Wild Card (Tony Valentine Series)

by James Swain

  “Were you present when your friend had these episodes?”

  Episodes. That was an interesting way to describe them.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Is it always the same voice?”

  Valentine hesitated. “I think so.”

  Crinklaw resumed writing. “You said your friend is involved in a multiple homicide investigation. Is it safe to assume that he’s under a lot of pressure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are his superiors aware of these problems?”

  “Yes. His boss told him to stay off the case.”

  She glanced up, and waited for an explanation. Lying had never been his strong suit, and he finally said, “It’s not his case. But the killer is contacting him, so he’s gotten himself involved. His boss is worried about him. So am I.”

  “Does your friend have any family members who’ve had mental health issues?”

  He stared over her shoulder at a college certificate hanging from the wall. He’d always wanted to go to college but there had been no money. His eyes shifted to her face.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “My friend’s father was a drunk who suffered a mental breakdown many years ago. My friend came downstairs one night, and found his father sitting in an armchair, having a conversation with someone who wasn’t in the room.”

  “So your friend is fearful that this is now happening to him.”

  “Yes.”

  Crinklaw finished writing, then put her pen down and rose from her chair. Coming around the desk, she proceeded to sit on the edge of it. It gave her a vantage point of looking look straight down on him. It was a technique Valentine had used during interrogations for years, and now made him uncomfortable.

  “Based upon what you’ve told me, you…” She coughed into her hand. “Excuse me, your friend is either suffering from a bi-polar disorder, and is going through a manic phase, or is a paranoid schizophrenic. Either condition lends itself to delusions, and hearing voices.”

  Valentine felt himself growing warm. Crinklaw had seen right through his ruse.

  “You mean he’s sick,” he said.

  “Very sick. If not treated, your friend could plunge further into psychosis, and get much worse. I’d suggest he seek immediate help.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, and gave him a long, thoughtful look. “He could come here and see me, or go directly to the psychiatric ward at the local hospital, and check himself in. Either way, your friend would get the proper attention that he needs.”

  “My friend is stubborn. That’s why he sent me.”

  “You mean, he may not take my advice.”

  “Probably not,” he conceded.

  Crinklaw unfolded her arms and let out an exasperated breath. “Then, I’d say your friend is in for real trouble.”

  Chapter 41

  Leaving Crinklaw’s office, Valentine got into his Pinto, and drove around the north end of the island. The doctor hadn’t called him crazy, but she’d come damn close. He was glad he hadn’t told her about his epiphanies. Hearing that, she probably would have called for the men with the butterfly nets to come and get him.

  There were only so many places you could go in Atlantic City, and after a while he parked in the employee parking lot next to the casino, and let the heater run. Last night, sitting in his kitchen, he had told himself he wasn’t going crazy. A little frightened and bewildered, but not crazy. The voice he’d heard in his backyard had a real life person behind it, and the connection to his past was real as well. He was being tricked. That was what his gut was telling him, and his gut had never been wrong before.

  But what if Crinklaw was right, and a fuse had blown in his head, and he was imagining things like his father had done years ago? What if something was wrong upstairs, and needed to be fixed?

  He rubbed his face with his hands. If he started getting psychiatric treatment, he would have to tell Banko. And if he did that, he’d be finished as a detective, and put behind a desk, or forced into retirement on a disability.

  Washed-up at thirty-eight. He could not think of anything worse.

  At noon he went inside, took the employee elevator to the third floor, and went to his office in the surveillance control room. A large envelope sat on his desk. It had been delivered by courier, the sender Bill Higgins. He shredded it , and a video cassette dropped into his hand. Taped to it was a handwritten note. Here’s the tape of the BJ cheats I told you about. Let me know if you spot anything.’

  Valentine stared at the note. He reminded himself that he’d been catching cheaters without any problems during his “episodes”. If he was going crazy, then why hadn’t it affected his work inside the casino? He walked into the next room, and handed the tape to Fossil. “Run this on monitors 1 through 12,” he told him.

  Monitors 1 through 12 made up a quadrant of the video wall. The tape began a few moments later. Valentine stood in front of the twelve screens, his face bathed in artificial light. Fossil came over and stood beside him.

  The tape showed a blackjack table with two male players. Both were in their early thirties, and had sandy brown hair, expensive clothes and jewelry, and carefree attitudes. They were betting the table maximum, five thousand dollars a hand. And winning every hand. Soon they had all of the dealer’s black chips in their possession.

  “Christmas!” Fossil exclaimed.

