Deadman's Poker: A Novel (Tony Valentine)

by James Swain

  “Really?” Mabel said.

  “Yes. You lose in a casino, but only gradually. That’s what keeps you playing. However, in the first few hours, you also have the best chance of winning some money, because you have your entire bankroll. Make sense?”

  “Yes,” Mabel said. “The cruise ship casinos are only open during the evening, and are susceptible to more losses than a casino that stays open longer.”

  “That’s right. Because of this situation, some cruise ship casinos have been known to cheat their customers. They short the decks in blackjack and don’t pay jackpots on slot machines. Since they operate in international waters, there isn’t much the authorities can do about them.”

  “Is that why they call them ‘cruises to nowhere’?”

  “No, but it should be.”

  “Do you think the ship I was on was cheating?”

  “No,” Valentine said. “They closed down early because they were getting beaten. That’s standard procedure. When the casino starts losing money, management stops the hemorrhaging.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” Mabel said.

  “Casinos don’t gamble. Your turn.”

  Knowing a con or scam that Tony didn’t know was rare, and Mabel could not help but savor the moment. Excusing herself, she went to the kitchen and poured herself an iced tea, then returned to the study and sat down in Tony’s big comfortable chair. Only after she’d taken a gulp of her drink did she pick the phone back up.

  “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” he said.

  “To the max. You’re so hard to pull the wool over, I consider it a special occasion.”

  “It’s really something stupid, isn’t it?”

  “Simple, but not stupid. Let’s use your famous Logical Backward Progression, and analyze what happened,” she said. “Explain to me what you saw.”

  “A sucker put ten sugar cubes on the table, and picked one. Rufus waved a coffee stirrer over it. A fly was let out of a mayonnaise jar, and it flew around, then landed on the sugar cube the sucker picked.”

  “What didn’t the fly do?”

  “You’ve lost me,” he said.

  “The fly didn’t land on the other nine cubes,” she said. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because those cubes have no smell. Flies are attracted by smell. Sugar in its pure form doesn’t have an odor. But, if you add moisture to sugar, it will release a powerful odor. That’s what attracted the fly to the cube.”

  “So Rufus used the stirrer to drop moisture onto the cube.”

  “Yes,” Mabel said. “It doesn’t have to be very much for the fly to smell it.”

  “Well, I guess you learn something new every day,” he said. “ I’ve got to run. Gerry is being held in the back room of a casino, and I need to have a talk with him.”

  “I thought Gerry was in San Juan with Yolanda,” Mabel said.

  “He came out here on the sly. I’m about to go read the riot act to him.”

  “What should I tell Yolanda if she calls?” Mabel asked.

  There was a long pause on the line.

  “Tell her Gerry’s doing a job with me,” Valentine said.

  Mabel smiled into the receiver. No matter what Gerry’s transgressions might be, Tony always stuck up for his son. It was Tony’s biggest flaw, and a constant reminder to Mabel that no matter how much Tony fought with Gerry, he placed parenthood above all else.

  “I will,” she said.

  19

  Valentine killed the connection, thinking how impressed Gloria Curtis was going to be when he explained the sugar scam over dinner. It would make him seem more rounded, knowing that sugar didn’t smell in its natural state. He hadn’t had the urge to impress a woman in a long time, and liked the way it made him feel.

  He took the stairs to the third floor of the casino and walked down a windowless hallway to a steel door marked PRIVATE. A surveillance camera was perched above the door, and he stared into its lenses. Moments later the door buzzed, and he entered Celebrity’s surveillance control room.

  The room’s lighting was subdued, the air kept at a chilly sixty degrees so the electronic equipment would run properly. Valentine let his eyes adjust, then stared at the opposing wall of video monitors, the four-color digital pictures as clear as real life. Bill Higgins stood beside the monitors, talking on a cell phone. Bill shut his phone, and walked over with a grim look on his face.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” his friend said, “but your son and his friends just robbed someone in the casino.”

