The Trinity Game

by Sean Chercover

  Time was, everyone in Las Vegas knew his name, and the important people in Chicago knew it too. Time was, he was a celebrity in this goddamn town. Feel like a little gambling, Mr. Lamech? A nod of his head, and a tray of checks would appear. Dino would be honored, Mr. Lamech, if you’d drop by his dressing room at the Sands for a drink before the show. And to have William Lamech seen in your restaurant was always worth a complimentary surf-n-turf and a bottle of your finest champagne.

  And then Las Vegas changed. Wall Street muscled out Chicago, and now corporate accountants ran the joint. Many of the better restaurants still refused to present Lamech with a bill, but outside the sports books, most of the younger casino workers didn’t know who the hell he was. They knew they should know, knew he was important, and always treated him with respect, but the days of widespread fawning were long past. And that was OK with him. He’d enjoyed the high profile of his middle years, but at a certain age it befits a man to gracefully yield the spotlight. Anyway, he’d never really been in it for the fame; it was always about the money.

  And he was still making a pantload of money, from both his legitimate casino operation and from the less legitimate network of backroom bookies he personally bankrolled in over a dozen cities.

  The corporate accountants now running Las Vegas didn’t much care for the old-school Chicago guys, but the sports book was the one part of a casino that couldn’t be managed by numbers alone. To maximize profit, you needed a deep and practical understanding of both gambling psychology and the dynamics of group behavior. And you needed a reliable network of informants to let you know when the fix was in, who was hiding an injury, and the sordid personal troubles of various athletes.

  Each year more than three billion dollars was wagered in Las Vegas sports books, and the books held onto 4.5 percent of it. If your hold dropped below 4 percent, you found yourself looking for a new career. If it hit 5 percent, you were a superstar. William Lamech’s sports book was one of the largest in town, with more than thirty massive screens on the wall and plush seating with personal monitors at each station. And Lamech’s book averaged a 5.6 percent hold. He was the best there was, and the corporate accountants just had to shut the hell up and kiss his ring. Much had changed in the Nevada desert, but gambling was still gambling and money was still money, and William Lamech had faced all comers for fifty-three years and hadn’t lost a fight yet.

  Whoever was behind this strange new threat had miscalculated, Lamech told himself. And whatever leverage they thought they had, it wouldn’t be enough. He was a tough old bastard; if they forced him to prove it, he would prove it.

  And woe be to them.

  “Well I think it’s bullshit,” said Michael Passarelli. “I don’t believe it for a second.”

  “I don’t buy it either,” said Jared Case. “It must’ve been recorded after the game.”

  “A new variation on past-posting,” added Pete DeFazio. Heads nodded around the boardroom table as the others murmured their agreement.

  William Lamech knew that the hardest part would be getting them to believe it. Nobody rises to the top of a sports book by being a pigeon, and these were twelve of the sharpest and most skeptical minds in the gambling business. Before playing the DVD and the decoded backward audio, he’d warned them it would seem incredible.

  “It’s not past-posting,” said Lamech, “I had the broadcast dates verified independently. He’s actually predicting the outcomes. And he’s always right.” He paused to let it sink in. “I know how you feel—I couldn’t believe it either, at first. And I still don’t know how he’s doing it. But he is doing it, and if this breaks public...” Lamech zapped the television off. He took his time, made eye contact around the long glass table. “You all know me. I don’t play jokes. This is for real.”

  DeFazio whistled through his teeth. “Goddamn,” he said. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Couple days ago, one of my bookies in Atlanta. Customer of his—some kid, audio engineer with a gambling problem—stumbled on it, brought it to the bookie, hoping to settle his debt with it. He didn’t believe the kid, naturally, but the kid played the tapes for him, and he was smart enough to call me in on it. It checked out.”

  “What’s Trinity’s game?” said Darwyn Jones from the other end of the table. Next to Lamech, Jones was the smartest man in the room. Maybe just as smart. “You think it’s a shakedown?”

