Sin City Homicide

21

Bill James got out of the shower and looked over his body in the full-length mirror. The years had been good to him, mostly free of the hard labor that he’d seen age his friends. He had no idea why society put such value on hard work. It aged people, caused them pain, and wore out their bodies and minds. It was for suckers. If they wanted to get rich, people had to work intelligently and with calculated forethought towards the future. Nothing else would get them rich.

He went to his walk-in closet and chose the Polo suit with the white pinstripes. Hand-made Italian sandals went over his sockless feet, and he chose a black t-shirt with no tie. Once he was dressed, he looked himself over and knew what was missing. He had been stalling, hoping he wouldn’t have to add it, but that would be a decision based solely on principle instead of practicality. Since he was a teenager, he’d sworn never to make decisions based only on principle.

He finally relented, reached into a drawer on his massive mahogany dresser, and pulled out a snub-nose revolver, which he tucked into his belt at the small of his back. He hadn’t carried a gun for forty years. The thought of it filled him with dread. People who carried guns naturally ended up in situations in which they had to use them. The universe wasn’t stupid. It gave back exactly what he put into it. But he feared the alternative might have been worse.

He left his suite and took the elevator down to the casino floor. He passed most of the tables, heading to one where a crowd had gathered. A chain-smoking Asian man sat at a blackjack table, a massive stack of chips piled in front of him. His glasses were down on the brim of his nose, and he was dispassionately analyzing the cards in his hand. He hit at sixteen and pulled a four. The dealer busted at twenty-three. The crowd cheered as the dealer counted out his bet: six thousand on one hand.

The pit boss came up to James and stood next to him quietly, like a soldier awaiting orders. Hot streaks required the commander’s attention.

“How long has he been winning?” James asked.

“Just over five hours.”

James smirked. The house had a nearly two percent edge over an amateur blackjack player, which meant that for every dollar played, the casino kept two cents as profit and paid the remaining ninety-eight cents back out to the player. Bet after bet, the edge would grind away at the player’s money, eventually taking all of it. In the long run, no one could beat the edge. The casino could be beaten in short bursts, usually no more than a half hour or so if someone was really on a hot streak. Few players had the self-control to make big bets a small number of times then walk away while they were ahead. In forty years of working in casinos, James had seen perhaps three people who could do it. Gamblers’ avarice was uncontrollable, and they were unable to pull themselves away from tables, even if they were millions of dollars ahead.

Five hours of winning was statistically impossible. James studied a couple of the man’s bets and his hands. He walked up behind the man, who was reaching to throw his cards to the dealer, and grabbed the man’s wrist. Twisting it, he exposed several thousand-dollar chips the man had palmed.

It was an old trick that had worked well before cameras were above every table. The player would place one or even two thousand-dollar chips under a stack of hundreds as his bet. If he leaned the stack toward the dealer at just the right angle, the entire stack appeared to be hundreds. If he won, he showed the dealer the thousand-dollar chips and claimed his prize. If he lost, he threw down his cards, and on the way out, he would pick up the chips at the bottom of the stack. Glue could be applied to the palm to make it easier, but the experts could pull out the bottom chips without making the stack fall.

Two security personnel rushed over and grabbed the Asian man. They lifted him out of his seat and dragged him toward the interrogation room at the back of the casino. James watched him go. He wanted to be back there with his own brass knuckles, but that wasn’t the way things were handled anymore. Nowadays, the police were called, the man would be cited, and lawyers would battle it out in court for a few months. He thought that even the cheats might have preferred a single, clean beating so they could move on with their lives.

James turned to the pit boss. “Fire the dealer now. Have him escorted out. Fire whoever was manning the eye in the sky for this table. Same thing, escort them out. That’s really important. If they’re in on it, they may be keeping a stack of chips somewhere in the building.”

“Will do. Anything else?”

“Follow up with me tomorrow,” James said before walking away. He knew the pit boss would be nervous that he was under suspicion as well, and he would work hard to clean up the mess. But after the pit boss had carried out his orders, James would fire him, too.