  “What?”

  “I was on the phone, telling hotel security to backroom your son when it happened,” Bill said. “Your son and his three friends ran out to the parking lot, and got away. Your son’s in serious trouble, Tony.”

  Trouble. It should have been Gerry’s middle name. Bill spoke to a tech sitting at a desk. The tech typed on a keyboard, and a tape appeared on a monitor showing Skip DeMarco, his bodyguard, and the Tuna exiting the casino bar. The tape had a time and date code in the right-hand corner, and had been taken a short while ago.

  “Watch,” Bill said.

  Gerry and his friends came out of the bar moments later. They were moving fast, and they threw themselves into the bodyguard and DeMarco, knocking them to the floor. Then Gerry grabbed the canvas bag from the Tuna, and with his friends ran out of the picture. The tech hit a button and froze the tape.

  “Have you called the cops?” Valentine asked.

  “No, I was waiting for you,” Bill said.

  Valentine tried to imagine his son in prison. Nevada’s penal system was one of the harshest in the country, and Gerry would never be the same if he ended up doing time. If he hadn’t asked Bill to backroom his son, Bill wouldn’t have been watching Gerry on a surveillance camera. He felt responsible, even though it was Gerry who’d broken the law.

  “Don’t,” Valentine said. “He’s working with me.”

  Bill gave him a look of pure astonishment. “Tony, he just robbed a guy.”

  Valentine pointed at the frozen picture on the monitor. “See that old guy? That’s George ‘the Tuna’ Scalzo, a mobster out of Newark. I’m convinced he’s scamming the tournament. He’s also backing DeMarco.”

  “You’re saying your son robbed DeMarco with your permission?”

  Valentine swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  “Do you have any proof against Scalzo?”

  Valentine shook his head.

  Bill crossed his arms in front of his chest and gave him a hard look. “Tony, listen to me. Scalzo is downstairs talking to hotel security. He’s going to file charges. I have to show security the tape of your son, and identify him. It’s the law.”

  Valentine glanced at the tech, then edged closer to Bill and dropped his voice. “The law? The Gaming Control Board routinely busts people you suspect of cheating without any proof. Correct?”

  Bill slowly nodded.

  “That means that you’re the law, Bill. And since you hired me to investigate this tournament, you have to back me up. My son is helping me solve this case, and I don’t want you to show security the tape. Okay?”

  Bill thought it over. “What if Scalzo calls the police?”

  “Let him.”

  “But the police will ask for the tape.”

  “Tell them the camera was taping something else.”

  One of the common fallacies of the casino business was that surveillance cameras taped everything on the casino floor. In reality, the cameras were constantly rotating, and missed a great deal of what was going on. Over 50 percent of the casino was not being watched most of the time. It was why casinos lost so much money to cheaters.

  Bill went over to the tech and spoke to him. The tech stared up at Bill, his eyes wide. He slowly typed a command into his keyboard. Valentine stared at the frozen picture on the monitor. The picture went into reverse, and stopped just before Gerry and his friends exited the bar.

  “You sure you want m
e to do this?” the tech asked.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Erase the whole thing.”

  The screen went blank and stayed that way. Valentine felt the air trapped in his lungs escape, and he went over and slapped Bill on the back.

  “I owe you,” he said.

  “I need to talk to you about the tournament,” Bill said.

  “I’m all ears.”

  Bill nodded at one of the offices. A casino’s surveillance control room should have been the safest place in the world, but secrets often escaped from there as well. They went into the office and Bill shut the door. “I’ve been recording DeMarco’s play, and having an old hustler watch the tapes to see if he can spot any hankypanky,” Bill said.

  “Which old hustler?”

  “Sammy Mann.”

  Sammy Mann was an old-time crossroader who’d given up his life of crime and gone to work helping casinos. He was a nice guy, as far as ex-crooks went.

  “He find anything?” Valentine asked.

  “Sammy says DeMarco is either incredibly good, or he’s cheating.”

