“You hear rumors, especially about the lawyers. Several of them have gotten into trouble over there.”
“But you’ve heard nothing about the Judge?”
“No. I still don’t believe it.”
“The money came from somewhere, Claudia. And something tells me it was dirty, otherwise he would have included it with the rest of his assets.”
“And if he won at gambling he would have considered that dirty, don’t you think?” Indeed, she knew the Judge better than anyone.
“Yes, and you?”
“Sounds like Reuben Atlee to me.”
They finished that round of conversation and took a break, both rocking gently in the cool shade of the front porch, as if time had stopped, neither bothered by the silence. Porch-sitting allowed great lapses while thoughts were gathered, or while there was no thinking at all.
Finally Ray, still plodding through an unwritten script, mustered the courage to ask the toughest question of the day. “I need to know something, Claudia, and please be honest.”
“I’m always honest. It’s one of my faults.”
“I have never questioned my father’s integrity.”
“Nor should you now.”
“Help me out here, okay.”
“Go on.”
“Was there anything on the side—a little extra from a lawyer, a slice of the pie from a litigant, a nice backhander as the Brits like to say?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m throwing darts, Claudia, hoping to hit something. You don’t just find a hundred thousand dollars in nice crisp bills tucked away on a shelf. When he died he had six thousand dollars in the bank. Why keep a hundred buried?”
“He was the most ethical man in the world.”
“I believe that.”
“Then stop talking about bribes and such.”
“Gladly.”
She lit another cigarette and he left to fill up the tea glasses. When he returned to the porch Claudia was deep in thought, her gaze stretching far beyond the street. They rocked for a while.
Finally, he said, “I think the Judge would want you to have some of it.”
“Oh you do?”
“Yes. We’ll need some of it now to finish fixing up the place, probably twenty-five thousand or so. What if you, me, and Forrest split the remainder?”
“Twenty-five each?”
“Yep. What do you think?”
“You’re not running it through the estate?” she asked. She knew the law better than Harry Rex.
“Why bother? It’s cash, nobody knows about it, and if we report it then half will go for taxes.”
“And how would you explain it?” she asked, as always, one step ahead. They used to say that Claudia would have the case decided before the lawyers began their opening statements.
And the woman loved money. Clothes, perfume, always a late-model car, and all these things from a poorly paid court reporter. If she was drawing a state pension, it couldn’t be much.
“It cannot be explained,” Ray said.
“If it’s from gambling, then you’ll have to go back and amend his tax returns for the past years,” she said, quickly on board. “What a mess.”
“A real mess.”
The mess was quietly put to rest. No one would ever know about her share of the money.
“We had a case once,” she said, gazing across the front lawn. “Over in Tippah County, thirty years ago. A man named Childers owned a scrap yard. He died with no will.” A pause, a long drag on the cigarette. “Had a bunch of kids, and they found money hidden all over the place, in his office, in his attic, in a utility shed behind his house, in his fireplace. It was a regular Easter egg hunt. Once they’d scoured every inch of the place, they counted it up and it was about two hundred thousand dollars. This, from a man who wouldn’t pay his phone bill and wore the same pair of overalls for ten years.” Another pause, another long puff. She could tell these stories forever. “Half the kids wanted
to split the money and run, the other half wanted to tell the lawyer and include the money in the probate. Word leaked out, the family got scared, and the money got added to the old man’s estate. The kids fought bitterly. Five years later all the money was gone—half to the government, half to the lawyers.”
She stopped, and Ray waited for the resolution. “What’s the point?” he asked.
“The Judge said it was a shame, said the kids should’ve kept the money quiet and split it. After all, it was the property of their father.”
“Sounds fair to me.”
“He hated inheritance taxes. Why should the government get a large portion of your wealth just because you die? I heard him grumble about it for years.”
Ray took an envelope from behind his rocker and handed it to her. “That’s twenty-five thousand in cash.”
She stared at it, then looked at him in disbelief.
“Take it,” he said, inching it closer to her. “No one will ever know.”
