Loaded Dice tv-4

by James Swain

  Wily looked through the stack. “Sixteen.”

  “Let’s figure out what they’re doing before we start pointing fingers. Don’t want Nick to get sued on top of everything.”

  “Wouldn’t that be swell,” Wily said without humor. “Where do you want to start?”

  “The catwalk,” Valentine said.

  The Acropolis was one of the last joints in Las Vegas to have a catwalk. Back before computers dominated the world, every casino had a catwalk. Usually, they were cavernous spaces in the ceiling with a narrow walkway and a railing. Through two-way mirrors, security people had watched for cheaters. Valentine had made his chops on a catwalk, and still considered them the best thing going.

  “Ready when you are,” he said to Wily.

  “What game you want?”

  “Craps.”

  Wily had spread the personnel files across the catwalk. He pulled the files of three employees dealing craps, and Valentine thumbed them open. Each had a snapshot of the employee. All guys. One redhead, one bald, and a blonde who spent too much time sunbathing. Staring down, he quickly found them at the table.

  Craps was a furious game. The three new hires were working different sides of the table. They seemed to be working the table hard. Too hard, he decided.

  He scouted the faces of the other players. A flashy kid in an Armani suit was shooting the dice. On his coming-out roll, he shot a six. That made the point six. He needed to throw a six again before shooting a seven or eleven, and losing.

  The flashy kid picked up the dice and shook them. A hot girl in a leather mini skirt was draped on his arm. The kid raised the dice to her lips, and had her kiss them for luck.

  The kid lowered his arm. His hand hung over the girl’s pocketbook for a split second, and Valentine envisioned the dice secretly being dropped, and the loaded pair in his palm, called tops, invisibly replacing them. Tops had only three numbers on each die—in this case, the two, four, and six. With tops, the flashy kid would never roll a seven or eleven and crap out, and eventually roll a six. Because the human eye could only see three sides of a die at any single time, the gaff was undetectable.

  Three rolls later, the kid won. Using a purse to switch dice wasn’t new. What Valentine didn’t understand was the three employees’ role in the scam. He decided to watch them closely. Wily did the same.

  To his credit, Wily made the scam.

  “They’re screwing the other players at the table,” the head of security said. Pointing at the redhead, he said, “He’s talking players out of making smart bets, where the odds are good, and steering them to making proposition bets, where the odds are terrible.”

  “What’s the blonde’s angle?”

  “He’s shorting the legitimate winners on the payoff,” Wily said. “He’s the banker. When he pays out, he cuts the chips on the table, then makes a giant stack out of the winnings and pushes them toward the winner, palming one in his hand.”

  “And adding them back to the tray,” Valentine said.

  Wily nodded. “He’s making the losses look less than they are.”

  “Which is why no one up in the surveillance control room caught on,” Valentine said.

  “Guys upstairs are trained to watch the stacks. If they get short, they get tense.”

  “How about the bald guy?”

  “The stick man? He’s getting the crooked dice off the table and switching them with a regular pair in his apron. If a floor manager strolls by and wants to look at the dice, they’ll be clean.”

  Valentine pushed himself off the railing. He was positive similar scams were taking place at the other tables where the new hires were working, scams that required gangs of hustlers schooled in the art of subterfuge. It was a Frank Fontaine trademark, with Oscar nominations going to everyone involved.

  “Give me the file on the finance guy,” he said.

  Wily handed the file over. Valentine opened it and stared at the new hire’s picture. Albert Moss, age thirty-five, a curly-haired guy with a loose smile. Moss’s job was to check the daily financials and keep Nick appraised of the casino’s win–loss ratios. Only Moss wasn’t doing that. He was cooking the books and telling Nick that there was money coming in the door, when the money was really going out the door. He was painting a picture of financial stability, letting Nick spend his afternoons in the arms of his nubile young bride without a worry in the world.

  “I’m going to go see Nick, tell him what’s going on,” Valentine said.

  Wily hesitated. “You going to tell him I screwed up?”

