“Lyle’s superstitious. Lots of gamblers are. Ever since he got Sweetlips, he’s been on one humongous winning streak.” Pete raced out into the yard. There, high on a branch of the tallest pine tree in the front yard, Sweetlips was savoring his (or her) freedom. Desperately, Pete waved birdseed at Sweetlips. Sweetlips regarded it with contempt.
Visions of Lyle playing abysmally at the World Series danced through both our heads. As might have been expected, Pete was there first with the obvious solution. “Freddy, we’ve got to come up with a substitute crow!”
Of course. What else? We tried about ten pet shops. No crows. We looked through the Recycler. Parakeets, budgies, canaries, and cockatoos. But no crows.
Things were getting desperate. Then, just as things looked black (an appropriate color, considering the missing party), I came through. I recalled that a casting director acquaintance of mine had told me about someone who supplied birds to movies. A twenty pried the name and number out of her. The birdman of West Covina was in, and he had a choice of three crows we could buy. We piled into Pete’s car, and three-quarters of an hour later we were ready to purchase a crow.
Pete looked at me. “Freddy, you spent more time with Sweetlips than I did. Which of these three birds looks the most like him?” Pete didn’t seem troubled by the he-or-she problem.
When you’ve seen one medium-sized crow, you’ve seen them all. It was a case of eenie-meenie-minie-crow. I voted for the one in the middle.
We turned to the trainer. “How much?”
“That’s $750.”
Whoever said that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush was obviously unfamiliar with current market conditions. “Crows are everywhere. Why so much?” I asked.
“They’re hard to catch.” Tell me about it. “Besides, they rent for $200 a day if the movies want them.”
I turned to Pete. “I’ll use the company credit card. Maybe we can claim a deduction.”
Luckily, we arrived home with Sweetlips II long before Lyle showed up. Evidently Lyle was fooled by the deception, for he departed for Las Vegas several days later with Sweetlips II in tow, not having the slightest inkling that he was no longer in possession of his lucky crow.
As it turned out, we were going to have a front row seat to the World Series of Poker without leaving home. As usual, ESPN had opted to telecast the entire World Series of Poker live. With a potential $100,000 or more on the line, we were going to be glued to the screen. At least, I was. Two sleepless days of TV-watching later, they had gotten rid of the amateurs, and there was Lyle at the final table!
Pete had been smart enough to catch up on sleep during the prelims, whereas I, like a dummy, had a bad case of strained eyeballs. So Pete was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the field narrowed to four. If it was hard for me to sleep, I wondered how it was for Lyle. He looked groggy, but there was more than $800,000 in chips in front of him when the fourth day’s play started.
If this had been Hollywood, there would have been lots of drama building up to a climactic hand. There wasn’t. Maybe Lyle had reached his level, maybe he was just exhausted, or maybe his luck was simply bad. Anyway, the money just started dribbling away. Five hours later, he shoved in his remaining chips, about $250,000, on a situation in which Pete later figured he was a 3-to-1 favorite. Unfortunately, his luck ran out. On the last card, his opponent made a flush to Lyle’s three queens. Lyle smiled a weary smile, murmured the words that Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous in Terminator I (“I’ll be back”), and walked out, possibly to trade Sweetlips II for a new lucky crow.
I cursed. Pete looked down at the floor and then slowly raised his face to me. It was clear that he was fighting an internal battle. Finally, for one of the few times since I have known Pete, a suppressed irrationality surfaced. He turned to me and said accusingly, “Freddy, why couldn’t you have picked a different crow?”
Pete had left an opening through which you could drive a Mack truck, and there was obviously a Mack truck handy. I swung into the driver’s seat and put the pedal to the metal. “Who was it who let Sweetlips escape in the first place?”
I have to give credit to Pete. He realized that bad blood was very likely to be spilled, and when bad blood is spilled, it is neither easily nor quickly mopped up. He grinned weakly and said, “Maybe it was your crow that got Lyle to the finals, and Lyle just blew it.”
