“I spoke with Gerry last night,” Yolanda said, laying her notes on the desk. “He told me the key to solving this scam was at the Atlantic City Medical Center. His friend Jack Donovan stole something from there that’s being used to invisibly mark cards, and Gerry is trying to find out what it is. Well, I think we can help him.”
“How?” Mabel asked.
“The first thing Gerry has to realize is that things get stolen from hospitals, and never get reported to the police.”
“Why’s that?”
“Hospitals are no different than anywhere else,” Yolanda said. “Stuff disappears, including narcotics and prescription drugs, and the police never hear about it. People internally know about it, but that’s where it stops.”
The baby was starting to squirm. Mabel put her on the floor, and watched her crawl away.
“Bad for business?” Mabel asked.
“Worse than bad,” Yolanda said. “If the state medical board hears that a hospital is losing drugs to thieves, they might pull the hospital’s license. As a result, thefts routinely get hushed up. Gerry can’t rely on anyone working at the Atlantic City Medical Center to be truthful in regards to what Jack Donovan might have stolen from them.”
“So the hospital is a dead end,” Mabel said.
“Not necessarily. Oh, better grab the baby.”
Lois had crawled across the floor and was drooling on the newest addition to Tony’s collection of cheating equipment. It was a crooked roulette wheel, courtesy of the famed London Club, that’d hired Tony to determine why they were losing on the wheel. Using a computer software program, Tony had analyzed a week’s worth of winning numbers, and determined that half were coming up too often. He’d gotten the casino to take the wheel apart, and remove all the screws holding the metal separators between the winning numbers, called frets. It was discovered that the threads of these screws were thinner than normal, and offered less resistance when hit by the spinning ball. The casino had arrested the roulette repairman, who’d immediately confessed to the ingenious crime.
Mabel scooped the baby up. “Why not necessarily?”
“If the hospital isconfronted by the police about a theft, they’ll help in the investigation, for the same reasons I just explained. The hard part is getting enough evidence for the police to feel comfortable doing that.” Yolanda glanced at her notes on the desk. “Right now, we know the following: Jack Donovan stole something from the hospital, which he hid inside a metal strongbox under his bed. The strongbox was missing after Jack was murdered, leaving everyone to assume that the murderer stole it. Now, here’s the interesting part. Gerry saw the murderer coming down a stairwell in the hospital, right?”
“Correct,” Mabel said.
“But the murderer wasn’t carrying a strongbox, a duffel bag, or anything at all,” Yolanda said. “Gerry said his hands were empty.”
“Maybe the murderer took the secret out of the strongbox, and put it in his pocket.”
“I don’t think so. We know the secret is dangerous, which is why it was kept inside the strongbox in a duffel bag. I have another theory as to what happened to Jack’s secret.”
Mabel rocked the baby against her chest. She sensed that Yolanda had found something that everyone else had missed. Something hiding in plain sight, to use one of Tony’s favorite expressions.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I think George Scalzo stole it,” Yolanda said.
Mabel blinked. She knew a lot about Scalzo, courtesy of Special Agent Romero. Scalzo had murdered Skip DeMarco’s mother, a prostitute, in order to get custody of DeMarco when he was a little boy. Scalzo would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
“If that’s true, then Scalzo was in the hospital during the murder,” Mabel said.
“I think so,” Yolanda said.
“You don’t think he would have sent one of his men?”
“Scalzo wants his nephew to win the World Poker Showdown,” Yolanda said. “Do you think he would have trusted one of his men to steal the scam from Jack’s room?”
Mabel considered it, then shook her head. “No, he would have done it himself.”
“So my theory makes sense,” Yolanda said.
“It makes perfect sense,” Mabel said. “If we can put Scalzo in that hospital, he’s an accomplice to Jack Donovan’s murder.”
“Most hospitals require visitors to sign in at a reception area,” Yolanda said. “There might be a record of Scalzo being there.”
Mabel handed Yolanda the baby. Yolanda didn’t know enough about crooks to know that most of them never used their real names. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t prove her theory. Special Agent Romero had said that the FBI was watching Scalzo twenty-four hours a day. The FBI would know if Scalzo was at the hospital that night.
Romero’s number was written on a slip of paper on the desk. Mabel punched the number into the phone, then looked appreciatively at Yolanda.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” Mabel said.
29
“What fucking happened?” Scalzo whispered. “I don’t know,” DeMarco whispered back.
“You don’t know?”
“No, Uncle George. I don’t know what happened.”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” his uncle whispered, his breath hot on his nephew’s neck. “A guy named Skins Turner just beat you out of a monster pot, and took a third of your chips away from you. You’re no longer in first place.”
“I know, Uncle George.”
“So tell me how Skins did it,” his uncle said.
“I told you, I don’t know,” DeMarco replied.
DeMarco and his uncle and Guido were standing on the far end of the poker room, next to the wall and away from the other players and mob of spectators. The tournament took a fifteen-minute bathroom break every two hours, and the players ran like lemmings to the johns. DeMarco had instead gone over to be with his uncle, whose voice hinted that he was on the verge of losing control.
“But Skins had three of a kind,” his uncle said, his voice rising. “You bet into a better hand, and lost. Why the fuck did you do that, Skipper? Tell me why you did that.”
DeMarco leaned against the wall, which was icy cool against his skin. Everything he touched inside the casino was cold and unfriendly, and he found himself wanting to return to Newark and the safety of his house. “It just happened.”
“But you knew Skins was holding a pair of kings before the flop,” his uncle shot back. “You knew what his cards were. You’re not supposed to lose monster pots, Skipper. You could get knocked out of the tournament.”
“I know, Uncle George.”
“You know?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not good enough, Skipper.”
“It’s not?”
“No. You gotta do better.”
DeMarco could hear the implied threat in his uncle’s voice, and wondered if his uncle thought he’d lost the hand on purpose, and was trying to sabotage his own chances of winning the tournament. That was the strange thing about his uncle George; his uncle loved him, but sometimes didn’t trust him.
DeMarco realized his chest was heaving. He took several deep breaths, trying to calm down. The truth was, Skins hadn’t started the hand with two kings. According to the clicks DeMarco had heard in his earpiece, Skins’s cards were a king and a three. Somehow, they became a pair of kings, and DeMarco had lost the biggest pot of the tournament. Either the receiver in his earpiece had malfunctioned, or Skins was cheating.
His uncle stood a few feet away, speaking in hushed tones to Guido. DeMarco wanted to ask his uncle what he was supposed to do. Should he ask the tournament director to stop play, so they could fix his earpiece? Or should he tell the tournament director that Skins was cheating because DeMarco had known Skins’s cards, and they weren’t a pair of kings? Those were his only two options, and either one would get him tossed from the tournament, and probably arrested.
DeMarco found the strength to laugh. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.