I have been a dispatcher in Washoe County for nineteen years, and I have never had a caller stay so calm. Winifred Hale was eighty five years old and lying in the trunk of her own Buick in the fifth level of the parking garage of the Atlantis Casino, and she told me her name, her address and her blood pressure medicine in the voice of a woman reading a recipe. I had been on the line with her for forty minutes. Sergeant Elena Vasquez came over the radio at that moment and said four words I will never forget. “I have eyes on the Buick.”
Here is what Mrs. Hale told me, a piece at a time. Her son Darren, who was fifty seven years old and had been gambling for decades, had talked her into withdrawing two hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash from the bank, to buy a condominium. She was a careful woman, and she did not trust him. So the night before, she had gone to a different bank and obtained a cashier check for the whole sum, made out to Grace Fellowship, her church, and she had put cash from her own cookie jar into the sack instead. Then she had climbed into her own trunk to see where he would go.
Sergeant Vasquez came back on the radio to say that she was at the trunk. I heard the pop of the latch through the open line, and I heard Mrs. Hale say, “Young lady, I would like a hand, please. These old knees.” There was a long pause, and then the sergeant said, very quietly, “Madam, you are all right. Do not move.” She told me later that she had never seen anything so brave in uniform. But she said her real question was the one that Mrs. Hale was asking her at that moment. Who walked out of the casino with Darren at two in the morning?
A cashier check switched in a parking garage gave one grandmother the night to bring her son back to the truth in Reno.
Mrs. Hale gave her terms from the back seat of the patrol car, wrapped in a blanket, with a cup of hot cocoa in both hands. I had asked the sergeant to hold the radio near so I could hear. “Sergeant, I will tell you everything I saw. Then I would like to go and see my son. I want him to hear it from me before it is on the television. He will go to the treatment program the church has found in Carson City, and I will pay for it. The cashier check goes to Grace Fellowship, as it was always meant to, and that is the end of the matter.”
The sergeant brought Darren to the car. He had been sitting on the curb of the garage with his head between his knees, and when he saw his mother in the blanket he began to shake. “Mom,” he said, “I was going to put it back. I owed a man named Roy Gaines forty thousand dollars from the sportsbook, and he said that if I did not pay by midnight, he would visit you. I could not think of anything else.” He dropped to his knees on the oil stained concrete. “And you climbed into the trunk. You climbed into the trunk for me. Mom, I do not deserve it.”
It was the sergeant who answered the question that mattered. The man who had walked out of the casino with Darren at two in the morning was Roy Gaines himself, a collector for a gambling ring that operated out of a back office in Sparks. He had seen the patrol car pull in, and now he came sprinting from the stairwell of the garage with a cell phone in his hand, heading for the exit ramp. I heard Officer Ben Tran on the radio call out, “Subject running, level five, east stair.” Then I heard nothing for four seconds.
Officer Tran had parked his unit across the mouth of the exit ramp, and he stepped out of it in the path of Roy Gaines, with one hand up. “Sir, that is far enough,” he said, perfectly calm. Gaines tried to dodge around the side, and Tran caught his sleeve and turned him against the hood of the unit. It was over in a moment. I heard the click of the cuffs through the radio, and I heard Sergeant Vasquez let out a long breath. I took off my headset for a second, and laid my forehead on the console.
The money consequences came out cleanly. Roy Gaines was charged with extortion and illegal gambling, and the books of his office in Sparks led to nine more arrests across northern Nevada. The cashier check was delivered to Grace Fellowship on Sunday morning, in the hands of Mrs. Hale, and the congregation stood to applaud. The cash in the sack, the cookie jar money, was returned to her pocket. Darren was not charged, because the sergeant and the district attorney agreed that he was a victim as much as a thief.
Winifred started the Walter Hale Fund, in the name of her husband who passed in 2016, and I sit on its board. It pays for treatment beds, welfare check volunteers and gambling help lines for seniors and their families, in Washoe, Storey and Lyon counties. In the first year we took one hundred and twelve calls from frightened families. One was a woman from Fernley, whose husband had lost their savings at a slot machine. She sat at our table with a coffee and said she had not told anyone for a year.
I met Winifred in person for the first time that spring, at the church on a Sunday, because she had asked for me by name. She was small, in a lavender suit. Darren stood behind her in a clean shirt, ninety days clean, holding her purse. She took both of my hands and looked up at me with eyes the color of a Nevada sky. “Dear,” she said, “you stayed on the line.” I told her it was my job. She patted my cheek and said it was a good deal more than that, and I cried in the foyer.
