It was several minutes before either of us spoke.
“Yes, Davis, he is my son.”
I could have died.
“And you need to know that if I divorce Bianca, I’ll lose my job, and most likely, custody of my son.”
“Is that in a prenup?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “That’s common sense.”
A nice guy like Mr. Sanders spilling his guts to an almost total stranger suddenly made all sorts of sense, too. He needed some discretion. I was his discretion. Which meant the rest of his team, or somebody on it, wasn’t his discretion. File away for later.
“There was a showdown several years ago,” he picked up his own trail, “when Thomas was just a baby. I never saw it coming, because when I wasn’t behind my desk or on the casino floor, I was with my son. I remember Bianca had been in Italy for months, and Salvatore called me to his office to inform me that not only had he fired all three of his sons, he’d changed his will to preclude them, and cut out their enormous allowances.”
“Your wife’s, too?”
“Yep,” he said. “They handled it admirably, as you can well imagine.”
“What did they do?”
“They turned to their mother,” he said, “and that lasted a few years. But eventually, my three brothers-in-law went to work for different vendors that service the Casimiro casinos.”
“Like Total Gaming Corporation?”
He turned to me. “Exactly.”
I sucked in icy air. “When did you realize Bianca was supplementing her income in your casino?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “Nattie was the one who caught it.”
We shared a long minute of listening to the wind whistle.
“Do you trust Natalie?”
“I couldn’t do my job without her.”
Not what I asked. “What’s your goal, Mr. Sanders? How do you want this to end?”
He turned to me. “I want you to tell me my wife isn’t responsible for anyone’s death.”
I might not be able to grant that wish. I wanted to ask him if he loved her, because I couldn’t get a feel for where this was coming from—his heart, ego, or wallet—but I couldn’t get the words out.
“I’ve known about the game for a while now,” he said, “and I can honestly say that if it weren’t for the dead bodies piling up, I’d be happy to look the other way.”
He wasn’t worried about the money.
“And Bianca’s going to do exactly what she wants to do.” He said this lightly, with a shrug and a grin, and every word on the edge of a laugh, like, my goofy wife would sleep with the devil.
Okay, not his ego.
“It’s my son, Davis.”
Ah. The heart.
“He can’t have a murderess for a mother.”
Was Mr. Sanders asking me to dig deeper or cover up?
I wandered to a sunny spot while he did more of the golf thing, and we didn’t speak again until after we drove up and down even more brown hills. I needed a Dramamine.
“Do you know Morgan George, Mr. Sanders?”
“Morgan George.” He tried it on. “Morgan George,” he repeated. “I’m not sure if I recognize the name, or if it’s so common that I feel like I should,” he said. “Tell me who Morgan George is.”
“It’s Morgan George, Jr., actually. You were at UNLV at the same time he was.”
Mr. Sanders shrugged one shoulder. “That doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “Big place.”
I twisted around in the seat. “He went on to work for Total Gaming, and he wrote the software for Double Whammy Deuces Wild.”
Mr. Sanders looked off into the distance, a look of recognition playing across his face. “A black man,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I do know who he is,” Mr. Sanders said. “Make that was.”
“Did you meet him at school?”
Mr. Sanders shook his head.
“Work?”
“No.”
I waited while Mr. Sanders did more golf: surveying, posturing, adjusting the visor he wore. He smacked the ball through the air, then watched, apparently pleased with where it plopped.
He looked over to me. “I walked in on him with my wife.” He tossed the club he was holding into the air and caught it in the middle on the way down. “Six weeks later, the guy was dead.”
I steeled myself, then asked, “Is your wife sleeping with my ex-husband?”
“I believe so.”
SEVENTEEN
A day of golf, an afternoon of digging through archived news and obituaries on the Internet. A pleasant and productive phone call to the police department in Atlantic City pretending I was a reporter. Another call, this time playing the role of genealogist, with a nice woman at the Las Vegas Sun. The longest call to Total Gaming Technology’s twenty-four-hour troubleshooting hotline, assuming the persona of a really stupid slot machine tech, and with the most patient human on Earth. A final phone exchange, this one impersonal and netting me exactly nothing, with my mother.
An evening with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, three almost-frozen Natural Lights, and a big box I exhumed from the back of Bradley Cole’s closet. In it: handwritten letters dating back three decades, photographs, airline-ticket stubs, loose change, high school ring, buttons in teeny plastic bags, cuff links, more than twenty birthday cards from his mother, receipts for extended warranties on car things, and two old condoms. (I knew they were old because for one, they were crunchy. For two, I’ve never seen the brand behind the cashier in a checkout line.)
One last phone call to Natalie to weasel my way into yet another department of the Bellissimo I had no business being in. Two and a half hours of sleep.
The alarm screamed. I stumbled to the door to retrieve the package waiting on the welcome mat. It contained the most heinous outfit yet, much worse than the housekeeping uniform. I tugged it on in the bedroom, the copier blocking the only mirror, because I didn’t care about seeing my reflection. Natalie sent a short, dark wig and wire-rimmed eyeglasses to complete the look. I didn’t bother with makeup. I whined a lot during the process of getting dressed.
