Wild Card (Tony Valentine Series)

by James Swain

  “He was cheating,” Valentine added.

  Banko’s eyes snapped open. “You can prove it?”

  “Absolutely. Did Galloway file a beef?”

  “He did better. He called Nancy Pulaski, the chairperson of our illustrious Casino Control Commission. They’re old pals. Pulaski has asked me to appear in front of the commission tomorrow morning, and explain what the hell’s going on.”

  Banko looked worried. The CCC was typical of the modern American representative committee. The board consisted of two high-powered attorneys, one heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, the owner of a car dealership, and Nancy Pulaski, the wife of a well-connected heart surgeon. The fact that none of them knew anything about casinos had made them a perfect rubber stamp for the governor.

  “Want me to go with you?” Valentine asked.

  “First tell me why you arrested Galloway,” Banko said.

  “I’ve put in several new procedures in the surveillance control room. One of them is called JDLR. It stands for Just Doesn’t Look Right. If a player does something that looks suspicious, we rewind the video, and watch it until we determine what the JDLR is.

  “Usually, it’s something innocent. Or, it can be cheating we’ve never seen before. In Galloway’s case, a camera caught him spilling a drink on his cards. It looked rehearsed. Then I noticed that Galloway had won a lot of money.”

  “How much?”

  “Five grand.”

  “Couldn’t it have been luck?”

  “That’s what I first thought. Galloway came back the next night, and we taped him. Sure enough, he spilled his drink on the cards again.”

  “How much did he win this time?”

  “Six grand.”

  “You figure out what he’s doing?”

  “Not right away. But I knew he wasn’t drunk. It was his first drink of the night.”

  “So you let him go.”

  “Couldn’t prove anything, so I had to. Then he came in yesterday, and spilled his drink again. And I nailed it.”

  Banko hunched his shoulders and leaned over his desk. For all his shortcomings, he still took tremendous pleasure out of arresting people who broke the law. “Tell me.”

  “Galloway always played two hands,” Valentine said. “When he got dealt baby cards in both hands, he spilled his drink, and took the cards out of play.”

  “Baby cards?”

  “The two through six. Those cards favor the house in blackjack. If a cheater depletes the deck of baby cards, he alters the odds in his favor.”

  “How many baby cards did Galloway take out?”

  “Eight. It gave him an unbeatable edge.”

  “Why didn’t the casino replace the cards?”

  “They should have. It’s standard procedure in most casinos.”

  “But not Resorts.”

  “No, sir.”

  Banko leaned back in his chair, the tension melting from his face. He had not disguised his dislike for the CCC over the past eighteen months. They had invaded his turf, and not once consulted him. “Why doesn’t Resorts replace the cards?” he asked.

  “Commission rules. I guess they think it slows the game down.”

  “Think we should get that rule changed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The office door opened, and Banko’s secretary came in. She was a Polish woman named Sabina who’d worked for Banko for many years. It was no secret that she disliked practically everyone, and she glanced impatiently at the clock on the wall, then frowned at her boss and walked out. Valentine guessed Banko’s next appointment was waiting.

  “We’re meeting the CCC in their offices,” Banko said. “I’ll pick you up at your house at seven-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  “Do I need to bring anything? Valentine asked.

  “Just wear a suit,” the sergeant said.

  Valentine found Doyle waiting for him in the lobby. The Pinto was in the shop, and Doyle had driven him to work. His son had suggested burning the Pinto to collect the insurance. Valentine wanted to burn the car just to put it out of its misery.

  Standing with Doyle was a woman dressed in a leather mini-skirt, red leggings and a fake fur draped seductively around her neck. As he got close, he realized it was Mona. She had painted enough make-up on her face to almost look attractive. He didn’t know too many hookers with the guts to walk into a police station house, and he smiled at her.

  “What brings you here?”

  “Something’s come up,” Mona said.

  “You got a hot tip for me?”

  “Yeah.” She pointed at the front doors. “Can we talk in the parking lot?”

  “You got a car?”

  “No, I just like standing outside in the fricking cold.”

  Mona marched out the front doors like she owned the place. Valentine looked at Doyle, and saw his partner shrug. “She wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “You don’t have a car, remember?”

  “I’ll bum a ride off Mona.”

  “Don’t let her talk you into anything.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Valentine walked out of the station house. Mona was waiting for him in her car, a black, four-door Volvo 164 with a leather interior. He had gone kicking tires with Lois a few months ago, and priced this exact same model. It had cost more than his Pinto and Lois’s car combined.

  “You act surprised,” Mona said as he slid into the passenger seat.

  “I am.” Then he added, “In a good way.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s boss.”

