by Jan Brogan
“Of course,” I said. “But does it bother you that the police haven’t released the results of the forensics report? That they won’t even say whether Delria is a possible suspect?”
Nadine looked over her shoulder at her son, and I got the sense that even medicated, she could see right through my questions. “He’s still unconscious, from what I understand. That limits what the police can do.”
I asked a few more questions about the police handling of the case to try to convince her that this was the point of the interview, but her expression remained wary and her answers cautious. Finally, I shifted to a completely nonthreatening topic. “So how long was your husband involved in veterans’ organizations?”
Nadine answered my questions without enthusiasm or elaboration. “Forever.” When I asked if Barry had ever worried about crime in the neighborhood, she offered, “Not lately,” and glanced up at a swirl of cigarette smoke that had drifted our way. The kettle whistled and Drew stubbed out his cigarette and served us tea. I’d swallowed the sugar that sinks to the bottom of the cup before Nadine finally warmed up to my effort to draw her out.
“When I was researching that profile I wrote, the owner of the Wayland Square bookstore made a point of telling me what a good husband Barry was.”
Nadine gave me kind of a wry smile, her first real expression.
“And what a devoted father,” I added.
Drew cleared his throat. She gave him a stern look. “Yes. A devoted father. A good husband. A good man.” She told me how hard he’d worked in the stores. Then, with a deliberate look over her shoulder at Drew, she added that Barry had always been determined not to force any of his kids into the family business the way his own father had forced him.
Drew, who was leaning against the kitchen counter, shifted his weight and folded his arms in front of his chest. He stared back at his mother, refusing her demand for gratitude.
I pretended not to notice. “Is that why he sold the stores?”
“Partly,” Nadine said, shifting her gaze back to me. The silent exchange with her son had sobered her. And now that she didn’t seem so sedated, I could see that she was an intelligent woman. “And partly because in the early nineties, when all that crack was around, a cash business was more dangerous.”
Drew cleared his throat again. But when I looked at him, he quickly looked away.
“So you believe his murder was random?” I tried to sound as if this question had just occurred to me.
Something flickered in her eyes. She glanced again at Drew, who stared back at her with his arms still folded.
“Or is it possible someone might have been out to get your husband?” I pressed.
“What are you trying to say?” Drew interrupted.
I met Nadine’s eyes. She was waiting for an answer. I began to talk too fast, a wild race to persuade. “I’ve heard that your husband might have had a gambling problem, and I can understand how you wouldn’t want to talk about that right now. But I have a confidential source who says your husband was in debt to loan sharks. And if his murder was caused by his gambling debts—if that was the motive—it’s going to come out during the trial anyway. And it might be an important message to get out right now—before the state votes on whether to legalize gambling.”
Nadine’s once vague eyes were now full of focus, full of energy. “My husband didn’t have any gambling problems,” she said directly into the microphone. With a sharp look at Drew, she added, “And at the moment, I don’t really give a damn about how the state votes on casino gambling.” Then she reached for the tape recorder, turning it twice in her hand to find the button to snap it off. Then she stood up.
I stood up, too. I was a half inch taller than she was but felt dwarfed by her suddenly imposing figure. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m well aware that my husband was not the perfect saint you wrote about in Sunday’s paper,” she said. “But he was not in any kind of gambling trouble.”
Drew was suddenly behind me, his hand on my arm. “I think it’s time you left.”
I picked up my tape recorder swiftly, along with my notebook, and protectively slipped them both into my bag. “I’m sorry if I upset you,” I said to Nadine, but she wouldn’t look at me. Her gaze was fixed downward, at the table, the painted tile.
I let Drew lead me to the door, watching as he unlocked both the inner and the storm doors.
“Please,” he said, as I stepped out into the cold air, “if you were really ever any friend of my father’s, don’t write anything about him in the paper—good or bad.”
