Nine of Diamonds

The Nine of Diamonds is a Boulder Highway casino in Las Vegas whose local, money-minded clientele and worn surroundings set it apart from the Strip. Doc goes there looking for Puck Beaverton and finds the casino’s jackpot machinery producing a real-world trap: Einar’s machine pays out, Puck’s machine hits as well, and the accomplices’ scheme collapses in the sudden attention of casino staff.

Finding Puck

Puck and Einar have been barred from both downtown and Strip casinos, where their routine has become too familiar. Einar plays a slot machine until its security staff catch on and stop him collecting; Puck waits nearby, pretending to play a nickel machine, then claims Einar’s jackpot. When suspicion falls on Puck, the pair move on. The Nine of Diamonds is one of the local rooms where Doc is advised to look for them.

Doc reaches the casino with Tito, who asks to come inside, ostensibly to wander, visit the buffet, or see the show. Adolfo reminds him that he is supposed to be kicking, and Tito protests that he is taking only homeopathic doses. Their exchange gives the outing a comic air, but Doc has a specific purpose: he has come to locate Puck.

A casino off the Strip

The casino’s name carries an old gambling association. Bigfoot says the nine of diamonds was the fifth card in Wild Bill Hickok’s final poker hand, alongside the black aces and eights. Outside, the parking lot holds contractor pickups, Ford Rancheros with hay in their beds, and old cars whose missing chrome has left rusty streaks and weld marks. A polygonal, Jetsons-like marquee advertises Carmine & the Cal-Zones.

Inside, the clientele seem local rather than drawn from the Strip. They play for money, whether hopeful or desperate, intoxicated or sober, guided by calculation or by private superstitions. The room’s less theatrical pursuit of “fun” does not make it innocent: beyond the players’ view, landlords, finance companies, and loan sharks weigh punishment, leniency, and, more rarely, mercy. The casino’s everyday gambling is shadowed by the debts and power that govern it.

The entertainment adds another layer of performance. Carmine, a longhaired lounge singer, treats his Gibson guitar more as a prop than an instrument, punctuating the act with tommy-gun gestures; the Cal-Zones play their conventional rock-band roles while two singers in red vinyl and fishnet perform time steps. Their latest release is called “Just the Lasagna.” The stylized show sits beside the practical business of wagering, without displacing it.

The jackpot trap

Tito excitedly leads Doc through the casino toward a remote corridor of slot machines, in a part of the floor some players avoid because they believe machines nearer the street pay better. There, Einar works an old machine illustrated with a smiling cowgirl. A line of half-dollars feeds into it, their Kennedy faces turning as the coins descend. Puck, his head marked with a swastika, pretends to play a nickel machine nearby. Doc recognizes the arrangement: Einar is the jackpot player, Puck the partner waiting to collect.

Before Doc can approach, Einar’s machine erupts in a noisy payout. Einar steps away and disappears, as the scam requires. Puck leaves his nickel machine to claim the jackpot, but that machine hits too. Suddenly he is caught between two winning machines while casino employees hurry over to verify the payouts. The method that depended on Einar winning and Puck appearing as the claimant has become conspicuous: Puck breaks for the nearest exit, screaming.

Place in the wider landscape

The casino’s local character echoes the novel’s broader attention to who gets to occupy a place and who is moved along. Aunt Reet’s knowledge of Los Angeles real estate encompasses land use, water, and the histories that deeds and contracts often omit. Tariq describes South Central as a Japanese neighborhood before the Second World War, whose residents were sent to camps before Black residents moved in; he sees the development at Channel View Estates as another turn in a repeated history of displacement. The book places that history alongside earlier removals from Chavez Ravine and Bunker Hill.

At Channel View Estates, Doc sees new homes and construction spreading over the former neighborhood, with streets laid out before the pavement and development reaching into unincorporated land. Later, Crocker Fenway casts the conflict over Channel View in the language of environmental preservation and property values, while asserting that land, water rights, oil, and cheap labor have long belonged to people like him. The Nine of Diamonds is not itself part of that development story, but its debt-shadowed gaming floor belongs to the same account of a region where access, money, and power are unevenly distributed.