“That’s the problem, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said.
“What… problem?” Dewey said, the bonhomie gone. Screw the steak. He began eye-fucking the kid behind those steel frames.
“Don’t get excited, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said. “I have money for you.”
“Then we don’t have a problem, do we?” Dewey said.
“I just don’t have it all. I had to gamble more than I intended to. Have you spent much time in those casinos, Mr. Willis?”
Unblinking, “Yes, I’ve been in all of them.”
“Well, there was this big Indian guy in the second casino, the one just outside Palm Springs? I think he was a security officer. He started following me after I withdrew the first bunch of money with my debit card. I was pretty sure he was watching, so I put way more in the slots than I wanted to. See what I mean?”
“Oh, yes, I see what you mean,” Dewey said. “It’s perfectly clear to me.”
“Okay, to start with, I followed your instructions, Mr. Willis. When I arrived, I got the five-hundred-dollar limit from the account, and then at one minute after midnight, I got another five hundred. And then I went back to the motel and went to bed. The next day, I went to the second casino and used the second card. You were right about the casinos. I don’t think there was a camera at the ATM machines like in the machines around here.”
“Only the general cameras surveying the wide areas,” Dewey said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
“Then I went to the third casino and used the third card,” the kid said. “I just felt a lot better doing it like that instead of using all three debit cards in one casino. You were right about that too.”
“Smart boy,” Dewey said. “Get to the point.”
Stuart took another sip from his cocktail and said, “I only played the slot machines to make it look good. I was actually thinking about playing something else in order to make it look even better.”
“I told you, only slots,” Dewey said. “And very few of those.”
“Right, so I maybe spent an extra two, two-fifty, in the slots that I didn’t wanna spend.”
Dewey was silent for a moment, knowing this was a lie, and said, “You spent over two hundred dollars of my money in slot machines? I don’t suppose you won anything in any of the three casinos, did you, Stuart?”
“No,” Stuart said. “Are you sure those machines aren’t rigged?”
“No, they’re not,” Dewey said, controlling his anger. “Where’s my money?”
“In the trunk of my car in an envelope.”
“Let’s go get it,” Dewey said.
When they got to the parking lot, Stuart opened the trunk of his Mazda and removed a large envelope, saying, “Everything is accounted for, just like you said, Mr. Willis. In the three casinos for the three days, I took out forty-five hundred dollars altogether. I spent two hundred for gas. I know it sounds like a lot, but my car needs a tune-up. I spent three hundred dollars for the three nights in a motel and only two hundred dollars for meals I was too tense to eat. I gambled two-fifty in the slots in the casinos. That left me with three thousand five hundred fifty. I deducted my thirty percent from the balance and had a few incidentals, including a new tire, and that came to four hundred fifty-five dollars. There’s twenty-five hundred for you, Mr. Willis. It came out a nice round number, and the cards are in the envelope with the money.”
“Nice round number,” Dewey said. “It always comes out a nice round number. And I wonder why so many of you young men claim that you had to gamble so much more than you were told to gamble? Is that because you are afflicted by compulsive gambling disorder or by inherent greed?”
“I swear to God, Mr. Willis -,” the kid said, but Dewey put up a hand to silence him.
“My… organization went to a lot of expense to set this whole thing up,” Dewey said. “It hardly seems worthwhile now, Stuart.”
“I worked three days for that money, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said, “when you consider the driving time.”
“How long do you think my organization spent setting it up?”
“Maybe I could do another part of the work next time,” Stuart said. “Maybe I could make the deposits for you. Somebody has to put checks into the debit accounts. Why not me?”
“Ambitious,” Dewey said. “You’re an ambitious lad, Stuart. Well, it’s getting late and I have to report to the boss of our organization. I hope he’s not unhappy with your work. If he is, you’ll be hearing from… somebody.”
“Mr. Willis,” the kid said, “I worked hard and did the best I could. I wouldn’t cheat you!”
“Of course not,” Dewey said. “Go home and get some sleep. We’ll be in touch.”
After Stuart was clear of the parking lot, Dewey went to his car, started it up, and began the drive home to Hollywood. The $2,500 wasn’t bad, considering he had two more kids like Stuart to collect from before the month ended. The “organization boss”-that smoke-reeking, foul-tempered bitch-was someone he could almost live with, as long as the calendar month netted them at least $10,000 after expenses. Any less than that and she was so horrible, it was all he could do to keep from packing up and running away for good. Maybe then he’d have a chance of living a normal life span instead of dying of emphysema or lung cancer. And he would do it too, except that Eunice had sole access to the so-called retirement account.
For the first five years of their marriage, he’d secretly searched for an account number, a routing number, or an online password-anything that might open the door to her treasure vault. But he was never even able to discover in which bank she hoarded their money. He reckoned that by now she’d accumulated about $500,000, give or take. Currently he was running six bank accounts under several names, where money from their various gags could be deposited, transferred to another bank, and withdrawn before their victims’ own banks ever discovered a problem. And Eunice did in-person as well as online banking. On one of his snooping forays, he’d found four checkbooks from local Hollywood banks.
Something had always bothered him about the “retirement account” story she’d fed him. It was that she was the momma bird protecting the nest egg that was going to see them through to a comfortable retirement in San Francisco. It was there that she owned an inherited family home on Russian Hill, currently leased out, but which would be theirs during their golden years. The thought of all that made him shiver with revulsion.
And then one day in March, after they’d gone out for a dress-up dinner at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she didn’t see a single celebrity and got drunk instead, he’d found a brass key. He’d spotted it while snooping in her wallet after she’d passed out in her bedroom, and it looked to him like a padlock key. He’d hardly slept that night, thinking about the lock that the key would fit. There had been too many occasions over the years when she’d nagged and harangued Dewey about making banking errors that could lead back to him, or rather to one of the characters he played when he did in-person banking.
The fact was, she was distrustful of banks and always overestimated the employees, always fearing “red flags,” as she put it. As far as Dewey could see, a few zeros added to a number meant nothing at all to the young tellers, most of whom looked like they’d rather be bartenders or cocktail waitresses or anything else where they could make a few bucks and meet some interesting people. He had persistent thoughts that someone like Eunice would keep her retirement fund in a safe deposit box rather than in an account where she’d surrender control to people she obsessively feared.
But the key he’d found in her wallet was not to a safe deposit box. It looked like an ordinary brass padlock key, the kind he used at storage facilities where he kept the merchandise that his runners bought with bogus checks and credit cards. He began thinking a lot about that key. There could be a huge amount of cash in storage somewhere in Los Angeles. That key provoked endless fantasies for Dewey Gleason.