“Yeah. Down in the basement,” Louie said.

  “All right, let’s go down to the basement then.”

  We went down the stairs, across the casino to a back door, and down into a cool basement. Louie switched on lights. “What you want first?” he asked.

  “How do they fix ‘em?”

  He said, “There’s lots of ways. They drill ‘em right here and stick in a piece of piano wire. Then the machine don’t lock off after each play, and they can keep pulling the handle until they milk the machine dry.

  “Or they can drill ‘em, stick in a wire, and pull down the trigger that releases the gold award. Or they can take a cup and slide it up through the pay slot. They play until they get a win, and the fingers start to work. Then they shove the cup up in the fingers. That keeps ‘em from closing, and they can milk all the money that’s in the tube out through the pay cup.”

  “What’s the tube?” I asked.

  “Say, you don’t know much about slot machines, huh?”

  “Not a thing.”

  He looked at me, and seemed rather sheepish. He said, “I guess I stepped on my foot. No bad feelings over the sock I gave you?”

  “Only my face is sore, not my feelings.”

  “Say, guy, you’re all right. Here, let me show you something about a machine.” - Louie pointed to a workbench. A slot machine was sitting on this bench. It took him only a few moments to unlock the back, take it off, unfasten a couple of catches, and lift out the internal mechanism.

  “Here you are,” he said.

  “How does it work?”

  “Simple. You drop the coin. That pulls back this little finger. You press the lever. That gives the power that starts ‘em going. Here’s a little time clock—right down here. That spins around, and when it comes to the first notch, that stops the first wheel. Then a bit later, the second stops, and then the third. Now, a slot machine has five clicks. The first three are the wheels. The fourth is the lock off, and the fifth is when the pay-off snaps. If you don’t get those five clicks, your machine’s gone flooey. Get me?”

  I looked at the three dials with the strings of different figures.

  “Those pictures don’t mean nothing,” Louie said. “The whole thing comes from these notches in the back. You can see where this shovel slides into the slot in the first one, then the second, and then the third. It’s the notches that count, and the notches are in the back.”

  “And how about this tube?”

  “That tube is always filled with coins. After it gets filled, the overflow goes into the jackpot and down into the box in the machine. You’ve got two jackpots. After the first pays off, the second comes into the pay-off position and the coins begin feeding into the first one again.”

  “Then once the wheels have started spinning, the clock in back determines the time when they’re going to stop?”

  “That’s right. It’s a question of timing. That’s what it is in everything: golf, baseball, tennis, fighting—anything.” I studied the mechanism of the machine.

  Louie said, “Timing! That’s the way I won the championship bout in the Navy.”

  He danced out into the middle of the cement floor, ducked his head down, raised his left shoulder, and started making jabs at an imaginary opponent, ducking and weaving around, dancing lightly on the balls of his feet, the leather soles of his shoes making a peculiar shuffling sound as they slid over the cement. I let him go because I wanted to study the machine.

  “Now, look it,” Louie said.

  I looked up.

  “He comes at me with a hard left twice, like this, see?” And Louie lashed out with his left. “You get me?” he asked anxiously, pausing in his shuffle to look over his shoulder, his left arm still outstretched.

  “I get you, but let’s get back—”

  “All right, then the third time I’m waiting for it. I throw up a block. And what happens? He outguesses me. His right comes across like a pile driver. I manage to duck and—”

  “Snap out of it!”

  But Louie started dancing again, all around the cellar, his feet stirring up a continual fog of dust as he weaved his shoulders, lashing out quick blows and battering out a blow-by-blow account of his fight. I couldn’t stop him. He was in the ring and I couldn’t get him out. I finally gave up and waited for him to finish. He ended up right in front of me.

  “Come on over here. I want to show you. I won’t hurt you, just get yourself in position. That’s right. Now shoot out a right at my chin. Go ahead. Shoot it out. Don’t be afraid. Just give me the works.”

  “I’m afraid I could never do it,” I said.

  “Shucks,” he said modestly. “It s easy.

  “That fall you took upstairs doesn’t seem to have hurt you at all.”

  The eager glow of animation faded from his eyes, left him as only a shell.

  “Shucks,” he said, “that was Sid Jannix. I seen him fight once. He’s good—awful good. But he ain’t too good. I could have taken him if I’d known who he was sooner, but you know how it is, buddy. You get careless in this business. You get so you don’t want to miss a punch. You try to get set, and get in just the position you want before you turn it loose. You can’t get set on Sid Jannix. You can’t get set on any pug that’s up on his toes. He just threw a fist at me, that’s all. Now let me show you something, buddy. You don’t hit right. You hit with your arms. You can’t do that. You gotta sink your body in back of the blows. Here, let me show you.”

  “I want to look at this slot machine.”

  “Okay, buddy, sure. I ain’t tryin’ to butt in. I just thought I’d teach you something, that’s all.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “What else do you want to know about the machine, buddy?”

  “What are your chances of winning?”

