“Won’t people be a little suspicious why I’m with you when you are considered Wan’s escort?”
“They’ll just assume Mr. Wan is doubling his pleasure.”
I was to get five thousand dollars for watching the games, whether it was one night or three, and an additional five if I spotted the trick. I held out for an extra ten thou if I spotted it. The surprise was that she would be paying me herself. She was hiring me, not Wan. Apparently he’d be more satisfied catching Chow himself. I guess the money she paid me was chicken feed compared to what she got for “escorting” Wan, not to mention his gratitude if she exposed Chow.
“Well, what do you think of her?” Con asked as soon as she was out the door.
“I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”
“I’d get down on my old hands and knees and howl like a prairie dog if she dropped her pants in front of me.”
“Con, we have to talk.”
He checked his watch. “I’ve got to run—”
“You’ve been avoiding me for a week. You know I’ve been offered the security job at the Sands.”
He heaved a great sigh. “Well, you know, son, I took you in when you were down, out, and stealing me blind. I knew you’d leave one day. My health is …”
“The only thing wrong with your health is fast women, slow horses, and that you confuse a bottle of Scotch for a wet nurse. Let’s cut the bull, Con. Your glass runneth over because you have to spend half your time just being Con Halliday. You need someone to run the day-to-day operations of the club, a real casino manager, not some flunky who has to run to you every time a decision has to be made.”
“Zack, you know I love you like a son.”
He hated his son, but that was beside the point.
“Con, it’s come down to this. I’m bored. I’ve got security down to running itself. I need more action. I can either get it with you, or I can take my chances on the Strip.”
“Son, at Halliday’s you’re somebody. On the Strip, you’d be just another rent-a-cop, someone they replace when the next FBI agent retires.”
“The decision is up to you. I can run this place, you know that. You made Halliday’s the star of Glitter Gulch and I can keep up that reputation, but I also have some fresh ideas on how to increase business.” I knew Con didn’t give a damn about increasing business unless it increased his prestige, so I hit him with the big one I had thought out. “You don’t understand your importance. It’s time you started thinking about the Con Halliday heritage you’re going to leave behind and not the day-to-day crap that a manager should take care of.”
He nodded, looking up at the ceiling as if he expected divine intervention. “You’re right, son.” He slapped the desk with his big hand. It sounded like a gun firing. “You’re damn right. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. We’ll cut for it.”
He grabbed a new deck and broke the seal. “High card and you get the casino manager’s job; low card and you stay in your security manager’s job for another year. If we have equal cards, you stay at the job for another year with a good raise. It’s a win-win-win scenario for you.”
He fanned the cards out. “Draw.”
I shook my head. “You first.”
He hesitated and then pulled a king. “Damn, I was hoping for an ace.”
There were fifty-one cards left in the deck and only four aces, which meant I had one chance in about twelve in pulling an ace to beat his king.
I pulled a card and flipped it over. Ace of spades. I grinned at him. “Goddamn, Con, second time in my life I’ve been lucky.”
He flipped over the entire deck. There were no aces and the only king was the one he drew.
“You sack of cow shit, you cheated me,” he shouted. “You palmed that ace.” He drew his .44 Colt and pulled back the hammer. He pointed it at my chest. “I ought to plug you and tell the cops I caught you skimming.”
I shrugged. “You’ll get blood on this Texas longhorn chair cover. Of course I palmed the ace. You’ve been cheating employees with that cold deck for years.” I didn’t bother telling him that I hadn’t lost at cutting cards since Embers took me for my rent money. I came in with an ace up my sleeve because I knew he’d pull out that crooked deck.
“My first act as casino manager is to eighty-six Bic. Put away your gun. You know it has to be done or he’ll cost you your license. Better coming from me than you.”
Con stroked his chin and looked back up to cowboy heaven before replying. “Okay, son, the ranch is all yours, you’re the ramrod.”
His head came down and he stared at me with those snake-eyed dice he had for eyes. “But you make one goddamn mistake and I’ll be on your ass like a rattler on a desert mouse. I’ll chew your goddamn head off and swallow you whole.”
I loved Vegas. It allowed people to be themselves.
35
The day before I was to check out Chenza’s whale and the game, I drove over to Windell’s place to talk to him about ways to cheat at chemin de fer. I first went over every possible scam with Embers, but the card sharp was from the old school, the smoke-and-mirror type of cheating using cold decks, bottom dealing, and the other tricks of card mechanics. The world was fast going to electronics and the one person who knew electronic cheating best was my old friend Windell. I kept him employed part-time in Halliday security for no other reason, I figured, than to neutralize him, sort of like paying a mobster protection so he doesn’t firebomb your store.
A surprise was coming down the stairs of the rooming house when I was approaching in my car—Janelle. I hadn’t seen her in months and didn’t like the stories I heard about her from people who knew her. I never loved Janelle, not the kind of love that romance books claimed moves mountains, but I hated to see her waste her life with drugs. I pulled over before I reached the house and waited for her to get in her car and drive away. If there was anything I knew about Janelle, it was that she wouldn’t go near Windell even if she was down to her last fix. Something was up. Money. I could smell it.
