Michael grinned and winked at Tina.
She smiled woodenly.
She waited impatiently as the five minutes crawled by; she was never comfortable in a casino when it was busy. The frantic activity and the unrelenting excitement, which bordered on hysteria at times, abraded her nerves.
The huge room was so noisy that the blend of sounds seemed to coalesce into a visible substance — like a humid yellow haze in the air. Slot machines rang and beeped and whistled and buzzed. Balls clattered around spinning roulette wheels. A five-piece band hammered out wildly amplified pop music from the small stage in the open cocktail lounge beyond and slightly above the slot machines. The paging system blared names. Ice rattled in glasses as gamblers drank while they played. And everyone seemed to be talking at once.
When Michael’s break time arrived, a replacement dealer took over the table, and Michael stepped out of the blackjack pit, into the center aisle. “You want to talk?”
“Not here,” she said, half-shouting. “I can’t hear myself think.”
“Let’s go down to the arcade.”
“Okay.”
To reach the escalators that would carry them down to the shopping arcade on the lower level, they had to cross the entire casino. Michael led the way, gently pushing and elbowing through the holiday crowd, and Tina followed quickly in his wake, before the path that he made could close up again.
Halfway across the long room, they stopped at a clearing where a middle-aged man lay on his back, unconscious, in front of a blackjack table. He was wearing a beige suit, a dark brown shirt, and a beige-patterned tie. An overturned stool lay beside him, and approximately five hundred dollars’ worth of green chips were scattered on the carpet. Two uniformed security men were performing first aid on the unconscious man, loosening his tie and collar, taking his pulse, while a third guard was keeping curious customers out of the way.
Michael said, “Heart attack, Pete?”
The third guard said, “Hi, Mike. Nah, I don’t think it’s his heart. Probably a combination of blackjack blackout and bingo bladder. He was sitting here for eight hours straight.”
On the floor, the man in the beige suit groaned. His eyelids fluttered.
Shaking his head, obviously amused, Michael moved around the clearing and into the crowd again.
When at last they reached the end of the casino and were on the escalators, heading down toward the shopping arcade, Tina said, “What is blackjack blackout?”
“It’s stupid is what it is,” Michael said, still amused. “The guy sits down to play cards and gets so involved he loses track of time, which is, of course, exactly what the management wants him to do. That’s why there aren’t any windows or clocks in the casino. But once in a while, a guy really loses track, doesn’t get up for hours and hours, just keeps on playing like a zombie. Meanwhile, he’s drinking too much. When he does finally stand up, he moves too fast. The blood drains from his head—bang! — and he faints dead away. Blackjack blackout.”
“Ah.”
“We see it all the time.”
“Bingo bladder?”
“Sometimes a player gets so interested in the game that he’s virtually hypnotized by it. He’s been drinking pretty regularly, but he’s so deep in a trance that he can completely ignore the call of nature until — bingo! — he has a bladder spasm. If it’s really a bad one, he finds out his pipes have blocked up. He can’t relieve himself, and he has to be taken to the hospital and catheterized.”
“My God, are you serious?”
“Yep.”
They stepped off the escalator, into the bustling shopping arcade. Crowds surged past the souvenir shops, art galleries, jewelry stores, clothing stores, and other retail businesses, but they were neither shoulder-to-shoulder nor as insistent as they were upstairs in the casino.
“I still don’t see anyplace where we can talk privately,” Tina said.
“Let’s walk down to the ice-cream parlor and get a couple of pistachio cones. What do you say? You always liked pistachio.”
“I don’t want any ice cream, Michael.”
She had lost the momentum occasioned by her anger, and now she was afraid of losing the sense of purpose that had driven her to confront him. He was trying so hard to be nice, which wasn’t like Michael at all. At least it wasn’t like the Michael Evans she had known for the past couple of years. When they were first married, he’d been fun, charming, easygoing, but he had not been that way with her in a long time.
“No ice cream,” she repeated. “Just some talk.”
“Well, if you don’t want some pistachio, I certainly do. I’ll get a cone, and then we can go outside, walk around the parking lot. It’s a fairly warm day.”
“How long is your break?”
“Twenty minutes. But I’m tight with the pit boss. He’ll cover for me if I don’t get back in time.”
The ice-cream parlor was at the far end of the arcade. As they walked, Michael continued to try to amuse her by telling her about other unusual maladies to which gamblers were prone.
“There’s what we call ‘jackpot attack,’” Michael said. “For years people go home from Vegas and tell all their friends that they came out ahead of the game. Lying their heads off. Everyone pretends to be a winner. And when all of a sudden someone does hit it big, especially on a slot machine where it can happen in a flash, they’re so surprised they pass out. Heart attacks are more frequent around the slot machines than anywhere else in the casino, and a lot of the victims are people who’ve just lined up three bars and won a bundle.
“Then there’s ‘Vegas syndrome.’ Someone gets so carried away with gambling and running from show to show that he forgets to eat for a whole day or longer. He or she — it happens to women nearly as often as men. Anyway, when he finally gets hungry and realizes he hasn’t eaten, he gulps down a huge meal, and the blood rushes from his head to his stomach, and he passes out in the middle of the restaurant. It’s not usually dangerous, except if he has a mouthful of food when he faints, because then he might choke to death.
“But my favorite is what we call the ‘time-warp syndrome.’ People come here from a lot of dull places, and Vegas is like an adult Disneyland. There’s so much going on, so much to see and do, constant excitement, so people get out of their normal rhythms. They go to bed at dawn, get up in the afternoon, and they lose track of what day it is. When the excitement wears off a little, they go to check out of the hotel, and they discover their three-day weekend somehow turned into five days. They can’t believe it. They think they’re being overcharged, and they argue with the desk clerks. When someone shows them a calendar and a daily newspaper, they’re really shocked. They’ve been through a time warp and lost a couple of days. Isn’t that weird?”
Michael kept up the friendly patter while he got his cone of ice cream. Then, as they stepped out of the rear entrance of the hotel and walked along the edge of the parking lot in the seventy-degree winter sunshine, he said, “So what did you want to talk about?”
Tina wasn’t sure how to begin. Her original intention had been to accuse him of ripping apart Danny’s room; she had been prepared to come on strong, so that even if he didn’t want her to know he’d done it, he might be rattled enough to reveal his guilt. But now, if she started making nasty accusations after he’d been so pleasant to her, she would seem to be a hysterical harpy, and if she still had any advantage left, she would quickly lose it.
At last she said, “Some strange things have been happening at the house.”
“Strange? Like what?”