Wild Card

Chapter 35

Mona gave him a lift back to Resorts. She pulled into the employee’s covered parking lot, and turned sideways in her seat.

“You’ve got to find this guy,” she said. “All the girls are terrified.”

“I’m trying,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.”

“See you around.”

He got out of her car, and entered the casino from the Boardwalk entrance. The place was packed, and it occurred to him that the Dresser could be hunting for his next victim at that very moment, right under their noses. Going upstairs, he found Doyle in the surveillance control room, drinking coffee.

“How did it go?” his partner asked.

“The Dresser was in the casino last night. I’m going to have the techs watch the tapes, see if they can spot him.”

Doyle grunted under his breath. If the casino’s surveillance had a flaw, it was the amount of raw tape that was recorded. A hundred hidden cameras produced thousands of hours of tape each day, much of it blurry, and out of focus. Finding one person who’d been inside the casino was like finding a needle in a haystack.

“I’ve got a JDLR on the wheel,” a voice called out.

They hurried across the room. The wheel was casino jargon for roulette, and Resorts’ wheel had been losing money for days. A white-haired Tech named Fassil who everyone called Fossil stood in front of a monitor.

“This guy is winning way too much,” Fossil declared, pointing at a player on the monitor.

Albert Einstein had said that the only way to win at roulette was by stealing chips. The player in question wore a polyester leisure suit, and had his left arm in a cast, which he rested on the table. He placed fifteen single bets of a hundred dollars on the layout. The croupier spun the ball, and the guy in the leisure suit’s number came up, putting him ahead by two grand.

“What doesn’t look right?” Valentine asked.

“Guy picked up his drink with his broken arm,” Fossil said. “I broke my arm once, and I couldn’t pick up a thing. And look how he places his bets. He always bets fifteen numbers that are together on the wheel. He knows something.”

Valentine saw where Fossil was headed. He went to a desk and picked up a house phone. Calling the floor, he got the head of security for roulette, and told him he wanted the player with the cast pulled into the back room, and held for questioning. Hanging up, he returned to the wall of monitors, and saw their suspect place fifteen more bets. The croupier set the wheel spinning, then spun the ball.

As sometimes happens at roulette, the ball hopped out of the wheel and flew through the air. It landed squarely on the suspect’s cast, where it remained stuck.

“He’s got a fricking magnet,” Fossil declared.

Valentine placed another call to downstairs.

“Arrest the croupier while you’re at it,” he told the head of security.

The croupier’s name was Alberto, only everyone called him Al. Al had been hired away from a casino in San Juan, where roulette bordered on high art. He sat in a plastic chair in the casino’s detention room, and pulled nervously on his droopy moustache. His partner with the cast sat in the next room, hollering for a lawyer.

Valentine read Al his Miranda rights. Then he made Al stand up, and empty his pockets. He was carrying the roulette ball he’d switched off the table. He looked disgusted with himself, and Valentine got the feeling he had something on his mind.

“You want to talk?” Valentine asked.

“Yeah. You got a butt?”

Valentine got him a cigarette and a light. Then he pulled a tape recorder out of a closet, checked the battery, and turned it on. Al took several drags and started talking.

Al was drinking at a bar when Larry, the clown with the cast, had approached him. Somehow, Larry knew that Al had gambling debts he couldn’t pay. Larry had a solution: He would wear a powerful earth magnet in a cast, and Al would switch the roulette ball for one with a steel core. The winnings would be split fifty/fifty.

“You ever commit a crime before?” Valentine asked.

“Never,” was Al’s reply.

“You were a law-abiding citizen until Larry approached you in the bar?”

“Yup.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

Al stared at the room’s concrete floor. He wore a wedding ring, and Valentine wondered how his wife would react to the news that he’d been arrested for cheating. Al hadn’t thought out the consequences, and now he was going to pay for it.

“I saw all that money passing by night after night, and I just wanted to reach out, and touch some of it,” Al said. “Know what I mean?”

“No I don’t. You sure you’ve never been arrested before?”

