Free Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) by Bill Pronzini Page B

said, “just over a hundred years ago. Bet you didn’t know that.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “In 1887. Guy named Charley Fey, had a machine shop on Howard Street. Called his first slot the Liberty Bell. It had three reels—horseshoes, spades, diamonds, hearts, and bells. Took a nickel, paid off up to twenty nickels if you lined up three bells. He rented them out to a bunch of saloons on Market, the Embarcadero, and the Barbary Coast. Fey had a lock on the slot machine business for twenty years, until a Chicago manufacturer, Herbert Mills, invented the first iron-cased slot—”
    “Joe, you’re wasting all of that on me. You know so much about gambling, why don’t you write a book?”
    “I am writing one,” he said. “Comprehensive history of gambling in the U.S. I’ll have it done this year.”
    “Good for you. Send me a copy when it’s published.”
    “Like hell I will. You cheap bastard, you can go out and buy a copy just like all my other friends.”
    After we’d rung off, I tucked the contract into an envelope and locked up the office. Jerry Polhemus was the person I wanted to talk to now. He was the vault: he had at least some of the answers hidden away inside himself. Find a way to unlock him and I’d have them too. But when I got to his building on Ninth Avenue, he wasn’t home. Or if he was, he was not answering his bell.
    Allyn Burnett lived in Glen Park, not far from Diamond Heights; I made her apartment building my last stop on the way to Kerry’s. She was still home, and she signed the contract and gave me a check to cover the first two days of my employment. But she didn’t have any answers to the questions I asked her. Her brother had never mentioned the names Manny or Arthur Welker, or Ekhern Manufacturing. No, as far as she knew he had never gambled exclusively at the Coliseum Club in Reno or the Nevornia in Stateline; he’d said something to her once about liking to club-hop because he felt it changed his luck. And she was amazed when I told her that he’d evidently taken his jackpot winnings in cash; she had “absolutely no clue” why he would have done such a thing.
    Dead end for Saturday.
    Tomorrow I would try to connect with Jerry Polhemus again —and see if I could crack him wide open.

Chapter 8
    ON SUNDAY MORNINGS I like to stay in bed late. Read the paper with my coffee, the only day I bother with it; one day out of seven is all the current events I can stand. Read a book or a pulp magazine, watch an old movie on TV or on tape. It’s especially nice if Kerry is there, too, because Sunday morning is a good time for making love or just sharing space. And it’s best of all when we’re in her bed because it and the room always smell clean and fresh, scented with her perfume. My bed has a vague musty smell, even with clean sheets, that I have never been able to identify. The effluvium of fifty-seven years of hard living, maybe.
    This should have been a fine Sunday morning, because it started off in Kerry’s bed. But it didn’t turn out that way. At nine-thirty she got a call from Jim Carpenter, one of her bosses, who wanted her to come down to the agency for some kind of emergency meeting on one of her accounts. Even when you’re a senior copywriter, you don’t say no to the boss; so she went. There had been a time when I was jealous of Jim Carpenter, because he was handsome and suave and well-mannered and an impeccable dresser—all the things I’m not—and because I knew he had a letch for Kerry and had made more than one sophisticated pass at her. I wasn’t jealous anymore, though. If she had wanted Jim Carpenter, she could have had him at any time during the three months I was chained to that cabin wall—for comfort and strength, if for no other reason. But she hadn’t wanted him or any other man; she had remained faithful to me. I’m damned if I know what a woman like her sees in a man like me, but I am eternally grateful for her love. Now more than ever.
    After