Deadman's Bluff

21

“I owe you a big steak,” Eddie Davis said. “I might just take you up on that,” Gerry replied.

Davis was signing paperwork so he could be released from the emergency room of Atlantic City Medical Center. The ER was relatively quiet, the groaning drunks and shooting victims and other casualties of the night having been treated and moved out. A bearded doctor stood beside Davis, holding a medicine bottle filled with white pills. He shoved them into Davis’s hand.

“This is penicillin. Follow the instructions on the bottle,” the doctor said. “The wound on your back could become infected. You need to watch it.”

“I will,” Davis said, pocketing the bottle.

The doctor handed Davis another sheet of paper to sign. It was printed in bold lettering, and stated that Davis had been given instructions from a doctor and fully understood them. Gerry guessed this freed the hospital from liability in case Davis got sick, and decided to sue. Davis scribbled his name across the bottom.

Outside in the parking lot they found Marconi sitting in a Chevy Impala, fighting to stay awake. Gerry guessed Marconi would rather be home sleeping than sitting there, only there was an unwritten code that said if your partner got hurt, you hung with him. His father had done it many times. Marconi climbed out of the car and whacked Eddie on the arm.

“Hey brother, glad to see you’re still in one piece. I spoke with the district attorney about Abruzzi getting killed outside Bally’s. Everything’s cool.”

“Did you nail the guy’s partners?” Davis asked.

“They escaped. I managed to grab a good piece of evidence, though.” Opening the back door of the car, Marconi took the gaffed Yankees cap off the passenger seat and handed it to Davis. “Take a look at this.”

Davis examined the cap, trying to hide his disappointment that Marconi hadn’t nailed Abruzzi’s partners. As he handed the cap back, Gerry stuck his hand out.

“Can I look at it again?”

Marconi handed him the cap. The cap had been bothering Gerry, only he hadn’t known why. Turning the cap over, Gerry ran his finger over the LEDs and receiver sewn into the rim. Most cheating equipment was crudely made, with the main emphasis on getting the money. The niceties were almost always ignored. But this cap was different. It was new and looked liked a tailor had stitched it. The transmitter and LEDs were unusually thin, and he suspected they’d cost a lot of money.

Then it occurred to him what was wrong.

Cheating equipment was expensive. Several underground companies sold devices to rip off games, and the equipment often cost several thousand dollars. The markup was incredible, the reasoning being that a cheater would make the money back in one night. Gerry tried to imagine how much the baseball cap would cost from one of these companies. They charged through the nose for anything electronic, and he guessed the cap would cost ten grand. He handed the cap back to Marconi.

“Can I ask you a couple of questions?” Gerry asked.

“Go ahead.”

“The gang you were chasing inside Bally’s, how many members were there?”

Marconi stuck the cap on his head. It was several sizes too large, and made him look like a little kid. He counted on the fingers of one hand. “One woman was nicking the cards. A second guy was reading the nicks and transmitting the information. And there was the guy wearing the cap and doing the betting. Three members.”

“Don’t forget Abruzzi,” Davis said.

“Correction. Four members.”

“Okay,” Gerry said. “Four members, but only one is actually stealing.”

“That’s right.”

“How much was the gang winning?”

“Around fifteen hundred a night,” Marconi said.

Gerry stared at the cap on Marconi’s head. Now he knew what was bothering him.

“That’s not enough money,” Gerry said.

Marconi shot him a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”

“Look at the overhead the gang has,” Gerry explained. “Four members, plus the cost of the cap and a police scanner. Oh, and there’s George Scalzo’s take to consider, since he’s bankrolling this operation. Fifteen hundred a night hardly covers the cost of doing business.”

“You’ve lost me,” Marconi said. “If fifteen hundred isn’t enough money, then why were they cheating Bally’s? For laughs?”

Gerry asked to see the cap again, and turned it over. The expert tailoring job was the clue. A pro had stitched this cap, and if his hunch was correct, many more just like it.

“If my hunch is right, there are more members of this gang cheating Bally’s, not just the ones you were after,” Gerry said.

Marconi and Davis snapped to attention.

“Can you prove that?” Davis asked him.

“I sure can,” Gerry said.

Marconi drove them to Bally’s with the gaffed baseball cap on his head. During the drive, he broke the news to Davis that his prized Mustang had been totaled from Gerry ramming it into Abruzzi’s car. Davis stared out the window and sulked.

“You’ll find another one,” Marconi said.