  Valentine had never seen a table lose money so quickly. The two players were not touching the cards, nor doing anything strange, and he found himself studying other things. Like the vivacious woman standing behind the table, sipping from a Coke bottle. Was she part of it? And what about the dealer? His back was to the camera, and his shoulders were hunched. Anxious? Or was that his normal posture? The tape ended. He played it again, and Fossil called a tech named Romaine over to watch.

  “That’s scary,” Romaine said when it was over.

  Valentine watched the tape a third time, and got no closer to a solution. It was the most amazing cheating he’d ever seen. Returning to his office, he removed a saran-wrapped Swiss cheese sandwich Lois had fixed him from the jacket of his overcoat. He ate it while sitting at his desk, and called Bill Higgins.

  “I don’t have a clue what they’re doing,” Valentine said, “but the woman with the Coke bottle bothers me.”

  “How so?” his friend asked.

  “She’s nursing it.”

  “So?”

  “Cokes are free in a casino.”

  Higgins made a clucking sound with his tongue. “You think she’s part of a gang?”

  “Yes. But don’t ask me what her role is, because I don’t know.”

  Higgins put him on hold. When he returned, he said, “I appreciate you taking a look. I’m sending you a present for helping me nail those slot cheats. You know what a dauber is?”

  Valentine pulled open his desk drawer, and removed the cocktail napkins containing Izzie’s Hirsch’s pearls of wisdom. Searching through them, he found the one devoted to daubers. “You mean a juice player, or a paint player or a painter?”

  “I’m impressed,”Higgins said. “You know how to catch a dauber?”

  “Sure. You put the suspected cards under an ultra-violet light, and if they light up, you’ve got a bust. It’s a bad system, because you have to stop the game, and take cards out of play to see if they’ve been daubed.”

  “That’s right,”Higgins said, “so, here’s what I’ve come up with. I got a company to manufacture a special discard tray for our blackjack tables. The tray is made of a luminous-detecting plastic. By looking through the plastic, you can spot a card that’s been daubed. That will let a pit boss stand beside the dealer, and stare through the discard tray. If a card lights up, they stop the game.”

  “How many trays are you sending?” Valentine asked.

  “One,” Higgins said. “And the phone number of the guy who made it for me.”

  Valentine drove home that night thinking about the tape of the blackj
ack cheats Bill had sent him. He had enough problems in his life right now, but this one seemed solvable. The two players had somehow rigged the game so they wouldn’t lose a hand. They’d done it without anything suspicious taking place, which meant collusion was involved, possibly by the dealer, or possibly another player. It was the only logical explanation.

  Pulling into the driveway, he spied Gerry’s bike with the banana seat lying in the grass. Ever since he’d had gotten in trouble at school, his son had started doing little things to annoy his parents, like leaving his belongings around the house, and riding his bike around the neighborhood at odd hours. Lois said it was just part of growing up. Slamming the car door, Valentine got the mail, and went inside.

  The house was unusually quiet. Lois always put music on when she came home. She liked to play big band or Sinatra and sometimes Peggy Lee. The good stuff.

  “Anybody home?” he called out.

  Someone was crying in the kitchen. As a cop, it was the worst sound you could hear. It always meant you were too late. He dropped the mail on the dining room table and hurried through the house. Gerry’s school books were scattered all over the floor, his son having dropped everything as he’d come inside. It made Valentine’s blood boil to see his boy act so disrespectfully. Pushing open the kitchen door, he was ready to say something scolding, when he saw Gerry standing with Lois by the sink, his head buried in his mother’s bosom. He was sobbing, and the sound stopped Valentine dead in his tracks.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  Lois looked up, her face awash with tears.

  “Something terrible happened at school today,” she said.

  Chapter 42

  Every class at Atlantic City High School has a sacrifice. Valentine had learned this from a pimply kid named Horace Gold his first day in the seventh grade, and it had scared the living daylights out of him. They’d been standing on the worn parquet floor in the gymnasium with three hundred other seventh graders, awaiting orientation.

  “My older brother told me,” Gold had whispered fearfully. “Look around the gym. One of these kids won’t make it out.”

  “You mean one’s going to die?” Valentine whispered back.

  “Yeah,” Gold said emphatically. “Sometime during the school year a kid will die. It happens to every class.”

  “But why?”

  “Beats me. It just does.”

  Gold had been right. Several months later, a seventh-grader named Wayne Horchuck had gotten run over by a milk truck while riding his bicycle home during a bad thunder storm. And kids from every other class had died as well. Some in cars that got into bad accidents, others from cancer or strange, childhood diseases. Every class lost at least one. There was no getting around it.

  From Gerry’s class, the sacrifice was Marcus Mink, the son of the black detective who’d survived the shootout at the Rainbow Arms.

