Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) (10 page)

“Now who was it you asked me about?” she said. “David somebody?”

“David Burnett. A friend of Jerry’s—the same young guy who won the big jackpot.”

“Big jackpot?”

“On the Megabucks progressive slot about three weeks ago. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar payoff.”

“You mean here? At this club?”

“Yes.”

“Gee,” Candy said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think we’ve had a big slot payoff all year. Not
that
big, anyway.”

“... Are you sure?”

“Well, I’m not positive but I don’t think so. Why don’t you go upstairs by the Lucky Trevi and look at the wall where they advertise all the big winners? If this guy David hit one of the Megabucks slots, his picture’ll be up there, you can bet on that.”

“His name isn’t familiar to you? David Burnett?”

“No,” she said, “it sure isn’t.”

I gave her five bucks for her time and the information. She didn’t want to take it—“Gee, I’m just glad to help”—but I insisted. Guilt money, because I’d lied to her about a thing like a missing daughter. Then I went and found the escalator and rode up to the second floor.

The Lucky Trevi, for Christ’s sake, was an alabaster-and-neon abomination designed to look like the Trevi Fountain in Rome. It was where the funseekers took the freebie booklets they got from hotels and motels and travel agencies, to exchange coupons for rolls of coins and free spins on a giant “Lucky Trevi Wheel of Fortune.” The way to it was marked by lighted bulbs set into the floor, and along the wall bordering the pathway were more lighted bulbs that spelled out LUCKY GLADIATORS. Under the sign was a long row of framed photographs of the club’s big winners, plus names and dates and dollar amounts.

It did not take me long to determine that the last big winner, of $50,000 on a Keno ticket, was three months ago, and that the last big winner on a progressive slot was a woman from Salem, Oregon, the previous August.

Candy had been right: David Burnett hadn’t hit a $200,000 Megabucks jackpot in the Coliseum Club, not three weeks ago and not ever.

AT TEN O’CLOCK Wednesday morning I put in a call to the offices of the Nevada Gaming Control Board in Carson City.

Before leaving the Coliseum Club the night before I’d got some literature from the cashier’s booth on the state gaming laws. It told me that all slot-machine jackpots over $1,200 had to be reported to both the Internal Revenue Service, which then automatically withholds twenty percent of the total winnings, and the Nevada Gaming Control Board; and that on the mega-jackpots—of a $200,000 payoff, for instance—state gaming agents come to verify that the equipment hasn’t been tampered with and that there are no other irregularities. The payoff is not made by the casino until the agents finish examining the machine’s computer chips and any surveillance film that recorded the event through the one-way ceiling mirrors. The Gaming Control Board therefore has a record of any major jackpot won anywhere in the state, and detailed reports on any jackpot won on a machine hooked into the Megabucks computer system.

The man I spoke to was named Buford. I gave him my name, and said that I was a California private investigator working on a case, and read him the ID number from my license, and told him just what it was I wanted to know. He said it would take some time to get the information out of the Board’s computer files, meaning that it would take some time to verify that I was who and what I said I was; he took down the Starburst’s telephone number and my extension and said he’d try to get back to me before noon.

To kill some time, I went and bought a copy of the Reno
Gazette-Journal
from a stand in front of the family restaurant. It was five minutes past eleven and I had just finished reading the sports section when the phone rang. Buford, with the information I’d requested. It was what I had already suspected, and what I did not particularly want to hear.

David Burnett had not won a $200,000 Megabucks jackpot at any casino in Reno or the entire state of Nevada. Nor had he won that much money—or
any
large amount of money—playing another gambling game or machine. The Gaming Control Board had never heard of him.

So where did he get the money?

Where and how did a not too bright, twenty-five-year-old sports junkie get his hands on two hundred grand in cold cash?