Al dragged hard on his cigarette. “Check it out if you don’t believe me.”

Al’s story checked out. Valentine was surprised. He had assumed that when employees went bad, it was because they’d come to the job that way. Jobs weren’t supposed to turn them bad. Al’s work folder said he made three hundred and fifty dollars a week, and was required to pay for his own clothes, which included a tuxedo shirt, fancy cummerbund, necktie, and dress pants. He also had to keep his shoes shined and his hair neatly trimmed. He worked an eight-hour shift, with a five minute break every hour. New Jersey’s politicians had touted the thousands of terrific new jobs the casinos would create for Atlantic City. Al’s job sounded anything but terrific.

Valentine went to his office, and typed out an Incident Activity Report. As he pecked away, it occurred to him that the scam Al and Larry had pulled not only ripped off the casino, but also the other players at the table, as it had denied them a fair game. At the bottom of the report was a space for notes. Normally, he left it blank. He typed in the words Throw the book at these guys and pulled the report from the typewriter, and scribbled his name across the bottom.

He spent the next hour sorting through the correspondence that had accumulated on his desk. He’d asked the records clerk at the station house to do a background check of Vinny Acosta, the hood they’d seen with Micky Wright, and later with the Hirsch brothers. The clerk had done the check, and Valentine pulled a handful of stapled pages from an envelope, and read Vinny’s rap sheet.

Vinny hailed from the Bronx section of Brooklyn. His childhood highlights consisted of dropping out of the seventh grade, and robbing a grocery store a few weeks later. Since then, he’d been arrested for vagrancy, burglary, contributing to delinquency, assault, assault and battery, assault to kill, obstructing justice, larceny, running an illegal “book”, loan sharking, damage by violence, bombing, running a prostitution ring, attempted murder, and murder.

Two of his arrests had led to convictions, and attached to Vinny’s rap sheet was a psychological evaluation that he’d undergone while doing a stretch in Sing Sing prison in upstate New York. The evaluation showed him to have a general IQ of 72 and a nonverbal of 88. The prison doctors had also psychoanalyzed him, and they deemed Vinny “a constitutional psychopath with strong antisocial tendencies.”

Valentine returned the rap sheet back to its envelope while thinking about the hundred thousand dollars Vinny had been carrying around his waist. Was Vinny laundering money for the mob, or was he stealing it from the casino? The casino was so tightly run that neither scenario seemed plausible, yet his gut told him that one of these crimes had to be going on. Yet somehow, he wasn’t seeing it.

At noon, the phone on his desk lit up, and he answered it.

“Tony?” a woman’s voice said. “This is Sabina.”

In all the years he’d known Banko’s secretary, she’d never addressed him by his first name, preferring to use his particular rank at the time. She was easily the most unfriendly person he’d ever known.

“Yes, Sabina,” he said.

“I just got a phone call for you. A man said he saw your name on a flyer, and wanted to talk to you about the serial killer.”

He grabbed a pen off his desk. “What’s his name?”

“He wouldn’t give it to me.”

“How about a phone number?”

“Not that, either. He asked you to meet him at the old Underwood Exhibit on the Boardwalk. He said he knew you once worked there.”

Valentine had worked at the Underwood Exhibit one summer as a kid. Except for Lois and his father, he didn’t think there was another living person who knew that.

“Did the guy say anything else?”

“He just emphasized that you hurry,” Sabina said.

There was a tremor in her voice. The newspaper had run a story that morning with a headline that read SERIAL KILLER CASE GONE COLD, and Valentine guessed there wasn’t a woman on the island who hadn’t seen it.

“I’ll get right on it,” he said.

“Thank you, Tony.”

Valentine grabbed his overcoat and went to the door. His movements were quick, and he felt a hot wire igniting his blood. He liked catching cheaters, but there were times when he desperately missed the street. He found Doyle sitting in front of a monitor.

“I just got a lead on our killer. Want to go for a ride?”

Doyle jumped out of his chair. “In a New Jersey minute.”