A Shroud for Aquarius (20 page)

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.

Jill wore a white bikini that was startling against her brown skin; so was her bright red lipstick. The short punky cut of her black hair gave her beauty a nicely casual quality. She was stretched out on her back on a lounge chair, letting the hundred-degree Nevada sun—almost directly over us—beat down on her. Tiny beads of sweat pearled her body. Sunglasses with sweeping pink fifties-style frames shielded her eyes. Occasionally she sipped a tall cool fruity drink, the kind with an umbrella in it. I was sitting nearby, on the edge of the pool, feet dangling in the cool water. Cool compared to the climate, that is. Half turning to look at her, I realized she was the most beautiful woman here, and there were plenty of younger, fleshier bikinied beauties around the pool atop the Four Kings, showgirls some of them, actresses, stewardesses, what-have-you. But to my eyes Jill Forest, thirty-three, of Port City, Iowa, topped them all.

I withdrew my legs from the pool and walked over next to her and sat on a towel, heat from cement coming right through and scalding my ass. I didn’t care. I wanted to talk to Jill.

“Have you ever been married?” I asked her.

A faint smile flickered over a face (a flawless face, actually, but that would be one too many
f
’s) that might otherwise have belonged to a sleeping beauty.

“Took you long enough to ask that question,” she said, red lips barely moving, upper lip moist with bodily dew.

“Maybe I was afraid to ask.”

“Have
you
been married, Mal?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Ever lived with anybody?”

“A couple times, when I was much younger.”

“Funny.”

“What’s funny?”

An expression I couldn’t read flitted across her face before her features settled into that expressionless tanning look. “You don’t seem the confirmed bachelor type.”

“Sometimes bachelors my age are assumed to be gay, you know.”

She lifted a hand to the sunglasses, lowered them to peer at me archly for a moment. “You’re not gay.” Put the pink frames back in place.

“Glad you noticed.”

Despite that show of confidence, the truth was we hadn’t made love last night. It was one something A.M. when we finished talking to Charlie Stone, and we walked Glitter Gulch awhile, peeking in here and there, and then hired a cab to take us up the Strip, finally got out and walked some of that, taking in the neon and the kitschy decadence. Not a word was said about Ginnie the whole time. It was almost four when we finally drifted up to our hotel room, and tumbled into bed like dice and crapped out.

Then, when the sun sliced through the place where the drapes hadn’t been closed all the way, I roused, aroused, drowsily rolled over and up against something or somebody and suddenly more or less realized a beautiful woman was in bed with
me. Half asleep, not knowing who this woman was exactly, not remembering who I was exactly, I began cuddling, bumping, generally making trouble, and the beautiful woman responded, seeming pleasantly surprised to find a man in her bed, and, tangled in blankets and sheets, the musky smell of slumber on us both, we made love in that sweet, spontaneous, half-asleep, am-I-dreaming, quite wonderful way, and fell back asleep again, in each other’s arms this time.