Sucker Bet

2

Palm Harbor sat north of St. Petersburg, on Florida’s laid-back west coast. Back when Valentine and his late wife had considered retiring there, there were five thousand residents. Sleepy and small, it had seemed like another world compared to bustling Atlantic City.

Fifteen years later, the residents numbered fifty thousand, the town’s quaintness run over by a developer’s bulldozer. Every day, the roads got more clogged, the public schools got more overcrowded, and the drinking water tasted a little less like drinking water.

Winter was particularly gruesome. The restaurants were asses-to-elbows with rude northerners, as were the beaches and malls. Valentine had been a rude northerner once, but had shed that skin soon after arriving. Palm Harbor’s lazy cadence suited him just fine, and he looked forward to the sweltering summers, when the snowbirds flew home.

He sat on his screened front porch and read the paper. The stock market had been flip-flopping, and he checked his mutual funds. As a cop, he’d never made much money. Now, in retirement, he had more than he knew what to do with.

Mabel came up his front walk, wearing canary yellow slacks and a blue blouse, her hands clutching a Tupperware container. He rose expectantly from his rocker.

“Good morning,” he said. “How you doing?”

“Who cares?” she replied.

Florida’s elderly took grim delight in discussing their ailments, their deterioration becoming monumental epics of collapse and decay. Mabel was having none of it. Who cares? summed up her attitude nicely.

“You up for breakfast?” she asked.

“Sure.”

They went inside. Mabel had been bringing him meals since Lois had died, nothing fancy, always hot and good. He set two places at the kitchen table, then fixed a pot of coffee while she stuck the container of scrambled eggs, sausage, and home fries in the microwave. The phone rang and he answered it.

“Go to hell,” he said, then hung up.

“Tony, that’s rude,” Mabel said.

“It was a salesman.”

“Salesperson.”

“This one was a guy.”

“You’re being obtuse.”

“I’m sick of the intrusions. I don’t want to change my long-distance carrier, get my carpets cleaned, or buy penny stocks. If I’m abusive long enough, they’ll go away.”

Mabel doled out the steaming food. Valentine sprinkled everything with Tabasco sauce and dug in. He was big on sauces, and guessed it came from years of eating crummy diner food.

“You going to tell me about it?” Mabel asked when they were done.

“What’s that?”

“What happened between you and Kat. I may be losing my vision, but I’m not blind.”

He cleaned his plate with a biscuit while giving her the Reader’s Digest version of the scene in the dressing room. “I drove home realizing what a horse’s ass I’ve been the past two months, dressing up in that ridiculous suit. I’m sorry you had to watch.”

Mabel reached across the table and touched his wrist. “Did you call her?”

“I left a message on her cell phone and at her hotel.”

“She didn’t call back?”

“No.”

“What about the diamond pin you bought for her at Avant Gold?”

“What about it?”

“Did you give it to her?”

“I threw it out of the window of my car.”

“Oh, Tony . . .”

“Zoe picked it up.”

“Do you think she gave it to her mother?”

No, she probably pierced her navel with it, he thought. “I hope so,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get on with my life, I suppose.”

They heard a car pull up the driveway, and Mabel went to the front door. She returned with a thick Federal Express envelope. “It’s from Jacques. You remember. He sent the five-thousand-dollar check. Luminous readers.”

“Right. The jerk from South Africa.”

“Tony, that’s no way to talk about a client.”

“You’re right. Open up the envelope. Maybe there’s more money.”

She did, and to both their surprise, there was. Another check, this one for two grand, his usual fee. Inside the envelope was a leather pouch filled with casino dice and a note. Mabel read aloud. “Dear Tony Valentine. I realize you are a busy man, but I need your help again. We have arrested the gambler for marking the cards, and he gave a full confession. He was once an employee, and has offered to turn in another employee, who he claims is stealing more money than he was.

“The gambler says the scam is happening at our craps tables, but won’t say who is involved. Last week, we lost five hundred thousand dollars at craps, so the gambler may be telling the truth. I have sent several dice, in the hopes you will examine them. Sincerely, Jacques Dugay.” Mabel looked up. “Wow, a half-million bucks.”

“Wow is right.”

“You think he got ripped off?”

“You bet. What a dope.”

Mabel waved the check in front of his face. “A dope with money.”

He heard it in her voice. Take the job, even if you are in a lousy mood. Mabel had been raised in the same era as him: tail end of the Depression. Money wasn’t their god, but walking away from it was something you just didn’t do.

“Okay,” he said.

In early 1981, a pewter canister had been found by scavengers in the muddy banks of the Thames near London Bridge. Instead of coins or jewelry, the canister had contained twenty-four ornate dice dating back five hundred years. Close examination of the dice had revealed that eighteen were loaded with quicksilver, while the remaining six were misspotted, and marked only with three numbers on each die.

During the same year, a team of archaeologists on a dig in Pompeii had found similar gaffed dice, only their heritage was several thousand years earlier.

Valentine had heard about both discoveries and hadn’t been terribly surprised. While there were hundreds of different ways to cheat at cards, there were only three surefire ways to cheat at dice: loading them, misspotting them, or shaving them.

Sitting at his desk, he used a micrometer to measure the dice Jacques had sent him. Each was a perfect one-inch square. Had one of the sides been short—even by as little as fifteen one-hundredths of an inch—the die would have favored certain combinations and destroyed the house edge.

Then he checked each with a calibrator. In the old days, dice were dropped in a glass of water to see if they were loaded. The calibrator was a little more scientific. He spun each die on its axis. To his surprise, they were clean.

