Wild Card

Chapter 41

Leaving Crinklaw’s office, Valentine got into his Pinto, and drove around the north end of the island. The doctor hadn’t called him crazy, but she’d come damn close. He was glad he hadn’t told her about his epiphanies. Hearing that, she probably would have called for the men with the butterfly nets to come and get him.

There were only so many places you could go in Atlantic City, and after a while he parked in the employee parking lot next to the casino, and let the heater run. Last night, sitting in his kitchen, he had told himself he wasn’t going crazy. A little frightened and bewildered, but not crazy. The voice he’d heard in his backyard had a real life person behind it, and the connection to his past was real as well. He was being tricked. That was what his gut was telling him, and his gut had never been wrong before.

But what if Crinklaw was right, and a fuse had blown in his head, and he was imagining things like his father had done years ago? What if something was wrong upstairs, and needed to be fixed?

He rubbed his face with his hands. If he started getting psychiatric treatment, he would have to tell Banko. And if he did that, he’d be finished as a detective, and put behind a desk, or forced into retirement on a disability.

Washed-up at thirty-eight. He could not think of anything worse.

At noon he went inside, took the employee elevator to the third floor, and went to his office in the surveillance control room. A large envelope sat on his desk. It had been delivered by courier, the sender Bill Higgins. He shredded it, and a video cassette dropped into his hand. Taped to it was a handwritten note. Here’s the tape of the BJ cheats I told you about. Let me know if you spot anything.’

Valentine stared at the note. He reminded himself that he’d been catching cheaters without any problems during his “episodes”. If he was going crazy, then why hadn’t it affected his work inside the casino? He walked into the next room, and handed the tape to Fossil. “Run this on monitors 1 through 12,” he told him.

Monitors 1 through 12 made up a quadrant of the video wall. The tape began a few moments later. Valentine stood in front of the twelve screens, his face bathed in artificial light. Fossil came over and stood beside him.

The tape showed a blackjack table with two male players. Both were in their early thirties, and had sandy brown hair, expensive clothes and jewelry, and carefree attitudes. They were betting the table maximum, five thousand dollars a hand. And winning every hand. Soon they had all of the dealer’s black chips in their possession.

“Christmas!” Fossil exclaimed.

Valentine had never seen a table lose money so quickly. The two players were not touching the cards, nor doing anything strange, and he found himself studying other things. Like the vivacious woman standing behind the table, sipping from a Coke bottle. Was she part of it? And what about the dealer? His back was to the camera, and his shoulders were hunched. Anxious? Or was that his normal posture? The tape ended. He played it again, and Fossil called a tech named Romaine over to watch.

“That’s scary,” Romaine said when it was over.

Valentine watched the tape a third time, and got no closer to a solution. It was the most amazing cheating he’d ever seen. Returning to his office, he removed a saran-wrapped Swiss cheese sandwich Lois had fixed him from the jacket of his overcoat. He ate it while sitting at his desk, and called Bill Higgins.

“I don’t have a clue what they’re doing,” Valentine said, “but the woman with the Coke bottle bothers me.”

“How so?” his friend asked.

“She’s nursing it.”

“So?”

“Cokes are free in a casino.”

Higgins made a clucking sound with his tongue. “You think she’s part of a gang?”

“Yes. But don’t ask me what her role is, because I don’t know.”

Higgins put him on hold. When he returned, he said, “I appreciate you taking a look. I’m sending you a present for helping me nail those slot cheats. You know what a dauber is?”

Valentine pulled open his desk drawer, and removed the cocktail napkins containing Izzie’s Hirsch’s pearls of wisdom. Searching through them, he found the one devoted to daubers. “You mean a juice player, or a paint player or a painter?”

“I’m impressed,”Higgins said. “You know how to catch a dauber?”

“Sure. You put the suspected cards under an ultra-violet light, and if they light up, you’ve got a bust. It’s a bad system, because you have to stop the game, and take cards out of play to see if they’ve been daubed.”

“That’s right,”Higgins said, “so, here’s what I’ve come up with. I got a company to manufacture a special discard tray for our blackjack tables. The tray is made of a luminous-detecting plastic. By looking through the plastic, you can spot a card that’s been daubed. That will let a pit boss stand beside the dealer, and stare through the discard tray. If a card lights up, they stop the game.”

“How many trays are you sending?” Valentine asked.

“One,” Higgins said. “And the phone number of the guy who made it for me.”

Valentine drove home that night thinking about the tape of the blackjack cheats Bill had sent him. He had enough problems in his life right now, but this one seemed solvable. The two players had somehow rigged the game so they wouldn’t lose a hand. They’d done it without anything suspicious taking place, which meant collusion was involved, possibly by the dealer, or possibly another player. It was the only logical explanation.

Pulling into the driveway, he spied Gerry’s bike with the banana seat lying in the grass. Ever since he’d had gotten in trouble at school, his son had started doing little things to annoy his parents, like leaving his belongings around the house, and riding his bike around the neighborhood at odd hours. Lois said it was just part of growing up. Slamming the car door, Valentine got the mail, and went inside.

The house was unusually quiet. Lois always put music on when she came home. She liked to play big band or Sinatra and sometimes Peggy Lee. The good stuff.

“Anybody home?” he called out.

Someone was crying in the kitchen. As a cop, it was the worst sound you could hear. It always meant you were too late. He dropped the mail on the dining room table and hurried through the house. Gerry’s school books were scattered all over the floor, his son having dropped everything as he’d come inside. It made Valentine’s blood boil to see his boy act so disrespectfully. Pushing open the kitchen door, he was ready to say something scolding, when he saw Gerry standing with Lois by the sink, his head buried in his mother’s bosom. He was sobbing, and the sound stopped Valentine dead in his tracks.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

Lois looked up, her face awash with tears.

“Something terrible happened at school today,” she said.