Mr. Lucky (8 page)

13

L
amar had rented the basement of a restaurant for Gerry’s meeting with the Dixie Magic’s surveillance team. The team consisted of twenty-one employees, who split three eight-hour shifts among them. The casino had shut down for an hour, to allow the TV crew filming the poker tournament to do a number of shots and interviews inside the casino. Heavily armed security guards followed the crew’s every move, giving Lamar the freedom to pull his staff for a quick off-site meeting.

“Okay, listen up,” Lamar said, standing at the front of the room. “As you all know, the casino is getting ripped off. The gentleman standing to my left is Gerry Valentine, a partner in the firm Grift Sense, whose specialty is catching casino cheaters. Gerry has come to the conclusion that the stealing is taking place at the tables in the form of chip scams. He’s going to give us a demonstration of this unusual art, and then take questions.”

Lamar relinquished the floor, and Gerry stepped up to a table in the room’s center. On it was a piece of green felt and a tray of chips similar to those used by dealers inside the casino. As he stepped up to the tray, he glanced at the faces in the crowd. Two women, the rest men, all in their thirties, all giving him hard looks, like they resented him waltzing in and telling them how dumb they were. His father had warned him about this. Casino surveillance people were territorial, just like cops.
Be humble,
his father had said.

He had inherited two things from his father. The first were his dark Italian looks, which he hadn’t liked as a kid but liked as he’d grown older. The second was his memory, which was close to photographic. Working off the script his father had given him, he said, “Good morning. Thanks for having me. There’s an old expression: Everything that’s old is new again. Chip scams have been around a long time. But they get the money, and that’s all cheaters care about.”

A man in the back row smothered a yawn.
A joke
, Gerry thought. He should have gone against his father’s advice and opened with a joke.

“There are three basic chip scams. Each involves the dealer in cahoots with a player. I’m sure you all know what that means.”

Now he was getting mean looks. Of course they knew what
cahoots
meant.

“I should also explain something. These scams are difficult to detect using surveillance cameras. Bosses on the floor
can
see them, but they’re usually looking the other way when they happen. Know why?”

His audience had turned to stone. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lamar staring at him like he’d grown two heads.

“The reason is because the dealer’s accomplice uses a prearranged set of signals to tell the dealer if the boss is watching the table or if he isn’t. Cheaters call this
giving the office.
The accomplice uses two signals:
stop
and
go.
Smart teams change signals every hour, making it impossible to read them.”

Gerry kept his eyes moving as he spoke. He’d read in an airline magazine that this was the best way to address a crowd. He saw Lamar look at his watch, and felt sweat start to trickle down his spine.
Dump the script,
he thought.

Taking four green twenty-five-dollar chips from the tray, he placed them into his left hand. He crumbled his fingers and showed the chips were gone. He’d been heavy into magic as a kid, and saw every face in the room light up. He showed them the four chips finger-palmed in his right hand. Then he placed them in a stack on the felt.

“Let’s pretend this is my accomplice’s bet. He wins his hand, and I move to pay him off. But before I pay him off, I size his bet.”

Gerry scattered the four chips on the felt. Only, now there were five. He pointed at the fifth chip. “Any of you see where that came from?”

“Your sleeve?” someone called out.

“No. I palmed it out of the rack,” Gerry said. “Then I added it to my accomplice’s bet. This is called
sizing in high.
I pay the player off, and we steal fifty dollars of the house’s money. This is hard to detect because every action looks normal.”

He demonstrated the scam two more times. Once slow, and once at regular speed.

“Show us another,” a black guy in the back of the room said.

“Sure,” Gerry said, giving him a smile. The black guy didn’t smile back. He had a hard face and wore a navy blazer with faded elbows. The jacket was hanging partially open, exposing the shoulder harness and gun strapped beneath his armpit. Gerry swallowed hard. Casino employees weren’t allowed to pack guns unless they were guards. Maybe this guy had some kind of special permit.

Gerry picked up four green chips and split them into two piles. He placed them on the felt. “Another common scam is to use a losing bet to cap a winning bet. The dealer picks up the losing bet and pretends to put it in the tray. In fact, he clips the chips between his fingers and immediately adds them to the winning bet.” He turned his palm over, showing the clipped chips. “If the bets are small, this is hard to detect.”

The black guy said, “Do it again.”

Gerry obliged him. This time, the man nodded approvingly. Gerry snuck a glance at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. It felt like an hour.

“The third common chip scam occurs when the accomplice asks for change,” he said. “It’s common for players to throw high-valued chips down and ask for them to be changed into chips of lower value. The dealer picks up the chips and adds chips palmed in his hand. He always adds enough chips to make the stack even. That way, he can break it into two even piles, which looks nice for the camera.”

