“He insists upon using his own chemin de fer table. He takes it with him no matter where he plays.”
“His rabbit foot?”
“Precisely.”
“He must be really attached to that table.”
“More than you can imagine. Mr. Chow ran a gambling establishment in Saigon before the city fell to the Communists. When he fled the country, there was room on the plane for only one item, the table or his wife.” Wan giggled like a little girl. “We Chinese are superstitious.”
Wan wanted to go to his suite to rest up for the match that was to start at ten. Of course, Chenza went with him to tuck him in bed. She took a suitcase with her with the explanation she was staying in the suite next to his. I wandered around the casino while I waited for Chenza to return. What she said to me in the car really got to me. She said I was common. Street trash, I could take. Low class, maybe. But common was poison. One thing about Con, he might be from common stock as me, but he played his country-fried character to the hilt. I decided I was going to stop being common. The new Armani suit set me back eight hundred, with another four hundred for the hand-stitched silk shirt, tie, belt, and Gucci shoes. I stuck my old suit and shoes in a Salvation Army Dumpster. I was going to do the same with every item of clothing I owned. From now on, it was to be nothing but the best.
A kidney-shaped table was being set up by maintenance people in the area roped off for high-roller baccarat games. Jeff Holland, the assistant security manager, was standing nearby.
“Hey, hey, what’s up, Zack.”
“Just hanging loose. A friend of mine is playing tonight and I’m here to observe the game. I’ve always been on the other side of the rope when high-stakes baccarat is played.”
Holland shook his head. “My wife and I have saved for three years toward the down payment on a house. These guys throw enough money on the table at every hand to buy a house.”
“Too rich for my blood.”
“You don’t look like you’re hurting. Nice suit. I hear you’re the manager now at Halliday’s. When Con the con fires you, drop by and I’ll get you up in here, working security.”
“Is it a sure thing Con’s going to can me?”
“Do bears shit in the woods? You’re the only security manager Con didn’t fire after six months and the only casino manager he’s ever had. You must have something going, but if Con doesn’t get you, his kid will. He’s been eighty-sixed from here, did you know that?”
“I’ve eighty-sixed him, too.”
Holland laughed. “Kid, you’ve got balls, but the Hallidays will cut them off one day. Didn’t your pappy ever tell you that blood is thicker than water?”
I walked around the kidney-shaped table. The wood was old and venerable, the chemin de fer layout done in ivory.
“Nice table.”
“Yeah, it’s that Chow dude’s personal table—he won’t play on any other.”
I bent over to take a closer look at it, squatting down to check underneath.
“I checked it over, just for the hell of it,” he said. “I didn’t see anything unusual. If that table’s gaffed, it must be with the ghost in the machine.”
38
I went to dinner with Chenza that evening. We looked like a million dollars walking into the restaurant, grabbing the best table in the place. Everything was comped.
“You pack a lot of weight in here,” I said.
“Only because I’m tied to Wan. If it wasn’t for his money, they wouldn’t let me in the door.”
I told her about the time a restaurant ran out Janelle and me because they wanted to make room for high rollers.
“Keep reminding yourself that only money counts in this town,” she said, “Vegas has no art, no science, no culture, no soul. No one in the whole state has a pedigree any longer than the great-grandfather who worked the mines or robbed banks. Money is the measure of everything. You either have it or you don’t. You’re in or you’re out. It’s as simple as that.”
She toasted me with her wineglass. “To the youngest casino manager in Vegas—who’ll be the youngest casino owner someday.”
“I’m going to have it.”
“I know you will. You’re smart enough, tough enough, fast enough … you’re even enough of a bastard.”
Chairs were set back from the table for myself, Chenza, and the rest of the players’ entourages, but I preferred to stand and watch the action. I had an intuitive feeling that Mr. Wan would be important in my life. I wanted to impress him, big time.
Tommy Chow’s features were not what I had expected. I assumed that with a name like that he would be young and flippant, but he turned out to be a beach ball with a bald head and short, jerky movements. His wrinkled business suit looked cheaper than the one I gave to charity and made Wan’s short red Chinese robe with fanning sleeves, white shirt, black tie, and black pants look even more impressive.
Chow made me nervous just watching him, and watch him I did, him and everyone else who touched the cards. The croupier who sat in the indentation of the kidney-shaped table laid out six decks, one at a time, showing they were true, then shuffled them. After Wan made the cut, the indicator card was put near the bottom of the deck, the decks put in the card shoe—in shimmy known as a sabot—and the shoe passed to Chow, who was on the croupier’s right, to deal.
Because of the large size of the table, the cards Chow dealt to Wan were placed on a paddle and given to Wan by the croupier. The action was watched by a ladderman on a tall stool back from the table. Another casino croupier handled the banker’s money and took the house’s cut. Both Wan and Chow had stacks of thousand-dollar chips.
The game was played a little like blackjack, with two cards dealt, then a possible hit with a third card, but the point count was different. The objective was to have cards totaling nine or be closest to nine. Chow took the first turn as dealer-banker, dealing Wan and himself each two cards. Unlike Vegas-style baccarat, shimmy allowed a small amount of discretion in taking hits. After checking his cards, Wan would have to decide whether to take a hit or not. The rules were so complicated, players usually needed a chart to tell them when a hit was required or an option, but these two were old pros at the game. Aces counted as one point; other cards had their normal face value, with the ten and painted card—jack, queen, king—counting as zero.