I, too, backed off my high horse. “It’s just a pity that instead of making fifty thousand smackers or so, we’re out $750 for a crow of dubious deductibility. And a twenty-buck bribe. All we have to show for it is half a pound of leftover birdseed.”
Suddenly, Pete got the look on his face that meant he was either hungry or he had an idea. When he didn’t immediately head for the kitchen, I knew he had an idea. After about a minute or so, he looked at me and said, “Freddy, we’re a couple of idiots. There might be a way for us to make some money out of this. It’s been right under our noses, and we didn’t see it. And all it will cost us is a couple of phone calls.”
Well, maybe you saw it, and if so, my hat is off to you. But just remember, you weren’t here chasing after substitute crows and losing sleep during the World Series of Poker. It’s a lot easier to pick up on it from the comfort of your armchair.
Pete got on the phone and called the publishers of the newsletter that had served as a vehicle for the letters predicting the horse race winners. As he had hoped, they had no idea what was happening. The idea had been dreamed up by two guys, one in the circulation department who had access to the computer with the mailing lists, and the other in shipping, who could stuff the newsletters.
A couple of weeks later, we got a grateful letter from the publisher, who said that a scam like this could have destroyed the credibility of the newsletter. Accompanying the letter was a token of his gratitude, consisting of a $5,000 check. It wasn’t $100,000, but by then we had realized that getting our hands on $100,000 had been a huge longshot to begin with.
We’ve still got the remainder of the birdseed, but we’re not keeping it as a memento. If you drop by the house in Brentwood, just ring the doorbell and ask for it, and it’s yours.
CHAPTER 9
THE WINNING STREAK
It had been a while since I’d heard from Lisa. I’d left a couple of voice mails and hadn’t heard back. Consequently, I wasn’t in the best of moods.
I don’t know about you, but when things are not going well in one of the departments of life, such as relationships, I always look for positive developments in one of life’s other departments to offset this. At the moment, however, I wasn’t finding any such positive developments.
Psychologists talk about displacement; when you’re irritated with someone and for one reason or another you can’t take out your irritation on that person, you look for someone else on whom to take out your irritation. So maybe when you hear what I have to say, you won’t feel that I had any right to be sore at Pete. However, he was the nearest available subject for displaced irritation, and I felt that I had a valid reason to take out my irritation on him. I had been hoping to find positive developments in the business department to compensate for not hearing from Lisa—and for reasons that will soon be clear, that wasn’t happening. So, as I wrote out my monthly rent check, I was more than just in a mood to displace irritation; I was coming close to all-out grudge mode.
No, he hadn’t raised the rent. Nonetheless, it did have to do with cash flow. There is a natural tendency of cash to flow from the renter (me) to the landlord (Pete). This creates what is known as a negative cash flow to the renter. “Negative cash flow” is investment jargon for losing money, and I have always had bad feelings about losing money.
Currently, my primary source of positive cash flow was the work I do with Pete. At the moment, he was turning down cases left and right, leaving me twisting (financially) in the wind. You’d have been in grudge mode, too.
I don’t know what it is about the football season that turns even seasoned sports bettors such as P
ete into raving maniacs. During the baseball season, assuming that you can find a bookie or get to Las Vegas, you can place bets every day. It used to be easier to find a bookie by simply going to the Internet, but the government has clamped down on that, as well as on eliminating online poker. But betting on football is practically a national institution. The football season begins before the baseball season ends, so you might think that football simply presents a few additional opportunities to place bets on weekends. Well, you might think that, but the hardened sports junkie certainly doesn’t.
The coming of the football season had turned Pete, as hardened a sports junkie as ever came down the pike, into a virtual vegetable. Except for occasional forays to (a) the refrigerator, (b) the bathroom, and (c) the bedroom, he had grown roots in front of the TV set. But I was used to this type of behavior, and besides, part of my job was to pry Pete away from the tube. However, right now it would have taken dynamite to accomplish this goal because Pete was on the mother of all winning streaks.
