Carter & Lovecraft (13 page)
The weekend had passed, and the pits were relatively quiet in the day. The pit managers, however, remain vigilant. While some con artists and cheats prefer to operate when the casino is busy, hiding their activities amid the crush, others assiduously groom themselves to look incompetent, put on a cheap rayon shirt, and visit when things are slow, to be as baffled as anyone when they have a run of “luck.”
One such guest was currently sitting at the roulette table, under the camera-moderated eye of the manager for that pit, Bernie Hayesman. The roulette table scams, what few of them there were, tended toward childish simplicity, primarily stealing back chips from failed numbers or sliding them surreptitiously into a winning neighbor. They were transparent and embarrassing, and some idiot tried them all the time. The croupiers and the floormen (a third of Hayesman’s floormen were women, but the title had become traditional—besides, “floorperson” sounded ridiculous) were long since inured to such pathetic ploys, and Hayesman was rarely troubled by calls from the roulette table.
Today was different. Hayesman had taken a call from Alia Rand, his floorman covering the double zero table, asking him to put the camera on the guy in the blue shirt. Hayesman did so.
The guy looked like a geek, one of the genii they got now and then who couldn’t tell the difference between statistics and numerology. Even when they got cleared out because their infallible system sucked dick, they’d go away to improve it to new heights of uselessness, come back in a few months, and lose it all again. You had to love these people.
The math is simple; the house
has
to win. So when it doesn’t, either somebody’s cheating, or they just got a run of luck. Casino people know there’s no such thing as luck, just the odds. It all evens out in the end, and the house 5.26-percent-plus edge continues to cut. Any bursts of luck at the wheel soon fall away, and the gambler loses.
This guy wasn’t losing. He had a small heap of chips by him. He didn’t gamble on every spin, but once every three or four, he would shove everything onto red with a weird little spasm. And then red would come up.
He never bet on black, and he didn’t bet every time red came up, but when he did it was always on red, and he always won. Every time he did, his stack doubled.
Hayesman hailed Rand on her Bluetooth earpiece. “How many times has he won, now?”
“Including the times you’ve seen, seven. He started on twenty-five bucks, now he’s got thirty-two hundred. I got a bad feeling about him the third time it happened. Once is normal, twice is coincidence, three times was starting to feel like voodoo.”
Hayesman knew what she meant. Three consecutive wins on the colors wasn’t statistically staggering—it was odds of about twenty to one—but the way the guest placed the bet with such certainty … well, it meant nothing objectively. Subjectively, it felt wrong. The guest knew something that was giving him wins. That was just a gut feeling. After seven consecutive wins, a chance of about a quarter of 1 percent, the gut feeling was becoming a certainty.
The guy won again. Hayesman took the desk calculator out of the drawer and stabbed in some numbers. That was a win at odds of 833 to 1, rounding the decimals. If the guest kept this up even a few more times, it would hurt the house’s bottom line badly; Hayesman knew enough about geometrical progressions not to want one on his watch. He looked up from ruminating over the number on the calculator’s display to see another win. The man was gathering a crowd, and looked to be enjoying the attention. He had almost thirteen grand of the casino’s money in front of him. It wasn’t a huge amount in the casino’s dealings, but two more wins would take it over fifty grand, and that just wasn’t going to happen.
“Close the table, and check it,” he told Rand. “If the guest makes a move toward another table, bring him up here. I’ll talk to him.”
The table was closed amid expressions of dismay from the onlookers. The guest himself seemed unfazed by events, tipped the croupier fifty bucks when he changed the pile of $25 and $100 chips for a more convenient fistful of 5G grays and 1G oranges, and wandered off. As soon as the table was unattended and the guests were elsewhere, the duty mechanic arrived to look it over. The wait until no one was around was diplomatic—it didn’t do to imply that a guest had been cheating without proof. It was doubly important not to imply such a method of cheating was even possible, because unsupported paths to wealth prosper in greedy minds, and such minds are not uncommon among casino guests. Hayesman had seen enough crops of idiots coming in with half-baked
Mission: Impossible
gadgets not to want to encourage them.
