“The FBI spent six months investigating a man running a casino in his basement?”
“He runs two dozen of these operations around the country,” Romero said. “His net worth is in the neighborhood of twenty million dollars a year.”
“You’re saying this man’s a public menace.”
“That’s a polite term for him.”
“I think I can help you,” Mabel said. “Do you have any agents near the suspect’s house?”
“There are a team of agents there right now,” Romero said. “They’re combing the basement for clues we may have missed. We had the craps table taken out, and examined by our forensics lab. The table was absolutely clean.”
“That doesn’t mean a magnet wasn’t in play,” Mabel said.
“It doesn’t?”
“No. Would your agents by chance have a mallet handy?”
“You mean to break down a door?”
“A wall, actually. They’ll need something with a little heft.”
“They have a battering ram in the trunk of their car,” Romero said. “It’s standard equipment. I’d like to put you on speakerphone with Special Agent Darling who’s in charge at the house. I want him to hear this directly from you.”
“Certainly.”
Romero put her on hold. Mabel took the top glossy off the stack, and stared at it once again. The electromagnet used to control the loaded dice was hidden behind the wall the craps table had been so auspiciously shoved up against. Somewhere in the room was a switch that activated the magnet. With a simple flip, the dice could be made to roll losers. That was how the suspect was making twenty million dollars a year.
Romero came back on the line, and introduced Special Agent Darling. Holding the glossy up to her face, Mabel told Darling which wall in the basement needed to be knocked down.
33
Valentine lay in his hotel bed staring at the ceiling. The drapes in his room wouldn’t properly close and tiny neon angels danced above his head. One of the great injustices of old age was the mind’s unwillingness to do what the body told it to. In this case, it was not falling asleep, even though he was exhausted. Something was bothering him, and no amount of counting sheep was going to let him rest until he figured out what it was.
He climbed out of bed and heard his joints creak. He still took judo classes three days a week, and did exercises every day at home, but some days he felt like he was fooling himself, and that his body kept going on memory.
He slipped into a bathrobe supplied by the hotel. It was a size too small, and felt like a straitjacket. He went into the living room, and not seeing Rufus, parked his tired bones on the living room couch. The casino’s giant neon sign was directly below the room’s window, and bathed him in a rainbow of garish colors. He stared into space, trying to put his finger on what was wrong.
He’d always been adept at finding incongruities. It was what made him good as a cop, and especially good as a casino cop. Sometimes, those incongruities were obvious, like the night he’d spotted a wedding party in Atlantic City walking across a casino carrying balloons and table decorations from the nuptials they’d just attended. He’d called down to security, and told a guard to follow them. Going into the slot machine area, the party had released their balloons and let them float to the ceiling, hiding the view of a surveillance camera as they opened a machine with a skeleton key, and set the reel for a million dollar jackpot. Later, after everyone was arrested, Valentine had told the guard why he’d acted so quickly.
“I’ve never seen balloons at a wedding before,” he’d said.
Other times, those incongruities weren’t so obvious. Like tonight. He’d been in Skip DeMarco’s suite an hour ago, and seen DeMarco practicing his martial arts exercises in the next room. There was nothing unusual about that — he’d met plenty of impaired people who practiced karate and judo — only DeMarco doing it just didn’t feel right. The problem was, he couldn’t put his finger on why.
He got up from the couch and went to the minibar. It had been restocked, and he weighed drinking a diet soda. Caffeine usually put his brain into another gear, but with it came the penalty of not being able to sleep. Of course, if he didn’t figure out what was bothering him, he wouldn’t sleep anyway. He said to hell with it, and drank the soda.
Returning to the couch, he noticed a deck of playing cards scattered across the coffee table. He guessed they belonged to Rufus, and he gathered them up, and began to shuffle them. The cards were old and dog-eared, but had a nice feel to them, and he imagined Rufus’s bony fingers playing with them. Most poker players kept a deck in their pockets at all times. Poker was easy to learn but difficult to master, and even the best players spent hours analyzing a bad hand or strategy.
As he shuffled the cards, he realized what was bothering him. People who played poker for a living lived the game every waking minute. When they weren’t playing in tournaments, they were playing in private games, and when they weren’t doing that, they were fiddling with cards and working out strategies in their heads. That was true for every single player in the tournament, except one. Skip DeMarco.
He hadn’t seen any playing cards in DeMarco’s suite, nor any evidence that DeMarco was a player. Guys who played in tournaments always went back to their rooms, and examined what they’d done wrong during the day. There had been no evidence of that in DeMarco’s suite. That was why DeMarco doing exercises seemed so out of place. It wasn’t what tournament chip leaders did.
He heard a knock on the door, and went to the peephole and peered into the hallway. Rufus Steele stood outside looking drunker than a sailor on a Saturday night. Valentine let him in.
“Having a bad night?”
Rufus belched whiskey in his face.
“I just lost all my money,” he said, falling forward in Valentine’s arms.
Rufus was as light as a feather. He didn’t look that light, and Valentine guessed it was because he stood about six one. But it was all bone and a little sinew. As he shut the door, Rufus straightened up. It was a startling transformation, the old cowboy snapping to attention. With his eyes downcast, he walked into the suite.
“Sorry, pardner, but I’m pretending to be drunk.”
“Pretending for who?”
“Whoever in this stinking hotel is watching me. Too many coincidences in the past couple of hours for someone not to be.”
Gloria had said the same thing. Someone in the hotel was playing Big Brother. He followed Rufus into the living room, and pulled up a chair as Rufus sank into the couch.
“Ever hear the expression, ‘Seldom do the sheep slaughter the butcher’?” the old cowboy asked.
“A couple of times, sure.”
“Well, this butcher just got slaughtered.”
Rufus doffed his Stetson and examined the crease in it. His eyes had yet to reach Valentine’s face, and he spoke in a monotone. “Got fleeced in a ring game. Lost my twenty thousand bucks, and then some. They were all in on it.”
“How many players?”
“Six guys and a professional dealer.”
“What were they doing?”
Rufus picked up the dog-eared deck from the coffee table, then placed one of the couch’s pillows onto his lap. He put the cards on the pillow and riffle-shuffled them. It was the same shuffle used by every professional dealer in the world, and he did it slowly and efficiently.
“You familiar with riffle-stacking?” Rufus asked.
“I saw a demonstration a few years ago by Darwin Ortiz. It was pretty amazing.”
“Amazing is right. Not many mechanics can riffle-stack. It’s too damn hard. I’m told there are five guys who are any good. Well, I met one of them tonight.”