She took it and for a second was unable to speak. Her eyes watered, and for Claudia that meant serious emotions were at work. “Thank you,” she whispered, and clutched the money even tighter.
______
Long after she left, Ray sat in the same chair, rocking in the darkness, quite pleased with himself for eliminating Claudia as a suspect. Her ready acceptance
of twenty-five thousand dollars was convincing proof that she knew nothing of the much larger fortune.
But there was no suspect to take her place on the list.
CHAPTER 23
The meeting had been arranged through a Virginia law alumnus who was now a partner in a New York megafirm, which in turn was counsel to a gaming group that operated Canyon Casinos across the country. Contacts had been made, favors exchanged, arms twisted slightly and very diplomatically. It was in the delicate area of security, and no one wanted to step over the line. Professor Atlee needed just the basics.
Canyon had been on the Mississippi River, in Tunica County, since the mid-nineties, arriving in the second wave of construction and surviving the first shakeout. It had ten floors, four hundred rooms, eighty thousand square feet of gaming opportunities, and had been very successful with old Motown acts. Mr. Jason Piccolo, a vice president of some sort from the home office in Vegas, was on hand to greet Ray, and with him was Alvin Barker, head of security. Piccolo
was in his early thirties and dressed like an Armani model. Barker was in his fifties and had the look of a weathered old cop in a bad suit.
They began by offering a quick tour, which Ray declined. He’d seen enough casino floors in the past month to last him forever. “How much of the upstairs is off-limits?” he asked.
“Well, let’s see,” Piccolo said politely, and they led him away from the slots and tables to a hallway behind the cashiers’ booths. Up the stairs and down another hallway, and they stopped in a narrow room with a long wall of one-way mirrors. Through it, there was a large, low room filled with round tables covered with closed-circuit monitors. Dozens of men and women were glued to the screens, seemingly afraid to miss anything.
“This is the eye-in-the-sky,” Piccolo was saying. “Those guys on the left are watching the blackjack tables. In the center, craps and roulette, to the right, slots and poker.”
“And what are they watching?”
“Everything. Absolutely everything.”
“Give me the list.”
“Every player. We watch the big hitters, the pros, the card counters, the crooks. Take blackjack. Those guys over there can watch ten hands and tell if a player is counting cards. That man in the gray jacket studies faces, looking for the serious players. They bounce around, here today, Vegas tomorrow, then they’ll lay low for a week and surface in Atlantic City or the Bahamas. If they cheat or count cards, he’ll spot them
when they sit down.” Piccolo was doing the talking. Barker was watching Ray as if he might be a potential cheater.
“How close is the camera view?” Ray asked.
“Close enough to read the serial number of any bill. We caught a cheater last month because we recognized a diamond ring he’d worn before.”
“Can I go in there?”
“Sorry.”
“What about the craps tables?”
“The same. It’s a bigger problem because the game is faster and more complicated.”
“Are there professional cheaters at craps?”
“They’re rare. Same with poker and roulette. Cheating is not a huge problem. We worry more about employee theft and mistakes at the table.”
“What kind of mistakes?”
“Last night a blackjack player won a forty-dollar hand, but our dealer made a mistake and pulled the chips. The player objected and called the pit boss over. Our guys up here saw it happen and we corrected the situation.”
“How?”
“We sent a security guy down with instructions to pay the customer his forty bucks, give him an apology, and comp a dinner.”
“What about the dealer?”
“He has a good record, but one more screwup and he’s gone.”
“So everything’s recorded?”
“Everything. Every hand, every throw of the dice,
every slot. We have two hundred cameras rolling right now.”
Ray walked along the wall and tried to absorb the level of surveillance. There seemed to be more people watching above than gambling below.
“How can a dealer cheat with all this?” he asked, waving a hand.
Piccolo said, “There are ways,” and gave Barker a knowing look. “Many ways. We catch one a month.”
“Why do you watch the slots?” Ray asked, changing the subject. He would kill some time scatter-shooting since he’d been promised only one visit upstairs.
“Because we watch everything,” Piccolo said. “And because there have been some instances where minors won jackpots. The casinos refused to pay, and they won the lawsuits because they had videos showing the minors ducking away while adults stepped in. Would you like something to drink?”