  “He hasn’t contacted us,” said Lamech.

  “Who’s backing him?” asked Passarelli.

  “We don’t know,” said Lamech.

  “Well, that’s just great.”

  “Goddamn,” repeated DeFazio. “We can’t just wait. I mean, he predicted the fuckin’ Superbowl.” He picked up the sheet of paper on the table before him—his copy of the decoded transcript—and read it over. “He got it exactly. He even nailed the over/under. And he said it ten days before game time. If that had gotten out…”

  Jared Case broke the silence. “It woulda killed us. Our margins are tight enough in this economy.”

  “We need to act now,” said DeFazio.

  “Act how, exactly?” said Sam Babcock.

  “I think,” said Darwyn Jones, “that William has an idea.” All eyes shifted to Lamech.

  “I do.” Lamech sipped some Perrier; made them all wait for it. “We’re in the information business, gentlemen. So let’s get some. The preacher must have his own sins, everyone does. Let’s find out what they are, and see what leverage that gives us with Trinity.”

  “I like it,” said Darwyn Jones.

  Once again, heads began to nod around the table.

  “You think the preacher will play ball?” said Case.

  “I don’t know the man, and I don’t know what leverage we’ll find. But one way or another I think I can convince him it would be better to work with us than against us.”

  “And if he refuses?”

  “If he refuses…we’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it.” Lamech gave the men a reassuring smile. “But one way or another, we will silence Tim Trinity.”

  Atlanta, Georgia…

  It was starting again. Tim Trinity felt it bearing down on him, like the dull ache before a heavy rain, pressure building inside his head, scrambling his thoughts, blurring his focus. Then the voices, quiet at first, but growing steadily louder and more critical. It always started like this, and he knew the tongues would be on him if he didn’t take action soon.

  How long since he’d called his connection? He checked his watch. Ten minutes. How long did he say it would take? Half an hour. OK, another twenty minutes to wait. He could hold off the tongues another twenty minutes, couldn’t he?

  He did, barely. Pacing furious circles around the living room of his Buckhead mansion, sweating profusely, peeking out between the front curtains every minute or two. By the time his dealer arrived, he was twitching and starting to babble. But he got the transaction done fast, and the dealer didn’t stay for conversation.

  Trinity’s movements were becoming spastic, but he managed his way into the den, got the small Ziploc baggie open, and poured two parallel white lines onto the coffee table. He rolled a twenty-dollar bill into a straw and shoved it into his left nostril. Snorted the first line and was immediately rewarded with an icy explosion of cocaine clarity, coating the inside of his skull from front to back.

  The voices faded away.

  The pressure dissipated.

  His head cleared.

  He switched to his right nostril and snorted the second line.

  The Second Line. No parade permit, no responsibilities, just twirl your umbrella and dance all the way to the French Quarter. The second line. Laissez les bon temps roulez…

  But no. The cocaine was medicinal, not recreational. And New Orleans was the past. It wouldn’t be the same anyway, even if he could go back.

  Not after that bitch, Katrina.

  When the voices began, in the aftermath of the hurricane, Trinity put it down to a delayed stress reaction.
It seemed everyone who stayed through the storm was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Why should he be immune? Cops and firefighters and doctors and nurses stayed because they were required to stay. The infirm also stayed, some abandoned in their homes or at the entrance of overcrowded hospitals, others attended by loved ones who couldn’t bear to leave them behind. And then there were those simply too stupid, too crazy, too lazy, too stoned, or too poor to leave.

  Trinity fell into another category. Too greedy. He’d stayed for Andrew in ’92, and it earned him a lot of credibility with the po’ folk. He figured if he rode out Katrina, he could be on-scene for the reopening of his soup kitchen in the Lower Ninth Ward, and he could snag some good press. Hell, if he played this right, he might even get interviewed by Anderson Cooper or that Soledad babe, get on CNN.

  Something to shove up the ass of the IRS, next time those fuckers questioned his legitimacy.

  But it didn’t play out like that.

