A Shroud for Aquarius

17

“I don’t believe this,” Jill Forest said, stepping out of the cab into the neon noon that was Las Vegas at midnight.

I handed the driver a ten-dollar bill and climbed out after Jill, saying, “Neither do I.”

We were on Fremont Street, and above us a gigantic garish sign said 4 KINGS above neon versions of its playing card namesakes. The Four Kings was a hotel and casino, taking up a block of the casino center, a.k.a. Glitter Gulch, in downtown Las Vegas. Just across the way, and down the street, were the Horseshoe and the Golden Nugget and the rest, mammoth glowing tributes to Mammon. It was overwhelming, this carnival of craps got out-of-hand, this Disneyland of dollars. And here I was basking in it. Here we were.

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Jill said. She had a large purse on a strap slung over her shoulder — it was serving as an overnight bag for both of us, actually — and her short red dress with wide patent-leather belt gave her a pop culture look that made her fit right in with the pulsating landscape. I was wearing a short-sleeve dark blue shirt that was sticking to me, and black slacks, and had a sportsjacket slung over my arm. Jane at Port City Travel had suggested I bring one along, despite the hundred-degrees-plus heat (and even at midnight, it was easily that); that way I’d look more presentable in the fancier casinos on the Strip, should we end up there. But it was also for comfort; as she (Jane) had pointed out, the casino air conditioning was on the chilly side; she knew people who’d fainted from going in and out of the Vegas cold and heat.

The conversation with Jane, incidentally, had been a hurried one this very afternoon. I had stopped in at Port City Travel, located in the Port City Hotel on Mississippi Drive, a little after three, having just got back from Ginnie’s farmhouse where I’d run across that confirmation slip on her final Vegas trip. Jane, a pleasant-looking, cheerful brunette about my age — yet another old friend from high school, but a class behind us — told me she’d booked that trip; that she’d booked many such trips for Ginnie over the past ten years. Their high school connection had prompted Ginnie’s doing business with Port City Travel, rather than an Iowa City agency, or so I supposed.

Anyway, Jane told me that Ginnie always stayed at the Four Kings, that she was friendly with the casino manager there, a man named Charlie Stone.

“What’s really odd about this trip,” Jane said, sitting at her desk by a little computer screen, “is it was for overnight.”

“I noticed that,” I said, “on the confirmation slip. And you find that odd?”

“Yes — for Ginnie, at least. Actually, sometimes we fly groups in for twenty-four-hour whirlwind junkets... businessmen sometimes, college students especially get a real kick out of that sort of thing. But never Ginnie, not before this.”

“How long would she usually stay in Vegas?”

“She’d go out for a week or ten days.”

“What if I wanted to fly out there today?”

“Today? Las Vegas? Are you kidding?”

“No. I’d leave from Moline, right? When would that be, and when would I get there, and how much would it cost me?”

She started punching info up on her computer; I had several options. I had several departure times to choose from, ranging between four and seven o’clock, but any way you sliced it the bite would be in the six-hundred-buck range.

“Ouch,” I said.

“If you had booked in advance, or as part of a group or junket or something... wait a minute. I may have something for you...”

Twenty minutes later I was at Cablevision, where I found Jill in her office, talking to somebody on the phone. She looked at me with a curious smile, covering the mouthpiece, and I said, “Want to go to Las Vegas?”

“Sure,” she said, perky. “When?”

I looked at my watch. “Ten minutes.”

That knocked the perk out of her. She completed her phone conversation in thirty seconds or so, all the while looking at me with wide eyes. She hung up, and I said, “We should have time for you to stop at your apartment and pick up a toothbrush, change of underwear and a bathing suit. Maybe we have time for me to do that, too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Flight leaves at five fifty-five, but we ought to be there half an hour early, and it’s three now, and it’s forty-five minutes to the airport, so what do you say?”

“Well... I... yes.”

Later, on the plane, she said, “I don’t know if I understand how it is, or why it is, that I’m saving you money by coming along.”

“You aren’t saving me anything by coming along. I told you. It was just cheaper to buy two seats than one. A couple canceled out on this group deal just today, and we stepped in their shoes for four-hundred something. It was over six, otherwise.”

“So I could just as easily have been an empty seat beside you?”

“Sure. But you look better in that red dress than the seat would.”

She smiled a little. “You’re crazy. It’s a good thing I’m the boss where I work, or I could get fired for this.”

“You’ll only miss a day. We’re coming back tomorrow afternoon.”

A mechanical delay turned our hour layover in Chicago into a two-hour one, and it was almost midnight when we landed at McCarran International, where we passed through avenues of slot machines, lined up like shiny tombstones, on our way past the baggage area, where taxis waited.

