Sucker Bet (15 page)

27

Climbing into his father’s Honda, Gerry said, “Pop, no offense, but your car smells like something died in it. It’s time.”

Valentine pulled away from Club Hedo’s valet stand, got onto Collins Avenue, and headed north in heavy traffic. “For what?”

“A new set of wheels. You’ve got the dough. What about a Beamer, or a Lexus?”

That was the thing about his son’s generation; they assumed that if you had money, you were dying to spend it. Valentine’s generation was exactly the opposite. If you had it, you wanted to keep it. “I like this car,” he said.

They drove in silence. Then his son popped the question.

“So, are you going to tell me, or what?”

“Tell you what?”

“How you know all that stuff about Rico.”

“No,” he said.

“At least tell me how you read the backs of those cards.”

“You didn’t believe what I told him?”

“About throwing your eyes out of focus?” Gerry pointed at his left eye. “This eye
is
out of focus. There was no writing on the back of those cards.”

“So why don’t you get glasses?”

“Pop, stop beating around the bush, would you?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because it’s important,” his son said.

Valentine was missing something. He glanced sideways and saw his son’s mouth tighten. “Don’t tell me,” he said.

Gerry stared through the windshield. “Afraid so.”

A few hundred decks of Riverboat playing cards had been sold to small-time hoodlums across New England by enterprising Riverboat employees. Every cop in Atlantic City knew about it, but no one had done anything. It was too damn funny.

“How much did you pay for them?”

“Five hundred bucks,” his son said.

The gift shop inside the Fontainebleau’s main lobby was empty. Taking a deck of cards off a rack, Valentine dropped it on the counter and took out his wallet. A jolt went through his spine as the cashier rang it up.

Gerry had laid claim to a couch in the lobby. As Valentine unwrapped the deck, his son sat at rapt attention, oblivious to the bevy of half-clad young ladies strolling about.

“Shuffle them,” his father said.

Gerry gave the cards a good mix. Valentine took them back, shuffled them some more, then took the top card and held it between his thumb and first finger.

“King of spades,” he announced.

Gerry took the card and turned it over. “Do it again,” he said.

Valentine repeated the trick, expecting his son to catch on.

“Come on, Pop. You’re killing me.”

“It’s called the one-ahead principle. When you handed the deck back to me, I spotted the bottom card, which was the king of spades. I shuffled, and brought the king to the top.” He did an overhand shuffle, showing his son how easy it was to bring the bottom card to the top. “With me so far?”

Gerry nodded, his eyes never leaving the pack.

“Now, when I take the top card off in my right fingers, I already know what it is. I pretend like I’m reading the back of the card, while I’m actually learning the identity of the new top card of the deck.”

“How?”

“It’s called the bubble peek. I squeeze the top card of the deck with my left thumb. The front corner of the card hits my left forefinger, which rests along the top of the deck, and the corner bubbles up.”

Holding the deck as if for dealing, he exposed the move to his son. “Normally, sitting as close as you are, you’d spot this. The reason you don’t is because the card in my right hand hides it from your line of vision. But the card doesn’t hide it from mine.”

Valentine shifted his arms so Gerry could see the cards from his angle. He did the bubble peek again, and said, “See it?”

“It looks like the four of clubs.”

Valentine turned the top card over. “You learn fast,” he said.

“I bet you can do that all night long,” his son said. “Does it take much practice?”

“Couple of hours in front of a mirror.”

“Show me.”

Valentine gave him half the deck and walked him through it. Within a few minutes, his son was “reading” the backs of the cards like a pro. They got onto an elevator filled with giggling young girls in bikinis, and Gerry immediately began to flaunt his newfound skill.

“Wow,” one of the girls gushed, “you’re good!”

Nigel and Candy ate lunch in their bungalow.

Eating the Delano’s food every day had gotten Candy spoiled. Fresh seafood and steaks covered in special sauces, potatoes served a dozen different ways, salads with fruits she’d never heard of and couldn’t pronounce, homemade desserts to die for. So when Nigel had said, “Let’s order a Domino’s pizza,” she hadn’t realized what a letdown it would be, the pie swimming in grease when it arrived, the pudgy pizza boy standing in his goofy uniform in the doorway, staring at the furnishings, then Nigel, then her.

To wash the pizza down, Nigel ordered a bucket of Shiner Bocks from room service. He’d discovered the beer in Texas while touring. After downing four, his drunkenness went to the next level. Soon his eyes were at half-mast, his chin dotted with tomato sauce.