I sat on the stool in my kitchen ignoring the half-eaten bowl of cereal I’d poured myself for dinner and stared at the pile of scratch tickets on the bar. They were the scratch tickets I’d bought the night Barry was murdered, and couldn’t bring myself to play. It had seemed horribly wrong to try to win money, to gain something from that evening. And yet, I’d jumped at the lead Leonard had given me, was willing to use Barry’s murder, his gambling problems, to get myself on the investigative team.
I picked up a ticket: the Caesar’s Palace game. Barry had said it was “hot off the presses.” The left side featured little roulette tables and the right side showed dice. You could win by matching the winning number, by getting a seven or an eleven in the dice, or by scratching a $$ symbol on the roulette side. The odds suddenly seemed absurd.
I’d gone out on a limb, pitching a story I couldn’t prove to a bunch of editors who didn’t particularly want to believe me. What on earth made me think I could walk into the widow’s house and have her confirm her husband’s vice?
I studied the bottom half of the card: the gray latex coating that separated you from your good luck, from your losses. I remembered the look of concern in Barry’s eyes when I’d bought all these tickets at once. The reckless impulse he had recognized.
The image of Nadine Mazursky rose before me. The momentary clearing of her grief as she talked about what a good husband Barry had been, followed by her outrage when she realized what I’d really been after. Had I shown any sensitivity at all, or had I just barreled into the interview with my accusations?
I dropped the ticket back on the pile, unscratched. My big shot at the investigative team was finished. No way was I going to get anyone in the Mazursky family to trust me again. Maybe I should have stuck to cocktail waitressing. Maybe I should never have left Boston.
I stood up. My legs felt cramped and sore from running too many miles that morning, but I was too antsy to stay in one place. I wanted to be anywhere but alone in my apartment.
I thought of the instant camaraderie I’d experienced at the casino. The strange clearheadedness, the sheer energy of the air, the elation when the cards worked in your favor.
It occurred to me that it was Thursday. On the last Thursday of the month, my mother and aunt routinely took the bus from Worcester in the late afternoon and stayed at Fox-woods until about eleven. It was only six o’clock, and the casino was only about an hour’s drive away. I told myself it was the perfect opportunity, a chance to combine daughterly duty with a much needed escape.
Foxwoods looked like it had come out of a crayon box: an inviting castlelike structure rising from the hills in unlikely shades of aqua and lavender. Inside, I was swept into a play-land of brightly patterned carpeting, old-fashioned Victorian facades with candy-pink trim. Mixing into the crowd, I felt energized and grabbed what looked like a board-game map of the place from a woman at an information booth. I remembered that my mother liked one area of slot machines better than the others, but couldn’t remember the name. Finally, after about a half-hour search through the main floor, I found my mother in what was called the Great Cedar Casino.
She stood between two slot machines, a bucket of change on one of the seats and her purse saving the other. She was feeding two quarters into each machine with a look of intense concentration.
A frugal woman of German extraction, Elsbeth Ahern had never so much as played church bingo until four yea
rs ago when she and my father took their first cruise together. My mother discovered that there was a casino onboard and on her very first quarter, she won $750. When my father died, after a year and a half in a nursing home, he left substantial debts. The only luxury my mother allowed herself were these monthly bus trips to the casino with my aunt.
My mother was not a woman who showed a lot of surprise. There was no double take or exclamation about this unexpected meeting at the casino. She accepted my explanation that I had research to do on a story and had timed my visit to see her, gave me a quick kiss, and returned her concentration to the slot machine. But she halted her play a moment later and looked at me suspiciously when I said I was going to head to the blackjack tables. “Since when do you play blackjack?” she asked.
I considered boasting about my beginner’s luck, my winnings the week before. Instead, I heard myself say: “Barry, the guy who was killed, was a big blackjack player, and I’ve always wanted to give it a try.”
Something in this answer alarmed her. Her eyes narrowed so intently on me that, for a moment, there was no clinking change or cheers of fortune—just a painfully protracted maternal silence.
