by James Swain
“This guy is winning way too much,” Fossil declared, pointing at a player on the monitor.
Albert Einstein had said that the only way to win at roulette was by stealing chips. The player in question wore a polyester leisure suit, and had his left arm in a cast, which he rested on the table. He placed fifteen single bets of a hundred dollars on the layout. The croupier spun the ball, and the guy in the leisure suit’s number came up, putting him ahead by two grand.
“What doesn’t look right?” Valentine asked.
“Guy picked up his drink with his broken arm,” Fossil said. “I broke my arm once, and I couldn’t pick up a thing. And look how he places his bets. He always bets fifteen numbers that are together on the wheel. He knows something.”
Valentine saw where Fossil was headed. He went to a desk and picked up a house phone. Calling the floor, he got the head of security for roulette, and told him he wanted the player with the cast pulled into the back room, and held for questioning. Hanging up, he returned to the wall of monitors, and saw their suspect place fifteen more bets. The croupier set the wheel spinning, then spun the ball.
As sometimes happens at roulette, the ball hopped out of the wheel and flew through the air. It landed squarely on the suspect’s cast, where it remained stuck.
“He’s got a fricking magnet,” Fossil declared.
Valentine placed another call to downstairs.
“Arrest the croupier while you’re at it,” he told the head of security.
The croupier’s name was Alberto, only everyone called him Al. Al had been hired away from a casino in San Juan, where roulette bordered on high art. He sat in a plastic chair in the casino’s detention room, and pulled nervously on his droopy moustache. His partner with the cast sat in the next room, hollering for a lawyer.
Valentine read Al his Miranda rights. Then he made Al stand up, and empty his pockets. He was carrying the roulette ball he’d switched off the table. He looked disgusted with himself, and Valentine got the feeling he had something on his mind.
“You want to talk?” Valentine asked.
“Yeah. You got a butt?”
Valentine got him a cigarette and a light. Then he pulled a tape recorder out of a closet, checked the battery, and turned it on. Al took several drags and started talking.
Al was drinking at a bar when Larry, the clown with the cast, had approached him. Somehow, Larry knew that Al had gambling debts he couldn’t pay. Larry had a solution: He would wear a powerful earth magnet in a cast, and Al would switch the roulette ball for one with a steel core. The winnings would be split fifty/fifty.
“You ever commit a crime before?” Valentine asked.
“Never,” was Al’s reply.
“You were a law-abiding citizen until Larry approached you in the bar?”
“Yup.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
Al stared at the room’s concrete floor. He wore a wedding ring, and Valentine wondered how his wife would react to the news that he’d been arrested for cheating. Al hadn’t thought out the consequences, and now he was going to pay for it.
“I saw all that money passing by night after night, and I just wanted to reach out, and touch some of it,” Al said. “Know what I mean?”
“No I don’t. You sure you’ve never been arrested before?”
Al dragged hard on his cigarette. “Check it out if you don’t believe me.”
Al’s story checked out. Valentine was surprised. He had assumed that when employees went bad, it was because they’d come to the job that way. Jobs weren’t supposed to turn them bad. Al’s work folder said he made three hundred and fifty dollars a week, and was required to pay for his own clothes, which included a tuxedo shirt, fancy cummerbund, necktie, and dress pants. He also had to keep his shoes shined and his hair neatly trimmed. He worked an eight-hour shift, with a five minute break every hour. New Jersey’s politicians had touted the thousands of terrific new jobs the casinos would create for Atlantic City. Al’s job sounded anything but terrific.
Valentine went to his office, and typed out an Incident Activity Report. As he pecked away, it occurred to him that the scam Al and Larry had pulled not only ripped off the casino, but also the other players at the table, as it had denied them a fair game. At the bottom of the report was a space for notes. Normally, he left it blank. He typed in the words Throw the book at these guys and pulled the report from the typewriter, and scribbled his name across the bottom.
He spent the next hour sorting through the correspondence that had accumulated on his desk. He’d asked the records clerk at the station house to do a background check of Vinny Acosta, the hood they’d seen with Micky Wright, and later with the Hirsch brothers. The clerk had done the check, and Valentine pulled a handful of stapled pages from an envelope, and read Vinny’s rap sheet.
Vinny hailed from the Bronx section of Brooklyn. His childhood highlights consisted of dropping out of the seventh grade, and robbing a grocery store a few weeks later. Since then, he’d been arrested for vagrancy, burglary, contributing to delinquency, assault, assault and battery, assault to kill, obstructing justice, larceny, running an illegal “book”, loan sharking, damage by violence, bombing, running a prostitution ring, attempted murder, and murder.
