The Dollar-a-Year Detective

by William Wells

  It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday and the regular crowd is shuffling into The Drunken Parrot, just like in one of my favorite Billy Joel songs, “Piano Man.”

  I’m leaning on one end of the bar, chatting with Ricky Mancuso, a friend who owns a small fleet of stone crab fishing boats. Florida stone crab season runs from October 15 to May 15, so we are in the heart of it. I have the delectable item on my menu, supplied right out of the gulf by Ricky.

  The crabs are caught in wire traps. If they are of legal size, one of the claws is removed and the crabs are returned to the water, where the missing appendage regenerates. The claw meat is sweet and tender and is especially good dipped in mustard sauce. I like it better than any other species of crab, and better than lobster.

  The story goes that no one ever thought to eat stone crab claws until an ichthyologist brought a bunch to Joe Weiss, a guy who moved to Miami Beach from New York and opened an establishment called Joe’s Restaurant on Biscayne Street with his wife, Jennie, in 1918. The fish expert had noticed a large number of the crabs in local waters and wondered if they were edible. Joe boiled them and Jennie whipped up some mustard sauce, and the rest is history. The restaurant was renamed Joe’s Stone Crab. It still exists and, according to Restaurant Business Magazine, which I sometimes flip through in the public library, is the second-highest grossing restaurant in the nation, behind TAO Asian bistro in Vegas and ahead of my favorite place to eat in DC, the Old Ebbitt Grill.

  Sam Long Tree walks over to us, tells Ricky we can use ten more dozen stone crab claws, and says to me: “Got a minute, boss?”

  Ricky checks his diver’s watch, says he needs to get home for dinner, and departs. Sam says, “You know that I’m on the Seminole Tribal Council. There’s an issue developing with the casino that’s troubling us.”

  He means the tribe’s Arrowhead Casino in Immokalee. “Tell me,” I say.

  “Someone’s skimming revenues and we can’t figure out who. We’ve got cameras on all the dealers and tellers and the nightly count is supervised by a bonded representative from our accounting firm, which we trust.”

  “How much cash is missing?”

  “It started small about four months ago, the best we can tell. It grew until now it’s in the range of three or four thousand every week. It adds up.”

  “Would you like me to look into it?”

  He looks at me as if he hadn’t thought of that, grins, and says, “I’d appreciate that, Detective.”

  First time he ever called me that.

  The next morning, I locate my Fort Myers Beach detective’s badge in a drawer and drive to Immokalee for a tour of the Arrowhead Casino. As I was leaving my boat I fed Joe and told him where I was going. He meowed, which I took to mean, “Bet the red.”

  I am ignoring the speed limit, not so much figuring my badge will save me from any speeding tickets as just enjoying the drive on a country road when a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, whose cruiser is hidden on a side road behind a stand of Calusa bushes on Highway 82, comes up behind me and pulls me over with a short blast on the siren.

  The trooper gets out of the cruiser and comes up to my window. She is an attractive young woman; her hand is on her pistol. There recently have been more shootings of police officers around the nation, including during routine traffic stops.

  “Hands on the steering wheel please, sir,” she says.

  Good technique. I comply. Now she is beside me. Her nameplate says her name is Cpl. Beinekee. The fit of her uniform says she has a tailor who appreciates natural beauty.

  “Do you know what the speed limit is on this road, sir?” she asks.

  “Eighty-five?” I answer, which is the speed I was traveling. Worth a shot.

  “Try forty,” she says, with an almost undetectable smile.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t paying attention. And going that slow is bad for the car.”

  I figure that Cpl. Beinekee won’t be impressed by my badge and my story that I’m heading to a robbery at the casino which, technically, isn’t occurring at the casino.

  She smiles and reaches for her ticket pad. As she is writing the ticket, I ask, “Do you come here often?”

  Humor still doesn’t work. I put the ticket in the glove compartment and think about seeing if Lance Porter can fix it at the state level.

