Free You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) by Stuart M. Kaminsky

arm. My first level of disguise had certainly been penetrated. I had been taken for a clown instead of an idiot.
    She guided me around black jack and poker tables to the roulette wheel in the far left corner.
    “We work in chips,” she whispered. “Fives, tens, twenties and fifties. You pay me, and I give the chips. You turn in what you have, if anything, when you leave. I usually get a tip.”
    “I’ll start with fifty bucks in fives,” I said. I counted out fifty-five and shook the last five indicating it was a tip. Her mask grin stayed put. Instead of sitting at the table, I watched her walk to the bartender, who took the cash and handed her the chips. The barkeep immediately took my money through the door behind the bar.
    The blonde came back, gave me ten white chips, patted my shoulder and said, “Find me if you need more chips. The guys in red are the waiters. Just call them if you want to order a drink. You can pay them in cash or chips.”
    There were seven or eight players at the roulette table. The first thing I noticed was the croupier, who never smiled and whose voice never changed. He was a thin guy with a tux and a little mustache. As the night wore on, his French accent disappeared.
    I squeezed in next to a tall, lean guy in his early thirties, wearing a perfectly tailored suit with a neat white monogrammed handkerchief in the pocket. He smoked his cigarette in a pearl holder and seemed slightly amused by the table, which didn’t look in the least funny to me.
    “How you doing?” I said, pushing a white chip on the black.
    The lean guy looked at me with a raised eyebrow and answered with an upper crust English accent that seemed somehow wrong for Cicero.
    “I’m losing,” he said, “but through my losses I’m developing a plan. All it takes is money and a great deal of patience.”
    He lost his red chip and I lost my white one.
    “You have enough money and patience?” I sniffled.
    “A reasonable supply of the former and an almost infinite supply of the latter. Fortunately, I’m obsessed with the Romantic fantasy that I will someday break the bank and save the British Empire.”
    We both lost again. He didn’t appear to mind. I decided he was imitating George Sanders playing a cad, or maybe George Sanders imitated this guy when he played a cad. English’s superior sneer seemed permanently fixed under a once broken nose, which added a soldier-of-fortune air to his good looking long face.
    My next monumental sneeze raised a grumble from a be-ringed matron on my right. I blew my nose and lost five bucks more in atonement. English raised his right hand elegantly, and a waiter who had been stuffed into a maroon jacket two sizes too small galloped over on the dark tile floor. The slot machines provided his musical accompaniment.
    “Have you a halfway decent wine?” English asked him, making clear what he expected the answer to be by the doubting arch of his brow.
    “Yeah,” said the waiter, confirming his assumption.
    English handed the waiter a white chip and told him to bring a glass of wine, preferably something French from the Loire, with a glass of orange juice and a raw egg.
    The waiter said, “Right,” and walked away. English leaned over to me.
    “He’ll come back with Chianti,” he said, losing ten bucks more on number seven.
    I skipped a couple of spins and looked around the room for someone who might be Gino or for Nitti’s men. If Gino was there, I decided, he was behind that door on the other side of the bar. Even if I could make it past the enormous barkeep, I had a feeling things were behind that door that could cause me grief.
    The wine, juice, and egg arrived. English held the dark glass to his nose and frowned.
    “California, no more than a year old,” he sighed. “But it will have to do. Actually it has to be swallowed quickly, so it doesn’t matter if there’s nothing to savor.”
    With all eyes on him including that of the croupier, he cracked the egg into the