Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 02 - City of Beads (5 page)

Men in evening clothes and ladies in cocktail dresses played craps, a game that he had once understood a little too well. And there were so many lovely ladies bearing gifts, trays of drinks, that you could not help pulling in your stomach. The noise level was constant, the voices happy, though surely people were losing money. Yes, here and there zombies drifted through, headed toward the doors or the bar. There were some faces looking drained and disappointed, though they didn’t stay long. They moseyed on, pardner. But look at the tables. All those green, red, and black chips. Was that a hundred-dollar slot machine into whose cold metal lips the Spanish lady, looking somewhat familiar, almost could be Tubby’s housekeeper, kept feeding chips?

“Whataya think?” Jake bellowed over the electronic, metallic din. “You wanna play some?”

“Not right now. I want to get the feel of the place,” Tubby shouted back.

“Sure. Get the feel. Here, how about a drink? Get us a couple of gin and tonics, would you, darlin’?” he asked a waitress passing by. She smiled and marched to the bar.

“This is the world’s easiest money, Tubby,” Jake shouted. “It’s a big damn money machine. Every day a certain amount gets bet, and we program it where a certain percentage gets won, a certain percentage gets lost, and a certain percentage flows upstairs. It operates just like a life insurance company. It’s nothing more than actuarial tables. Only we don’t get surprised by earthquakes or hurricanes. Nobody, but nobody, beats the odds. It’s wonderful. And everybody has a good time. Thanks, doll.” He smiled as she lifted the drinks she had brought and handed Tubby one. “Let me show you around.”

He started wading through the crowd.

“Down here we got thirty blackjack tables, five dice, and a dozen keno, roulette, and specialty games. Back there we got six hundred slot machines. That’s a lot. And upstairs we got six hundred more. Let me show you the rest.”

They started upstairs. A drunk Tubby thought he recognized from his bank teetered against him on a slow-motion trip downstairs, a wild grin stuck on his face.

“’Scuse me,” he said.

“Sure,” Tubby replied, and gently propelled his banker on his way.

“Up here,” Jake said, “we got a poker room and a bourré room. Lotsa older people come up here.” A throng of settled-down ladies from across the river and old gents with their white shirtsleeves rolled up, looking as if they were in for the night, ringed the table. They were tourists in their own town, and they were having a ball.

“This is more of a family atmosphere than I remembered,” Tubby said. “Or maybe it was just different in Nevada.”

“Oh yeah. Listen, we’re going to be offering day care in a couple of weeks. It’s just a matter of seven or eight more permits,” Jake said sourly. “Maybe you can help us with that. We want people to bring the kids. No sweat about finding a baby-sitter. And we’re going to have entertainments for these kids like you wouldn’t believe. Educational, like a miniature Disney World.”

“You’re making it user friendly.”

“You bet,” Jake said. “Come on. I’ll show you my orifice, ha, ha.”

Through a door marked PRIVATE they waved past a guard who pushed a buzzer that unlocked another door. Inside was the counting room, where people and machines processed quarters and bills, made them all neat and tidy, and where dozens of guys in suits walked up and down watching that things were done right.

“Look over here,” Jake said.

Across a rail you could see the action below through glass panels placed above the dealers at the tables. More guys in suits monitored that action, casting a serious eye on the card shuffles and the slip and slide of chips across green felt. Others around them sat on swivel chairs, eyes fastened to television screens that tracked the progress of carts of chips and money across the gaming floors as the attendants sucked dough out of the slot machines and picked up stacks of chips from the dealers at the tables.

It was much quieter here, upstairs, than it was in the circus below. No drinks, no cigarettes or cigars, very professional.

“There’s Leo Caspar,” Jake said. “He’s the guy who really runs the place. Let me introduce you.”

From a distance Caspar wasn’t very impressive. He was slender and had short black hair, a brown suit, and a narrow face that looked like it had been squeezed too hard when he was a baby. He didn’t converse much as he drifted around the floor, but made little gestures that provoked reactions in employees. He was cool. When he noticed Jake and Tubby approaching, he revealed his most striking feature – hangman’s eyes. Very cold, very gray, very hard.

“Leo, I want you to meet Mr. Tubby Dubonnet, Esquire. He’s the lawyer I was telling you about.”

