Deadman's Poker: A Novel (Tony Valentine)

by James Swain

  “It is in poker,” Valentine said.

  There was a pause on the line. Valentine found a pad and pencil on his desk, and jotted down the number of players in the World Poker Showdown, then determined the likelihood of one player beating seven other players within an hour based upon the Poisson equation. Although his formal education had ended in high school, he’d become schooled in statistics and probability when he’d started policing Atlantic City’s casinos, and as a result understood the math behind the games as well as anyone. Finished, he stared at the long number on the pad. Rufus had been dead on: six billion to one.

  “Would you mind explaining?” Bill said.

  Poker was not a big casino game, and not a lot of people in the gambling business understood it. He said, “Sure. Poker isn’t like other casino games, where the players gamble against the house, and the house always has an edge. In those games, the house is expected to win.”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “Good. In poker, every player has the same chance, especially at the beginning of a tournament, when players start with an equal number of chips. Now, the odds of an amateur beating seven other players out of all their chips within the first hour is off the chart.”

  “But it could happen,” Bill said.

  “Maybe, but not necessarily,” Valentine said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means it could happen, but probably won’t, especially in a tournament like the World Poker Showdown. There are a number of reasons. First, people always play tight on the first day, because they don’t want to get bounced out. Second, amateurs tend to be picked on by pros or more experienced players, so the chance of an amateur knocking out seven other players is slim.”

  “Maybe the guy got lucky,” Bill interrupted. “That’s a big part of the game.”

  “I’ll agree with you there.”

  “So, the amateur who beat Rufus Steele got lucky.”

  “That would be the natural assumption,” Valentine said, “only the Poisson distribution rules that out in this situation.”

  “How?”

  “When applied to gambling, the main assumption of the Poisson distribution is that the chance of winning is randomly distributed. Which means that every individual has an equal chance. For example, if someone won a million-dollar jackpot on a slot machine, that’s luck. Right?”

  “Of course.”

  “However, if someone won two million-dollar jackpots on the same machine within an hour, that’s probably cheating. You agree?”

  Bill let out an exasperated breath. “Yeah, probably.”

  “The same thing is true in poker. An amateur might beat a guy at his table out of all his chips in an hour. However, the chances of him beating two guys is unlikely, and the odds of him beating everyone is exactly what Rufus said during his interview.”

  “Six billion to one?”

  “Yeah, give or take a few thousand.”

  “So the amateur was cheating.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “You want the job?” Bill asked.

  “What job?”

  “I want to hire you to figure out how this amateur beat those seven players at his table. I’ll send you the surveillance tapes, plus the footage Gloria Curtis’s cameraman shot. Study them, and tell me what the guy’s doing. Then we can bar him from the tournament, and everyone will be happy.”

  “Does Celebrity know you’re hiring me?”

  “No,” Bill said. “They haven’t been very cooperative. Between you and me, I think they’d just like this whole thing to go away.”

  Valentine thought back to the threatening phone call he’d received from the suit at Celebrity. Most casinos tried to expose cheating, and get the cheats barred or arrested. Celebrity was taking the opposite approach, and doing everything possible to pretend it didn’t exist. It didn’t smell right, and he stared at the Celebrity playing card on his desk.

  “Who’s the suspected cheat?” Valentine asked.

  “An amateur named Skip DeMarco.”

  Skip DeMarco was the same player that Gerry had said was in Las Vegas using Jack Donovan’s poker scam. Maybe he could nail DeMarco, and give his son something to smile about.

  “You want the job or not?” Bill asked.

  “I want it,” Valentine said.

  A minute later, Bill’s e-mail appeared on his computer screen with the surveillance tapes of Celebrity’s poker room and the footage shot by Gloria Curtis’s cameraman attached.

  He watched the poker tape first. Celebrity’s surveillance cameras were digital, and the tape’s resolution was crystal clear. Eight men in their late twenties sat at a table along with a professional female dealer, who wore a red bow tie and starched white shirt.

  Skip DeMarco sat in the center of the table. He wore purple shades and stared into space as he played. The game was Texas Hold ’Em, with each player dealt two cards to start. Instead of peeking at his cards like the other players, DeMarco brought his cards up to his nose, and stared at them. He enjoyed belittling his opponents and trumpeting his own wins. Had it been a private game, someone would have silenced him, either through words or a request to step outside. But this was a tournament, where anything was permissible. By the hour’s end, he had everyone’s chips.

  Valentine paused the tape and got a diet soda from the rattling fridge in the kitchen. The fridge had come with the house, and he’d been meaning to buy a new one, only it still worked, and he’d never believed in getting rid of things simply because they were old. Back in his study, he resumed watching the tape.

  Everything about the game looked on the square. DeMarco played smart, and got good cards when he needed them. Maybe the odds of him beating the other players were six billion to one, but sometimes those things happened. He decided to play Gloria Curtis’s tape, and see if it revealed anything.

  Curtis had interviewed DeMarco at the end of the first day of the tournament, right after DeMarco had beaten Rufus Steel. DeMarco was tall and good-looking, and she held the mike up to his face.