  Valentine whacked him on the shoulder with Moss’s file. “You didn’t screw up. So I won’t say that.”

  Wily grinned. “Thanks, man.”

  Nick’s office in the Acropolis was like his house: a testimonial to bad taste that had been converted into a Laura Ashley showroom. Nick’s secretary didn’t work on weekends, and Valentine walked unannounced into the great one’s office. It was empty.

  He went to the door that led to Nick’s private bedroom. A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung from the knob. Screwing was to Nick what eating was to the rest of the world. If he didn’t get enough, there was no worse person to be around. Valentine tapped lightly on the door.

  “Come on,” Nick called out.

  He cracked the door open. The room was huge. Nick sat on a bed in his jockeys, clapping like a kid at his first baseball game. Wanda, who was stark naked, was standing on her head on a metal contraption that let her spin with her legs stuck out in opposite directions. Blaring disco music played in the background.

  “Come on . . . baby!” Nick exclaimed.

  Valentine immediately shut the door. Then it registered in his brain what he’d just seen. It was Wanda’s act from the talent portion of the Miss Nude World competition, the act that had captured Nick’s eye, and stolen his heart.

  He made it into the hallway before peals of laughter seeped out of him. It was laughter to make you hurt, and he leaned against a potted plant and held his sides until it subsided.

  Valentine waited ten minutes before rapping on the bedroom door again.

  “We’re all friends here,” Nick called out.

  He opened the door and stuck his head in. Nick lay beneath satin sheets, staring dreamily at his reflection in the mirrored ceiling. The bathroom door on the other side of the room was closed. Behind it, Valentine could hear water running. Nick lifted his head, then sat bolt upright.

  “No offense, Tony, but can’t this wait?”

  “No. Can I come in?”

  “Sure. Make yourself at home. We’re only screwing.”

  Nick slipped naked out of bed. His body was covered with black hair and looked like something that had just washed up on the beach. Putting on a monogrammed bathrobe, he met Valentine in the room’s sitting area. Valentine handed him Albert Moss’s file. Nick read through it.

  “So, what’s Curly doing?” he asked.

  Valentine explained how Nick was being systematically bled by Fontaine’s gang, then said, “The reason you’re not seeing it on your books is because Albert Moss is hiding it from you. Moss has been cooking the books for three to four weeks, which means you’re out a whole bunch of money.”

  “How much?”

  Valentine had thought about it while waiting in the hallway. He’d done enough work for Nick to know how much money flowed through the Acropolis each day. He also knew there was a limit on how much cheaters could steal before it became obvious.

  “Seven to eight million bucks. That might be on the low side.”

  Nick shut his eyes. “What’s the high side?”

  “Ten to twelve million.”

  Nick whistled through his teeth. “Does that put me in the Guinness Book of World Records?”

  “It might.” Valentine hesitated, then asked him the question that had been bothering him since he’d done the math. “Can you cover it?”

  Nick opened his eyes, and shook his head.

  “No way,” he said.

  23
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br />   Mabel wanted to talk to Tony before calling the police. Only Tony’s cell phone wasn’t on. Damn him!

  Hanging up, she stared across the kitchen at Reynolds and Fisher. They were handcuffed together, hanging from a chin-up bar in the kitchen doorway. They looked madder than hell. Yolanda had cuffed them and gone through their pockets while Mabel held the Sig Sauer on them. Their IDs said they were FBI agents, but Mabel wasn’t buying it. There was no reason for them to come barging in the way they had and accuse Tony of being unpatriotic and anti-American. The FBI had worked with Tony on many cases; they knew him.

  “Shit,” Mabel swore under her breath. What if they were FBI agents? Then she and Yolanda would be in more trouble than an army of lawyers could handle. If only she hadn’t pulled the gun on them. But Reynolds and Fisher had acted like gestapo, and something inside her had snapped.

  “Call him back,” Yolanda said. She’d taken a yogurt out of the refrigerator and was eating it with a spoon. It somehow added normalcy to a picture that had none.

