by James Swain
“You might.”
The door opened and a lanky shift supervisor greeted them.
“We need to talk to one of your people,” Bill said.
The shift supervisor blinked. “Is there something wrong?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.”
“Who do you want to talk to?” the shift supervisor asked.
Bill looked at Valentine.
“Sammy Mann,” Valentine said.
The shift supervisor led them through the surveillance control room to the offices that lined the back wall. He knocked on a door, then cracked it open. “You’ve got visitors,” he announced.
The shift supervisor left, and Bill and Valentine entered. The office was hardly big enough for them to squeeze in, and Valentine sucked in his breath as he shut the door. Sammy Mann sat behind the desk, staring at computer screen containing a live feed from a surveillance camera on the casino floor. Seeing them, he smiled. Sammy was a man of sartorial splendor, and wore a silk sports jackets with mother-of-pearl buttons, a baby blue shirt with French cuffs, and a gold tie with a perfect Windsor knot. He was the classiest cheater Valentine had ever known. Now retired, he hired himself out to Las Vegas casinos as a consultant.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Sammy said pleasantly. “Welcome to my humble abode. Make yourselves at home.”
“I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” Valentine said.
The smile left Sammy’s face. “You’re here on business?”
“That’s right,” Bill said.
“What’s wrong?” Sammy asked.
Valentine dug out of his pocket the Silly Putty and paper clip that Rufus had found in Celebrity’s poker room, and placed them on the desk. He deliberately shoved the paper clip into the putty, and saw Sammy wince.
“We’ve got a mucker cheating the World Poker Showdown, and I think you might know who it is,” Valentine said.
Smart crooks never lied; they just kept their mouths shut. Sammy’s lips closed and he continued to stare at the bug. Sammy’s speciality had been switching decks of cards at casino blackjack tables. Because of him and his well-trained gangs, every casino in the world now chained their dealing shoes to their tables.
“Start talking,” Bill said.
Sammy wore a perpetual tan, and it was unsettling to see the color drain from his cheeks. “Are you going to arrest me?” he asked.
“I might if you don’t give us some straight answers,” Bill said.
“On what grounds?”
“Collusion,” Bill said.
“With who?”
“You know every mucker in the country,” Valentine jumped in. “Hell, you trained most of them. The question is, did you see one working the tournament?”
Sammy reached into the pocket of his sports jacket and removed a medicine bottle. He spilled a few dozen tiny pills onto the table, then stuck one on the tip of his tongue. He washed it down with a glass of water sitting on the desk.
“For my heart,” he said, taking a deep breath.
They waited him out. Las Vegas’s casinos liked to boast that they didn’t use ex-cheaters in surveillance, but it wasn’t true. Nearly every casino used them, and for good reason. There was no other way to learn how grifters worked.
“To answer your question,” Sammy finally said, “no, I have not seen anyone I know from the past scamming the poker tournament.”
Valentine slammed his hand on the desk, making Sammy jump.
“That wasn’t the question.”
“It wasn’t?” Sammy asked meekly.
“No. I asked you if you’d spotted any muckers you know, not if you saw them switching cards. My guess is, if you recognized someone, you wouldn’t watch them, just so you couldn’t be pinned down later.”
Sammy was breathing hard. Not reporting a scam was a felony, punishable by up to three years in state prison. Sammy had visited the crossbar motel before, and knew how harsh prison life was for cheaters.
“If you’re asking me if I spotted anyone in the tournament who I know from the past, the answer is yes,” Sammy said. “There are many guys playing here who cheated at one time or another. But that doesn’t mean they’re cheating here.”
“Did you watch them to make sure they weren’t cheating?” Valentine asked.
A sweat moustache appeared above Sammy’s upper lip.
“No,” he said.
“You’re in serious trouble,” Bill informed him.
The best thing a cop could do to a crook was make him sweat. Leaving Sammy in the office, they went into the surveillance control room to have a little chat.
“What a crummy prick,” Bill said. “He’s sitting there collecting a paycheck to catch cheaters, yet isn’t reporting cheaters he knows are playing in the tournament. When I’m finished with him, he won’t be able to get another job in town.”
“Actually, I was hoping you’d let him skate,” Valentine said.
Bill’s mouth opened a few centimeters. “You were?”
“Yes. I want him working for us.”
“You sound like you’ve got a soft spot for the guy.”
Bill wasn’t far off the mark. Sammy had class. Like Rufus, he could charm the pants off a person while stealing their money. “I wanted to scare him, and we have,” Valentine said. “If you give Sammy another chance, I feel certain he’ll lead us to the mucker. When he does, you can call the governor, and tell him you want to raid the tournament. That way, we’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
“We will?”
“Yes. I watched DeMarco play earlier, and I’d be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that the dealer at his table is involved in the scam.”
“Which dealer are you talking about?”
“Heavyset guy with a walrus moustache. He’s doing something fishy when he deals. His movements are too slow.”
“Is he reading the cards and somehow signaling DeMarco?”
The air-conditioning never stopped blowing in a surveillance control room, and Valentine shivered and said, “No. The dealer hardly looked at the deck when he dealt. But I’m certain he’s involved.”