I’d arranged for George to shuttle me back and forth for this assignment, more to keep the lines of communication open between us than anything else, but when I climbed in the back seat of his cab at six in the dark morning and he started snickering at my latest costume, I decided I really didn’t have a thing to say to him other than, “Shut up, George.”
He turned around to face forward, but I could still see his shoulders rising and falling with mirth. “You’re never going to catch a man dressed like that.”
“Who says I’m trying to catch a man?”
He pulled out onto one of five empty lanes of Beach Boulevard, turning right toward the Bellissimo, several miles away, but more visible against the backdrop of the crystal night than I’d ever seen it during the day. I’d ridden away from the complex under the glow of the moon dozens of times, but never to. There had to be a million Bellissimo lights blinking against the black sky, and I was about to see the switch that turned them on. To get a glimpse of said switch, apparently you had to be head-to-toe in navy-blue canvas Dickies and wearing a boot that called itself Wolverine. I could barely move in this getup. The boots weighed about seven pounds each. The required head gear, which covered my lap, was a white hard hat.
“What time are you supposed to be there?” George asked.
“Seven.”
“Where is it you need to go before?” He glanced at the clock on the dash. “You having your picture made?” He laughed at his own joke.
“Very funny.” I set the hat aside so I could pick at the ugly pants. “I was thinking we’d get a donut.”
“Come again?” He caught my eye in the rear view mirror.
“A donut, George. A cup of coffee and a donut.”
After a long argument, which I won, I stayed in the car while George’s lazy self went into the Krispy Kreme, doing a brisk business at
this ungodly hour, where he stood in line to get me three chocolate-glazed and a bucket of coffee. A neon sign announcing hot donuts cast a blinking red glow on me.
When George returned, he drove a block east to a darkened fast-food restaurant, parked just left of a streetlight, then twisted in his seat so he could either watch me eat, or have another laugh at my expense. When I saw the set of his jaw, though, I knew the fun and games were over.
“You’re not going to like it, George,” I said through thick chocolate.
“I already hate it.”
I explained my theory to him: Bianca Casimiro had made a deal with his son to write backdoor software for a video poker game, Double Whammy Deuces Wild Progressives.
“What kind of backdoor?” George asked.
“Where there’d be a key of sorts, George, where the game could be won at will.”
“And he did this? My son rigged this game?”
“It looks like it.”
I leaned heavily on the fact there was no evidence that led me to believe his son had out-and-out complied, or even profited in any way. It felt more like Morgan had been forced or coerced in some manner. I purposely left out the part about his son banging my boss’s wife.
Afterward, it was so quiet in the car, I could hear the steam coming off my coffee. I had explained my theory as kindly, respectfully, and gently as I possibly could, and this in spite of how George had laughed his ass off at me not fifteen minutes earlier, but his heavy heart sucked all the air out of the car anyway, and I had to crack a window to breathe.
After several moments of silence, I wondered if George had fallen asleep.
Finally, he asked, “What else?”
“She knew how to win it,” I said of Bianca, “but it’s a two-man job, so she lined up pawns.”
“Did she have sex with the pawns, too?” George asked.
So much for sparing him that piece of the story.
“It’s safe to assume so,” I answered. “But two of them are dead, George, so I can’t very well ask.”
“How did they die?”
“Their necks were snapped.”
“Ah,” George said. “Same killer. A large man with a martial arts background. And that means my son’s death wasn’t premeditated.”
I agreed. Killers have their ticks, and this one went for the neck. Breaking a neck left very little in the way of evidence. Whoever did this hadn’t thought out his first kill, or he wouldn’t have made such a mess. He cleaned up his act before the next two victims met their maker. “I’m sure you’re right, George.” Unbelievably, the coffee still hadn’t cooled enough to drink, but that didn’t keep me from trying, and I got a scorched tongue for my efforts.
“I can think of two who might fit the bill,” he said, “those big guys you work with. Got a pick between ’em?”
“I honestly don’t know, George. I don’t want to stick my foot out and trip the bald one, unlike the other one,” I said, “the one with the big teeth. Every time I’m in the same room with him, I want to poke his eye out with a fork, but I’ve got nothing on either of them.”
“Have you looked?”
“Briefly.” Well, my father looked briefly. “I probably should nose around.”
“Good idea,” George said. “Rifle through their desks.”
Their offices scared me. They scared me.
“George?”
“Hmm?”
“You know how sometimes you really don’t know who has the hate?”
I beat down the evil that jumped in my throat, and I’m sure George was doing the same. In a very practiced process, I crawled up from the dark place so I could keep going, and I’m sure George was clawing his way back, too. We had a secret, me and George: the only way to keep going—left foot, right foot, inhale, exhale—was to know that you were here to stop it from happening to someone else. If you give up, you leave a hole. Then someone falls in it.
