JC2 The Raiders (10 page)

Wyatt lost money. Too much money. He disappeared. She was not sure if
he'd been taken out in the desert and killed or if he had run. Either
way he was gone, and she divorced him on the grounds of abandonment.

She got a job as a secretary in a Las Vegas automobile agency. She
became the officer manager. Nights, she picked up extra money as a
shill in the casinos. She was never a B-girl. Ten men a week
propositioned her and offered everything from straight cash to
European vacations, but she never accepted.

Two years ago Morris Chandler had offered her a
job as
his
secretary, and she had left the automobile agency,
for more money. What Chandler had done was send up his own secretary
to become Jonas's. Of course she did not owe him five hundred dollars
on a gambling chit. Chandler had been surprised when Jonas called and
told him to put Mrs. Wyatt's account on his bill. He went along,
amused. He did not suggest to her that she act as a spy. He only
suggested, diffidently, that she might find out something it would be
to their mutual benefit to know.

Morris Chandler did not suspect that she saw in this job with Jonas
Cord a chance, not just to do something better with her life at long
last, but to do it with a man any woman could be glad to be with.

One more thing about Angie pleased Jonas immensely. Over the years he
had found he most appreciated women who would give him oral sex. It
was not only that he enjoyed the act — which he most assuredly
did — but he had found, too, that women who were willing to do
it were bold and playful not just in bed but in their approach to
life in general. They were the kind of women he most liked and was
most ready to respect.

"Say, Angie," he whispered to her one night during their
second week together. "You're great in bed, but — "

"
But
?"

"No, not 'but.' You're great. I wondered, though, if you ... if
you'd take me into your mouth."

She lifted herself up on one elbow. "Seriously? I don't know. I
don't really know. I've never done it." She reached down and
lifted his penis in her hand. "I could never get all that in.
I'd gag."

"Getting it all in is not the point," he said.

"What
is
the point? How would I do
it?"

"Like eating a lollipop," he said.

She laughed. "Like eating a lollipop! Well ... Is it a big deal
for you?"

He drew a deep breath. "I'd like it. I don't demand it."

She stared at his crotch for a few seconds. "Will you wash it
first?"

"For sure."

"Well, then ... I'll try."

She was telling the truth. She had never done it. She had heard it
called ugly names, heard women who did it called ugly names. But —
He was worth it.

When he came back from the bathroom he smelled of soap and of shaving
lotion he had splashed on his upper body. He plumped up pillows and
put them against the headboard of the bed, then sat and leaned back
against them — and waited.

She took a moment to firm up her courage. She smiled at him, then
lowered her face, opened her mouth wide, and sucked his throbbing
organ into her mouth. She held it there and massaged his puckered
foreskin with the tip of her tongue. Then she pulled back, seized the
thick stalk in her left hand, and began to lick it, taking long
strokes from the base up to the tip. He whispered a suggestion that
she lick what was below, too: his dark, wrinkled pouch the size of
two fists. She did that for a moment and returned to it briefly now
and again, but mostly she alternated between holding the upper half
of his penis in her mouth, manipulating his foreskin with her tongue
and lips, and pulling it out and licking its full length.

He began to gasp and moan. She was giving him
ecstasy. She was surprised; she hadn't imagined a man would
experience utter bliss under such ministration. So ... He would love
her for it. Well — not love. He would treasure her for it. She
had heard women denounce it as debasing, abnegating. They might
consider that she was in control of this, as she was never in control
when a man was on top of her, pounding himself into her in his final
stage. Of this,
she
was the manager and could bring him along
or slow him down, as she wished. No way at all did she feel degraded.

She found nothing unpleasant about it, though she was nervous about
his ejaculation, wondering what she would do with his fluid,
wondering if it was nasty-tasting stuff. She worked to bring it, but
it took some time, five or six minutes anyway. When the abrupt gush
came, she discovered it had almost no taste at all. Certainly it was
nothing offensive. The word for this was sucking, so she guessed she
was supposed to suck when he climaxed, so she closed her lips around
his shaft and drew the stuff from him. Some of it went down her
throat. She swallowed. Some accumulated in her mouth. She swallowed
that, too.