  “But not lucky.”

  “His luck stinks,” Bill said. “He’s gotten the worst draws of any player in the tournament. But, he’s got this knack of knowing when to play his good cards.”

  Valentine considered what that meant. If DeMarco knew when to play his good cards, it also meant that he knew that his opponents were weak. Knowing those two things said that DeMarco knew every card on the table. Either the kid was psychic, or he was using marked cards, just like Gerry had been saying all along.

  “Did you have today’s cards examined?”

  “Yes. We sent them over to the FBI’s forensic lab after today’s round was done. The FBI even gave the cards the burn test.”

  The burn test was a clever way to detect if a playing card was marked with a foreign substance. The suspected card was slowly burned while being examined under a microscope. If there was a foreign substance on the card, it would burn differently and reveal itself.

  “What did they find?” Valentine asked.

  “Absolutely nothing,” Bill said.

  There was nothing more frustrating than knowing a scam was taking place, but not having enough evidence to nail the cheaters and shut it down. They agreed to talk again later that night. Bill opened the office door, and they walked back into the surveillance control room.

  As Valentine passed the wall of monitors, he saw a tape of the Tuna taken in the casino lobby right after he’d been robbed by Gerry and his friends. The Tuna was stomping his feet and cursing up a storm, and looked almost comical. Valentine walked over to the tech whom Bill had told to erase the tape. The tech was sucking a thick shake like it was the only food he’d had in days.

  “Any particular reason you’re watching this tape?” Valentine asked.

  “Just covering my ass,” the tech said.

  “How so?”

  “Mr. Higgins told me to erase the tape of that guy having his bag stolen. I figured I’d better erase the aftermath as well.”

  “I’d like to watch it before you erase it.”

  “Be my guest,” the tech said.

  Valentine went back to the monitor and watched the tape. The Tuna was poking DeMarco’s bodyguard in the chest while yelling at him. The bodyguard whipped out a cell phone and made a call. Thirty seconds later a guy with pocked skin entered the picture. Valentine felt the icy chill of recognition and turned to the tech.

  “Freeze this.”

  Instantly the image became frozen on the monitor.

  “Now enlarge the guy’s face.”

  “I can show you his pimples,” the tech said.

  “A head shot will do.”

  The face became enlarged, then appeared on every monitor on the wall. The tech was having fun, showing what his toys could do. It was enough of an overload to jolt Valentine’s memory into remembering where he’d seen that face before. Taking out his wallet, he removed the composite that Gerry had paid a courthouse artist to draw of Jack Donovan’s killer, and compared the composite to the face on the monitor. It was a match.

  “Are your tapes digital?” Valentine asked.

  “State of the art,” the tech said. “We use Loronex.”

  Loronex was a digital surveillance system that could take a picture of a person, run it against ninety days of past tapes, and pull up any tapes the person appeared on.

  “Find this guy in your digital database,” Valentine said. “I want to see where he went after this tape was shot.”

  The tech’s fingers were a blur on the keyboard. Moments later, the monitors came alive with a new tape. It showed the guy with the pocked skin walking through the front doors, and giving the valet a stub for his car. As he waited for his car, he removed a shiny business card from his pocket, and dialed his cell phone while staring at it.

  “Can you enlarge that card?” Valentine asked.

  The business card became enlarged on the monitor. It was for the Sugar Shack, and had a naked girl lying horizontally across it. Bill, who’d been talking to another tech, came over to where Valentine stood.

  “That’s Jinky Harris’s club,” Bill said. “He runs the local flesh market.”

  “Is he in the mob?”

  “He sure is.”

  Valentine stared at the monitor while feeling his heart pound against his rib cage. Gerry and his friends were in real trouble, and not just because they’d stolen the Tuna’s canvas bag. He took out his cell phone and called Gerry’s cell. An automated voice answered, and told him to leave a voice or text message. His son was always picking up text messages from his wife, and Valentine typed a short message telling Gerry his life was in danger. He marked it urgent and hit send.