  She had the heater on, and the local jazz station, and turned both down. She started to say something, then hesitated. He waited her out. No one liked to talk to cops, not even good people. It was especially hard for Mona.

  “A girl I know had a strange thing happen last night,” Mona said. “She picked up a john at the casino. They got into his car, and he was driving her to a motel. The next thing my friend knows, she’s lying on the sidewalk, staring at the stars.”

  “She black out?”

  “She thinks he knocked her out. She thinks it was the Dresser.”

  Valentine turned sideways in his seat. “Did she get a good look at him?”

  “Yeah. He was maybe forty, about five-eight, a hundred and sixty, round face.”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “She said the john acted like he was sick, asked her to remove his medicine from the glove compartment. Everything after that is a blank.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  Mona shook her head.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “My friend violated her parole. She’s afraid you’ll run her in.”

  “Mona, please. Even if its just over the phone. I need to interview her. Who knows what I’ll draw out of her. Maybe she saw the guy’s license plate, and doesn’t remember it.”

  “No fucking way, so stop begging.”

  “But —”

  “She told me everything she remembered, so just listen. The guy combed his hair down, and it made him look different from the guy in the flyer. He wore nice clothes and was a smooth talker. My friend said he smelled like he’d just taken a shower.”

  “What about the car?”

  “Four-door, white, made in Detroit, maybe six or seven years old. She’s not big on makes. There was one really weird thing. When she opened the glove compartment to get his medicine, she saw this fake finger. It was hollow and made of flesh-colored plastic.”

  “Was there something wrong with his hand?”

  “She was going to look. The next thing she knew, she was lying in the gutter.”

  Valentine digested what Mona had told him. Her hooker friend had seen a lot; his intuition told him there was more. He needed to talk to her friend right now, before the memory faded. He gave Mona a hard look. He liked her, but was ready to sacrifice that friendship if it meant finding a clue that would help catch their killer.
Reaching behind his belt, he removed his handcuffs. Then he grabbed Mona by the wrist, and slapped the cuff on. Her painted face turned to horror.

  “What are you doing?” she said angrily.

  “Take me to your friend, Mona.”

  “You can’t just cuff me,” she howled belligerently. “I have rights!”

  “I can’t?”

  “No, you fucking weasel.”

  Valentine grabbed her purse off the seat, and turned it upside down. The usual women’s stuff fell into a heap on his lap. He sifted through it, found a tiny vial of white powder which he assumed was cocaine, and held it inches beneath her nose.

  “Do you want me to arrest you?”

  Mona drew back in her seat, her ringed eyes filled with tears. “I came here to help you,” she said indignantly.

  “Just do as I say,” Valentine said. Then added, “Right now.”

  Chapter 34

  Mona calmed down during the drive to her friend’s place. She’d been turning tricks for twenty years, and understood the strange dance hookers and cops did in Atlantic City. The hookers hated the cops, but understood that they needed them when johns got rough.

  Mona’s friend lived on the ground floor of a depressed apartment building on the south end of the island. Garbage everywhere, the windows barred. Since Resorts had opened its doors, there had been a revitalization in Atlantic City, but it had taken place strictly around the casino: Fresh pavement, new sidewalks, plenty of streetlights, everything spit-shine clean. On the south end of the island where people actually lived, everything was still the same.

  Valentine recognized Mona’s friend the moment the front door opened. It was Sissy, the Queen of Visine. Sissy’s speciality was to mickey a john’s drink with Visine, then steal his money when he ran to the bathroom with his ass on fire. He’d busted her several times.

  Seeing him at the door, Sissy said, “Oh, Jesus.”

  She backed into the apartment, and they followed her in. She wore tight blue jeans, and a tee shirt that said, I’M FROM PITTSBURGH, A DRINKING TOWN WITH A FOOTBALL PROBLEM, and had a strung-out look in her eyes.

  “I guess you wanna talk,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Valentine replied.

  Sissy led them down a hall to the kitchen. A hooker’s life could be summed up by the apartment’s empty rooms, and the grease-stained pizza box on the kitchen table. A radio was playing the Bee Gee’s How Deep is Your Love? Valentine lowered the volume, then pointed at the kitchen table’s two chairs.

  “Take a load off your feet,” he said. “Both of you.”

  The two women sat down at the table. Sissy emitted a little gasp and started to shake. She picked up a pack of Kools, and fumbled trying to light one. Mona reached out and steadied her hand.

  “Tell me about the fake finger,” Valentine said.

  “You going to throw me back in jail?” Sissy asked.

  “Depends if you cooperate. You realize this guy is a killer.”

