When Old Men Die by Bill Crider Read Free Book Online Page B

shoulders when we were kids."
    Dino didn't usually get sentimental, and I didn't want to encourage him.
    "I remember," I said.   "What else did the cops find?"
    "Not a damn thing, at least not as far as my guy could tell me.   Braddy was shot a couple of times, but I don't know what with or how long he'd been there."
    I'd been shot at recently too, and I wondered if there was a connection between what had happened to me and what had happened to Braddy .   As I said, I don't believe in coincidence.   One old man missing, and another old man was dead.   That probably wasn't a coincidence either, and if one of the two had been shot, what did that mean for the other?   Finding Harry was beginning to seem more urgent by the moment.
    " Braddy has a kid," Dino said, interrupting my thoughts.
    "A kid?   At his age?"
    "I don't mean a kid kid .   She's nearly as old as we are."
    I wondered how old he meant.   When I was thirty, I thought anyone else would have to be at least twenty-nine to be nearly as old as I was.   Now that I was long past thirty, I figured that people even ten years younger were nearly my age.
    "Does she live on the Island?" I asked.
    "Yeah.   She manages a condo out on the seawall."
    I thought that I might want to talk to her later.   Right now, finding Harry seemed more important.
    "About the Retreat," Dino said.   "There's something else you need to know."
    "So tell me."
    "The realtor told me he's had a lot of calls on it the last couple of weeks.   Gambling's a hot topic again, and there's a rumor that Galveston's going to vote it in.   So the Retreat would be a natural.   It's got a history, and some of the old furnishings are still there.   Not the roulette wheel or the slots, maybe, but the dining tables, the kitchen, stuff like that."
    Dino was right about the history.   The Texas Rangers had dumped all the slots into Galveston Bay, and the roulette wheel was probably there too.  
    "Someone's always trying to get gambling voted back into Galveston," I said.   "Just about every year, in fact.   It never wins."
    "This time it might," Dino said.   "We've already got the cruise ship that takes people out past the three-mile limit, and there's that dog track just a few miles up the Interstate in La Marque.   The state has a lottery, and those Indians out in El Paso or wherever they are keep pushing for casino gambling on their reservation.   And there'll be horse racing in Houston later this year.   People around here don't want all the gambling money going over to other places.   Much less Louisiana.
    Lake Charles already had riverboat gambling, and I'd heard that interests in Houston were looking into something similar.   Maybe gambling did have a chance to make a comeback in Galveston after all.
    "Did your realtor friend say who was interested in the Retreat?" I asked.
    "Heavy hitters, he said.   That could mean anything.   One group has a couple of big-name baseball players in it.   Retired players, he said."
    "Let's get back to the heavy hitters.   He probably didn't mean that they had a .300 average.   You have any thoughts on that?"
    "You can probably guess."
    I could, of course.   As long as the uncles were in power, Galveston had never worried about organized crime getting involved in the gambling.   The uncles didn't count.   They were local boys, and local boys weren't considered to be organized crime because they had no connections to the mob.   The uncles were criminals, or at least they were involved in highly illegal activities, but they were hometown boys and that made everything all right.
    The respectable locals, the rich families who traced their ancestry back to the previous century and their fortunes back to shipping, banking, and insurance, were comfortable with the uncles.   They brought in big-name Hollywood entertainers, they kept the town's secrets, and they avoided messy