  “Pretty good. Of course, if you was to play a hundred dollars right across the board, you’d probably only get forty of it back. That sixty would represent the profit for the house. But, in playing that hundred, you might feed five bucks into the machine without getting over fifty cents back. Then you might play fifty cents, and get four dollars back—see? That’s the way it works. Guys don’t play slot machines the way they play the stock market, putting a bunch of dough in it. They just come in and try ‘em out to see if they’re lucky. Or in a restaurant if they get some change in nickels, they put ten or fifteen cents into the slot machines. Then maybe they get hot and pull all the nickels out of their pocket and play ‘em. They’ll get a few wins, and they play back their winnings. That’s why they keep machines around restaurants rollered so heavy. They don’t have to let the customer win. Up here, we figure it’s good advertisement to hear the coins jingle in the pay-off up once in a while; but that’s not saying we can afford to donate to charity.”

  “What do you mean by a machine being rollered?”

  He pointed to a bulky piece of metal clamped over one of the sprockets and screwed into place. “See the roller on hat first wheel?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s a roller. That’s on one of the oranges. Now, you see there’s three oranges on the first wheel, four on the second, and six on the third. That makes a man feel good. You see, the machine stops just that way. One—two—three. Now suppose he gets an orange on the first, and an orange on the second. He’s got time to do a little thinking before be third wheel clicks, and if it’s an orange, he thinks he made it come just by thinking about it. That’s why there’s ,o many oranges on the third wheel. Six out of twenty. Get me? There’s twenty figures on each wheel. Well, with six oranges on the third wheel, there’s about one chance jut of three that it’ll stop on an orange after you’ve got the ;first two oranges. That’s the trick. Getting the first two )ranges.

  “Now that’s where the roller comes in. Ain’t you never played a slot machine and seen a pay-off figure sorta hesitate in front of the window, and then shoot on by, and the wheel lock with a hell of a heavy click on the next figure? Well, buddy, when that happens, you’ve been rollered off.. rake this machine, for instance. There’s three oranges on the first wheel. That means you got about one chance in seven of gettin’ your first orange. All right, we put a roller on this orange slot, and that means there’s only two oranges left. Get me? Two oranges out of twenty. That means you only stand one chance in ten of getting your first orange. You might not think there was much difference between one chance in seven and one chance in ten, but when you’re givin’ a machine steady play, it sure shows up in the old bread basket.”

  looked the machine over. “How do they tamper with them?”

  “They carry a little drill, and they drill a hole right through here. See? Now you notice these rivets here? Well, they plug up that little hole with a fake rivet head. Then if a man looks at the machine, he don’t see nothing wrong. Get me? A man don’t never bother to count the rivets in a machine. Just one extra rivet don’t show up at all.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Then after they get the machine bored and riveted, they’ll come back. Usually, they have a gang of three or four. There’s usually a hell of a good-looking jane in the gang. They pretend to be liquored up, and they’re having a great time. They get all excited and crowd around the machine. And one of the good-looking janes will slip that false rivet out. They got a piece of stiff wire that they stick in that hole, and it’s got a little twister on the end, and they turn it. Now, if they’ve drilled that hole in the right place, when they turn that wire, it pushes this metal finger back, and they can keep on playing the machine without putting no coin in. If the machine ain’t got a cheese knife—or if the cheese knife has been disconnected.”

  “What’s a cheese knife?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s something that rolls over the nickel. It won’t release unless it first slides over the round part of a nickel. But they’re pretty delicate, and they’re always jamming, so lots of places take ‘em off. Then lots of times they get stuck and won’t work at all.”

  “You said something about a cup.”

  “That’s different,” he said. “That goes up in the pay-off mechanism. They stick it up through the cup where the coins come out, and when those little metal fingers that release just so many coins start working, they slip this cup up and jam ‘em open. Then the coins start spilling out until they empty the tubes.”

  “You keep the machines here rollered?” I asked.

  “Sure, they’re rollered. Particularly those near the front of the line. You get me? We figure that the customer that just drops by the slot machine and only puts in four or five nickels is the guy that’s going to quit after he’s put in those four or five nickels. He’s just playing to be doing something. May be a tourist who wants to say he’s been out in the wild West where they have gambling running wide open. Get me?”

  “But why not let those people win occasionally? I think that would be good bait.”

  “Nope,” he said. “The percentage is against you. They’ve only got four or five nickels in their pocket to lose. They ain’t going to change fifty-cent pieces or dollars into nickels. They’re just going to play with what they’ve got. All right, we let ‘em win on a couple of cherries, and maybe sometimes on three oranges. But the heavy stuff is all rollered off. There ain’t no percentage in letting a man win five bucks on a jackpot if the limit he’d let you win is - twenty cents. Get me?”

  I nodded.

  “Now then, the machines toward the back we don’t roller so heavy. The people that get back that far are the slot-machine addicts. They get a fad for it, just like drinking whisky or anything else. They keep thinking that the next machine farther down is going to be a little hotter. Well, they are hotter. They stand more chance there, and those people stand a chance of making a big winning. That brings ‘em back.

