Wild Card (Tony Valentine Series)

by James Swain

  “It will come to you eventually,” Lois said.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  It was nearly ten o’clock and raining cats and dogs outside. That was the crummy thing about living in Atlantic City during the winter; one day it snowed, the next it rained. Gerry came downstairs in his pajamas, and kissed his mother on the forehead. Then, he put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “I hope you feel better, Pop.”

  Valentine looked up at his son and smiled. He’d been teaching Gerry magic tricks he’d bought from Uncle Al’s shop, and his son seemed eager to learn more. They’d also received a note from school that said Gerry was showing improvement in his math and English classes. It had thrilled them to no end.

  “I will,” Valentine said. “Sleep tight.”

  They listened to their son go upstairs to bed. Then Valentine said, “I have a meeting tomorrow morning with the Casino Control Commission. I caught Louis Galloway cheating at blackjack the other day and busted him.”

  “The Louis Galloway?”

  “Yeah. Galloway is tight with the commission’s chairperson, Nancy Pulaski. She’s going to put my feet to the fire.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Valentine stared at the ceiling some more. He’d never backed down from a case before, and had no intention of starting now. “Stand up for myself.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the words of a crazy man to me.”

  He had a feeling that his wife would support him even if he started running naked down the street with a tomahawk in his hand, and he looked lovingly into her face. “I need you to help me pick out what to wear. Banko wants me in a suit.”

  Lois giggled. “Well, you only have one suit, so that should be easy.”

  He pushed himself off the couch, then offered his hand to her.

  “Yeah, but I have three neckties,” he said.

  Banko picked him up the next morning at seven-thirty sharp, and drove to the three-story brick building on Tropicana Avenue where the Casino Control Commission was headquartered “Nice tie,” he said, looking him over.

  Like most buildings on the island, the CCC’s headquarters had been a thing of beauty once, but had fallen on hard times, and was badly in need of refurbishing. They identified themselves to a stern-faced female receptionist, then stood in drab lobby while waiting to be called upstairs. Banko eyed the envelope in Valentine’s hand.

  “What’s that?”

  “I spliced together some surveillance tapes I wanted the commission to see.”

  His superior grinned. “A little show-and-tell, eh?”

  “I think they’ll like it.”

  At seven-fifty-nine, they were summoned upstairs.

  The commission’s five members worked in a boardroom with fraying carpet and rattling pipes. They sat at a faded mahogany table with pitchers of ice water in front of each member. Behind them, through a bank of windows, Resorts’ towering casino shone on the otherwise depressing skyline.

  Nancy Pulaski, the commission’s chairperson, gave Valentine a no-nonsense stare as Banko introduced him to the group. Pulaski was pushing fifty, with lots of gray hair and wrinkles, yet dressed like a woman twenty years younger. Her haircut was particularly unnerving: A page boy. Picking up some papers from the table, she said, “Detective Valentine, do you know what this is?”

  “No, ma’am,” he replied.

  “I’m holding in my hand Louis Galloway’s arrest report. It says that you arrested him for spilling a drink on his cards. How can that be a crime?”

  “Louis Galloway was exploiting a weakness in one of the casino’s procedures, so I had him arrested,” Valentine said.

  “Please explain yourself.”

  “ A player can gain an edge by spilling his drinks on low-valued cards, and getting them taken out of play. Louis Galloway did this three times. The last time, we caught it on video tape.”

  Two of the commission members were attorneys. One said, “How big an edge?”

  “Two percent,” Valentine said.

  “That’s huge, isn’t it?”

  “Yes sir, it is.”

  “If enough players did this, we’d lose money at blackjack, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yes, sir, we would.”

  Nancy Pulaski wasn’t buying it, and stared at him like he’d made the whole thing up. “I’m sorry, detective, but your logic escapes me. Players spill drinks on cards all the time. Why does this make Louis Galloway guilty of a crime, when others aren’t?”

  “Louis Galloway purposely exploited a weakness in the casino’s procedures,” Valentine said.

  “So you’re saying it’s the casino’s fault.”

  He hesitated, then said, “Partially. In most casinos, ruined cards are immediately replaced. Resorts doesn’t do that. Louis Galloway was clever enough to figure it out, and exploited it.”

  “Does that make him a criminal?”

  “In my book it does.”

  Nancy Pulaski didn’t know what to say, and drew back in her chair. The other members nodded their heads, and seemed to be agreeing with him. Sensing his opportunity, Valentine said, “If you don’t mind, there are some other problems at the casino which I’d like to bring to the commission’s attention.”

  The five members’ heads snapped in unison.

  “Problems?” Nancy Pulaski choked.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well, by all means, go ahead.”

