Funny Money (12 page)

21

The Devil's Playthings

V
alentine woke up the next morning feeling better than he had in weeks. Saving his son's neck had something to do with it, but also the realization that Mabel was right. He couldn't start quitting jobs because he got cold feet.

He did his morning exercises, then called Joe Cortez at a few minutes before eight. People who were good at what they did usually got to work early, and he found Joe at his desk.

“I think I found your blackjack cheaters,” Joe said.

Valentine grinned. He loved days that started out like this.

“I was sifting through the names when I had an idea,” the INS agent said. “If these cheaters were staying in New York, they'd be playing blackjack at Foxwoods or the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. So I concentrated on foreigners with teaching visas just in Jersey. Then I looked for three males and one female traveling together, and
bingo,
there they were.”

“How can you be sure it's them?”

“The girl,” Cortez said. “I pulled up her passport photo on my computer. You nailed her perfectly: She looks like Audrey Hepburn. Name's Anna Ravic. Born in Belgrade, thirty-five years young.”

“What's their background?”

“Bunch of Croatian eggheads with Ph.D.s in numbers. They came over in late October from Zagreb, wherever that is. They're guests of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.”

Cortez named the other members of the gang. Juraj Havelka, Alex Havelka, who was Juraj's brother, and Rolf Pujin. Cortez had called Interpol, just to see if they were wanted or had criminal records. He'd come up empty.

“I really appreciate this,” Valentine said when Joe told him he had to run.

“What are friends for,” Cortez said.

         

Valentine had rented the room adjacent to his for Gerry and Yolanda. He tapped lightly on the door.

It was Yolanda who greeted him, wearing one of his son's long-sleeve white shirts and nothing else. She was one of those remarkable women that looked great without any makeup and her hair a screaming mess.

“You sleep any?”

She stifled a yawn. “A little.”

“Hungry?”

She rubbed her eyes and grunted in the affirmative. He took out his wallet and extracted a hundred-dollar bill.

“I'm going to Princeton for a few hours,” he said. “Try to stay around the motel, okay? Just in case the Mollo brothers change their minds.”

She stared at the money he'd given her. Valentine didn't know much about her, except she was studying to be a doctor and was head-over-heels in love with his son. Somehow, those two facts didn't mesh, and he found himself regarding her as a dumb broad for getting mixed up with his son. She sensed this, and shot him a scornful look.

“I'm not some floozy, or whatever it is you think I am.”

“Did I say that?”

“It's written all over your face.”

“What?”

“Your thoughts.”

“Gerry didn't tell me you were psychic. You do parties?”

“You're a jerk,” she said.

“And?”

“Get lost.”

She slammed the door in his face and threw the dead bolt. Valentine laughed all the way to the car. Was she insinuating that she didn't want him to come back? That was typical of her generation; they opened their mouths without thinking about the consequences.

He checked beneath the hood for explosives, then climbed in and fired up the engine. If he didn't come back, who the hell did she think was going to pay for the room?

         

Yolanda opened the door and stuck her head out. “He's gone. You can come out.”

Gerry appeared beside her. He'd asked Yolanda to answer the door, hoping his old man would take a liking to her. Only the opposite seemed to have happened. Yolanda was livid and gave him a mean stare.

“Your old man's a prick.”

“He can be nice,” he said defensively.

“So what do we do now?”

That was a good question. Gerry knew what
he
wanted to do. Have a roll in the sheets, take a hot shower, get some chow. Only Yolanda's question was more big picture. So he scratched his belly and pretended to think.

“Where's the hundred my old man gave you?”

She pulled it from her shirt pocket. Gerry tried to take it, and she steadfastly held on to a corner.

“What's the plan, Stan?” she said.

“Do you feel lucky?” he asked.

“What have you got in mind?”

“Let's go gamble,” he said.