  All casinos look pretty much alike, whether they’re in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Biloxi, or on tribal land from Maine to California. Some are housed in elaborate structures mimicking wonders of ancient, modern, or future worlds, and some from the outside look more like chain motels. But once inside, the effect is the same: huge rooms filled with flashing neon forests of slot machines, semicircular felt card-game tables, spinning roulette wheels, long rectangular craps tables where the bones roll, and poker rooms where men and women play it close to the vest and try to avoid tells.

  There are bars and restaurants and raised stages where bands of varying degrees of competence can barely be heard above the frantic din of people being separated from their paychecks, because, in the end, the house always wins. Never any windows—the proprietors don’t want their customers (aka suckers) to be distracted by outside influences such as the transition from day to night and back to day again. No clocks on the walls. No matter what time it is, it’s always time to play.

  The Arrowhead Casino is a large two-story structure with tan stucco walls and a metal roof. When I walk inside, I am immediately hit by a blue-grey cloud of acrid, eye-watering, nasal-passage-constricting tobacco smoke. Native American casinos are not governed by local, state, or federal nonsmoking laws. Tribal land is sovereign. Tribes were granted the right to operate gaming venues by the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988.

  I used to call Native Americans “Indians” before I met Sam Long Tree. He informed me, in his casual but direct and dignified way, that Indians are from India. Native Americans are the people who originally owned the land I was standing on. He quoted Red Cloud, a leader of the Oglala Lakota: “The white man made us many promises, but he kept only one. He promised to take our land and he took it.”

  “Now somebody is taking our casino money,” Sam told me. “I’m not saying it’s a member of your tribe but, given the history of this continent since warfare between Europeans and indigenous peoples began in the seventeenth century, I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  I have no authority on tribal land. Sam hopes to keep quiet whatever fraud is happening so as not to harm the image of the casino. I told him I’d do my best, working with casino security and, if necessary, the tribal police. He’d explained that the FBI has jurisdiction over crimes committed relating to Indian (which was how the feds still refer to Native Americans) gaming crimes because of that federal law authorizing the casinos.

  If it gets to that, I know a friendly FBI agent who can keep a secret.

  29.

  A Riddle, Wrapped in a

  Mystery, Inside an Enigma

  I make my way through the haze, like a fireman in a burning building, across the casino floor toward an information desk. Easier to breathe if I crawled on the floor, but that would be undignified.

  The stereotype of older women incessantly feeding slot machines is correct. Some older men, here and there. Apparently the slots attract a mostly elderly crowd, at least in Florida, aka God’s Waiting Room.

  I pause behind a woman at one of the slots for whom seventy has been in the rearview mirror for many miles. Her white hair is permed into small curls. She’s wearing a print housedress and white sneakers. An unfiltered cigarette burns in an ashtray placed on a narrow ledge in front of the machine. It’s clear she likes doughnuts as much as I do, maybe more.

  Her slot machine is some elaborate game that has something to do with the “Treasures of Cleopatra.” A seductive Cleo, camels, pyramids, a desert oasis are pictured. The woman feeds a five-dollar bill into the machine, which flashes its lights: good to go.

  She senses my presence, turns, points at the big white plastic play bu
tton, and says, “I’m having no luck. How about you try it, sonny boy.”

  I shrug, push the button, and, one in a million, more lights flash, a siren sounds, Cleopatra starts doing a Nile dance, and a cascade of metal token coins pours out into a basket. A computer voice from the machine loudly announces that she’s hit a five-thousand-dollar jackpot.

  The woman shrieks with joy, stands, gives me a bear hug, then takes one of the coins and hands it to me. “Way to go, playa,” she says. “Can you stay awhile longer?”

  “Sorry, ma’am, I’ve got an appointment, but good luck.”

  As I walk away, I check the coin. Its face value is fifty dollars—fifty times my detective’s salary. Time well spent.

