Tales of Old Las Vegas

Murphy was thinking that today, in modern 1960, the population of Las Vegas was getting out of hand. He’d heard there were presently thirty seven thousand people living in the city alone and almost as many in the surrounding county. There had always been the gambling hustlers, but now the city beckoned the baser kind, the entrepreneurs, the thieves, the drug dealers and the salivating lawyers.

The Golden Nugget Gambling Hall was still the gem of downtown, just as it had been in the old days when they were building the dam. But Little Bud’s dime ante game was at the downtown Boulder Club, an even older club than The Nugget. The game would start when a couple of strangers wandered in and sat at the table. The regular players were already in attendance. Sitting at the table mostly in silence, but occasionally forcing uneasy conversation, were Puggy Pearson, Slim Lewis and Henderson Al, all ready for action.  The poker group needed only a couple of producing strangers. Actually, one loose player would do.

Murphy’s reverie was interrupted by Little Bud. The dealer announced two new players had just sat down at the table. Better come on in, Bud suggested; it was time to start the game.

Murphy turned and quickly strode past the bar, the “21” tables and past the sleeve gartered craps dealers to the poker table. He nodded to the newcomers. Bud had neatly arranged Murphy’s stacks of players’ five dollar checks and silver dollars. Murphy learned the newcomers names were Otto and Eric. Otto, a man in his late sixties, was in a wheelchair.

Little Bud broke the seal on a new deck of Bee cards and spread them on the table. Everybody could see all fifty-two cards plus the joker were in the deck, ready for the game. He then shuffled the deck and spread it upside down. Each player drew a card to see who would get the button on the first deal. Murphy drew a card but his mind wasn’t on the game; he was thinking about Otto, the man in the wheelchair. Where had he seen him before?

Now Murphy remembered. Otto was the man he’d encountered a couple of years ago in a Kansas City game at the Club Royal on the Kansas side of the river. Otto, he recalled, was an irascible sort, the kind that could change, in no time at all, a peaceful group of card players into a ring of shouting pugilists. The last time he saw Otto, he was being wheeled out the front door of a place in Kansas City by a security guard at a reported wheelchair speed of sixty miles an hour.

It was also rumored that Otto had lost his legs in the First World War and, in Otto’s considerable and constant pain, he didn’t really care whether he lived, died, or was arrested. Many insisted he kept an Army Colt slide action .45 under his seat cushion, just for the big moment. Murphy wondered if Little Bud knew about this man, a temperamental man most often referred to as “Ottomatic”.

On Little Bud’s first break, Murphy left the table and walked through the smoke and sawdust to talk to him. No one, Murphy insisted, wants to find out for sure if that Colt .45 is under Otto’s seat cushion.

But Ottomatic, Bud replied, had just come into some money in Miami and it was reason enough to make him welcome in the game.

“How’d he get the money?” asked White Haired Murphy.

“I heard he found it – a lot of it. On a Miami bag man, running money for the mob. More than a hundred thousand dollars.”

Mob money. It was the kind of answer that was no answer at all, as far as Murphy was concerned. Rumors of found money were common in the hustler community. It could have been from a drug deal, or most anything, and it didn’t necessarily have to be one hundred thousand dollars.

After two hours of good dime ante no limit draw poker, Ottomatic had lost almost two hundred dollars. His feeble epithets had gradually turned to more powerful profanity and a security guard began to hover. Little Bud had to warn Otto to hold down his language.

Then, in the next hand, Slim Lewis’ aces and sevens topped Otto’s kings and deuces and took the rest of Otto’s playing money.

Ottomatic growled at Little Bud. He muttered some obscenities under his breath, then he wheeled his chair backwards, looked up and screamed at the top of his voice, “Where the hell’s the waitress?”

He wheeled back to the table where he called Bud names and accused him of running a bust out game. Full of frustration, Ottomatic began to fumble under his seat cushion. His nervous fumbling became earnest digging, accompanied by an ever increasing stream of profanity.

Murphy and Bud sat frozen as Ottomatic continued to frantically burrow under the stub of one leg and his seat cushion.

“Damn, I can’t get this thing out from under here.”

The security guard hurried over. As the guard approached the wheelchair, Ottomatic was able to produce the object of his frenzied search – a hand tooled leather pouch. The security guard wrested the pouch from Otto and began to look through its contents.

Otto looked disgusted. “When you get to the hundred dollar bills, could I have a couple of them so I can play poker?”

In addition to a lot of money and a few small items, the guard produced a picture of a lady in a silver dress. The picture w