The five hundred Karch deposited each month into a bank account the two cops had access to was a bargain. He drew as many as a dozen calls a month on missing persons cases. He charged four hundred dollars a day plus expenses, with a two-day minimum. He often located the supposedly missing person inside an hour with a simple credit card trace but he never told the clients that. He just had them wire payment to his bank account before he revealed their loved one's location. To Karch it was all another form of sleight of hand. Keep things in motion with misdirection. Never reveal what is in your palm.
His office was a shrine to a Las Vegas long gone by. The walls were a collage of photographs of entertainers from the fifties and sixties. There were numerous shots of Frank and Dean and Sammy, some individual and some as a group. There were photos of dancers and framed fight cards.
There were postcards depicting casino resorts that no longer existed. There was a framed collection of gambling chips – one from every casino that opened its doors in the fifties. There was a large blowup photo of the Sands crumbling to the ground after being dynamited to make way for the new era of Las Vegas. Many of the photos were autographed and inscribed, but not to Jack Karch. They were inscribed to "The Amazing Karch!" – his father.
At center on the wall Karch faced while seated at his desk was the largest frame on any of the walls. It was a blowup photo of the huge neon-gilded headliner sign that had stood outside the Sands. It said Now Appearing FRANK SINATRA
JOEY BISHOP
THE AMAZING KARCH!
Karch looked at the photo across from him for a long moment before getting down to work. He had been nine years old when he saw his father's name on the big sign. His father took him with him one night to watch the show from the side of the stage. He was standing there watching his father perform an illusion called The Art of the Cape when he was tapped on the shoulder and looked up to see Frank Sinatra. The man who was the living embodiment of Las Vegas faked a punch off his chin and asked with a smile if he had an exclamation point at the end of his name, too. It was the most indelible memory of his childhood. That and what happened to his father a few years later at Circus, Circus.
Karch looked away from the photo and checked the message machine on the desk. He had three waiting messages. He hit the playback button and picked up a pencil, ready to take notes. The first message was from a woman named Marion Rutter from Atlanta who wanted to hire Karch to look for her husband, Clyde, who hadn't come home from a kitchenware convention in Las Vegas. She was very worried and wanted someone to start looking for Clyde right away. Karch wrote down her name and number but wouldn't be calling back because for the moment he was booked.
The next two messages were both from Vincent Grimaldi. He sounded annoyed. He demanded that Karch check in with him right away.
Karch erased the messages and leaned back in his padded leather desk chair. He grabbed another handful of cereal and studied the two stacks of cash on his desk while he ate. He had gone to Jersey Paltz's apartment after the desert and used the dead man's keys to go in, open the strongbox he found in a closet and take the money. One stack was $ 8,000 in one-hundred-dollar bills. The other stack was $4,480 in twenties. Karch figured the $ 8,000 belonged to Grimaldi. Minus the $ 550 Karch had accumulated so far in expenses – $ 500 to Cannon for the Flamingo video trail and $ 50 to Iverson for the plate run. Make it an even $ 600 to cover gas and other incidentals, he decided. The other stack Karch was going to keep free and clear. It had not been part of the caper at the Cleo. It had apparently been Paltz's own savings.
He put what was his into one of the desk drawers, which he then locked with a key. He took out a preprinted and generic invoice form and wrote out a receipt for the $ 7,400 he would be returning to Grimaldi. He did not put his name anywhere on the form. When he was finished he folded the money inside the receipt and put it in an envelope he then slid into the inside pocket of his coat.
He sat motionless at the desk for a few moments wondering if he should have deducted more money to cover the trip he knew he would be making to Los Angeles. He finally decided against it and got up and came around the desk to the row of file cabinets beneath the blowup photo of the Sands going down. He unlocked a drawer with a key, looked through the files until he found the one he wanted and then went back to the desk with it.
The file was labeled FREELING, MAX. Karch opened it on the desk and spread the contents out. There were several police reports and handwritten pages of notes. There was also a packet of carefully folded and yellowed newspaper clippings. He opened these and read the one with the largest headline. It had been on the front page of the Las Vegas Sun six-and-a-half years before.
"HIGH-ROLLER ROBBER"
PLUNGES TO DEATH
BY DARLENE GUNTER
Sun Staff Writer A man authorities believe to have been responsible for a string of hotel room burglaries of high rollers at Strip casinos jumped to his death early Wednesday when faced with certain capture in a penthouse suite at the Cleopatra Resort and Casino.
The man's body crashed through the casino's signature atrium ceiling, sending glass showering on players at 4:30 A. M. The body landed on an unused craps table and the incident caused a momentary panic among those in the casino. However, authorities said no one was hurt in the incident other than the man who fell.
Metro police spokesmen said the suspect, identified as 34-year-old Maxwell James Freeling of Las Vegas, fell twenty floors after crashing through the window of a penthouse suite when he was confronted by a Cleopatra security agent who had set up a sting operation to nab him.
It was unclear late Wednesday why Metro police were not involved in the sting operation. Also unclear was why Freeling chose to jump through the window in a fatal effort to avoid capture.
Vincent Grimaldi, the casino's chief of security, was close-lipped about the incident but expressed relief that it occurred during a time when the casino was at its least crowded.
"We were just lucky it happened when it happened," Grimaldi said. "There weren't many people in the casino at the time. If it had happened during a high-occupancy period, who knows what could have resulted."
Grimaldi said the casino would stay open while repairs were made to the atrium ceiling. He said a small portion of the playing area would have to be roped off during the repairs.
After Freeling's death a 26-year-old woman was taken into custody at the hotel and turned over to police officers. She was arrested when she ran to Freeling's body in the casino after his fall. Authorities said that it became obvious by her reactions that she was "involved" with Freeling in some capacity.
"If she had just split we probably wouldn't have ever known about her," said Metro detective Stan Knapp. "But she ran to the guy and gave herself away."
The woman, whom police declined to identify until charges are filed, was being questioned throughout the day Wednesday at Metro headquarters.
Police said that Freeling is believed to have been the highly skilled thief who struck eleven times in the last seven months at casino hotels on the Strip. In each case, a casino guest was robbed of cash and jewels in his or her hotel room by a thief who entered while they slept.
The thief was dubbed the "High-Roller Robber" by police because the targets were all "players" – hotel guests who wagered and won large amounts of cash. The estimated take from the eleven capers was in excess of $300,000, according to police sources.