Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) Page 10

  She didn’t want to hear that, either. She might have pulled back inside and shut the door in my face, or she might have told me to go to hell; she didn’t do either one. Something kept her standing there talking to me—the same sort of thing, maybe, that keeps a rabbit standing in thrall of a snake.

  She gnawed off some more lipstick before she said, “Listen, my boyfriend’ll be home any minute. He catches me talking to a strange guy, he’ll kick my ass. So why don’t you just leave me alone, okay?”

  “Your boyfriend isn’t what you’re afraid of.”

  “No? You don’t know Scott.”

  “Were you living with him while you were seeing Burnett?”

  One, two, three beats. “Yeah. You happy now? Scott doesn’t know. He finds out, he’ll really kick my ass.”

  “Tell me about you and Burnett.”

  “Tell you what? There’s nothing to tell. We saw each other a few times, had some grins together ... that’s all.”

  “When did you start seeing him?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Answer the question, Wendy.”

  “Last year. Late last year.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “He came into the Nevornia, where I used to work. Him and Jerry. I was dealing blackjack and play was slow that day and we started talking.”

  “Pretty heavy gambler, was he? Big bets?”

  “Not Dave. Five bucks a hand, tops.”

  “So the two of you got to talking. Then what?”

  “Jerry’s got this cabin at Fallen Leaf Lake. They were up for a long weekend and Dave asked me if I wanted to come party with them.”

  “And you said yes.”

  “Scott had a winter job in L.A.,” she said, and shrugged.

  “Dave tell you he was living with a girl in San Francisco? That they were planning to be married soon?”

  “You kidding? Guys say that, it chills you right out. Dave was no airhead. He knew what he was doing.”

  “Sure he did. Good old Dave. He tell you about his fiancée later or did somebody else?”

  “He told me. Didn’t matter by then. He had somebody, I’ve got somebody—that’s the way it is. We were just having some grins, I told you that.”

  Yeah, I thought. Grins.

  I said, “Who else was at Jerry’s cabin that first weekend?”

  “His girl, nobody else.”

  “The other girl in the photo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Five-second hesitation. “Janine. Janine Wovoka.”

  “You know her well?”

  “No. We never met before then.”

  “She live here in Tahoe?”

  “No.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Reno. She lives in Reno.”

  “Where in Reno?”

  “She never told me and I never asked.”

  “She tell you where she works?”

  “Coliseum Club. She did then, anyway.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “I dunno. I haven’t seen her since the last time the four of us were together.”

  “The weekend Burnett won his big jackpot, you mean.”

  “I told you, I wasn’t with him then!”

  “Jerry was, though. How about Janine?”

  “How should I know?”

  “What was Janine’s job at the Coliseum Club?”

  “Change-girl. She was trying to get on as a dealer.”

  “Burnett made his big score at the Coliseum Club,” I said. “But I guess that’s just coincidence. Couldn’t have had anything to do with Janine working there.”

  She didn’t bite on that. She said, “How many times I have to tell you? I don’t know!”

  “You think maybe Janine got fired from her job?”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “You said she might not be working at the Coliseum Club anymore. Why not? There a reason she might have been fired?”

  “I don’t think she got fired. I don’t know if she’s still there and I don’t give a shit, either.”

  “You were fired from your job, though. At the Nevornia.”

  “... So?”

  “Couple of weeks ago. Right before Burnett killed himself.”

  “So?”

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “Yeah, I mind. It’s none of your fucking business.”

  “It is if it has something to do with Burnett or Polhemus or Janine Wovoka.”

  “Well, it doesn’t.”

  “Same people own both the Nevornia and the Coliseum Club, did you know that? Arthur Welker, for one.”

  The name made her twitch. She worked on her lower lip some more; there wasn’t much lipstick left on it.

  “You know him?” I asked. “Arthur Welker?”

  “No.”

  “But you do know he’s got Mob connections.”

  She said, “You’re crazy.” But she knew, all right. She might be good at deception with her mouth, but she hadn’t learned the trick yet of carrying it through with her eyes.