“Sure.”
“We have a secret little room with a better view.”
Ray followed them up another flight of stairs to a small enclosed balcony with views of the gaming floor and the surveillance room. A waitress materialized from thin air and took their drink orders. Ray asked for cappuccino. Waters for his hosts.
“What’s your biggest security concern?” Ray asked. He was looking at a list of questions he’d pulled from his coat pocket.
“Card counters and sticky-fingered dealers,” Piccolo answered. “Those little chips are very easy to drop into
cuffs and pockets. Fifty bucks a day is a thousand dollars a month, tax free, of course.”
“How many card counters do you see in here?”
“More and more. There are casinos in forty states now, so more people are gambling. We keep extensive files on suspected counters, and when we think we have one here, then we simply ask them to leave. We have that right, you know.”
“What’s your biggest one-day winner?” Ray asked.
Piccolo looked at Barker, who said, “Excluding slots?”
“Yes.”
“We had a guy win a buck eighty in craps one night.”
“A hundred and eighty thousand?”
“Right.”
“And your biggest loser?”
Barker took his water from the waitress and scratched his face for a second. “Same guy dropped two hundred grand three nights later.”
“Do you have consistent winners?” Ray asked, looking at his notes as if serious academic research was under way.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Piccolo said.
“Let’s say a guy comes in two or three times every week, plays cards or dice, wins more than he loses, and over time racks up some nice gains. How often do you see that?”
“It’s very rare,” said Piccolo. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in business.”
“Extremely rare,” Barker said. “A guy might get hot for a week or two. We’ll zero in on him, watch him real close, nothing suspicious, but he is taking our money. Sooner or later he’s gonna take one chance too many, do something stupid, and we’ll get our money back.”
“Eighty percent lose over time,” Piccolo added.
Ray stirred his cappuccino and glanced at his notes. “A guy walks in, complete stranger, lays down a thousand bucks on a blackjack table and wants hundred-dollar chips. What happens up here?”
Barker smiled and cracked his thick knuckles. “We perk up. We’ll watch him for a few minutes, see if he knows what he’s doing. The pit boss’ll ask him if he wants to be rated, or tracked, and if so then we’ll get his name. If he says no, then we’ll offer him a dinner. The cocktail waitress will keep the drinks coming, but if he doesn’t drink then that’s another sign that he might be serious.”
“The pros never drink when they gamble,” Piccolo added. “They might order a drink for cover, but they’ll just play with it.”
“What is rating?”
“Most gamblers want some extras,” explained Piccolo. “Dinner, tickets to a show, room discounts, all kinds of goodies we can throw in. They have membership cards that we monitor to see how much they’re gambling. The guy in your hypothetical has no card, so we’ll ask him if he wants to be rated.”
“And he says no.”
“Then it’s no big deal. Strangers come and go all the time.”
“But we sure try to keep up with them,” Barker admitted.
Ray scribbled something meaningless on his folded sheet of paper. “Do the casinos pool their surveillance?” he asked, and for the first time Piccolo and Barker squirmed in unison.
“What do you mean by pool?” Piccolo asked with a smile, which Ray returned, Barker quickly joining in.
While all three were smiling, Ray said, “Okay another hypothetical about our consistent winner. Let’s say the guy plays one night at the Monte Carlo, the next night at Treasure Cove, the next night at Alladin, and so on down the strip here. He works all the casinos, and he wins a lot more than he loses. And this goes on for a year. How much will you know about this guy?”
Piccolo nodded at Barker, who was pinching his lips between a thumb and an index finger. “We’ll know a lot,” he admitted.
“How much?” Ray pressed.
“Go on,” Piccolo said to Barker, who reluctantly began talking.
“We’ll know his name, his address, his occupation, phone number, automobile, bank. We’ll know where he is each night, when he arrives, when he leaves, how much he wins or loses, how much he drinks, did he have dinner, did he tip the waitress, and if so then how much, how much did he tip the dealer.”
“And you keep records on these people?”