faces.
22
Valentine sat behind the desk in Wily’s office in the surveillance control room. The office was windowless and as dreary as a cave. Wily materialized in the doorway, clutching a stack of file folders to his chest.
“These are the personnel files of the new hires,” he said, placing the folders on the desk. “Nick’s right. It is as suspicious as hell they all flocked over here at once. I should have suspected something.”
Valentine started examining the files and saw that Wily had done a smart thing. He’d separated the employees by the games they worked. Of the new hires, four dealt blackjack, one was a pit boss, six dealt craps, six worked roulette, four dealt poker, six emptied slot and video poker machines, two worked the cage, and one was in finance.
Valentine closed his eyes. He was working with a big puzzle, and there were a lot of pieces here. He spent a minute sorting through them in his head. Then he opened his eyes. Wily was standing in front of the desk, waiting expectantly.
“What you got?” he asked.
“Nick said something interesting before,” Valentine said. “He said he knew that Chance Newman wanted to tear down the Acropolis and run a road through the property. That’s why Fontaine was brought in.”
“So?” Wily said.
“The Acropolis makes money, right?”
Wily smiled brightly. “Nick cleared six million last year.”
“Okay. Fontaine isn’t going to close Nick down by stealing twenty-five grand at blackjack. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Wily cast his eyes downward. Then, like a comic strip character, the proverbial lightbulb went off above his head, and he said, “What you’re saying is, we’re getting scammed at
“That would be my guess.”
“But that would be obvious, wouldn’t it?”
“Not if it’s being hidden.”
Wily took a deep breath. The look of a man about to lose his job was no longer on his face. Now it was one of anger. He drew a file from the pile and held it beneath Valentine’s nose. It was the file for their new guy in finance.
“This joker’s hiding all the losses, isn’t he?”
“I think so,” Valentine said.
“So we’re getting bled to death.”
“Yes.”
Wily bit his lower lip. There was no way of knowing how bad the damages were until they started digging. Judging by the amount of time the thirty new hires had been employed by Nick, the chances were the losses were heavy. Nick might very well be ruined, and Wily knew it.
Valentine got up and patted the head of security on the shoulder. He saw the life come back to Wily’s face, but not much of it, and said, “Where is Nick, anyway?”
“Upstairs with Wanda.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nick’s a creature of habit. Time for his afternoon screw.”
Valentine had to give Nick credit. He knew things were bad, but he didn’t let it spoil his day. Pointing at the files, he said, “How many of these folks are working right now?”
Wily looked through the stack. “Sixteen.”
“Let’s figure out what they’re doing before we start pointing fingers. Don’t want Nick to get sued on top of everything.”
“Wouldn’t that be swell,” Wily said without humor. “Where do you want to start?”
“The catwalk,” Valentine said.
The Acropolis was one of the last joints in Las Vegas to have a catwalk. Back before computers dominated the world, every casino had a catwalk. Usually, they were cavernous spaces in the ceiling with a narrow walkway and a railing. Through two-way mirrors, security people had watched for cheaters. Valentine had made his chops on a catwalk, and still considered them the best thing going.
“Ready when you are,” he said to Wily.
“What game you want?”
“Craps.”
Wily had spread the personnel files across the catwalk. He pulled the files of three employees dealing craps, and Valentine thumbed them open. Each had a snapshot of the employee. All guys. One redhead, one bald, and a blonde who spent too much time sunbathing. Staring down, he quickly found them at the table.
Craps was a furious game. The three new hires were working different sides of the table. They seemed to be working the table hard. Too hard, he decided.
He scouted the faces of the other players. A flashy kid in an Armani suit was shooting the dice. On his coming-out roll, he shot a six. That made the point six. He needed to throw a six again before shooting a seven or eleven, and losing.
The flashy kid picked up the dice and shook them. A hot girl in a leather mini skirt was draped on his arm. The kid raised the dice to her lips, and had her kiss them for luck.
The kid lowered his arm. His hand hung over the girl’s pocketbook for a split second, and Valentine envisioned the dice secretly being dropped, and the loaded pair in his palm, called tops, invisibly replacing them. Tops had only three numbers on each die—in this case, the two, four, and six. With tops, the flashy kid would never roll a seven or eleven and crap out, and eventually roll a six. Because the human eye could only see three sides of a die at any single time, the gaff was undetectable.
Three rolls later, the kid won. Using a purse to switch dice wasn’t new. What Valentine didn’t understand was the three employees’ role in the scam. He decided to watch them closely. Wily did the same.
To his credit, Wily made the scam.
“They’re screwing the other players at the table,” the head of security said. Pointing at the redhead, he said, “He’s talking players out of making smart bets, where the odds are good, and steering them to making proposition bets, where the odds are terrible.”
“What’s the blonde’s angle?”
“He’s shorting the legitimate winners on the payoff,” Wily said. “He’s the banker. When he pays out, he cuts the chips on the table, then makes a giant stack out of the winnings and pushes them toward the winner, palming one in his hand.”
“And adding them back to the tray,” Valentine said.
Wily nodded. “He’s making the losses look less than they are.”
“Which is why no one up in the surveillance control room caught on,” Valentine said.
“Guys upstairs are trained to watch the stacks. If they get short, they get tense.”
“How about the bald guy?”
“The stick man? He’s getting the crooked dice off the table and switching them with a regular pair in his apron. If a floor manager strolls by and wants to look at the dice, they’ll be clean.”
Valentine pushed himself off the railing. He was positive similar scams were taking place at the other tables where the new hires were working, scams that required gangs of hustlers schooled in the art of subterfuge. It was a Frank Fontaine trademark, with Oscar nominations going to everyone involved.
“Give me the file on the finance guy,” he said.
Wily handed the file over. Valentine opened it and stared at the new hire’s picture. Albert Moss, age thirty- five, a curly-haired guy with a loose smile. Moss’s job was to check the daily financials and keep Nick appraised of the casino’s win–loss ratios. Only Moss wasn’t doing that. He was cooking the books and telling Nick that there was money coming in the door, when the money was really going out the door. He was painting a picture of financial
