A Door in the River by Inger Ash Wolfe Page A

Smoked glass gave the casino an intimate nighttime feel, and as she approached the inner doors, she could also feel the soothing blast of air-conditioning from within. One of the casino’s security guards was standing beside a podium and stepped out toward them as they reached the inner doors. “Is thereanything wrong, Constable Bellecourt?” His uniform was too big on him.
    “No,” she said, “not at all. This is Detective Inspector Micallef, and she’s just here to have a look-see.”
    The guard offered his hand. “Jesus,” Hazel muttered as she shook it.
    “Now, ma’am, I hope you won’t be gambling while on duty! That would be against provincial laws.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Hazel said. “I just wanted to look around.”
    “Well,” he said, “normally, you’d need a player’s card to go in. It’s a members-only casino, but anyone can be a member.”
    “Where’s the fun in that?” she said. “If just
anyone
can be a member?”
    The guard smiled warmly at her. “That’s just the rules here, ma’am.” He stepped aside and let them pass.
    The moment they entered the casino proper, the dark silence of the foyer was cancelled by an eruption of sound and light. Electronic bells clanged, chips clacked against each other, voices rose. And although it was much cooler in here – as she began to walk between the banks of slot machines with Constable Bellecourt exactly two steps behind her – she also detected little ribbons of sour heat coming off the machines and the people who worked them. Overheating transistors and flop sweat. There was a seizure-inducing scintillation of light everywhere.
    Bellecourt leaned into toward her and said into her ear, “Dr. Brett is a nice guy, huh?”
    “A prince.” She tried to put a bit more distance between them, but from the sounds of the constable’s footfalls, she was keeping up.
    It was a huge room, at least the size of a football field. It looked like it could hold five thousand people. As she walked toward the back, she saw, through a cut-out in one of the walls, that there was a little poker room with men in it gathered around tables. She turned away and walked toward the table games. Men and women sat or stood around these tables, throwing dice or placing bets on green felt. The occasional hoot of triumph broke through the low-level hum of disappointment. As if a sound were being played through individual speakers scattered throughout the area, she heard the same defeated groan go up in one place and then another. There was something … 
damp
about the whole place, as if everything and everyone in it had been swabbed down with a moist, dirty cloth.
    She paused at the craps table, which had raised sides and a playing field within it. She watched the impenetrable ritual, and the people participating in it watched her and Constable Bellecourt nervously. One man rolled the dice while others looked on and sometimes everyone cheered and sometimes a few people cheered and others emitted the defeated groan. And then sometimes, the three-man crew running the game would suddenly take allthe chips and the baize would be left bare. She shook her head in wonder and walked toward where there had been a huge roar. This was a roulette table with people standing around one side of it three deep, and the croupier was shouting, “Twenty-three black! Big winner!”
    Hazel leaned over the shoulders of the people at the rear of the crowd and saw the croupier putting a heavy Plexiglas cylinder on top of a pile of green chips. The croupier was bringing out a big pile of purple chips and stacking them at the back.
    “Two-hundred straight up pays seven thousand,” he said, and he pushed the purple chips onto 23.
    “It’s a lot of money,” said Bellecourt, and Hazel involuntarily brought her shoulders up around her ears. “Unfortunately, it has the steepest edge in the house and people who get hooked on the game lose a lot of money.” They stepped away from the