He rolled them across his desk. The fact that they were normal didn’t mean that crooked dice weren’t being used. The cheater, or cheaters, might be switching crooked dice in and out of the game, without anyone being the wiser.

“So call him up,” Mabel said when he returned to the kitchen.

He sat at the kitchen table. “I don’t want to.”

She split the last of the coffee between two mugs and sat down.

“But he’s desperate.”

“They usually are when they’re losing money.”

“Tony . . .”

He sipped his coffee. “The guy’s such a jerk.”

“How do you know him?”

“He ran one of Trump’s joints in Atlantic City for about sixty minutes. Everybody hated his guts.”

“Would you like me to call him?”

Mabel was great at finding solutions. It would be fun to let Jacques think that he didn’t rate an audience with the boss. “Sure,” he said.

Jacques’s phone number was in the letter. Mabel dialed it and awoke him from a deep sleep. She stuck her hand over the mouthpiece. “He’s cursing in French.”

“Tell him French wine tastes like urine and hang up.”

She waved him off. To Jacques she said, “We just received your Federal Express package. Tony examined the dice—”

“Zee dice,” Valentine corrected.

“—and found nothing wrong with them. He believes the cheater must have switched out the crooked dice for clean ones.” Mabel listened for a minute, then stuck her hand over the mouthpiece. “Jacques says that the casino searches its employees before their shift starts and after it’s over. That way, the dealers can’t bring crooked dice in or take them out.”

“Ask Jacques where the craps dealers go on their break.”

She asked. “To the employee lounge.”

“Are there lockers where they change into their uniforms?”

She asked. “Jacques said yes.”

“Tell Jacques one of his dealers is taking normal dice to the lounge and altering them. He needs to search the dealers’ lockers and be on the lookout for the following items. Ready?”

“Ready.”

“A file, a drill, a vise, a burr for hollowing, celluloid rope, fast-drying cement, ink, a bottle of mercury, some kind of polishing compound, and sandpaper. If any of those items turn up, that’s their man.”

Mabel relayed it all to Jacques. When she hung up, she was smiling. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but when she found reason to smile, Valentine didn’t think there was a prettier face on the planet. “Jacques says you are a genius,” she said.

“He’s still a pain in the ass,” Valentine replied.

He spent the morning sifting through his mail. Over a dozen casino surveillance videotapes of suspected cheaters sat on his desk. Beside them was a stack of mail-order catalogues that had come addressed to U. R. Dead, and he guessed someone he’d put in prison had decided to get creative.

For a while he pushed papers around his desk. Three times the business line on his phone lit up. Mabel was still in the kitchen, and he heard her answer each call. Yesterday he’d been on top of the world. Now, he felt like he’d stepped off a cliff and was falling through space. Going to the kitchen, he found her working on the St. Petersburg Times crossword puzzle and pulled up a chair.

“I’m stumped,” she said. “The clue reads ‘Floored Ali.’ The answer is six letters. I was going to write Foreman, only it doesn’t fit. George Foreman floored Ali, didn’t he?”

“No. Ali floored Foreman.”

“Frazier. Joe Frazier floored Ali.”

“He sure did. But his name’s got seven letters.”

Mabel frowned. “Then who is it?”

“Wepner,” Valentine said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A strapping can of Ragu named Chuck Wepner. One of the worst fighters to ever grace the heavyweight ranks. He floored Ali.”

“Where, in a bar?”

“No, in the ring. Chuck was from Bayonne. Ali fought him because he thought Chuck was a patsy. Chuck was lousy, but he was nobody’s water boy. In one of the later rounds, Chuck stepped on Ali’s foot. Ali was going backwards and lost his balance. Chuck popped him, and Ali went down. Ali got up and tortured Chuck, opened a million cuts on his face.”

“A Jersey boy,” Mabel said.

“A Jersey hero,” he corrected.

She put the paper aside, then read from a message pad beside the phone. “Your son called from Puerto Rico to say he and Yolanda are loving every minute of their honeymoon. He asked if you were still mad at him, and I said I thought you’d gotten over having to pay for his wedding and his honeymoon.”

Valentine bristled. “He hit me up for five grand on his wedding night. He knows damn well—”

Mabel touched his wrist. “Tony, stop obsessing over it. You have more money than you know what to do with. Your boy’s trying to get his life straightened out.”

“That’s right. He’s trying.”

“You make that sound like an ugly word.”

“He’s thirty-five years old. When’s he going to start doing?”

Mabel had two grown children and had accepted long ago that she couldn’t control their lives. She glanced down at her pad. “The second message was from Bill Higgins of the Nevada Gaming Control Board. He said he needed your help on a case.”

“I’m not going to Nevada.”

“You are in one foul mood, young man.”

“Every time a casino gets scammed, I get a distress call. You think these morons would consider having me check their joints out before they get ripped off? Fat chance.”

“I thought Bill was a friend.”

“I’m not going to run every time he calls, friend or not.”

There were days when she couldn’t win with him. Her eyes returned to her pad. “The third message was from Harry Smooth Stone at the Micanopy Indian reservation casino. He called yesterday, as well. He sounds desperate.”

“Too bad,” Valentine said.

A person could take just so much abuse. Mabel said good-bye, and Valentine walked her to the sidewalk in front of his house.

“You are such a bear,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

“Are you going to sit around, waiting for her to call?”

It sounded pitiful, and he said, “What are you suggesting?”

“Go help Bill Higgins, or Harry Smooth Stone. Take your mind off your problems for a few days.”

He didn’t want to go to Vegas. Too much time coming and going. The Micanopy reservation casino was in south Florida, and a leisurely four-hour drive. Down today, back tomorrow. Maybe Mabel was right. A change of scenery would do him good.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.