         

Princeton was a two-hour drive made shorter by Valentine's heavy foot. The turnpike was clear, and the Mercedes' twelve-cylinder engine took a deep breath at ninety miles per hour. He was a law-abiding citizen except when it came to being on an empty highway. There he drove like a lunatic and suffered the consequences if a cop happened to be around. His late wife had scolded him for it endlessly, and he'd never listened.

He found jazz on the local public station, Dave Brubeck,
Concord on a Summer Night
. When it came to the airwaves, New Jersey had the Sunshine State beat by a country mile. Back home, he could never find jazz or big band or Sinatra, the stations held hostage by shock jocks and every bad Led Zeppelin tune ever recorded. Except for ball games, he rarely tuned in.

On the hour the news came on. The lead story was from Florida. The Micanopy Indian reservation was under siege.

“Earlier today,” the announcer said, “Florida's governor ordered fifty shotgun-toting agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement onto the Micanopy Indian Reservation in Broward County. ‘Video poker must go,' the governor told a group of reporters from his mansion in Tallahassee. But the Indians are fighting back. The tribe's leader, Chief Running Bear, released dozens of alligators into the casino. According to reports, the FDLE agents have fled.

“Reaction from Indian tribes across the nation has been negative. Legally, federal agents are forbidden from entering Indian reservations. Many tribal chieftains are calling upon Washington to intervene.”

The rest of the news was blather, and he tuned it out. So Archie had gotten his wish. He felt bad for the Micanopys. He'd met Running Bear at a cheating seminar he'd done in Las Vegas and had learned a little bit about the tribe's history. They'd been treated like doormats for centuries, and he sensed they were about to get the short end of the stick once again.

A road sign said
PRINCETON, 60 MILES
. His foot challenged the accelerator, and he watched the speedometer creep past a hundred miles per hour.

         

Princeton University is in the center of New Jersey, the hilly landscape thick with hundred-year-old oaks and a history of higher education. The university's campus is as big as a large town, and he had to stop twice to ask for directions.

He pulled into a spot in front of the Institute for Advanced Studies and killed the engine. The mathematics department, for which the university was world renowned, resided here, and he watched a group of students walk by. He'd never made it to college and had always regretted it. Not that being a cop hadn't been an education, but all of its lessons had come the hard way.

He went inside. A bulletin board in the foyer announced the day's seminars. In Lecture Hall 1, physics of oscillatory integrals. In Hall 2, vorticity in the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity. Hall 3, geometric analysis of Chow-Mumford. You needed a degree just to understand the language. Walking into an office, he found a receptionist sitting behind a desk, filling out a form on an old-fashioned typewriter. Looking up, she said, “Can I help you?”

“I'm looking for a visiting professor named Juraj Havelka. He's here as a guest of the mathematics department.”

She thumbed through a log of visiting professors. Valentine leaned over the desk, reading the upside down page she stopped at. One line caught his eyes. Juraj's sponsor was a teacher named Peter Diamondis.

“Sorry,” the receptionist said. “But he left last fall.”

“Did he leave a forwarding address?”

“I'm afraid not.”

Back in the foyer, he consulted the teacher list tacked to the bulletin board. Dr. Peter Diamondis, head of the probability department, was in Fine Hall, Room 408. He asked a student for directions and was soon hiking across campus.

Fine Hall was what a college building was supposed to look like. Six-story, redbrick, with ivy-covered walls. Every student that passed through its doors was weighted down with books. Going inside, he took the stairs to the fourth floor.

The climb got his heart racing. Room 408 was at the end of a cavernous hallway. He tapped on the frosted glass door, then stuck his head in. “Dr. Diamondis?”

Diamondis sat hunched over a PC. He reminded Valentine of the absent-minded professors from the old Disney movies. A scholarly type in his late fifties with pince-nez glasses, his hair resembling cyclone fencing. Above his desk hung a photograph of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out.

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if I could speak to you.”

Valentine entered with his business card in his hand. The professor put the card under his nose and scrunched up his face. “Tony Valentine. Your company is called Grift Sense. What's that?”