Now here we were, standing before a twenty-some-story building that took up a city block, with an overhang all around, a neon-framed marquee promising the expected games of chance as well as twenty-four-hour restaurants and free souvenirs, with big plastic glowing neon playing cards interspersed occasionally — specifically, kings of hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds.

“Have you ever been to Vegas before?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “You?”

“Long, long time ago. I lost a hundred dollars here.”

“You make it sound tragic,” she said, with a little smile. “That’s not so much, is it?”

“It was at the time; I was still in the service. And it only took me about an hour to do it.”

“Somehow I don’t think you were the first serviceman to lose a hundred dollars in this town.”

“Maybe not,” I said, the desert heat starting to get to me. “Shall we go in?”

“Let’s,” she said, and I slipped my arm in hers, and we went in.

Like other downtown casinos, the Four Kings was smaller than the “super” casinos on the Strip, but it was massive just the same. The decor was somewhere between riverboat and New Orleans whorehouse (not unlike the redecorated Port City Elks Club Ginnie had scoffed at), and the dealers and croupiers, predominantly male, were in white frilled shirts with string ties, to match the riverboat/Maverick decor; the waitresses were dressed much the same, though with mini-skirts and mesh stockings; the gaming-table patrons, of which there was no shortage, were casually dressed. We paused at a craps table, a large affair longer than it was wide, that took four men to run; some spectators had gathered there, joining the players, and we had to strain to see. Standing at one end, a fat, fiftyish, balding, cigar-puffing guy in a red and blue Hawaiian shirt and polyester pants a shade of brown never dreamed of by God was kissing the red plastic cubes and their white dots; he then held the dice out gingerly between thumb and forefinger like a sacrament before the proffered pucker of a stunning blonde of about twenty in a pink low-cut sweater and impossibly tight white jeans. She kissed the dice, neatly. He kissed her, sloppily. Then he flung the dice.

They bounced off the backboard, tumbled across the money-green felt awhile, came up 6 and 5.

“Aw right!” the obnoxious fat guy said, chewing on his stogie; the blonde cheerleader bounced up and down, only it was a stationary bounce: she went up and down like a piston, due perhaps to the tightness of her pants.

“Put your eyes back in your head, Mallory,” Jill said, with a mock-nasty smirk.

“I’ve just never seen polyester that color before,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “How are you planning to find this guy Charlie Stone?”

“Let’s ask at the check-in desk.”

Which was on the abbreviated second floor, a balcony overlooking the casino’s sea of green felt and the people swimming there. Since this package we’d lucked into was your basic twenty-four-hour crash-course in Vegas, hotel rooms weren’t included — we’d crashed an all-night party, it seemed. But since we weren’t here to party, I’d had Jane back at Port City Travel make us a hotel reservation. What I had to do in Vegas could be accomplished in a few hours tonight, and possibly a few more tomorrow. With luck. And if you couldn’t get lucky in Las Vegas, where could you?

“Port City, Iowa,” the middle-aged male clerk behind the counter said, with a knowing smile; he had a mustache and slick hair. “We’ll make sure you get the special rate.”

Jill and I exchanged bewildered looks.

“Why?” I asked, ever skeptical about gift horses.

The clerk beamed. “You’re friends of Mr. Stone, aren’t you?”

Aw right!

“And you didn’t even kiss my dice,” I said to Jill.

“Pardon?” the clerk said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Is Charlie in?”

“Sure,” the clerk said. “You know Charlie — he loves working nights.”

“Actually,” Jill said, “we don’t know Charlie. We’re just friends of a friend. We promised we’d say hello.”

“Well,” the clerk said with practiced cheer, “I’m sure that’s no problem. Anybody from Port City is a friend of Charlie’s.”

And he called down to the casino floor and had Charlie Stone paged.

Soon a big, heavyset, white-haired, ruddy man in a shark-skin suit and a black silk tie was approaching us with a huge hand extended toward me and a smile as big as the neon cowboy’s who loomed over Glitter Gulch.

“So you’re from Port City!” he said. His eyes were casino-felt green, but a little red-lined; booze? “What’s your name?”

I told him, and he snapped two thick fingers; the sound was like a gunshot.

“You’re that mystery writer! I read about you in the paper.”

Jill and I exchanged looks again. “What paper?” I asked. Had I made the Las Vegas Sun?

“Port City Journal, of course,” he said. “I subscribe. Best way in the world to keep up — next to having friends drop by. And what’s your name, miss?”

He had offered Jill his big hand — on one finger of which was a single large gold ring glittering with diamonds, his only ostentatious touch — and she was taking it, telling him her name.

