Mr. Lucky

23

At eight forty-five Valentine drove to Slippery Rock High School and parked by the front entrance. He had never gotten back to sleep and felt stiff climbing out of the car. It took only a few bad nights for his body to start feeling old.

At a minute before nine he went inside. Schools were empty places without kids, and he listened to his own footsteps as he walked down a tiled hallway to the library. The note had said to go to end of the hall. He stopped at the last door and rapped with his knuckles.

“It’s open,” a woman’s voice said from within.

He pushed the door open and stuck his head in. Five kids looked up at him. They ranged in age from about fifteen to about nine, and had books open in front of them.

“Over here,” the voice said.

He followed the voice across the room. A handsome white-haired woman sat at a desk in the corner. “Sorry,” he said. “I must have the wrong room.”

“This is the right room,” she said. “Please come in.”

Valentine stepped into the library and shut the door behind him. The kids had stopped looking at him and gone back to their studying. Crossing the room, he realized that he recognized her. It was Mary Alice Stoker, the blind librarian he’d met at the Ping-Pong drawing the day before. She had sent the note.

“Please sit down,” she said.

He pulled up a chair. An item on her desk caught his eye. It was a picture of her skiing, taken before she’d lost her vision. She couldn’t see it anymore, but others could.

“I had hoped to meet with you alone,” she said, “but the children’s parents called and asked me to open up. Finals are in a few weeks, and they need to use the reference library. I’m sure you understand.”

He nodded, then felt his face burn with embarrassment.

“Of course,” he said.

“Good. If we keep our voices low, I’m sure they won’t hear a thing.”

He pulled his chair up a little closer.

“My hearing isn’t what it used to be,” he admitted.

Surprise registered on her face. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”

“Soon to be sixty-three.”

“Really. With all that’s happened, well, I just assumed—”

“I was young and strapping?”

Her hand came up to her mouth. It was too late, and her laughter escaped. The five kids jerked their heads in her direction.

“Now you’ve really got them confused,” Valentine said.

“Are they staring?”

“Afraid so.”

“The town drums will be beating this afternoon.”

Valentine leaned back in his chair and laughed softly. She was an easy person to be around and seemed at peace with her situation. Maybe if he was good, she’d explain her secret.

“I’d like to tell you a story,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“I used to have a favorite little boy. By the time he’d reached the sixth grade he’d read every book in this library. He could also recite Shakespeare by heart and the Preamble to the Constitution and anything else he put his mind to. He was brilliant; only, he came from a terrible family situation. Parents always drinking and fighting and getting thrown in jail. He came to the library to escape. I used to open up on Sundays for him, too.

“One day, right after he turned thirteen, he disappeared. The police thought he’d been kidnapped, and there was a frantic manhunt around the state. All the women in town cried when he wasn’t found. I think I cried the hardest.

“Eleven months later, he was found in a sleepy town in the Florida Panhandle. He hadn’t been kidnapped as everyone thought. He’d gone and run away with a carnival.

“The carnival people were gypsies. They’d adopted him and had him working for them. They’d dyed his hair dark and given him a new name. When he came back to Slippery Rock, he was a different person. They hadn’t molested him or abused him or anything like that. But they’d changed him.”

She folded her hands and put them in her lap. Tears welled at the corners of her sightless eyes. The memory was so painful that her chest heaved up and down. Valentine felt like he’d sat down in the middle of a movie and didn’t know what was going on.

“You don’t understand, do you?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“That little boy was Ricky Smith.”

One of Valentine’s first jobs as a cop in Atlantic City had been to drive a carnival out of town. It hadn’t been an easy assignment. The same carnival had been coming to town ever since he could remember. They would rent an empty lot for the summer and set up their colorful tents and old-fashioned midways. They offered games where people could win prizes, and sometimes they had entertainment, as well. Right after Labor Day they would pack up and head down south. Watching them leave had always made him feel sad.

At first he had wondered why the carnival had to be run out. The Atlantic City Boardwalk also featured games and entertainment, and no one gave their owners a hard time. It didn’t seem right, so he’d gone to his superior and asked him.

His superior was a hard-ass named Banko. Normally, Banko would have chewed him out for not following orders. But he’d seen something in Valentine’s eyes that told him an explanation was warranted. So Banko had sat him down and explained.

