Suddenly, going to Jay’s office didn’t seem like such a good idea after all. For the second day in a row, Dianne had come to the club to be with him. Let her have her private moments with her husband, Kasey told herself. According to Dianne, they were few and far between. The staff meeting in the morning would be soon enough to discuss business. If her instincts were right, she and Jay would be spending a lot of time together the next several weeks. It was a good possibility she would see more of Jay than his own wife. At the thought, her pulse seemed to quicken.
She bit down hard on her lower lip. The last thing she wanted to do was revive that go-nowhere crush of years ago.
She wondered if physical attractions, crushes which were never to be consummated, ever went away by themselves? Or did they only smolder like dying embers, to blaze again and again by a breeze of emotion?
Kasey turned and dropped three coins in the end slot machine. A moment later, empty-handed, she pushed through the doors into the bright afternoon sun.
Chapter Thirteen
The kids, four of them ranging in age from three to nine, screamed and shrieked. Water splashed on Kasey’s skirt as she sat poolside in the padded lounge chair. She had come straight over from the club. Allen Czeczko reclined on a chaise lounge. Directly beneath his wrap-around Ray Bans, a white strip of Scootie sunscreen made his large nose appear broader, more porous. Between pale toothpick legs and a hairy Buddha belly, a canary yellow bikini was stretched to the endurance point.
Kasey, not comfortable looking at anyone that big with so much exposed skin, kept her eyes on the kids and their mother splashing in the shallow end of the pool. Where Mr. Czeczko was openly uninhibited regarding his body, his wife was not. The heavyset woman wore a matronly swimsuit with a built-in bra and a flared skirt that only accentuated what she had hoped to conceal.
“It’s that sneaky little chink Lee, isn’t it?” Czeczko said. “Karla warned me about him. She wanted to boot his kiester out of there, but I told her to hold off.”
The week before, under the guise of a new employee, Kasey had been hired to discover which one of the six sales clerks at Koko’s Gift Shop was moving valuable items out the back door. Sales were down while shoplifting theft was up. Czeczko also had a shop in Vegas and another in Palm Springs that Kasey had been commissioned to check out, but it was the receipts in the Reno store that initiated immediate concern.
Koko’s was no nickel-and-dime operation. No stock of logo Tshirts, souvenir plates, or cheap trinkets. Czeczko catered to the elite. The gifts he carried were the sort wives selected when their spouses hit it big gambling; the sort beautiful young things received from their wealthy, married lovers as a matter of course. Specialty items, custom jewelry, designer clothes, figurines, music boxes, paintings, and numbered prints by notable artists. With the price of merchandise inflated as high as three hundred percent, shops like Czeczko’s had little trouble meeting the exorbitant lease rates in the lower level of the Reno Hilton.
Czeczko and family lived in a custom home in a neighborhood where the smallest house with an inferior view was valued at close to a million. Czeczko’s house was large, with a view that wouldn’t quit.
Kasey had wound up her assignment for Allen Czeczko the week before. He had been in Vegas, at his main store, until this morning, and this was her first opportunity to fill him in on her findings.
“No, Mr. Czeczko, it’s not Kim Lee. He’s probably your most honest and dedicated employee.”
“Who, then? Lynch? Hess?”
“It’s all in here.” She held out a manila folder.
He sat up, leaned forward, the yellow strip of cloth completely disappearing beneath his huge belly. He took the folder, opened it, and began to read. A moment later he rose.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
She followed him inside the tri-level house to his ground-floor office. Wearing nothing but the yellow bikini and a pair of lime-green thongs, looking ridiculously out of place among the gray ledgers, Bragg lithographs, and hi-tech computer and office equipment, he continued to read as he paced. Sounds of children laughing filtered in through the French doors.
“As you can see by the report,” Kasey said, “there’s absolutely no doubt where those items are going or who’s taking them. I’d say by her actions, by her sheer audaciousness, she’s been at it for some time and has, in my opinion, little fear of castigation.”
“You’re accusing my manager.”