“Was your father Fred J. Forest?”

“Yes!”

“Didn’t he marry Viola Phillips?”

“That’s my mother!” Then, as if apologizing: “But I’m afraid they’ve both passed away.”

He patted her shoulder; like her long lost Uncle Charlie. “I’m sorry to hear that. I knew Fred pretty well. He was younger than me — wild kid, though!”

Jill smiled, a tinge of sadness in it. “He was a pretty sedate father. But I heard rumors he got around, way back when.”

“That he did,” Stone said, grinning broadly. “Can I get you folks a drink? Are my people treating you right?”

“I wouldn’t mind a drink, actually,” Jill said.

“Nor would I,” I said. “And your people are treating us fine. We’re getting some sort of special rate on our room.”

He waved a thick hand in the air, magicianlike, diamond ring reflecting light. “More special than that. We’ll comp you.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “That’s hardly necessary...”

“Not a word!” he said. “Let’s go down to my office and chat.” He asked us what we’d like to drink, and Jill wanted a Manhattan, and after that dry air outside I wanted a Pabst more than life in the hereafter, and he had the check-in clerk make a call.

We went down the wide, rose-carpeted steps and back into the casino, past a battalion of chrome and glass slots, where patrons, women mostly, stood worshipping, making offerings, often from paper cups of coins, staring at the brightly glowing colored glass in the polished metal machines, transfixed by spinning fruit. Beyond the slots were the gaming tables — blackjack, craps, baccarat. Then roulette, chuck-a-luck, wheel-of-fortune; in a separate open room, with comfortable chairs, armrests and all, people were playing a bingolike game called keno. The air in here was cold, and though many people were smoking, not at all smoky; the room was brightly lit, but despite the high ceiling, it was something like being in a great big submarine.

Stone led us through the casino — where slightly muffled Dixieland music from a lounge mingled with the ka-chunk of slot machines eating money, their alarm bells signaling sporadic payoffs that came in rattling downpours of coin — and into a small, spartan office. Just a desk, some framed documents; a single black-and-white, wall-mounted TV monitor of an overview of the casino. It was a lot like Brennan’s office, without the ducks.

A riverboat-gal waitress came in and delivered our drinks. We thanked her.

“So you’re originally from Port City,” I said. You didn’t have to be a mystery writer to figure that one out.

“Born and bred,” he nodded. He’d ordered a drink, too: milk. “Been in Nevada thirty years now. But I left Port City, oh, ten, fifteen years prior.”

Jill smiled prettily and said, “How did a Port City boy wind up managing a casino?”

He laughed — a single booming “ha.” “Day at a time, dear. Began running a crap game over a saloon in Port City, many, many years ago. Those were wild days.”

I sipped my Pabst, smiled meaninglessly. “I hear Port City was pretty rough, back then.”

“Yes sir, it was. Cooled down in the fifties. I moved on to Idaho when they legalized gambling, and finally wound up here — as a dealer, floor man, pit boss, shift boss. Worked my way up the ladder, like any business.”

“Do you ever get back to Port City?”

“Not in years,” he said, regretfully. “My family’s died out, mostly — what little’s left of ’em aren’t in Port City anymore. But friends drop by. I keep in touch with, oh, dozens of people from home. I try to show ’em a good time, too.”

“You knew Ginnie Mullens, then?”

His pleasant expression fell; the ruddy face looked longer than my day had been. With infinite sadness, he said, “She was a sweet kid. Mixed up, maybe. But I loved her.”

“How did you happen to know her? She wasn’t even born when you left town...”

He held the glass of milk in one hand, looked into it, as if searching for memories. “I knew her dad. Jack Mullens.” He glanced up, brightening. “Great guy! That guy coulda sold Satan a truckload of Bibles. He always had some damn scheme or other up his sleeve, some new idea that was gonna make his fortune. Never did, though. Poor guy. Died young, y’know.”

“Not as young as Ginnie,” I said.

“They were a lot alike,” Stone said. He drank half the glass of milk, more or less; set it down, pushed it away, through with it, a duty he’d dispatched. Ulcers? He folded his hands before him, fingers thick as sausages. “I loved her old man. We played poker, shot craps, from dusk till dawn, many a time. He was younger than me, a little. But we had some wild ol’ times. May he rest in peace.”

“When and how did you get to know Ginnie?”

He thought back. “Well — it must’ve been twelve, thirteen years ago. She came out here, just turned twenty-one. Introduced herself. Cute as a button, smart as a whip. Spittin’ image of her daddy. Pretty version of ’im. Wanted to work as a blackjack dealer. That wasn’t unheard of; lots of college kids were getting jobs with us and other casinos, if they were of age and good enough. And she was. She handled the cards well. She knew the score. She knew the odds, too. Good little gambler, most of the time. Though she had a bad habit of...” He stopped.

