Jackpot (Tony Valentine series)

by James Swain

  “What did Gerry do?” Yolanda asked, sounding worried.

  “No, no,” Mabel said. “Tony said he’s going to be a star.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a change.”

  The living room of Tony’s house had newspapers on the floor, and lots of comfortable furniture. Turning on the TV, Mabel found the horse-race channel with the remote, hit record on the TIVO, then joined Yolanda on the couch.

  “Gerry’s been on his best behavior lately,” Mabel said.

  “But it’s just not his normal behavior,” Yolanda said. She looked into Mabel’s face and grinned. “That’s a joke.”

  “Is everything between you two okay?”

  “Just the usual pressures.”

  “Which are?”

  “Bills, bills and more bills. I’m a doctor, but somehow I never comprehended how expensive having a baby is.”

  Mabel put a reassuring hand on Yolanda’s knee. “How’s Gerry taking this?

  “He lies in bed at night, dreaming up get rich quick schemes, some of which probably aren’t legal, and I tell him, ‘Banish those thoughts from your head.’”

  “Does he listen?”

  “Most of the time. But it’s tough.”

  “Oh, look. The race is starting.”

  They directed their attention to the screen. There were eleven horses in the gate, and when the starting bell sounded, they exploded forward in a mad rush of muscle and controlled fury. The resolution of the TV’s picture was breathtakingly real, and the dirt on the track flew up before their eyes.

  “So what’s going on?” Yolanda asked.

  “The race is fixed.”

  “How?”

  “We’re about to find out.” Mabel increased the volume with the remote. She supposed that if something unusual was going on, the TV announcer would pick it up. Sure enough, as the horses came around the final bend, the announcer began to yell .

  “Here comes Buster and Little Sheba around the turn, with Corky’s Boy glued to their tails. What a race this is, folks! They’re in the final stretch, and Corky’s Boy is even with the two favorites. Now, Corky’s Boy is pulling away. We’re coming up to the finish line, and it’s Corky’s Boy by three lengths for the win.”

  The picture showed the jockey for Corky’s Boy’s waving to the crowd, and directing his mount to the winner’s circle. As he climbed down, an announcement came over the track’s public address system that the race was under review. The jockey made a face and glanced nervously in both directions. Moments later, the winner’s circle was swarming with people. One of them was Gerry, and he was holding a green garden hose. As he walked over to Corky’s Boy, an older man appeared by his side. His father.

  “Why’s Gerry giving that horse a bath?” Yolanda asked.

  “Beats me,” Mabel confessed.

  Gerry sprayed Corky’s Boy with the hose. Before their eyes, the horse’s color changed from burnt orange to dark black, the dye running off its body to the ground. In the corner of the screen, they saw the jockey being forcibly held by a steward.

  “It’s a different horse,” Yolanda said. “How did Gerry know that?”

  Mabel shook her head. She’d come to the conclusion that there was a lot about Gerry that they probably didn’t know about it.

  “I guess we’ll have to ask him,” she said.

  Chapter 4

  “Are you serious?” Gerry said an hour later when they were on the road. “It’s really all mine?”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?” his father replied.

  “That’s awfully generous, Pop.”

  Valentine heard skepticism in his son’s voice. Taking Suzie Brinkman’s check for three thousand bucks out of his shirt pocket, he endorsed it to Gerry while driving one-handed. Normally, the split was sixty-forty, with Valentine getting the lion’s share because his name was on the shingle. But this job was different. Gerry had handled himself like a pro, and deserved a reward.

  “Thanks, Pop,” his son said.

  Valentine heard a crack of late-afternoon thunder as he drove into Palm Harbor. It was late September, and hot as blazes. In a few weeks, the temperatures would drop, and millions of northerners would descend upon the state like migratory birds. Up north, the leaves changed in the autumn; in Florida, it was the color of the license plates. Soon the skies opened up, and rain began to fall in solid, vertical lines. By the time he reached his house, the street resembled a canal.

  “What are you going to do with the money?” he asked, pulling into the driveway.

  “Bet it on the ponies,” Gerry replied.

  He killed the engine and stared at his son.

  “Buy early college tuition for the baby,” Gerry said.

  Florida had a great program for purchasing college tuition for kids while they were young. Even though Lois was only a few months old, the price was too cheap to pass by. “You’re starting to sound like a father,” he said.

  “Scary, isn’t it?” Gerry popped the glove compartment and pulled out Kleenex which he handed it to his father. “Left cheek.”

  Valentine looked in the mirror and saw red lipstick smeared on his face. Suzie Brinkman had planted another kiss on him right after Corky’s Boy’s jockey was hauled away by the police, that same wonderful smile lighting up her face. “How old do you think she is?” he asked, wiping away the evidence.

  “You thinking of asking her out?”