Hence my soreness. My cash was flowing negatively, while his was flowing positively. Flowing doesn’t begin to describe it—it was positively gushing. And so was Pete. It was hard to remain civil while I was writing out rent checks, turning down cases, and hearing Pete gleefully announce that he had gone nine and two in the pros last Sunday and had won all his two- and three-unit bets.1
So when the latest phone call came in on the business line, it was the answer to my prayer. Before the call, I had been trying to dream up schemes to talk Pete into taking a case, and I had come up completely dry. Even if I had been sufficiently imaginative to invent the phone call I had just received, as you will soon see, I could never have acted upon it.
I walked into the living room, where Pete was sprawled on the couch in front of the big-screen HDTV. He looked up as I entered the room. “You look like the cat that just swallowed the canary, Freddy. What’s up?”
“Maybe your number,” I replied, pushing away the bag of tortilla chips he was shaking under my nose. “No, thanks. How do you stand with your bookie?”
Pete consulted a few slips of paper in front of him. “I’m current as of last Tuesday, but I’m burying him this weekend. Why?”
“Your bookie works for Victor March, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, March gobbled up a lot of the independents on the Westside. It’s hard to find good lines anymore.” He crunched a few more tortilla chips and washed them down with some Coors. “I say again—why do you ask?”
“Because Victor March wants to see us this evening. I know your reluctance to take cases during the football season, but I accepted anyway. If I didn’t, maybe he’d cut off your credit. Then whom would you bet with?”
Pete gazed at the living room. “Maybe we’d better straighten up the place before he arrives. This place is a mess.”
I snorted. “Victor March doesn’t arrive. He sends out. A chauffeur will pick us up at eight this evening.”
Pete was still not interested in taking cases. “I wanted to watch the game this evening,” he stated, aggravating me even further. “I’m loaded up on UCLA minus six over Arizona State.”
“Why don’t you record it on the DVR? Isn’t that why DVRs were invented?”
“It’s not the same thing as seeing it live,” Pete said assertively. “Besides, there’s a universal conspiracy on the part of the world to inform you of the outcome of any sports event you have decided to record. Particularly if you’ve got a heavy bet down.”
“Think of it this way. If we get back early, you can fast-forward through the game and avoid those annoying commercials. If we get back late, instead of having to watch dull pregame commentary Sunday morning, you can fast-forward through the game during breakfast. Plus, there’s always the chance that March may have something interesting and profitable for us. We really shouldn’t pass it up.”
Maybe my powers of persuasion were improving, or Pete just wanted to meet his bookie in person, as a little after eight we were in the office of High Rollers, Victor March’s elegant Beverly Hills club. March himself was a little bit of a letdown, as he looked more like a florist than a nightclub proprietor and reputed head of a major bookmaking operation. He offered drinks, which Pete and I accepted. After a few preliminary remarks, obviously designed to create a cordial atmosphere, he came quickly to the point.
“The two of you have a reputation for being able to solve unusual problems,” he said. “I have one that I think might be of interest to you.” We looked interested (at least, I did—Pete has one of those faces that it’s really hard to look interested with), and so March continued, “I’m out ten thousand bucks. I’m sure I’ve been swindled, but I have no idea how it was done. It’s chump change, but if the word gets around town that I’ve been taken, I’m not going to look good. It’s bad for me and bad for business. And if I find out how it’s done, it’s going to be bad for DiStefano as well.” Suddenly March looked a lot meaner than my neighborhood florist—or any neighborhood’s florist, for that matter. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gotten a lot less cordial.
When business is being discussed, it is understood that my job is to stay alert. Pete’s is to conduct the conversation. I stayed alert. Pete may have been suffering withdrawal symptoms, not having seen a pigskin in more than an hour and a half, but he kept his share of the bargain and asked March, “Do you mean Danny DiStefano?”
