her. What had Kris done to deserve that? The police wouldn’t ask him, because the police didn’t give a shit. All they cared about were the chips.
“Do it,” he said.
10
Valentine finished eating lunch with Nick, then rode back to town with Wily. He hadn’t talked to Mabel all day, and he pulled out his cell phone and called her.
Mabel Struck was the most important woman in his life. An attractive southern lady who’d befriended him after Lois had died, she now ran his business, solved an occasional minor scam, and fed him when she thought he needed a home-cooked meal. Next to his late wife, he’d never known a better person.
“Grift Sense,” she answered cheerfully.
“Is this a rare coin shop?”
“There you are! I was starting to get worried about you.”
“You holding down the fort without me?”
“I got a Federal Express package this morning from the Yeslenti Indian tribe in northern California,” Mabel said. “They also sent a certified check with your usual fee.”
“What’s the problem?”
Mabel read from a letter included in the package. The Yeslentis had opened a casino twelve months ago. It was nothing more than a giant circus tent in the middle of a parking lot, and had none of the hysterical architecture of Las Vegas or Atlantic City, yet it had already pulled in a hundred million bucks.
The problem the Yeslentis were having was at their blackjack games. A pair of gamblers had been winning regularly, and the tribe suspected marked cards. Finishing the letter, Mabel said, “They sent six decks of cards from the casino.”
“Did you look at them?”
She hesitated. One of the great things about Mabel was that she wasn’t afraid to take the initiative. Admitting it was another matter, and he said, “You did.”
“Well, yes.”
“Find anything?”
“I put the decks under the ultraviolet light on your desk. They haven’t been treated with luminous paint. There aren’t any obvious marks or nicks, either. I know you said there are marked decks that are nearly invisible to the naked eye, but I don’t think these cards are marked like that.”
“Why not?”
“I went onto the tribe’s Web site and looked at their setup. The lighting in those tents is horrible. You start squinting at the backs of the cards, people are going to get suspicious. I think the marks are there, but somehow I can’t see them.”
Valentine closed his eyes and thought for a few moments. “Are the cards Bees?”
She let out a laugh. “Why yes, how did you know?”
“It’s an old trick, dates back to the Wild West. The cards aren’t marked, but a cheater can tell what value they are.”
“That’s some trick,” Mabel said.
“Open up the center drawer on my desk,” he said. “There should be a brand-new deck of Bees. Take it out and put it next to the cards the Yeslentis sent you.”
He waited while Mabel found the deck. Through the car’s windshield he could see the surreal skyline of the Las Vegas Strip. Wily had been driving for ten minutes, yet didn’t seem any closer to their destination.
“Done,” Mabel said. “Well, would you look at that! It’s the sides of the cards that are different. Your deck has lines running up the sides that are in perfect alignment. The deck from the reservation casino has irregular lines running up the sides. How clever.”
“They’re called sorts,” he said. “A deck of cards is cut from a sheet. That way, all the cards have identical markings on the backs and the sides. To construct a deck of sorts, the cheater buys a few cases of Bees and finds decks that are cut off-center. He removes the high-valued cards from an off-center deck, and mixes them with low- valued cards from a regular deck. That’s all he needs to know.”
“Who should the Yeslentis arrest?”
“They need to determine who’s bringing the cards to the table. It might be a pit boss, or a shift manager. They should watch him for a few days, see who he’s tight with. For all they know, he may be the ringleader of a gang.”
Mabel wrote down what he’d said, then read it back to him. It sounded better than anything he could write, and he told her so. Then he said, “How’s Yolanda? How’s the baby?”
“Yolanda is coming over later. Baby’s still cooking.”
“Tell her I said hi.”
They had reached the Strip. He started to say good-bye, then remembered that he’d called Mabel for a reason. Instead of spending a few hours looking at surveillance tapes of Lucy Price, why not have Mabel find out if she was a cheater?
“I need you to look up a woman in Creep File. She may be a blackjack cheater. I’ll give you her profile.” Closing his eyes, he described the woman he’d talked out of committing suicide that morning.
“You sound like you got a good look at her,” Mabel said.
He opened his eyes. He detected a hint of jealousy in his neighbor’s voice. That’s wasn’t like her, and he said, “We were on TV together. Talk to you later.”
Mabel hung up the phone with a smile on her face. Leave it to Tony to end the conversation with a puzzle.
She booted up the computer on his desk. The study was her favorite room in Tony’s house, its walls lined with a treasure trove of crooked gambling equipment and gambling books. But when it came to catching cheaters, the most important thing in the room was a computer program called Creep File. The program contained the names of five thousand cheaters and con artists whom Tony had tangled with during his twenty years policing Atlantic City’s casinos. When it came to catching cheaters, there was nothing like it.
Pulling up a blank profile, she typed in Lucy Price’s particu-lars. Then she ran it against the other profiles in Creep File. No matches came up.
She reread what she’d typed, just to be sure she’d filled in all the boxes. There was something unusual about Lucy Price’s profile, only she couldn’t figure out what it was.
Then she had an idea. Tony said the best way to tell if something wasn’t right was to compare it to something that
For the heck of it, she pulled up three more women. And saw the same thing.
Tony had known Lucy Price’s height, weight, and age. For the other four women, he had put in estimates. He hadn’t known exactly, so he’d guessed.
He hadn’t guessed on Lucy Price.
Tony was old-fashioned when it came to the opposite sex. And he rarely talked to strange women when he was working. Too fearful of being set up, she guessed. So how had he known so much about Lucy Price? There could only be one explanation. He was attracted to her.
She shook her head sadly. She loved her boss, but had also accepted that he didn’t quite love her. Not that he didn’t treat her well; he was an absolute prince in that department. He paid her a wonderful salary with terrific benefits, made her laugh every day, took her out to meals and to the movies, and was willing to share just about everything he knew. But he didn’t love her. And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
Hearing the front door chime, she went to greet her visitor.
Yolanda stood on the stoop, clutching a paper bag to her pregnant belly. Her eyes were bloodshot, and Mabel realized she’d been crying. It was a nasty day; rain pelted her shoulders like stones thrown by wicked little boys. She ushered her inside.
