fever when Blanche was twelve. She did nothing but cry for years.”
    I’d seen no sign that Dressler was married, nor had I read about it, although very few aspects of his private life ever made it into print. “Did you meet her?”
    “I’d never have met her, not in my circle, but practically nobody did. She was from an old family, listed in the Los Angeles Blue Book. Gentile, of course, in those days, and her parents were frantic not to have it get out that she’d married a Jew, anda
gangster
Jew at that. She and Winnie eloped, got married by a justice of the peace in Santa Barbara, and lived very quietly. But, in the interest of time, let me get back to my story. The funny thing was that it wasn’t Winnie who got me involved with organized crime. It was George Raft.”
    “I remember George—”
    “Georgie was dumb,” she said. She was looking down into her empty glass as though she could see tiny figures from the past in it. “A sweet man and great in the sack, but dumb as a bag of nuts. I was never sure he could actually read or write. I know he had his movie scripts read to him, because I’m the one who read some of them. Here’s how dumb Georgie was. He wanted to get out of his contract at Warner Brothers, and that prick Jack Warner was sick and tired of him, so he asked Georgie what it would take to terminate the contract. Warner was thinking he’d have to pay Georgie a hundred thousand, a hundred and a half, to get out of the arrangement, but Georgie said, ten thousand. Warner practically leapt at it, but before he could write Georgie a check, Georgie wrote
him
one.” She shook her head. “Dumb, dumb, dumb. Ten thousand was a lot of money in those days. My big contract at Universe, I made three hundred fifty dollars a week.”
    She looked up at me and gave me a smile that almost melted me, the smile that had sold a hundred thousand copies of
Life
. “Poor Georgie. He made Bogart a star, you know. Turned down
High Sierra
and
The Maltese Falcon
and
Casablanca
, turned down half the scripts that transformed Bogart into Bogey. Everybody thought Bogey was the tough guy, but Bogey was a tennis-playing socialite and Georgie grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, with real gangsters, not the movie kind. It wasn’t his fault he was dumb. One of his friends when he was a boy was Owney Madden. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of Owney Madden.”
    “I remember. The Killer, right?”
    “Right, that was his nickname. The Killer. Little cocky English guy, but he grew up in New York near Georgie, got famous as the kid who was shot eleven times one night on 52nd Street and lived. After he got out of the hospital, the boys who shot him began to turn up in the East River. Showed his talent early. He grew up to be a big man in the mobs, much to Georgie’s envy. Owned the Cotton Club in Harlem, owned part of The Stork Club—where I had some of the best nights of my life. Probably Owney’s most famous murder was when he killed Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ McColl, whom I’m sorry to say I never met. Nickname like that, I’d have liked to have a drink with him. Most of the guys with the horrific nicknames were pussycats. Anyway, Owney Madden was Georgie’s friend, and I was also Georgie’s friend. And you know what they say about the friends of my friends.”
    “They’re your friends.”
    “Good, you’re listening.” She shifted her weight forward and put both hands on the coffee table. “Here’s something you’re too young to know, dear. Getting old shrinks your bladder to the size of a tear duct. I’m going to go to the little girl’s room, and that’ll give you an opportunity to snoop around.