  I said, “The Mob have something to do with Burnett’s suicide, Wendy? That part of what’s scaring you?”

  She made a low sound in her throat, and I think she would either have cracked or slammed the door in my face if a car hadn’t come wheeling into the driveway just then. She said, “Oh shit, ” almost moaning the words.

  I turned. The just-arrived car was a battered, primer-patched, twenty-year-old Porsche, and the guy who got out of it was six feet of blond curls, tanned skin, and muscles rippling under cutoff jeans and a sleeveless net shirt. He stood glaring up at us for a few seconds, then came stalking over the porch.

  I glanced back at Wendy. Her eyes pleaded with me: Don’t say anything about Dave! When I turned my head again, it was just in time to come nose to nose with the blond kid.

  “Who the hell are you, man?”

  “Lakeside Maintenance,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Lakeside Maintenance. We paint and repair trailers. Looks like yours could use the work, but the lady doesn’t seem to think so.”

  He shifted his gaze to Wendy. “That right?”

  “Well, what did you think?” she said. I’d given her a reprieve and she had hold of it with both hands. “Would I mess around with an old geek like him?”

  “You’d mess around with a goat if it had a big enough pecker,” the blond guy said. His eyes flicked my way again. “Get out of here,” he said.

  “Try being polite. I’m more than twice your age.”

  “So what? Get off my property or I’ll throw you off.”

  “No you won’t,” I said. “I’ll walk off but that’s the only way.”

  I smiled as I spoke—the kind of smile that has wolf’s teeth in it. He didn’t like the smile or the words but he didn’t do anything about them. Maybe he wasn’t as macho as he pretended to be. Or maybe there was something about me that made him think twice about trying to get tough.

  I transferred the smile to Wendy, said, “Thanks for talking to me, miss,” and went down off the porch and across the drive, taking my time about it. I was almost to the sidewalk when I heard her cry out behind me, not too loud and more in surprise than anything else. When I looked back, he had hold of her arm and was shoving her roughly inside the trailer. She said, “God damn you, Scott!” and he said, “Shut up, you little bitch!” and then the door banged shut behind them.

  Nice kids. The kind that made me glad I’d never had any of my own.

  Chapter 12

  THERE WAS A TIME, not so long ago, when Reno—“The Biggest Little City in the World”—was known for two things: quickie divorces, because of a six-week residence law established in the 1930s; and gambling, which was first licensed in Nevada in the 1870s, outlawed between 1910 and the end of Prohibition, and then fully legalized. Nowadays, with the no-fault divorce law in many states, a lot more people go to Reno to take on spouses than to shed them: w
edding chapels outnumber divorce lawyers by a wide margin. Gambling is still a big business, but not nearly as big as it once was; revenues are down all over Nevada because of competitive pressure from the lotteries in California and other states, legalized gambling set-ups on Indian reservations, and other factors. Light industry has burgeoned in the Washoe basin in recent years, which has led to a population explosion and a suburban sprawl typical of other small cities its size, which in turn has made Reno much more family-oriented and image-conscious. It now has its own opera company and symphony orchestra, and such wholesome tourist attractions as hot-air balloon races.

  The changes are for the best, maybe, but I preferred the old Reno, when it really was the biggest little city in the world: loud, gaudy, a little tawdry, but still loaded with excitement and allure, like a slightly tipsy middle-aged bawd flaunting her charms and telling the world to go to hell. The new Reno was going the way of too many other small cities; it had confined its bawdiness to Virginia Street and other little pockets of socially acceptable sin, exchanged its tarnished image for one of upscale respectability, and lost some of its identity as a result.

  The distance between South Lake Tahoe and Reno is only about fifty miles, but it took me close to an hour and a half to cover it. Traffic wasn’t bad along the southeastern shore of the lake or coming down out of the mountains, but it got heavy in Carson City and stayed heavy all the way up Highway 395 and through an endless string of traffic lights on the outskirts of Reno. It was six-thirty by the time I found a motel that still had a vacancy—a place called the Starburst off 395 between the airport and the biggest and fanciest of the local casinos, Bally’s.

