Funny Money

41 Balzac

Sitting in front of the Blue Dolphin in Davis’s Thunderbird, Valentine counted the dead on the fingers of both hands. Doyle. Sparky. Rolf. Juraj’s brother, Alex. The fun-loving Mollos. The Mod Squad. And now Frank. He shook his head in disgust. They were all dead, and over what? A few million bucks? It was chickenshit when you cut it up among a hundred people. Prison was no picnic, but murdering so many people to avoid it? That seemed like a crime all by itself.

“What happened to Coleman and Marconi?” he asked Davis.

“I shot them,” the detective said. Then added, “They’re both expected to live.”

“Make you feel any better?”

The detective gave it some serious thought, then shook his head. Valentine started to get out of the car and felt the cold rip through his overcoat like a knife. Davis touched his sleeve.

“How long are you going to be?”

“Give me a half hour.”

“How about ten minutes?”

It was 3 A.M. and Valentine was ready to collapse.

“What’s the rush?”

“I’ve got the district attorney waiting, Tony. He’s got a hundred people in jail and he doesn’t have a case. That’s the rush.”

Certain things never changed. Taking the fax from Bally’s Gaming out of his pocket, Valentine tossed it onto Davis’s lap. “Okay, here’s your case. Last summer, some Bombay employees talked Archie into running a promotion called Funny Money. There was only one catch. Archie would have to rearrange the casino.

“Arch bought the idea. He let everything get turned upside down. What Arch didn’t know was that the employees put fifty slot machines on the floor that he didn’t own. They owned the machines, and that’s the bill for them.

“In the act of rearranging the casino, a number of surveillance cameras were put on double-duty. When the employees wanted to empty their slot machines, Frank Porter switched the double-duty camera so those machines weren’t filmed.

“Getting the money out was simple. The coins were put into buckets, with Funny Money coins going on top, just in case a DGE agent happened to be around. They were dumped on a tray in the Hard Count room that was for Funny Money only. Then they were wrapped and taken out of the casino.” He paused. “Think you can remember all that?”

The detective nodded his head.

“Good-bye, Eddie,” he said.

He entered the motel office, wallet in hand. The manager was asleep in his chair. He slipped two hundred-dollar bills into the sleeping man’s pocket, then went to his room and threw his things into his suitcase.

Out of habit he checked under the bed and found Kat’s red lace Victoria’s Secret underwear. Just holding the garment in his hand made his heart race. The phone on the night table rang. He answered it.

“Oh Tony, how could you?”

It was Mabel. “How did you find me?”

“I called the Atlantic City police, who called Detective Davis in his car, who told me where you were,” his neighbor replied.

She was turning into one hell of a detective.

“How could I what?” he asked.

“Get into a relationship with a woman with a twelve-year-old.”

He stared at the undergarment clutched in his hand.

“Beats me,” he confessed.

“Gerry called while I was at the airport picking you up. I saved his message on voice mail.”

“Is he okay?”

“Listen to the message yourself. Oh, and one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You owe me,” his neighbor said.

A dial tone filled his ear. Dialing voice mail, he punched in his seven-digit code and heard his son’s voice ring out.

“Hey, Pop. I figured I’d better touch base, give you an update. We arrived in Zagreb last night. You wouldn’t believe the mess the city’s in. Yolanda convinced me to go to the U.S. Embassy, and ask about this person you wanted us to find. Which is what I did.

“Well, you really struck out, Pop. This person isn’t some big crime boss like you thought. It’s a Catholic nun running a mission. She’s the local Mother Teresa. Yolanda and I visited her this morning. She feeds half the town’s poor people. Said her brothers in the United States send her money.

“We couldn’t get a flight out until tomorrow, so Yolanda offered our services to the mission. They’ve got a small hospital, and Yolanda is treating a bunch of sick kids.” His son paused. “Guess what they’ve got me doing.”

“Try me,” Valentine said.

“Cleaning bed pans. Yeeech!!! Okay, it’s not that bad, and the patients are really appreciative, even if I can’t understand a word they’re saying. So, that’s the story. I’ll call you when we reach Spain. Oh, yeah, Yolanda says ‘Hi.’ ”

Valentine replayed the message, letting the words form a picture in his head that he hoped to take with him to his grave. Which was of his son helping people.

Then he put on his overcoat and took a walk.

His first stop was the pay phone on the corner next to his motel. He’d been thinking a lot about Sparky Rhodes, wondering if anyone had discovered his body. He doubted it, and he started to dial 911, then decided he’d better not. All 911 calls were recorded, and he didn’t need someone recognizing his voice and dragging him into another investigation.