  There are mostly men playing the card games. All of the dealers are young women wearing tight Hooters-type tops, hot pants, black fishnet stockings, and high black vinyl boots. None of the players I come across are Native Americans. The idea, I guess, is to separate the white man (and woman) from their bank accounts.

  “I’m Jack Starkey,” I tell the woman behind the information desk. “I have an appointment with Jonathan Running Bear.”

  He’s the head of casino security.

  The woman manning the info desk has copper skin and long, shiny dark hair descending to the middle of her back. She is wearing a buckskin dress with fringe and colorful beading. Maybe I’ll see if the gift shop has one I can buy for Marisa.

  She points to an elevator on a wall behind the roulette tables. “Second floor. John is expecting you.”

  The elevator opens into a hallway with numerous doors running its length. The third one down is labeled “Security.” I open it and enter a large square room. One wall has a bank of screens showing images of the casino floor. A long console with dials and buttons occupies another wall and one wall has a large window overlooking the casino floor. One-way glass, I assume.

  A man is sitting at a desk positioned so he can see the screens. He comes around the desk and offers his hand: “Detective Starkey, I’m John Running Bear. Sam Long Tree said you’ve offered to help us look into a problem we’re having.”

  He appears to be in his forties or early fifties and has the build of a middle linebacker, which Sam told me he had been for Florida State, graduating with a degree in criminal justice. The pros had their eyes on him until he blew out a knee senior year. He worked for a private security company before taking the casino job, Sam told me.

  He gestures toward one of the two guest chairs in front of his desk and returns to his seat.

  “Sam Long Tree is a good friend. You come highly recommended.”

  “I don’t know if I can add anything to your investigation, Mr… . John.”

  “That’s diplomatic of you, Detective. But you’re not stepping on any toes here. I’m glad I can draw upon your experience.”

  I don’t mention that I’ve blown my last case.

  “We’ll start with a tour of the floor. Then I’ll show you the count room. Our general manager, Larry Tall Chief, is in New Orleans today for a convention of casino executives. He’ll be back in three days and I can schedule an appointment for you, as well as with a forensic accountant we’ve hired to examine our accounting firm’s audits of our books.”

  As we ride the elevator down, John says, “We run an honest operation here. The payouts are fair in terms of casino gambling. If someone is consistently losing more than we think he or she can afford, we cut them off and refer them to Gamblers Anonymous. If someone is intoxicated, we get them a ride home. If someone consistently shows an above-average ability to beat the house, which the vast majority of players cannot do, we watch that person carefully. If the player isn’t cheating or counting cards, which is legal, but we don’t like it, we let that player run. Most casinos don’t do that. You win too much and you’re banned. So you understand that we don’t like being ripped off.”

  He explains the various games as we pass their areas. He says that the slots are set to a 2-percent hold percentage, meaning that the house gets two dollars for every hundred dollars that players wager. “That’s generous,” he says. “Doesn’t sound like much but it adds up.”

  We come to the card games and he says, “The best chance you have is blackjack. The possibility of an overall win is 42.22 percent, a tie is 8.48 percent, and the odds of the house winning are 49.1 percent. And if you know what you’re doing, you can get along okay in the poker rooms.”

  Next come the spinning roulette wheels each with a little white ball whirling around the edges and finally falling into a hole.

  “Generally, the easier a game is to understand, the worse the odds for the player,” John explains. “Like roulette, where the house has a 37-to-1 edge and only pays out 35-to-1 if you win. That’s just the way the complicated mathematical formula for calculating the odds works out.”

  We continue with his tutorial while strolling around the crowded floor, covering the rest of the games. Mostly the players seem happy to be there, even though the odds are against them. Maybe the casino odds are better than in their real lives.

  “Lesson learned,” I tell him. “Don’t bet against the house. Be the house.”

  “You got it. And in case you’re thinking about buying a Powerball ticket for that $1.5 billion drawing tomorrow night, your odds of picking all six numbers are one in 292.2 million.”

  “But there are winners, and it’s fun to watch the drawings on TV because they always have a pretty girl picking the balls out of the drum.”