Gerry placed six green chips on the felt, then demonstrated the move, adding two additional green chips in the act of cutting the stack into two piles. From the front, it looked like a magic trick, the chips instantly growing before everyone’s eyes, and he saw the unfriendly looks leave their faces.

“Those are the three basic chip scams,” he said. “There are countless variations, but all rely on these same elements. Distraction, signals between the accomplice and the dealer, and a boss on the floor looking the other way. Any questions?”

A dozen hands went up. Lamar pointed at one of the females in the group. She was pretty, had flaming red hair, and looked French. Gerry assumed she was from Louisiana, and saw her flash a sly Southern smile.

“Yes, Isabelle,” Lamar said.

“How do we catch these sons of bitches?” she asked.

Isabelle leaned forward in her chair. So did everyone else in the room. Gerry thought back to the phone conversation with his father. His old man had a theory about what was happening at the Dixie Magic, and Gerry decided it was time to return to the script.

“Lamar said you’re losing four grand, twice a month,” Gerry said. “Most chip teams steal four hundred a session. That’s about ten plays. Any more would draw heat.

“Divide four hundred into four thousand, and that gives us ten teams. That’s a lot. My guess is, they’re all working together. They may even have a member who serves as the ‘turn.’”

“What’s that?” Isabelle asked.

“The turn’s job is to turn the floor boss’s attention away from the action. It usually comes in the form of a question. Turns are usually attractive females or older people with hearing problems.”

“Why hearing problems?”

“Because it forces the floor boss to repeat everything he says.”

His father had promised Gerry that at some point in his presentation, he would win the group over. Gerry had taken his words as fatherly encouragement and was pleasantly surprised when he saw everyone start smiling and nodding.

“The next question is, how do you identify the team?” he went on. “You have sixty blackjack dealers on every shift, and you have three shifts. Which ten dealers are dirty?” He paused, and let his eyes glance across their faces. “What you look for is some other connection. Perhaps they all live in the same apartment complex. Or they worked together before, or served in the military. There
has
to be a link.”

“Why is that?” Lamar asked.

“Because the hardest part of working in a team is trusting your partners. That trust has to be there from the start. Nearly all cheating teams have some type of shared past.”

A dozen more hands shot up. Gerry realized he had run out of things to say and glanced at Lamar. As if reading his thoughts, the head of surveillance came up beside him and placed his hand on Gerry’s shoulder.

“I think this was very illuminating and has given us a lot to work with in catching these folks. What do you say we show Gerry our appreciation?”

And with that, his audience burst into long and loud applause.

Lamar drove Gerry back to the Holiday Inn. Lamar had held up his end of the bargain and arranged through the casino for Gerry to meet Tex “All In” Snyder, who was also staying at the hotel. Pulling up to the front entrance, Lamar said, “Well, here’s where we part ways. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I hope your meeting is worth it.”

Gerry started to get out of the car. He had expected Lamar to mention hiring his father’s firm and was disappointed that he hadn’t. Then he remembered the guy at the meeting who was packing a gun. He got back in, looked Lamar straight in the eye.

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

Lamar stuck his tongue in his cheek. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I just spoke to a roomful of cops.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because there wasn’t a fat one in the bunch. And one of them was packing heat. They’re working for you, aren’t they?”

“Maybe,” Lamar said. “You see a lot.”

Gerry looked through the windshield at an orange tour bus disgorging a gang of elderly passengers. He’d seen them leaving the hotel for the casino, all hearty and full of pep. Now, they looked tired and beat up.
Not a winner in the bunch,
he thought.

“You have a real problem, don’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” Lamar said.

“How many games are getting ripped off?”

Lamar took a deep breath, as if considering whether or not he should talk about it.

“From what we can tell, all of them,” he said quietly.

“Blatant stealing like what I described?”

Lamar nodded. The last of the tour bus junkies walked past the car. A white-haired woman was all smiles and chattering up a storm. None of her friends were listening to her. She must have won a jackpot, Gerry guessed. He started to get out of the car again, then glanced at Lamar a final time. “Let me know if we can help.”

“I’ll do that,” Lamar said. “Good luck with Tex.”

“Am I going to need it?”

Lamar smiled. “Yeah. I hear he’s a real asshole.”

14

V
alentine got a man in the parking lot of Slippery Rock High to give him a lift back to his rented house. At least one person in town hadn’t been there for Ricky’s shining moment. Then he took his Honda into town and bought a ham-and-Swiss sandwich at a deli. It was a real deli, and not located inside the bowels of a supermarket like the delis back home in Florida. The sandwich filling was easily an inch thick, what they used to call a Dagwood. He ate the sandwich at the kitchen table while drinking a homemade lemonade he’d also bought at the deli. It was a little tart and had the kind of taste you could never get out of a bottle. He drank it slowly, thinking about the public embarrassment he’d endured that morning. Ricky had played him like a fiddle.