  “I’m speaking with today’s Cinderella story of the tournament, Skip ‘Dead Money’ DeMarco, an amateur player from New Jersey. Although this is your first tournament, I’m told you’ve played poker for many years.”

  “I got my chops in Atlantic City,” he said, holding a beer to his chest.

  “Can you tell us where the name Dead Money comes from?”

  “It’s what the old-timers call amateurs.”

  “Well, it looks like you knocked one of those old-timers out today,” Curtis said. “Rufus ‘the Thin Man’ Steele wasn’t very happy with how you beat him.”

  “Too bad,” he said.

  “Rufus claims you had an unfair advantage.”

  “Try disadvantage. I’m legally blind, and have been my whole life,” he said. “Try playing poker and not being able to see your opponents’ faces.”

  “What about Rufus’s claim?”

  “Rufus Steele is past his prime. I’m starting a petition to have his name changed.”

  “To what?”

  “The Old Man.”

  “How far do you think you’ll go in the tournament?”

  “All the way,” he said.

  The camera switched to show DeMarco at the poker table, raking in the chips. Valentine froze the tape and stared at DeMarco’s face. One thing that hadn’t diminished as he’d gotten older was his memory; he’d never seen this guy play poker in Atlantic City.

  So why had he lied? DeMarco could have said he’d learned to play on the Internet, just like millions of other people. Only he’d wanted to let Gloria Curtis know that he was experienced, and that his winning wasn’t a fluke. Valentine picked up the phone, and punched in Bill Higgins’s cell number.

  “I want to see some more tapes,” he said.

  “You think he’s cheating?” Bill asked.

  “I sure do.”

  It took Bill several hours to get him the additional surveill
ance tapes from Celebrity. By law, Nevada’s casinos were required to film any area of the casino where money changed hands. The buy-in for a poker tournament was no different, and at noon the tapes appeared on Valentine’s computer.

  The tapes were about as inspiring as watching paint dry. Endlessly long lines of men and women stood in front of dozens of tables, waiting to pay the ten thousand–dollar entry fee and get a table assignment.

  It took an hour and a half of searching to find Skip DeMarco. He stood in a long line, drinking coffee and talking with several other players. He walked with a cane, his movements out of sync with everything around him.

  Valentine scrutinized the players standing with DeMarco. It was the same seven guys who’d played with him the first day. People registering together in poker tournaments were never supposed to be placed at the same table. But the WPS had let DeMarco sit with his pals, and they’d folded to DeMarco, and let him amass a huge stack of chips that later let him beat Rufus Steele. It was cheating, pure and simple.

  But what bothered Valentine most was the scope of it. DeMarco was involved, and so were seven of his friends. Someone in tournament registration was also involved. That made nine people. That was a lot of people to push one player into the next round.

  “Sounds like a conspiracy,” Bill said, after Valentine explained what he’d discovered.

  “It does, except there’s a flaw,” Valentine said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Eight members of the gang are now useless to DeMarco. His pals are out of the tournament, and whoever helped him in registration can’t do him any good now. DeMarco is on his own, and there’s another seven days to play.”

  “Then why did he do it?”

  Valentine picked up the Celebrity playing card lying on his desk. He had a sneaking suspicion that there was something else going on, and he wasn’t seeing it.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said.

  “Have you ever heard of a blind person cheating at poker before? Or any game?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I. I think he’s got something up his sleeve. Maybe he’s doing a special for one of those reality-TV shows, and he’s going to show how he swindled the world’s biggest poker tournament. Stranger things have happened. In the meantime, he might end up ruining the tournament and hurting every casino in town.”

  “The guy is a world-class jerk,” Valentine said.

  “Meaning my scenario isn’t so far-fetched.”

  “Not at all.”

  “So here’s what I’d like to offer you,” Bill said. “Come out here for a few days, and scrutinize DeMarco’s play. If you catch him doing anything illegal—bending a card, peeking at another player’s hand, copping a chip—we’ll bust his ass and bar him for life. Say yes, and I’ll fly you out first class, pay your daily fee, and put you up. On top of that, you’ll earn my undying gratitude.”

  Valentine’s gut had been telling him that something wasn’t right at this tournament. Now he could find out what it was, and thumb his nose at the threatened lawsuit from Celebrity. It was a sweet deal if he’d ever heard one.

  “For you, anything,” Valentine said.

  10

  The day Gerry Valentine had become a partner in his father’s business, he’d gotten a history lesson about Las Vegas. He hadn’t wanted to get a history lesson, but his father had wagged a finger in his face, and made him listen.

  “It’s for your own good,” his father said.

  So Gerry pulled up a chair and let his father talk.

  Back in the 1940s, Las Vegas had been a dumpy gambling destination that attracted illiterate cowboys and other rough trade. Then two men with long criminal backgrounds came to town and changed the place. The first was a New York mobster named Bugsy Siegel. Bugsy was famous for wearing tailored suits, murdering anyone who got in his way, and helping Meyer Lansky and Al Capone start organized crime in America. Bugsy believed Las Vegas could be turned into Monte Carlo, and had sunk millions of the mob’s money into building the town’s first mega-resort on Las Vegas Boulevard. It was called the Flamingo, and was the beginning of the fabled “Strip.”