“I want to ask you a question,” she said.

He smothered a belch. “By all means.”

“What’s the deal between you and Rico?”

“We’re partners in a business venture.”

“He’s a scumbag. I don’t like you getting involved with him.”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“You don’t need to be hanging out with swindlers. Or pulling scams.”

“So he’s not your friend anymore.”

She reached out and took his hand. “Not as much as you’re my friend.”

Nigel smiled. “I’ve been hanging out with crooks my whole life. They’re called record producers and concert promoters. And look where it’s gotten me.”

“Rico is different.”

The table they were eating at was covered with dead soldiers and pizza crusts. Nigel killed the last Shiner Bock, and Candy found herself wishing she had waited until he was sober to have this conversation. Sensing her displeasure, he took her hand and kissed it.

“No one’s going to get hurt except a bookie,” Nigel said.

“Will you show me?”

He said yes, went into the bedroom, and returned with his laptop computer. It was a paper-thin job with a carbon battery and a screen with better resolution than most TVs. Sitting beside her, he clicked on an icon, and Candy found herself staring at an Excel spreadsheet. In the left-hand columns were the names of hundreds of different colleges. In the right-hand columns, projected point spreads.

“You’re betting on basketball games,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said.

“You could lose.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. There’s no sure thing, unless Rico’s fixing the games.”

“Au contraire,”
he said. “There is a system, and it has nothing to do with fixing the games. And it always wins. Want to see how it works?”

Candy felt her skin tingle. The stupidest damn things turned her on, like the smell of buttered popcorn and truck drivers with sweaty chests. Guys speaking in French was at the top of the list. Her hand dropped on Nigel’s crotch.

“You speak French.”

“Yes. I mean,
oui.
”

Candy squeezed the little dipper, and his drunken eyes lit up. “More,” she purred.

“Of course,” he replied. “But first, let me get out of these clothes.”

28

“Never heard of him,” Bobby Jewel said.

“You sure?” Rico said.

Bobby Jewel was the biggest bookie in south Florida. He worked out of a newspaper store on the Arthur Godfrey Road, which connected Miami Beach to the rest of the world. His operation was as big as two closets sitting side by side. In the back room, two Cuban guys worked the phones, taking bets. Bobby was the face to the operation and sat at the cash register, his four-hundred-pound body pouring out of a helpless chair. Acting perturbed, he yelled into the back room, “Hey, Jesus!”

A window slid back, and Jesus stuck his head out, his mop of black hair partially obscuring his face. Bobby loved Cubans, and used them in his operation whenever he could. He called them the Jews of the Caribbean.

“Yes, Mr. Jewel.”

“You ever hear of some ginzo named Tony Valentine?”

“Ginzo?” Jesus asked.

“A wop. A guinea. You know, an Italian.”

Jesus shook his head. From where Rico was sitting, he could have been a shaggy dog. “Ask Pepe,” Bobby said. “Will you?”

Jesus quizzed the man sitting next to him. “Pepe doesn’t know him, either.” Then his phone rang, and he shut the sliding window.

Bobby slurped the Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino Rico had brought him. He wasn’t very old, maybe thirty-two, but the weight made him look closer to fifty. “Satisfied?”

Rico stared into space. An alarm was going off inside his head. Tony Valentine wasn’t connected; if he was, one of the men in this little store would know it. So how had he known about the murder at the Micanopy casino and that Rico was planning to scam Bobby? Valentine hadn’t heard it over a wiretap because Rico spoke in code whenever he talked business over the phone. Rico took a long, deep breath. Someone had fucking told him.

“Earth to Rico,” Bobby said.

Rico blinked awake. “Sorry.”

“Something the matter?”

Coming out of Bobby’s mouth, the line sounded comical. Rico straightened up in his chair and dropped his voice. “I got this deal I can’t stop thinking about.”

Bobby crushed the empty plastic cup in his massive hand, the sound like a bridge collapsing. “Yeah?”

Rico said, “Nigel Moon, the rock star, came into my club a week ago. We played golf, guy thinks he’s my friend. He’s a real pig, but he’s got money coming out of his ass, so you gotta love him, you know?”

“I’m with you so far.”

“So Nigel and I get drunk. He says, ‘I want to show you something.’ So I let him. It’s a software program on his laptop. Says he paid twenty grand for it.”

Unwrapping a candy bar, Bobby bit off an end. “What’s it do?”

“This is sweet. The program analyzes point spreads on college basketball games. Moon bought it from some scammer in Las Vegas. This scammer convinced Moon that each week, there are one or two games where the point spread is wrong. Some statistical-error mumbo jumbo.”