“Like hell I will,” Davis replied.

Bally’s entrance was jammed with tour buses. Marconi maneuvered around them and parked by the valet stand. As they got out, he said, “Boat people.”

Boat people was casino slang for senior citizens. Like every other casino in Atlantic City, Bally’s relied on seniors to make its nut. They were easy customers, staying long enough to squander their social security checks in slot and video poker machines. Inside they found a sea of white hair and polyester. They walked to the cashier’s cage where Marconi cornered the casino’s floor manager, a red-faced man wearing a purple sports jacket. Marconi explained why they were there.

“You want to do what?” the floor manager said.

“Go up to your surveillance control room and take a look at some tapes,” Marconi said.

“Gaining entrance to that room takes a fricking act of Congress,” the floor manager said. “I need to tell the people upstairs what this is about.”

Marconi took off the cap, and showed the floor manager the rim. “This cap was used to scam your blackjack tables. We want to watch the tapes of the guy who was wearing it. Think you can arrange that?”

The floor manager muttered something unpleasant and left. Casino people were fiercely territorial, and tended to bang heads with cops as a matter of principle. They went into a coffee shop to wait.

“Do senior citizens rip off casinos?” Marconi asked a few minutes later.

Gerry had ordered coffee and was gulping it down to stay awake. “Seniors can be as bad as anyone else. My father nailed a gang who were stealing six figures a year.”

“What were they doing, putting slugs in slot machines?” Marconi asked.

Gerry shook his head.

“Fudging their Keno cards?” Davis asked.

Gerry shook his head again. “It was a bus scam. The tour operator was in cahoots with them.”

Cops liked to think they knew everything when it came to crime. Davis and Marconi traded looks, then stared Gerry down.

“What the hell’s a bus scam?” Davis asked.

Gerry put down his coffee. “The casino was paying a tour operator ten dollars a head to bus seniors in twice a week. The seniors had a larcenous streak, and told the tour operator they’d inflate the count if he’d split the money with them.”

“They stole six figures doing this?” Marconi asked incredulously.

“Yeah. The tour operator was bringing in ten buses, twice a week. The count on each bus was being inflated by ten heads. That’s two grand a week.”

Marconi and Davis dealt with bad people every day, but this seemed to bother them. If Gerry had learned anything working for his father, it was that gambling made people do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do. He finished his drink.

“How did your father nail them?” Davis asked.

“My father was working the casino on another case,” Gerry said. “He happened to walk outside, and saw the tour operator throwing unopened box lunches into a Dumpster. He mentioned it to management, and was told the casino gave each senior a boxed lunch as part of the deal. My father went outside, and counted all the boxes in the Dumpster. That’s when he figured out what they were doing.”

“Did the seniors go to jail?” Davis asked.

“No one went to jail,” Gerry said. “The tour operator gave his share back, and did community service. The seniors had spent theirs, so they worked it off at the casino.”

“That your father’s idea?” Davis asked.

Gerry nodded. His father believed in giving first-time offenders a pass, provided they were truly repentant. Everyone involved in this case had been. The floor manager appeared at the entrance to the restaurant, and motioned to them impatiently. They settled the bill, then came out to where the floor manager waited.

“You’ve got clearance,” the floor manager said.

Bally’s surveillance control room was the heart and soul of its security operation. Housed on the third floor, it was a windowless, claustrophobic room filled with the finest snooping equipment money could buy. The room was kept at a chilly sixty degrees, and each technician wore several layers of clothing. The floor manager led them past a wall of video monitors to a master console in the rear of the room, where a short, bespectacled man wearing a gray turtleneck sat with his fingers clutched around a joystick.

“They’re all yours,” the floor manager said.

The floor manager left, and Marconi introduced himself, Davis, and Gerry. The man at the console removed his glasses and quizzed Gerry with a glance.

“You Tony Valentine’s son?”

“Sure am,” Gerry said.

“Your father taught me the ropes,” the man said. “We used to say your father could see a gnat’s ass and hear a mouse piss. How’s he doing?”

“Great,” Gerry said.

“Glad to hear it. My name’s Lou Preston. I hear you want to watch some tapes.”

Gerry explained the blackjack scam with the baseball cap to Lou Preston. When he was finished, Preston’s head was bobbing up and down.

“So you think there might have been more cheaters wearing these caps,” Preston said. “Can you give me an approximate time when this took place?”

“Around four o’clock this morning,” Marconi said.

