They were calling it “the storm of the year.” All along Market Street in the city of Philadelphia the rain blew sideways and the wind gusted near hurricane force. Buses splashed through huge puddles and thunder rumbled overhead.
In the middle of this chaos, a woman suddenly appeared, young, not yet twenty years old. Her thick hair, the color of coal, blew wildly around her face, covering her eyes. She seemed confused, as if this storm were a surprise.
She clutched her handbag and undid the clasp as the rain soaked her jeans and matted them against her legs. She pulled out a small object, stared at it, then slowly put it back.
Looking up, she spotted the front entrance of Gimbels department store. She narrowed her gaze at the sight of a revolving door, and a young man at the window, waving his arms.
A breath caught in her chest. She shivered slightly, then began to walk toward him, steadily, deliberately, as if she had been here before.
The detective clucked his tongue. He stared at the gray-haired man slumped across the table.
“Come on, friend. How did you do it?”
Silence.
“We can sit here all day if that’s what you want to do. Is that what you want to do? Sit here all day?”
The small room inside the police station was hot and in need of paint. The only furniture was a wooden table and the two occupied chairs. The detective, Vincent LaPorta, opened a roll of hard candy, plucked the top one out, cherry red, and popped it in his mouth.
“Want one?”
The man snorted a laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“The name.”
“Life Savers?”
“Yes.”
“Wish you had one now?”
“My life’s been saved too many times already.”
LaPorta waited for more, but the suspect hooked his fingers and looked down, as if praying. His face was tanned and unshaven, his jaw and cheekbones well-defined, maybe too defined, like a man who’d grown thin from an illness. His mustard-colored shirt and navy-blue pants were badly wrinkled, as if he’d slept in them.
“Let’s go over the accusation against you,” LaPorta said. “Maybe it will jog your memory.”
He slid a photograph across the table.
“In a single visit, at the island’s largest casino, you correctly played three straight roulette numbers, winning over two million dollars. Then you walked out the door.”
“Is that a crime?”
“No, but only because we haven’t pieced together how you did it.”
“So, not a crime?”
“Look, friend. My job is catching casino cheats. I’ve been doing it a long time. Vegas. Atlantic City. Now here in the Bahamas. What you did, you can’t do without breaking the law.”
“I see.” The man nodded thoughtfully. “May I ask you a question, Detective?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why this kind of work?”
“What are you, a shrink?”
“Just curious.”
LaPorta smirked. “Let’s just say I don’t like people who bend the rules.”
“Ah. Then you wouldn’t like me.”
LaPorta studied his tall, rangy suspect, who wore a small earring on his left lobe and no socks under his weathered loafers. LaPorta guessed he was in his late fifties and not particularly well-off.