  He shook his head. After he’d lost his wife, he’d become curious about the age of women who still found him attractive. He’d figured that his son, who’d had more than his share of girlfriends, would know the answer.

  “Mid-forties,” Gerry replied.

  “Think that’s a good age for me?”

  “Perfect.”

  The storm soon passed. Going inside, they found Mabel glued to the computer in Valentine’s study.

  “Where’s my wife?” Gerry asked.

  “She went home to feed the baby.”

  “Did you see me on TV?”

  “Yes. You were dashing. Both of you. Now, take a look at this.” On the computer was a live-feed from a casino surveillance camera. The game was roulette, the table filled with dashing men in tuxedos and beautiful women in long evening dresses.

  “Let me guess,” Valentine said. “This is from Biloxi.”

  “Time to get your eyes checked,” Mabel replied.

  “One of those parking lot Indian reservation casinos?”

  “You’re a stitch. It’s from The Casino in Monte Carlo.”

  “We don’t do business with Monte Carlo,” Valentine said.

  “We do now,” Mabel said. “The director of surveillance called, and I signed them up. We got their check this afternoon.”

  Valentine thought Mabel was joking. The Casino in Monte Carlo was the most elegant casino in the world, with the best surveillance money could buy. The idea that he, a retired Atlantic City detective, might be working for them, didn’t seem real. On his desk he spied a Federal Express package with a certified check lying on top. It was from the Casino in Monte Carlo for five grand.

  “I thought my fee was three grand,” he said.

  “I raised it. You ever see the chandeliers in that place? They’ve got money.”

  If he’d learned anything from Mabel, it was that his services were more valuable than he’d realized. “How much have they lost?” he asked.

  “A half-million buckeroos,” Mabel replied. “They conducted their own investigation, but came up with air. The director of surveillance said the money’s being lost on this particular table.”

  That was all Valentine needed to know. Going to the kitchen, he grabbed a six-pack of Diet Coke from the refrigerator, then returned to his study and pulled up a chair beside his office manager.

  “Ready when you are,” he said.

  As a cop, Valentine had done his best work with a cigarette in one hand, a caffeinated beverage in the other. The cigarettes were a thing of the past, but not the caffeine. Sucking on a soda, he h
ad Mabel rattle off her checklist of what wasn’t happening at the Monte Carlo casino’s losing roulette table.

  “The wheel is clean, and so is the table and the ball,” she said. “All of the apparatus has been given forensic checks. The casino also polygraphed each of the dealers, and they came out clean. With all of those things ruled out, I figured the cheaters were working from the outside.”

  Working from the outside meant the cheaters didn’t have any employees helping them. “Working how from the outside?” Valentine asked.

  Mabel enjoyed an occasional challenge and said, “My guess is, they’re using an electronic device to predict where the ball might fall.”

  “Visual prediction,” he said.

  “Yes. You told me about a Serbian roulette cheater who used a cell phone with a laser scanner to track the speed of the ball, and the speed of the wheel, and determine which half of the wheel the ball would fall in. So, I started looking for anyone with a cell phone.”

  “Any luck?”

  “No cell phones are permitted inside the Casino in Monte Carlo. Which means someone has one hidden.”

  Valentine tossed his empty soda can into the trash. Using a hidden cell phone might work once or twice, but wouldn’t win you half a million bucks. “I think something else is going on,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  Gerry, who was scribbling on a legal pad, said, “Think it’s a payoff scam, Pop?”

  Valentine nearly fell out of his chair. His son’s education had yet to include payoff scams, and he wondered how he knew about them. Then he remembered that Gerry had run a bar which had fronted his bookie operation, and was probably familiar with hiding money.

  “That would be my guess,” he said.

  Mabel looked annoyed. “What’s a payoff scam?”

  “It’s a method of stealing chips,” Valentine explained. “Albert Einstein said stealing chips was the only way you could beat roulette, and he was right.”

  “So it has nothing to do with the equipment?”

  “No.” He removed another soda from the pack and popped it open. “You said the dealers were given polygraphs. What about the box man?”

  “Is he the person who pays out winners?” Mabel asked.

  “Yes.”

  “He wasn’t given one. The casino’s director of surveillance personally vouched for him. They’re related.”

  “Oh-oh,” his son said under his breath.

  Mabel’s head snapped like a spectator at a tennis match. “You think they’re the ones doing the stealing?”

  Gerry turned the legal pad around, and showed her what he’d written. Of the many sentences on the page, he’d crossed out all but two. The first sentence, three spaces down, said, ‘Too much money flying out the door.’ The second, just below it, said, ‘Inside job.’ Mabel nodded; it was the same technique Tony used. Eliminate the obvious, and the answer will often stare you in the face.

  “And the director of surveillance was so polite over the phone,” she said.