“Yes.”
“Karla’s been running that shop for two years.”
“Yes. And probably stealing for just as long, though not as aggressively as now. I couldn’t get to the receipts, but I’ll bet there’s some very creative bookkeeping going on there.”
Czeczko crossed to his desk, sat in the massive chair, and opened a check binder. After a moment’s hesitation, he laid down the pen and closed the binder. He bent over, opened a drawer in the desk, his bare skin on the leather making a rude noise, and counted out a number of bills. He rose and, with a somber expression, handed her the money.
“That’s the amount we agreed on for this job. Take it because it’s all you’re going to get. You can just forget about doing those other jobs we spoke of.”
She took the money, waited.
“You’re fired.” He tore the manila folder in half, then in half again. “This, Miss Atwood, is what I think of your lying report. Your work was shoddy. This—” he said, shaking the torn papers, “is nothing but made-up garbage. You weren’t there long enough to learn a damn thing, so you had to pick the most obvious employee to accuse. My manager. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t pocket a thing a two yourself while you were there.”
Kasey wasn’t surprised by his reaction. She’d been here before. She had two strict rules that had to be followed without question before she agreed to take a job. One, the person hiring her must stay away. Two, no one else was to know who she was or what she was doing there. Either Czeczko trusted Karla Hite so much that he thought her above consideration in any wrongdoing or he was a very stupid man, thinking with a part of his anatomy that was now swaddled in bright yellow spandex. Kasey wondered how long the affair had been going on.
“She’s not working alone, Mr. Czeczko. There’s a man. Twice in three days he posed as a customer and she waited on him personally. He purchased some very expensive jewelry items. I think he got a deal, a very good deal. Later, at closing, he parked behind the shop. I saw her open the back door for him and hand something out. It’s all there in the report.”
“As far as anyone is concerned, I never hired you. You never stepped foot in my place of business. I want every copy of this report, you understand?”
“Photos, too?”
His face turned sanguine, then purple. “You can find your own way out,” he said. He brushed past her and marched through the door, the green thongs slapping against his soles and rolls of fat jiggling at his waist.
*
From the Czeczko house Kasey drove back downtown. Ugly confrontations made her think of her father—not that she ever argued with him, for years her mother had had an exclusive on that. What she did was worry about him. She had tried to reach him again that morning with no success, the line ringing on and on, the answering machine obviously disconnected—
Or hocked.
Good ol’ dad was a gambler. A horseplayer. Ponies were his life. His home-away-from-home was a race-and-sports book on Commercial Row near the railroad tracks. Most days, from ten A.M. to eight P.M., he could be found there pouring over racing forms for the more than half-a-dozen open tracks across the country. The second love of his life was sourmash whiskey, which came free with the price of a wager. Kasey’s mother had divorced him not long after they were forced to sell their riverfront resort to cover his outrageous gambling debts.
Whenever Kasey thought about the resort, she felt a rush of bittersweet nostalgia. Most of her childhood had been spent there—formative years, good years. Located six miles out of town
on the Truckee River, the resort had consisted of casino, tavern, restaurant, and twelve bungalows adjacent to a natural hot springs and bathhouse. Lined up along the wall in the tavern like neon soldiers, the three-reel, single-coin, one-armed bandits had blinked and clanged, their bells ringing day and night. In the evening her mother had operated the wheel of fortune while her father dealt blackjack. On weekend nights he had dealt until he became too drunk to count the cards and handle the bets, at which time he closed the game and moved on to the bar. Behind the bar, he’d fished for pickled eggs and tossed back shots with the customers until he’d passed out.
When not in school, Kasey had been everywhere, doing everything at the resort. Early morning had found her making up rooms in the motel, helping in the kitchen and dining room until around midday when her father, pale and lethargic, finally rolled out of bed. That was when Kasey had found things to do as far as possible from her parents and the constant one-sided bickering. Her mother, who worked harder than all of them put together and was more than justified in her feelings, nagged and carried on until Kasey had begun to feel sorry for her father, who shamefaced, could only nod and swear before God and all his disciples to get it together.
