"Sucker City,'' Emilio confided. "If you're gonna play the chrome-armed bandit, at least do the quarter and dollar slots. They pay off better."
She watched Rico lose two hundred and forty dollars at blackjack in two minutes. She could have bought a really radical pair of Weitzmans for that money. She watched Emilio do
'something at the craps table--lots of somethings--but he didn't win there, either. And these guys were experts.
The brothers reluctantly drew away from the action to explain the arcana to her.
"The lead player actually plays," she said, "and the other people bet for or against him?"
"Right."
"So they put their chips on certain places and sometimes they win, sometimes they don't . . .
but there's no pattern to it, no sense. Everybody's excited, but I can't tell for the life of me why or for what--"
The brothers looked properly sympathetic, and were about to explain the whole tedious set of inexplicable rules one more time.
Then the crowd around the craps table oohed and aahed as the dice rolled and they all leaped back screaming at the sound of a thud so strong it seemed to rock the immediate area.
Maybe the dice were hot, but even the ceiling was giving off puffs like smoke. A woman began a shrill screaming that just kept going and going up and down the scale of distress.
Temple could see why: the craps table was an utter mess. You couldn't tell whose chips were on what. Temple couldn't begin to figure out who had won or lost, because of the man's body lying there, covering everything, limbs splayed to the table's four corners.
People were backing away, even as her intrepid Mario Brothers--uh, Fontana brothers--
were pushing close to the table, along with a couple of armed guards in burgundy uniforms who had materialized from nowhere.
Someone was calling her "folks," and telling her to clear the floor. There had been an accident and they needed room.
The people behind Temple drew back lawfully, but the immoveable object before her was just a private security man, after all, and she was small enough to duck under his arm. She was a legitimate hotel employee, a public relations person, and she had a pressing need to know....
She pressed forward when everyone else ebbed back.
The brothers weren't at all surprised when she burrowed between them for a good look at the craps table.
"It's pretty hard to see the action right now,'' Rico apologized, "with this stiff lying all over it."
Temple consulted the brothers' intent, suave young faces. "Doberman" wasn't half wrong.
"Are you sure he's . . . dead?" she asked.
Emilio nodded mournfully. "We'll never know how the dice landed now."
The man who fell from the ceiling lay there, mum, not moving, not giving away a thing, not even the action.
Temple concluded that craps was not her game.
Chapter 15
Oddball Witness
"You witnessed the victim's plunge onto the table, too, Ma'am?"
Temple looked up at the homicide lieutenant, dazed.
Not Molina. He was not Molina. She couldn't believe her luck. Too bad she didn't care for gambling. Today would be her lucky one.
Lieutenant Hector Ferraro not only was not as tall as Molina, he was also balding--definitely not Molina's personal grooming problem. Ferraro's coloring was as dark as hers, however, and his attitude as unforthcoming. Must be something in the water coolers at Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department headquarters. Temple thought.
"Yes, Lieutenant," she made herself answer, after realizing she had been thinking too much and saying too little. ''We all saw him fall."
"You and the. . . um, brothers Fontana?" The officer's stubby pencil tip jerked toward an urbane clot of custom tailoring a few feet away. The Fontana Brothers smiled as smoothly as a juggling act. Emilio even waved.
"That's right."
"They say you're a freelance public relations person." Lieutenant Ferraro sounded as if he didn't quite believe that, but not believing people and things was part of his job. "What were you doing with the brothers?" The way he posed the question, he could have been asking Temple why she had been caught cold in the company of a cadre of cockroaches.
"They were instructing me on the fine points of craps."
"Learn anything?" he quirked out of the side of his mouth,
"Zilch. That poor man came crashing down before I could figure odds from evens. How did he . . . die?"
"Not from the fall, that's for sure. You know what's up there?"
"Eye in the Sky," Temple replied promptly, eager to show her mastery of some Las Vegas facts of life, if not of gambling. Realizing she sounded like her former TV newswoman incarnation, she modified her statement. "Not a traffic helicopter, but the surveillance equipment every casino stashes above its gaming areas." She leaned around the lieutenant's awesome stomach paunch--as taut as a wind-filled sail in its pristine white broadcloth--to eye the evidence. "Isn't that a . . . hole in the victim's temple?"
"No doubt you're an expert on temples," he responded deadpan.
Glancing up, she decided that he was kidding her, maybe even flirting.
"Sure. I've seen a dead body before. A murdered dead body."
"Where and when?"
"As a TV news reporter in Minnesota a few years ago. And ... I was doing PR for the stripper's competition a few weeks back."
"Oh, you're the one." Lieutenant Ferraro spoke with unnerving emphasis.
"I can't help being observant."
''Neither can I, or I get canned. Now. Give me your address and phone number, and I can get on with being observant myself."
Temple hesitated just long enough for his pathetic pencil to lift from the notebook page and point at her. ''It's required information, Ma'am."
She provided her vital statistics, still trying to glimpse the crime scene crew as it fussed around the craps table.
A ring of eyewitnesses was forced to watch the police go about their business, but the area was otherwise private.
That was because the floor pit boss and the Fontana boys had moved like red-hot lava--
deliberate but inexorably effective--to stop the action, calm and corral witnesses, then banish any curiosity-seekers.
By then, Temple had thought to suggest that they ring the area with portable curtains from the exhibition area. It had been accomplished before the police even arrived, thanks to the security personnel's quick work.
Beyond the burgundy linen circle. Van von Rhine and her husband Nicky waited impatiently for news. Temple knew. Figuring--hoping--that she had been dismissed. Temple slipped through a slit in the curtains. She was back amid the noisy bustle she had heard even within the charmed circle of death and detection-in-progress. Back with the quick and the curious.
"What's happening?" Nicky asked staccato-fast.
Van shot him a warning look. "Temple might like to sit down for a moment and rest. It must have been a terrible shock."
"I'm fine," Temple insisted, veteran of sudden death that she had become. Funny that her knees knocked a bit. "The police are awfully interested in your brothers," she told Nicky.
"The police are always interested in my brothers. They can handle it. So. Is the dead guy some sort of delusional diver, or did someone push him?"
"I think someone centered a bullet on his left temple, unless he was born with a large and unsightly mole he never had removed. The police didn't allow me near enough to check it out."
"Really!" Van said, "You two talk as if murder is a daily event in Las Vegas. At least these curtains are in place. I'd never have thought the police would be so sensible."
''They weren't," Temple said. ''I asked for the curtains, and the staff set them up in triple time."
Van nodded, pleased. ''The sooner this . . . mess ... is cleared away, the better. Death is always an unwanted guest at a hotel, particularly violent death." She winced. "That poor man. A Cliff Effinger. He's not registered at the hotel. That's the first thing the police asked. But who would have shot him in the ceiling? It must be suicide."