  New Orleanians are no strangers to weather, and while Katrina remained a category three storm, there was much talk about who would be hosting the hurricane party on each block. But as the storm passed through the Gulf, she gained strength, and talk turned to evacuation.

  Trinity never seriously considered leaving. He owned a six-thousand-square-foot stone mansion in Lakeview, and he could ride out anything nature cared to send his way. He did urge his congregation to evacuate, and they did. But before they got out, he conscripted a half dozen of their strapping teenage boys. The boys hauled 120 jugs of Kentwood Springs water from the neighborhood Rite Aid to Trinity’s mansion. They boarded up the massive ground floor windows and helped him secure the storm shutters on the second and third floors. They sandbagged the front of Trinity’s three-car garage. When the boys’ parents picked them up, Trinity gave each a thousand dollars in cash, for “traveling money.”

  On August 28, 2005, Katrina was upgraded to category five. At ten a.m., just twenty hours before the storm would make landfall, Mayor Ray Nagin held a press conference and made the evacuation mandatory. The National Guard was being called in, and the Louisiana Superdome was being set up as a shelter-of-last-resort for those who couldn’t get out in time. About ten thousand would take refuge there, and many of them would later wish they hadn’t.

  It would be a bad storm, but the roads out of town were already jammed, and Trinity’s mansion was thoroughly battened down. In addition to the stormproofing, Trinity had Robért Fresh Market deliver enough non-perishable food to feed a family of a hundred for a week. He had a portable shortwave radio and a waterproof flashlight and a ton of batteries, a Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol and seventy-two hollow point bullets, if it came to that. He was ready.

  During the long night that followed, Trinity buzzed with anticipation, unable to sleep. News reports suggested that maybe one hundred thousand people would be unable to get out in time. There would be plenty of hungry mouths to feed when he re-opened his soup kitchen in the Lower Nine.

  The wealthy of New Orleans had long since evacuated and Tim Trinity was the only soul left in Lakeview. But the “Hurricane Party” is a venerable tradition, so as the black sky lightened to gray, he mixed a very large Sazerac—to the original recipe, with real absinthe, and cognac instead of rye—and proceeded to get thoroughly drunk in preparation for the show.

  Katrina made landfall at 6:10 a.m. on August 29, 2005, with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. For a while, the radio said she was veering east and everything would be OK. But then the radio announcements changed, and Katrina slammed into the Crescent City with a storm surge of twenty-two feet.

  People say a hurricane sounds like a freight train. It doesn’t, not exactly, but the analogy is close as dammit. Tim Trinity ambled through his mansion, from empty room to empty room, listening to the approach of nature’s freight train, sipping Sazerac and congratulating himself on his place in the world.

  His dad had been an ineffectual door-to-door salesman—vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias, aluminum siding, whatever he could get a job peddling—and his mother had been a poor housewife, because Dad wouldn’t cotton to a wife who worked outside the home, even though he never earned a decent living. Tim and his little sister Iris never knew real hunger, but they knew red beans and rice, not just on Mondays but sometimes three, four days a week. They knew the shame of having to lie to bill collectors on the phone, saying, “My daddy ain’t home just now,” while Dad stood quietly to one side, grinning like it was a game. And they lived their childhood in threadbare clothing that had been worn hundreds of times by older kids and donated to the VOA thrift shop. They grew up, cheek by jowl, in a cramped Uptown shotgun that Mom kept ruthlessly clean.

  Young Tim grew to hate his father for how easily the old man resigned himself to failure. He vowed to make a million, and he had, many times over. The rickety childhood house on Ursulines would probably not be standing after today. But this place would shrug Katrina off like a bad idea.

  Trinity refreshed his drink, wandered downstairs and faced the front door, which rattled a little against the gusting wind and lashing rain. But the door was three-inch cypress and it wasn’t going anywhere. He raised his glass in a toasting gesture.

  “Fuck you, storm,” he said. “Do your worst. You can’t touch me.”