  “Okay.” Mabel hit REDIAL, and was immediately put into Tony’s voice mail. “Damn.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “His cell phone’s still turned off.”

  She hung up and saw Reynolds staring helplessly at her from across the kitchen. He had an embarrassed look on his face. Tony had said that having a gun pointed at you disrupted your bowels, and she wondered if he’d wet his pants.

  Yolanda put her spoon in the sink. “I think we’d better call the police. It’s what Tony will tell us to do anyway.”

  Yolanda was right. The local cops needed to get involved. Mabel glanced at her watch. Several minutes had passed since she’d pulled the gun from the fridge. The police were going to ask her why she’d waited to call them. She didn’t have a good answer, but figured she’d come up with something by the time they arrived.

  She picked up the phone and, while punching in 911, heard the dial tone go flat, then fade away and disappear. She clicked the receiver several times with her finger, but got nothing. Hanging up, she said, “That’s strange.”

  Yolanda plucked an apple from the fruit bowl sitting on the counter. “What is?”

  “The phone just went dead.”

  The kitchen wasn’t terribly big, and from where Mabel stood, she had a clear view of the backyard through the window above the sink. Tony said fences made good neighbors, and a three-board one lined his property. Butting up to it was a phone pole, and Mabel saw a man scurry down it. He cut the line, she thought. She shot a glance at Reynolds and saw him shake his head.

  “Is he with you?”

  Reynolds licked his lips, hesitated.

  “Go ahead and say it,” she told him.

  “Yes, he’s with us. Ma’am, you are in so much trouble,” he said.

  Mabel felt an icy finger run down her spine. That wasn’t the kind of threat that thieves made. She edged up to the window and watched the man jump off the phone pole, then go running down the narrow alley behind the house. Across the alley was another New England clapboard house constructed by the same builder who had built Tony’s house. On its shingle roof she saw a man hiding behind the chimney. Yolanda bumped into her, munching on her apple and sharing her view.

  “What’s that guy doing up there?” she asked.

  “I was wondering that myself,” Mabel said. Leaning over the sink, she brought her nose up an inch from the glass and stared. “It looks like he’s holding something.”

  Yolanda dropped her half-eaten apple into the sink.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  Mabel kept staring. “What is it? It looks like a shovel . . .”

  “Oh, my God,” Yolanda said again.

  Mabel pulled away from the window. Yolanda had her hand over her mouth, and the expectant-mother glow had drained from her face. Mabel grabbed her by the wrists.

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  “He’s holding a rifle,” Yolanda said fearfully.

  Nick had owned the Acropolis for more than thirty years, and had experienced a lot of bad times and misfortune along with every other casino owner. What he hadn’t experienced was the widespread looting that Valentine had described to him. Few casino owners had.

  “Ohhh, Nicky,” Wanda called from the bathroom.

  Nick raised his head. “I’m busy, honey. We’ve got company.”

  “But I have something to tell you. Something wonderful.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  His bride emerged from the bathroom wearing six-inch heels and a bathing suit made from pink dental floss.

  “But Nicky . . . ,” she pouted, standing expectantly in the room’s center.

  Nick stared through her, too immersed in his casino’s demise to realize Wanda might have something important to say. Stung, she grabbed a robe from the closet and marched out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Shaking his head, Nick said, “The other day, Wanda tells me it’s my duty to make the coffee every morning. My duty. I say, baby, why is it my duty? And she goes and gets her Bible, and opens it up to a page, and points. Guess what it said.”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Hebrew.”

  A few moments passed, then Nick said, “So what do I do?”

  Valentine had given Nick’s options some serious thought. If he could prove to the Gaming Control Board that the Acropolis had been cheated, Bill Higgins would throw the thirty employees in jail, seize their bank accounts, plus their homes, cars, and everything of value they owned. They would be stripped clean. It wouldn’t cover Nick’s losses, but it was a start.