  “Do you mind my asking you a question?” Bill asked.

  Valentine snapped his cell phone shut. “What’s that?”

  “Is your son really working with you?”

  A lie was only good if you kept it going.

  “Yes,” he said.

  20

  Las Vegas was like any other major city once you get away from the downtown, the roads and highways jammed with impossibly long lines of traffic. Highway 15, the main thoroughfare on the west side of town, was particularly bad, with lots of tire-burning stop-and-go. Gerry drove in the slow lane, searching for their exit.

  “Boy, that was slick,” Vinny said, the canvas bag Gerry had snatched from the Tuna sitting protectively in his lap. “Those assholes didn’t know what hit them.”

  “You did a good job knocking down that bodyguard,” Gerry said.

  Vinny glanced into the backseat at Frank and Nunzie. “It was just like the good old days, wasn’t it, guys?”

  Frank and Nunzie both started laughing. They had spent their formative years doing hit-and-runs on drunks playing the slot machines in Atlantic City’s casinos, knocking them off their stools and stealing their plastic buckets of coins. For a lot of bad kids, it had been the equivalent of having a summer job.

  “So, when are we going to open the bag?” Nunzie wanted to know.

  “Yeah,” Frank said, leaning between the seat, “let’s see what this secret is.”

  Gerry took his eyes off the highway and glanced at Vinny. They’d talked about this earlier; Jack Donovan had lost his life because of this secret, and Gerry didn’t think they should just open up the bag, and start playing with it like a toy.

  “We’re going to wait until we get back to the motel,” Vinny said.

  “Aw, come on,” Frank said belligerently. “I want to know what it is.”

  “Me too,” Nunzie said.

  “Only when we’re back at the motel,” Vinny said.

  Since Vinny was buying the secret, his word stood. Frank looked dejected, and popped an unlit cigarette into his mouth. It made him look like Marlon Brando from On the Waterfront, and he said, “I got a question. I know we were moving fast, but what if the cameras caught us? We could go to jail.”

  Gerry saw their exit and put his in
dicator on. “The cameras are always rotating. Which means we had a one-in-two shot of not being seen. Sort of like a coin toss.”

  Frank thought it over, then removed a quarter from his pocket, and tossed it into the air. Nunzie called heads, and Frank caught the coin, and slapped it on the back of his hand. He slowly pulled his hand away. Nunzie’s face said it all. Tails.

  “Gotcha,” Frank said.

  Gerry was in the motel parking lot when Vinny’s cell phone rang. Vinny had downloaded Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” and used it as the chime for his cell phone. The novelty had already worn off, and Gerry felt like tossing it out the window. Vinny answered the call, then covered the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand.

  “It’s Jinky Harris,” he announced.

  “Ask him if he’s still cleaning up the milk,” Gerry said.

  “Shut up. That goes for everybody, okay?”

  Everyone in the car quit talking, and Vinny took his hand away.

  “I’m here, Jinky. What’s shaking?”

  Vinny’s head bobbed up and down while he listened to Jinky talk. Vinny couldn’t have a conversation without some part of his body acting like a metronome. If he was standing, it was his hands; sitting, his head or his foot.

  “You got it,” Vinny said. “We’ll meet you at the Voodoo Lounge in twenty minutes. I know where it is. See you there.”

  Vinny killed the connection and gave Gerry instructions to the Voodoo Lounge. It was halfway between Las Vegas and the town of Henderson, and well off the beaten path. As Gerry headed back to Highway 15, Vinny explained that Jinky wasn’t angry about the night before, and wanted to talk to them about a business proposition.

  “Jinky says he’s got a sweet deal for us,” Vinny explained.

  “What kind of deal?” Gerry asked.

  “You think he was going to tell me over the phone?”

  Gerry got back on the highway and followed the signs to Henderson. Jinky hadn’t been willing to share his egg rolls, yet now was offering them some easy money. It didn’t add up.