  He removed a video cassette from the envelope he was holding. The board room had a TV, and he went and turned it on, then popped the tape into the VCR that was hooked up to it. The screen came to life, and he paused it. “This is a composite of some incidents which have happened inside Resorts’ casino in the past month. The first took place in the blackjack pit.”

  He hit play, and on the screen appeared an unusually tall, male blackjack dealer. The dealer was shuffling cards at his table. Another dealer came over, and tapped his shoulder. The tall dealer clapped his hands, and stepped away from the table. Break time.

  “Most casinos make their dealers sew their pants pockets together to discourage them from stealing chips off the table,” Valentine said. “Resorts doesn’t do that. This dealer had a habit of sticking his hands in his pockets, so we started watching him.”

  The film showed the dealer leaving the table. He walked with a pronounced limp. Suddenly he halted, and a torrent of silver dollars came pouring out his pants leg. Back at the station house, there wasn’t a single cop who hadn’t busted a gut seeing this. Valentine glanced into the commissioners’ faces. None of them were laughing.

  The tape changed to show a man wearing a Superman costume standing on a craps table while bellowing at the top of his lungs. A security guard appeared, grabbed the man’s cape, and pulled him down.

  “This happened last week, and caused such a commotion, I decided to look at the tapes of the other games,” Valentine said. “Here’s what I found.”

  The tape switched to show a blackjack game. Play had halted, with everyone’s eyes on Superman. The dealer grabbed the plastic shoe that held the game’s six decks of cards, took it beneath the table, and switched it for another shoe in a woman’s floppy bag, which he immediately placed on the table.

  “Every player at the table was involved in this scam,” he said. “They’re part of a cooler mob. This same scam happened in Las Vegas several years ago; now they chain their shoes to the tables.”

  “And we don’t,” one of the attorneys said.

  “No, sir,” Valentine replied.

  The tape changed to show the roulette table. Because the table was unusually long, the camera did not show the complete picture. Instead, there was a split screen, one half showing the wheel, the other showing the betting area.

  “In roulette, it’s the croupier’s job to tell the players when they can no longer place bets,” Valentine said. “The croupier does this by waving his hands over the betting surface. Resorts doesn’t do this. Instead, the
croupier says, ‘No more bets.’ There’s a problem with that. No one in the surveillance control room can hear him. Which means that no one watching through the cameras knows when the betting has stopped.”

  He pointed at the split screen. As the roulette ball came to rest, a hand appeared, and placed a late bet. “That’s called past-posting. And guess what? We couldn’t arrest the player for doing it, because the tape doesn’t show that the betting was halted.”

  “Was the croupier involved?” the other attorney asked.

  “No, just poorly trained,” Valentine said.

  The air in the boardroom grew uncomfortably still. The tape changed to show an elderly man playing a slot machine. The gods were smiling, and the man won a jackpot. He was so happy there were tears in his eyes.

  “This happened yesterday,” Valentine said.

  They watched the elderly man go to the cashier’s cage. He was paid off in stacks of hundreds, which he stuffed gleefully into his pockets.

  “In a few seconds, an I.R.S. agent is going to step into the picture, and tell the man he needs to collect taxes on the man’s winnings,” Valentine said. “Watch what happens.”

  A male I.R.S. agent appeared on the screen. Pointing at the elderly man’s money, the agent explained the deal. The elderly man’s face turned to horror, and he shoved the I.R.S. agent to the floor, and ran out the door.

  The camera followed him outside. The elderly man ran into a parking lot with a pair of guards on his heels. He appeared to be trapped. Leaping onto the roof of a car, he began hopping from vehicle to vehicle, leaving dents in the rag tops and cheap imports. Jumping to the street, he quickly disappeared.

  “We never caught him,” Valentine said.

  The tape had ended, and he popped it out of the VCR. Several members of the commission were mumbling under their breath to Nancy Pulaski. When he turned around, the chairperson was staring at him.

  “Detective, you have obviously become an expert on catching cheaters,” she said. “The commission is open to hearing how you’d like to tackle these problems.”

  Valentine hid the smile forming at the corners of his mouth. He knew that the commission members had graduated from some of the finest universities in his country. His own degree had come from Atlantic City High School. “First, I suggest we drop charges against Louis Galloway, if he agrees to never gamble in Atlantic City again.”

  “I thought you said he was guilty,” she said.

  “He’s guilty of being clever. He saw a flaw, and he exploited it. He probably didn’t realize he was breaking the law.”

  “But you still want to ban him.”

  “It would send a bad message to other cheaters if we didn’t.”

  The members went into a huddle. Under his breath, Banko said, “Go for the kill, kid.”

  The commission members came up for air.

