Top of the Heap (19 page)

Danby was sitting there studying the card.

I hoped he wouldn’t realize that the address was that of police headquarters until he got there.

I turned the knob and pushed the green door open.

It swung back on well-oiled hinges and I stepped into a little hallway. A flight of worn board stairs, uncarpeted, echoing and splintered, stretched up to another door.

I started to raise my hand to knock on the door, then realized it wasn’t necessary. I’d gone through a beam of invisible light and a little shutter slid open in the door. A pair of eyes regarded me through a small window of plate glass which must have been an inch thick.

“Got a card?” a voice asked, which evidently came through a microphone and wires.

I produced one of the cards I had picked up at Bishop’s place. I had written my name in the blank line.

The eyes on the other side of the plate glass regarded the card, the voice through the loud-speaker said impatiently, “Well, shove it through the crack.”

It was then I noticed for the first time the very narrow slit in the thick door.

I pushed the card into the narrow opening.

There was a period of complete silence, then I heard an electric mechanism pulling bolts back. The heavy door rumbled to one side, running on rollers on a steel rail. The heavy rumbling and the vibration of the stairs as the door moved showed the reason for the microphone and the amplification of the voice. That door must have been as heavy as the door of a vault. Looking curiously around me, I suddenly realized that the stairs were the only bits of wood in the entire entranceway. I had gone through the green door and entered a steel inspection room. A raiding party of police equipped with picks and sledge hammers couldn’t have done more than dent the defenses.

“Well,” the voice said impatiently, “go on in.”

I noticed that the voice had said “go in” instead of “come in,” so I wasn’t too surprised to find on entering that the guard was no longer standing by the door. He had
stepped into a steel, bulletproof closet on one side of the door. I could see the closet, but I couldn’t see him. He probably had a revolver covering me.

I walked over the sunken steel rail on which the door had slid, and entered a completely new world. My feet were in a soft, thick carpet which felt like moss in a forest. The hallway glowed with the soft effect of indirect lighting. There was that atmosphere of casual, easy wealth, which is so necessary to a high-class gambling place. It’s designed to put the customer on the defensive right at the start, to make him feel that he’s associating with wealth and standing.

There’s enough of the social climber in most people so that they fall for this stuff and consider it a privilege to be admitted to a place that specializes in taking their money. They’d walk out the worse for wear financially, but still with a certain deferential restraint. It’s an atmosphere that cuts down on beefs and scenes, and makes even the thought of rigged wheels and marked cards seem a social sacrilege.

That atmosphere is a business investment and doesn’t cost as much as one would think. It takes a few props. One is the paintings in heavy frames, carefully illuminated by shaded frame lamps. If the customer doesn’t appreciate them he shamefacedly considers it’s due to his own artistic ignorance. Actually the paintings are twenty-dollar copies in fifty-dollar frames, illuminated by ten-dollar lights.

The customer who can appreciate the price of the frame better than the worth of the painting, thinks they must be old masters. Otherwise why all the frame and illumination on the painting?

The other props are even more simple — Carpets with rich colors and sponge rubber underneath, and the artistic use of color in the draperies. In the soft, indirect lighting it looks like a million dollars. By daylight it would stink.

I entered rooms containing exactly what I had expected to find.

The first room was nothing but a conventional cocktail lounge. It had tables, cushioned stools, a bar, love seats, dim lighting, and the all but inaudible strains of organ music.

Two or three couples were at the tables. A party of three stags were at the far end of the bar with money scattered in front of them, two bottles of champagne, and all of the external evidence of celebrating a huge financial success.

I wondered whether they were also part of the props.

A coldly courteous individual handed me the card which I had left with the doorman downstairs.

“May I ask exactly what it was you were looking for, Mr. Lam?”

“Exactly what you have here,” I said.

The cold eyes softened a bit. “May I ask where you got your card? Who vouched for you when you got it?”

I said, “The card’s properly signed.”