  “Good marketing,” John says as we complete the circuit of the main floor. “Now let’s see the count room.”

  Back on the second floor we stop before an unlabeled door. John punches numbers into a keypad to unlock it. We enter a large room with white walls and bright fluorescent lights that illuminate tables with maybe twenty men and women using machines to count stacks of paper currency and coins. The machines create an electronic din of whirring and metallic clanking noises.

  “We monitor this process closely by those cameras on the ceiling, and by searching the workers when they leave, even though I know all of these people and their families. All Seminoles. So I don’t think this is where the problem is, but we’ll see.”

  “What happens to all this money once it’s counted?”

  “Every night our armored car company picks it up and takes it to our bank for deposit to our account.”

  “Which bank?”

  “Manatee National in Fort Myers.”

  Interesting. The bank that keeps coming up in my investigations.

  “I hope they at least gave you a toaster or a clock radio when you opened your account.”

  “What they give us is preferred treatment, meaning good interest rates, competitive investment returns, and the services of their correspondent banks around the world.”

  “That’s my bank too,” I tell him. “Maybe you could put in a word for me to get free checking.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Back in his office, I ask him where he suspects the problem is.

  “You’ll get a better answer from Larry Tall Chief and the forensic accountant when you meet with them. All I know is that the security tapes show no evidence that the dealers or cashiers are skimming or that money is being lost in the count. But our count number has been ending up higher than our bank balance for the last four months. So you’d think that the armored car guys are the problem. But I don’t see how because, once the first discrepancy was noticed, I began to randomly ride to the bank with them, but the balances were still off, whether I rode with them or not.”

  “As Winston Churchill said, it’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

  “That’s why you’re paid the big bucks to solve it, Jack,” he said.

  The big buck—plus the fifty I just got from the slot machine lady. This job is becoming downright lucrative.

  30.

  Dead Even

  The only thing I know for certain is that Reynold Livingstone III, the
bank’s former executive veep, isn’t taking the casino’s money. So that narrows the suspect pool to—everyone employed by the casino and by its accounting firm and the armored car company and the bank.

  It would be both unkind and inaccurate to say that I’m not making progress.

  I’m at The Drunken Parrot on a Friday afternoon telling Sam about that promising and laudatory progress and waiting for John Running Bear to set up my next round of meetings when Cubby Cullen comes in. Respecting the casino’s request for privacy, I haven’t told Cubby about the casino case. He wouldn’t mind if he knew; a dollar doesn’t buy my exclusive services, after all.

  “You still got that detective’s badge, Jack?” he asks me.

  “Nothing good can come of a question like that, Cubby. But have one on the house.”

  He orders a Blue Moon ale with an orange slice. After he has his first sip, he tells me: “I’m not suggesting that you get involved in a new case. But there’s just been a murder that maybe relates to your old one.”

  “Tell me.”

  Cubby knows that I hate cold cases as much as every detective does.

  “Guy named Turner Hatfield was found dead in his office last night. He was a lawyer in solo practice. Office on Canal Street. Shot once in the head with a small-caliber pistol. Cleaning lady found him on the floor at eleven P.M.”

  “To state the obvious, there’s a pretty big suspect pool for the murder of a lawyer, Cubby.”

  “True. Thing that made me think of you was that Hatfield was challenging your pal Lance Porter for Porter’s House seat. Don’t know if that means anything or not.”

  There is a chapter in the Detecting for Dummies handbook titled “Who Benefits?” As in, whoever benefits from a crime should top the list of suspects.

  The only person to benefit from all four murders is … Lance Porter.

  Turner Hatfield was shot with a .22-caliber pistol, same as the Hendersons and Russell Tolliver. My cold case just heated up.

  I ask my pal Google for info about the race. The latest opinion polls show that Porter and Hatfield were dead even, within the margin of error. The stories about the race also note that Porter represents a heavily Democratic district. The last time a Republican had won there was more than three decades ago.