By the time she and I got together, though, Peggy had abandoned her show business aspirations and used her considerable business skills-she was particularly adept at accounting-to help support her family, after her father’s second and fatal stroke. She was one of seven kids, and her only brother, Johnny, had been killed in the war.

That burden was off her back now, however, because her uncle James Ragen-a client of mine-had died last August and left Peggy’s mother a tidy sum. Jim Ragen had been the head of Continental Press, a racing wire service used by bookies nationwide, and he had died-despite my best efforts to prevent it-at the hands of “rival business interests.”

Close to her uncle and looking up to him, Peggy had been around that kind of people all her life-underworld figures, I mean (she even at one time dated a Capone bodyguard)-and had an unfortunate propensity toward fancying the “glamorous” world of bigtime gangsters.

I guess my reputation for having mob ties myself-really exaggerated-maybe lent me a little of that same shady allure, from Peggy’s point of view. So maybe I shouldn’t have complained about her yen for the likes of her late uncle, and Capone bodyguards, and did I mention the friend of mine she’d run off to Las Vegas with was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel?

All of which is to say, Peggy had been around, yet at the same time was naive about certain things. She could be impressed by the phony glitz of Ben Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel, the aura of excitement, danger and affluence that emanated from bigtime gamblers and gangsters, surrounded as they were by fawning sycophants and beautiful women in jewels and fur.

And of course, by his own crafty design, Ben Siegel’s Las Vegas was the bastard brother to Tinsel Town; so I suppose it should have been no surprise to me that honeymooning in Hollywood would stir certain dormant leanings and longings within my bride.