Deadman's Bluff

22

Within sixty seconds of Takarama being dragged out of Celebrity’s casino, the mess around the roulette table was cleaned up and the croupier was back spinning the little white ball while happily exhorting the crowd to “Place your bets! Place your bets!”

Flush with cash, Rufus Steele threw a fan of hundred-dollar bills on the layout. He had collected his winnings from the Greek and the other suckers who’d bet against him, and his pockets were overflowing with money. “Five thousand on the black,” he said.

The ball rolled around the wheel and dropped on a black number. A number of bystanders broke into wild applause and Rufus bowed to them.

“Is he always so lucky?” Gloria Curtis asked.

Valentine stood off to the side with Gloria and Zack.

He wanted to tell her that up until a few days ago, Rufus had been flat broke, but he bit his tongue. He had never liked hustlers, yet hanging around Rufus, his sense of fair play had become curiously elastic.

“He’s got the magic touch,” he said.

Rufus joined them and smiled at Gloria. “I owe you, Ms. Curtis,” he said.

“You do?” she asked.

“Moon balls.”

“How about an interview?” she asked.

“You know me,” Rufus said. “I love to talk.”

They walked out of the casino and across the lobby to the entrance of Celebrity’s poker room. A leader board had been erected by the front doors. Skip DeMarco was still in a commanding position, with everyone else far behind. Rufus read the board, then made a disparaging noise that originated deep in his throat.

Gloria’s cameraman did a sound check, then held his hand up in the air.

“Five…four…three…two…one. We’re rolling.”

“This is Gloria Curtis, coming to you from the World Poker Showdown in Las Vegas,” Gloria said into her mike. “Standing beside me is legendary gambler Rufus Steele, who just beat a former world champion Ping-Pong champion in a winner-take-all match for half a million dollars. Rufus, you’ve beaten a race horse in the hundred-yard dash, and now you’ve beaten a world champion athlete. What’s next?”

“Once this tournament is over, Skip DeMarco and I are going to sit down and play poker for two million dollars, winner-take-all,” Rufus said.

“DeMarco is the tournament’s chip leader, and considers himself the best poker player in the world,” Gloria said. “How do you rate your chances against him?”

“Being the chip leader doesn’t mean much,” Rufus said. “Neither does playing in a tournament. People who play in tournaments for a living are what gamblers call fun players. When they’re not playing, they’re singing in the church choir or playing volleyball at the YMCA.”

“Are you saying that DeMarco is not the best player in the world?”

A smile spread across Rufus’s leathery face. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but every time that boy gets on television and says he’s the best, a few dozen guys around the country jump out of their chairs and run to the toilet before they ruin the rug.”

“How would you rate him?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“But he’s the tournament chip leader. Surely that means something.”

Rufus’s smile spread. “Afraid not.”

“Could you explain?”

“A tournament is several days long, and luck plays a big part in determining the winner. When DeMarco and I play, luck won’t have anything to do with the out come.”

“If DeMarco does win the tournament, will that change your opinion of him?”

The friendly expression vanished from Rufus’s face and he scowled at the camera. “Giving DeMarco a trophy and calling him the best player in the world is like putting whip cream on a hot dog. No, it wouldn’t change my opinion of him one bit.”

Beating Takarama at Ping-Pong had gotten Rufus’s competitive juices flowing, and once again he denounced DeMarco, as though the sheer volume of his angry words would expose the younger man as a fraud. It gave Valentine an idea, and he slipped inside the poker room.

The World Poker Showdown had started with over five thousand players, and probably just as many dreams. Less than a hundred remained, and they sat at a dozen felt tables in the room’s center, bathed in bright TV lights and surrounded by fans. At the feature table was DeMarco with seven other players.

Standing on his tiptoes, Valentine watched DeMarco play. He was a handsome kid, and seemed to be enjoying himself. Tournament poker was different from your friendly neighborhood game because of the elimination process. If you played a couple of bad hands in tournament poker, you were gone. As a result, most people played tight, and bet only when they had good cards.

But DeMarco didn’t play this way. Because of his blindness, he held his two cards up to his face, then placed them on the table, and did not look at them again. Instead, he focused his attention on his opponents’ bets and calls. When the bet came to him, he inevitably made the right decision, and either threw away a losing hand—which he flashed to the table—or stayed in with winning cards. The crowd was in his corner, and each decision was met with thunderous applause.