“What exactly did the caps look like?” Preston asked.

Marconi took the cap off his head and gave it to Preston. Preston placed the cap beneath the reading light on his console, and spent a few moments examining it.

“Let’s see if we can find this cap in our digital library,” he said.

Preston began to type on the keyboard on his console. Like most large casinos, Bally’s used digital video recorders to continuously tape the action on the floor. It was a far cry from the old days, when the tapes in VCRs had to be switched every hour. Within seconds, four tapes appeared on a matrix on Preston’s computer screen. Each tape showed a different man in the casino wearing a baseball cap while playing blackjack.

“These four gentlemen were playing blackjack in our casino at four o’clock this morning,” Preston said. “Is one of them your guy?”

Marconi pointed at the guy in the right-hand corner of the matrix. “That’s him.”

Preston dragged the cursor over the picture and clicked on it. The picture enlarged to show a guy in his early fifties wearing a Yankees cap and smoking a cigar. He wore his shirt open, and hanging around his neck were several thick gold chains.

Preston did some more magic with his cursor, and the baseball cap became the only thing on the screen. He struck the ENTER key, then leaned back in his chair.

“In sixty seconds we’ll know if your hunch is correct,” he told Gerry.

The hard drive on Preston’s console made a whirring sound. Marconi and Davis looked confused, and Gerry guessed they weren’t up to speed on the latest technology being employed by casinos to track cheaters. Pointing at the baseball cap, he said, “Lou just burned an image of this cap into his computer. He’s asked the computer to take a look at all recent tapes, and see how many similar caps turn up. Within a minute we’ll know how many there were.”

“I thought that took hours,” Davis said.

“Used to take hours,” Preston corrected him. “We now use Kalatel DVRs to record digitally. It’s light years faster than before. We can search the tapes for anything we want.”

“Beats using a catwalk, huh?” Gerry said.

“Personally, I liked the catwalks,” Preston said.

“Gave me plenty of exercise. They did have their drawbacks, though. One time, I was on the catwalk with a camera with a zoom lens, trying to photograph a cheater switching dice. There was a two-way mirror in the ceiling, and as I tried to photograph the switch, the cheater stared straight up at me. I must have leaned on the mirror, because dust was falling down on his head. Needless to say, he ran like hell.”

The hard drive had stopped whirring, and Preston hit ENTER again.

“Bingo,” he said. “Four matches.”

They huddled behind his chair, and Preston pulled up each match the computer had made. Four men, all Italian, with ages ranging from late forties to late fifties, wearing jewelry around their necks or hands, and wearing Yankees baseball caps.

“Looks like a casting call for The Sopranos,” Marconi said.

Gerry felt a hand on his shoulder, and glanced at Davis.

“Good job,” Davis said.

Preston e-mailed copies of each man’s image to the Atlantic City Police Department to be checked against its database of known criminals. Then he escorted his guests through the surveillance control room to the door. As Marconi and Davis walked into the hall, Preston turned to Gerry.

“One thing’s bothering me,” Preston said. “Why me?”

Gerry didn’t understand the question.

“Let me rephrase that. Why my casino?” Preston said. “There are a dozen casinos on the island; why did these guys pick mine? It’s a question I always ask myself when we get ripped off. Is there a flaw in our system, or did a security person on the floor get paid to look the other way? Or is there another reason?”

“Such as?”

“Maybe your hunch is correct,” Preston said. “Maybe the scam is bigger than everyone thought. Makes sense, don’t you think?”

Gerry realized he was nodding. Talking to Lou Preston was like talking to his old man. Lou knew how cheaters thought, and had grift sense. “You think this gang might be hitting all the casinos on the island?” Gerry asked.

“I don’t see why not.”

“How can we check?”

“Easy,” Preston said. “Atlantic City’s casinos are connected through a system called SIN. Stands for Secure Internal Network. We use it primarily to alert each other about teams of card counters. I’ll use SIN to alert them about the Yankees caps, and ask the casinos to run the same check that I ran. Who knows? We might hit gold.”

Lou was smiling, and Gerry realized why. Lou knew the outcome of what that check would be. They were going to find mobsters with Yankees caps in other casinos.

“Just one second,” Gerry said.

Going into the hall, Gerry went to where Davis and Marconi waited by the elevators. They looked ready to call it a day, and Gerry put a hand on each of their shoulders.

“Sorry, guys, but we’re not done yet,” he said.