"Oh
god
, Angie!"

She smiled gently. Some of his ejaculate gleamed on her chin. "You
like that, huh?" she whispered.

He reached for her and drew her into his arms.

Nevada and Angie gaped at Jonas. They laughed, and yet they knew he
was serious.

Clint McClintock, on a trip to Los Angeles, had gone as ordered to a
costume shop in Culver City and had come back with a number of items
Jonas had specified. One was a gray, almost white toupee. Another was
a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses, with ordinary glass, not lenses,
in the round frames. Another was a can of wax an actor could mold by
hand into the desired shape and then work into place in the mouth
between gums and cheeks, shoving out the cheeks and making a man's
face look fatter, even jowly.

Jonas had experimented for two hours with his disguise and was now
showing it to Angie and Nevada. With a toothbrush he had worked
gray-white from a jar into his eyebrows and into the bit of his hair
that showed below the edge of the toupee. The spectacles were astride
his nose. The wax in his mouth puffed out his cheeks.

"What th' hell is th' idea of that?" asked Nevada when he
stopped laughing.

"I'm going down and have a look at the casino operation,"
said Jonas. "A lot of money is moving down there. I want to see
how."

"Maurie'll
tell
you how."

"I want to
see
how."

He put on the suit he had worn on the flight from Bel Air gray with a
white pinstripe, double-breasted. He wore a white shirt and a
flowered necktie, the kind that was in style that year.

"I'll go with you," said Angie.

Jonas considered her offer for a moment, then accepted it. She would
complement his disguise, the more so since her face was known in the
casino.

They went down in the private elevator and stepped out into the part
of The Seven Voyages that Jonas had not yet seen. The casino floor
was the hotel's reason for being. It was the focus of the entire
operation, the source of the profit. Without the take from the casino
floor, The Seven Voyages was a losing proposition.

Jonas had gambled in other casinos and understood something about the
layout. The casino offered only fast-moving games: roulette, craps,
blackjack, and chuck-a-luck. The players stood or sat around solid
tables with green covers, under bright lights. Jonas had played in
French casinos, where the players dressed in formal clothes. Here
they could wear almost anything, though The Seven Voyages would not
admit cowboys in jeans. The house men wore white shirts with black
bow ties and black trousers — with no pockets. Girls in
thigh-high ruffled skirts and net stockings carried trays among the
tables, offering free drinks to players, trying to avoid giving any
to people just wandering through. The air was blue with tobacco
smoke.

The players stared and frowned at the tables or at their cards, and
there was little conversation. When they talked at all, they talked
quietly. No one cheered a win. No one groaned at a loss.

Morris Chandler wanted the casino in The Seven
Voyages to have the aspect of the casino at Monte Carlo, as much as
practicable. Little was practicable, since he could not ask the
players to wear evening clothes. But the croupiers at the roulette
tables kept up a tradition by making two announcements in French.
They called for the bets by saying, "
Faites vos jouets
,"
and they closed the betting just before they spun the wheel by
announcing, "
Rien va plus
."

Jonas understood that the games were scrupulously honest. The wheels
were not weighted, the dice were not loaded, and the cards were not
marked. The casino did not need to cheat to win. It could not lose,
because it set the odds.

The roulette wheels, for example, had a zero and a double zero —
an American innovation; European wheels had only the single zero.
When the ball landed on zero or double zero, the house won. At the
black-jack tables, the house kept the deal — and the small
advantage of the dealer — even when the player had a blackjack.
And so on. An individual player might win, might in fact win heavily,
but every day, over the whole operation, the house inevitably won.
Knowledgeable players understood that; but, with the chronic optimism
of gamblers, they believed they could beat the odds. Gamblers who
played any way but knowledgeably, rationally, and unemotionally
invariably lost — and often heavily.

