I produced one of the cards I had picked up at Bishop’s place. I had written my name in the blank line.
The eyes on the other side of the plate glass regarded the card, the voice through the loud-speaker said impatiently, “Well, shove it through the crack.”
It was then I noticed for the first time the very narrow slit in the thick door.
I pushed the card into the narrow opening.
There was a period of complete silence, then I heard an electric mechanism pulling bolts back. The heavy door rumbled to one side, running on rollers on a steel rail. The heavy rumbling and the vibration of the stairs as the door moved showed the reason for the microphone and the amplification of the voice. That door must have been as heavy as the door of a vault. Looking curiously around me, I suddenly realized that the stairs were the only bits of wood in the entire entranceway. I had gone through the green door and entered a steel inspection room. A raiding party of police equipped with picks and sledge hammers couldn’t have done more than dent the defenses.
“Well,” the voice said impatiently, “go on in.”
I noticed that the voice had said “go in” instead of “come in,” so I wasn’t too surprised to find on entering that the guard was no longer standing by the door. He had stepped into a steel, bulletproof closet on one side of the door. I could see the closet, but I couldn’t see him. He probably had a revolver covering me.
I walked over the sunken steel rail on which the door had slid, and entered a completely new world. My feet were in a soft, thick carpet which felt like moss in a forest. The hallway glowed with the soft effect of indirect lighting. There was that atmosphere of casual, easy wealth, which is so necessary to a high-class gambling place. It’s designed to put the customer on the defensive right at the start, to make him feel that he’s associating with wealth and standing.
There’s enough of the social climber in most people so that they fall for this stuff and consider it a privilege to be admitted to a place that specializes in taking their money. They’d walk out the worse for wear financially, but still with a certain deferential restraint. It’s an atmosphere that cuts down on beefs and scenes, and makes even the thought of rigged wheels and marked cards seem a social sacrilege.
That atmosphere is a business investment and doesn’t cost as much as one would think. It takes a few props. One is the paintings in heavy frames, carefully illuminated by shaded frame lamps. If the customer doesn’t appreciate them he shamefacedly considers it’s due to his own artistic ignorance. Actually the paintings are twenty-dollar copies in fifty-dollar frames, illuminated by ten-dollar lights.
The customer who can appreciate the price of the frame better than the worth of the painting, thinks they must be old masters. Otherwise why all the frame and illumination on the painting?
The other props are even more simple — Carpets with rich colors and sponge rubber underneath, and the artistic use of color in the draperies. In the soft, indirect lighting it looks like a million dollars. By daylight it would stink.
I entered rooms containing exactly what I had expected to find.
The first room was nothing but a conventional cocktail lounge. It had tables, cushioned stools, a bar, love seats, dim lighting, and the all but inaudible strains of organ music.
Two or three couples were at the tables. A party of three stags were at the far end of the bar with money scattered in front of them, two bottles of champagne, and all of the external evidence of celebrating a huge financial success.
I wondered whether they were also part of the props.
A coldly courteous individual handed me the card which I had left with the doorman downstairs.
“May I ask exactly what it was you were looking for, Mr. Lam?”
“Exactly what you have here,” I said.
The cold eyes softened a bit. “May I ask where you got your card? Who vouched for you when you got it?”
I said, “The card’s properly signed.”
“I know, but sometimes signed cards are given to various sources for distribution.”
I said, “This was given me by the owner.”
He looked a little surprised then, turned it over, and said, “You know Mr. Channing personally then?”
“That’s right.”
“Then the situation is entirely different,” he said. “Just go right on in, Mr. Lam.”
Before I could move, and as though he had been struck with an afterthought, he said apologetically, “I am afraid I’m going to have to comply with the regulations and ask to look at your driving license and make sure you’re the person described on the card.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, and flipped open my wallet, showing him my driving license.
“From Los Angeles, eh?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s probably why I don’t place you. You’re going to be up here for a while, Mr. Lam?”
“Not long. I want a little action while I’m here. I am familiar with Al’s place down in Los Angeles.”
“Oh,” he said. “How is Al?”
“I don’t know him personally,” I said, “just the place. I know the manager there—”
I stopped abruptly as though I had caught myself just in time to keep from using a name.
“Well?” he asked.
I smiled. “If you know the man I mean, you know his name. If you don’t know the man I mean, there’s no point in mentioning his name.”
He laughed. “Did you wish to make any arrangements for credit, for having checks cashed, or anything, Mr. Lam?”
“I think I have enough cash to see me through.”
“If you’d like to make any credit arrangements—”
“I’ll do that when I run out of cash. I’ll run in and see Channing personally in case that happens.”
“Go on in, Mr. Lam.”
He indicated a door at the far end of the room, around the end of the bar.
I walked around the bar, pushed open the door, and once more found myself in a hallway. At one end was a door marked His and at the other end a door marked Hers.
An attendant stood in the hallway.
A buzzer made sounds. Three quick distinct buzzes.
The white-coated attendant, without a word, pulled on a lever and a concealed door slid back.
I entered the gambling rooms. There wasn’t much of a crowd at the moment. Probably the heavy spenders would come later, after the dinner and theater hours.
Here again the atmosphere of synthetic luxury was carried out. There were the usual roulette and crap tables, a couple of twenty-one games, and a poker game.
From the fact that some six or eight of the persons present at the tables were dressed for the evening and were wagering rather large stakes with that impeccable hauteur which is the sucker’s idea of the well-bred, upper class gambler, I knew they were the stooges who are employed to keep the place from seeming too lonely during the early evening, and to encourage play during the later hours.
Horace B. Catlin wasn’t among those present.
If there had been anything depressing to the club about the news of George Tustin Bishop’s death, there was no outward indication. Play went on with the smooth decorum of an exclusive club where men were gentlemen and the loss of a few hundred dollars was merely one of life’s amusing incidents to be dismissed with a well-bred shrug of the shoulders.
Later on, when the play became more spirited, some of the stooges would lose large sums with a patronizing smile, then begin to rake in great sacks of chips with a sophisticated lift of the eyebrow to indicate a complete control of the emotions.
The suckers who didn’t stand a chance of winning a dime would be tempted to ape their “well-bred” neighbors at the table, and they, too, would shrug off their losses with a patronizing smile, wait in vain for “luck” to turn, and then go outside really to beef.