Hayesman returned to the plate of ribs he had ordered and that had just been delivered when the geek on the wheel started to do so suspiciously well. He enjoyed it in quiet solitude for a little over five minutes before there was a knock at the door. Rand put her head around to ask if he was free. Hayesman looked regretfully at the cooling ribs and said yes.
The geek looked about as prepossessing as he had on the closed-circuit TV. He dressed like his mother had sent him out, and Hayesman hoped he’d spend some of his money on some new clothes. It wasn’t
The Big Bang Theory
or
Napoleon Dynamite
levels of poor choices, but the wardrobe still looked oddly standardized. Maybe all the geek’s clothes were the same so he never had to think about what to wear in the morning. Hayesman remembered reading that was how Albert Einstein bought his clothes. He rubbed his brow; that was the second time he’d thought about Einstein that day, he was sure, but he couldn’t remember what it had been about the first time.
“Enjoying your lunch?” asked the geek. Hayesman knew right that second that he would never like the guest.
“That was quite a run of luck you had just now,” he said, wiping sauce away from his mouth with the edge of his napkin. He suddenly realized he was looking like a B movie gangster, took the napkin from his collar, and dropped it on his plate. “You have a system?”
“Not really,” said the guest. “I just decide when I want to double my money, and then bet. It was working pretty well.”
“There’s a little thing called ‘The Rules of Probability’ that say that’s not such a good system, sir.”
“Rules.” The man wrinkled his nose. “There’s always a higher authority to appeal.”
Hayesman leaned back in his chair. He was coming to the conclusion that the guy was probably just honestly lucky for those few spins, and could easily have lost on the next spin. “You talking about God?”
The man seemed slightly pained by the suggestion. He shook his head.
“You know how likely that little winning streak of yours was?”
The man looked up, his eyes flickering a little from side to side as if he were reckoning it up in his head. “One in seventeen hundred and fifty-seven,” he said after two seconds.
“And do—”
“Point,” interrupted the guest, “seven eight six six. The decimals go on for a while, but you get the gist.”
“And do you see why we might take an interest in those kinds of figures? Sir, our whole business is built on understanding those Rules of Probability, and nothing makes us more wary than when we see what we call
unusual patterns of betting
that keep somebody winning.”
“This is all fascinating,” said the guest.
Hayesman couldn’t get a handle on him at all. Most people have seen enough films and TV to know—or to think they know—that being taken off to an office in a casino is a bad thing. In reality, being beaten, shot, and buried in the desert for Vegas or given concrete boots in Atlantic City was utterly out of character for modern casinos. The wise guys had been superseded by entities bigger, just as ruthless, and way smarter. Smart enough to stay within the law, and where the law wasn’t suitable to their needs, rich enough to lobby and get it changed.
Most people would be looking pretty panicky by now, but the guest just looked bored. Hayesman decided to skip the lecture about how
unusual patterns of betting
clued in observant floormen and their pit managers. He would just cut to the chase.
“Your pattern of betting was very unusual, sir, and your results were off the chart.”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Nothing we can prove. But this isn’t a court of law, sir. It is a private business, and we can choose who we deal with. We choose not to deal with you.”
“You mean,
you
choose not to.”
“I represent the company in this matter. If you disagree with the ruling, you may communicate your grievance to the company by writing to this address”—he took a card from a box on his desk and held it out—“marking it to the attention of Guest Relations.”
The guest made no move to take the card. Hayesman lowered his hand and dropped the card to the desktop. “The address is also available on our website.”
There was near silence. The guest had gone from smug to pettishly angry. He kept exhaling heavily through his nose.
“But it was your decision,” said the guest. He didn’t say it as if he were arguing. He simply wished to be clear on the facts, no more, no less.
“There’s not a manager in the country wouldn’t have made the same call, sir. I’m sorry, but there it is. I’m afraid you are no longer welcome at the Oceanic.”
“I keep the money, though? Yes?”
