apologize. Repeat them, and I’ll do my best. But I don’t need to know any more than I do.”
“Who said you had a choice?” snapped Salateri.
Peter Buckley gave a deprecating smile and said, “You think we’re going to tell you something that will make you a liability. That’s perceptive, but I’m afraid there’s nothing we could tell you that would make you more vulnerable than you already are.” A moment went by. “Now you’re thinking that we’re going to tell you something intended to give you a better appreciation for the importance of Pete Hatcher: what we win if we win, what we lose if we lose. If that happened we wouldn’t be sorry, but that’s not why you’re here. We’re hoping that if we tell you more, you’ll think of new ways to help us.”
“I’ll try,” said Seaver.
“You know we gave Pete Hatcher quite an education,” said Foley. “We started him in personnel with Stella. Then we had him work customer service on the hotel side for a while. First the tennis shop, then he was a starter at the golf course. Then we shifted him to the casino side. He worked the floor as a runner for the pit bosses.” He turned to his partners. “Help me here.”
“Finance,” said Buckley. “First purchasing, then accounts. Then I think it was entertainment.”
“Right,” said Salateri. “Ticket sales, then booking.” He glared at Seaver. “I think that was when we sent him to you.”
Seaver nodded.
“Then we started promoting him. He seemed to have potential,” said Buckley. “He was young, not a genius, but not stupid. He didn’t care how hard he had to work, he seemed to get by just fine. He had one rare and special gift. That was the way he got along with people. Everybody liked Pete Hatcher: grandmas, little kids, people from foreign countries who might interpret some normal gesture as an insult.”
Salateri looked as though he were sucking on something sour. “We gave him a taste of everything. We trusted him with little things, then tried bigger things. He never let us down.”
Buckley sighed wistfully. “We began to rely on him. That was where we got into trouble. Las Vegas is a special place. There’s never been anything like it in the world. When the country goes into a recession, we do better. People flock here in the summer, when you can burn your hand on the roof of a car. Sometimes it seems as though the laws of economics don’t apply here. But they do.”
“This is a business like any other,” said Foley. “If this company is going to survive, it has to diversify, expand, form alliances. Staying put means dying. We’ve presented Pleasure Island as a family attraction. We may have done ourselves incalculable good for the future, but in the meantime, it has cut the number of dollars we take in per customer. Kids don’t spend much. All they use is the beds and the food, which we practically give away to attract business.”
“We’ve looked into other areas,” said Buckley.
Foley said, “One we’ve been studying is off-site gambling. The attraction is obvious. At some point, the number of people who can fly here and bring serious money to the tables will reach a peak. Other companies have already figured out that they can start casinos near big population centers—first in New Jersey, then on riverboats in the Midwest, then Indian reservations. Each casino somewhere else clogs one healthy artery and turns the flow from there into a trickle. So we looked into growing some new arteries.”
“You’re thinking of building more casinos? When?”
Foley shrugged. “This has been in the works for several years. After some study, we decided that the most promising idea was Indian reservations. We put fifteen reservations under scrutiny, and came up with one we want.”
“Where is it?”
“Upstate New York. Draw a triangle from Rochester to Buffalo to Niagara Falls, and it’s in the middle. It’s less than two hundred miles from Cleveland and Toronto, less than four hundred from New York and Philadelphia, less than five hundred from Baltimore, Detroit, Hartford, Indianapolis. It sits just off the New York State Thruway. If you go by car from one of those cities to the other, you may very well have to go past it.”
Seaver looked at the three men, keeping his expression empty. He had no way of knowing whether it was a good idea or madness.
Buckley seemed to read his mind. “You’re thinking that we’re not exactly diversifying. But we are. Think of a full-service world-class resort. Casinos and hotels, of course. That’s our strength. Only this time they would be exclusive, on land only we had access to. But best of all, we could offer things that nobody else can do, anywhere.”
“You could?”
“An Indian reservation is a peculiar place, in the law. They can already sell tax-free gas and cigarettes. Why not foreign cars? High-ticket jewelry? Designer clothes? Appliances? Besides the tariffs, the sales tax in New York is eight and a half percent.”
“Are you saying that’s legal?”
“It hasn’t been tried yet. We think we could use the precedent of those companies that sell tickets to police benefits. As long as they give a cent to the police, they can keep ninety-nine for overhead and profit. We give a cent to the Indians and they still make millions a year. This could all be in the open. But what would not be in the open is even more intriguing. Indians have exclusive hunting and fishing rights on their land, with no external regulation. We could have live hunts with game we release: bag a rhino in Upstate New York. We could build a private port a few miles north, on Lake Ontario, connect it to the resort by rail, and offer cruises: package tours for Mom and the kids. For Dad, maybe a members-only junket with high-stakes games and even some exotic companionship. We could rotate girls in and out maybe once a week. The port would also give us access to the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Atlantic. We could take anything out, bring anything in.” He looked sad. “It was all intriguing. Very intriguing.”
Seaver shook his head. “I never heard a word about any of this. I’m amazed.”
The three smiled. “The world is a complicated place,” said Foley. “No one head can carry all of the pieces.”
“What about Hatcher’s? Is this what he knew?”
Salateri muttered something to himself that could have been a curse. “Hatcher knew nothing about this, because none of it has happened yet.”
“There have been delays,” said Foley. “The Indians have to accept the idea, and we haven’t really approached them yet, just left our card, you might say. First we needed to do feasibility studies, find out what wasn’t possible, then make it possible. The big delay has to do with the Indian Gaming Act. The federal law says that gambling is okay under conditions established by the state where the reservation is. Before we go handing money to a bunch of Indians we needed to be sure that we could get the state legislature’s approval. And we had to make friends in Albany and Washington.”
“How do you do that?”
Buckley smiled. “We’ll have to learn about the Indians—keep them in the dark while we study them. Politicians, on the other hand, are a tribe whose customs we know.”
“Hatcher handled the payouts,” Salateri blurted.
Seaver frowned. “I thought he didn’t know anything.”
Salateri scowled defensively. “It was all indirect. We didn’t want to see a videotape with a time and date in the corner and a shot of Hatcher counting out hundred-dollar bills to some New York politician in a hotel room. We set up a fund.”
“What kind of fund—cash?”
Buckley said, “It was a corporation that received some of its money in cash. We had a lot of land—here, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles—which we sold to the corporation for an imaginary sum before we brought Pete in. We converted various plots to parking lots—put asphalt over them. Pete was in charge of taking the money we said came in, and paying it to people we said were investors or creditors. He paid it to other corporations, middlemen, girlfriends, relatives, some to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.”
“And Hatcher didn’t know what he was doing?”
“Never,” said Foley.
Salateri said, “He might have suspected that the money that started the corporation came fresh from the casino tables. There were a couple of times when he told us the numbers on the official slips were lower than the count that night. Max told him that it was because we needed a lot of cash in the vault in case somebody hit the million-dollar jackpot on the big slot. That way we could take publicity pictures of the guy up to his ass in hundreds.
