Funny Money

5 The Great One

Cursing, Valentine climbed into his rental. Buying Gerry the bar had been an olive branch, his way of trying to make peace. And now Gerry had given it away to a bunch of hoods. His son could screw up a wet dream.

The engine whined but did not turn over. The car was made by Ford and called a Probe. Naming a car after a surgical procedure seemed pretty dumb. Through the snowy windshield he saw a white van with tinted windows pull up to the corner.

The light changed, but the van did not move. Rolling down his window, Valentine stuck his head out and remembered that Doyle’s killers had been driving a white van. He reached into his pocket for the Glock, then realized how stupid that was.

Get out of the goddamn car.

He had the door open when he heard a gunshot. A bullet cracked the windshield dead center. He hit the pavement hard, struggling to draw his gun, when he heard the van speed away.

He lifted his head. Without his bifocals, he couldn’t see worth a damn, and the van’s license was a blur.

Blue gunpowder smoke hung in the frigid air. He got up, then popped the hood of the Probe. The main wire to the distributor cap hung down. He reconnected it, then got in and tried the engine. Soon the heater was blowing and his teeth had stopped chattering. But his heart would not slow down.

Valentine drove back to the Drake wondering why the European had come after him. Had he been at Doyle’s funeral, and heard Valentine’s eulogy? Back in Sicily, where Valentine’s family was from, it was common for killers to murder their victims’ best friends to avoid retribution later on. Which meant the European would probably try again. He needed to start being a lot more careful. And switch motels.

Frank Porter’s mini-Mercedes sat idling in front of the Drake. He parked on a side street so Frank wouldn’t see his windshield, then hiked over. Porter hit the unlock button.

“How’d you find me?” he asked, climbing in.

“I called your office,” Porter said. “Mabel told me.”

Valentine made a mental note to tell Mabel not to do that anymore.

“I need a favor,” Porter said.

“What’s that?”

“I told Archie Tanner about your offer to help. Archie says, ‘Screw that. Hire him.’ I told Archie I’d have to ask you. Archie says, ‘It’s your ass if he says no.’ ”

Archie Tanner owned The Bombay and was one of the richest men in New Jersey. He was also a mean, foul-mouthed thug and disliked by everyone in the casino business.

“Your ass, as in your job?” Valentine said.

“That’s right,” Porter said.

Normally, Valentine would have said yes, just to help Porter out. Only this was Archie Tanner, a man he’d never trusted.

“I need to talk to him first,” Valentine said.

“About what?”

“My terms.”

Porter blew out his cheeks. “Okay.”

Soon they were heading north on Pacific Avenue, and Valentine noticed that Porter looked pale. He’d recently gone through a bitter divorce, with his ex getting everything but the house.

“So how’s the joke-telling business?”

Porter smiled thinly. “I heard a joke which sums it up pretty well.”

“What’s that.”

“Do you know the difference between a comedian and a pizza pie?”

“No.”

“You can feed a family of four with a pizza pie.”

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting in Archie Tanner’s penthouse office atop The Bombay. Archie knew how to live, and the room’s panoramic view was the best in town. To the east, cruise ships dotted the churning black waters of the Atlantic; to the west, a private Lear jet landed at Bader Field, the airport’s crisscrossing runways forming a black cross in the snow.

And then there was the office itself. Burnished mahogany book shelves, polished wood floors covered with Persian rugs, a marble desk the size of a sports car. On the walls, framed photos of Archie clowning with Frank Sinatra, sparring with Muhammad Ali, kissing the Pope’s ring.

Porter picked up a book on the coffee table. It was Archie’s ghost-written autobiography, The Great One: The Life and Times of Atlantic City’s Living Legend.

“Archie send you one?”

Valentine nodded. Archie had bought several thousand copies and sent them to everyone in town. The inscription on his copy had read To the squarest guy in Atlantic City.

“So, what did you think?”

“I read ten pages and threw it in the garbage.”

Porter rolled his eyes. In the adjacent office they could hear Archie chewing someone out. The brunt of his assault was either a dopey fuck or a fucking dope, and when the door opened and the great one marched in, Valentine was surprised to see three attractive young misses in tow. One blond, one brunette, one African-American, all dressed in stylish leather miniskirts and black leggings. The blond had been crying, her cheeks still moist. Valentine rose from his chair.

“Sit down, sit down,” Archie said, pumping his hand. For a punk, he cleaned up well, and wore a handsome blue Armani suit and silver necktie that accentuated his deep tan. When Valentine remained standing, he bristled.

“What’s the matter, you got piles?”

“There are ladies in the room.” Facing them, he said, “Name’s Tony Valentine. Nice to meet you.”

