“Suit yourself.” She rose abruptly from her chair, and signaled to the guard on duty that she was ready to leave. “Goodbye, Tony.”
“But I need your help.”
“You’re hurting me. Don’t you understand that?”
“Please. It will only take a few minutes.”
She did not bother to turn around as she walked out of the room.
Valentine sat there for a while, staring at the chair she’d occupied. After a few minutes, a guard stuck his head in, quizzed him with a glance, then left. Valentine tried to imagine how he looked, sitting there dejectedly like a jilted highschool kid.
He found Bill and his son in the cafeteria, drinking coffee.
“How did it go?” Bill asked.
“Looks like we’re going to Reno,” he said.
Chapter 13
There were three ways to travel from Las Vegas to Reno. You could drive for eight hours through the mountains, take a throw-up flight on a puddle jumper, or, if the governor was backing your action, go in style on the taxpayer’s nickel. Gerry whistled through his teeth as they boarded Smoltz’s private Lear jet on a tarmac at McCarren.
“Wow, leather seats and upholstery. This guy travels like a rock star.”
Five minutes later they were airborne. The pilot came over the P.A., and announced their cruising altitude at twenty thousand feet, and what side of the plane the best views would be on. After they leveled off, Bill opened his briefcase, and removed a stack of documents.
“I had my secretary Xerox the files of every agent on my payroll, ” he said. “She highlighted those agents who had filed grievances, or had disputes with their superiors, plus anyone with a medical problem resulting from the job.”
Valentine took the documents out of Bill’s hands. There were nine hundred agents with the Gaming Control Board, and the stack weighed several pounds. He separated it into three piles, and turned to Gerry. His son had his seat back, and was snoring like a baby. Valentine dropped a stack into his lap, and Gerry blinked awake.
“No sleeping on the job.”
“I was just resting my eyes. What’s up?”
“There’s a bad apple in these files,” Valentine said. “See if you can find him.”
Looking for a crooked law enforcement agent was never fun. It reminded you that even good people turned bad.
In Valentine’s opinion, the Nevada Gaming Control Board had some of the best law enforcement agents in the world. They not only helped casinos protect themselves, they were also responsible for protecting consumers against bad casinos. At any time, a GCB agent could enter a casino, and declare a “freezeout” for a particular game. The equipment would be confiscated, and sent to a laboratory for forensic testing. If the equipment was found to be “gaffed,” the casino would lose its license. Because of these responsibilities, GCB agents were viewed as the knights on the white horses, entrusted to keep things fair. In a place like Nevada, that was no easy task.
As Valentine looked through the files, he tried to imagine why an agent might go bad. Money was the obvious motivator, but he guessed it went deeper. As a cop, he’d known other cops who’d taken bribes, or flagrantly broken the rules. In every case, there had been a prior event that had triggered the event, a turning point.
For a GCB agent to go bad, he imagined the turning point was tied to the job. Why else would an agent cheat a casino, unless he’d seen a casino do something unsavory which he felt warranted a payback? He imagined their bad agent saw himself as an avenging angel. It happened a lot with cops.
“These guys are all boy scouts,” Gerry said after pouring through the agent files for an hour. To his father he said, “You find anything?”
“Maybe.”
His son sat up straight. “Way to go.”
Valentine had pulled out the files of five agents whose primary job was to inspect slot machines. Each had filed a work-related grievance in the past year. Passing the files to Bill, he said, “Tell me what a typical day would be like for one of these agents.”
Bill looked through each file, then removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The five agents you pulled out are part of our field group. There are a hundred and fifty field agents in Nevada. Every day, they enter casinos, and check different slot machines to ensure they’re running properly.”
“You mean freezeouts?”
Bill shook his head. “We used to cart the machines out of the casino and check them, but the downtime cost the casino money. So, we came up with a way to do a test on the floor. The machine is opened, and the agent wires a laptop computer to the machine’s RNG chip. The notebook runs a series of tests to determine if the RNG chip is generating random numbers. Once the test is finished, the information is e-mailed back to headquarters, and the results are checked by a tech.”
“How many of these tests are done per day?”
“About five hundred.”
“Is there any way an agent could use his laptop to corrupt the slot machine?”
“Believe me, we thought about that,” Bill said. “So, we devised a failsafe system to keep everyone honest. There are two agents present whenever a slot machine is tested, and every tested machine is retested a few days later by another team. If tampering is found, the agents who conducted the first test face dismissal and arrest.”
“Has that ever happened?”
“Never.”
“And you keep all this information stored in Vegas?”
Bill nodded. “The information fills several floors. It’s overseen by Fred Friendly, the director of the Electronic Systems Division. Fred and his team examine the results of the tests every single day.”
“And you think they’d notice any discrepancies,” Valentine said.
“Yes. It’s what they’re paid to do.”
The pilot came over the P.A. to announce he was beginning his initial descent into the Reno/Tahoe International airport, and asked them to make sure their seat belts were fastened.
Chapter 14
Instead of going home after cashing his check, Karl Klinghoffer went to a saloon and drank whiskey with some strangers sitting at the bar. Coupled with the two beers he’d sucked down at the Gold Rush, the alcohol had a more powerful effect on him than he would have liked. Driving home a few hours later, he wrestled with the wheel each time his car crossed the double line.
He drove past the amphitheater where afternoon concerts were performed on the weekends during the summer. Crossing Arlington Street, he entered the area of town called “City of Trembling Leaves.” Maybe they should call it ‘City of Trembling Hands,’ he thought. It was the oldest part of Reno, the streets lined with three-story Victorians left over from the Roaring Twenties, when rich divorcees had waited out the six-week residence required for their freedom.
He parked in the street and killed the engine. He lived with Becky and his son behind one of these grand dames in a converted two-car garage. The rent was steep, but Becky was accustomed to a certain standard of living.
He walked down a dirt path to his place. The people they rented from made him use this path instead of the driveway. It had always made him feel like a servant, and he wanted to knock on their front door, and tell them off.
Instead, he climbed the wood staircase that hugged the side of the garage. Their apartment was on the second floor, and he saw lights inside and stopped. He tucked his shirt in, then unlocked the door and went in.
“Hey, Becky, I’m home.”
“Hey yourself,” his wife said from the dining room.