He went outside onto the screened-in porch. The furniture was covered in plastic, and he peeled a protective sheet off a love seat and made himself comfortable. The porch was in the shade and very cold, and he felt his head clear. His thoughts went back to Ricky holding the winning ticket in front of his face an hour earlier. Why had Ricky done that? He thought about it for several minutes before the answer came to him. Because Ricky didn’t want him to think he had somehow printed the ticket after the fact. Ricky had wanted to establish the numbers. Which meant the barker had somehow manipulated the selection of the five Ping-Pong balls. There was no other logical explanation.

He heard a loud banging coming from inside the house, followed by a man’s voice. He went inside and walked through the house to the front door. The voice sounded familiar, and he jerked the door open and saw Ricky jump back.

“Hey, don’t hit me,” he said, flashing his court-jester grin.

“Should I?”

He stood on the steps, still smiling. “You were pretty pissed when you left the school.”

“You set me up.”

“Me?” Ricky put his hand over his heart. “Scout’s honor, I did no such thing. You just don’t want to believe what you saw is real. You’re a skeptic.”

“So why the house call? You want to rub it in?”

“No, no,” his visitor said. “I came to make peace. I don’t want you thinking I’m some kind of crook. I know that’s what you deal with every day; I went on your Web site. But I’m not a crook. Never broke a law a day in my life. I want to convince you of that.”

“There’s only one problem,” Valentine said.

“What’s that?”

“You
are
a crook.”

Stepping onto the stoop, Valentine jabbed his forefinger hard into Ricky’s chest. “Tell me something. When you were on your streak at the Mint, why didn’t you try the slot machines? They have a progressive jackpot worth ten million. Why didn’t you take a shot at that?” He could see the gears grinding inside Ricky’s head. “I’ll tell you why. Because you couldn’t rig a slot machine. Practically nobody can. So you avoided them.”

“Slots are for idiots, that’s why I didn’t play them,” Ricky said, slapping Valentine’s hand away. He was blushing and acted like his feelings had been hurt. He stuck his hands into his pockets. “You have a real serious anger issue, you know that?”

“So I’ve heard. Now what do you want?”

“Another chance.”

“To do what?”

“Convince you that this isn’t a scam, that I really am lucky.”

“You going to make me look like a fool again?”

“No,” Ricky said.

Valentine burned a hole into Ricky’s face with his eyes.

“That’s a promise,” Ricky added.

“You just buy this?” Valentine asked, sitting in the passenger seat of Ricky’s Lexus a few minutes later. The car had more amenities than most third-world countries, and he counted twenty-six different buttons on the dashboard and his door.

“I bought it with the money I don’t have,” Ricky said with a derisive laugh.

“You mean the Mint’s money?”

“That’s right. I’ve got an unlimited line of credit everywhere I go in town. It’s like being king for a day, every day of the week.”

They began to descend a steep hill, and Valentine listened but could not hear the car’s gears shift as they reduced speed. It was a hell of a car, and it reminded him that he was going to need new wheels someday soon. He’d been putting off thinking about it, not wanting to jinx the car he had. So far, the philosophy was working just fine.

“I want to explain something about my lucky streak,” Ricky said when they reached the bottom of the hill and the road flattened out. “If I’m drawn to something, I go to it. If not, I don’t. I can’t just sit down at a slot machine and expect to win.”

“Unless you’re drawn to it,” Valentine said.

“That’s right.”

“Let me guess. A little voice tells you.”

Ricky bit the words about to escape his lips. He was trying not to be a jerk, and it was killing him. Valentine, on the other hand, could be a jerk whenever he wanted to, and said, “There was one flaw to the Ping-Pong scam this morning. Want me to tell you what it was?”

Ricky flashed a village-idiot grin. “Oh, pray tell, do.”

“There were a hundred Ping-Pong balls with numbers in that bag. What do you think the odds of you getting all five on your ticket were?”

“I have no idea,” Ricky said, staring at the road.

“More than seventy-five million to one. Which is the same as walking out of your house, and being struck by lightning twice. Get it?”

“No. What’s your point?”

“My point is, if you got four out of five, I could buy that. But not five out of five. There’s a name for what you did. It’s called the too-perfect ending. It screams fix. You and your barker friend and whoever else is involved messed up.”

Ricky blew his cheeks out. They were on a highway, driving away from town, and Valentine glanced at the dashboard and realized they were doing eighty. It didn’t feel that way, the car insulated from everything on the outside except the fleeting scenery.

“And based on that, you’re calling me a cheater.”