  “This seems like a reasonable compromise,” Nancy Pulaski said. “We’ll have the district attorney contact Galloway’s attorney, and present your offer. Now, what are your other suggestions, detective?”

  Valentine looked into their faces. The night before, lying with his head in Lois’s lap, he’d realized something. If the casino was going to be his new home, then he needed to police it, and stop horsing around. “I want to overhaul Resorts’ procedures from top to bottom. First, I want to bring in an outside consultant to shore up our procedures. Then I want to add more cameras. And, I want to do background checks on our high rollers.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to make sure the casino isn’t being used to launder money.”

  They went into another huddle. He had thought long and hard about the hundred grand in Vinny Acosta’s money belt. He was convinced Resorts wasn’t getting ripped off, which meant Vinny was somehow laundering mob money.

  The commission broke from their huddle, and he saw Nancy Pulaski lean forward on her elbows, studying him. The other members mimicked her. Banko laughed softly under his breath.

  “Think you’re up for the job, detective?” she asked.

  Valentine nodded and said, “Yes ma’am.”

  “Then it’s yours,” she said.

  Chapter 38

  “Your tip led to the biggest bust here in ten years,” Bill Higgins said over the phone that night. His voice was slightly raised, and he sounded happy. “A group of employees at the Stardust had rigged the scales used to weigh coins from the slot machines. They were stealing thirty-five grand a day in quarters. It was going on right in front of our noses.”

  Valentine smiled into the receiver. “You nail the whole gang?”

  “Every last one of them. Tell your snitch I owe him a drink.”

  Valentine stood at his kitchen sink drying dishes. Before dinner, he’d told Lois about his new responsibilities, and she’d acted like it was the best news she’d ever heard. Now, Bill was telling him he’d help nail a bunch of wise guys three thousand miles away. It didn’t get any better than this.

  “How would you like to do some consulting work for me?” Valentine asked. “I’m paying two hundred bucks a day, plus expenses.”

  “Air fare, too?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s your time table?” Higgins asked.

  Valentine glanced at the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall. The date was January 5th. In three months, Atlantic City’s second casino would open on the spot where the Marlborough-Blenheim hotel had stood, and he had a feeling that every hustler on the east coast was going to be there.

  “As soon as you can.”

  “I’m in a bind right now,” Higgins said. “There’s a gang of blackjack cheaters that’s taking us to the cleaners.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve watched the tape a dozen times. My gut tells me they’re using a computer, only there’s no evidence of one. They’ve taken five different casinos for two hundred grand apiece.”

  Valentine whistled through his teeth. “You want me to look at the tape? Maybe a fresh pair of eyes would do some good.”

  A few months ago, Bill would have probably laughed at him. He didn’t now.

  “That would be great,” his friend said.

  Valentine climbed into bed with Lois at ten o’clock. It had been a long day and he was dead-tired, yet he felt better than he had in weeks. Ever since the shooting at the Rainbow Arms, his life had seemed off-kilter. Now, finally, things were getting back on track. He kissed his wife goodnight and turned out the lights.

  He was drifting off to sleep when a low, mournful wail got his attention. Cracking an eye, he stared at the luminous clock on the bedside table. 10:35 The wind was blowing hard outside, and it magnified the unhappy sounds coming from his backyard.

  “Is that Max?” his wife asked sleepily.

  “Yeah, he sounds hungry. Think I’d better go feed him.”

  “Scratch his head for me.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  He put on his bathrobe and slippers and padded downstairs to his kitchen, stopping on the way to glance out the front window at the police cruiser sitting across the street. In it were two uniforms named Robinson and Schiffmiller. They patrolled Margate, and often parked on his street to drink coffee. Going to the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, and removed a package of ground chuck. It was the cheapest grade of meat the grocery carried, and he removed a handful and shaped it into a ball, then threw the deadbolt on the back door and went outside.

  The cold knifed through his bathrobe as he crossed his snow-covered backyard. There was a gibbous moon, and he spotted Max, his neighbor’s hundred-pound German Shepherd, sitting by his dog house. The dog protected every house on the street, and Valentine showed his appreciation by occasionally tossing meat over the fence.

  A wicket fence separated their backyards. He tossed the burger ball over, and saw Max leap on it. His tail wagged ferociously as he devoured the meat.

  “If it isn’t Tony Valentine, my hero.”

  Valentine momentarily sto
pped feeling the cold. The voice had come from behind him, and he spun around to stare at his moon-lit backyard. It was empty save for him, Gerry’s toys, and the bird bath. He ducked into the alley that ran behind the house, and looked up and down it. Empty as well.

  “I’ll bet you still haven’t figured out why I hate you.”

  Valentine walked into the center of his yard. There was no one but himself there.

  “Answer me, fuck face!”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”