“Tomorrow night? I’m from New York, pal. I’ll be returning tomorrow night. I made this reservation three days ago.”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have a table tonight.”
“I can see empty tables.” I was getting hot under the collar.
“Those are reserved,” the cold broad said.
“You got in high rollers and you’re giving them our table,” Janelle said angrily.
“Why don’t you take your business elsewhere.”
Janelle leaned across the desk. “Up yours.” She grabbed the front of the woman’s dress, jerked it open and poured the iced drink down it.
I had tickets for a show, but we split with the bitch screaming hot and loud. Two security dudes came out after us onto the sidewalk and I whipped around and gave them my best sneer.
“You’re off the reservation, assholes.”
“Leav’em alone, Rocco,” Janelle said. “I’ll have my old man send around some of his boys to teach them manners.”
That stopped them. I didn’t know if I could pass for a tough guy, but Janelle definitely had gangland written all over her.
We ended up eating hamburgers and milk shakes at a drive-in. I was still burning from the put-down. “Those dirty bastards, I’ll show them someday, you wait and see, I’ll shove the Strip right up their asses.”
“Don’t hold your breath, Zack. They’ve got one thing that we’ll never have.
“What?”
“Money.”
“I’ll have money.”
“Not in this town you won’t—the people who have it, keep it.” She took her purse and a straw and went to the restroom. When she came back, I could see white powder on her nostrils.
I hated when she did that, taking a hit. I tried cocaine once at a party and was dizzy for three days, so I knew I had to use it carefully. Janelle claimed she wasn’t hooked on the stuff, but she was always wired or crashing. She worked two jobs, lap dancing at the Pussy Kat and dealing blackjack part-time at Halliday’s, the biggest of the grind joints downtown. On the side she did private lap dances for a guy who gave her tickets for shows along the Strip. The guy was nothing more than a lightbulb distributor, but Vegas was one hell of a lit-up city. Janelle swore to me that she had never turned tricks and I didn’t push it or believe her. Her background was similar to Betty’s—junkyard trailer-park life in Modesto until she was old enough to push out on her own. She’d been in Vegas for two years, after dumping a guy she had shacked up with in Frisco, getting rid of a pregnancy with an abortion, and deciding to head for Vegas where she could earn some real money.
“One of my friends is a schoolteacher in L.A. She flies to Vegas every Friday night and returns on Sunday. Even after expenses, in two nights she earns more from dating than she does a week teaching.”
There was no question about it, sin paid more than schools. But for all of Janelle’s hard work, she had nothing but some hot clothes because the money went up her nose.
I knew Janelle was hurt by the rejection at the restaurant, but she had something of the same fatalism of the poor that Betty had, the inner belief that no matter how much she tried, nothing would ever go right for her. But I was still sweltering inside. Some bastard got away with killing my mother because he had money. It was my turn to have the dough, to get a piece of Vegas besides the six-by-six pauper’s plot Betty was in.
“I’m pulling a big one with Windell,” I said. “You can be part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“Windell’s got a gimmick.”
“Windell’s a perverted twit who probably jacks off in his sister’s panties.”
“He’s a genius, screwy for sure, but a real whiz at gimmicks.”
“You know your little friend is banned from every casino in town? He’s tried everything from triggering the payoff mechanism in the coin drop of slots to manipulating the reels with a magnet. That crazy bastard went into the Thunderbird with an enormous electromagnet and battery in a backpack and tried to control the reels. The battery started leaking and he ran screaming out of the place with acid burning him.”
“That’s why I’m the boss. You know what marked cards are?”
“Yeah, they got stripes on them, prison stripes. Unless you try to use them in Vegas, then they got a skull and bones on them.”
“Cards are all personalized with a casino’s logo. Windell had an idea to get to the Mexicans who manufacture the cards and get a whole shipment of cards to a casino marked.”
“Windell needs electroconvulsive therapy.”