  I called Kerry first thing, or tried to; she wasn’t home yet. I left a message on her machine, telling her where I was. Then I dragged the local telephone directory out of a nightstand drawer and looked up Janine Wovoka. No listing for her or anyone named Wovoka. So much for that idea. Just for the hell of it, I looked up Arthur Welker. No listing for him, either. I would have been surprised if there was. According to the information Eberhardt had gotten from the Organized Crime Strike Force, Welker lived over at Tahoe.

  I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and I was hungry, so I went to a nearby “family restaurant” and waited half an hour for a tough, gravyless veal cutlet shamelessly described in the menu as “scrumptious chicken-fried steak.” I could have sued them for false advertising, if not for attempted food poisoning, and won the case with no trouble at all. Instead, I settled for leaving a quarter tip. On the one hand, it wasn’t the waitress’s fault; on the other hand, she was slow and on the cranky side, and all restaurant employees share in the gratuities, including the cook.

  It was after eight when I got into my car and pointed it crosstown to Virginia Street, and eight-thirty by the time I found a parking place within walking distance of the casinos. You could see the neon glow a long way off; up close, the glitter and sparkle and splashes of primary color from dozens of signs large and small assaulted your eyes. Harrah’s, Harold’s, Fitzgeralds, Eldorado, Cal-Neva, Sundowner, Riverboat, Circus Circus, Nevada Club, Coliseum Club. Best Odds. Megabucks. Triple-Odds Craps. Progressive Slots. Video Poker. Pai Gow Poker. Progressive Keno. Reno’s Best Variety 21. Fantastic Fun Machine. Free Cash Drawings. All You Can Eat Buffet. Fun, Fun, Fun. And looming across Virginia, Reno’s famous gateway arch—not the plain original arch that had been put up in 1927 to signify completion of U.S. Highway 40, not the big lighted arch that had been erected on New Year’s Eve of 1963 to celebrate Nevada’s 1964 centennial, but a huge, garish blazing thing that had been installed in 1987 and hurled laser and fiber-optic light into the night sky as if it were heralding the second coming of the Messiah. The irony was, it heralded or celebrated or commemorated nothing at all.

  The sidewalks were moderately crowded this warm night. But the gamblers and funseekers here were different than those in Stateline, less affluent, older—another of the reasons that gambling in Reno was on a decline. A couple of the older, smaller clubs, in fact—the Mapes and the Riverside—had gone out of business. Polyester and seersucker were the dominant fabrics; late forties to early sixties was the dominant age-group. People from small towns and rural environments; blue-collar men and blue-haired women. Every third person looked to be overweight. Most of the fatties were women, and most of the men with them were thin—as if the women might have been feeding off them, consuming their flesh a little at a time over a period of years. Even the younger people ran to fat. I passed one entire obese family: father, mother, two young sons; the kids eating ice cream, the father munching on popcorn, the mother hunting in her purse as if for a misplaced chocolate bar.

  No, this wasn’t the Reno of old, the biggest little city in the world, the mecca of divorcees and high rollers. This was a cheap year-round carnival, complete with sideshow and glitter and new forms of the old come-on. Hey, rube! Lookee here! Try your luck, win a big prize! Virginia Street in the high-tech, low-taste, knock-your-eye-out eighties.

  And if I hadn’t believed that walking the streets, I’d have believed it the instant I entered the Coliseum Club. Carnival kitsch not only lived here; it flourished like weeds. The motif was fake Roman—fluted pillars, busts on pedestals, big alabaster torches with electric flames, bar-girls and change-girls in togas and high gold-strapped sandals—and it was made even more ludicrous by all the bright flashing neon. A rage of whirring, clanging, babbling, shrieking noise reverberated off the walls and mirrored ceilings and swelled in your ears like a pagan beat. Roman orgy, updated and travestied, with the lust for sex replaced by the lust for easy money and fun, fun, fun.