Two of his arrests had led to convictions, and attached to Vinny’s rap sheet was a psychological evaluation that he’d undergone while doing a stretch in Sing Sing prison in upstate New York. The evaluation showed him to have a general IQ of 72 and a nonverbal of 88. The prison doctors had also psychoanalyzed him, and they deemed Vinny “a constitutional psychopath with strong antisocial tendencies.”
Valentine returned the rap sheet back to its envelope while thinking about the hundred thousand dollars Vinny had been carrying around his waist. Was Vinny laundering money for the mob, or was he stealing it from the casino? The casino was so tightly run that neither scenario seemed plausible, yet his gut told him that one of these crimes had to be going on. Yet somehow, he wasn’t seeing it.
At noon, the phone on his desk lit up, and he answered it.
“Tony?” a woman’s voice said. “This is Sabina.”
In all the years he’d known Banko’s secretary, she’d never addressed him by his first name, preferring to use his particular rank at the time. She was easily the most unfriendly person he’d ever known.
“Yes, Sabina,” he said.
“I just got a phone call for you. A man said he saw your name on a flyer, and wanted to talk to you about the serial killer.”
He grabbed a pen off his desk. “What’s his name?”
“He wouldn’t give it to me.”
“How about a phone number?”
“Not that, either. He asked you to meet him at the old Underwood Exhibit on the Boardwalk. He said he knew you once worked there.”
Valentine had worked at the Underwood Exhibit one summer as a kid. Except for Lois and his father, he didn’t think there was another living person who knew that.
“Did the guy say anything else?”
“He just emphasized that you hurry,” Sabina said.
There was a tremor in her voice. The newspaper had run a story that morning with a headline that read SERIAL KILLER CASE GONE COLD, and Valentine guessed there wasn’t a woman on the island who hadn’t seen it.
“I’ll get right on it,” he said.
“Thank you, Tony.”
Valentine grabbed his overcoat and went to the door. His movements were quick, and he felt a hot wire igniting his blood. He liked catching cheaters, but there were times when he desperately missed the street. He found Doyle sitting in front of a monitor.
“I just got a lead on our killer. Want to go for a ride?”
Doyle jumped out of his chair. “In a New Jersey minute.”
Chapter 36
As a kid, Valentine had never had a problem getting a summer job. The Boardwalk always had plenty of openings. There were jobs hawking ice cream, working carnival games, or selling photographs of
beautiful women on horseback jumping off the Steel Pier. But, the best jobs were at the amusements and exhibits.
The summer of his sixteenth birthday, he’d landed a job at the Underwood Exhibit. Underwood was the country’s biggest maker of typewriters. As a publicity gimmick, the company had built the world’s largest typewriter, and shipped it to Atlantic City. The typewriter was 1,728 the times the size of a normal typewriter, and weighed five tons. It typed on stationery measuring nine by twelve feet, with a ribbon over thirty yards long. Valentine’s job had been to jump on keys, and type out messages for tourists, a nickel a letter. His father had been working a construction job nearby, and when Valentine was ready to go home, he’d jump on the typewriter’s bell, which could be heard for blocks.
The exhibit had been housed in the Bijou Theater, where it still remained. The Bijou had been built during the Depression to capitalize on the country’s madness for movies, its owner spending a fortune on its terra-cotta facade, terrazzo floors, and twinkling lights embedded in the domed ceiling. These days, the theater sat vacant, its history forgotten.
Valentine pressed the front door buzzer. A sleep-walking guard opened the door, and gave him a curious stare. Valentine showed him his badge.
“I got a call that someone wanted to meet me here.”
“Wasn’t from me,” the guard said.
“Mind if we come inside, and have a look around?”
“Not at all. I could use the company.”
Valentine and Doyle followed the guard past the musty-smelling concession area into the darkened theater. The guard flicked on the overhead lights and the room came to life. “Ain’t nobody been here in a while,” he said.
The theater was as Valentine remembered it, vast and beautiful. The world’s largest typewriter sat on the stage, covered with a blanket of gray dust. Getting paid to jump on something had been fun, and he found himself remembering all the vacationing secretaries who’d paid him to type out barbs to the boss back home.
My typust is awa on vacarion
My nu secreary cant spel
Git yur own cofee
“Looks like someone got here before us,” Doyle said.
There were fresh footprints around the base of the machine. Valentine got up next to the stage, and saw a message on the stationery, the letters so faint that he had to squint.
Do yu knw why I hate yu?
Doyle edged up beside him. “Think your father is behind this?”
Valentine’s gut said no. His old man was a drunk. Drunks pissed in doorways, and picked fights in bars. They didn’t go into old buildings, and pull crazy stunts.
“No. I think it’s the Dresser.”