  The second was a Texas gambler named Benny Binion. Benny had a police record a mile long, and liked to say, “I never killed a man that didn’t deserve it.” Benny left Texas after learning that the Rangers had orders to kill him on sight. Las Vegas welcomed him with open arms, and he bought the Horseshoe on Fremont Street in old downtown. His first day open, Benny hung out a sign that said WORLD’S HIGHEST LIMITS, and attracted every serious gambler around.

  According to Gerry’s father, these two men had created modern Las Vegas. It was the town’s legacy, and no one was ashamed of it. But it did bother his father. His father believed that casinos, and the people who ran them, must have integrity. The majority of casino owners did not share this view, and had given his father a nickname. They called him Mr. Black and White.

  This was on Gerry’s mind as he stepped off the plane at McCarran International Airport. A lot of people in Las Vegas knew his father and didn’t like him. And because Gerry was looking more like his father every day, people were going to recognize him. What were they going to call him? Mr. Black and White Jr.?

  He ducked into a gift shop inside the terminal. Five minutes later he emerged wearing a Dodgers’ baseball cap, cheap sunglasses, and his shirt pulled out of his pants. He glanced at himself in the reflection in the gift shop’s window.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  He rented a car, and drove to a joint on Las Vegas Boulevard called the Laughing Jackalope. Las Vegas was always boasting about being the fastest-growing city in the country, and about all the great jobs the city offered, but only the casinos made serious money. Every other place struggled to make ends meet. The Jackalope was no exception.

  He squeezed the rental between a maxed-out Harley and a mud-caked junker. The Jackalope’s cross-eyed, albino bartender was considered a good source of information, and Gerry found him at the bar, standing like a statue beneath the TV. There was a hockey game on, a dozen guys slugging it out on the ice.

  “A draft,” Gerry said, taking a stool.

  The albino filled a mug with beer. He put a giant head on it, and plunked it onto the water-stained bar; the beer rolled down the glass. Having once run a bar himself, Gerry realized he was being insulted.

  “Two bucks fifty,” the albino said.

  “Can I get a scoop of ice cream with my drink?”

  The albino didn’t laugh, nor did the drunken prophets sitting at the bar.

  “Two bucks fifty,” the albino repeated.

  “You always so hospitable?” Gerry asked as he paid up.

  The albino eyed the C-note that Gerry had tugged out of his wallet. “I remember you,” the albino said. “You’re from New York.”

  “Was,” Gerry said.

  “Where you living now?”

  “Sunny Florida.”

  “You like it down there?”

  “Love it.”

  “I hear the summers are murder.”

  “They’re not as bad as here.”

  “Here? Give me a break. You have the fucking humidity. We don’t.”

  “No, you just step outside and burst into flames.”

  The albino’s face cracked. Almost a smile, but not quite there.

  “Drink your beer,” he said.

  The albino walked down the bar to take care of a female customer. The woman didn’t have any money but wanted another drink. The albino showed her to the door, then returned.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for a couple of brothers who came into town yesterday,” Gerry said, a frosty beer moustache painting his upper lip. “Their names are Nunzie and Vinny Fountain. There’s a third guy with them, a gorilla named Frank.”

  “Tush hog?” the albino asked.

  Gerry had never heard anyone use that expression except his father. A tush hog was a muscleman employed by mobsters
who enjoyed putting the hurt on people. Usually, their presence was enough to settle things.

  “Wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen him fight,” Gerry said.

  “Let me make a phone call, see what I can find out,” the albino said.

  Gerry reached into his wallet and folded the C-note. He handed the money to the albino along with his empty mug. The albino walked down the bar, picked up the house phone, and made a call. Gerry lifted his gaze and stared at the TV. The hockey players were still fighting, their masks and gloves lying on the ice. He remembered going to a hockey game at Madison Square Garden with Jack Donovan, and Jack saying that hockey games had to have fights. Otherwise, they would last only about fifteen minutes.

  The albino came back. “Your friends are staying at the Riviera.”

  “Thanks,” Gerry said.

  Going out, Gerry stopped to watch two guys at the pool table playing one-pocket. One-pocket was the favorite game among skilled players. Both players were too drunk to make any decent shots, and he left before the game ended.

  He stepped outside into a blast of heat coming off the desert. The sunlight was fading, and the casinos’ feverishly pulsing neon was beginning to define the skyline. Standing in the parking lot, he stared northward at the brilliant sphere of light coming out of the Luxor’s towering green glass pyramid. The light had attracted thousands of moths, which in turn attracted hundreds of bats, and their wings beat furiously against the sky. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen a bat in the desert. Behind him, a car pulled into the lot, and two guys jumped out.

  “Is that supposed to be a disguise?” one said sarcastically.

  Gerry spun around. It was Vinny and the tush hog. He glanced into the idling car, and saw Nunzie behind the wheel.

  “How did you find me?” Gerry asked.

  “The albino called me,” Vinny said. “We’ve got an arrangement.”

  “You sleeping with him?”

  The tush hog laughed under his breath. Vinny threw an elbow into the bigger man’s ribs. Then Vinny stared at Gerry for what seemed like an eternity.