There was something else strange. She wore a heavy canvas backpack. Janelle wasn’t the backpack type. Years ago Windell had nearly burned himself toting a battery in a backpack because he was trying to use a powerful battery to control the reel spins on a slot machine. I wondered if he was back to his old schemes and whether he had recruited Janelle to help him.
I followed Janelle down to a bank on Eastern Avenue. She went in and waited in line. I had to walk by the bank a couple of times before it was her turn with a clerk. She opened the backpack and pulled out ten-dollar rolls of quarters, a load of them. What kind of penny-ante nonsense was that? Quarters? Was Windell back making slugs, only this time minting real-looking-quarters? After she left, I hurried up to the teller who was still putting Janelle’s quarter rolls into a box. She had put up a closed sign on her window.
“Excuse me. My friend thought she left her sunglasses here—did you just help her, Janelle … ?” I raised my eyebrows and gestured toward the door.
“With Riordan Vending Machines? No, she didn’t leave her glasses here. You might look on the check-writing counter?”
I muttered my thanks, briefly checked the counter, and left the bank barely able to keep from kicking the first person who crossed my path. Riordan Vending Machines? Here I was busting my butt to make something of myself and these two losers were involved in a two-bit scam. And using my name. But what the hell money could there be in quarters? Janelle wasn’t stupid. And neither was Windell, even if he lacked good sense. They wouldn’t go to all the trouble of setting up a phony bank account just to cash in quarters. Not unless there were so many quarters to make it worth their while.
When I got back to Halliday’s, I went into the accounting office and collared Clarke, the accounting manager. “Give me the coin sheets for the last six months.”
After looking them over, I had him give me the same six-month period for the previous three years, and I found an inconsistency. We were down in one sector for about thirty thousa
nd dollars a month for the last three months from the same time period in the previous years. “Does Con know anything about this?” I asked.
Clarke shrugged. “He gets the results, but it’s no big deal. Business is off a little from prior years. It’s not that much.”
“Thirty thousand a month can get lost in the shuffle, but this isn’t money off the top. The loss is entirely in quarters.”
I went to my office and did some thinking and calculating. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that Windell and Janelle had come up with a scheme that was hauling about a thousand dollars a day in quarters out of the casino. We didn’t add up change in the count room; we weighed it to determine its value. A thousand dollars in quarters weighed about fifty pounds. Divided in half, about twenty-five pounds each into a couple backpacks, they could make two deposits a day and thirty thousand dollars a month. Into the “Riordan Vending” account. I wondered how many other accounts in Vegas banks had my name on it.
I shook my head at the sheer audacity of it. Only Windell would think of a two-bit way to steal a bundle. They were taking enough money to eventually get rich, but not enough to have alarm bells go off, especially the way Con ran the casino.
There was no way I could cover this for Janelle and Windell, it was too much money. And I didn’t want to. Ripping off the casino under my nose was as good as ripping me off, and by putting the bank accounts in my name they were framing me. The latter part had to be Janelle’s idea. Windell wasn’t that clever when it came to screwing people.
I called in Mike Elliot, my assistant, who I was promoting to security manager. I told him what was going on. “Bring in Windell Palmer, get him in on the pretext that we need something electronic repaired immediately. And get me the count-room surveillance tapes. The hallway tapes outside, too, for the past three months. The only place with that much change at one time is the count room. Someone in there has to be an accomplice.”
“That’s twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week of videotapes. It’ll take days just to fast forward through the tapes.”
“Do it. And get me Windell’s work sheets. He’s only around here ten or twelve hours a week. Windell’s sloppy—and greedy. I’ll lay you five to one that he made up a service call to bill each time he came to make a haul. We’ll identify the phony service calls and look at the tapes for those times.”
“You must know this guy pretty well.”
I grinned. “You don’t know the half of it.”
Windell sweated bullets in the conference room, which was set up with a TV, VCR, the surveillance tapes, and his billing sheets. It was easy to see how he could haul out tons of quarters. His “tool case” was mounted on a dolly. The case was three feet tall, but he only used a few inches for tools; the rest was all storage space.
“We have to talk, Zack,” Windell said.
“We will, old buddy, but first you have to sing.”
Coordinating the tapes to the service orders, I realized how Windell had pulled it off. He had repeated service calls on the coin scale that change was weighed on. Clever as hell, but only a nerd like Windell would spotlight his crime by billing twenty bucks for a service call on the scales.
“You’re a sly little bastard. You rigged the scale to give false weights. One of the count people skims off the excess and you stuff it in the tool case.”
“Can I talk to you in private?”
“Sure.” I sent my security people out of the room.
“Janelle put me up to it, Zack, no kidding. She even spread her legs for me.”
I put pen and paper in front of him. “I’m going to cut you a deal you don’t deserve. Put down a full confession, tell me exactly how it came down, naming Janelle and your buddy in the count room.”
“What’ll I get out of it?”
“You walk out free and clear. But you can never enter Halliday’s again.”
“That’s it?”