“So the mucker is an excuse to raid the game,” Bill said.
Valentine nodded. He had been studying DeMarco’s scam for a week, and was no closer to the solution than the day he’d started. The proverbial sand was slipping from the hourglass. If he didn’t solve this puzzle soon, DeMarco would be crowned the champion, and he and Bill would look like chumps.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Bill said.
28
Mabel was on the computer when she heard the front door slam. Not long ago a man had entered the house under false pretenses, and held her hostage. She’d learned a valuable lesson from the experience, and reaching across the desk, she grabbed a copy of Crime and Punishment nestled between a pair of bookends, and removed a loaded Sig Sauer that Tony kept in the hollowed-out interior. She rose from her chair.
“I’m armed,” she called out.
“Don’t shoot,” a familiar woman’s voice called back.
“Yolanda, is that you?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get here so fast?”
“I flew Southwest.”
Mabel returned the gun to its hiding place and went to the foyer. Tony and his late wife had bought the house to retire to, and it was a charming relic that represented the way Florida houses used to be made, with hardwood floors, crown molding, and jalousie windows. Yolanda stood by the front door, the baby cradled in her arms.
“I’ve missed you,” Mabel said, hugging her.
“I missed you, too,” Yolanda said. “The baby’s diaper needs changing. Talk to me in the kitchen.”
The kitchen was in the back of the house, and faced a postage-stamp-size backyard. Yolanda put the baby on the kitchen table and said, “So tell me why Tony and Gerry are in trouble.”
“Right before we spoke, I got a phone call from Special Agent Romero of the FBI,” Mabel explained. “He told m
e that Tony and Gerry have gotten on the wrong side of a notorious mobster, and are in danger.”
“So they could end up dead, like in my dream,” Yolanda said.
“Yes.”
Yolanda tickled the baby’s stomach and made her giggle. The baby was named Lois, and resembled Tony’s late wife, whom she’d been named after. As a result, Yolanda had Tony and Gerry wrapped around her little finger, yet rarely took advantage of it. Lifting the baby to her shoulder, she said, “I suppose I should call them, and ask them to come home, but somehow I have a feeling that they’d both tell me they’re okay, and not to worry. Am I right?”
Mabel sunk down into a chair. Yolanda was right. Tony and Gerry weren’t going to be forced out of a case by anyone.
“Besides, think of the long-term consequences if I ask them to come home,” Yolanda said, patting the baby’s behind.
“What long-term consequences?”
“I’d be drawing a line in the sand,” Yolanda said, “and telling Tony and Gerry that I’m not willing to let them work under certain situations. If I did that, they might as well close Grift Sense, and go into some other line of work.”
Mabel swallowed hard. She hadn’t thought of it that way. “I see your point.”
“Good. I suggest we take another tack.”
“Which is?”
“Maybe we can help them solve this case, ” Yolanda said.
“How are we going to do that? We don’t know anything about it.”
Yolanda handed her the baby, then dug a piece of folded paper from her pocket. Yolanda was big on writing things down, and unfolded a page filled with notes.
“Oh yes, we do,” the younger woman said.
They went into Tony’s office with Mabel still holding the baby. She’d raised two children of her own, and looked back fondly at the experience, even though she hardly heard from either of them now. One day, they’d have children of their own, and start calling her more regularly. It was how it had worked with her mother.
“I spoke with Gerry last night,” Yolanda said, laying her notes on the desk. “He told me the key to solving this scam was at the Atlantic City Medical Center. His friend Jack Donovan stole something from there that’s being used to invisibly mark cards, and Gerry is trying to find out what it is. Well, I think we can help him.”
“How?” Mabel asked.
“The first thing Gerry has to realize is that things get stolen from hospitals, and never get reported to the police.”
“Why’s that?”
“Hospitals are no different than anywhere else,” Yolanda said. “Stuff disappears, including narcotics and prescription drugs, and the police never hear about it. People internally know about it, but that’s where it stops.”
The baby was starting to squirm. Mabel put her on the floor, and watched her crawl away.
“Bad for business?” Mabel asked.
“Worse than bad,” Yolanda said. “If the state medical board hears that a hospital is losing drugs to thieves, they might pull the hospital’s license. As a result, thefts routinely get hushed up. Gerry can’t rely on anyone working at the Atlantic City Medical Center to be truthful in regards to what Jack Donovan might have stolen from them.”
“So the hospital is a dead end,” Mabel said.
“Not necessarily. Oh, better grab the baby.”
Lois had crawled across the floor and was drooling on the newest addition to Tony’s collection of cheating equipment. It was a crooked roulette wheel, courtesy of the famed London Club, that’d hired Tony to determine why they were losing on the wheel. Using a computer software program, Tony had analyzed a week’s worth of winning numbers, and determined that half were coming up too often. He’d gotten the casino to take the wheel apart, and remove all the screws holding the metal separators between the winning numbers, called frets. It was discovered that the threads of these screws were thinner than normal, and offered less resistance when hit by the spinning ball. The casino had arrested the roulette repairman, who’d immediately confessed to the ingenious crime.
Mabel scooped the baby up. “Why not necessarily?”