I was still alert but feeling a lot less enthusiastic about this situation than I had when I first received March’s phone call. Danny DiStefano and Victor March probably accounted for three out of every four sports dollars bet on the Westside. However, where March used his profits to run legitimate enterprises (or so I’d been informed), Danny DiStefano was reputed to sink his back into drugs. DiStefano also was reputed to have more aggressive methods of debt collection than Victor March, as well as a squad of aggressive debt collectors whom you didn’t want to annoy. I had to stop my teeth from chattering as I contemplated being caught in a Danny DiStefano–Victor March crossfire.
Pete seemed oblivious to such unfortunate consequences. It occurred to me that, despite his recent winning streak, the reference to $10,000 as chump change had impressed him. He finished the last of his drink and asked March to describe how he was swindled.
“I ran into DiStefano the other night in a club over on Melrose. We had a few drinks and then started making bets on whether the next person to enter the club would be a man or a woman.” March paused, but that didn’t surprise either me or Pete. Hardened gamblers have been known to bet on which raindrop would slide down a window and reach the bottom first.
After a short pause, filled only by silence, March continued. “After a few bets, he came up with an amazing proposition. DiStefano told me he was willing to lay me odds of eleven to ten that he could guess the sex of a person he had never met!”
Pete raised his eyebrows. “I’d almost be willing to go for that one myself. Are you sure that he had never met the individuals in question? That’s the obvious way to rig the bet.”
March took a puff of his cigarette. “That’s what has me stumped. I would swear that he would have had no chance to do so. You see, I selected the people myself!”
It is hard to surprise Pete, but I could see that March had managed it. “Then you knew the sex of these people and still lost?” Pete asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” March snapped. “It was like this. He suggested that I just choose people at random, and he would guess the sex of their siblings. In order to insure that there would be no room for argument, we would only use those individuals who had precisely one brother or sister. It certainly seemed to me that the brother or sister was equally likely to be a man or a woman, and I was therefore receiving eleven-to-ten odds on an even-money proposition. Needless to say, I went for it, and it cost me ten thousand bucks. I dislike being swindled, especially by scum like DiStefano. It’s worth five thousand to me to find out how he did it.”
Pete got up. “A very interesting
problem, Mr. March. Let us think about it overnight, and Mr. Carmichael will call you in the morning with our answer.”
When we got back to the house, Pete immediately turned on the previously recorded UCLA–Arizona State game. I blew up.
“There’s five thousand bucks on the line, Pete. To say nothing of the continued good will of our client, the influential and potentially dangerous Mr. March. Maybe you should get to work.”
Pete watched the opening kickoff, then favored me with a reaction during the commercial. “Don’t sweat it, Freddy. It’s in the bag.”
I had no idea why he was so optimistic. “You haven’t asked anybody any questions. You haven’t visited the scene of the crime. How can you tell me with a straight face that we’ve just made $5,000?”
As I mentioned at the start of this story, there are times when Pete drives me crazy. I have to admit, though, that when he decides to explain something, he does it quite clearly.
“Look, Freddy, here’s what happened. Since the person being asked what the sex of his or her sibling was had only one sibling, there are four possible orders in which the two children were born. These are boy–boy, boy–girl, girl–boy, and girl–girl. Each of these is equally likely.”
I thought about it for a minute. “Yeah, Pete, that makes sense. But I don’t see what difference it makes.”
Pete paused briefly. “Let’s assume that March asked a man the sex of his sibling. Since he asked a man, the two children could not have been girl–girl. This leaves only three possible cases remaining: boy–boy, boy–girl, and girl–boy. In two out of three cases, the man’s sibling was a girl. If my analysis is correct, DiStefano guessed that the sex of the sibling was opposite to the sex of the individual being asked. All we have to do is confirm that with March when we call him tomorrow.”
(Probabilities for two-child family continued on p. 193)
I thought about it. “Pretty neat. So instead of laying 11 to 10 on an even-money proposition, DiStefano was laying 11 to 10 on a 2-to-1 favorite.”
L.A. Math: Romance, Crime, and Mathematics in the City of Angels Page 10