  “Call an emergency meeting of your new hires,” Valentine said. “We’ll back-room them, and I’ll interrogate them. I’ll turn them against each other. I’ll promise to cut deals with the guys I have by the balls in return for the information I don’t have.”

  “You think it will work?”

  He nodded. “Cheaters always squeal. It’s their nature.”

  Nick called Wily and had him set the meeting for four o’clock in the casino’s basement. “No, I’m not going to fire you,” he told his head of security. Hanging up, he said, “Give me five minutes to get dressed. We can go downstairs together.”

  Valentine went into Nick’s office to wait. He remembered his earlier promise to Mabel and powered up his cell phone. She’d asked him many times to leave it on, but he’d never seen the value in it. Too damn intrusive.

  He had a message. He retrieved it and heard his neighbor’s voice.

  Mabel was screaming at him.

  24

  Valentine’s heart jumped into his throat. Hysterical women did that to him. From what he could make out from his neighbor’s message, there were two men inside his house who may or may not be FBI agents and were handcuffed to his chin-up bar, while a third man was on the neighbor’s roof with a rifle. The phone lines had been cut, and Mabel was calling him from Yolanda’s cell phone.

  “Call me back on Yolanda’s cell!” she told him.

  He punched in Yolanda’s number. A frantic busy signal filled his ear. The call wasn’t going through. Going to the bedroom door, he rapped loudly. Nick bid him entrance, and he stuck his head in. “I need to use a phone. It’s an emergency. My cell phone isn’t cooperating.”

  Nick emerged still dressed in his robe. He escorted Valentine across the room to his desk. It was as big as a sports car and covered with photographs. He pointed at the phone. “Use line two. It’s my private line.”

  Nick went back to the bedroom. Valentine picked up line two and dialed Yolanda’s cell number while staring at the photographs. Groups of smiling Greek fishermen stared back at him. In the photos, the men were standing on fishing docks and holding up their catches.

  He heard the connection ring through. Mabel answered on the first ring.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Oh, Tony,” his neighbor replied. “I’ve done something truly awful.”

  He listened to Mabel explain what had happened. She
and Yolanda were staying away from the kitchen window, fearful of the sniper on the roof next door. And there was a strange car parked in his driveway, and she had heard scratching sounds around the house.

  “Why did you pull the gun on them?” he asked when she was done.

  “Because they barged in here and practically called you a traitor,” she hissed. “You always told me you had a good relationship with the FBI, and these men acted like they’d never heard of you.”

  “They called me a what?”

  “Well, they said you were unpatriotic.”

  Valentine felt his face burn. He hung his flag out on Veterans Day, paid his taxes, and believed in truth, justice, and the American Way.

  “Are they within earshot?”

  “You bet they are,” his neighbor seethed.

  “Put one of them on.”

  He heard Mabel cross his kitchen, and the sound of the cell phone being placed beneath someone’s mouth. Mabel had said she’d handcuffed the agents to his chin-up bar, and he wondered how they felt about being outwitted by a sixty-five-year-old woman. He said, “This is Tony Valentine. Who is this?”

  “FBI Special Agent Reynolds,” a man’s voice replied.

  “Sounds like you and your partner are in a pickle,” Valentine said.

  There was a long pause. Reynolds cleared his throat. “Your friend Mabel is in a lot of trouble, if you hadn’t already figured that out.”

  “So are you,” Valentine replied. “I want you to call off your dogs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The guys who’ve surrounded my house, and the guy on the roof with the rifle. I want you to call them off.”

  “What are you offering in return?”

  “The opportunity to end this peacefully, without anyone getting hurt.”

  Another pause. Reynolds said something to his hanging partner. Valentine made out the words It’s worth a shot and heard Reynolds agree.

  “Mind telling me how?” Reynolds asked him.

  “Easy,” Valentine replied. “I’m going to have a chat with Peter Fuller, your boss. You wouldn’t have a number where I might reach him, would you?”

  Reynolds gave him Peter Fuller’s private number, then promised to keep the agents surrounding the house at bay. Valentine hung up and walked out of Nick’s office.