Valentine hid the smile forming at his lips. It was the second time that Ricky had used that word. He leaned back in his seat and didn’t respond. After a minute he saw Ricky point at a green highway sign. They were crossing into South Carolina.

“Our exit is a few miles ahead. South Carolina legalized betting on horses last year. I’m going to pick some winners.” He smiled and added, “Don’t worry. For some reason, I’m never one hundred percent when it comes to the ponies. I guess even luck has its problems with stupid beasts.”

The Off Track Betting parlor was a few miles across the state line. From the distance, it resembled a black outhouse with tinted windows. Valentine’s father had frequented OTBs back in New Jersey, and he could still remember the night his old man had lost his paycheck before his mother could get her hands on it. She had cried for hours.

He followed Ricky inside the building. The parlor was packed with unshaven, chain-smoking men staring at a wall of color TVs showing racetracks around the country. Ricky waved at the men, and got dull looks in return.

“Guess you didn’t pick any winners for them, huh?” Valentine asked.

“You think they’d listen?” he said, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his coat.

“Probably not,” Valentine admitted.

“Probably not is right. I could pick winners all day, and they wouldn’t notice.”

Valentine followed him to the far end of the room. Three skinny, sallow-faced men sat behind barred windows and took bets. Valentine wasn’t sure who was worse looking—the people who frequented OTBs, or the people who worked in them.

“You know why they wouldn’t notice?” Ricky said, peeling off his jacket. “Because they all have a system or a premonition or a hunch that tells them how to bet. They think luck is going to wave a magic wand over them, and they’re going to get rich.”

Throwing the jacket over his arm, he approached the betting window. The teller pushed a racing slip through the bars, and Ricky picked up a pencil while staring at the names of the horses. In a matter of seconds he circled the names of three horses for a race at Belmont Park in New York and pushed the slip back through the bars. From his pants pocket he extracted three crisp hundred-dollar bills. He shoved them through the bars into the teller’s hands.

“Those three horses to show,” Ricky said.

Valentine watched the teller place the three bets. To show meant that Ricky would win money if the horse came in first, second, or third. It was a safe bet, except the three horses Ricky had picked were long shots. The odds were heavily against him winning any money at all.

They crossed the room to the TV sets to watch the race. The room was a smoker’s paradise, and Valentine found himself struggling not to grab a pack out of the nearest guy’s hand.

“You a punter?” Ricky asked.

It was an English expression for a gambler, and Valentine shook his head. “My father was. He lost all our money.”

“And the son was forever cured,” Ricky said. He pointed at a TV set in the center of the wall and said, “That’s us.”

Valentine stared at the set. Belmont Park near Queens, New York, was one of the most respected thoroughbred tracks in the world. He remembered once hearing about a race that was fixed by a jockey at Belmont. Somehow, the track stewards had found out the moment the race was about to start. Instead of letting the horses run, they’d shut off the power to the starting gate and offered refunds to everyone who’d placed a bet. Ricky Smith might somehow rig a casino game or a high school lottery, but he wasn’t capable of rigging a race out of Belmont. No one was.

The race was a mile and a half long. There were nine horses, a crowded field. Valentine had memorized the numbers of the horses Ricky had picked. As they came out of the gate, all three horses started strong. Ricky broke out in a crazy dance, drawing the ire of his fellow bettors.

“Sorry, guys,” he said. “Just working my mojo.”

At the mile marker, Ricky’s horses were lined up in a row and fighting for the lead. In fourth place was the favorite, a horse named Four Leaf Clover. The jockey had run a poor race and allowed himself to get boxed in. His horse had the speed; he just couldn’t properly use it.

A cry went up among the other bettors. As Four Leaf Clover faded from the picture and Ricky’s three picks crossed the finish line, they tore up their tickets and stomped their feet. Ricky was oblivious to their pain and started doing a faithful rendition of the twist. Valentine saw a bettor ball his hand into a fist, and instinctively stepped between him and Ricky.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Valentine said.

“Your friend’s a flaming jerk,” the man growled.

“I’m not arguing with you there,” Valentine said.

Ricky had shut his eyes and was rolling his head like Stevie Wonder. He was making fun of them, and the men quickly surrounded them. They had wolflike looks on their faces, as if they were planning to tear Ricky up and devour him.

“Cut it out,” Valentine told him.

Ricky’s eyes snapped open. Seeing the situation he had created, he stuck his leg out and gyrated like Elvis Presley.

A door banged open on the far side of the room. The teller who’d taken Ricky’s bet stuck his head out. “Knock it off!” he exclaimed.

Ricky kept doing his crazy dance. The teller marched across the room and shoved Ricky’s winnings into his hand. Then he pointed at the door.

“Get the hell out of here.”

Ricky was still gyrating as Valentine dragged him out the door.