Sammy turned and gave him a long stare. “Who checked them?”
“The Gaming Control Board and the FBI. Every single card in the tournament has been checked.”
“Like I told you before, that doesn’t mean anything,” Sammy said.
Valentine choked on his cigarette smoke. When he finally got his breath, he saw the old hustler smiling at him. Sammy had gotten his choppers whitened, and they looked like a million bucks.
“Why not?”
“Because there are ways to mark cards that you don’t see,” Sammy said.
“That’s a new one,” Valentine said.
“New to you,” Sammy replied.
Valentine shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He’d recognized long ago that no matter how much he knew about cheating, there would still be things he didn’t know.
“If I admitted I was a sucker, would you smarten me up?”
“Sure,” Sammy said.
“I’m a sucker,” Valentine said.
“It’s like this,” Sammy said, an impossibly long ash dangling from his cigarette. “Twenty years ago, you arrested me for ringing in a cooler in Atlantic City, and assumed that was my speciality. Well, it wasn’t.”
“Switching decks wasn’t your speciality?”
“No,” Sammy said.
“But at the sentencing you told the judge you’d switched decks in casinos over a hundred times,” Valentine said.
“That’s right,” Sammy said. “And remember my sob story? I said I was turned out by my uncle, who was a cheater, and that he started training me when I was six years old.”
“Let me guess, you didn’t have an uncle.”
“No, but I had eight aunts.”
Valentine laughed through a cloud of smoke. The judge at Sammy’s sentencing had been a woman, and she’d gone soft on Sammy, and put him in a work-release program.
“All right, I’m stumped,” Valentine said. “If you weren’t a specialist at switching cards, then what were you a specialist at?”
Sammy gave him a sly look. He was holding back, as if this piece of information would somehow change things. Cheaters wore many layers, and it was rare that they ever pulled them all back at the same time. Only after a long moment had passed did he speak.
“My speciality was marked cards.”
It took a long moment for the words to sink in, and then Valentine felt like someone had hit him in the head with a lead pipe. Marked cards. Sammy was telling him that the decks of cards he’d switched in casinos were stacked and marked, which let the cards be used more than once to rip off the house.
“That’s brilliant,” Valentine said. “You must have made a fortune.”
Sammy gave him the best smile of the night. “We ate steak and lobster a lot.”
“Who marked the cards?”
“I did. I also trained the other members in how to use the information. One player would read the dealer’s hole card in blackjack, and signal its value to the other players at the table. The other players all were small betters, so their wins didn’t look too horrifying to the house. They would leave, and another team would sit down, and do the same thing. It was like taking candy from a baby.”
“The marks must have been spotted later on,” Valentine said. “Every casino checks for them when the cards are taken out of play.”
“They were never spotted,” Sammy said.
“What about by a forensic lab?”
“I imagine it would fool them as well.”
“You’ve lost me,” Valentine said. “If the mark can’t be seen, and can’t be tested for, it doesn’t exist.”
Sammy shot him the You’re-So-Stupid look, and Valentine swallowed hard. There was a paddle for everyone’s ass in this town, and his was getting royally spanked.
“Or does it?” he said.
“I came up with this marking system by accident,” Sammy said. “My crew used it for over twenty years. When we retired, so did the system.”
There was a glass of water sitting on the table in front of them. Sammy stuck his fingertips into it, then sprinkled several drops on the tabletop. After several moments he brushed the drops away with his napkin, and pointed at the tabletop. Valentine stared at the tiny marks left on the table’s finish.
“Water stains,” he said.
“Exactly. They reduce the shine on the back of the card. It’s not uncommon for water to get sprayed on cards in casinos. The casino people who were looking for marks were used to seeing water stains, so they didn’t pay any attention to ours. We used a lot of clever patterns to mark the cards. I used to be able to read them from across the room.”
“That’s brilliant,” Valentine said.
“Thank you. Over time, we also made the marks fainter. We would record each casino’s lighting with a light sensitivity machine, then learn to read the marks under those conditions. I used to practice for an hour a day reading those marks, and so did the members of my crew.”
Sammy had finished his ginger ale and was looking at his watch. Valentine took out his wallet and settled the bill. It was rare for a hustler to reveal his secrets, especially one that had worked so well, and Valentine guessed there was a motive behind Sammy’s generosity. Leaning forward, he said, “Do you think this is what DeMarco is doing?”
Sammy coughed into his hand. “Or something like it.”
It slowly dawned on him what Sammy was saying. DeMarco had a marking system that wasn’t immediately obvious, just like Sammy’s.
“So what do I do?”
“Keep examining the cards,” the retired hustler said. “You’ll find the marks eventually.”
Sammy’s eyes drifted to the plasma-screen TV showing DeMarco playing poker. DeMarco’s image was larger-than-life, and dwarfed everything else in the bar. Sammy gritted his teeth in displeasure, then took out his business card and handed it to Valentine. They shook hands, and Valentine watched him walk away, then stared at the card.
31
Valentine left the bar shaking his head. Everyone seemed to know that DeMarco was cheating, yet no one could do anything about it. There was an old baseball expression — “It ain’t cheating if you don’t get caught” — and it applied perfectly to this situation. Until they found evidence that proved DeMarco was rigging the game, the tournament had to let him play.
At the concierge’s desk he got the bag of insulin and asked to use the house phone. The concierge obliged him, and after a moment the house operator came on. Valentine asked to be put through to Skip DeMarco’s room.
“I’m sorry, sir, but we’ve been instructed not to put any calls through to Mr. DeMarco,” the operator informed him.
“Tell him I’ve got his bag of insulin, then call me back,” Valentine said.
He hung up, and waited for the callback while tapping his foot to the live music coming from the casino. If Las Vegas had anything in abundance, it was good live music, and he kept time to an old Count Basie tune until the phone rang.
“You found my bag?” a gravelly voice said.
The voice had a lot of years behind it, and Valentine guessed it was the Tuna. He said, “A bag of insulin was found in the parking lot which I believe belongs to you.”
“How much you want?”
“Excuse me?”
“How much money you want for it? That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
“I don’t want your money,” Valentine said. “I just wanted to return the bag to its rightful owner.”