“What?” I asked.
At seventy, my mother was an amazingly fit, strong-shouldered woman who commanded the space around her. Gamblers did not bump into her with drinks in their hands and no one tried to horn in on her machines. “Let me show you how I gamble.” She opened her purse and withdrew two small cosmetic bags. One of them was filled with coins. The other was empty.
“I bring forty dollars each time I come,” she said, pointing to the full bag. “If I win anything from the machine, it goes into that bag.” She pointed to the empty one. “None of the winnings ever go back into the machine, do you understand?”
I was not in the mood for a lecture. But Aunt Cecilia, my mother’s younger sister, was three machines away and stopped her play to give me a look: Don’t argue with her, the look said.
My mother was an absolutist who lived her life efficiently by never considering shades of gray. But my aunt was right, it was best to nod and accept the black-and-whiteness of her rules. For one thing, she had an eerie way of being right. For another, she would not back off until you capitulated.
“I know. I know. Never gamble more than you can afford to lose,” I said.
But this wasn’t good enough. She shook her head vehemently. “You think that little slogan is going to help you? No. You can’t make a decision about how much you can afford to lose when you’re in the middle of the action. You have to set your limits before you start to play.”
I nodded solemnly to show that I was not just following along, but was in complete agreement.
“You come with forty dollars or so, money you budgeted for entertainment, because that’s what this is, entertainment. And when your original forty dollars is gone, you go home.” She stopped for a moment and looked fondly at her slot machine. “Even if you win the jackpot.”
My aunt, a younger, thinner version of my mother, shook her head vigorously in agreement.
“Of course,” I said. “I can’t stay as late as you guys anyway. I’ve got work tomorrow.”
My mother smiled and all sternness disappeared from her face. She was a handsome woman with wide Teutonic cheekbones and a decided chin, the only thing I’d inherited in an otherwise Irish face. When she relaxed and let up on the rules, she was entirely lovable. I kissed her for luck and left the cacophony of clinking coins, headed for the gaming tables.
After chain-smoking beside me all night long, the man next to me had the audacity to give me a dirty look when I pointed to my hand and asked to be hit again.
“You sure?” another woman at the table asked.
I had thirteen and the dealer had two threes. By asking for another card, I was violating basic strategy, the mathematical equation that was supposed to reduce the favored odds of the dealer. Even the dealer looked at me as if it was a bad move.
In an hour and a half of play, I’d managed to lose almost the entire $450 in winnings from the week before. My last $25 was on the felt, the dealer was already at eighteen, and I desperately needed a win to remain at the table.
The dealer straightened her embroidered cuff, giving me a second to change my mind. Another waft of cigarette smoke from the man beside me blew into my eyes.
“Hit me,” I said, with authority. The dealer flipped the card over slowly, as if to emphasize my mistake. A king. The guy next to me gave me a look of disgust, and the dealer swept my last $25 away.
I felt weak looking at the empty space where my chips had been. What had I done? I considered going back to the ATM, but I had just enough left to live on until my next paycheck. Still, I did not want to leave the table, did not want to admit defeat.
I glanced back at the bright pink exit sign and saw my mother and aunt marching past the baccarat tables toward me. The night was clearly over. I summoned all the bravado I could find. “I’ll be back,” I said to my fellow gamblers. They did not look impressed.
“We’re going for ice cream; do you want ice cream?” my mother asked.
I did not want ice cream. More important, I didn’t want to detail to my mother, or even to myself, how much money I’d lost. “Early day tomorrow,” I said, throwing my purse over my shoulder.
“Did you win?” Aunt Cecilia asked.
“Broke even,” I said, taking a step away from the table so none of my fellow gamblers could hear me. I wasn’t lying actually. I had broken even if you counted my total gambling experience with the Mohegan Sun winnings.