Hayesman was positive that very second that the man had cheated. He had no idea how, but now he was sure. Without an understanding of the method, however, he was on thin ice if he withheld the guest’s winnings. “How much have you got in chips, sir?”
“Twelve thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars,” said the man. He said it without hesitation and without looking at his chips. Hayesman had a feeling he could tell you exactly what change he had in his pocket and the mix of coins that made it up. The guy was either eidetic or had a trained memory. Hayesman had seen his like before.
He took a cashbox from the deep drawer in his desk, unlocked it, and counted out $12,750. Rand took the money and offered it to the guest, her hand held out for the chips. The man regarded her for a moment, then gave in. He put the bills in his wallet and looked at Hayesman.
“Are we done?”
“We’re done. Have a nice day, sir, and—please—don’t come back.”
The man smiled. “
Bon appétit
,” he said. Rand led him out.
* * *
Rand was joined by three other floor staff outside the office, and they formed up around the guest as he was walked off the premises. It seemed to amuse him.
“I’m flattered that you think it would take four of you to subdue me,” he said to Rand as she led the group through the old-school coin slots to a side exit.
“SOP,” she said. “There’s nothing personal in this, sir.” She could hardly wait to get him out of the building. They’d had to deal with real sharpers, drunks, and people who couldn’t tell the difference between the house’s edge and actual fraud. It could get messy sometimes. In comparison, this guy was quiet and cooperative. The bad,
bad
feeling she was getting from him was not something she could rationalize or justify, but it bothered her more than if he had been fighting drunk and cussing her.
“Okay, okay,” he said, suddenly speeding up and getting ahead of his escort before they knew what he was doing. There were no other guests in that corner, and ahead of them was the fire door they were taking him to. Despite the sense that all was not well, Rand couldn’t see any good reason to feel worried. Yet she was, profoundly and certainly.
“The house always wins. I get it. I truly do. You, ma’am, gentlemen, are just doing your jobs. Let me tip you.” He had some coins in his hands, and for a bemused moment, Rand thought he was going to give them his spare change. But instead, he fed the coins into four slot machines, two on either side of the aisle, triggering each before going on to the next. When he was done, he went to the door by himself.
“Three point two four five two times ten to the twenty-seventh.” He smiled, a cold thing. “Enjoy.”
The first machine leaped into noisy life as the last reel clicked home. Rand was distracted from the closing door by a harsh electronic fanfare. She glanced at the machine, and did a double-take as she saw it had hit its maximum jackpot.
Another fanfare from the opposite side of the aisle, and another jackpot, and another, and another. The four machines played their triumphant tunes as lights flashed and coins vomited from four prize chutes.
The door closed.
Questioning was a different skill now.
When he was still a cop, you flashed the badge and people started talking. Even if they were lying, or evasive, at least their lips were moving and you could get something out of them. Of course, there were always the idiots who got their cues from TV and the movies, echoing, “You won’t get nuthin’ from me, copper,” since Jimmy Cagney first sneered into a camera, or its modern counterpart, “I want a lawyer.” They always said, “I know my rights,” but usually they didn’t. They panicked and gabbled, or they shut up about the wrong things and talked more than they realized. The last generation of gang members he’d had to deal with before resigning, the “fuck the po-po” people, they were so focused on posing for their mug shot that it occupied most of their attention budget for the day and then they’d talk without even realizing it. It’s a truism that the vast majority of criminals are not too bright. For every Moriarty, there’s an army of guys who use Velcro shoes because laces are too challenging.
As for civilians, getting them to shut up once they know they’re talking to a cop is the hard part.
That all changed when Carter became a private investigator. People regard PIs as in pretty much the same compartment of stereotypes as reporters: bottom-feeding scum they don’t want to talk to.
It had taken some ingenuity and psychology to find a way around it, but Carter had found a pretty good solution. He disassociated himself from the actual act of investigation, putting the focus—and any associated onus—on the client. If he simply introduced himself as a PI, things turned cold. If, however, he could identify or at least hint to them (whether it was true or not) that he was simply a hireling, then he became just an employee, another working stiff.