The ladies introduced themselves. Gigi, Brandi, Monique. Hardly any makeup, no jewelry, Monique sporting a little rose tattoo on her bare shoulder. They were a far cry from the rough-and-tumble females that had worked in the casinos twenty years earlier. Archie stood behind his desk, not enjoying being upstaged. “I call them my Mod Squad,” the casino owner said. “One blond, one brown, one black. Get it?”

Valentine eyed him the way he would any other blow-dried moron. “You know, Archie, with all this dough you ought to consider buying yourself some class.”

Archie’s face grew red. He looked like he wanted to bust Valentine in the mouth, only Valentine knew that wasn’t going to happen. Thirty years ago, he’d ticketed Archie for speeding and found bootleg cigarettes in the trunk of his car. He’d let Archie go because he knew his old man, and that single act of kindness had let Archie later obtain The Bombay’s gaming license, his record clean as a whistle.

“Ladies, if you don’t mind, we have business to discuss,” the great one said.

The Mod Squad filed out, with Brandi catching Valentine’s eye. She winked.

“Pleased to meet you,” Valentine said.

“So how’s retirement treating you?” Archie asked, sitting at his desk sipping Evian out of a Waterford tumbler.

Valentine swirled the ice cubes in his soda. Life had been treating him crummy, but he didn’t think Archie really cared.

“I opened a consulting business. It keeps me busy.”

“Still catching hustlers, huh? You were always the best, wasn’t he, Frank?”

Porter nodded. “Tony’s the best.”

“That’s what I said. I remember when The Bombay first opened. We were getting killed at blackjack. Everybody was beating us, even little old ladies. I didn’t know my ass from my elbow back then, so I tell another casino owner, and he says, ‘Call Tony Valentine. He’s the best at catching cheats.’ Now, I’ve known Tony a long time. How long has it been, Tony?”

“Since I busted you,” Valentine said.

Archie burst out laughing. “What a kidder. Anyway, so Tony comes in, takes a stroll through the blackjack pit, and comes up to me. He says, ‘Hey, Arch, were you born yesterday? You’re using playing cards with a one-way back design. I said, ‘So?’ And he says, ‘If a card gets turned around, every player at the table can track it.’ So we replaced the cards, and our problems vanished.”

Valentine sipped his soda. He didn’t remember the incident, which he attributed to the fact that so many casinos had gotten ripped off back then. Atlantic City hadn’t known what it was doing, and hustlers from around the globe had come running.

Rising, Archie crossed the spacious room and stopped at the floor-to-ceiling window that faced the ocean. “You and Doyle were buddies, weren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“I was down in Florida when he got killed. I would have come to the funeral, but business had me tied up.”

“You buying Disney World?”

Archie took a big fat cigar from his pocket and fired it up. “I’m buying hotels, Tony. Hotels that I’m going to turn into casinos. Florida isn’t going to let the Indians have a monopoly forever. Gambling generates taxes, and taxes build roads and schools, two things Florida desperately needs.”

Valentine nearly stood up and walked out of the room. He’d retired to Florida because it didn’t have casinos. Biting his tongue, he said, “Okay.”

Archie picked up on his hesitation. He stared at him in the window’s reflection. Then said, “How would you like to finish doing Doyle’s job?”

“Depends,” Valentine said.

The great one’s eyes turned into slits.

“My rate’s a thousand bucks a day, plus expenses. I also need access to your surveillance control room. And your library of surveillance tapes.”

Archie turned to look at Porter. New Jersey law strictly forbids outsiders inside a casino’s surveillance area, and Archie would be disciplined and fined heavily if Valentine was discovered where he didn’t belong.

“We’ll have to risk it,” Porter told his boss.

“Okay,” Archie said. To Valentine he said, “Anything else?”

Valentine was about to say no, then saw something sparkling on his shirt. He removed a tiny shard of glass that had been part of his rental’s windshield.

“A car,” he said. “My rental’s shot.”

Archie went to his desk, picked up a key ring, and tossed it to him. “This is my spare. It’s in the basement. I’ll call the guard, tell him to let you out.”

Valentine glanced at the keys. They were for a Mercedes. He’d planned to go looking for the European anyway; now he was going to get paid for it, and drive a rich man’s car.

He picked up his overcoat from a chair, then went over to the window and stuck his hand out. Archie shook it, the way business had always been done in Atlantic City.

“Nice to have you onboard,” Archie said.

Valentine stared downward. He saw kids sledding on the Boardwalk, just like Gerry had once done. And the two guys walking on the beach, that was him and Doyle just off work, going to get a burger. You move away, he thought, but you never leave.

“Nice to be onboard,” he replied.