newspaper
nude picture
candy bar
Smiling, he powered up his cell phone and called Mabel.
“Grift Sense.”
“Do you do psychic readings?”
“Very funny,” his neighbor said. “I’ve been trying to call you. Don’t you ever leave your cell phone on?”
No, he never did. He hated hearing cell phones ring in public places and private ones, as well. He ignored the question, and said, “I solved the mystery of Jacques’s dice cheater.”
“You did! Jacques called twenty minutes ago. He’s so irritating!”
“Tell Jacques the craps dealer who has the clothes iron in his locker is the cheater.”
“The clothes iron?”
“That’s right. I’m surprised I didn’t figure it out sooner.”
“Figure what out?”
“I’ve known a lot of craps dealers over the years,” he said, “and none iron their shirts. They have them dry-cleaned. Jacques’s cheater is using the iron to shrink the dice. You put a die up to a red-hot iron and hold it against the metal for a split second. The iron shrinks the circumference of the die. That causes the die to be biased, and certain combinations will come up more than others. The neat part is once the die cools off, it returns to its original size. All the evidence disappears.”
Mabel laughed with delight. “That’s wonderful. Now we get to keep the money.”
“After you call Jacques back, I’ve got two more things for you to do.”
“Fire away,” she said.
“First, I need you to call Detective Eddie Davis in Atlantic City and ask him to run a check on a guy named Rico Blanco.”
“The same Rico Blanco who ripped off your son?”
Valentine nearly slapped himself in the head. Two months ago, a hoodlum named Rico Blanco had stolen fifty grand from Gerry by getting him to bet on a videotape of a college football game. It had to be the same guy.
“You’re a genius,” he said.
“Thank you. Then what?”
“Turn on my computer—”
“Done.”
“—and boot up Creep File. Pull up the file on Victor Marks.”
Creep File was a database of over five thousand hustlers, crossroaders, and con men that he’d crossed paths with during his years policing Atlantic City’s casinos. It was a veritable Who’s Who of Sleaze.
“Here he is,” Mabel said. “Victor Marks. Professional con artist. Came to Atlantic City in 1982. Doesn’t read like he stayed long. No picture.”
Valentine closed his eyes and tried to remember him. He drew a blank.
“There’s no physical description,” Mabel added, “so I guess he got away. Ah, here’s something. He had a partner who you arrested. Saul Hyman.”
Valentine smiled thinly. Saul he did remember. An old-time scuffler, one of those guys who couldn’t stop stealing if his life depended on it.
“Pull up his file, will you?”
Mabel’s fingers tapped away. “Saul Hyman, aka the Coney Island Kid. Your notes are several pages long. Did he really do all these things?”
“That’s the tip of the iceberg. See if the file has his last known address.”
Mabel laughed out loud when she found it. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“What’s that?”
“He lives on Miami Beach.”
Saul Hyman lived in a retirement village in north Miami called Sunny Isles. He had to be pushing eighty, and Valentine imagined him doing what most old guys in Florida did: going to doctors, going to the track, and ogling the pretty girls who dotted the landscape like palm trees.
“Would you like his phone number?” Mabel asked.
“How did you get that?” Valentine asked.
“I typed his name into a search engine called whitepages.com.”
Valentine scribbled the number down. “While you’re at it, give me Gerry’s number in Puerto Rico.”
Mabel gave him the hotel’s number, and Valentine wrote it beneath Saul’s. His son was honeymooning at the Ritz-Carlton with his pregnant bride. Nothing but the best for his boy, especially when his old man was paying. “Listen,” he said, “have you ever watched that TV show, Who Wants to Be Rich?”
“Once in a while.”
“Victor Marks scammed it. I’d like to figure out how.”
“As in cheated it? I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Why not?”
“I read in TV Guide that the security on the show is like Fort Knox.”
“Talk to you later,” he said.
14
Gerry Valentine’s father had been yelling at him since he was a kid.
It had started when Gerry had gotten caught selling marijuana in the sixth grade, and had continued until a week ago, when he’d hit his father up to pay for his honeymoon. Twenty-three years of yelling, and always over the same thing: Gerry didn’t listen.
Gerry didn’t deny it. He marched to the beat of his own drummer, always had, always would. Take the night before in the hotel casino. For years, his old man had told him not to gamble in the islands. “The regulation stinks,” his father liked to say, “and there’s no one to gripe to if something seems fishy.”
Only, Gerry hadn’t listened. Yolanda had gone to bed early, leaving him with the evening to kill. Taking the last of the money his father had lent him, he’d gone downstairs to give Lady Luck a whirl.
The hotel’s casino was small and European in flavor. Gerry knew enough to avoid playing roulette, the Big Wheel, and Caribbean stud poker—which were games for suckers—and he also steered clear of the craps table, which gave a player decent odds if you knew what you were doing. The only other game that gave you a chance was blackjack, and he found a vacant seat at a table with a hundred-dollar minimum.
Having grown up in Atlantic City, he knew a thing or two about the game. The only smart way to play had been published in a book by Edward Thorp called Beat the Dealer. Thorp had doped out a system that he called Basic Strategy. It was as exact a science as algebra.
Sitting beside Gerry was a cruise-ship drunk. The drunk wore an ugly parrot shirt dotted with catsup and a green avocado-like substance. Belching into his hand, he said, “You Puerto Rican?”
“Italian. What’s it to you?”
“Sorry. With that tan, you look Puerto Rican.”
“You got something against Puerto Ricans?”
“Puerto Ricans aren’t allowed to play in the casino,” the drunk said defensively.
“Says who?”
“Says the government. They just want us tourists playing.” The drunk lowered his voice. “If you ask me, I think it’s because they’re too stupid to understand the rules.”
Yolanda was Puerto Rican. Had he been on his home turf, Gerry would have smacked the guy in the head. He glanced at the dealer. He was an effeminate Puerto Rican with olive skin and wavy hair. He didn’t say much, but in his eyes a fire was burning. He heard the drunk, Gerry thought.
His father had told him to never play with a pissed-off dealer. But what could the dealer do? A pit boss was watching, and the cards were dealt out of a plastic shoe. Deciding to go against his old man’s advice, Gerry had stayed put.
That had been his first mistake.
The dealer had cleaned out everyone at the table. Because Basic Strategy required intense concentration, Gerry had noticed the inordinate number of small cards being dealt. Small cards—two, three, four, five, six—favored the house, while big cards—ten, jack, queen, king, and ace—favored the players. Not enough big cards were coming out of the shoe, which meant something fishy was going on. He’d decided to call the dealer on it.
That had been his second mistake.
“How do you know the dealer was cheating?” Yolanda asked the next day, applying a fresh ice pack to Gerry’s eye. For his imprudence he’d been asked to step outside, where a security guard had punched him.