VIRGINIA LAKE was a body of water the size of a couple of city blocks, edged with little strips of park, in a residential area off South Virginia. Good neighborhood, close to downtown and a couple of big golf courses. Ringing the pond was a mix of expensive homes, middle-income homes, condos, and apartment complexes. The apartments off Eastshore Drive were a string of two-storied buildings, newish, with balconies and well-kept lawns that faced the pond.

I had looked up Alice Cardeen’s name in the telephone directory. No listing. But when I’d checked the
A
’s, there she was under “Avon Representative”: A. Cardeen, 4210 Eastshore Drive. The entrances to the various apartments were off one of the cross streets, and you got to them by way of a flower-bordered path that bisected the block. A bank of mailboxes under the numerals 4210 said that A. Cardeen, Avon Rep., occupied number 6.

Number 6 was a ground-floor apartment midway along. I rang the bell and waited and rang it again. Nobody home. Well, that was hardly surprising; it was almost noon and cosmetics salespersons, if they’re good at their job, don’t sit around waiting for customers to come to them.

I rang the bell at number 8; no response there, either. But at number 4, on the other side, I got results. The woman who opened the door was middle-aged, plump, wearing a pair of too-tight slacks that advertised her big behind. She said, “Yes, what is it?” in the vaguely annoyed way of people who have been interrupted doing something that gives them pleasure. In her case, it was probably watching a daytime soap opera. I could hear the sounds of it coming from behind her.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you know the people who live next door? In number six.”

“Alice? The Avon girl? Yes, I know her.”

“Do you also know her roommate?”

“She doesn’t have a roommate.”

“She did have one, though, didn’t she? Until recently?”

“That’s right. The Paiute girl.”

“Janine Wovoka.”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I’m trying to find Janine. You see, she’s a friend of my daughter’s,” and I went into the missing-daughter pitch again. It worked just as well today. The woman’s face softened; she said she had kids of her own and she understood what I must be going through.

I nodded, feeling guilty again, and asked, “When did Janine move out?”

“Well, it was about two weeks ago, I think. Perhaps a little longer.”

“Do you know why she moved?”

“She lost her job and couldn’t afford the rent. The rents here aren’t cheap.”

“Would you know where she moved to?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Have you talked to Alice?”

“Not yet. She’s not home.”

“Hardly ever is, days. She’s a hard worker, that girl. Works long hours.”

“So you haven’t any idea where Janine might have gone?”

“Well ... back to the reservation, I suppose.”

“Reservation?”

“The Indian reservation. She’s a full-blooded Paiute, you know.”

“Yes,” I said. “Which reservation?”

“Pyramid Lake, of course.”

“She has people there? A family?”

“I imagine she does,” the woman said. “That’s where she came from, so she must have. Don’t you think?”

YOU GET TO PYRAMID LAKE by way of Highway 445 through Sparks, a small community that adjoins Reno on the northeast. I’d been out there a couple of times, the last one with Kerry a few years ago. Odd desert lake in the middle of nowhere, some thirty miles north of Sparks and entirely on Paiute land. Mostly uninhabited except for a hamlet called Sutcliffe on its western shore.

Time was, once you left Sparks proper you were in open desert, with no sign of human habitation other than a few scattered cattle and horse ranches. But now, over to the west, there are a bunch of planned communities with names like Sun Valley and Golden Valley and Panther Valley; and Sparks itself is growing in the same sprawling, unappealing way as Reno. For almost ten miles beyond its former boundaries I drove through housing tracts that were completed, partially completed, or about to be built on reclaimed desert land. They were all of such a monotonous sameness, without a single tree to relieve their bleak appearance, that I began to feel mildly depressed. One day this entire area—the whole damned face of the country, for that matter—would be covered with clone housing and clone shopping centers and clone people with all the individuality bled out of them. Sheep in identical pens. The pioneer spirit turned into the American dream turned into an Orwellian nightmare vision of total conformity. I was glad I would not be alive to see it happen.

