Sissy looked at him with fear in her eyes. “You won’t… you know, take advantage of me while I was under, make me do something I wouldn’t want to, would you?”
Valentine shook his head. He wondered which family member had abused her when she was a kid. He hadn’t met a hooker who hadn’t been.
“Scout’s honor,” he said.
Sissy glanced at Mona. “He okay?”
“He’s the squarest guy in Atlantic City,” Mona said.
“All right. Go ahead and hypnotize me.”
He got a pillow from the living room and made Sissy put it behind her head. Then, he made her tilt her head back and roll her eyes up. A quarter inch of white cornea was visible below each iris. It was a good sign that she was receptive to hypnosis.
“Okay,” he said, “I want you to tell me about last night, what you were wearing, what you had for dinner, the whole nine yards. Play it out in your head like a movie, and you’re the narrator of the movie. Take your time.”
Sissy spent fifteen minutes recounting the events of the previous evening. Up until the point she encountered the Dresser inside Resorts it was pretty boring; then her voice changed, and became strained. “He was making me laugh, giving me a line. The first few minutes with a john, you have to feel him out, make sure you don’t have a Son of Sam on your hands. This guy was ultra-smooth, even if he wasn’t good-looking.”
She described the negotiation, then walking outside in the bitter cold to his car, then him feigning illness and pulling the car onto a darkened side street. “He asked me to open the glove compartment and get his pills. That’s when I saw the fake finger. It was sitting on a deck of playing cards that had the word DeLand printed on its side. My mom’s from Deland, Florida. Anyway, I stare at the finger, thinking ‘How weird is this?’ and then I saw something white and crumpled stuck in its end. It was…” She grit her teeth, working to pull the memory from the recesses of her brain. “… a cigarette butt.”
Her next memory was of lying face-up in the gutter. Valentine slowly brought her out of her trance, and got her a glass of water. Then said, “I want to have an artist come by named Ernie Roe. I want him to draw a composite of the man who picked you up.”
“Okay, detective,” she said.
Valentine motioned to Mona, and she took her handbag off the back of her chair and stood up. Sissy walked them to the front door and undid the chain.
“Guess I should stay inside until this guy gets caught, huh?” she said.
It was the first smart thing Sissy had said.
“I would,” Valentine replied.
Chapter 35
Mona gave him a lift back to Resorts. She pulled into the employee’s covered parking lot, and turned sideways in her seat.
“You’ve got to find this guy,” she said. “All the girls are terrified.”
“I’m trying,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.”
“See you around.”
He got out of her car, and entered the casino from the Boardwalk entrance. The place was packed, and it occurred to him that the Dresser could be hunting for his next victim at that very moment, right under their noses. Going upstairs, he found Doyle in the surveillance control room, drinking coffee.
“How did it go?” his partner asked.
“The Dresser was in the casino last night. I’m going to have the techs watch the tapes, see if they can spot him.”
Doyle grunted under his breath. If the casino’s surveillance had a flaw, it was the amount of raw tape that was recorded. A hundred hidden cameras produced thousands of hours of tape each day, much of it blurry, and out of focus. Finding one person who’d been inside the casino was like finding a needle in a haystack.
“I’ve got a JDLR on the wheel,” a voice called out.
They hurried across the room. The wheel was casino jargon for roulette, and Resorts’ wheel had been losing money for days. A white-haired Tech named Fassil who everyone called Fossil stood in front of a monitor.
“This guy is winning way too much,” Fossil declared, pointing at a player on the monitor.
Albert Einstein had said that the only way to win at roulette was by stealing chips. The player in question wore a polyester leisure suit, and had his left arm in a cast, which he rested on the table. He placed fifteen single bets of a hundred dollars on the layout. The croupier spun the ball, and the guy in the leisure suit’s number came up, putting him ahead by two grand.
“What doesn’t look right?” Valentine asked.
“Guy picked up his drink with his broken arm,” Fossil said. “I broke my arm once, and I couldn’t pick up a thing. And look how he places his bets. He always bets fifteen numbers that are together on the wheel. He knows something.”
Valentine saw where Fossil was headed. He went to a desk and picked up a house phone. Calling the floor, he got the head of security for roulette, and told him he wanted the player with the cast pulled into the back room, and held for questioning. Hanging up, he returned to the wall of monitors, and saw their suspect place fifteen more bets. The croupier set the wheel spinning, then spun the ball.
As sometimes happens at roulette, the ball hopped out of the wheel and flew through the air. It landed squarely on the suspect’s cast, where it remained stuck.
“He’s got a fricking magnet,” Fossil declared.
Valentine placed another call to downstairs.
“Arrest the croupier while you’re at it,” he told the head of security.
The croupier’s name was Alberto, only everyone called him Al. Al had been hired away from a casino in San Juan, where roulette bordered on high art. He sat in a plastic chair in the casino’s detention room, and pulled nervously on his droopy moustache. His partner with the cast sat in the next room, hollering for a lawyer.
Valentine read Al his Miranda rights. Then he made Al stand up, and empty his pockets. He was carrying the roulette ball he’d switched off the table. He looked disgusted with himself, and Valentine got the feeling he had something on his mind.
“You want to talk?” Valentine asked.
“Yeah. You got a butt?”
Valentine got him a cigarette and a light. Then he pulled a tape recorder out of a closet, checked the battery, and turned it on. Al took several drags and started talking.
Al was drinking at a bar when Larry, the clown with the cast, had approached him. Somehow, Larry knew that Al had gambling debts he couldn’t pay. Larry had a solution: He would wear a powerful earth magnet in a cast, and Al would switch the roulette ball for one with a steel core. The winnings would be split fifty/fifty.
“You ever commit a crime before?” Valentine asked.
“Never,” was Al’s reply.
“You were a law-abiding citizen until Larry approached you in the bar?”
“Yup.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
Al stared at the room’s concrete floor. He wore a wedding ring, and Valentine wondered how his wife would react to the news that he’d been arrested for cheating. Al hadn’t thought out the consequences, and now he was going to pay for it.
“I saw all that money passing by night after night, and I just wanted to reach out, and touch some of it,” Al said. “Know what I mean?”
“No I don’t. You sure you’ve never been arrested before?”
Al dragged hard on his cigarette. “Check it out if you don’t believe me.”
Al’s story checked out. Valentine was surprised. He had assumed that when employees went bad, it was because they’d come to the job that way. Jobs weren’t supposed to turn them bad. Al’s work folder said he made three hundred and fifty dollars a week, and was required to pay for his own clothes, which included a tuxedo shirt, fancy cummerbund, necktie, and dress pants. He also had to keep his shoes shined and his hair neatly trimmed. He worked an eight-hour shift, with a five minute break every hour. New Jersey’s politicians had touted the thousands of terrific new jobs the casinos would create for Atlantic City. Al’s job sounded anything but terrific.
Valentine went to his office, and typed out an Incident Activity Report. As he pecked away, it occurred to him that the scam Al and Larry had pulled not only ripped off the casino, but also the other players at the table, as it had denied them a fair game. At the bottom of the report was a space for notes. Normally, he left it blank. He typed in the words Throw the book at these guysand pulled the report from the typewriter, and scribbled his name across the bottom.