“The idea stinks, I know. You’d need to have special dies engraved, bribe a million people, the whole nine yards. But Windell finally came up with a horse that’s in the money.”
She sighed theatrically. “What’s the play?”
“We know the dealer’s hole card in blackjack.”
“Christ, Zack, don’t you think that and every other card scam has been tried in every casino in town? Look at Embers’s hands.”
“What do you mean? What about Embers’s hands?”
“You don’t know?” She stared at me. “You really don’t know? Embers got caught cheating in a high-stakes poker game. He got his hands smashed to teach him a lesson. The grind joints keep a piece of lead pipe around to break knuckles with. That’s the kind of lesson cheaters get in Vegas.”
“Jesus.” That explained a lot. Including Embers’s aversion to getting involved in any schemes. Poor bastard. He loved cards. He must have wanted to win so bad that he stepped over the line.
“Look, you don’t have to be part of it. I’ll find someone else. I just thought you’d like to have a piece of the action. Enough money to go back and buy that crummy restaurant we got thrown out of tonight.”
“Zack, players come up with schemes to get a peek at the dealer’s hole card everyday—and get dragged into the back room by security just as fast. Didn’t you read just yesterday about that dealer at the Frontier who was looking away for a moment whenever she had a high card buried? It was a signal to a player. I guarantee you they left the casino for jail or intensive care, and probably both.”
“Shut up and listen.” I stuck a French fry in her mouth. “Windell has brains. He could build an A-bomb with a kid’s chemistry set. This time he didn’t come up with an idea to mark cards, but to read the markings already on them.”
“Come again?”
“Cards are marked on their face, right: The painted cards—jack, queen, king—all have pictures, the two of diamonds has twos and a couple diamonds, ten of clubs, ten clubs on it.”
“Okay, that’s what a deck of cards looks like. How’s it marked?”
“It’s marked by the amount of ink used.”
“What—”
“Listen to me. The cards with the most ink are the painted face cards, right? Right. The cards with the least ink are the numbered cards, especially the smaller ones. There’s less ink on a two than on a ten or a jack, right?
“What Windell has concocted is an ink reader. It doesn’t read the value or type of card, but the amount of ink on the face of card. When you pass a card by it, a light glows if there’s a lot of ink. Aces, face cards, tens, have a lot of ink. Twos, threes, fours, so forth, have less ink.”
“You think you can sit there and pass the cards over an ink reader as they’re being dealt?” Janelle laughed so hard she choked on a French fry.
“Don’t laugh yet. I’m not stupid, I know the casinos have two-way mirrors with cat walks, surveillance cameras, pit bosses, and floor-men.”
“They see everything that goes on at the tables, every move, every motion.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. There’s a hole in their system, a blind spot.”
“Where?”
“The palm of your right hand.”
“Excuse me?”
“There’s a deck of cards in the glove compartment.”
She took out the deck and broke the seal.
“Now, imagine you’re dealing f
rom a card shoe at Halliday’s. Do it on the seat. Show me exactly what you do.”
“I’m given six decks of cards and an empty shoe. I do the same thing with each deck, opening the box, fanning them onto the table so the players can see the deck is true, and removing the jokers.” She slipped the cards out of the box and fanned them to lay them on the seat.
“Show me how you deal from a shoe.” As she dealt, I said, “Stop. What are you holding in your right hand?”
“A card.”
“Facedown, lying across your finger. If you had something attached to those fingers that could read the amount of ink on the card—”
“How could I have that? The security people—”
“Won’t see it because it’s part of your jewelry.”
“Excuse me?”
I laid it out for her. She wore very distinctive jewelry, a ring on each finger and a chain going back to a bracelet. Windell could make jewelry, taught by his old man who was a jeweler. Windell duplicated the rings she wore on her right hand and the chain that ran from the middle ring to her bracelet.