Once I got past the last of the tracts under construction, and into what was left of the desert, my depression lifted. Stark landscape here, whole vistas opening up ahead where there was nothing but brown rocky hills and sagebrush flats. The desert colors were distinctive and sharp: browns, dark greens, dark reds. Puffy clouds, pushed by a high wind, made shifting shadow patterns on the barren hills. Heat shimmered faintly on the two-lane blacktop and out across the flats—but it was nothing like the heat that would blister the area in the middle of summer. After the clone tracts, the desolation had an elemental beauty that was somehow reassuring. The developers and their political cronies couldn’t get all of the wilderness land—not
all
of it, surely.

There wasn’t much traffic, so I could drive pretty much on automatic pilot. And that gave me the chance to reflect on the implications of what I’d found out this morning from the Gaming Control Board.

So David Burnett hadn’t won the two hundred thousand gambling. All right, then, how
did
he lay hands on that much cash? Had to be by some illegal or extralegal means or else there was no reason for him to make up the story about the Megabucks jackpot. Had to involve organized crime in some way, too; and at least peripherally, Jerry Polhemus and Wendy Oliver and Janine Wovoka were mixed up in it as well.

Drugs? That was the first consideration nowadays when large sums of illegal cash turned up. But Burnett had no history of involvement with drugs beyond the smoking of a little grass; Harry Craddock had scoffed when I’d broached the possibility to him. And while the Mob has its fingers deep in the national drug trade, its operations in Nevada are more or less restricted to gambling and prostitution. The Bay Area is a hotbed of drugs and drug deals, so why come up to Tahoe or Reno to buy or sell? And why would anyone connected with organized crime deal with a young amateur in the first place? In a time when multimillion-dollar drug transactions are commonplace, two hundred thousand is strictly small potatoes.

Some other kind of contraband? But what sort was there around here except drugs? I’d heard of a resurgence of high-profile gold mining in northeastern Nevada, in the area around Elko; but neither the Mob nor David Burnett were likely candidates to trade in contraband gold.

Stolen cash? Hell, that made even less sense. Two hundred thousand dollars was a big score for a
professional
thief—and not even a professional would hit a Mob-run operation. The idea of Burnett planning and executing a big caper was ludicrous. From all I’d learned about him, his idea of high adventure was to perpetuate a trite little double life spiced with small-time gambling and casual sex. Polhemus was in the same category. Wendy Oliver was a bimbo and Janine Wovoka probably wasn’t much better.

Found money? Every now and then you read about people stumbling on large sums of cash on buses or in taxicabs or the like. But not in Nevada, not when it almost has to be Mob money. Their employees do not leave two hundred thousand lying around for somebody to play finders-keepers with. That sort of mistake makes you dead in a hurry.

Four unlikely possibilities. And I was fresh out of ideas for a fifth, even an unlikely fifth.

One thing seemed evident now, at least: Burnett hadn’t lost what was left of the two hundred thousand gambling with Reno and Vegas sports books. That had been another lie concocted for the benefit of his sister and fiancée. The probable scenario was that the Mob had come around demanding money, as a payback for a debt owed. Thus Burnett’s frantic scramble to sell off his new Corvette and the presents he’d bought, and to raise an additional thirty-five thousand. And when he couldn’t raise the money, Mob pressure or fear of Mob reprisal prodded him into doing the Dutch.

Pretty story. Allyn Burnett and Karen Salter would be so pleased to hear me tell it.

I thought about Polhemus. Something had happened in that cabin of his yesterday, some sort of violent act—to him or by him to someone else. Was that Mob-connected too? The easy answer was yes, but it didn’t stand up under scrutiny. It had been more than a week since Burnett’s suicide; if the Mob was after Polhemus, they’d had plenty of time and opportunity to take him out. I could see no reason for them to wait this long. Or to want him dead in the first place. It was possible he’d done something stupid enough in the past few days to turn himself into a target, but it seemed out of character for him to buck the Mob in any lethal way. They kill their own often enough, but when it comes to outsiders, average citizens, they’ll order a hit only as a last resort. All that stuff you see on TV about Mr. Average being chased all over the country by Mob assassins is so much crap. Besides which, when those people take somebody out, they clean up after themselves—all nice and tidy, with no loose ends. They don’t remove dead bodies and leave bloodstains and the victim’s personal belongings and automobile behind.

