“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a distance.”
“Travel is broadening. You must be getting sick of this town, Johnny.”
“It’s a good town. I don’t know.”
“Think about it.”
He thought, or pretended to. “How would we work it? I don’t care for artificial husband-and-wife routines.”
“Adjoining rooms. A good hotel asks no questions. Especially in Nevada.”
He nodded. “That seems sensible,” he said. “But why would you want me along?”
“For company. You know me, Johnny. I get lonely easily. And I enjoy your company.”
He didn’t put up much of an argument but let himself be talked into it easily from that point on. The arrangements were simple enough. She would pay all expenses — air transportation there and back, the hotel bill, all meals. She’d give him spending money and gambling money.
It sounded fine.
The next morning he paid two more weeks rent on his room at the Ruskin, told the manager he’d be out of town for an indeterminate period of time, and packed his two suitcases. He didn’t want to check out of the Ruskin, not for two weeks rent. He liked the room and wanted it to be waiting for him when he returned. Besides, he couldn’t take all his clothes with him. He had to have a place to leave them.
He met Moira and they taxied to LaGuardia, caught a flight to Vegas non-stop. They registered in adjoining singles at the Calypso House, the newest and most expensive hotel and gambling palace on the Strip. They went to their rooms, changed, and met in the hallway. Johnny figured they’d grab a bite to eat, then see a show or something. But he hadn’t figured out Moira’s second greatest vice, second only to sex.
It was gambling.
They went to the casino right off the bat and she bee-lined for the roulette wheel, pausing only to convert a thousand dollars into fifty-dollar chips. He followed her and stood by her side. She bet the chips one at a time, betting an individual number on each spin of the wheel. He watched her lose two hundred fifty dollars in five straight spins of the wheel. It was her money, but he couldn’t figure out why she wanted to throw it away on sucker bets. The house had the percentage no matter what kind of gambling you were doing. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any house. But the house edge in roulette was a little better than average, which was frightening. Not as bad as the horse races, maybe, but bad enough.
“Why don’t you switch to craps,” he suggested. “The odds are better.”
She turned on him. She handed him four chips. “You switch to craps,” she said.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I’d rather play alone,” she snapped. “Meet me later.”
He didn’t argue with her. He took the chips and held them in the palm of his hand. Fifty bucks a chip, he thought. He could put all four on one roll of the dice if he wanted. He could bet them one at a time. Or he could cash them in, tell her he’d lost his money. It wouldn’t matter whether she believed him or not, because she wouldn’t give a damn.
He compromised. He walked to the nearest cashier’s cage and passed over the four chips. “Cash two of these,” he said. “And break the rest into dollars.”
The cashier did a long double take and Johnny decided that it must have been an unusual request. It made sense to him. He’d drag half the money for himself, then use the others to pass the time. Gambling wasn’t his kick, but it would make the time pass a little faster.
The cashier followed instructions. Johnny put two fifties in his wallet and found his way to a crap table. He played the way very few people play dice. He bet only against the shooter and made his bets only after the shooter had rolled his point. When it was his turn with the dice he passed. His bet was always two dollars, never more and never less.
When you shoot craps in this manner the odds are slightly in your favor. If you do it long enough, and consistently enough, you will get rich. If you do anything long enough and consistently enough with the odds always constant and unyielding in your favor, you will grow rich.
This is mathematics.
He played for two hours. He passed the dice many times in the course of the two hours, a practice which seemed to amuse some of the players. They couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to roll.
He was even with them. He couldn’t understand why they’d buck the odds.
At the end of the two hours he cashed in one hundred and forty dollars worth of chips. It was a small profit but it pleased him. He had been lucky. The odds weren’t that strongly in his favor. At one point, when a shooter made five straight passes, He was beginning to lose faith in higher mathematics. But he was pleased.
He wandered back to the roulette wheel. Moira wasn’t there. He looked around, spotted her at another cashier’s cage. She was buying more chips. He wondered whether this was her second trip to the cage — or her twentieth.
He never found out. She didn’t talk about how much she lost, and he knew better than to ask her. If she wanted him to know she would tell him herself.
She was a creature of patterns, and once again the pattern was established and followed to the letter. Every day she gave him two hundred dollars when they finished breakfast at noon or later. They met for dinner — then she returned to the casino and he amused himself whatever way he wanted. At night he made love to her if she indicated that she was in the mood. She did so rarely, never two nights in a row and never more than one time in one night.
He had enough time for himself so that he could line up women on his own. Money didn’t bother him — he was making a minimum of a hundred dollars a day from Moira — so he no longer spent his time looking for wealthy women ready to pay for him. Instead he shopped for what he wanted.
He picked up a waitress in a restaurant and spent a hectic evening at her cottage. She was young and blonde and wild. Sex was her sole interest and she couldn’t get enough to make her happy. While they rested between bouts she told him anecdotes of her own personal and none-too-private life.
“One time I did it with five boys at once,” she said happily. “Can you imagine?”
He couldn’t imagine.
“Five at once,” she repeated dreamily. “You never felt anything like it. Groovy.”
“You mean one after the other?”
“No, all at once, dummy. I did it like one after the other lots of times. You know, like a line-up. More than five, you can bet on it. Sixteen one time. One after the other, sixteen of them, I like to die it felt so good. But this time the five was at once, all of them.”
He asked her how she had managed it.
“One here,” she explained. “Naturally. And another one there. That much they call a sandwich. Then another one here and two more here and there. See?”
He saw.
“It’s too bad there weren’t two more guys,” she added. “I still had two hands free. But the hell with it. Let’s go again, Johnny.”
Fortunately for his health, the one evening was all he spent with the nymphomaniacal waitress. But despite such distractions he still spent a great deal of time thinking about Moira. She wasn’t even gambling sensibly. She reversed the usual gambler’s desperation play — whenever she won a bet she kept doubling up until she lost it all.
It was a simple case of her constantly trying to lose everything she had.
He tried to fit that in with what he knew about her. She wanted to be independent, wanted to be on top with no strings attached. And at the same time she felt that she was bad, and she was losing her money at the roulette wheel because she wanted to punish herself. That much almost anybody could figure out, he thought. But he would never know why.