“I win,” Rufus declared.
Part IV
Showdown
39
“You busy?” Gerry Valentine asked. Nurse Susan Gladwell lifted her eyes from the hospital report she was filling out. It was a few minutes past midnight, and she’d just come on her shift at the cancer ward of Atlantic City Medical Center, which was as quiet as a church.
“Yes, I am,” she said.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, you’re Gerry Valentine, Jack Donovan’s friend,” she replied, putting her pencil down. “We spoke yesterday about the poker scam you were investigating. I was going to look into the hospital records to see if anything was stolen from our medicine department while Jack was here. Which I actually did, believe it or not.” Reaching across the cluttered desk, she plucked a blue folder from a stack. “Here’s the report.”
Gerry was standing at the nurse’s station where Gladwell worked. He’d brought a cup of steaming hot coffee for himself, and one for her. He made no attempt to take the file. “Let me guess,” he said, “there was nothing stolen.”
She held the file motionless in the air. “That’s right. How did you know?”
“Because most hospitals don’t report theft of medicines to the police. I learned that from my wife. She’s a doctor.”
Gladwell dropped the file on the desk, made an annoyed face. “If you knew that, then why did you have me go to the trouble of pulling up the records?”
“I didn’t know it when I asked you,” Gerry explained.
“But I know now, along with a bunch of other stuff. You and I need to talk.”
“Is that what the coffee is about?”
“Yes.”
“Not interested. Maybe some other time.”
Her eyes dropped to the form, giving him the ice maiden treatment. He cleared his throat. “See that black dude standing in the hallway behind me?”
“I said I’m not interested,” she said.
“He’s a cop.”
Her head came up very slowly. “I see him. Is he with you?”
“Yes,” Gerry said. “He’s an undercover detective named Eddie Davis. If you don’t talk to me, he’s going to haul you down to the police station and grill you about a conversation you had with George Scalzo the morning after Jack Donovan was murdered. He’s going to want to know why Scalzo brought you flowers and bought you a meal.”
She stiffened. “How did you know about that?”
“Does it matter?”
She stared at Eddie Davis standing in the hallway. She wore little makeup, her face pleasantly plain, with tiny freckles on her nose, and soft amber eyes. Something in her face melted, and suddenly she looked scared. Rising from her chair, she took the steaming cup from Gerry’s outstretched hand.
“I’ll talk, but not here.”
“How about the cafeteria?” Gerry suggested.
“Just so long as no one is around,” she said.
The cafeteria was fairly quiet, with a maintenance man mopping the floor. They took a table in the back of the room, and Gladwell waited for a couple of doctors at the next table to leave, then spoke while staring at the reflection in her drink. “I really liked Jack Donovan. He was fun to be around, even when he was getting chemo. Nurses and doctors aren’t supposed to get involved with patients, but it happens. Take off the white coats, and we’re no different than anyone else.”
Gerry glanced at the rings on her third finger, let out a deep breath.
“I saw Jack on the sly for three months,” she went on.
“He confided in me, told me about scams he pulled on the casinos. There was one I’ll never forget. He had a tiny mirror glued to the bottom of a beer can. He could hold the can on a blackjack table, and see the face of the cards as they were dealt out of the plastic shoe. He’d know what the dealer had before the dealer did. Jack said he only had to see the dealer’s hand once an hour to clean up. I never figured out what he meant.”
“Jack was a card counter,” Gerry said. “He played with an edge to begin with. By cheating once an hour, the edge increased, and guaranteed him a winning night.”
“Did you show him that scam? Jack said he learned a lot from you when you were growing up.”
Gerry thought back, smiled. “Come to mention it, I did show that to him.”
“I thought so.” She gulped her coffee, grimaced.
“Jack also told me about the poker scam. At first, he wouldn’t explain how it worked, just said that a player could know his opponents’ cards and never lose.
“Jack told me he was going to sell the scam to a mobster named George Scalzo, and that Scalzo was going to give Jack’s mother a hundred thousand dollars for it. I’d met Jack’s mom, knew she was living on federal assistance, so I didn’t say anything.”
“Would you have otherwise?”
Her head snapped, eyes flaming. “Just because I loved Jack doesn’t mean I approved of what he did. I normally don’t hang out with people like you and Jack.”
Gerry’s face reddened. “Sorry.”
“One afternoon at Jack’s apartment, he sat down at the kitchen table and showed me the poker scam,” she said. “First he gave me an earpiece, which he said was a modified children’s hearing aid, and made me put it in my ear. Then he gave me a deck of cards and had me shuffle them. He took the cards, dealt us a hand. Each time one of the cards came off the deck, I heard a series of clicks. The clicks were in Morse code. Jack had a Morse code chart, and he let me read it while listening to the clicks. The clicks were always right.
“It was pretty amazing. Jack let me examine the cards. I couldn’t find anything wrong with them. The clicks just seemed to come out of thin air.”
Ever since Jack had died, Gerry had wondered how the poker scam worked, and he put his elbows on the table and knocked his drink over. Gladwell grabbed the cup before too much of the liquid spilled out and righted it.
“Down, boy,” she said.
She wiped up the spill with a paper napkin. Gerry could see her and Jack hitting it off. Jack had liked strong women.
“Did he show you the secret?”
“I eventually pried it out of him,” she said, smiling at the memory. “There was a cigarette lighter sitting on the table. The lighter had a dosimeter hidden inside that Jack had stolen from the hospital.”
“What’s a dosimeter?”
“It’s a device used to detect X-rays or radiation. You see them in dentists’ offices. When Jack passed the cards over the lighter, the dosimeter picked up a signal from the card and sent it to a computer strapped around his waist. The computer read the signal then told me the card’s value in Morse code. Jack said he’d borrowed the technology from some Japanese company that used it in kids’ toys.”
A group of female nurses came up to the table and spoke to Gladwell while checking out Gerry. Gerry rose, and introduced himself as Gladwell’s old high school friend. The nurses chatted for another minute and left.
“You didn’t have to do that, but thanks anyway,” Gladwell said.
Gerry returned to his chair. “You’re leaving out the important part. How was the dosimeter reading the cards?”
Gladwell’s eyes fell to the dull tabletop. She seemed to be wrestling with her conscience, and a long moment passed before she spoke again. “That was the secret that Jack sold to George Scalzo. You could examine the cards, but nothing would show up. Jack made me promise not to tell. And so did Scalzo.”
Gerry thought back to what Yolanda had said over the phone earlier. The FBI had tailed Scalzo coming to the hospital. They’d seen him bring flowers to Gladwell, then go to the cafeteria with her and have breakfast together. As if reading his mind, Gladwell said, “I wasn’t on duty the night Jack died, and didn’t hear the news until the next day when I came in. Then Scalzo shows up with flowers, tells me how sorry he is that Jack’s dead. He knewI’d been having an affair with Jack, and over breakfast told me I needed to keep quiet, if I knew what was good for me.”
“So Scalzo threatened you.”
“He didn’t have to. If word got out about my affair with Jack, I’d lose my job, my nurse’s license, and probably my marriage. I had a sword hanging over my head, and Scalzo knew it.” She lifted her eyes. “There’s your friend again.”