Years passed where Kasey worked, played, and, on a daily basis, witnessed the hired help pilfering the Atwood goods. In the beginning it was difficult for her to believe that these people whom she loved, who teased, joked, and watched over her, could possibly steal from her family. She soon changed her mind.
Uncovering the thefts became a game with her. Who was taking what, when, and where? She never bothered with the why, that was far too perplexing to deal with. Once, she did ask a maid why she stole towels and linen. “Why, honey, it’s expected. Everybody does it. Your folks got insurance. It don’t cost them nothin’.” In her own backyard, Kasey became well educated in the art of in-house sleight of hand, and she would put it to good use later in life.
Shortly after the resort sold and her parents divorced. Grandma Bane had become ill and Kasey and her mother had moved to the ranch to care for her and to take over the chores. While they tended bees, fruit trees, and a vegetable garden and took in boarders, her father turned to a life of full-time drinking and gambling.
Although her mother criticized her for enabling the “old souse,” Kasey could never forget the good times spent with her dad, usually in the hours between lunch and dinner when the bitters he took for the hangover finally kicked in, the color returned to his face, and he could almost tolerate the daylight. At those times, father and daughter had gravitated to the river, gathering driftwood, tubing the rapids, or sitting on the deck of the restaurant fishing for trout—a menu item—while Kasey read, softly so her mother wouldn’t hear, the following day’s entries from the racing form to her father.
Remembering those days made Kasey smile. To a young, impressionable girl, her father was the coolest person she knew.
Kasey parked in front of the olive-green complex, left the car, and made her way down to the tiny basement apartment where her father had lived for a dozen years. She knocked, waited, knocked again.
“He ain’t home.”
Kasey stepped back and looked up. Above her on the second-story balcony stood an elderly woman with iodine-red hair caught in a frizzy knot on top her head. Ashes from a smoldering cigarette drifted down on Kasey.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“Not for a while. Says he’s got something going in the ninth at Belmont. You a friend of his?”
“I’m his daughter.”
The woman pushed the cigarette out of her mouth with her tongue. She grinned wide. “No shit? I been wanting to meet you. You’re Kasey, right? I’m Sasha.”
“Hi.”
The grin melted away. “He never talked about me? Sasha? Sasha Micom?”
Her expression, disconcerted, told Kasey that whoever she was she thought she was important to Dotus Atwood. “Well, he might’ve mentioned you.”
“Aw, don’t bullshit me, honey. He didn’t say diddly-poop about me. Hell, that’s okay, though. We both know most men got priorities, an’ women ain’t one of ‘em.” She began to cough, a thick, phlegmy smoker’s cough.
Kasey glanced at her watch: 5:42. The race was an hour away. It would take another ten minutes for him to walk home—her father had been on foot for over ten years, his driver’s license pulled after his third DUI citation.
“You wanna wait inside? I got a key.” Looking smug, she pulled one from the pocket of her shorts.
“No, that’s all right. Maybe I’ll look him up.” Kasey left Sasha coughing and fumbling for another smoke. She returned to her car and drove to the race book.
*
“And they’re off!”
Kasey stood in the open doorway of the Winner’s Circle and scanned the vast room with its poster collage of champion racehorses on one side and famous sports players on the other. At her back, the air was hot and arid. In front, it was cool, refrigerated, smelling of popcorn, tobacco smoke, and stale beer. The green naugahyde seats on the racebook side were nearly all occupied with hunched backs and lowered heads. Tables, joined together in rows like schoolroom desks, each with a green plastic lamp, were cluttered with overflowing ashtrays, drinks, newspaper, and discarded betting tickets.
When her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, she stepped inside and let the door shut behind her. She looked for the distinctive silver hair that was a bit longish for a man his age. She spotted him seated in the middle of the room. He sat hunched over a racing form, a drink in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other.
She crossed the room, came up behind him as he turned to chat with the two men on his left.
