Detective

off. “What should I call it?”
    “Are there more than one?”
    “No.”
    “Then why not call it the gambling joint?”
    “Right. Anyway, I went to the gambling joint, and you know how it is.”
    “I don’t. Why don’t you tell me?”
    “Well, the first few times I won. Not big, but I won. Maybe fifty, or a hundred. Once over three hundred.”
    “And then?”
    “Then I started to lose. The more I bet, the more I lost, and the more I lost, the more I bet.”
    “What were you playing?”
    “Roulette.”
    “You think the wheel was rigged?”
    “Sure it was.”
    “Then why’d you keep playing?”
    “Because—I didn’t—I mean, I did, but—it’s really hard to explain. You wouldn’t understand.”
    “Yeah. I would. So what happened?”
    “Well, I got in over my head. See, some nights, when I got cleaned out, since I was sort of a regular there, Mr.—” He broke off. “The guy who ran the place,” he explained.
    “Bambi,” I said.
    “Right,” he said. “Anyway, since I was a regular there, Bambi would give me credit. You know, he took my marker.”
    “Yeah.”
    “And, of course, having a credit line made it easier to bet higher. I mean, if I dropped five or six hundred in the course of an evening, I could always put my marker down and go double-or-nothing on red or black.”
    “There was no limit?”
    “Technically, there was a house limit of one grand on any single bet.”
    “You say technically?”
    “Yeah. In a special case, you could go over that.”
    “You have any special cases?”
    “A few.”
    “Ever win one?”
    “No.”
    “Go on.”
    “Anyway, as I said, I got in way over my head and then Mr., uh, Bambi called in the marker.”
    “For how much?”
    Despite the fact that I had assured him I was not his mother, he could not quite bring himself to meet my eyes.
    “Fifty-six grand.”
    I didn’t tell him he was a bad boy or threaten to cut off his allowance. “So what did you do?”
    “What could I do?” he said, looking at me ingratiatingly. “I don’t have that kind of money, and I didn’t know where to get it.”
    “What do you do for a living?” I asked him.
    “O.K. to mention names?” he said, hopefully.
    “Unless it’s involved in the case.”
    “Oh.”
    “Is it?”
    “Only indirectly,” he said. “So what shall I call it?”
    “How about ‘the firm I work for’?” I suggested with just a trace of irony. “All right,” I went on. “You ran up some gambling debts. You embezzled money from the firm you work for to cover them. Then you got faced with an audit. You were afraid your embezzlement would be discovered. You needed money fast. Then what?”
    He stared at me. “How do you know all of that?”
    “What else?” I told him. “So what did you do?”
    “Well, I told, uh, Dumbo, and he happened to know a loan shark who was willing to cover the whole amount.”
    “At a modest interest, no doubt.”
    “Yeah. It was backbreaking, but what could I do? It bought me time. I covered the shortage, and then I started to work on paying off the loan.”
    “Which you couldn’t do?”
    “No, I was handling it.”
    “Then what went wrong?”
    “Well, one day I went to pay off this guy and he tells me I don’t owe him any more.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah. He says some guy bought out my loan.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No. He says he owed the guy money, so the guy took my marker.”
    “What guy?”
    “Bambi.”
    “Oh. I see.”
    “Yeah. See, it turns out this loan shark was pretty good friends with Bambi.”
    “What a surprise.”
    “What? Oh,” he smiled sheepishly and nodded. “Yeah. Well, anyway, Bambi told me he was sorry about the whole thing. It was just a coincidence. The guy owed him money and, since he couldn’t pay, he gave him my marker.”
    “And you believed him?”
    “No. Particularly when he told me something else. He said he knew I was in trouble and was going to have a hard time paying off the loan, but maybe he could help me.”
    “How?”
    “Well, it turns out he knew this other guy—” he looked at me.
    “Pluto,” I told him.
    “Who?”
    “Mickey Mouse’s dog.”
    “Right. Pluto. It turned out Pluto had some work he needed done and it would pay well and it was my chance to get out of the hole.”
    “What was the work?”
    “I’m coming to that.”
    “Today, I hope.”
    “O.K., O.K. Well, you see, one of the things about my job is that I have to travel a lot. And I hate to fly. I’m afraid of