  Valentine stared at the live-feed of the Casino at Monte Carlo on his computer. The player sitting to the box man’s right was sweating, the collar of his starched shirt cutting his neck like a garrotte.

  “You taping this?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Mabel said. “Want to see something again?”

  “The last minute.”

  Mabel rewound the tape, then hit play. Valentine and Gerry leaned forward and stared. After the tape was done, they both pulled back. “Got it,” Valentine said.

  “Me, too,” Gerry said.

  “Oh, I hate you both,” Mabel said. “What’s going on?”

  “The player to the box man’s right is stealing the money. He bets red, or black. Forty-five percent of the time, he wins. When the box man slides him his winnings, he overpays him. The player immediately adds his winnings to his stack. The evidence is only on the table for a few seconds. Then, it melts away.”

  “Doesn’t the eye-in-the-sky catch on?” Mabel asked.

  “The director of surveillance makes sure it doesn’t. He tells the techs manning the cameras to watch the wheel. They never see the overpay.”

  Mabel leaned back in her chair, clearly perplexed. “But the director of surveillance hired us. Surely he had to think you might catch on.”

  If there was one part of the business Mabel didn’t understand, it was that casino cheaters didn’t just steal for the money. They stole because they enjoyed the high that came from beating the house. Sometimes they enjoyed it so much, they couldn’t stop. Valentine dialed The Casino in Monte Carlo, and within a minute, had the casino’s GM on the line. He explained the scam, and the GM cursed loudly when he learned who was involved. He thanked the GM for his business, then hung up.

  “What will happen now?” Mabel asked.

  “Watch.”

  Sixty seconds later, four security guards appeared, and escorted the box man and his partner from the table.

  “That’s what I call service,” Mabel said.

  Chapter 5

  It was quitting time. Gerry and Mabel both left, while Valentine went back to work. Since losing his wife, he’d found it the perfect antidote for loneliness. As he sat down in the chair in his study, his private line rang. Only a handful of people had the number, and he snatched up the phone.

  “Valentine here.”

  “Higgins, here,” Bill Higgins said. Bill was the director of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and a close friend. “I’m standing in the governor’s office in the Capitol Building in Carson City. Governor Smoltz is here, along with his staff. The governor personally asked me to call you. He needs your help.”

  Valentine leaned back in his chair. He’d vowed never to work for Nevada’s casinos after the casino owners had tried to blackball his son. His business hadn’t suffered, and he’d been a better man for the decision.

  “Is this about one of your casinos?”

  “It’s about all our casinos,” Bill said.

  “Tell Smoltz I’m not interested.”

  The line went silent, and Valentine stared out his study window. It was growing dark, and he was looking forward to his evening stroll. He’d left his kitchen door open a week ago, and been amazed at the number of critters that had decided to pay him a visit. Five varieties of frogs, a chameleon, a colorful banana spider, and a squirrel had poked their heads in. Palm Harbor was filled with wildlife, and he could either be like his neighbors and set traps, or get a book from the library and learn what the animals were. The latter choice had appealed to him, and he’d started taking nightly walks.

  “The governor has asked me to ask you to reconsider,” Bill said, coming back on the line. “This problem could cripple every casino in Nevada.”

  “Is your job on the line?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m not interested. How’s the weather out there?”

  Bill relayed his answer to Smoltz. Valentine heard the phone being ripped out of Bill’s hands, and the governor come on the line. Valentine had met Smoltz when he was the head prosecuting attorney in Las Vegas, and hadn’t know his ass from a shovel. Valentine had told him so, and they’d never bonded.

  “Goddamn it, Valentine!” Smoltz thundered. “We’re talking about a problem that could turn the state’s economy upside-down. A catastrophe with a capital C.”

  “Still not interested. Put Bill back on, will you?”

  Smoltz swore and passed the phone back to Bill.

  “So, how’s the weather?” Valentine asked.

  “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” Bill asked.

  From his desk drawer Valentine removed his binoculars and the notebook he used to jot down his wildlife sightings. “Just sticking to my principles, that’s all.”

  “This involves Bronco Marchese,” Bill said.

  The smile faded from Valentine’s face. A day hadn’t gone by in the last twenty years that he hadn’t thought about Bronco Marchese.

  “How does he figure
into this?”

  “Bronco got arrested in Reno yesterday. He’s charged with second-degree murder, and for stealing a jackpot from the Cal Neva Lodge. Bronco’s asked the prosecutor to cut him a deal, and it looks like he might.”

  Valentine put his binoculars and notebook back into the drawer. Bronco’s gang had murdered his brother-in-law Sal on the Atlantic City Boardwalk twenty years ago. Every other member of the gang was now in prison, and it was the last piece of unfinished business from his days in law enforcement.