by James Swain
“Just a little shook up,” Gerry admitted.
“Here. Come with me.”
She led him to a visitors’ area where they sat on a small couch. An ambulance had shown up outside Bally’s before any police cruisers, and Gerry had ridden to the hospital with Davis. Watching Davis bleed all over the back of the ambulance, Gerry had realized that he was partially responsible for what had happened. Davis had picked him up at the airport as a favor to his father. Davis should have been home, and not on the street.
“Did the sight of all that blood bother you?” the doctor asked.
“Yeah, how did you know?” Gerry said.
“It’s a common reaction. The human body has a hundred quarts of blood. Eddie lost a tiny fraction of that. He’ll be fine. Trust me.”
Gerry gazed into her kind face, and found it in him to smile.
“You’re a Valentine, aren’t you?” she asked.
His smile grew. “That’s right. Gerry Valentine.”
“Faith Toperoff. I knew your parents. How are they doing?”
“My mom passed away two years ago,” Gerry said. “My dad runs a consulting business out of Florida.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. I always admired your parents for staying on the island after the casinos came,” she said. “Not many people had the stomach for it, especially those first few years.”
“How long have you been here?” Gerry asked.
“All my life.”
There weren’t many like her left on the island, and he said, “My folks talked about packing up and leaving, but my father couldn’t do it. He said he’d be a traitor.”
“It was especially hard on the local cops,” she said. “The crime rate shot up every time a casino opened, and it was already the highest in the nation. I remember the night your father shot to death the man who’d shot his partner. Your father took it hard, even though he’d done the right thing. New Jersey struck a devil’s bargain the day it decided to let casinos take over this island.”
Gerry stared at the scuffed tile floor. He got depressed when locals talked about the old days. Atlantic City had been a decent place to live until the casinos had appeared. He’d been a teenager, and remembered hundreds of restaurants and retail stores closing down, while neighborhoods like South Inlet and Ducktown had disappeared altogether. A voice came over a public address, looking for Dr. Toperoff. She rose and slapped Gerry on the leg the way his mother used to do.
“Tell your father I said hello,” she said.
Gerry stayed in the visitors’ area until he saw the sun come up. He decided he was thirsty, and went downstairs to the basement and bought an iced tea from a humming soda machine. It tasted like the best thing he’d ever drunk.
He walked around, trying to collect his thoughts. Once the police found out he was responsible for sending Abruzzi to the big poker game in the sky, he was going to be put through endless questioning. He was in for a long day.
He came to the hospital cafeteria. It didn’t open for another half hour, and he stared through the doorway into the darkness. Two weeks ago, while visiting Jack Donovan, he’d come downstairs to this same cafeteria to get sodas, then returned to Jack’s room to find his friend’s oxygen tubes ripped out. Jack had died trying to tell him about the amazing poker scam he’d invented.
Gerry continued to stare into the darkness. His father believed the secret to Jack’s scam was hidden inside the hospital, and that if Gerry looked hard enough, he’d discover what it was. Jack had invented the scam while getting chemotherapy, and Gerry decided that would be the best place to start searching.
He found a hospital directory posted by the elevators, and located the floor on which cancer treatments were given. Getting on an elevator, he pushed the button for the floor. He finished his drink while the elevator creaked upward.
Even though Jack knew he was terminal, he’d still continued to get weekly chemotherapy, unwilling to give up the fight despite having already been counted out. It was the kind of courage that Gerry hoped he would summon when he faced the music.
The signs led him to a wing that looked brand new. A honey-blond nurse with the beginning of a double chin manned the nurses’ station, a fat diamond ring and gold band sitting on her third finger. Her eyes said it was okay for Gerry to approach, so he did.
“Can I help you?” the nurse asked.
“Please.” He took a business card from his wallet and placed it on the counter. His title was partner, a nice gift from his father. She stared at it indifferently.
“Grift Sense. What’s that?”
“We help casinos catch cheaters.”
“I thought it was the other way around.”
Gerry started to put the card away, then thought better of it. “Sometimes it is. We nail those guys, too.”
“What does ‘grift sense’ mean?”
“It’s a hustler’s expression, a compliment, really. It means you have a gift for spotting grift.”
“Sounds like fun. What can I do for you?”
There were charts spread all over her work area and a pen stuck behind her ear. Working alone and working hard. Gerry found himself liking her, despite her coolness.
“A friend of mine was getting chemotherapy here,” Gerry said. “His name was Jack Donovan. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.”
She stiffened. “Jack Donovan is dead.”
“Yes. I know that.”
“I can’t talk to you about his death,” she said.
“There’s an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by the homicide division of the Atlantic City Police Department. I was interviewed by two detectives, along with practically everyone else on the floor who was in contact with Jack.”
“I don’t want to talk to you about his death,” Gerry said. “I want to talk to you about his therapy.”
She pushed her chair back a foot from the desk. “What about it?”
“Jack invented a way to cheat at poker during his therapy. So far, it’s got all the experts fooled.”