“If the hospital is confronted by the police about a theft, they’ll help in the investigation, for the same reasons I just explained. The hard part is getting enough evidence for the police to feel comfortable doing that.” Yolanda glanced at her notes on the desk. “Right now, we know the following: Jack Donovan stole something from the hospital, which he hid inside a metal strongbox under his bed. The strongbox was missing after Jack was murdered, leaving everyone to assume that the murderer stole it. Now, here’s the interesting part. Gerry saw the murderer coming down a stairwell in the hospital, right?”
“Correct,” Mabel said.
“But the murderer wasn’t carrying a strongbox, a duffel bag, or anything at all,” Yolanda said. “Gerry said his hands were empty.”
“Maybe the murderer took the secret out of the strongbox, and put it in his pocket.”
“I don’t think so. We know the secret is dangerous, which is why it was kept inside the strongbox in a duffel bag. I have another theory as to what happened to Jack’s secret.”
Mabel rocked the baby against her chest. She sensed that Yolanda had found something that everyone else had missed. Something hiding in plain sight, to use one of Tony’s favorite expressions.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I think George Scalzo stole it,” Yolanda said.
Mabel blinked. She knew a lot about Scalzo, courtesy of Special Agent Romero. Scalzo had murdered Skip DeMarco’s mother, a prostitute, in order to get custody of DeMarco when he was a little boy. Scalzo would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
“If that’s true, then Scalzo was in the hospital during the murder,” Mabel said.
“I think so,” Yolanda said.
“You don’t think he would have sent one of his men?”
“Scalzo wants his nephew to win the World Poker Showdown,” Yolanda said. “Do you think he would have trusted one of his men to steal the scam from Jack’s room?”
Mabel considered it, then shook her head. “No, he would have done it himself.”
“So my theory makes sense,” Yolanda said.
“It makes perfect sense,” Mabel said. “If we can put Scalzo in that hospital, he’s an accomplice to Jack Donovan’s murder.”
“Most hospitals require visitors to sign in at a reception area,” Yolanda said. “There might be a record of Scalzo being there.”
Mabel handed Yolanda the baby. Yolanda didn’t know enough about crooks to know that most of them never used their real names. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t prove her theory. Special Agent Romero had said that the FBI was watching Scalzo twenty-four hours a day. The FBI would know if Scalzo was at the hospital that night.
Romero’s number was written on a slip of paper on the desk. Mabel punched the number into the phone, then looked appreciatively at Yolanda.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” Mabel said.
29
“What fucking happened?” Scalzo whispered. “I don’t know,” DeMarco whispered back.
“You don’t know?”
“No, Uncle George. I don’t know what happened.”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” his uncle whispered, his breath hot on his nephew’s neck. “A guy named Skins Turner just beat you out of a monster pot, and took a third of your chips away from you. You’re no longer in first place.”
“I know, Uncle George.”
“So tell me how Skins did it,” his uncle said.
“I told you, I don’t know,” DeMarco replied.
DeMarco and his uncle and Guido were standing on the far end of the poker room, next to the wall and away from the other players and mob of spectators. The tournament took a fifteen-minute bathroom break every two hours, and the players ran like lemmings to the johns. DeMarco had instead gone over to be with his uncle, whose voice hinted that he was on the verge of losing control.
“B
ut Skins had three of a kind,” his uncle said, his voice rising. “You bet into a better hand, and lost. Why the fuck did you do that, Skipper? Tell me why you did that.”
DeMarco leaned against the wall, which was icy cool against his skin. Everything he touched inside the casino was cold and unfriendly, and he found himself wanting to return to Newark and the safety of his house. “It just happened.”
“But you knew Skins was holding a pair of kings before the flop,” his uncle shot back. “You knew what his cards were. You’re not supposed to lose monster pots, Skipper. You could get knocked out of the tournament.”
“I know, Uncle George.”
“You know?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not good enough, Skipper.”
“It’s not?”
“No. You gotta do better.”
DeMarco could hear the implied threat in his uncle’s voice, and wondered if his uncle thought he’d lost the hand on purpose, and was trying to sabotage his own chances of winning the tournament. That was the strange thing about his uncle George; his uncle loved him, but sometimes didn’t trust him.
DeMarco realized his chest was heaving. He took several deep breaths, trying to calm down. The truth was, Skins hadn’t started the hand with two kings. According to the clicks DeMarco had heard in his earpiece, Skins’s cards were a king and a three. Somehow, they became a pair of kings, and DeMarco had lost the biggest pot of the tournament. Either the receiver in his earpiece had malfunctioned, or Skins was cheating.
His uncle stood a few feet away, speaking in hushed tones to Guido. DeMarco wanted to ask his uncle what he was supposed to do. Should he ask the tournament director to stop play, so they could fix his earpiece? Or should he tell the tournament director that Skins was cheating because DeMarco had known Skins’s cards, and they weren’t a pair of kings? Those were his only two options, and either one would get him tossed from the tournament, and probably arrested.
DeMarco found the strength to laugh. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
“What’s so funny?” his uncle asked, drawing close.
“This is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into, Uncle George,” DeMarco said.