“I'm a private consultant for the gaming industry.”

“May I ask in what capacity?”

“I help catch crossroaders.”

“Is that any relation to cross-dressing?”

“They're miles apart. May I sit down?”

“I have a class in twenty minutes.”

“It shouldn't take that long.”

“Be my guest.”

Valentine took the chair across from the desk and unbuttoned his overcoat. “Crossroaders are thieves who specialize in ripping off casinos. It's a big business—about a hundred million a year in Las Vegas alone.”

“And you catch these people?”

“Yes. I can sense when things aren't right on a casino floor and I just take it from there.”

“Grift sense.”

“That's what hustlers call it.”

“You must be very good.”

Valentine nodded that he was.

“And you've come to see me because of my work on cheating at blackjack?”

Valentine hesitated. He'd read just about everything written on hustling blackjack, and Diamondis's name didn't ring any bells. But sometimes it was better to keep your mouth shut and play along, so he nodded his head. He was rewarded when Diamondis removed a deck of playing cards from his desk.

         

“Take out the cards and shuffle them,” the professor said.

Valentine broke the seal on a fresh pack of Bees, the cards used at hundreds of casinos around the world. He gave them a cursory exam; no marks, crimps, or shaved ends.

“Do it this way,” Diamondis instructed him. “Riffle-shuffle, then cut, then riffle-shuffle, cut again, then riffle-shuffle and cut again. As I'm sure you're aware, this is the same shuffling sequence used by most casinos in the country.”

Valentine shuffled as instructed. He kept the cards tight to the table the way a dealer would, with none of the faces being exposed. Finished, he handed the deck to his host. Diamondis declined with a shake of the head.

“I don't want to touch them,” he said. “You deal.”

Valentine hesitated. Had he missed something?

“What are we playing?” Valentine asked.

“Blackjack.”

“How many hands?”

“Four. The fourth will be yours, the others mine.”

Diamondis cleared a space on the cluttered desk. Valentine dealt three blackjack hands to Diamondis, one for himself. The professor played his hands, busting on two, winning one.

“Now,” Diamondis said, “would you say that everything is aboveboard, or to use the gambling lexicon, on the square?”

“I would.”

“Good. On the next round, would you be suspicious if I decided to bet heavily on my hands? This is a hypothetical question, of course.”

Valentine thought about it. He'd started with a new deck and handled the cards throughout. If Diamondis had rigged the game, he was at a loss to explain how.

“How heavily?” he asked.

“Say, five thousand dollars a hand.”

“Yeah, I'd be suspicious.”

“But you wouldn't know why, would you?”

“No.”

“This time, deal five hands,” his host said.

Valentine did so, sensing that he'd been led down the garden path. The professor turned his hands over. He had a twenty, a blackjack, a nineteen, and a sixteen, which he drew a card on, and busted. Valentine flipped his own hand over. He had a seventeen. Had they been in a casino, Diamondis would have won twelve thousand five hundred dollars.

Valentine stared at the professor's cards. Three of his hands contained aces. Juraj had drawn a lot of aces as well. In blackjack, aces were the magic cards, and gave a player a 500 percent better chance of beating the house.

The professor stuffed a pipe with tobacco and fired up the bowl, thoroughly enjoying himself.

“Do it again,” Valentine said.

         

Valentine got burned the second time as well, but on the third go around the proverbial lightbulb went off in his head. It was the shuffle. Diamondis was having him shuffle the deck the same way
every
time, just like casino dealers did. It was predictable, which had allowed the professor to devise a formula to track how cards descended in the deck.

The professor thumped his desk. “Very good! You know, I have several graduate students who spent weeks trying to figure it out. I don't suppose you have a degree in mathematics?”

“Atlantic City High, class of '56.”

“I'll be sure to tell my students that.”

“I'm confused about one thing,” Valentine said.

“And what is that?”