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Before walking over to the Black Jack table Jeff Twigg manned, Dela made a detour over to the entrance and Arthur. The night valet was in his sixties. His two long braids were laced with gray and draped down the front of his snap western shirt.
“Dela, you’ve been putting in too many hours since Godfrey left us.” Arthur greeted her.
“That I have and they aren’t going to get any shorter with the body found on the tenth floor this morning.”
He nodded. “Hello Special Agent Pierce. Didn’t think I’d be seeing you so soon.”
“Me either,” Quinn responded.
“Can you tell us if Tristan Pomroy spent any time on the casino floor after work?” Dela asked, knowing that Arthur had a keen eye and memory.
“He did. But he wasn’t gambling. He’d wander around the gaming tables and sit at slot machines near the tables. But I don’t think I ever saw him put a dime in a slot.” Arthur rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “He was always watching people. He had a little book he carried with him that he would write things down in.”
Dela glanced at Quinn. They hadn’t found a small book with the body, at his desk, or at his home. She wondered if it could have fallen down the laundry chute. Another place to check out this evening. “Thank you, Arthur. If you can think of anything else, let me know.” Dela turned to head to the gaming area.
“His wife was here last night.”
She spun back around. “You know his wife by sight?”
“The two of them came here a couple times for concerts and to have dinner in the Stallion once.” Arthur nodded. “But she came in by herself around eleven. I hadn’t seen Tristan all night. I was surprised to see her alone.”
“Thank you.” Quinn grasped Dela’s elbow, leading her away from the entrance. “It seems the wife forgot to tell us she was here last night.”
“I wonder why? Maybe because she had something to do with her husband’s death?” Dela wanted to confront the woman with their information but they had other suspects right here that needed to be questioned.
“We’ll catch up to her in the morning,” Quinn said.
Dela nodded and walked up to the Black Jack table. “Finish this hand and then this table will be closed for thirty minutes,” Dela said to Jeff, the dealer.
He nodded but his hands shook as he called out the cards and dealt to the players who asked for another card. When the hand was over, he paid the winners, scooped in the loser’s money, and tossed a cloth over the table, putting a sign, “Be back in 15” on top.
Quinn walked over next to the man. “Let’s take a little walk to the security offices.”
“I don’t understand why you want to talk to me,” Jeff said, walking between them. His forehead glistened with perspiration.
“We just have a few questions we’d like answered,” Dela said as Quinn held the door for them both to enter.
They walked through the main office, where Tammie Rhoda sat monitoring employees coming and going, and into the smaller interview room.
Dela found the photos of Tristan’s ledger and the list of names on her phone and showed them to Jeff. “We were wondering why your name and initials, with money next to them, were in a book belonging to Tristan Pomroy who was killed last night.”
Jeff’s hands were clasped on the table in front of him. He stared at his hands, not even glancing at her phone. “I don’t know. He would come in at night and watch us dealers. It made all of us a bit jumpy when he was around. We thought he was watching us for you.”
“No. I just learned of this behavior tonight.” Dela could tell he was holding something back.
“What did he have on you?” Quinn asked.
The dealer’s head snapped up as he stared at Quinn. “He didn’t have anything.”
“I’m not so sure. Your name. Your initials. Money. He had something and was blackmailing you. That’s a pretty good motive to kill him.” Quinn leaned back in his chair.
Dela wasn’t feeling so calm. This was her mess, but Quinn had more experience interrogating suspects. It was what he’d specialized in for the marines and now the federal government.
“We have him watching you, putting your name in his little book...”
The perspiration on the man’s head was dripping down the sides of his face. He swiped at it with a hand.
“You know about the little book. The one he kept all his blackmail information in.” Quinn leaned closer. “Information that was worth killing him for.”
“I didn’t kill him. I’m glad he’s dead, but I didn’t kill him. I worked all last night. I only took my usual break at nine and that was it. You can ask Brie. She filled in for me last night. She only filled in the one time.” Jeff was offering up his alibi, but not confessing to anything.
Dela had to find out if he was a crooked dealer. That was the only thing she could think Tristan would have on the man. If he was, he needed to be fired. She pulled out her phone and texted Marty.
I need as much footage as you can get where I can see Jeff Twigg dealing. Also, any footage of Tristan Pomroy hanging around the gaming tables and his wife arriving last night around eleven.
Ok.
“Finish tonight. If I discover you’ve been shorting the house, there is no need for you to come back to work tomorrow.” She stood.
Quinn stood, but he had a puzzled expression.
Jeff nodded and sprinted out of the room.
“You think Pomroy noticed he was shorting the house?”
“That’s the only thing I can think of that Tristan would notice watching Jeff work his table.” Dela sighed. “I hate how when you dig up one bad thing there seem to be roots that have spread throughout the building.”
“Like the human trafficking ring we broke up,” he said, holding the door for her.