Caspar checked out Tubby from head to toe. The eyes didn’t like what they saw but the lips twisted into what might have been a smile. He said, “Good to meet you,” and dropped Tubby’s hand.

“Mr. Caspar is our gambling czar,” Jake announced exuberantly. “He’s in charge of all that’s glitter and gold.”

“I understand that you might be doing some legal work for us, Mr. Dubonnet.”

“Well, Jake just mentioned that possibility this afternoon.”

“What is your legal specialty, if there is such a thing?”

“Client satisfaction,” Tubby said.

Caspar raised his eyebrows and looked Tubby over once again.

“In that case, we’re glad to have you aboard,” he said.

“I’m going to show Tubby around and let him get the feel of the place.”

“Sure, go ahead.” Caspar turned to Tubby. “As long as you’re here, why not go downstairs and play for a while? I’ve got a feeling this could be your lucky night.”

“I wouldn’t want to clean out the house. I’d be gambling against my client.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Caspar said. “The house can stand it. It’s all simple arithmetic.”

“How’s that?”

“You play long enough and the house eventually wins.” The eyes probed again.

“So you gotta know when to quit.”

“It helps,” Caspar said.

“But the winner always can come back, right, Leo?” Jake beamed.

“Generally they do. But the fact is, if you was to win enough to make a difference, we’d cut you off. I’ve got to go watch the count. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dubonnet.” He didn’t offer to shake but nodded his head slightly, turned, and walked away. He followed a rolling safe that had been brought up from below by an attractive female attendant, flanked by two more of those men in suits.

“That’s the take from one wall of quarter slots, maybe five hundred pounds of quarters. And it just keeps rolling in, Tubby. Amazing, huh? Let me show you where I work.”

Jake led Tubby off to the side to a door marked MANAGER. He pressed a plastic card against a plastic square in the wall, which emitted a click, then opened the door and ushered Tubby in. It was a neat room with no windows and less character. In fact, now that you thought about it, there were no windows in the entire casino. Jake had two desks, a big rental monster against the far wall surrounded by abstract paintings and green plants, clean on top, and a smaller one, very cluttered, off to one side. A pretty blonde woman wearing a cobalt-blue dress, businesslike but on the sexy side, was sitting there, and she turned and smiled when they walked in.

“Hi, Jake,” she said.

“Let me introduce you. Nicole, this is Tubby Dubonnet, a lawyer. And Tubby, this is Nicole Normande, Mr. Caspar’s assistant.”

They said hello and shook hands. Tubby liked the way her fingers felt. Jake mentioned that she might be seeing Tubby around because he would be doing some legal work for the casino, and she said she looked forward to that. Then Jake said why didn’t she take a break and go show Tubby the tables—give him a taste of the action. And that’s how Tubby found himself sitting at a $5 blackjack table touching knees and elbows with Nicole Normande.

She smelled good.

She placed a bet for him, putting a red and white chip on the table for him and another for her and talked him through a couple of hands. Tubby knew quite well how to play blackjack, but he enjoyed letting her teach him. A waitress came by offering drinks, and before long both of them were sipping rum and Coke from plastic glasses and feeling quite chipper.

“I thought there was a rule about gambling where you worked,” he said.

“It doesn’t apply to everyone,” Nicole replied.

Tubby got into the spirit, and extracted two $20 bills from his wallet to buy four chips from the dealer, a girl who looked fifteen and whose nameplate said GISELLE. HOMETOWN: PICAYUNE, MS. She was amazingly adroit at shuffling six decks at one time.

“How ya like working here?” Tubby asked her.

“Great,” she said, while she competently dealt out a hand. The other players at the table were an odd lot. To his left there was a young man with a neat black mustache, happy about a stack of $20 chips that Giselle had just shoved across to him. To his right was a small Asian woman who seemed to be betting $100 black chips exclusively. She had three tidy stacks, little missile silos, by her elbow.

She kept a cigarette lit and tipped the dealer $10 every time she won. Then there was a college kid joking with his friends, and a shorthaired woman without makeup who laughed “Hah” each time she won and coughed “Hah” disgustedly each time she lost.

Nicole drew an ace and a king for blackjack, and got paid double.