“The carny people that come to Atlantic City are coldhearted thieves. Their games look the same as the Boardwalk games, but they ain’t. They’re crooked. Know why?”

Valentine shook his head. The carnival people had always been nice to him, and he was having a hard time believing Banko.

“Because they have to make a living, that’s why,” Banko snapped. “The carny people are here for two months. They’re only open at night. It’s not like the Boardwalk, which is always filled with customers. People go to the carnival once or twice. If one-tenth of them won prizes—like those big stuffed animals—the carny people would go broke. So they rig the games so nobody can win.”

“But I’ve seen people win,” Valentine blurted out.

“You’ve seen pretty girls win,” Banko replied.

“What do you mean?”

“Only pretty girls win.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s good for business. A pretty girl walking around a carnival carrying a giant stuffed panda? It’s gonna make everyone smile.” He put his hand on Valentine’s shoulder. “These people are rotten to the core. They offer acts on the midway. Sword swallowers, the world’s tallest man, Hilda the Bearded Lady. Some of them are pretty good. And the carnival people only charge you twenty-five cents admission. Bargain of the century, right?”

“Right,” Valentine said.

“Well, it’s a ploy, a con. The reason they charge you any admission is because they want to see inside a guy’s wallet. Guys always bring money with them to the carnival, especially if they’re on a date or have kids. The guy selling the tickets sits on a high chair and rips tickets off a spool. But what he really does is stare into wallets. If a guy has a lot of dough, he signals to another carny guy in the crowd.

“That guy walks up behind the pigeon and draws a mark down his back with a piece of chalk. He does this as he bumps into him. The pigeon never feels it.

“The pigeon is now a target for a pickpocket. He gets cleaned out, and his wallet gets returned without him knowing it. That way, if he goes to the police with a beef, they’ll see he still has his wallet and figure he just blew the money.”

Valentine tapped his fingers on Mary Alice Stoker’s desk. He could remember the conversation with Banko like it was yesterday. It had been like learning there was no Santa Claus. And now the librarian was telling him that Ricky Smith had spent nearly an entire year with bad carnival people.

“How was Ricky different when he came back?” he asked.

“He wasn’t a little boy anymore. I guess you could say he’d lost his innocence.”

“Did he get back with his parents?”

“They split up, and then Ricky moved in with his aunt.”

“Did you have much contact with him?”

She shook her head. Behind her desk was a window that faced the forest. A deer stepped into the picture, watching him out of the corner of its eye as it munched on the grass.

“Ricky stopped coming to the library,” she said. “He started cutting classes and never carried books in school. Somehow he still managed to get straight A’s.”

“Think he was cheating?”

“A lot of the teachers suspected it, but they couldn’t prove it.”

“What do you think?”

“He was cheating.”

Valentine stared over her shoulder at the deer. It was eating nervously, and he guessed it had gotten used to coming by and not getting any response out of Mary Alice.

“Any other suspicious behavior?”

The blind librarian nodded. “Ricky had a friend named Stanley Kessel who also came from a broken home. Stanley was a gambler. Got caught several times in school running card and dice games. Got expelled in his senior year and never returned.”

“And they hung out together.”

“Bosom buddies.”

“Are they still friends now?”

“Stanley went to New York five years ago, became a stockbroker, and made a killing in the market. I’m told he and Ricky are still friends.”

“Did you know Stanley personally?”

“Yes. Stanley was slime. My blindness is caused by a degenerative eye disease that started twenty years ago. The week I lost my vision, Stanley came into this room and stole forty dollars from my purse. I was here.”

There was a harshness in her voice that he hadn’t heard before. Stanley Kessel had stuck an invisible knife in her and probably hadn’t even realized it. Valentine reached across the desk and placed his hand onto hers. She smiled thinly, and he left his hand there.

“Ms. Stoker, we’re done,” a little voice said.

Valentine glanced over his shoulder. The five kids who’d been buried in their books a moment ago were now standing behind them in a row. They had funny smiles on their faces, and he slowly withdrew his hand.

Mary Alice introduced the children to him. “This is Kristen, David, and Annie Buchholz, and Sara and Terry Williams,” she said. “Children, say hello to Mr. Valentine. And, David, if you’re wearing your baseball cap, please take it off.”