“I know, but sometimes signed cards are given to various sources for distribution.”

I said, “This was given me by the owner.”

He looked a little surprised then, turned it over, and said, “You know Mr. Channing personally then?”

“That’s right.”

“Then the situation is entirely different,” he said. “Just go right on in, Mr. Lam.”

Before I could move, and as though he had been struck with an afterthought, he said apologetically, “I am afraid I’m going to have to comply with the regulations and ask to look at your driving license and make sure you’re the person described on the card.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, and flipped open my wallet, showing him my driving license.

“From Los Angeles, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s probably why I don’t place you. You’re going to be up here for a while, Mr. Lam?”

“Not long. I want a little action while I’m here. I am familiar with Al’s place down in Los Angeles.”

“Oh,” he said. “How
is
Al?”

“I don’t know him personally,” I said, “just the place. I know the manager there—”

I stopped abruptly as though I had caught myself just in time to keep from using a name.

“Well?” he asked.

I smiled. “If you know the man I mean, you know his name. If you don’t know the man I mean, there’s no point in mentioning his name.”

He laughed. “Did you wish to make any arrangements for credit, for having checks cashed, or anything, Mr. Lam?”

“I think I have enough cash to see me through.”

“If you’d like to make any credit arrangements—”

“I’ll do that when I run out of cash. I’ll run in and see Channing personally in case that happens.”

“Go on in, Mr. Lam.”

He indicated a door at the far end of the room, around the end of the bar.

I walked around the bar, pushed open the door, and once more found myself in a hallway. At one end was a door marked
His
and at the other end a door marked
Hers.

An attendant stood in the hallway.

A buzzer made sounds. Three quick distinct buzzes.

The white-coated attendant, without a word, pulled on a lever and a concealed door slid back.

I entered the gambling rooms. There wasn’t much of a crowd at the moment. Probably the heavy spenders would come later, after the dinner and theater hours.

Here again the atmosphere of synthetic luxury was carried out. There were the usual roulette and crap tables, a couple of twenty-one games, and a poker game.

From the fact that some six or eight of the persons present at the tables were dressed for the evening and were wagering rather large stakes with that impeccable hauteur which is the sucker’s idea of the well-bred, upper class gambler, I knew they were the stooges who are employed to keep the place from seeming too lonely during the early evening, and to encourage play during the later hours.

Horace B. Catlin wasn’t among those present.

If there had been anything depressing to the club about the news of George Tustin Bishop’s death, there was no outward indication. Play went on with the smooth decorum of an exclusive club where men were gentlemen and the loss of a few hundred dollars was merely one of life’s amusing incidents to be dismissed with a well-bred shrug of the shoulders.

Later on, when the play became more spirited, some of the stooges would lose large sums with a patronizing smile, then begin to rake in great sacks of chips with a sophisticated lift of the eyebrow to indicate a complete control of the emotions.

The suckers who didn’t stand a chance of winning a dime would be tempted to ape their “well-bred” neighbors at the table, and they, too, would shrug off their losses with a patronizing smile, wait in vain for “luck” to turn, and then go outside really to beef.

There are, of course, a few square gambling houses in the United States. Somehow I had the impression The Green Door wasn’t one of those few.

I watched for a while, then went over and bought a twenty-dollar stack of chips. The man who presided over the wheel flashed a diamond as his well-manicured, skillful fingers slid the chips out to me in a careless ges-
ture. His entire attitude seemed to say that the place was broad-minded, and if a piker wanted to get a stack of chips for twenty dollars, it was quite all right with the management. They were running a democratic house.

I bet five dollars on red and the wheel came black. I doubled my bet on red. Red came up and paid off. I put two dollars on number three and number thirty came up. I put another two dollars on number three and number seven came up.

Again I put two dollars on number three and number three came up. The man in charge of the game paid off and honored me with a quizzical glance. Some of the other people began to size me up.