James made his way over to the high rollers’ lounge, where men in suits and tuxedos were gathered around several tables. The gorgeous women on their arms could’ve been ripped out of the pages of any glamorous magazine. He looked for the blackjack table in the corner with the black dealer, a woman who used to be in his shows. He had found that her beauty and charm kept the high rollers, most of whom were old white men, drinking and gambling.

“Hey, Suzan,” he said as he sat down.

“Mr. James. Hope you’re having a pleasant evening.”

“Good enough.”

“Would you like to play a hand?”

“No, thank you. I’m waiting for someone.”

He watched her deal to the other two gentlemen at the table. They made moderately large bets, three or four thousand a hand, but their minds were on the women, whom James had planted in the high roller rooms of other casinos. The women would get to know the men, get them drinking, and then suggest they go to the Havana because they preferred the atmosphere there. The women slept with the winners, then attempted to steal back the winnings before morning. As soon as the men ran out of money or stopped gambling, the women excused themselves to the restroom and never returned to the table.

Cal Robertson sat down, and James glanced over at him. James had known many powerful men who had aged and watched their power fade. They wanted to feel relevant, as if they still mattered, and often, they were stubborn just because they wanted the attention.

“How long have we known each other, Cal? Thirty years?”

“Yeah,” he said, laying out a credit card that the dealer swiped. “Twenty thousand in chips, please.”

“This deal, Cal, it has to go through.”

“You’re betting on something that’s not going to happen, Bill. Cuba will never allow gambling again. They have bad memories. The mob ran everything down there when all of that was going on. People were starving in the streets, and the casino owners were moving millions of dollars out of the country every day. Even as bad as they got it now, they’re not going back to that.”

“I disagree. I go down there a lot, Cal. People are sick of the government telling them what career they’re going to have and who they can or can’t talk to. They realize communism was a mistake. Even the damned Commies know that, but they can’t just come out and say, ‘Hey, by the way, sorry for the mass murders. Turns out communism doesn’t work.’ They’d be crucified afterwards. They’re going to do it in degrees. But the casinos are coming, and we need to stake our claim now.”

Cal bet five thousand on a hand and pushed with the dealer. He swore under his breath and bet another five on the next hand. “Do you know how many grandchildren I have? Twenty-four, with two more on the way. I’ve got a legacy. I want to leave them something. If this merger goes through, and we can’t acquire it ’cause the Reds won’t allow it, we’ll lose our shirts. Do you hear me on that, Bill? We will lose this casino. The banks will tear it apart piece by piece and sell it like a junk car. Why take the risk?”

“Risk is how you get rich. You wanna be remembered as owning a two-bit casino that’s going to be taken over by pussy Harvard MBAs after we’re gone? That’s not where we come from, Cal. We’re bigger than that. What if Cuba does pay off? We won’t be multi-millionaires, Cal. We’ll be billionaires. You can give each of you grandkids ten million dollars and not even miss it. We can influence things. I don’t care about the money, either. I got no delusions. I know I’m on the way out of this life. I got, what, ten good years left, if I’m lucky? I can’t spend the money in that time, but I can change things. I can influence the way things work. I can set up think tanks and foundations. I can really change things.”

Cal bet his last ten thousand on a single hand and hit twenty-one. “You ever heard that saying, Bill? I think it was Churchill who said it. ‘If you’re not a liberal by twenty, you got no heart, but if you’re not conservative by thirty, you’ve got no brains.’ I’m fine with things the way they are. I’m not looking to shake things up. I’m sorry, Bill. My answer’s no.”

James looked down at the floor, at a scrap of trash, a paper from a marker. He picked it up and placed it in the garbage can underneath the table on the dealer’s side. “Then we got nothing else to discuss.”

James returned to his suite, where he walked out on the balcony and looked over the city. His city. No, that wasn’t true anymore. It had belonged to him and those like him, maybe three or four decades ago. But Las Vegas was excitement and immorality, and it was the purview of the young to stake a claim on those things.

He let the breeze blow over his face for a while then took out his cell phone and dialed a number.

“This is Bill,” he told the person on the other end. He hesitated a moment. “The old man won’t play ball. Get him out of the game.”

He hung up quickly, as if that would absolve him, then set the phone down on a glass table near him.

Lord forgive me.