  He took a long swallow from the glass and realized that he was drunker than he’d intended to be. Walking back upstairs required some concentration.

  He missed the rest of the storm. He’d passed out, fully clothed, atop leopard-print silk sheets on his king-size bed in the second-floor master bedroom.

  But he dreamed the fury.

  In his dream, Trinity lay on his back, lengthwise in the middle of the railway tracks just riverside of Tchoupitoulas, while a freight train thundered over him, inches from his face. The sound was earsplitting and the turbulence threatened to jostle his body against the wheels. His heart pounded against his ribs, and he forced himself to breathe. Then there was another sound, like an elephant groaning, and he turned his head to the right, looking through the blur of rushing wheels toward the mighty Mississippi. A wave rolled down the length of the river, cresting the banks. Then another, and another, and with each wave the river swelled over the embankment, and now water flowed steadily into the basin of the rail yards, toward the track where Trinity lay. It seemed the train would never end. He guessed that maybe twenty cars had passed over him, but he couldn’t raise his head to look down and see how many more cars were still to come. The water was flowing fast now, splashing against his side. If the train didn’t end soon, Trinity would surely drown.

  And in a flash, he knew. The train would not end in time, and he would drown. And he knew why. Trinity knew this was God’s punishment for his unbelief.

  He woke from his nightmare in the silence that followed the storm and realized it was the silence that woke him. The storm had passed. He shook off the dream’s residue, grabbed the flashlight, and staggered to the bathroom, his head pounding. There was a box of BC headache powders in the cabinet, and Trinity fumbled a couple out of the box and poured the bitter powder onto his tongue. He spun the faucet and stuck his mouth under the tap. Nothing.

  Then he remembered. Right, of course. There wouldn’t be. He reached for the jug he’d placed next to the sink and guzzled warm spring water.

  The house was like a sauna. Out in the hallway, he aimed the flashlight down the stairs, expecting to see a little water. He saw a lot. The entrance hall was waist-deep and rising. He watched as a chair floated by the staircase. Shit. He moved back to the bedroom, opened the hurricane shutters, and stuck his head outside.

  The sky was a solid sheet of blue, the sun white-hot on his face. The air was thick and heavy and smelled of salt and mud. Aside from the soft murmur of moving water, there was no sound. No barking dogs, no chirping birds, no human voices, and no machinery of human civilization. Nothing. Most of the trees on the street were down, and those that stood were stripped of their leaves, naked limbs hanging down
like broken arms. There were no power lines, and the poles stood at odd angles, like drunken sentries guarding the abandoned neighborhood. The entire street was a lake, and the muddy water flowed so quickly he thought he could see the level rising as he watched.

  So much water.

  Trinity craned his head to the left. The water was about chest-high against the doors of his garage. Behind the doors, his tricked-out Cadillacs would be underwater, ruined.

  He turned away from the window, switched on the shortwave radio. The radio told him that the worst had indeed happened. The Seventeenth Street Canal levee had given way, and Lake Pontchartrain was now fulfilling its destiny, annexing Lakeview and flooding on into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park…

  Fifty-two other levees were breached, over 80 percent of the city now flooded or flooding.

  So much water. And it kept on coming.

  A few hours later, Trinity’s entrance hall was completely submerged, the water halfway up the staircase. Outside was still silence, occasionally punctuated by the whirring blades of a Coast Guard helicopter and the patter of distant gunfire. A dead German shepherd floated down the street. A few minutes later, a ten-foot gator swam by.

  “OK, joke’s over,” Trinity said aloud. “This shit ain’t funny no more.” He’d planned on camping out for a few days, was well provisioned, but now he just wanted the hell out. He could come back later.

  Trinity set up on the balcony off the front guest room, and the next time he heard a helicopter nearby, he started shooting flares into the air.

  No luck.

  The pistol fire continued in the distance, more frequently now, and the radio said New Orleans had slipped into a state of anarchy. The radio said tens of thousands were stranded on rooftops, and no one was picking them up. Where the hell was the government?