“They’ve got another shill in there now,” I choked out, “who won, and yet he’s still alive,” I said. “At least so far. I don’t know what’s coming, George. I guess he’s next if someone doesn’t stop them.”
“Your ex,” George said.
My mouth dropped open. “Who? What?”
He started the car. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
The new day finished dawning as we drove to the Bellissimo in silence, other than the music of me slurping coffee.
When we arrived, he turned to me. “Morgan fixed the machines so they’d pay out,” he said. “What did the other guys do?”
“They were electricians.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s right on the Internet, in their obituaries.”
“What do you think that has to do with it? Surely it’s not a coincidence.”
“I think they knew how to cause the machines to lose power for a split second,” I said, “long enough to reset. Somehow, they caused a power surge, which seems to be the trigger,” I explained. “All three times the jackpot has hit, it’s been within an hour of a power flash, and there’s been an electrician there every time.”
“How in the world,” his black eyes bore into mine, “do you mess with the power in a casino?”
They didn’t mess with all the power, just the one bank of machines, but now wasn’t the time for details, or I’d be late for my meeting. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m about to find out.”
Fifteen minutes later, a very large man dressed just like me pushed through double doors to the reception room, where I waited alone. “Sandy?” he glanced between a clipboard and me.
I looked around for Sandy, too. Then I jumped up and shot out my hand. “That’s me,” I said. “Sandy McCormick.”
“You’re from accounting? Going to take a look around?”
“That’s right.”
“Well,” he tipped his hard hat. “Welcome to Electrical Engineering. Follow me and I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”
* * *
I trailed behind him into another world, a scary world. Every piece of equipment I could see was the size of a school bus. Half of them were on end, rising two stories into the air. Catwalks were built above everything, and scores of people dressed in the navy blue Dickies attire crawled all over the place. Wide walkways between the machines were marked by red-painted paths, and emergency cut-off switches were scattered along the walls. The noise alone would knock you down. My companion decided to add to it by screaming at me.
“On any given day, the Bellissimo load requirement is thirty-five megawatts, but we’re built out to fifty-five. That’s enough for a whole city. Hell,” he laughed, “we are a whole city. Now over here, we’ve got thirteen-point-two kilovolt feeders coming in off three different substations. You see those?”
I followed his hand and nodded, but I had no idea what I was looking for, and he might as well have been speaking Russian.
“We’ve got six steel rooms here that are bolted together,” he yelled. “This is just the first, the largest, and built on exterior walls for the head room. Follow me and we’ll go downstairs and take a look at the conduit.”
I trudged along, hoping a conduit wasn’t a large animal. As promised, we took a look at the miles of conduit—not animal at all—and every navy blue Dickied electrician took a look at me. From there we walked a mile through a tunnel before climbing eerily silent steps. He swiped a card that hung on a chain from his neck, and glass doors slid open to allow us entry into the noise again.
“Do you know where you are?” he yelled.
“I don’t have a clue,” I yelled back.
“You’re two levels below the casino. The vault is above us, over there.” He pointed. “And the main banking center is over there.” He swung his arm in the opposite direction, clearing my hard hat by a mile.
This room, as large as a theatre, without a splinter of natural light, had rectangular metal silver cabinets, each the size of a one-car garage, spaced along the walls with six huddled to
gether in the middle of the concrete floor. I didn’t count, but there had to be more than thirty altogether. Coming out of the cabinets were thousands of colorful ropes of wire that climbed up the walls and steel poles like rainbow vines, disappearing into the ceiling. The fronts of the metal boxes had blinking panels. I’d be afraid to even guess how many million lights were blinking in that room, just like I’d be afraid to guess how many million grains of sand were on a stretch of beach. If I really did work in accounting, I would go back and suggest this department’s pay be doubled because of the sensory overload alone. As my eyes began to adjust, my guide started up with his electric mumbo-jumbo again.
“Every switch in here is on a single feeder with emergency generator backup. It all leads to a threesome.”
Finally, a term I was familiar with.
“We’re on thirteen breakers in this room, each on a twenty-five kilovolt automatic transfer. Every outgoing feeder ties straight into one of the main sources, and they’re all connected to each other. So if we have an outage here,” he pointed to one of the garages, “its neighbor,” he pointed to another, “picks it up.”
“How often does that happen?” I asked as I looked around the room. “An outage.”
“We shoot for never,” he said, “but you know the old saying, shit happens?”
“Sure.”
“Well, shit happens here, too. Everything’s color coded,” he yelled. “If it’s blue, it’s a light fixture, and as you can see, we’ve got a ton of lights. It might be something as innocent as a light bulb blowing in one overhead that throws the switch.”
We stepped over to a thick bundle of multi-colored cables coming out of a steel box that I couldn’t have wrapped my arms around.
He picked out a blue cable with the tip of a finger. “If this guy blows,” his finger inched over, “this guy picks him up. And the panel lets us know the fixture’s on backup, then we repair the central. The only thing that happens upstairs is a blink. The backup system kicks in immediately.”
Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) Page 17