Valentine placed another call to downstairs.
“Arrest the croupier while you’re at it,” he told the head of security.
The croupier’s name was Alberto, only everyone called him Al. Al had been hired away from a casino in San Juan, where roulette bordered on high art. He sat in a plastic chair in the casino’s detention room, and pulled nervously on his droopy moustache. His partner with the cast sat in the next room, hollering for a lawyer.
Valentine read Al his Miranda rights. Then he made Al stand up, and empty his pockets. He was carrying the roulette ball he’d switched off the table. He looked disgusted with himself, and Valentine got the feeling he had something on his mind.
“You want to talk?” Valentine asked.
“Yeah. You got a butt?”
Valentine got him a cigarette and a light. Then he pulled a tape recorder out of a closet, checked the battery, and turned it on. Al took several drags and started talking.
Al was drinking at a bar when Larry, the clown with the cast, had approached him. Somehow, Larry knew that Al had gambling debts he couldn’t pay. Larry had a solution: He would wear a powerful earth magnet in a cast, and Al would switch the roulette ball for one with a steel core. The winnings would be split fifty/fifty.
“You ever commit a crime before?” Valentine asked.
“Never,” was Al’s reply.
“You were a law-abiding citizen until Larry approached you in the bar?”
“Yup.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
Al stared at the room’s concrete floor. He wore a wedding ring, and Valentine wondered how his wife would react to the news that he’d been arrested for cheating. Al hadn’t thought out the consequences, and now he was going to pay for it.
“I saw all that money passing by night after night, and I just wanted to reach out, and touch some of it,” Al said. “Know what I mean?”
“No I don’t. You sure you’ve never been arrested before?”
Al dragged hard on his cigarette. “Check it out if you don’t believe me.”
Al’s story checked out. Valentine was surprised. He had assumed that when employees went bad, it was because they’d come to the job that way. Jobs weren’t supposed to turn them bad. Al’s work folder said he made three hundred and fifty dollars a week, and was required to pay for his own clothes, which included a tuxedo shirt, fancy cummerbund, necktie, and dress pants. He also had to keep his shoes shined and his hair neatly trimmed. He worked an eight-hour shift, with a five minute break every hour. New Jersey’s politicians had touted the thousands of terrific new jobs the casinos would create for Atlantic City. Al’s job sounded anything but terrific.
Valentine went to his office, and typed out an Incident Activity Report. As he pecked away, it occurred to him that the scam Al and Larry had pulled not only ripped off the casino, but also the other players at the table, as it had denied them a fair game. At the bottom of the report was a space for notes. Normally, he left it blank. He typed in the words
He spent the next hour sorting through the correspondence that had accumulated on his desk. He’d asked the records clerk at the station house to do a background check of Vinny Acosta, the hood they’d seen with Micky Wright, and later with the Hirsch brothers. The clerk had done the check, and Valentine pulled a handful of stapled pages from an envelope, and read Vinny’s rap sheet.
Vinny hailed from the Bronx section of Brooklyn. His childhood highlights consisted of dropping out of the seventh grade, and robbing a grocery store a few weeks later. Since then, he’d been arrested for vagrancy, burglary, contributing to delinquency, assault, assault and battery, assault to kill, obstructing justice, larceny, running an illegal “book”, loan sharking, damage by violence, bombing, running a prostitution ring, attempted murder, and murder.
Two of his arrests had led to convictions, and attached to Vinny’s rap sheet was a psychological evaluation that he’d undergone while doing a stretch in Sing Sing prison in upstate New York. The evaluation showed him to have a general IQ of 72 and a nonverbal of 88. The prison doctors had also psychoanalyzed him, and they deemed Vinny “a constitutional psychopath with strong antisocial tendencies.”
Valentine returned the rap sheet back to its envelope while thinking about the hundred thousand dollars Vinny had been carrying around his waist. Was Vinny laundering money for the mob, or was he stealing it from the casino? The casino was so tightly run that neither scenario seemed plausible, yet his gut told him that one of these crimes had to be going on. Yet somehow, he wasn’t seeing it.
At noon, the phone on his desk lit up, and he answered it.
“Tony?” a woman’s voice said. “This is Sabina.”
In all the years he’d known Banko’s secretary, she’d never addressed him by his first name, preferring to use his particular rank at the time. She was easily the most unfriendly person he’d ever known.
“Yes, Sabina,” he said.
“I just got a phone call for you. A man said he saw your name on a flyer, and wanted to talk to you about the serial killer.”
He grabbed a pen off his desk. “What’s his name?”
“He wouldn’t give it to me.”
“How about a phone number?”
“Not that, either. He asked you to meet him at the old Underwood Exhibit on the Boardwalk. He said he knew you once worked there.”
Valentine had worked at the Underwood Exhibit one summer as a kid. Except for Lois and his father, he didn’t think there was another living person who knew that.