One man wadded a ticket into a ball and threw it toward a board displaying the track and racing lineup. “Didya see that? Didya see her die in the stretch. She got all rubber-legged and then just friggin’ died. Chriiiist!”
“Hey, John, the ol’ girl ran her heart out,” Dot said.
“Heart, fart. She folded. Well, that’s it for me. I couldn’t catch a cold today.” The man stood and tossed his racing form in the wastebasket. It tipped over at Kasey’s feet. He looked contrite as he picked it up again. “Lemme give you a solid tip, little lady. Best tip of the day. Don’t bet the ponies. Stick to slots or bingo. Mechanical gambling. It won’t break your heart like these damn fillies and mares. Just like a woman— sucks ya in, takes ya for what you got, then smacks ya down, laughing all the way.”
“I’ll remember that,” she said.
Kasey’s father leaped up from his chair. “Hey, sweetheart, how you doing?”
She nodded. Smiled.
“Hey, guys, this is my daughter. Kasey, say hello to a couple bums I hafta put up with every day. Lou and Dinty, my little girl Kasey.”
Lou grinned. “Your daughter, huh, Dot? Guess I don’t have to tell her to lay off the ponies. You’re testimonial enough.”
The other man, a tiny fellow in a plaid cap, stood, took her hand, and held it. “Your father told us he had a pretty daughter. Of course no one believed him. Of late, he has the eyesight of a slug, and his perception and judgment are no better. But in your case, he was grossly deficient in his praise.”
Kasey thanked him.
“That’s enough, you two. Go back to what you were doing. I’ll have a word alone with my girl,” Dotus Atwood said, wadding up at least a dozen paper bets and tossing them into the basket. He steered Kasey to the small bar in the corner. Under his breath he said, “One’s as smooth as the other is crude.”
After clearing a table of empty beer bottles, ashtrays, and food remnants, Dotus asked her what she was drinking. She offered to buy but he refused.
“Your money’s no good here. It’s on the house.”
He detoured to a betting window and spoke to the writer. When the man shook his head, Dotus pointed to Kasey sitting in the bar. The writer sighed, again shaking his head, but handed over a couple of drink tokes. Minutes later, Dotus was back with two beers.<
br />
“This isn’t tonic, Dad.”
“Carbonated water’s a waste of a good drink toke, not to mention the barkeep’s time. I’ll finish what you don’t drink.” He sat and drank down half of the first beer.
Kasey knew it was pointless to argue with him. Her father was a drunk, had been a drunk for as long as she’d known him, and he wasn’t likely to change in the near future. It was early enough in the day to catch him relatively sober— well, not exactly sober, he was never that. Lucid. There was a certain window in the day where he was at his best. Too early found him hung over, slow-thinking, whiny. Too late and he became incomprehensible, on his way to being catatonic. One thing he never was and that was mean. If he had been a mean drunk, she might have given up on him long ago.
He wore clean cotton chinos and a polo shirt. His wardrobe was supplied by Kasey—gifts at Christmas, his birthday, and Father’s Day. He had shaved that morning, and she caught a whiff of Mennen aftershave.
She touched the silver strands that curled over his collar. Kasey had begun trimming his hair years ago. She suspected he’d let it grow halfway down his back if she didn’t cut it. Money for haircuts was not in his budget. She gathered the hair at the back of his neck. “How ‘bout a trim, Dad? Another inch and you could wear it in a ponytail.”
“Yeah?” He said, sitting up straight. He grinned. “You think it’d make me look cool, like those guys in Hollywood?”
“Which guys? The pimps? Drug lords? Which?”
“Not cool?”
“Depends on what image you’re after.”
He slumped back down into his seat. “I gave up trying to impress folks a long ways back.”
“I’ve got some time this afternoon,” she said. “How about it?”
“Ah, honey, appreciate the offer, but I can’t leave. There’s this old racebook crony who owes me money. He hit it big last night. Said he’d be in today to square up. Gotta get it, y’know, when they got it. It comes and goes so quick. Maybe tomorrow, yeah?”
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