I left two dollars on the three and played two dollars on the twenty.

The twenty came up, and the man in charge once more slid out a stack of chips.

He also paused to adjust his tie.

I put two dollars on the five.

There was a nervous feminine laugh. I saw the flash of bare shoulder as an arm reached across so that the flesh all but brushed my cheek. A young vision said, “I hope you don’t think I’m forward, but with luck like yours I’m not going to pass up a chance to ride along.”

“Not at all,” I said politely, and looked her over.

She was blond, with a cute, upturned nose, a rosebud mouth, and a figure which could well have won prizes in any bathing-beauty parade.

She smiled up at me with just the right amount of cordiality and then almost instantly became somewhat coldly aloof, as though suddenly realizing that, after all, she didn’t know who I was and our acquaintanceship had stemmed from the fact that we happened to be standing at a roulette table together.

The wheel spun, the ball clattered, and number seven came up.

I put two dollars on number ten. The blonde put two dollars right on top of mine.

The wheel spun and we lost.

I put two dollars on number twenty-seven. The blonde hesitated a moment, then put a dollar bet on the top of mine.

The wheel spun, the ball clattered, and number twelve came.

I heard the blonde sigh. I put two dollars on number seven and a dollar on number three.

The blonde hesitated, then, as though trying bravely to conceal the fact that this was her last dollar, she put a chip on number three, right on top of mine.

The ball spun around and popped into a pocket. The blonde saw it before I did. She gave a startled squeal and grabbed my arm in an ecstasy of enthusiasm that she couldn’t quite control.

“We’ve done it!” she cried. “We’ve done it! We’ve won!”

The man at the wheel gave her a fatherly glance of dignified, quiet amusement and paid us off.

We bet together three or four times more, then we won again.

I was beginning to get a fair-sized pile of chips.

The blonde nervously took a cigarette case from a black bag and tapped the cigarette on the side of the polished silver. She inserted it in her mouth, and I snapped a match into flame.

She leaned forward for the light.

I could see the long curling eyelashes, the mischievous glint of saucy hazel eyes, as she looked me over with demure interest.

“Thank you,” she said, and then after a moment added, “for everything.”

“Don’t thank me,” I told her.

“Lots of people wouldn’t like to have me — well, share their luck.” Her glance was of the type to inspire a man to say that it would be a pleasure to share everything he had with her on a permanent basis.

I merely smiled.

Her hand rested on mine for an instant as she moved her pile of chips an inch or two along the side of the table.

Abruptly she said, “It means so much, so very, very much to me, and I was down to my last dollar.”

We lost three or four more bets, then I put five dollars on a number. She suddenly felt lucky and put ten dollars above my five.

The number paid off.

Her scream of delight was almost instantly suppressed as though she was afraid she might be put out, but she looked up at me and her eyes were dancing. Once more her hand was on my arm, the fingers digging in through the coat. “Oh,” she said, and then after a moment, “Oh!”

The man at the wheel paid off my bet, seemed to frown with annoyance as he paid off the blonde’s bet. It was a sizable bunch of chips.

She leaned against me. I could feel her tremble.

“I’ve got to go where I can sit down,” she said. “Please — Please, what can I do about my — about my chips?”

“Cash them in, if you wish,” the dealer said carelessly, “and then you can buy in again when you get ready to play.”

“Oh, I — Very well.”

Her weight was heavy against me as though her knees were getting ready to buckle.

“Please,” she said in a half-whisper, “can you help me over to a chair?”

I gave a quick glance at my stack of chips and at hers.

The man at the wheel caught my eye and nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, with the gesture of one who disdains to consider money of any great importance.

I took the girl’s arm and helped her out to a table at the bar.

A waiter hovered over us solicitously as soon as we were seated.

“The occasion,” I said, “would seem to call for celebration. Would you care for champagne?”

“Oh, I’d love it. I have to have — something. Oh, it means so much! Would you — Could you—”