Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

“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.