The man in the turtleneck pumped my hand. Beads of sweat dotted his brow, and I could tell that something was bothering him.
“Nice to meet you,” Harry said.
“Same here,” I replied.
“I need to run,” Black Cloud said. “Good luck in your search.”
“What can I do for you?” Harry asked when Black Cloud had left.
“I’m looking for a missing college girl that was in your casino two nights ago,” I replied. “There was a man stalking her. I’m hoping one of your surveillance cameras took a photo of him.”
“We’re dealing with a situation inside the casino right now,” Harry said. “Once we’re done, I’ll do what I can to help you.”
I followed Harry to the back of the room. Five men were huddled around a high-resolution monitor showing a blackjack game. The game consisted of seven players, a dealer wearing a tuxedo, and some bystanders watching the action.
“This is Jack Carpenter and his dog,” Harry said to the group.
None of the men took their eyes from the monitor.
“You’ll go blind doing that,” I said.
One man turned his head, a thin smile on his face. He was in his early sixties and Italian, with salt and pepper hair and a nose that had been broken a few times but hadn’t lost its character. His face was best described as intense.
“You a cop?” the man asked.
“Ex-detective,” I replied. “I used to run the Missing Persons Unit of the Broward sheriff’s department.”
“My name’s Tony Valentine,” the man said. “I’m a consultant. I help casinos catch cheaters. Do you know what grift sense is?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s the ability to spot a con or someone who’s a crook. Think you can spot a crook in a crowd of people?”
“Sure,” I replied.
Valentine turned to the others. “Want to give him a shot, guys?”
“Why not?” one of the men replied.
Valentine turned back to me. “Here’s the deal, Jack. The guys on the monitor are a gang of professional cheaters. They’ve been swindling the Hard Rock for a month, and have stolen over three hundred thousand bucks.”
I whistled through my teeth. The seven guys at the table wore baseball caps and colorful T-shirts and were swigging bottles of beer. They looked like a bunch of regular Joes, and did not fit the image that I had of professional cheaters.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“They’re using paper.”
“What’s that?”
“They marked the casino’s cards, and put them back into play.”
“Can I see them?”
Valentine removed a worn deck of playing cards from his pocket and gave it to me. The deck had a red diamond design along with the Hard Rock’s distinctive logo.
“The casino subjects its dealers to polygraph tests every month,” Valentine said. “One of the dealers got tripped up in a lie, and confessed to taking several dozen decks out of the casino, giving them to the gang to be marked, and slipping them back in.”
“Is this one of the decks?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I examined the cards but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“How are they marked?”
“They’ve been stained with drops of water,” Valentine said. “The gang only stained the high value cards, which are the most important cards in blackjack. The stains let the cheaters know the value of the cards the dealer is holding. That knowledge gives the cheaters a fifteen percent edge over the house.”
I removed the ace of spades from the deck, and held it up to the dim overhead light. When viewed from the right angle, the stain on the card was plainly visible.
“Why don’t you arrest them?” I asked.
The men fell silent, as did Valentine.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“The dealer who snitched was found in the trunk of his car with his throat slit,” Valentine said. “Without his testimony, we don’t have a case.”
“So you’re letting the cheaters play in the hopes of catching them,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“How can I help?”
“One member of the gang is reading the marks, and signaling the information to the others,” Valentine said. “That’s how marked card scams work. We need to figure out who the reader is, arrest him, and make him talk. That’s our best chance of nailing the gang.”
It was common when the police were stymied in a case to bring in a fresh pair of eyes to examine the evidence. I didn’t know anything about gambling or cheating, but I was good at picking slime-bags out of a crowd.
“I’d be happy to give it a try,” I said.
Standing in front of the wall-sized monitor, I tried to pick out the reader.
Cheating at blackjack wasn’t hard. Each player at the table received two cards, as did the dealer. The object was to get close to twenty-one, without going over. The dealer went last, and had the advantage of receiving one card facedown, the other face up. If the cheaters could learn the value of the dealer’s facedown card, they would know if the dealer was weak or strong, and play accordingly.
At first, I saw nothing out of the ordinary. The gang was drinking and smoking and having a swell time. So was the crowd standing around them. It was like one big party, and had Valentine not tipped me to the scam, I would have been clueless.
After twenty minutes of watching, something strange happened.
The dealer flipped over his facedown card, revealing an eight. His other card was a three, making his total eleven. The dealer dealt himself another card. It was a ten, giving him twenty-one, a winning hand. As the dealer raked in the losing bets, the seven men at the table frowned disapprovingly.
“Somebody screwed up,” I said.
Valentine put down the can of diet soda he was drinking. He shouldered up next to me, and stared at the monitor.
“You think so?” he asked.
“Yeah. I want to see this again.”
Valentine crossed the room, and two-finger typed a command into the keyboard that was wired to the monitor. The film was rewound. Again I watched the dealer pull twenty-one, and the cheaters’ reaction.
“See their faces?” I said. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“You’re right,” Valentine said. “So who’s the reader?”
“I’m not sure. Can we watch it in slow motion?”
“Sure.”
Valentine typed another command into the keyboard. This time, the clip ran in slow motion. Behind the cheaters I noticed a tall, menacing-looking Hispanic wearing a glittering array of gold jewelry. As the dealer raked in the losing bets, the Hispanic brought his hands up to his eye as if to replace a fallen contact lens.
“The tall Hispanic standing behind the players is your reader,” I said. “His contact lens fell out, which caused him to screw up.”
Valentine picked up a house telephone and called downstairs to the floor. “Put an RF tracking device on Table Sixteen.”
