I told Pete to bring the beagles, and he told me the beagles were not coming, but he drove the whole way up the canyon with one hand on my knee. It was past one in the morning when we reached the dark loading dock behind the Silver Pick. Gil Navarro let us in himself, pale as paper, and walked us down a back corridor to a conference room where a tall agent named Marcus Teague stood waiting. He did not offer small talk. “Mrs. Kulick, do you still have your notebook?” I took it out of my purse. The pencil was smudged, the cover soft as cloth.
“Four months ago I wrote down everything I saw,” I said. “Footage can be erased. Pencil on paper cannot.” I opened to the spring of 2023 and read aloud. “Thursday, April 18, 9:42 p.m., camera 212, Brock Hadley signs comp slip for Vern Dolan, three thousand dollars. Friday, April 19, 6:10 a.m., camera 31, garage stairwell B, Dolan hands Brock a white envelope.” I turned page after page. Twenty six Thursdays. Twenty six Fridays. Every time, every camera number, every plate in the garage lot. Agent Teague read over my shoulder and said very quietly, “You wrote the plates down.”
“Habit,” I said. “Eleven years of habit.” He explained why that mattered more than I knew. The servers inside the casino had been wiped, but the garage gates are run by an outside parking company, with its own records, kept in a separate building in Denver. Without a date and a plate, nobody would have known where to look. With my notebook, his team could order those gate logs, the bank records of the four men, and the stairwell times in one stroke. He closed the cover with great care. “Mrs. Kulick, this notebook is the case.” Pete squeezed my shoulder so hard it hurt.
A fired casino surveillance worker used her pencil notebook to bring down a corrupt manager and returned through the front door as the new director.
“Now, about the lobby,” Teague said. The four men, Vern Dolan, Ray Pruitt, Lyle Becker and a retired roofer named Walt Sims, had been sitting there since ten, asking the front desk for my home address. They had heard from a friend in the surveillance room that I always wrote things down. They were going to ask me, politely at first, to hand over the notebook. Gil had kept them waiting with free coffee. Teague smiled for the first time all night. “I would like you to step out and let them see you, Mrs. Kulick. I will be right behind you with five friends.”
I walked into that lobby in my old fleece jacket, past the same carpet where I had carried my plastic tub. Dolan stood up first. “Rhonda, there you are. Listen, we all want to put this behind us. Name a number.” I said, “I already have one. Twenty six.” His smile froze. Teague stepped out of the hallway with five agents and a folded piece of paper. “Gentlemen, I am Agent Teague of the Division of Gaming, and these are warrants.” Walt Sims sat down so fast he missed the chair and landed on the edge of the sofa. Nobody in the lobby said a word.
Brock was found two days later, on a Wednesday, in the Denver airport with a one way ticket to Mexico and ninety one thousand dollars in cash inside a carry on bag. He had erased the footage on Sunday night and run. The surveillance director, his brother in law Dale Pruitt, was marched out through the main casino floor in front of a hundred stunned gamblers on a quiet Thursday afternoon. Nobody waved. Dale carried his own things in a plastic tub. I heard that one of the dealers stood up from a blackjack table and slowly began to clap.
The hearing was in March. Brock Hadley pleaded guilty to bribery and theft of two hundred sixty thousand dollars in comps, and the judge in Denver gave him six years in state prison. Dolan, Pruitt, Becker and Sims paid fines of eighty thousand dollars each and are banned from every casino in Colorado for life. The Silver Pick paid a penalty of one million two hundred thousand dollars to the state, and Gil Navarro said he had never been so glad to write a check in his whole career. I sat in the second row with Pete and listened to every word.
On the first Monday of April, Gil called me up to his office for the second time in my life. “Rhonda, you are the best eyes this building ever had, and we let you walk out in front of everybody. I would like to do better.” He offered me the job of Director of Surveillance, at ninety eight thousand dollars a year, with eleven years of back seniority and a signed letter of apology from the board. I asked for one condition. He said, “Anything.” I said, “I want to come in through the front door.”
So I did. On a bright Monday morning I drove up the canyon and parked in the same garage, and I walked across the main floor with my head up and Pete beside me. The dealers lined up beside the tables. The same ones who had looked at the carpet. Now they looked right at me. A craps dealer named Maria Ortega started the applause, and then the whole floor joined, and I laughed and cried at once. At the cage, where Brock once stood and waved, a young cashier handed me a coffee mug.
The new notebook is on my desk, a fresh spiral one, and I still write in pencil. My old plaque hangs on the wall of the surveillance room again, with a second brass plate under it. It reads, “She wrote it down.” Pete says it is the best thing he has ever read. The check engine light in the car is finally fixed, the beagles have a new bed, and my daughter at Colorado State wants to study forensic accounting. Hands tell you who is honest. But a patient woman with a pencil tells you the rest.