We were playing Canasta with our neighbors. Rick was my partner. I was fascinated by the way he was shuffling the cards. It was whisper quiet.

"Where did you learn to shuffle like that?" I asked.

"At dealer's school," Rick told us. "I was a blackjack dealer for a casino in Detroit, Michigan. We spent weeks just learning how to shuffle."

He gave the cards one last riff and started dealing.

"When was this?"

"After I retired from GM. In the late nineties. They were building a casino in town and I thought it might be a good retirement job. So I applied. We finished training before they finished building the casino so they sent me to Las Vegas to get some experience.

"I guess I did pretty good there because my Vegas boss offered me a job. Maybe I shoulda taken the offer. Maybe things woulda been different. But I went back to Detroit and a guy died.

By now he had our complete attention. The card hand was forgotten.

"I was dealing in the high roller section. It was a separate room on the fourth floor where the limits were higher. My blackjack table had a five hundred dollar minimum. I remember it was a Wednesday.

"I always tried to chat up my players, get to know them a little bit. Not enough to delay the game. Just to keep it social. I would sometimes offer some soft advice. The house is going to win about seventy percent of the time anyway. So if a player wanted to take another card, when the odds were against it, I would ask 'Are you sure?' Sometimes they would take the hint and stand pat.

"But this one guy, his name was Solomon, it was like he wanted to give them his money, the bets he was making." Rick shook his head and took a drink from his bottle of Pepsi.

"I asked the pit boss soon after I started dealing if we should shut a player off if he got too drunk, or was losing too heavy. He told me as long as they wanted to bet, we would take their money. Well, that night Solomon was betting big. He bet four thousand dollars on a single hand.

"And lost.

"He looked at me and said, 'Rick, you're killing me.' Then he leaned to his left and half stood. If I thought about it at all, I woulda thought he was getting more money. It was that kind of motion. Instead, he pulled out a gun.

"I didn't move. I couldn't. I thought I was going to die." Rick paused He had been looking down at his hands as he spoke. Now he looked at each one of us, then said, "He shot himself in the head.

"The casino shut down the High Roller room while the cops investigated but they were open again just a few hours later.

"I stopped dealing after that night. I tried a couple of other jobs in the casino but it just didn't hold any interest for me anymore. So I quit.

"We found out later that Solomon had been to the MGM Grand before he came to our place. Overall, he had lost around twenty thousand dollars that night and nobody tried to intervene.

"It's all about the money."