  Marcus’s funeral was held at St. Michael’s church, and brought out of most of his high school class, and every cop in town. He was a young man that everyone admired; star football player, strikingly handsome, a straight-A student, and as the hearse carrying his coffin turned the corner onto Mississippi Avenue, the motorcycle cops stationed in front of the church had to push back the sea of mourners standing along the sidewalk.

  St. Michael’s had filled up fast, with the overflow standing behind the organ, where the choir normally stood. It was a mixture of street-wise cops and pubescent kids, of those who had loved Marcus and those who hardly knew him, all sharing in his loss.

  Valentine sat with Lois and Gerry in the back of the church. It was a long service, and many of Marcus’s classmates had openly cried while giving their eulogies. Then Father Riley had taken the pulpit. It was hard to make sense of a death so young, the priest said, but God worked in ways that no human being could ever comprehend. Marcus’s death was a loss to us all, but a welcome addition in heaven.

  The service ended with Father Riley reading a prayer by St. Francis. It was the same prayer he’d used at Valentine’s mother’s funeral, and Valentine shut his eyes, and silently recited the last lines along with him.

  O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

  To be consoled… as to console

  To be understood… as to understand

  To be loved… as to love

  for

  It is in giving…. that we receive

  It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,

  It is in dying… that we are born to eternal life.

  Marcus’s closed coffin sat in the front of the church. He had been driving an illegal motorbike in front of the high school when he’d lost control, wrapped himself around a tree, and broken his neck. Like every other parent on the island, Valentine wondered what his parents had been thinking to let him have such a dangerous toy.

  One by one, the rows of mourners filed past the coffin to say goodbye. When their turn came, Gerry went to the coffin with his head bowed, while Valentine and Lois paid their condolences to Mink and his wife Gloria, who stood bravely nearby.

  “We’re so sorry for your loss,” Lois said.

  Gloria Mink nodded stiffly. She’d been beautiful once, but the light had gone out of her eyes, and reduced her to something less than whole. Leaning against his cane, her husband put his arm around his wife’s shoulder, and somehow found the strength to smile.

  “My son is with the Lord,” Mink said.

  Sitting across the street from the church, the Dresser watched the mourners file out the front doors, and pile into the black limousines that would take them to the cemetery. He’d read about the boy’s death in the paper, and immediately noted that his father was a cop. The police were a brotherhood, and he’d realized that all the other cops in town would attend the funeral out of respect.

  Taking the orange juice container off the seat, he took a long swallow. A police cruiser led the funeral procession away from the church, and he listened to its siren fade into the afternoon, then started up his car’s engine, and pulled away from the curb.

  He drove north. He had learned that the key to killing was being an opportunist. If an opportunity presented itself, then he needed to take advantage of it. Marcus Mink’s death was such an opportunity.

  He parked a few blocks from the beach and walked to the Boardwalk. It was a cold day, yet there were tourists everywhere. Blending in was easy with so many people around. He didn’t have to change his appearance much — a pair of sunglasses, or a floppy hat usually did the trick. That, and a group of people he could walk with. It didn’t matter that there were flyers everywhere now with his composite. With the right crowd, he was still invisible.

  Reaching the Boardwalk, he went into a confectionary store, and bought an ice cream cone. He made the girl put chocolate sprinkles on top, and a cherry. Then he stood outside the store, and watched the tourists. The Boardwalk’s narrow wood planks were laid in a hypnotic, herringbone pattern, and people seemed to float as they walked past.

  He saw a hooker strolling toward him, doing the walk. She was past her prime, and wore too much make-up. She was taller than he liked, but she would do in a pinch. He needed a girl. He flashed a smile, and she came over to where he stood.

  “Hey, handsome,” the hooker said.

  “Well, hello.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Great. How about you?”

  “Having the time of my life.”

  He licked his cone, and came away with an ice cream moustache. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  She laughed. “Always talk with your mouth full?”

  “Depends what it’s filled with. What’s your name?”

  “Mona. You in town for the convention?”

  He’d seen several Shriners walk by, wearing their silly purple hats, and nodded his head. Mona eyed the cone, and he handed it to her. She licked at the cherry sitting atop the whipped cream. Her tongue was pointed like a serpent’s. She saw the effect it had on him, and went for the kill.

&nb
sp; “Want to go on a date?”

  “Depends. How much do you charge?”

  “Two hundred bucks.”

  “For how long?”

  “For as long as you can last, handsome.”

  He removed a wad of cash from his pocket along with a handful of black casino chips. Carrying the chips was a little touch, but sometimes they were the most important things. He peeled away a brand new hundred, and handed it to her.

  “Half now, half when we get there.”

  Mona made the C-note disappear in her leather jacket.

  “I like your style,” she said.