In the first game, Wan was dealt a ten and a three. The ten didn’t count, so he only had a total of three. He took a hit and got a five, which now gave him a total of eight. Chow had two queens, both of which had no face value, thus he had zero. He drew a seven, which was beaten by Wan’s eight.
After the first win, everything went downhill for Wan. It wasn’t so much that Chow’s hands were good—he rarely had a natural nine—but that Wan’s were so bad. If luck was a lady, she was a real bitch to Wan.
When the game broke up several hours later, Wan was down beaucoup bucks. I didn’t know exactly how much, but enough to buy a whole damn tract of houses. I went over to the table and examined the back of the cards and the shoe.
“What do you think?” Chenza asked.
“It has to be the deck, the shuffle, the shoe, or Chow is a card mechanic.”
“Card mechanic?”
“A card sharp who’s so smooth you don’t spot him dealing from the bottom or taking cards out of play.”
“That can’t be done with a shoe.”
“It can, especially if the shoe is bugged. There are clip joints that use shoes with a false compartment where cards are stored. As the dealer pulls out cards with his right hand, he holds the shoe with his left to release cards from the compartment. But there’s nothing wrong with the shoe.”
“You think Chow’s a card mechanic?”
“If he is, he’s the best I’ve ever seen.”
“Find the gimmick. Wan’s only going to be here one more night. He’s already dropped half a million.”
She left me in her dust and I went back and examined the table again. It had to be somethin
g electronic. I wished Windell wasn’t cooling his heels in jail. My limit with electronics was turning light switches on and off.
The table looked solid to me. I even looked over the paddle used to distribute cards. Nada. I examined the shoe again. No secret compartment. The deck could have been marked with a Windell-type invisible substance, but that would require special glasses. I had the cold feeling that I wouldn’t be seeing Chenza again, or the enigmatic Mr. Wan, if I didn’t solve her mystery.
I left the casino, certain that something was rotten not only in Denmark and just as sure that I was somehow going to be a fall guy. Chenza had made it clear: If I wasn’t sharp enough to bust a grifter, I wasn’t in her class. Yeah, I was thinking with my dick again, but I had never made love to a cheetah before either.
39
The next night I showed up at the Dunes decked out in another new suit with all the trimmings. I took a seat next to Chenza. She gave me a sucker token smile, the kind a waiter who refills your glass of water gets.
“Bitch,” I said, through clenched teeth.
“Amateur.”
That set the tone for the rest of the evening. As I watched, hour after hour, Wan’s money moved across the table that Chow sacrificed his wife for. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t take my eyes off of Chow and he exposed nothing. I watched the three croupiers and they exposed nothing. The ladderman was clean. I even looked out into the casino and found no one waving flags to tip Chow. Whatever Chow’s scheme was, it was too good for me. I just knew it had to be electronic. There was no way I could miss his hand movements even if he was the best card mechanic in the country.
Wan was down almost another half a mil when I went over to the food table set up for the players and guests and poured myself a glass of cold water. I thought I was the best and this pint-sized Chinese, Vietnamese, whatever the hell he was, was making a fool out of me. And Chenza was colder toward me than the ice water.
I leaned my head back and looked up at the gold-veined, mirrored ceiling above the playing area, reflecting the play between Wan and Chow. It suddenly hit me between the eyes, a bolt from the gods. I almost laughed out loud. It was so damn simple, so damn clever, I wouldn’t have tumbled to it in a million years if I hadn’t spent so much time card sharping before Embers’s mirror.
I stepped over to the table and whispered in Wan’s ear. I left the roped area with Chenza staring at me open-mouthed and Wan still at the table, his body shaking as he tried to keep from exploding with laughter.
A joke, it really was. Funnier than hell.
I answered the door to my Halliday room at three in the morning. I already knew who it would be before I opened the door. Chenza stormed in, not at all a happy camper. The scent of her perfume overwhelmed my nostrils—and my gonads.
“Wan kept on playing and losing. He lost a million, all together. He sent you this,” she said coldly.
Twenty chips were in the envelope, each worth a thousand dollars.
“Tell me what you whispered to him, what was so funny? Why’s he paying you off?”—the edge in her voice building.
“So many questions, so little time.”
She slapped me hard. “Listen to me, you prick, I hired you for the job. Something came down tonight and I want to know.”
The slap stung my face but it also turned me on. The desire in my loins had already ignited when she walked in the door.
“I’ll tell you. But first you owe me for that sting.” I seized her arm and forced her toward me and kissed her hard on the lips. I thought for a moment I could feel the response rising in her body, but then she angrily tore away from me.
“Stop it,” she hissed and gave me another slap on the face.
“That makes two now you owe me,” I smiled. My adrenaline was up and running. I grabbed the top of her thin dress and ripped it from her body. She stood naked except for her stockings and garter belt. Her breasts were hard and strong and definitely had not gone south. There was no fear in her face, only defiance.