“How do you cheat at poker?”
“In this case, marked cards.”
“Marked how?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
From his wallet, Gerry removed the playing card that Jack had given him before he’d died. It was an ace of spades from Celebrity’s casino in Las Vegas. The card had been scrutinized by an FBI forensic lab and found to be clean. Yet it was marked, and could be read if you knew the secret. She examined the card and handed it back.
“So you think Jack Donovan devised some special way to mark cards while getting treatment in this hospital,” she said.
“That’s right,” Gerry said.
Her face changed, and so did her tone. “What do you want me to do, Gerry Valentine, vice president of Grift Sense, let you search the place? Get real.”
This was a real Jersey girl, filled with piss and vinegar and capable of intimidating a three-hundred-pound NFL lineman.
“Of course not,” he replied.
“Then what do you want?”
“Jack Donovan stole something from this hospital,” Gerry said.
“He did?”
“Yes. It was in a metal strongbox in a bag under his bed. I saw it. Whatever was in that strongbox can be used to mark cards, but also happens to be dangerous.”
“Dangerous how?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you be looking for something if you don’t know what it is?”
“I’m guessing there has to be a record of the theft. If I know what was taken, I’ll know what the scam is.”
“It’s that easy?” she asked.
Gerry nodded. He would take the mystery substance and coat a few dozen playing cards with it, and the rest would explain itself. To his surprise, she picked up his business card, and slipped it into her breast pocket.
“And it will go no further than that?” she asked.
“That’s right. No one w
ill ever hear about it.”
She pulled out her lower lip and let it snap back, deep in thought. “I liked Jack. He was always cracking jokes, even when he knew what his situation was. I’ll look through the computer, let you know what turns up.”
“Thanks a lot,” Gerry said.
The phone on her desk had several buttons. The red one lit up and rang at the same time. She picked it up and said, “Cancer ward nurses’ station, Gladwell here.”
She listened for a moment, then looked at Gerry a little differently than before. “There are some homicide detectives in ER searching the hospital for you. They want to question you about a dead guy they think you sent through the windshield of a car.”
It was not the way Gerry had hoped to end their conversation.
“Tell them I’ll be right down,” he said.
Part II
George and Tom
13
Skip DeMarco stood naked at the bedroom window in his suite, imagining the world he could not see. Although his vision was limited to a few inches in front of his face, DeMarco had a keen sense of light and dark, and imagined the sun climbing over the tall, bluish mountains that ringed Las Vegas, a city his uncle had described to him in great detail. His uncle made the casino-lined streets sound like something out of The Wizard of Oz, but DeMarco didn’t picture them that way. Vegas was a cutthroat town, designed to separate suckers from their money. That was why his uncle liked it here so much.
The room’s air-conditioning rose with the intrusion of natural light. Shutting the blinds, he walked to the closet and went through the slow, painstaking process of picking out today’s outfit, holding each garment in front of his face to determine its color. He decided on a flowing black silk shirt, black linen pants, two gold necklaces, and shades. The tiny inner-canal earpiece he’d worn each day of the tournament lay on his bureau. As he fitted it into his ear, he heard his uncle’s soft tapping on the door.
“Come in, Uncle George.”
His uncle entered, shutting the door behind him.
“You sleep good?” the older man asked.
“Like a rock. How about you?”
“Fine. Show me what you’re wearing.”
DeMarco stood in the center of the bedroom, and let his uncle appraise his selection of clothes. It was a routine they’d followed since he’d gone to live with Scalzo as a little boy.
“You look great, kid,” his uncle said.
“The black isn’t too ominous?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Foreboding. Scary.”
“You look like a man,” his uncle bristled.
DeMarco pointed at the dresser. A radio transmitter lay on it, which was used to test the earpiece and make sure it was functioning properly. “Do the test, Uncle George.”
His uncle picked up the transmitter and flipped the power on. Then he pressed the transmitter’s main button. DeMarco heard a short click in his ear.
“Do it again,” DeMarco said.
His uncle pushed the button twice. DeMarco heard two clicks.
“Perfect,” he said.
“You’re not leaving this out for the maid to see, are you?” his uncle asked.
“It goes in the wall safe,” DeMarco said. “Put it away for me, Uncle George, would you?”
His uncle shuffled across the room and put the transmitter into the wall safe. A diabetic, he suffered from swollen feet. “It’s like walking on marshmallows all the time,” he often said. His uncle carried insulin with him, yet told everyone the insulin was for his nephew, not himself. DeMarco believed that little deception said a lot about his uncle.
“Now, look in my ear,” DeMarco said.
“You clean it real good?” his uncle asked. DeMarco smiled. Another standard line.
“Yes, I cleaned it real good.”
His uncle examined his nephew’s ear. When properly fitted, the earpiece was impossible to see. Earpieces had been used to cheat card games for years, with someone on the outside secretly reading everyone’s hands, and passing the information to the cheater via a radio transmitter. But that scam was easy to detect. If an RF detector was pointed at the table during the transmission, the detector would pick up the radio frequency, and the cheater would be exposed. Nearly every casino and poker room in the world used RF detectors for this purpose.
