It had gone dead.
Two croupiers stood behind it with their heads together and their eyes sideways. One moved a rake back and forth aimlessly over the empty layout.
They were both staring at Vivian Regan.
Her long lashes twitched and her face looked unnaturally white.
She was at the middle table, exactly opposite the wheel.
There was a disordered pile of money and chips in front of her.
It looked like a lot of money.
She spoke to the croupier with a cool, insolent, ill-tempered drawl.
"What kind of a cheap outfit is this, I'd like to know.
Get busy and spin that wheel, highpockets.
I want one more play and I'm playing table stakes.
You take it away fast enough I've noticed, but when it comes to dishing it out you start to whine."
The croupier smiled a cold polite smile that had looked at thousands of boors and millions of fools.
His tall dark disinterested manner was flawless.
He said gravely:
"The table cannot cover your bet, madam.
You have over sixteen thousand dollars there."
"It's your money," the girl jeered. "Don't you want it back?"
A man beside her tried to tell her something.
She turned swiftly and spat something at him and he faded back into the crowd red-faced.
A door opened in the paneling at the far end of the enclosed place made by the bronze railing.
Eddie Mars came through the door with a set indifferent smile on his face, his hands thrust into the pockets of his dinner jacket, both thumbnails glistening outside.
He seemed to like that pose.
He strolled behind the croupiers and stopped at the corner of the middle table. He spoke with lazy calm, less politely than the croupier.
"Something the matter, Mrs. Regan?"
She turned her face to him with a sort of lunge.
I saw the curve of her cheek stiffen, as if with an almost unbearable inner tautness.
She didn't answer him.
Eddie Mars said gravely: "If you're not playing any more, you must let me send someone home with you."
The girl flushed. Her cheekbones stood out white in her face.
Then she laughed off-key. She said bitterly:
"One more play, Eddie.
Everything I have on the red.
I like red. It's the color of blood."
Eddie Mars smiled faintly, then nodded and reached into his inner breast pocket.
He drew out a large pinseal wallet with gold corners and tossed it carelessly along the table to the croupier.
"Cover her bet in even thousands," he said, "if no one objects to this turn of the wheel being just for the lady."
No one objected, Vivian Regan leaned down and pushed all her winnings savagely with both hands on to the large red diamond on the layout.
The croupier leaned over the table without haste. He counted and stacked her money and chips, placed all but a few chips and bills in a neat pile and pushed the rest back off the layout with his rake.
He opened Eddie Mars' wallet and drew out two flat packets of thousand-dollar bills.
He broke one, counted six bills out, added them to the unbroken packet, put the four loose bills in the wallet and laid it aside as carelessly as if it had been a packet of matches.
Eddie Mars didn't touch the wallet.
Nobody moved except the croupier. He spun the wheel lefthanded and sent the ivory ball skittering along the upper edge with a casual flirt of his wrist. Then he drew his hands back and folded his arms.
Vivian's lips parted slowly until her teeth caught the light and glittered like knives.
The ball drifted lazily down the slope of the wheel and bounced on the chromium ridges above the numbers.
After a long time and then very suddenly motion left it with a dry click.
The wheel slowed, carrying the ball around with it.
The croupier didn't unfold his arms until the wheel had entirely ceased to revolve.
"The red wins," he said formally, without interest.
The little ivory ball lay in Red 25, the third number from the Double Zero.