Two-way mirrors covered the ceiling of the casino. In a dark chamber
above, supervisors prowled catwalks, observing the action below,
looking for any possibility of skimming by the dealers and stick men.
Though the house men could not have carried away the bulky chips in
their tight pocketless clothes, sometimes one would cheat by shoving
stacks of chips to confederates who had not actually won.

They watched also for cheating players. Cheating by players was all
but impossible. They could not touch the wheels. The oversized house
dice, especially made for The Seven Voyages, carried the casino logo
etched into the surface, so players could not substitute their own
dice for the house dice. Just about the only serious problem the
house had was with card counters at the blackjack tables. Card
counters were prodigies of memory who kept track of what cards had
been dealt and improved their odds greatly. To discourage them, the
games were played with two decks of cards. Still, some were good
enough to count even two decks. There were few who could do it, and
they were generally recognized. The casinos had a blacklist of them.
When a house man saw a known counter, or when he suspected a new
counter, that player was taken by the elbow and gently expelled from
the casino. Strictly speaking, card counting was not illegal. All the
casinos hated the card counters, though, and tried to keep them away
from the games.

With Angie at his side, Jonas bought five hundred dollars' worth of
chips. He played blackjack, the game where a smart player had the
best chance, and in the course of an hour won a hundred twenty-five
dollars. That was no big deal. When he cashed in, the cashier took no
particular notice of him.

They walked through the hall where ranks of slot machines swallowed
half dollars and silver dollars, spun, clunked to a stop, and did not
pay. Slot-machine players were more emotional than the gamblers on
the casino floor. When they won, they whooped and yelled —
which was good for business. Some of the payouts were big, but they
were infrequent. A twenty-five- or fifty-dollar payout was more
common. It kept the players happy, kept them at the machines. The
slots were pure profit. There was no risk the house would lose on
them, even temporarily.

"The place is a license to print money," Jonas muttered to
Angie as they returned to the top floor.

JONAS ADOPTED A NAME FOR THE GRAY-HAIRED JOWLY man who played
blackjack: Al String. It was a play on the name Cord. He gambled
night after night for a week in The Seven Voyages and lost eighteen
hundred dollars. He moved from there to the Flamingo, where he played
four nights and won three hundred. He moved on to some of the older
howdy-pardner gaming rooms. Angie went with him every night. Nevada,
dressed in a suit that would have looked right on a Texas oilman,
complete with champagne-colored Stetson, went with him to the old
places.

"I'm beginning to figure this thing out," Jonas said to
Nevada and Angie one night when they sat down over a late supper in
the suite. "The beauty of casino operations is that most of the
money that passes through them is in cash. That's what attracts the
kind of operators that are running this town. Think about it! Think
of the opportunities."

"Like?" asked Nevada — though he was not so innocent
that he didn't know what Jonas was about to say. "The simplest
element of it is tax evasion," said Jonas. "What part of
the take do you guess they report? Fifty percent? Seventy-five
percent? In those back rooms they count cash. How much of it slips
out of the hotel without being accounted for?"

"There's more to it than that," said Angie. "The
casinos are owned by partners, most of them back East. They fly out
here on junkets and gamble. They fly home with briefcases full of
cash, which is their share of the partnership profits. If the tax
boys happen to find out about their cash, they say they had good luck
and won a lot of money. They never admit they own a part of the
casino and get a regular distribution of the profits. The cash they
get is skimmed off the take every night."

Their late-night snack was club sandwiches. Angie and Nevada drank
beer with theirs. Jonas drank bourbon. He had pulled off his wig and
had of course pulled from his mouth the wax which for some odd reason
made him thirsty.

"A lot of the partners can't afford to be identified as
partners," Angie went on. "They have criminal records, and
the State of Nevada would lift the casino license if it were known
that they own shares. So they come out here and play the tables, go
home with 'winnings,' and no one's the wiser ... so they think."