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 button, 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.