Page 182 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

view. At least I was counting on her to stay in character and be that
perverse.
“Napoleon,” I hurried on, “did come home, but not until four or
five a.m. He was at the Chewmash Indian Casino out on Sticks River
Road, arriving about ten o’clock Saturday night. He went from one
game to another—craps, slots, poker—nursed a couple of Black
Russians in the bar, and then went into a back room at precisely two
a.m. It has no other exit, and we have every tape from every security
camera in the casino. I spent a lot of time watching him from several
angles. Thank God for fast-forward! He came out a couple of hours
later and left the building immediately.”
“What was going on in that room?”
“High-stakes blackjack, by invitation only. Quite a few people went
in and out during that span, and I had those tapes analyzed by an
expert. You can disguise yourself in a number of ways, but a
scientifically-accepted enumeration of the angles of the facial bones
adds up to a unique profile, as it were. Gamblers, cocktail waitresses,
pit bosses, bouncers—none was Napoleon in drag.”
“No other exit. You’re certain?”
I knew she would go down there and tap on the walls for invisible
sliding panels and lift the carpeting in search of hidden trapdoors.
What a crazy thing to do! Luckily, I had already done it. “Oh, sure,” I
said in an offhand way. “I had a good look around.”
Then she threw a curve ball.
“Did he win or lose?”
I had no answer. “You mean, the net effect after playing for a
couple of hours? I don’t know: some of the other players at the table
remember him; others were too drunk or focused on their own hand.
The camera zeroed in on that table shows him some of the time, but
not always. The dealers in that room change shifts at three a.m., and
both of them recollect him playing very conservatively, folding at
fourteen on occasion. Does it matter?”
She shrugged. Was that conscious mimicry of my own ambiguous
gesture? No, she had never demonstrated that much subtlety before.
Maybe a trip to the tropics had taught her a few new tricks, after all. I
had always imagined her endless study as producing ever-larger data
files in her head, not any breakthroughs in dealing with other people.

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