  “Yeah. I’m one of the lucky ones, huh?”

  “You sure are,” he said.

  “Think I should go play a slot machine?”

  “Slots are for suckers. Now tell me about him.”

  The cigarette calmed Sissy down, and she passed it across the table to Mona. “The finger was in the glove compartment. It was hollow and flesh-colored. I think there was something stuck inside of it, but I can’t swear to it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something white.”

  “Was one of his hands deformed?”

  “No. I sat next to him in the casino, and we played a slot machine together. I would have noticed if there was something wrong with his fingers.”

  “So he had all his fingers?”

  “Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “You gonna bust me?”

  Valentine stared into her face. Sissy’s eyes looked like busted panes of glass, and he felt reasonably certain that there were narcotics in the apartment. He didn’t know too many hookers who didn’t use them. The only person Sissy was a threat to was herself.

  “Not today,” he said.

  The answer made her smile. “You gonna bust Mona?”

  “No. The only person I want to bust is the Dresser.” He put his hand on the back of her chair, then knelt down so their faces were level. “I came here to see if I could get you to remember any more details from last night. I’d like to hypnotize you.”

  Sissy looked at him with fear in her eyes. “You won’t… you know, take advantage of me while I was under, make me do something I wouldn’t want to, would you?”

  Valentine shook his head. He wondered which family member had abused her when she was a kid. He hadn’t met a hooker who hadn’t been.

  “Scout’s honor,” he said.

  Sissy glanced at Mona. “He okay?”

  “He’s the squarest guy in Atlantic City,” Mona said.

  “All right. Go ahead and hypnotize me.”

  He got a pillow from the living room and made Sissy put it behind her head. Then, he made her tilt her head back and roll her eyes up. A quarter inch of white cornea was visible below each iris. It was a good sign that she was receptive to hypnosis.

  “Okay,” he said, “I want you to tell me about last night, what you were wearing, what you had for dinner, the whole nine yards. Play it out in your head like a movie, and you’re the narrator of the movie. Take your time.”

  Sissy spent fifteen minutes recounting the events of the previous evening. Up until the point she encountered the Dresser inside Resorts it was pretty boring; then her voice changed, and became strained. “He was making me laugh, giving me a line. The first few minutes with a john, you have to feel him out, make sure you don’t have a Son of Sam on your hands. This guy was ultra-smooth, even if he wasn’t good-looking.”

  She described the negotiation, then walking outside in the bitter cold to his car, then him feigning illness and pulling the car onto a darkened side street. “He asked me to open the glove compartment and get his pills. That’s when I saw the fake finger. It was sitting on a deck of playing cards that had the word DeLand printed on its side. My mom’s from Deland, Florida. Anyway, I stare at the finger, thinking ‘How weird is this?’ and then I saw something white and crumpled stuck in its end. It was…” She grit her teeth, working to pull the memory from the recesses of her brain. “… a cigarette butt.”

  Her next memory was of lying face-up in the gutter. Valentine slowly brought her out of her trance, and got her a glass of water. Then said, “I want to have an artist come by named Ernie Roe. I want him to draw a composite of the man who picked you up.”

  “Okay, detective,” she said.

  Valentine motioned to Mona, and she took her handbag off the back of her chair and stood up. Sissy walked them to the front door and undid the chain.

  “Guess I should stay inside until this guy gets caught, huh?” she said.

  It was the first smart thing Sissy had said.

  “I would,” Valentine replied.

  Chapter 35

  Mona gave him a lift back to Resorts. She pulled into the employee’s covered parking lot, and turned sideways in her seat.

  “You’ve got to find this guy,” she said. “All the girls are terrified.”

  “I’m trying,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “See you around.”

  He got out of her car, and entered the casino from the Boardwalk entrance. The place was packed, and it occurred to him that the Dresser could be hunting for his next victim at that very moment, right under their noses. Going upstairs, he found Doyle in the surveillance control room, drinking coffee.

  “How did it go?” his partner asked.

  “The Dresser was in the casino last night. I’m going to have the techs watch the tapes, see if they can spot him.”

  Doyle grunted under his breath. If the casino’s surveillance had a flaw, it was the amount of raw tape that was recorded. A hundred hidden cameras produced thousands of hours of tape each
day, much of it blurry, and out of focus. Finding one person who’d been inside the casino was like finding a needle in a haystack.

  “I’ve got a JDLR on the wheel,” a voice called out.

  They hurried across the room. The wheel was casino jargon for roulette, and Resorts’ wheel had been losing money for days. A white-haired Tech named Fassil who everyone called Fossil stood in front of a monitor.