“What’s your strategy?” Tubby asked. His 17 won, too, when Giselle from Picayune busted.

“I don’t really have a strategy,” Nicole said. “But I have a system. Every third hand I double my bet.”

“Does that work?”

“It seems to. Not all the time, but more often than not. I can’t explain why.”

“I’ll see if it works for me.”

It did for a while, then it didn’t. After about fifteen minutes Tubby managed to lose his red and green chip at the same time and he was through.

“I’m wiped out,” he said dejectedly.

“Here, let me stake you to one.” Nicole placed a $20 bet for Tubby.

He drew an 18. The cards came around the table fast. The dealer had an 18, too, but when she raked up the hands and chips she pushed a red one to Tubby as if he had won. He didn’t protest. Just one of those lucky errors.

Nicole was soon up to about $120 and had a very Christmassy little pile in front of her. Tubby was breaking even.

“Come on, I’ll buy you supper,” she said with satisfaction. “If you’re hungry. I’m starved.”

“Sure thing,” Tubby said. He hadn’t eaten since lunch.

As they got up, two people waiting behind them slid into their warm chairs. The place had gotten even more crowded since Tubby and Jake had arrived, and it took a little work just to get to the restaurant. Compared to the gaming area, it was dark and quiet.

“That was quite an experience,” Tubby said, sinking back. “It’s different at the racetrack. It takes a lot longer to lose when you bet on horses.”

“But is it as exciting?”

“To me it’s more so. I guess some people like horses, and some people like video games and flashing lights. Everybody likes being around the money.”

“We’ve got one lady who comes in here almost every night. She is astonishing. She can put fifty quarters in a slot machine in a minute, providing she doesn’t win anything.”

“She must win sometimes.”

“Everybody wins sometimes. But I mean she’s fast. You’d think it would be physically impossible to do that.”

“You ever been in a sweatshop, like down in Tijuana, where they make hand-painted souvenirs?”

“No.”

“Same thing. Lightning fingers, but they’re getting paid to do it.”

“That sounds horrible.”

“Yeah, well anyway, you ought to try the track. You might like it. It’s a more serious crowd because everybody thinks they’ve got an angle.”

“You mean the races are fixed?”

“No, but that’s the atmosphere. Maybe some are fixed, like a jockey might hold his horse back to let another win, and some horse might get some kind of a pick-me-up before the race, but really, it’s hard to fix ten or twelve horses and their jockeys without getting caught. Everybody just acts like they’ve got some kind of trick up their sleeve. The dudes who look the most shady are the kings of the track. You think they must know something. So you buy them a drink. These folks here in the casino look more like contestants on a game show. Come on down and spin the wheel.”

She laughed. He liked it when she did that. A second set of creases formed and disappeared between her cheeks and lips, very deep for a moment. She stared at him directly while he mostly shot her sly glances and studied the ice cubes in his glass. She was always waiting for his eyes to catch hers when he looked up.

“You’re selling people everything they want in the world of adult entertainment,” he went on. “Fast action, lots of booze. And guards everywhere, so it’s safe and secure. Sexy-looking people, and the theme of the show is a favorite topic, money. I need to buy some stock in this place. Let me use your phone.”

“I believe you like to gamble.”

“I must. I’m considering buying a bar.”

“Really? Some place with video poker and lots of crowds, like this?”

“Hardly.”

“What kind of place is it?”

“Just a regular bar. Guys come in to watch the game, maybe play some cards. Women come in to listen to the jukebox and hang out with people who won’t give them a hard time, and see if maybe somebody’ll buy them a drink. Just a regular old bar.”

She looked puzzled.

“Why do you want to do that?”

“I haven’t thought of the reason yet.”

“I must admit,” she said, “the entertainment value of this place wears off very quickly.”

“I can imagine. How much time do you spend here?”

“Oh, I come in around noon and work till eight or nine o’clock. Those are the casino version of normal business hours. I try to be here whenever Mr. Caspar is, and he sleeps late.”

“Oh,” Tubby said.

She stared at him for a minute, then rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I’ve known him for years. He was a business associate of my father’s before he died.”

“Oh,” Tubby said again.

“He died ten years ago. He was away on business in Georgia.”