But the scam his uncle had given DeMarco to cheat the World Poker Showdown was different. For starters, there was no outside person reading the other players’ cards. And, if an RF detector was pointed at the table, the machine would hardly register, and the operator would think it was someone’s cell phone. But the best part was that there was no evidence. The cards were clean, and so was everything else.
There was only one bad part about the scam. DeMarco didn’t know how his opponent’s cards were being read. It was a creepy feeling to hear clicks in his ear, and not know who was sending them, and several times he’d asked his uncle to explain the secret. Each time, his uncle had placed his hand on his nephew’s shoulder and promised to tell him after he won the tournament.
Scalzo watched his nephew finish getting dressed, then looked at his watch. “Let’s go downstairs. They’re going to start playing soon.”
“I need to brush my teeth and comb my hair,” his nephew replied, heading toward the bathroom.
“Your hair looks fine, and no one’s going to smell your breath.”
“Come on, Uncle George. Appearances are important.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? You look fine.”
“It won’t take two minutes. Is that so much to ask?”
The bathroom door closed before Scalzo could reply. His nephew was letting all the attention go to his head. Scalzo had adopted Skipper twenty years ago, expecting the boy to grow up to be like him. Instead, Skipper had turned into a big peacock.
Scalzo went into the next room, slamming the door behind him. He spied Karl Jasper standing in the center of the living room, talking with Guido. It was the second time in two days that Jasper had come to Scalzo’s suite without being asked.
Guido hurried over to his boss.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” Scalzo asked under his breath.
“He demanded that I let him in,” Guido said.
“He demanded?”
“Yeah. I figured it was important. You want, I’ll throw him out.”
Guido’s job didn’t involve making decisions. Going to the boss was the only right decision for Guido to make. Reaching down, Scalzo grabbed his bodyguard by the balls, and gave them a healthy squeeze. Guido’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
“Don’t ever do something without asking me first,” Scalzo said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Never do something without asking me first,” he said, as if clarification were needed.
“Yes, sir.”
Scalzo released his death grip, and Guido slunk away. Then he walked up to Jasper. Jasper had been watching them, and his face had turned a sickly white.
“What the fuck do you want?” Scalzo said.
“We need to talk,” Jasper said.
“About what?”
“About what happened last night with Valentine.”
Scalzo pointed at the glass slider that led to a narrow balcony with a view of the desert. Only high-roller suites had windows that actually opened in Las Vegas hotels; everyone else was a prisoner of their room.
“Out there,” Scalzo said.
Jasper opened the slider and let Scalzo go first. Showing some respect, Scalzo thought. They both went outside.
“What happened last night?” Jasper asked, closing the slider behind him.
Scalzo grasped the balcony’s metal railing and stared at the mountains. He hated when people questioned him, hated it more when he had to answer. The mountains seemed close, and he tried to guess their distance.
“We had a problem,” he said quietly.
Jasper edged up beside him, bumping shoulders, his voice a wh
isper. “A problem? You hire two goons to snuff Valentine, and they end up dead in the hotel stairwell. I’d call that a catastrophe.”
Scalzo kept staring ahead. “You want to know what really happened?”
“Of course I want to know. We’re partners, aren’t we?”
“Valentine killed them.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I picked them up, brought them to the hotel, and sent them to Valentine’s room. Twenty minutes later, one of them called my cell, said that Valentine and the cowboy had fought back. I waited by the elevators for them to come down. I heard two shots from the stairwell. I went and opened the door, saw them lying dead on the floor. I heard footsteps and looked up. Valentine was running up the stairs holding a gun.”
Jasper swallowed hard, then opened and shut his eyes several times. When he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper.
“So what do we? We can’t have Valentine screwing things up for us.”
A hundred miles, Scalzo decided. The mountains were one hundred miles away. He turned from the balcony and leaned against the railing, staring through the slider into the living room of the suite. Skipper hadn’t come out yet. Still preening two inches in front of the vanity, he guessed.
“I already made arrangements for Valentine to be taken care of,” Scalzo said.
“That was fast.”
“I have a flag in every state.”
A flag in every state meant Scalzo knew a mob guy in every state who would do him a favor. In this case, the favor came from a mob guy who had connections with the warden of a local prison. This warden had an inmate doing a life stretch, courtesy of Tony Valentine. By noon, that inmate would be on his way to Las Vegas.
“This man won’t screw up,” Scalzo added.
“How can you be sure?”
“He and Valentine have a history.”
Through the slider Scalzo saw Skipper come in. His nephew had switched into a shiny gold shirt and looked like a fag. This bullshit has to stop, he thought.
“I sure hope you’re right,” Jasper said.
Scalzo shifted his gaze, and stared into Jasper’s face. It was a look meant to inspire fear. He saw Jasper’s lower lip tremble, and knew that it had worked.