“The chain to the bracelet hides an electrical connection that goes up your arm and to a battery pack in the small of your back. The palm side of the middle ring is sensitive to ink. When a high card with a lot of ink passes over it, the top of the ring glows.”
“Security will see the glow.”
“No, they won’t; Windell thought of that. You can’t see the glow under normal lighting. You have to wear special dark glasses, like watching a 3D movie. It’s really simple. You deal just as you normally do, drag a card out of the shoe for each payer, and then you drag out your hole card. When you deal from a shoe, you push the card out of the shoe with your right hand and then lift it with your fingers and put it down in front of you. When you lift the card with your fingers and put it down, the face of the card will be exposed to the palm side of your rings. That’s the part of your rings Windell has cooked up to be sensitive to the ink used on the face of the cards. I’m not going to be counting cards, I’m only going to be interested in whether you have a high or low card in the hole. If it’s a high card, the ruby ring will glow a little. I won’t know exactly what your hole card is, but most of the time I will know whether it’s a high card or not. After you deal yourself the face-up card to go with your hole card, I will have a pretty good idea as to whether I should take a hit or not.”
“You won’t win all the time.”
“That’s the beauty of it: We’ll lose a lot, but over time, we’ll make a killing.”
“I don’t know …”
“Don’t you see? No camera, no pit boss, no sky walker can see your palm when you’re dealing. And everyone knows you wear that strange jewelry. It’s your trademark; it won’t trigger any suspicion. It’s a sure thing.”
“How did you duplicate my jewelry?”
“Remember I took a picture of it so I could show it to a friend?”
“You bastard, you planned this without telling me.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“It won’t work.”
“Why?”
“Because it just never does.”
“It doesn’t work because people screw up and do stupid things. And the most stupid thing they do is get greedy. I’m not planning to break the bank. We do it in shifts, me for a couple hours, Windell the next day, we cut it for a couple of days, I figure we could take in a hundred grand from Halliday’s before—”
“Halliday’s! No way José. Con Halliday is old school. Maybe you better look at Embers’s hands again.”
“He got it at Halliday’s?”
“He got it from Con. The story is that Con used the butt end of that six-gun he packs to bust Embers’s knuckles when he caught him cheating. A few years ago some mob-punk from Chicago walked into Halliday’s and offered to sell Con ‘protection.’ The skinny is that the guy was shipped back to the Windy City in a body bag with a slot machine handle up his ass. I swear, it’s true—I used to ball the ambulance driver who took the punk to emergency.”
“It has to be Halliday’s.”
“Get another dealer. Everyone in this town wants to go for the money.”
“You’re the only one with the right jewelry. If someone comes in with strange new jewelry, security would be on to it. It has to be you and it has to be Halliday’s.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck them, those two who treated us like trash tonight and everyone else in this town who thinks they’re better than us because they have money. I’m going someplace, Janelle, and you can be in or out, up or down. How do you think a guy like Con Halliday got his own casino? He robbed, cheated, or made a deal with the devil. He did it with a gun, a pen, or a lie. Halliday, Rockefeller, the Wall Streeters—they’re grifters like the rest of us. They’re just bigger crooks than us, that’s all.”
Part 5
CON HALLIDAY, THE KING OF GLITTER GULCH
24
LAS VEGAS, 1942
“Why’d you leave Hot Springs?”
“Had a spot of trouble.” Con looked away from the owner of the club and stared at the neon sign behind the bar across the room. It advertised Halliday’s Smooth Irish Whiskey. A leprechaun in green drunkenly rocked sideways every second or two. There was an expression of dazed satisfaction on the little guy’s face, like he just belted down a quart of the Irish whiskey. The name of the saloon-casino in downtown Las Vegas was the Lucky Irishman Gambling Hall and the man he was talking to ran it. Con thought it was kind of funny that a Jew would be running a poker and red-eye whiskey joint. Howard Mintz was the first Jew he had met in his life. Where he came from, people thought Jews had horns.