  I spent twenty minutes pushing my way among the tight-packed banks of slot machines. Row after row of men and women on stools feeding in coins, yanking handles, feeding in coins, yanking handles in a steady monotonous rhythm and with a kind of controlled frenzy. Some of them would be there for hours, for days on end, performing the same mindless ritual. And yet, paradoxically, you couldn’t have hired any of them to do a job in a factory where they had to continually put a piece of metal in a slot and then pull a handle. Too boring, they would have said. You couldn’t pay us enough to do a boring job like that, they would have said.

  None of the change-girls was Janine Wovoka. None of the five I spoke to claimed to know Janine Wovoka, either. Finally I made my way to the central gaming area.

  Most of the tables were getting heavy play; I was not going to find a dealer or croupier to talk to here. If this had been a different club and a less hectic time of day, I might have tried to buttonhole one of the pit bosses: they always know who’s who and what’s what. Or I might have gone over to the cashier’s booth and asked to see one of the managerial staff. But I didn’t want to take that sort of chance here. This was a Mob-owned club, at least in part. Nobody up in the pecking order was likely to answer questions about one of the employees. The menials were my best bet. They’re not supposed to be privy to inside information, so the higher-ups don’t bother to tell them to keep their mouths shut. And most of them know more than the bosses think they do.

  Behind the long rows of gaming tables was the Chariot Bar, the entrance to which was built to resemble something out of Ben Hur. I went in there and tried to talk to one of the three bartenders on duty. No soap; the place was full to overflowing and they were too busy mixing drinks. So I wandered out again, tried a couple of toga-clad table waitresses and didn’t get anywhere with them either.

  Back toward the rear was the Keno booth, and beyond that was another bar—smaller, more intimate, and not nearly as crowded. Nero’s Fiddle. Only one bartender was on duty and he didn’t look half as frazzled as the trio in the Chariot Bar.

  I sat on an empty stool removed by two from the nearest of the other customers. When the bartender, a thin guy in his forties, came my way I ordered a draft beer. And when he brought it I said, “I’m trying to find a girl who works here or used to work here. Change-girl named Janine Wovoka.”

  “Who?”

&
nbsp; “Wovoka, Janine Wovoka.”

  He shook his head, started to move away. I said, “Wait,” and showed him the snapshot, pointing out the raven-haired woman.

  “Oh,” he said, “yeah. What do you want with her?”

  “Conversation. See, it’s my daughter I’m really trying to find and Janine’s a friend of hers.” I put a pleading note into my voice. “She’s been missing two weeks. My daughter, I mean.”

  “That’s too bad.” He didn’t sound particularly sympathetic, but then he didn’t sound indifferent either. “Run off with some guy?”

  “I hope that’s all it is. So does Janine Wovoka still work here?”

  “I don’t think so. Ask Candy. She’d know.”

  “Candy?”

  “Keno runner.” He glanced past me, scanning the bar. “She’s not around now but she’ll be through pretty soon.”

  “How will I know her?”

  “Name tag on her toga. Short black hair. Nice bod.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure. Hope you find your daughter.”

  There was one empty table at the rear. I took my beer over and claimed it. Mounted nearby was a Keno board; the latest game, #256, was in progress. I watched the numbers light up, and sipped my beer, and waited.

  Five minutes after Game #256 closed and #257 opened, a young woman with short black hair, wearing the toga-and-sandals costume and carrying a tray of crayons and Keno odds booklets and marking sheets, appeared and began making her way among the tables. Saying “Keno? Keno?” like someone calling a lost pet.

  When she got close enough so that I could see her name tag, I said, “Here, miss.” And when she leaned down, “The bartender told me you know Janine Wovoka. Is that right?”

  “Janine?” She frowned. “Sure, I know her. Why?”

  “I’m trying to find her.”

  “What for?”

  I gave Candy the same pitch I’d given the bartender. The results were even better; she said, “Gee, that’s too bad about your daughter. I hope she’s okay.”

  “Me too.”

  “Maybe I know her too. What’s her name?”