Dropping fifty cents into the machine, he called information instead. The line rang ten times before a female operator answered.

“What number please?”

“I need you to call the police.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard what I said. Tell them there’s a dead man lying in a basement.” He gave her Sparky’s address, then said, “Please tell the police there’s a cat in the house.”

“A cat,” the operator said.

“Yes. An old black cat. She’ll need a home.”

“I’ll be sure to tell them,” the operator said.

“Thank you,” he said.

His next stop was the Drake. He found Juraj and Anna standing by the empty swimming pool, the orange tips of their cigarettes glowing mysteriously in the dark. Anna came toward him.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” Valentine asked.

“We were lying in bed when we saw the news on TV,” she said. “There was a film of you and Archie Tanner going into The Bombay. It took us a while, but then we realized what you had done.”

Valentine waited. Anna threw her arms around him.

“Thank you. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.”

That was more like it.

“You’re welcome, Anna,” he said.

She gave him a kiss as good as any of Kat’s, a kiss from the soul. It was great until Juraj decided he wanted to kiss him too, and planted his lips on both of Valentine’s cheeks, then gave him an old-fashioned bear hug.

The Croatians walked him down to the shoreline. Valentine wanted to tell them how lucky they were — he was not in the habit of letting hustlers go, even well-meaning ones — but he sensed they already knew that. They said another round of good-byes, with Anna giving him another kiss. Valentine pinched her sleeve as Juraj walked away.

“You’re going to keep cheating casinos, aren’t you?”

“No,” she said.

“Don’t lie to me, Anna.”

She crossed her arms defiantly. “No!”

“Anna...”

“All right, yes.”

Taking two crisp twenties from his pocket, Valentine shoved them into her hand.

“What is this for?” she asked.

“If you’re going to keep playing the five thousand dollar tables, make him get a decent haircut.”

He walked the beach he’d grown up on. The tide was low, the waves a bare ripple across the black sea. A brightly lit cruise ship was anchored offshore, and he stopped to stare. There was a late-night party going on, everyone having a swell time. He felt himself shudder.

Hindsight being twenty-twenty, it hadn’t taken him long to realize what he’d done. He’d solved a crime that hadn’t occurred. No one had missed the money. Not Archie, or the Division of Gaming Enforcement or the Casino Control Commission. And if no one missed the money, then who cared?

The money. That was what it always came down to in Atlantic City. The money. It flowed back and forth, changing hands every day, but in the end, it stayed in the casino’s coffers, because the casinos set the odds, and the casinos never lost. Somehow, Porter and the rest of The Bombay gang had forgotten that.

He slipped off his shoes and socks and let the waves slap his toes. The water was freezing cold, but that was okay. He wanted to feel connected to something besides here, and the icy waves sure did the trick.

He stared across the ocean, trying to imagine himself cleaning up after sick people. It had to be the worst job in the world, yet Gerry had made it sound okay. Like he was getting something in return.

There was a message there somewhere, he thought.

Back at the motel, he found Davis hanging out by the manager’s office. He started to walk away. The detective followed him.

“You always so antisocial?”

“I’m done,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

The detective kept following him. “You ever read any Balzac?”

“Who?”

“He was a nineteenth-century French novelist.”

“No, I never read him.”

“I did. In high school. One line in a book stayed with me. Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.”

The cold was making Valentine’s ears ring. “So?”

“When we raided The Bombay, you told me to watch where the employees ran to. Well, they ran to two places. The employees in the casino ran to the Hard Count room. But a bunch of employees in the back ran to a storage room.”

Valentine stared at him. “Did you find anything?”

“Yeah. Cases and cases of champagne sitting out in the open. While behind locked doors, a few thousand cartons of cigarettes.”

“So?”

“Case of champagne costs what — a thousand bucks? Carton of cigarettes costs twenty. Why keep the cigarettes locked up, unless they’re hot. So I had a check run on them.”

Valentine stuck his hands in his pockets, remembering it like it was yesterday. He’d pulled Archie over for speeding and found the trunk of his car stuffed with bootleg cigarettes.

“And?”

“They’re hot,” the detective said.

“Did you jam him?”

“About twenty minutes ago,” Davis said. “You should have seen Archie squawk.”

It had been one of the saddest weeks of Valentine’s life, yet he found himself smiling. Selling bootleg cigarettes in New Jersey is a felony: Archie Tanner would do hard time and lose his casino license. Valentine couldn’t help himself, and he pinched Davis on the cheek.

“You are one smart kid,” he told him.