Well, then? Was yesterday’s violent act tied in
any
way to the Burnett case? I had a feeling it was. Coincidences happen—I’d run across them before in my work—but I couldn’t see that explanation here. Polhemus had been running scared; if he’d contacted anybody after he arrived at Fallen Leaf Lake, it figured to be Janine Wovoka. Or maybe Wendy Oliver, because she lived nearby. Either way, there was a connection—and the connection made whatever had happened my business....

A big wooden sign appeared ahead, marking the border of the Paiute reservation and advertising Pyramid Lake as a paradise for fishermen after cutthroat trout. The terrain here was even more barren and rocky, a sere landscape capable of supporting life only with great effort. Which figured. When the government handed out land to the Indian tribes late last century, it was almost always poor land nobody else wanted. And at that they’d expected the Indians to lick their boots in gratitude, and been surprised, outraged, quick to revoke rights and privileges, when instead there were complaints and sometimes open rebellion. Must be hell, I thought, to be born with a skin color different than that of the men who run your country, particularly when the country had belonged to you in the first place.

I came around a curve and into a long downslope, and Pyramid Lake was there ahead—so suddenly that the effect was almost startling. It was as I remembered it: pale blue, glass smooth, somehow unreal, so that in the first moment you saw it, it struck you as a desert mirage; surrounded by more of the stark brown hills, with a bare pyramid-shaped island and a bunch of little islets jutting up off the east shore. The last time I’d been here it had been summer and those islands were alive with thousands of gray and white birds—migratory waterfowl, mostly pelicans. Pyramid Lake was a nesting ground for them in the summer months. Now the islands were deserted, and so was the lake itself except for a handful of widely scattered boats.

As I came down to the shoreline I could see the buildings of Sutcliffe along the west shore—but that first impression of strangeness lingered in my mind. There was something prehistoric about this whole area, as if in some elemental way it had been untouched by the passage of time and the rise of civilization, like the mountaintop in
Lost Horizon.
I would not have been very surprised to see a Tyrannosaurus rex pop up from behind one of the low brown hills.

At the bottom of the downslope, 445 joined another road that ran both ways along the rim of the lake. I turned left, toward Sutcliffe. It seemed even warmer here than on the drive out; the thin, dry desert wind blowing in through the open window smelled of sage and held the promise of a blazing summer. The sky looked more white than blue, not with clouds but with a milky sun-glare, like an alkali flat turned upside down.

The village was small, maybe a hundred buildings clustered on flatland extending back from the water’s edge. Most of the buildings looked to be private housing, with an air of newness about them that was enhanced by several big satellite TV dishes. On the near side was a public boat-launching facility and fishing access. I passed a structure that housed the Pyramid Lake Tribal Enterprises, dispenser of fishing licenses; then there was a road leading down into the village proper—an oasis of trees, a small trailer park, a public campground. And a weathered, clapboard building with a roof sign—DENHAM’s—and a lot of small signs plastered across its face:
Slots. Pool
.
Video Arcade. Groceries. Liquor. Fishing Tackle and Marine Supplies
.

I parked and went into the store. The interior was cut into two halves: the left half a saloon with dance floor, the advertised pool tables and video arcade, and a short bar at which two Indians were deep in conversation with an Anglo bartender; the right half, beyond a wall covered with photos of fishermen and their catches, contained the groceries and marine supplies. The only person in the grocery half was a gaunt, gray-haired woman behind the checkout counter. Not an Indian, unless she was of lightly mixed blood.