“Yeah.” She straightened her back and walked over to the door that entered the bowels of the casino. What could Jeff have been doing that caused Tristan to blackmail him? And the others. Who could they be and why? As these thoughts flit through her mind, she navigated the hallway leading to I.T., the laundry, maintenance, and breakroom.
“You think someone found the book in the laundry chute?” Quinn asked.
“We can hope.” She entered the large room with four huge commercial washers and dryers. A small crew was on duty through the night washing bedding and towels that didn’t get finished during the day. To make sure there would be enough for housekeeping in the morning.
“Dela, what brings you back here?” Crystal, an Umatilla woman in her forties, asked. Her gaze landed on Quinn and she smiled bigger. “And who is your handsome friend?”
“Crystal, this is Special Agent Pierce with the FBI. We’re investigating the death on ten last night.” Dela wasn’t going to let Quinn use his charms on the woman. Not when she and Crystal had always had a good relationship. In school and out.
“That was terrible. See these stacks of dirty sheets? We’re still working on what should have been done during the day.” She waved to the piles of sheets and towels still in need of laundering.
“Did anyone happen to come across a book in the sheets that came out of the chute for floor ten?” Dela wandered over to the large rolling metal basket below one of the chute openings.
“It would have been this chute here.” Crystal walked over to the basket under the opening to Dela’s right. “We have four floors per chute. This is the nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.”
Quinn stepped by Dela and started moving and shaking each sheet and towel in that basket before he tossed it into the closest basket. He went all the way to the bottom.
“Nothing.” He scanned the area. “Do you have a lost and found where items are put that might end up down here with the bedding?”
“Everything we find goes to security. I don’t think anything was handed in today.” She marched over to the small office and opened a book. “Nothing has been turned in since Sunday.”
Dela pulled out her phone and put it to notes. “Can you give me the names of the people who worked in here today?”
Crystal nodded to the door. “I don’t know for sure who was here today. You’ll have to ask personnel.”
“Everyone that is in here right now worked last night?” Quinn asked.
The woman glanced around the room. “Yeah. We’re the same crew minus Mattie. She called in. Her cousin is sick and she couldn’t come to work.”
Dela glanced at Quinn. “Did you see or hear anything unusual last night?” she asked the laundry supervisor.
“No. the baskets were half empty, as usual, we finished washing the bedding and towels, ironed and folded the sheets, and loaded up the carts for each floor. Same as we do every night.” Crystal glanced over at a worker. “Stella, put that phone away and get to work.” She mumbled. “I don’t know why you can’t make it mandatory that cell phones have to stay in their lockers.”
Dealers had to leave their phones in their lockers. It might be a good idea to ask the same of all the employees. “I’ll check on that.”
“Thanks!” Crystal said.
“Let’s talk to Stella first.” Quinn verbalized her thoughts.
Dela nodded.
They walked over to the woman who appeared to be nineteen or twenty. Her short hair had a red section. It could be a symbol of a family member who was missing or had been murdered. Red, the color for strength, had become the symbol of the MMIP- Missing and Murdered Indigenous People movement across the U.S. at all reservations. Too many women, children, and even some men, had become victims of murder, human trafficking, and hate crimes with the local authorities not taking their disappearances as serious as they should. The vast wilderness of some of the reservations and the lack of family in urban cities also made it hard to find people who went missing.
“Stella,” Dela started. “Did you see or hear anything different last night when you were at work?”
The young woman looked up from her phone. “Is this about the man who was shoved into the laundry chute? How big was he? How did he fit?”
When her gaze drifted back to her phone, Quinn snatched it out of her hand. “This is an FBI investigation. We need your full attention and cooperation.”
Stella glared at him but shifted her attention to Dela. “Not really. I mean, all the laundry from the chutes had already been dropped down when we came on duty. We fill a basket with a washer load from one of the large baskets, roll it over to a washing machine, shove it in, start the machine, and go back to folding until the load needs transferred to the dryer then we go grab another load for a washer.”
“Do you each have an assigned chute or washer?” Dela asked.
“Not really, we just come in and start working on one of the large baskets, but usually stay with the same one all night.” She nodded to the large industrial ironing system that resembled a large pasta rolling machine. “Only Crystal, Jeri, and Eve are allowed to iron the sheets.”
“Which chute were you taking the dirty linen from?” Quinn asked.
“Number two.”
“Who had number four?” Dela asked.
“Mattie.” She glanced around. “I guess she took tonight off.”
“Thank you,” Dela said, and Quinn handed the woman’s phone back to her.
“I don’t think we need to speak with anyone else, do you?” Quinn said quietly, as they both started walking for the door.
“Nope. I have a feeling the book fell on top of the laundry and Mattie picked it up, possibly knew some of the names and took it home with her.”
“That’s my thought, too.” Quinn held the door open. “Personnel to find her address?”
Dela nodded, wondering if the woman was stupid enough to contact the people in Tristan’s book, considering that the book was probably why he was killed.