Luckily, my mother had scored $250 at her favorite machine and was beaming too much to detect any rationalizations. My aunt was preoccupied with the upcoming ice cream. They had finished gambling for the night. With a full hour to kill before their bus, they insisted on walking me to the elevator to the parking garage before heading back to Scoops.
My mother’s handbag looked heavy, as if weighted with coin, and her walk, after a long night, was slower than usual. But I noticed that my aunt, who had nerve damage in her leg, hardly seemed to be limping. When I mentioned this, she responded, “Even when I lose, this place takes my mind off the pain. My doctor calls it my therapy.”
“Therapy for old people,” my mother quickly added as she pecked my cheek good-bye. “Not for the young.”
* * *
By the time I crossed the border from Connecticut to Rhode Island, I was feeling better. I’d been stupid, let myself lose too much money, but I’d been tense from the beginning and distracted with my mother and aunt there. Who in their right mind could concentrate under those conditions?
The heat in the Honda had two settings, zero and sauna. I’d already flipped it on and off three times. So I couldn’t make an extra payment on the loan to my mother, the way I’d wanted. It’s not like she knew about the Mohegan Sun winnings. On a net basis, I hadn’t actually lost anything from my bank account. It wasn’t like I’d have to miss a car payment or anything.
I pushed the radio button preprogrammed for WKZI but couldn’t make out anything because of the static. It was twenty more miles before I recognized the grandfatherly voice of Gregory Ayers, the lottery guy, who was apparently the night’s guest on Leonard’s show. “Legalized gambling will dramatically decrease lottery revenue from video slots and keno. When you figure the social costs of casino gambling, it’s not a gain. It’s a loss.”
Hearing his voice, I felt cheated. What happened to all that good luck I was supposed to get from rubbing his sleeve? In one incredibly crummy day, I’d lost $450 and my shot at the investigative team.
I felt the pressure of the day building behind my eyes, and I had to focus hard on the road ahead of me. Jennifer Trowbridge, the woman from Evening Star Gaming International who’d been dining with the mayor, was Ayers’s counterpoint. She had the confident, educated tone of someone who did a lot of arguing on national media. “How can you possibly imply that one form of gambling is okay and another is immoral?
”
“It’s not a matter of morality, but practicality,” Gregory Ayers replied. “The state retains more control over the games in a state lottery than in a privately run casino.”
I didn’t care about the referendum—the question wasn’t about whether gambling was right or wrong, but who got to run it—the state lottery, or the Narragansett Indians. Why shouldn’t the Narragansett, who’d been massacred so brutally in the Great Swamp Fight, be allowed to team up with Evening Star Gaming to run their own casino? As long as the state got its cut, why shouldn’t the Narragansetts get as rich as the Pequots in Connecticut?
But I did care about why Barry was murdered, and that the mayor was trying to cover it up to make sure he got his waterfront redevelopment and the graft that comes with it.
Ayers began reciting statistics. “More than seven million Americans can be classified as problem gamblers. That’s a five-billion-dollar drain on the economy. Around Foxwoods, the crime rate has increased three hundred percent—”
Leonard interrupted. “You mean the kind of crime we saw last week with that Wayland Square shooting? I’ve tried to get the attorney general on the air to talk about that murder, but he’s not returning my calls. They’re being very quiet about that case, have you noticed?”
Gregory Ayers had not noticed. Or more likely, he did not want to piss off the attorney general. “We don’t need to speculate about cases we don’t know are related,” he said. “We have plenty of hard data about Atlantic City and Las Vegas and Ledyard—”
Leonard cut him off midsentence to repeat the station’s phone number. “Lines are free, and we want to hear from you: Do you think Providence police are dragging their heels on the Wayland Square shooting?”
He was practically begging. I looked at the car clock. It was 10:30. Why wasn’t anyone calling in? It occurred to me that there might be a PC basketball game on television tonight. Still, it was very quiet. Where was Tom of Woonsocket, or Eva of North Kingstown, or Andre of Cranston?