The kids stuck out their hands and said hello. They stared at him like he had two heads, and Valentine made them repeat their names as he shook their hands. Each one carried a book, and he recalled how difficult it had been to get Gerry to study back when he was in school. Terry Williams, who looked about thirteen and had a mop of dark hair, stepped forward. “Ms. Stoker, we were wondering if Mr. Valentine could show us something.”

“And what might that be, Terry?” the librarian asked.

“Well, we all went on Mr. Valentine’s Web site yesterday, and there’s all this cool stuff about casino cheating and crooks. On the Web site, it says that Mr. Valentine goes to casinos and gives demonstrations.”

“Yeah,” Annie piped up. “And we want to see some.”

“Cheating?” the librarian said.

“Yeah!” the five kids replied in unison.

“I have a deck of cards,” Terry said brightly, producing a dog-eared deck of Bicycles from his pocket. Handing them to Valentine, he said, “They’re all there. I counted.”

Valentine saw Mary Alice Stoker shift uncomfortably in her chair and guessed she was having visions of five more children being corrupted. He considered showing the kids a simple trick or two, but realized she wouldn’t be able to see. Then he had another idea.

He made the kids pull up chairs so they sat around him in a semicircle. He took the deck from Terry and removed the rubber band encasing the cards. Then he held the cards on his outstretched palm. The five children stared at them.

“I’m not going to show you any cheating. Do you know why?”

Disappointment appeared on their faces, and they shook their heads.

“Because cheating is a crime. It’s no different than stealing. But I know something about these playing cards that few people know. Want to hear it?”

They slowly nodded.

“Okay. No one knows who invented playing cards. Some people believe they were invented by medieval magicians who concealed all sorts of occult symbolism into the different pictures.” Valentine turned the cards faceup and spread them between his hands. “The cards are evenly divided, with twenty-six red cards and twenty-six black. This symbolizes day and night. Then there are the four suits: clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds. What do you think these stand for?”

David, the boy with the baseball cap, said, “The four seasons of the year?”

“That’s right. How did you get so smart?”

The kids were all smiling now. Valentine upjogged all the jacks, queens, and kings and pointed at them. “Okay. There are twelve picture cards in the deck. Do any of you know what they stand for?”

“The twelve months in the year?” Sara said.

“Very good. Now, here’s a tough one. There are thirteen values—ace through the king. What do these stand for?”

The kids acted stumped. Then a lightbulb went off over Terry’s head.

“The thirteen lunar cycles?”

“Right. Now, here’s an easy one. What do the fifty-two cards stand for?”

“The fifty-two weeks in the year,” Kristen said.

“That was an easy one. Okay, here’s the last one, and it’s a doozy.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “If you were to add up the values of all the cards in a full deck, counting the joker as one, what do you think you’ll get?” The kids looked at each other and shook their heads. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mary Alice nodding in approval. He said, “You’ll get exactly three-hundred and sixty-five, the number of days in a year.”

The kids looked at one another. “That’s really cool,” Annie said.

Valentine squared the deck between his palms. He had big hands, and they completely obscured the cards. When he opened his hands a moment later, the deck had disappeared. He removed them from his jacket pocket with a faint smile on his face.

“Show’s over,” he said.

The kids left the library chattering among themselves. Valentine offered to give Mary Alice a lift back to wherever she lived. She declined, saying a friend was coming by later to take her home.

She escorted him down the empty hallway to the entrance of the school. She walked without a cane, and he thought how nice it was that she worked in a place that her memory still remembered. She stopped a foot before the front door.

“I know this might sound strange,” she said, “but you aren’t the man I expected you to be.”

He stared through the glass cutout in the door. His car looked lonely in the empty parking lot. He tried to imagine how a blind person would envision him.

“Did I live up to your expectations?”

A startled look registered across her face. She reached out, groping to find his arm. Her fingers found his wrist and squeezed it. “I thought you would be some kind of brute,” she said. “I was wrong. You’re a caring man beneath the tough exterior. You can help us.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I most certainly do.”

“Help you how?”

“By straightening out this mess.” With her free hand, Mary Alice made a sweeping gesture. “First Ricky wins all that money in Las Vegas, then he comes home and starts winning lotteries and sweepstake drawings. And then the robbery at the bank. That mess.”

“You think they’re connected?”

She released his wrist. “Yes. I just wish I could tell you how.”

Valentine watched her walk away. Her steps reverberated down the hallway, and when she was safely back in the library, he went outside and started up his car.