Bobby laughed so hard that he started to choke. Reaching into a cooler, he extracted a bottle of Pepsi and unscrewed the top with his teeth. Everyone had heard about scams out in Las Vegas where con artists sold devices that predicted the outcome of sporting events. The devices were always junk. The scam worked by predicting games that had already been played, then convincing the sucker otherwise. Rico watched the soda in Bobby’s bottle disappear. He wished Bobby would offer him a drink, but Bobby wasn’t like that. He hadn’t reached four hundred pounds by sharing his food.

“What a sucker,” Bobby said.

“Here’s the good part. Nigel told me this computer program has given him an incredible tip, and he wants to place a big bet.”

“How big?”

“Two hundred grand.”

“You’re shitting me. On which game?”

“Miami College against Duke. He thinks Miami has a chance.”

“Of beating the spread?”

“No, of winning.”

Bobby slapped the counter and roared with laughter. The exertion caused him to belch, the sound so loud that it hurt Rico’s ears. He was easily the most disgusting human being that Rico had ever known, and Rico was looking forward to taking him to the cleaners.

“Is that what his computer program tells him? That stinky Miami College is going to beat the number three team in the nation? I can cover that two hundred grand. What’s your take?”

Rico smiled to himself. It had gone exactly the way Victor had said it would.

“Twenty percent,” he said.

“Deal,” the bookie replied.

Taking the Chinese leftovers out of the minibar, Valentine and Gerry ate out of the white cartons. Mealtime had been a no-nonsense affair in their house, and silence ruled. When the food was gone, Gerry said, “I need to talk to you about something.”

Valentine arched his eyebrows. “What’s that?”

“The bar.”

Gerry’s bar in Brooklyn had been a constant source of friction. Valentine had put up the seed money, and the liquor license was in his name. The problem was the office in back, where Gerry ran his bookmaking operation.

“What about it?”

“I’m thinking of selling it.”

There was a rap on the door. Valentine got up and stuck his eye to the peephole. It was Gladys Soft Wings. He glanced at his son, who was in his Jockeys, and said, “Company,” then cracked the door, and said, “Good morning.”

“I got the tribal police to search the dealers’ lockers.” She held up several typed sheets of paper. “Here’s what they found.”

“Come on in.” He heard his son scoot into the bathroom, then opened the door fully. Gladys walked in and tossed her handbag on the bed. Valentine took the typed sheets out of her hand and scanned the list, paying careful attention to the items owned by Karl Blackhorn. Being the most inexperienced member of the gang, he was the most likely candidate to have left something incriminating in his locker.

Fifteen items were listed beneath Blackhorn’s name. Most of it was ordinary stuff like aftershave and hairbrushes. There was an envelope from an Eckerd drug store, and in parentheses it said
Pictures
. He pointed at the word, and said, “Did the tribal police let you see what the pictures were?”

“Yes,” she said. “They were taken at a restaurant, and showed some men sitting at a table, pigging out on barbecue.”

“Know any of them?”

“Oh, sure,” she said after a few seconds. “Karl, Smooth Stone, and the other three dealers we arrested. And there’s a dealer who left the casino.”

“Who’s that?”

“Jack Lightfoot.”

It made all the sense in the world, and Valentine was surprised he hadn’t seen it sooner. Jack Lightfoot had come to the Micanopy reservation to do a job for Bill Higgins. But because he was a criminal, he had immediately taken up with other criminals and taught them his special method of cheating at blackjack. Gerry emerged from the bathroom, smelling like a barber shop. Valentine introduced him to the Indian lawyer.

“The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, did it,” Gladys said.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” his son said.

Valentine again looked at the list of Blackhorn’s things. The second-to-last item was a bottle of Bayer aspirin, and in parentheses it said
Expired.
He said, “Did anyone look inside the aspirin bottle?”

Gladys shook her head. “I didn’t think—”

“Was it plastic or see-through?”

“Plastic. Should I call the tribal police and ask them?”

“You bet.”

She called on her cell phone. It took five minutes for the captain on duty to get the items out of storage, find the aspirin bottle, and unscrew the childproof lid.

“Huh,” Gladys said. “The chief found a tiny square of paper. He says it’s no bigger than a quarter.”

“Ask him if it’s sandpaper.”

She did. “He wants to know how you knew that.”

Valentine felt the burn of calling it right. One piece of the puzzle had been solved. “Practice,” he said.