“Lunch?”
“Really? You’re hitting on me at the children’s library?” Up with the hand, crossing the body to part the hair falling as she laughed. “Really hopping town.”
“I guess I could tell you I wanted to compare notes.”
“You writing a story about John Salteau too?” She laughed even harder.
“Nope, nope. Just his number one fan. You could work me into the piece. I’m quotable.”
“Yeah, you’ve already shared some of your quotes with me. I’d get myself fired if I used one of your quotes.”
“Not with the alternative press, huh?”
“Here?” She gestured, taking in the entire northwest lower peninsula.
“I’ll buy.”
“I can expense my meals.”
“Even better. You buy. I’ll tell you everything I know about John and you can either use that, or you can make up whatever you want me to have said and put quotation marks around it.”
“Wait, you know him?”
“We’re friends,” I said, with a kind of dazed pleasure, like some New Hampshire yokel divulging a connection to Salinger.
“Well, OK. Come on.”
6
THE reflective skin of the Manitou Sands Casino & Hotel, the tallest structure between the Mackinac Bridge and Grand Rapids, appeared as a faint metallic shimmer on the winter horizon miles before the building itself could be discerned as something separate and distinct from the sandy hills rolling toward the lake. Kat Danhoff was driving to meet a man who had promised to talk to her about Jackie Saltino, or Jackie Crackers as he was sometimes called. The man was named Robert Argenziano and when they had spoken on the phone he had described himself, a little obscurely, as a “liaison” working with the Northwest Michigan Band of Chippewa Indians to help them implement the new family-friendly resort hotels that were introducing casino gambling to the area. But the first of the casinos had been open now for more than a dozen years, Kat had observed mildly. Robert Argenziano had laughed a hearty laugh and said something nonsensical about one hand washing the other, and Kat detected the long, rounded vowels of northeastern pronunciation in his speech, which otherwise sounded as placelessly clipped as that of a television announcer. They made a date, or so Robert Argenziano had persisted in calling it, to meet that Thursday for lunch at Highlands, the whisky bar and “first-class casual dining environment” just off the main 60,000-square-foot gaming floor. The exquisite tackiness of Highlands was later confirmed by Kat in an online search, although the place fell short, as Robert Argenziano himself had fallen short, of outright sleaze. More than anything else, it represented an insistence on the primacy of nice even in a place where it was possible to lose everything in an instant.
Up close, it appeared that the building’s architects had taken the silhouette of a cardboard milk carton as their inspiration, wrapping the form in gleaming reflective plastic and enlarging it hundreds of times. Although it was indeed by far the tallest structure in view, it inspired neither contemplation nor wonder, only the peculiar and adamant sensation of wanting it out of sight.
While online, Kat had also found 517 results in response to her search query about Robert Argenziano. 504 of them had to do with a Florida osteopath; ten with an Oberlin student on Facebook; two listed separate triathlon results for a thirty-six-year-old man living in Mesa, Arizona; and one, also in Florida, was a court order in connection with a divorce case. LexisNexis yielded ordinary-looking filings with the Michigan Gaming Control Board, and a five-year-old local news story describing Argenziano as one of the “experts” who had helped resolve incidences of suspected card-counting that had been taking place at two of the Chippewa casinos. Looking up Rob Argenziano generated similar results. Then she’d tried Bob, and found a single brief New York Times story from the mid-1980s reporting the arrest, along with two other suspects, of Bobby F. Argenziano, twenty-six, of Staten Island, on charges of second-degree murder in connection with the beating death of James Patrick Sheehan, also twenty-six, of Rockaway.
She parked and approached the front entrance. A man wearing a red jacket and cap stood by a luggage cart near the doors, but ignored her. The doors parted for her by themselves when she drew near. Inside, the lobby space seemed to reach back through the ages, grabbing at architectural and interior flourishes from random points in history while retaining an out-of-the-box-new appearance. Though she could hear noise from the casino, a muted buzzing and ringing, the lobby was as sober and hushed a monument to the waste of enormous amounts of square footage as the casino was no doubt a hectic one to its maximization. Across a quarter-acre of spongy fleur-de-lys-patterned carpeting, archipelagoes of modular furniture stood at distant removes from one another and from the front desk, a long, curved piece of dark wood at which a man in a blue blazer stood tapping at a computer keyboard. One wall of glass looked out upon the lake; on other walls were hung framed historical photographs of the region: Indians at Peshawbestown, farmers unloading cherries at the old Front Street Market in Cherry City, bathers in cumbersome one-piece suits near Little Bonny Lake, and, as if in odd self-rebuke, an enormous photo of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.
At the entry to a passage leading from the diffident lobby, a small sign — tasteful, understated — directed Kat to both Highlands and the Grand Gaming Floor. Here any sense that she was inside just another vanilla mid-range hotel began to dissipate. The buzzing and ringing took on definition, became discrete and individual peals. It was mostly cheerful, with the soft edge of morning calm to it, like conversation coming from someone else’s kitchen on a bright getaway Sunday, the feeling of caffeine gently kicking in, of kettles whistling, of egg timers softly pinging; of the day is still ours to make the most of. Still, these people here, having chosen to do so from among several more or less equally attractive alternatives, were gambling. Kat was not disapproving, merely incomprehending: a gambler she could understand, but someone who threw away money one day and then went sailing or golfing the next defied her understanding. She felt no competitive heat here — that she could easily have understood. People stood there and fed money into one pot or another, periodically gently cursed or celebrated their luck, and then walked away. And the sexuality that always seemed intertwined with the proximity to chance — now, that she could have understood — was completely absent amid these mutually solicitous retired couples, tanned right to the crinkled edges of their elastin-depleted skin, and the fatties, their kids parked in the Tot Lot, laboring at the two-dollar tables.
Still, someone here was poised to lose it all, if not just yet. At lunchtime, the day was still organized as something you could fit within the margins of a four-color brochure. Now was not the slack and uninhibited hour when one discovered reckless desires. If she could have stood there at the carpeted edge of things where she could watch the players, she might have pegged the one who would blow the kids’ college fund or tap the IRA. But just walking by, the room looked like any contained space full of mutual strangers and the whiff of polite transience. She headed for the restaurant’s entryway, catching sight of herself in a mirror as she passed. She looked good.