The funny part of it is that with me it’s just the other way around: I don’t give a rap about betting or games of chance — in fact, don’t believe in it at all; but I never yet chucked down four bits or a dollar on any kind of a table at all without it collected everyone else’s dough like flypaper and swept the board clean. So then I always picked the nearest sucker with a long face and made him a present of the whole wad — minus the original buck, of course — and he went right back and lost it. The wages I get from Miss North are enough for me; I’m no hog.
Well, we drive all night, pass through San Diego about seven in the morning, and roll up to the bridge across the Mexican border just as they’re getting ready to open it for the day. Miss North only has to show her face and we clear it, only as usual one of the guardsmen can’t resist hollering after us, “Drop around, don’t be bashful!” which is the catch-phrase from one of her pictures. She’s so used to hearing it she just smiles.
After that comes a sandy stretch with a lot of cactus, and then flowers, fountains, and a lot of chicken-wire architecture show up, and that’s Agua. Miss North engages her usual layout and signs the book “Peggy Peabody” or something, to fool any reporters that may be hanging around.
Everybody always stays up all night down there, but I suppose she has to have some place to powder her nose in and change clothes between losses. Anyway, I see to it that I have an adjoining room with a communicating door between. Then we separate to scrape off some of the desert, and in a little while she knocks on the side-door.
“You’re armed,” she says, “so maybe you better take care of this for me until tonight,” and she hands me a little two-by-four black toilet-case with her initials on it in gold. “I’m so absent-minded I’m liable to mislay it just when I need it—”
Well, I’m just nosey enough to snap the latch and look in it — it isn’t even locked, mind you!
“It’s the stake for tonight," she smiles sweetly. “Fifteen thousand. I didn’t bring much along this time because I’m so sure of winning.”
“But, Miss North,” I groan, “carrying it around like this—”
“Yes, don’t you think that’s clever of me?” she agrees. “I just dumped out all the gold toilet articles. No one would think of looking in there.” Then she says, “See you later,” closes the door, and leaves me to do the worrying about it.
Well, the first thing I decide is, it don’t slay in that beauty-kit which hasn’t even got a key to it. No matter where it goes, it gets out of there. So I empty it out — it’s all ticketed just the way the bank gave к to her — stack it neatly inside a big, roomy envelope, seal it, write her name on the outside, and take it down to the manager’s office.
“Put this in your safe,” I say “and keep it there until Miss North or me calls for it when the session opens tonight.”
“If her luck,” he grins, “is what it usually is, she might just as well not bother taking it out, because it will only come right straight back in again.” Then he takes out a fat bundle of vouchers and tells me not to bother Miss North’s head about it, but don’t I think maybe she’d like to clear them up and start with a clean slate before she starts plunging again the next few nights?
“But Timothy paid up everything she owed you people, right after she was down here the last time, and that’s over two months ago,” I object. “I heard him hollering, that’s how I happen to know. Lemme see the dates on some of those.”
Well, some are only from the week end before, and all of them are later than the last time she was there.
“There’s somebody been down here impersonating her,” I warn him, “and getting credit from you. You better warn your bankers and notify the police.”
His face drops and he tells me, “I never know when she is here and when she isn’t. She always stops off under an alias anyway. Well, I can’t afford to attract attention to a thing like this — it would stop the picture people from coming here; so we’ll just have to forget about these, and I’ll tip off my staff not to let it happen in future.”
And he tears the whole lot of them up and dribbles them into the wastebasket. Most of them were only for medium-sized amounts anyway (which is another reason I know they’re not Fay’s), but it just goes to show there are some regular guys, even in his business.
She comes downstairs after a while, but I don’t tell her about it, because she’s down here to relax, in the first place; and in the second, it’s Timothy’s look-out, not hers, and everybody in her business has this impersonating stunt pulled on them at one time or another. It’s nothing new.
She’s wearing smoked glasses to keep from being recognized; but then, almost everybody else around is, too, so it don’t mean much.
Well, we spent a quiet afternoon, me tagging after her while she strolls and buys picture postcards; and then at five she goes back to her room to get ready for the fireworks, telling me I can eat downstairs, but she’s going to eat alone, up in her room.
Now, here’s where the first mistake comes in. I have a right to stick with her, even if I have to cat outside her room door; but I figure everything’s under control, that she’s safer here than she would be in her own home, that I’m right down at the foot of the stairs if she needs me, and that she’ll be down again as soon as she’s through dressing.
So I sit me down in the big patio dining-room, and I tear a sirloin at four bucks a throw (not Mex, either). After a while the dancing quits and the stars — I mean the ones in the sky — show and the big gambling rooms light up, and things get right down to business.
And still no sign of her. I know I haven’t missed her, because I’m right on a line with the stairs and she’d have to pass me on her way in. So I dunk my cigarette and I go up to see what’s keeping her.
Well, it seems I pick just the right time for it; a minute later and I wouldn’t have seen what I did; a minute sooner and I wouldn’t have either.
Just as I get to the top of the stairs and turn down the corridor leading to her room and mine, I catch a strange dame in the act of easing out of my door. She didn’t get in by mistake either — one look at the way she’s tiptoeing out tells me that. “Oho,” I say to myself, “a hotel rat — or rather, a casino rat, eh?”
Well, I want to see what she’s up to and find out who she’s working with, if possible; so instead of giving myself away I quickly step back onto the stair-landing and lean over the railing as though I am watching what was going on below. Her head was turned the other way, so I know she hasn’t spotted me. She thinks the coast is clear.
She closes the door carefully after her and comes hurrying along to-ward where I am. I turn around slowly and size her up. She is a tough-looking little customer, with jet-black hair and layers of paint all over her map that you could scrape off with a spoon. She is dressed like a dance-hall girl, too — or like what people that never saw one think they are like — only personally I never met one that was such a dead give-away. In fact, I wonder how she ever got into such a ritzy place with such a get-up.
She’s got a red shirtwaist on. and a yellow and black checked skirt, that hurts your eyes, only it misses her knees by a mile. But what interests me mostly is that in one hand she is hanging onto that toilet-case that Fay turned over to me when we got in. I know it by the gold initials on it.
She has lifted it from my room without bothering to find out if it still has the money in it or not; maybe on account of Fay being right next door, she didn’t have time. It is easy to see, though, that she must have overheard Fay tell me what was in it earlier in the day; that’s how she knew what to go for. Probably eavesdropped outside our doors.