“How would he have known you worked here?”
“Because he’s a local. The FBI has thought that all along.”
“And he’s got a grudge against you.”
“It sure seems that way.”
Doyle decided he wanted to talk to the guard, who’d picked a seat in the theater to park himself in. As Doyle walked up the aisle, Valentine heard a man’s voice. It was so close, it sounded like someone whispering in his ear.
“You like being the hero, don’t you, Tony?”
Valentine looked over his shoulder at his partner. “Did you hear that?”
Doyle turned around in the aisle. “Hear what?”
“That voice.”
“I didn’t hear anything, Tony. You must be imagining things.”
Valentine let his eyes canvas the stage. The typewriter was pushed right up against the wall, leaving nowhere to hide behind it. And the curtains had been removed long ago. There was no one there. So where had the voice come from?
“Defender of the weak and the innocent. All the girls had a thing for you.”
Valentine stared up at the fresco in the dome. The voice seemed to be coming from the air, and he stared at the angels and demons carousing above his head.
“Come on, Tony. I’ve given you enough clues. Don’t you know why I hate you?”
He continued to stare, seeing nothing.
“Something wrong?” Doyle said.
Valentine again looked over his shoulder. His partner was standing beside the guard. “You didn’t hear that voice?”
“No, Tony, honest, I didn’t hear a thing.”
There was a doorway next to the stage. Valentine walked over to it, and stared down a dimly lit hallway at the dressing rooms in the back. It was the only place in the theater to hide. Drawing his .38, he pointed the barrel straight ahead, then glanced back at his partner. “Cover me,” he said.
Doyle limped up behind him, his weapon drawn. Valentine walked down the hallway remembering all the famous actors that used to play the Bijou. His leg hit a trip wire, and he heard a sickening Thwap! Before his life had time to flash before his eyes, his partner barreled into him from behind, and together they hit the floor.
Valentine landed on his side, and watched as a baby grand piano came crashing down on the spot where he’d just stood. The piano once sat in front of the stage, where a lady in a white dress would play old show tunes. As it hit the earth, music rushed out like a drowning symphony.
He got up off the floor, then helped Doyle to his feet. His partner was grimacing and holding his crippled leg.
“You okay?”
“I’ll live,” Doyle said.
The guard came running down the hallway, looking scared to death. He pulled a flashlight out of his back pocket, and shone it up at the ceiling. The piano had been hanging from a pulley. “I don’t remember that being there,” the guard said.
Valentine went to the dressing rooms and checked them. They hadn’t been used in years, and there was no sign of anyone being in them recently. Then, he checked the back entrance to the theater, and found it locked.
There was a pay phone at the end of the hall. Valentine fished a dime out of his pocket, and called Banko.
“You better come down here,” he told his superior.
“You heard a voice?” Banko said fifteen minutes later.
They were standing in front of the stage. In the hallway, they could hear the guard cleaning up the broken piano. Every time he threw a piece of wood in a wheelbarrow, the instrument emitted a mournful chord. Valentine had explained everything — from hearing the voice, to the misspelled message on the typewriter mimicking the messages he’d typed as a kid — and Banko was looking at him like he’d lost his mind.
“It was a man’s voice,” Valentine said. “He whispered my name.”
“Did Doyle hear it? Or the guard?”
“No.”
Banko made an exasperated face. “Tony, this isn’t good. You’re hearing things, and making connections that no one else is making. I want you to do your job at the casino. Stop running around town every time someone calls you on the phone.”
Doyle stood a few feet away, listening. He mouthed the words Say yes.
“Okay,” Valentine said.
“Terrific. If it makes you feel better, I’ll have another detective look into this, and see what turns up.” Banko started to walk away, then came back. “We have a meeting with the CCC tomorrow regarding Louis Galloway. Remember?”
Valentine said, “Of course I remember.”
“What time am I picking you up at your house?”
“Uh… seven-thirty?”
Banko walked away muttering under his breath.
Chapter 37
“You’re not going crazy,” Lois said reassuringly that night.
Valentine lay on the couch in the living room with his head in his wife’s lap. He had told her everything that had happened that day, hoping it would make him feel better. So far, it wasn’t working. “No,” he said, “but I’m headed in that direction.”
“Stop talking like that. It’s not like you. Lots of people hear voices.”
“Do say their name, and tell them they hate them?”
“Oh, Tony, it was just…”
“My imagination?” He shook his head. “My im
agination isn’t that good. Someone was in that theater besides me and Doyle and the guard. Someone from my past who holds a grudge and who’s also killing hookers on the island.” He looked into her eyes. They were soft and beautiful and had never failed to melt his heart. “I just wish I could figure out who it is.”