“Taking risks?”

“Gambling at all’s a risk. Life’s a risk.”

“So’s playing in traffic.”

“Well,” he admitted, “you got something there — she’d play in traffic, sometimes. Take kinda pointless risks. Take long shots, and, well, hell, sometimes they pay off. Anybody involved in gambling over a long period of time knows never to rule out the improbable.”

“They also learn never to rule out the probable.”

“True,” he said.

“You read about her death in the Port City Journal, then.”

“Yes. I get it two days late. The paper. I got it today.”

So that was why his eyes were red.

“It came as a shock to you,” I said.

“It came as a disappointment. You can’t work in this town for thirty years without losin’ your sense of shock.”

Jill sat forward. Said, “Ginnie’s been coming here to gamble over the last ten years, hasn’t she? Every now and then?”

He nodded. “She’d stay here, and gamble some here. But she was a smart cookie. She moved from casino to casino. Never winning too much. She was counting cards in blackjack when it was just a rumor.” He laughed. “Same with baccarat. Those were her games. Y’know, she had the right kind of smarts, right kind of psychology. Most dealers are men, with your typical macho ideas and all. So she’d doll herself up — a low-cut sweater that showed off her frame, a slit skirt, some makeup... she was a cute thing, anyway, that red hair of hers. And the men dealers just sit there grinning at her while she whips their butts and end up handing her thousands of dollars and then smile and help her to her taxi after. The male ego. Ha!”

“She usually did well?” I asked.

“Until the last year and a half or so. She had a real bad run of luck, took some major losses.” He thought for a moment. “You know, it wasn’t just that she caught a wrong-way streak, either — I don’t think she was playing as well. She played the market some, too, you know, and I know she lost plenty, there.”

“When she came to town, how long would she usually stay?”

“Like any good gambler,” he said, “she knew that to make the odds work for you, you got to invest some time, as well as money. She’d give it ten days, usually.”

“But this last time,” Jill said, “she was only here a day....”

Sadness pulled at his face like a weight. “That was an unfortunate thing.”

“Please explain,” I said.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Why are you here? Why do you want to know these things about little Ginnie?”

“I was her friend,” I said. “I was her best friend, once. The sheriff...”

“Brennan,” Stone interrupted. “I knew his people.”

“Yes; anyway, the sheriff has reason to believe Ginnie may have been murdered. The suicide seems to have been, well... rigged.”

“I see,” Stone said, leaning forward; he was like a huge St. Bernard sitting upright in a chair. “So this is an... inquiry of sorts?”

“Unofficial,” I said. “I’m not a cop. Just a friend of Ginnie’s. But the sheriff will hear what I find out.”

“She played craps,” he said.

“What?”

“This time... this one time... she played craps.”

“I thought you said she was a blackjack and baccarat player, exclusively—”

“This one time she played craps.” He sighed. “I blame myself. I okayed the thing. She’d have just gone somewhere else with it, if I didn’t let her.”

“What are you saying?”

Shaking his big head, with sadness, regret, he said, “She came here with a satchel of money. $250,000. Cash. I told her, honey, you got a line of credit a block long here, and she said, no. Cash. She’d sold her business, y’see. She was here to break that losing streak of hers. And to play out a theory... a pet theory of hers.”

“Which was?”

He seemed almost embarrassed to say it. “Ginnie believed — and there’s some truth to it — that your best odds are on your first bet. Your odds decrease as you stand and play. She always said that one day she wanted to walk in here and put her whole bankroll on one roll of the dice. One bet. One win.”

“Or one loss,” I said.

“Or one loss,” he agreed.

“And did she?”

“Yes.”

“And you allowed that?”

“If I hadn’t, she coulda walked over to the Horseshoe. Or the Union Plaza. She wanted to gamble. And that’s what we’re in business for. All of us.”

“Tell us what happened.”

“She bet half of her satchel of money on herself, on the ‘pass’ line. She threw a ten. She bet the rest of her satchel of money on throwing a ‘hard way’ ten, which’d be two fives. Meaning if she made her point, if she shot a ten before crapping out, and shot a two-five ten doing it, she’d get eight-to-one odds on the second bet, plus even money on the original bet.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“Well, with what she was betting, if everything worked out — over and above her original $250,000 — she’d have made a cool million.”

That figure again.

“And?” I asked.

He shrugged; them’s the breaks.

“She crapped out,” he said.