Backing away from the table, Valentine shook his head. The whole thing smelled like three-day-old fish. DeMarco wasn’t playing cards—he was acting like someone playing cards. Had he any common sense, he would have purposely lost a hand, just to keep things looking normal. Only he liked to showboat.

Valentine’s eyes scanned the room. DeMarco didn’t go anywhere without his handlers, and George Scalzo and his bodyguard stood by the bar, watching their boy. Nevada did not let mobsters into its casinos, and Valentine still did not understand how Scalzo had managed to be at the tournament and not get arrested. A cocktail waitress walked by, and he touched her arm.

“I need a favor,” Valentine said.

“I’m busy,” she said curtly.

He dug out his wallet and stuffed a twenty into the tip glass on her tray.

“Name it,” she said.

He borrowed her pen and a frilly cocktail napkin. On the napkin he wrote:

HEY GEORGIE, YOUR BOY IS GETTING TRASHED IN THE LOBBY

He handed it back to her. “See the guy that looks like Don Corleone?” He pointed across the room at Scalzo. “I want you to give him this.”

The waitress walked away with a bemused look on her face that made him think of his son’s crack about him playing cops and robbers. She delivered the note. Scalzo read it, then crumbled the napkin into a ball. He motioned to his bodyguard, and they marched out of the poker room.

It was the opportunity Valentine had been waiting for. He edged up to the feature table, and pushed his way through the crowd until he was in front. A new hand was about to begin, and he stared intently at the table. The tournament had gotten nailed several days ago for employing dealers with criminal records, and he watched the dealer at the table shuffle the cards. The shuffle looked fair, as did the cut that followed it, but something about the dealer’s body language wasn’t right. The dealer, who had a walrus moustache and a square jaw, looked apprehensive. It could have been the presence of the TV cameras, but Valentine’s gut told him otherwise.

Each player got two face-down cards, and the dealer sailed them around the table in a slow, deliberate manner. It was slower than any deal Valentine had ever seen, and he found himself staring at the dealer’s hands. The dealer’s right hand, his dealing hand, was completely stiff. That wasn’t normal.

Finished, the dealer placed the deck on the table. Dealers who used sleight-of-hand to cheat were always conscious of their manipulations. No matter how good they were, they knew that a trained observer could nail them. As a result, there was always a moment of truth after the cheating was done.

The dealer looked up. There was hesitation in his eyes. He glanced into the crowd of spectators and saw Valentine. He swallowed hard.

Gotcha, Valentine thought.

Valentine had always liked movies when the cavalry showed up to save the day, and felt an adrenaline rush seeing Pete Longo and three uniformed cops come barging into the poker room. They were moving fast, the uniforms having unsnapped the harness on their revolvers. He wondered if they were going to nail DeMarco, or the dealer, or both of them. It was about time.

The crowd was slow to get out of their way, and Longo flashed his silver detective’s badge to hurry them along. Valentine stared at the dealer, and saw a look of panic distorting his face.

Longo came up to the tournament director, and the two men had a talk. Part of the director’s job was to act as an MC, and announce when players had won hands. To do this, he used a hand-held microphone, which he now raised to his face. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to have a five-minute recess. Dealers, please stop your games and reshuffle. Thank you.”

Longo and the three uniforms had broken away from the tournament director, and were coming around the table. The dealer had pushed his chair back and placed both his hands palms down on the felt, a sure sign that he’d been arrested before. Longo walked past the dealer and directly toward Valentine while barking an order to the uniforms. Reaching into his jacket, Longo removed a pair of handcuffs from the clip on his belt.

“Tony, you’re under arrest,” Longo said.

“For what?” Valentine said incredulously.

“Two counts of second-degree murder.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Valentine said.

“Like hell I am. Lift your arms into the air.”

The crowd was giving the police plenty of room now, and Valentine felt their hostile stares. He’d arrested hundreds of people in his life, and had always wondered what it felt like. Now, he was going to find out.

He lifted his arms into the air, and a uniform frisked him. Then his wrists were handcuffed behind his back. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but that didn’t matter; he felt like he’d done something wrong, and his face was burning.

As Longo led him out of the poker room and into the lobby, Gloria and Rufus stood off to the side, watching with horrified faces. Valentine wanted to tell them that he was innocent, but instead stared down at the ugly carpet as he walked past.