  “You get me? Suppose a party keeps working his way down the slot machines? Well, we’ve got four or five nickel machines, then a dime machine, then a nickel machine, then a two-bit machine, then two nickel machines, and another two-bit machine. Well, by the time he’s got down toward the end of the line, he’s paid a bunch of money to us. Because those first machines are all rollered so heavy, he can’t win nothing big. Now then, what do we care if we give him an even break on the last machine? We’re already working on velvet. Maybe if he wins a jackpot, he’ll put the coins in his pocket and walk out, but don’t worry. He’s a slot-machine addict, and next day, he’ll be back. And the next and the next and the next. That’s why I figured you for a crook when you won the jackpot on that nickel machine up near the front. Ordinarily, your jackpot has two bars on the first wheel. That gives you one chance in ten. Then there’s one on the middle wheel, and one op the third wheel. Get it? One chance in twenty on each of those wheels, and one chance in ten on the first wheel. Now, on that nickel machine, we’d rollered off one of the bars on the first wheel, so figure how much chance you’ve got of hitting a big jackpot. Right away, I thought you was slicking the machine.”

  “What about that girl?” I asked.

  “‘The jane, brother, was a slicker.”

  “How do you know, Louie?”

  “How does a guy know anything? Shucks, I had her spotted ever since I came here.”

  “How long’s that been?”

  “About ten days or two weeks. She’s been a slot-machine fiend. She played it on the square at first, all right. That’s where she threw me off guard, and she’s such a cute little trick. She certainly did play me for a sucker. She’d play those machines. I don’t think she was doing much more than breaking even. So I’d look the machines over after she left, and there wouldn’t be nothing wrong with ‘em. Well, she fooled me all right. She drilled a couple of machines after I’d classed her as okay. She’d been milkin’ them for a couple of days, and then she and this boy friend of hers showed up for the big clean-up tonight. They were going co cup ‘em dry. And if it hadn’t been for you winning that big jackpot on the machine that was rollered off, I’d have had ‘em.”

  “Where you from?”

  “N’Orleans originally. I came here from San Francisco. I looked over the machines, and seen about half of ‘em was drilled. I went up to Harvey Breckenridge and told him he was a sucker, that they was milking him dry. So after I’d talked with him awhile, and showed him the machines, he give me the job of taking charge of the joint. I told him I knew all the mobs that was working the machines. And I did, too. I didn’t know Sid Jannix had gone into the machine racket, and this jane is a new one. But all the regulars I know. You understand they ain’t so bad here in Las Vegas as they are in California.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s illegal in other states. Here in Las Vegas it’s legal.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Be your age, buddy. Be your age. Suppose the machines is illegal, and you catch a guy cupping the pay-off? Well, you kick him out in the street and cuss him, but you don’t arrest him, because he ain’t stealing nothing, and the reason he ain’t stealing nothing is because you ain’t got no machine, and the reason you ain’t got no machine is because the law says you can’t have it. Get me?”

  “I get you.”

  “Anything else you want to know?”

  “You don’t know that girl’s name?”

  “No.”

  “How does she play the game? Is she on the make?” . “You mean with men?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought for a while, scratched the fringe of dark, woolly hair around his ears, and said, “Now you got me, buddy. Y’understand Las Vegas is different from other places. Girls come here to get a divorce. They have to wait to establish a residence. It ain’t a long time, when you just think of it as so much time out of a year, but when you stay here, it gets pretty long. The girls get lonesome, and if a good-looking guy gives ‘em the eye, they figure what the hell. They ain’t got nothing else to do, and they fall. Back in their home town, they’d give him the icy stare, but out here, they want something to break the monotony and they’re just getting a divorce so they figure it’s sorta in between drinks, and a little cheating don’t count. You get me?”

  “I get you.”

  “So when you ask me, is a woman on the make, I can’ tell much unless she’s pretty heavy on the make, because out here they’re all more or less on the make. You get me?”

  “Can you remember anybody who’s been in with her?”

  “No, I can’t. But wait a minute. I do, too. I remember one girl that was in with her yesterday, a knockout.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “She had red hair. I don’t remember what color her eyes were, but she was all strawberries an’ cream, and when she moved, she moved as easy as jelly on a plate.”

  “Fat?” I asked.

  “No. That’s it. She wasn’t fat. She was thin like, but she wasn’t stiff. Lots of women go on a diet and starve themselves until their joints get frozen stiff, and they move like wooden jumping jacks. This girl just walked like she w; all double-jointed. I noticed her particularly.”

  “Anything else about her?”

  “No.”

  “How old?”

  “In the twenties maybe.”

  “How many times has she been here?”

  “She was here a couple of times with this girl. Say, wait ; minute. I remember something about her, too. She was a ,canny-nose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know the way a bunny moves his nose? Well, she had thin nostrils, and when she’d get a little excited, they’d twitch. I remember now, I noticed that. She was a good-looking jane. Boy, I could have gone for her in a big way.”

  I gave him my hand. “Thanks, Louie,” I said.

  “Not at all. And no hard feelings over the sock I gave you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Honest,” he said, “you was a pushover. Now mind, I ain’t throwing no slams at you, buddy. I’m just telling you. You didn’t have any neck hold at all. When you’re fight-mg, you want to keep your neck muscles so that when a punch gets by your guard and you have to take it on the button, you can roll it off. You get me?”