The teller at the bank in Winnemucca was a nervous young man, and he told me the whole thing in a whisper across the counter. A man in a good gray suit had come in at opening time, he said, and asked to see my safe deposit box. He carried a letter on official looking paper, stamped and signed, claiming to be a court order. The manager had read it twice and said no. She had told him that only the renter could open the box, and that any real order would come through the lawyers of the bank. The man had left angry and had not given a name.
Agent Daniels, the man in the suit from my card class, drove me to Winnemucca himself, and Brandon followed in his truck with Jessica. We rode in silence for most of the two hours. Agent Daniels was not what I expected. He was a quiet man of about fifty, with tired eyes and a wedding band worn thin, and he told me somewhere past Battle Mountain that his father had been the young agent who raided the casino in Reno in 1982. His father had spent the rest of his life looking for what went missing that night. He had died without knowing.
In the office of the manager, with the door shut, I used the little key I keep on a chain around my neck and the manager used hers, and the long steel drawer slid out. Brandon stood behind me. I lifted the walnut case onto the table and opened it. Five hundred clay tokens lay in their neat rows, red and blue and black, each one with its gold crown. Agent Daniels put on white gloves and lifted a red one to the light. He turned it over. Along the edge, hidden by years of wear, was a tiny nick, and another on the next, and another. “A pattern,” he said softly. “It is a code.”
That night in 1982 I was thirty three years old. I dealt blackjack at the Silver Crown in Reno, a glittering place that made rich men richer. The owners, two brothers named Corrigan, took a little off the top of every night, and the pit boss, an old man named Mr. Dellacroce, had kept a secret count in the only way he could, marking the edge of certain tokens with his pocketknife to show which ones passed through the skim room. He was dying of cancer. He knew the raid was coming. On the last night, he slipped the case into my hands at the end of my shift.
Some honest people spend a lifetime holding the proof of a crime and never know it, until a son in a hurry asks them to sell it for a dollar.
“Keep it safe,” he told me. “These are the only honest tokens in the building. Give them to someone who will do right with them.” I did not know what he meant. I was frightened, with police cars outside, and I walked out the back door with the case under my coat. Frank was waiting in his Ford in the alley. He had come to drive me home. When I told him what had happened, he drove us straight out of Reno to Elko, and he put the case in the hall closet, and he told me never to speak of it. “It is evidence,” he said. “And evidence has teeth.”
“Why did you not give it to the police?” Agent Daniels asked gently. I told him that the next week Mr. Dellacroce died, and the Corrigan brothers sent a man to Elko with a message for anyone who had been close to the pit. Frank met the man at our front door. Frank never told me what was said. He only told me afterward that it was safest to say nothing, and I believed him, because I was young and he was steady. We told ourselves we would turn it in when the danger passed. Then the danger passed, and the years passed, and the case became a thing in the closet.
Brandon had been standing in the corner of the office with his cap in his hands. He cleared his throat. “Mom,” he said, and his voice broke, “I thought it was just junk. I wanted to sell the things of Dad for a dollar. I wanted the money for a truck.” I looked at my son, my grown son with the gray at his temples. “Brandon,” I said, “you did not know. But you know now. The things of your father were never junk.”
Agent Daniels carried the case out to his car himself, like a man carrying a sleeping child. In the months that followed, the marked tokens went to a lab in Quantico. The pattern was exactly what Mr. Dellacroce had meant it to be. Every nick matched a date and an amount in a ledger that the FBI had held since 1983 and never been able to read. It proved at last that the Corrigan family had skimmed more than four million dollars from the Silver Crown, and it was enough to freeze the fortune that the grandsons still held in Reno.
A federal court ordered the money seized and set up a fund for the people who had been cheated. In October the Nevada Gaming Control Board, which had posted a reward in 1983 that nobody ever claimed, sent me a check for fifty thousand dollars and a letter of thanks. I read it at the dining room table, where Brandon had once set down a dollar bill. I did not feel rich. I felt as if a heavy hand that had been holding down my shoulder for forty three years had finally lifted.
Agent Daniels came to the senior center to deliver a plaque from the Bureau, and the thirty old ladies of my Thursday class stood and applauded. One of them, Mrs. Abernathy, who is ninety, said she had known I was hiding something good, because I was the only dealer she had ever met who never cheated at rummy. I used the reward to build a bright new room onto the back of the center, with card tables, a coffee bar, and a large window. On the door we put a small brass plate. The Frank Varner Room.
Brandon and Jessica come every Thursday and sit in the back. He has learned cribbage, and he is terrible at it. Last week he lost to a woman of eighty eight with a hearing aid, and she patted his cheek. At the end of the night he stays to stack the chairs, and then he walks me out to my car in the dark. He said once, quietly, that he would give the whole world to have stood in that alley beside his father. I told him that his father walks beside him every day.