“Roll on the other two and you get to walk.” I squeezed Windell’s shoulder with my hand. “We’re like blood brothers. Wouldn’t you do the same for me?”
Surprisingly, Windell had nice, neat handwriting. And a real knack for details. He laid it all out like an accountant would, incriminating himself, Janelle, and an employee on the graveyard shift in the count room.
When he was done and signed his name, I handed the confession to Mike Elliot. “Take Windell and his confession and dump him at LVPD.”
“Zack! You promised me. You made a deal.”
I shook my head. “Windell, I’m not trustworthy. You should know my word’s no good.”
I hit him in the mouth, knocking out his two front teeth. “Tell the cops he resisted arrest.”
36
When the day came for the whales to battle at shimmy, I drove out to Chenza’s place to pick her up. At the Dunes we’d take a limo to the airport to pick up her Hong Kong friend. She lived in a sprawling hacienda-style adobe on a bluff outside of town. I parked my car, then went through a wrought-iron gate into a courtyard surrounded by lush foliage. To my left was parked a silver Aston-Martin with license plate number 007.
A middle-aged Chicano woman answered the door and led me into a living room that provided a view of Vegas from its floor-to-ceiling windows.
Chenza came out a few minutes later and went directly to the bar. “Jack Coke?”
The woman does her homework. I saluted her with my drink. “Did you have a game plan?”
“You’re the security manager.”
“Casino manager.”
“Really. Congratulations.”
She kissed me full on the mouth. I fumbled to set my glass down. She stepped back. “Don’t get too excited. All you get for being manager of a grind joint is a kiss.”
“What would I get if I ran the Strip?”
“More than you could handle.”
She had a way of getting to the point. I could be just as blunt. “I want to fuck you.”
“Who doesn’t?”
I followed her out the door, imagining in my mind her firm buttocks on top of my rock-hard dick.
“I like your car,” I said. “It looks like something James Bond would drive.”
“It’s the car he drove in Goldfinger.”
“That must have cost a few bucks.”
She rolled her eyes. It was a dumb remark. A woman like Chenza didn’t pay for anything. She took one look at my Ford Maverick and stopped short.
“We’re taking my car,” she said.
“Embarrassed to be seen in mine?”
“Yes.”
She threw me the keys of the Aston-Martin and I climbed in, hoping I could handle driving on the right side. I got it out of the driveway without denting the fenders and drove in silence for a minute, but I wasn’t someone who let dead dogs lie, or whatever the expression. I hated cars. When I started driving, I only had money for junkers and no old man to take me into a garage and show me how to change a set of spark plugs.
“Listen, I’m not a car person. I bought the Maverick because it was cheap and a no-brainer in terms of maintenance—when the ashtray gets full, I buy another.”
“You also don’t know anything about clothes.”
“Look, lady—”
“No, you look. Vegas is as phony as Hollywood. If you want to be big time in this town, you have to act the part. We’re stopping at Syd Devore’s.”
“What’s wrong with the way I’m dressed?” It was my best suit.
“You’re dressed like a pit boss, a medium-quality ready-made suit. Tonight you’re mingling with the rich and famous. Do you want to look like one of them or an employee?”
I was ready to tell her to take her sweet ass out onto the street where she belonged, when she leaned over and put her hand on my thigh. Testosterone flooded my brain.
“Zack, I know what you want—respect, money, being a somebody. But you’ll never get it by just working hard. In this town, you only get it if you look like you have money. Money breeds money. If you wa
nt me around, you’re going to have to look like you’re somebody.”
I gave her a sideways glance. “Does this mean I get some pussy?”
“Zack, a real man doesn’t say it that way.”
“How does a real man say it?”
“With money.”
37
We picked up Hong Kong Wan in a stretch limo. He walked off the chartered plane with bodyguards who looked like sumo wrestlers in three-piece suits. They could have scared the sushi out of a samurai. One of them was carrying a suitcase attached to a wrist chain. A suitcase, for crissake, not a briefcase.
Wan could have been sixty or eighty, I couldn’t tell. He was small built, thin to the point of almost being emaciated, with dark eyebrows so thin they looked sketched on and raven black hair without a speck of gray. You might mistake him for a schoolteacher if you missed his eyes—fathomless in their blackness, eyes that could suck you in.
Chenza gave Wan a cheek peck and introduced me. The airport was just around the corner from the Strip, and I told the limo driver to take a longer route to give us time to talk.
“Chenza thinks Chow is cheating,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I suspect she is right. At first I was not pleased when she suggested bringing in someone to uncover the trick. I would prefer to do so myself, but since she wishes to help …”
“You have any clue as to how he’s doing it?”
Wan spread his hands on his knees. “I have some small experience with cheating, having an interest in gambling establishments, however, I now fear Chow has devised a scheme that I cannot penetrate.”
“How’s he aroused your suspicions?”
“We have had three private games and each time I lost a million dollars, exactly.”
“No matter how you varied the bets?”
“No matter what I bet. It is as if he is toying with me, challenging me.”
As I stared into Wan’s swirling black holes, I had an image of Chow drowning in a whirlpool.
“Anything unusual in his style of play?”
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