“Got in a little hassle workin’ for Arbe.” Jack Arbuckle ran the biggest gambling establishment in Hot Springs. The Arkansas town was wide open and illegal as hell. When the drought turned the middle part of the country into a dust bowl and the stock crash brought on the Great Depression, people got hungry enough in places like Hot Springs to become real tolerant about sin that created jobs and money.
Mintz picked his teeth with a gold toothpick. Con had never seen a gold toothpick before. He was twenty-two years old, born and raised in the Panhandle of Texas; the only part of the world he had any personal experience with was the parched Panhandle and the stretch of road from Hot Springs to Vegas.
“You know, Arbe and I go back a long time,” Mintz said. “We ran booze together, good Scotch and Irish whiskey from French Canucks in Quebec and ran it down through Hampshire to Boston. I came out West after Prohibition died and gambling got legal. That was in ’thirty-one. Arbe ended up running a joint in Hot Springs that Capone used to own. How’s Arbe doing? Hear he’s got a regular rug joint.”
The Lucky Irishman was on Fremont Street, the center of gambling in Vegas. The clientele was mostly long-distance truck drivers, military personnel, women in town for a quickie divorce, and weekend gamblers from Los Angeles. The place was not a “gambling palace.” Like the other casinos in town, it was a sawdust joint. There were no rug joints, fancy places with carpeting, in Vegas. The rug joints were all back East and on the gambling ships that operated out of L.A., Jersey, and Miami.
“Yeah, it’s got real carpeting made back East and glass chandeliers. Arbe said to say hello. He said you might be able to fix me up with a job.”
“What kind of work did you do for Arbe?”
“Different things. Made sure there was no trouble in the club. Watched the games for cheating.”
“You got a name?”
“Conway, but my friends call me Con.”
“What’s your surname?”
“My what?”
“Your last name, family name.”
Con’s eye went to the Irish whiskey sign. “Halliday, Con Halliday.”
Mintz didn’t bother looking at the neon whiskey sign; he hadn’t expected the truth from a man who left Arkansas in a race with the sheriff for the state line. He picked his teeth as he studied the young man in
front of him. Con looked like dirt cowboy, boots worn at the heels, straw cowboy hat frayed along the brim, faded shirt and pants—the kind of poor Westerner created by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The war was supposed to fix the economy for everyone, but the little Arkie and Texas towns that had their asses kicked by the dry years were still down for the count.
Mintz decided Con could handle himself. Along with his big six-one, six-two frame, packing maybe 210 or 220 pounds, he noticed the widespread hands, scarred and knuckle-split, and palms that were rope burned. His hair was bleached blond from the sun and his face a healthy red even before he took a drink. He could have played a man-to-ride-the-river-with in a John Ford western.
“What kind of trouble did you have?”
“Caught a man cheatin’.” Con spread his big hands. “There was an argument, a knife …”
Mintz raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Doesn’t sound like that much trouble for Hot Springs. The sheriff declares it self-defense and Arbe sweetens the sheriffs envelope for the month and pays for the deceased’s pine box.”
“It was the sheriffs cousin.”
“Ahhh.” Mintz worked his tongue and the gold toothpick back to a socket left over from his yanked wisdom teeth. “You ever kill anyone else?”
Con shook his head. “A nigger once.”
“How come you’re not in the army? We got a war going, you know.”
“Punctured an eardrum when I was a kid.” Con wished he was in the army. Stories about Japs throwing American babies up in the air and catching them on their bayonets inflamed him.
“You from Arkansas?”
“Texas Panhandle.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Nothing left for me there. My ma died when I was little. Lived with my pa and worked our little ranch until the wind and dust came and the cattle started dying ’cause they couldn’t eat dirt.”
“Where’s your father?”
“Dead. Killed himself after we lost the ranch.”
“Too bad, but I hear there’s a lot of that happening. The banks are bastards.”
Sin City Page 10
