drops half a grand an evening at your tables would be characterized in just those words.”
“That’s a high estimate.”
“Is it?” challenged Shayne.
“Quite high. On the other hand…” Griffin sighed deeply and spread out his hands. “She’s a woman, too, Shayne.”
“I have a certain feeling about that.” Shayne kept his eyes hooded as he turned the old-fashioned glass around and around on the desk in front of him. “Want to volunteer any information?” he demanded abruptly.
“About one of our steady customers?” Griffin sounded properly shocked.
Shayne said, “There’s an emerald bracelet missing.”
“I heard about that.”
“Is that all?” Shayne threw at him.
Alexander Griffin lifted one hand defensively. “I’m not a fence, Shayne.”
“Then you do think she had a hand in lifting it?”
Griffin hesitated a long time as though seeking exactly the right words with which to answer the detective. He took a long, contemplative pull at his highball, opened the center drawer of the desk and took out a blunt cigar. He lit it carefully and slowly.
“Mrs. Laura Peralta has been coming here two or three nights a week for the past six months, Shayne. She plays roulette exclusively. She buys twenty five-dollar chips and plays them, and then buys another twenty. Never more than five batches. She walks away from the table… a perfect lady… any time she has dropped her half grand. If she gets ahead and stays ahead, she cashes in around midnight. I’ve kept track… as we do in a place like this… and when she goes away ahead one night, she doesn’t buy extra chips the next time she shows up. Never any more than five hundred.”
Shayne frowned thoughtfully. “You say she cashes in around midnight, if she’s ahead. What if she’s behind, but still has some of her original stake at midnight?”
“Then she keeps on spreading chips around until she breaks or gets ahead,” said Griffin, promptly.
“Do you keep such minute records on all your customers, Alex?”
“You know we don’t. But you notice a woman like Mrs. Peralta. The house-men all get to know her and they begin talking about her. In all my years in the business I’ve never known another player who followed a line so exactly.”
“A good customer,” mused Shayne. He took a sip of cognac and made a rapid calculation. “Dropping several grand a month.”
“That’s about it.” Alexander Griffin’s voice was bland. “So you can see why we wouldn’t like it if… you did anything to disturb the set-up.”
“By ‘we’ you mean Joe Locke?”
“Joe’s the owner,” agreed Griffin. “I just work on a salary. Does that satisfy you?”
Three horizontal creases indented Shayne’s forehead. His left hand went up to the side of his head, and thumb and forefinger tugged, at his earlobe. His gray eyes were very bright and interested, and they fixed themselves on Griffin’s austere face across the desk from him.
“I don’t think so. You’re trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what it is.”
“I’m telling you to stay away from her, Shayne.”
“Why?” The redhead’s voice was dangerously calm.
Griffin started to reply angrily, but checked himself. He spread out his hands, palms upward, placatingly. “You can start asking questions, Shayne. I can’t stop you… I wouldn’t try to stop you. But, don’t.”
Shayne said, “Nuts. It’s good cognac, Griffin. I appreciate it.” He drained his glass and took a sip of ice-water, and then stood up.
“I’m going to ask Mrs. Peralta the questions. There’s only one answer I want from you, and I want it straight, Griffin. During the time Mrs. Peralta’s been coming here… has she ever gone over the line and plunged deeply?”
He replied flatly, “No. She’s never dropped more than five C’s any one night. She’s got ice-water in her veins, Shayne.”
“When it comes to gambling,” Shayne amplified harshly.
“Yeh. That’s what we were talking about, isn’t it?”
Shayne said, “That’s not what I’m going to be talking to her about. Thanks for the drink.” He turned away abruptly and went to the door with silence behind him.
The roulette room looked just the same as before. Shayne strolled across to the far table and stopped directly behind Laura Peralta who was seated at the end of it. She had a stack of a dozen or fifteen five-dollar chips in front of her. He watched over her shoulder while she spread six of them out in a seemingly haphazard pattern on combinations of the numbers closest to her. The ball went around while other, smaller bets, were being placed about the table, and settled into a slot at the upper end.
The croupier raked in Laura’s chips, and she listlessly played with the stack remaining in front of her. She turned her head and glanced sideways and up at Shayne with no start of surprise, as though she had known he was standing behind her.
She said, “Hello,” composedly. “It won’t be long now. This is my last stack.”
Shayne said, “It certainly won’t be long if you keep on playing them that way.”
The ball started around the wheel again, and she turned back to the table and began arranging chips again in the same haphazard manner. “Do you know a better way to play roulette, Mr. Shayne?” She hesitated pensively with her last two chips in her hand, then dropped them on a single number just an instant before the ball dropped into the zero.
Shayne said wryly, “There are betting systems that lose money a little more slowly.”
The croupier raked in her chips and she pushed her chair back and said to him, “Thank you for a pleasant evening, George.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Peralta. And good night.”
She turned to Shayne and asked challengingly, “Who wants to lose money slowly?”
Shayne shrugged. He took her arm and said, “I’ll buy you that drink.”
“Several drinks,” she amended, moving her rounded hip against his thigh as they went toward the archway.
“As many as you want.”
The door of the manager’s office was open, and Alexander Griffin stood on the threshold watching them go by together.
NINE
Outside the archway, Shayne hesitated, glancing down at his companion. The entrance to the cocktail lounge was directly in front of them. Laura Peralta squeezed his arm and turned him toward the outer doorway.
She said throatily, “Take me some place, Mike. Some place that’s rancid and depraved. You do know about the seamy side of life, don’t you?”
He grinned down at her, fumbling in his pocket for half a dollar and his hat check which he exchanged with the girl at the counter for his Panama. He told her gravely, “I’ll try to think of a joint that fits those descriptive adjectives.”
“Take your car,” she told him. “I think I’m going to get drunk tonight.”
“What about yours?”
“They’ll drive it home for me and leave it. Jimmy,” she called out to a parking lot attendant, “see that my car gets home.”
“Sure, Mrs. Peralta,” the attendant replied cheerfully, and Shayne led the way around a row of parked cars to Timothy Rourke’s nondescript heap. He said, “It sounds like a regular thing.”
She said, “If you mean do I usually go off with some man and leave my car here, the answer is ‘no,’ Mike. On the other hand,” she went on composedly as he opened the door for her, “I am a very favored customer and they