“This dress cost me a thousand,” she said, looking straight in my eyes.
I grabbed a handful of chips and pushed them into her hand. “Keep an accounting.” I grabbed her arm and held it behind her back while my other hand cupped her pubis. I kissed her hard on the lips again but this time she responded back, eagerly pushing her body against mine.
“You want me, don’t you.”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed, her heart pounding.
“Say it.” I squeezed my hands on her buttocks.
“Yes,” she moaned. “I want you.”
I was feeling warm and cozy and still sleepy when Chenza suddenly bit my ear.
“Ouch! Do you like raw meat, is that your thing?”
“I don’t like being left out in the cold. What did you tell Wan?”
“You hired me to find out who was cheating. I did.”
“And?”
“Wan was cheating.”
“What do you mean? He lost a fortune.”
“That was the idea. He was cheating so he would lose.”
She sat up in bed and shook her head. “What are you talking about?”
“Wan’s the grifter, not Chow. Everyone in the place was watching Chow, looking for the trick, and no one, including me, was watching Wan’s play. When I looked up at the ceiling mirror, I saw a hand motion that I used to practice in front of a mirror. It was so damn funny because it was Wan, not Chow, who was the card mechanic. He was switching good cards for bad ones. He could have hid a six-deck shoe up those big sleeves.”
“This makes no sense at all.”
“Why Wan was losing on purpose? That I can’t tell you, but I can give you a pretty good guess. Vegas is the biggest and loosest bank in the world, the place of choice for mobsters and drug lords to wash their money. Wan obviously is making a payoff to Chow for something. If he gives Chow cash, Chow has to account for it, show the IRS it came from a legit source. The casino is inadvertently washing it for them. Wan brings in a suitcase of cash, buys chips, loses them to Chow, and the casino writes Chow a check when he cashes in his winnings.”
“That’s bizarre.”
“That’s business,” I said, as I kissed her on the mouth, then pushed her head down on my hard phallus.
Part 7
SHOW GIRL
Hollywood is a place where they buy a kiss for fifty thousand dollars and a soul for fifty cents.
—Marilyn Monroe
40
HOLLYWOOD, 1966
Chenza looked at May Epstein, the casting director, and two words came to her mind—very musculine. She often wondered why some women seemed a bit masculine, had that certain hardness in their features, even the facial hair. She was told it was because they had too many male hormones, but as a twenty-year-old who’d learned nothing in high school and hadn’t attended college, she thought hormones were something out of a vitamin bottle. Chenza didn’t care if the woman was a diesel dyke or cross-dresser—May was a top Hollywood casting director and she was lucky to get an interview with her.
The woman wore a manly looking business suit, Italian cut, with wide padded shoulders. She reminded Chenza of someone and decided it was the villainous Russian female colonel in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.
May tossed Chenza’s resume in the trash can behind her. “You have no high school drama credits, no college drama credits, no equity waiver credits. In fact, the only acting credit you seem to have is the snow job—or should I say blow job—you did on my assistant to get this interview.”
“I’ve won beauty contests—”
“Being ‘Little Miss Schwartz’s Department Store’ at twelve and a runner up for Miss Wisconsin at eighteen hardly qualifies you for movie roles. Miss America doesn’t get movie offers. Every one of you blondes who’ve had a few modeling gigs and won a Miss Dime-Stores contest think you’re ready for the big screen. Doesn’t it occur to any of you that it takes more than wiggling your ass to get a part?”
/> Chenza stood up, her face hot. “I’m sorry I took up your time.”
“No you’re not. You’re sorry I didn’t fall over backward when you walked in. Sit down. Movie roles require charisma and there is something about you that might do it.” May looked at the pictures attached to Chenza’s resume. “Take off your blouse.”
“I don’t do porn—”
“Neither do I. Take off your blouse. And brassiere.”
Chenza unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it off, then removed her bra. She was proud of her breasts. They stood tall, as one male admirer, a sailor, described them.
May got up and came around to her, half-sitting against the side of her desk.
“You might do for the part.”
“What kind of part is it?”
“One of our top box-office actresses just had her second kid and she let her breasts sag.”
“You think my acting would be good enough to take her place?”
“Acting? Honey, I’m not going to cast your face. They need a body double, a pair of boobs for a scene. That’s where all your charisma is, right in the tits.”
May leaned closer and put her hand on the side of Chenza’s breast. Chenza flinched. Her hand slowly moved around the breast and cupped the nipple.
“It’s five thousand for a day’s work,” May said. She squeezed the nipple. “If I cast you.”
Chenza had always known what the score was when it came to men—and the May Epsteins of this world. Born in Brooklyn the same year the war ended, she grew up in an atmosphere of quiet desperation. Her mother had been a frustrated actress who never made it beyond a vaudeville sister song-and-dance act that lasted two years and never got out of the sticks and into the big time. She married a salesman who worked for a furniture manufacturer and settled down to spend the rest of her life a martyr, regretting her lost “opportunities.” She passed her own frustrations about stardom onto her daughter like a genetic defect.
Sin City Page 17
