Lay the Favorite (6 page)

I flipped an index card.

Grand Salami: The grand total of goals scored in all the hockey games of the day. It can be wagered to go Over/Under
.

Robbie J looked at me and raised his perfectly waxed eyebrows. Wrinkles bulged across his shaved head.

“Flash cards?” he said, giggling.

“I’m nervous,” I said.

“’Cause I’m so good-lookin’?”

Even Money:

Flip.

A bet in which no vigorish is laid
.

“No. Because I keep thinking I’m gonna bet thousands of dollars on the wrong team.”

Tony and Robbie J offered different advice, but their sentiments were the same. Dink came up with the plan, we followed it.

“Dinky’s the architect, we’re the construction workers,” Robbie J
said. “Just copy what I do and try not to get too distracted by my beautiful muscles.”

Dink held the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
sports section close to his face and underlined the box scores with his thumb. While driving. Dink drove an aqua four-door Nissan Altima. It was an ugly car, and Dink could definitely afford something nicer, but he bought it as a “self-punishment vehicle” for doing so poorly last baseball season.

There was barely enough room in the car for both Dink and his bouffant. His belly nudged the steering wheel. He was too big to wear a seat belt comfortably, so to drown the
ding ding ding
of the seat-belt reminder system he blasted his Donovan CD. His car jumped the curb as it pulled into the office parking lot.

He entered the office with a bounce in his step. Baseball, with its grueling five-month-long, 4,080-game regular season and its five-inning lines, alternate run lines, and strikeout propositions, had finally wound down and Dink could now focus on football, horse racing, and his beloved hockey. He carried stacks of hockey schedules and a brand-new spiral-bound
Jim Feist Football Workbook
, a compilation of ten years’ worth of results for both college and pro teams with team logs, spread breakdowns, matchup reports, and reminders of the type of surface on which each game would be played. Dink purchased these materials from the Gambler’s Book Shop, downtown. The Book Shop was stocked with information on how to beat any casino or gambling system ever devised. It also carried novels like
Sex, Lies, and Video Poker
, and do-it-yourself divorce kits.

Plopped on top of Dink’s workbook was a brown paper lunch sack from which he pulled out ninety thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He tossed the rubber-banded brick to Tony, who stuffed it into his pockets. A quick discussion of a few games that piqued Dink’s interest and Tony was off.

Between my two phones, I had sixty bookmakers programmed to
speed dial. Beneath the speed dial cover plate was a list of bookmakers’ offices, each with a different code name and password. I had spent plenty of hours becoming acquainted with the telephones. It was important to be quick on them and to know which bookmaker booked which sport, what time they opened, closed, and what their maximum limits were. One of the bookmakers on my list was Texas Toast, a farmer in south Texas who was also a poker player. A notoriously slow speaker, he took twenty minutes to give a rundown of his day’s odds. Dink always assigned him to his new clerks.

Robbie J picked up his receiver and punched a speed dial button with the eraser of his pencil. I picked up mine.

“Yep,” Texas Toast answered.

“Hi. Uh, nine seven six popcorn. Can I get a rundown?”

There was a long silence. In the background, I thought I heard a cow moo.

“My Gawd, popcorn, you sound like a child. Here we go …. N … B … A. Golden State … four … and … a hook. Eighty … eight. Bucks … six … and … a hook. Ninety … two.”

I wondered what a hook was. Too shy to ask, I pretended to fill in the blank boxes of my rundown sheet and then called the next bookmaker on my list.

An 800 number and a man with a Caribbean accent answered:

“Sports. Dis is Bush.”

“GJ nine seven two Dinky,” I said. “Can I get a rundown?”

“Of course, Ms. Dinky. Starting with College Football.
Jee-or-jee-uh, Boo-dog
, ten and a half …”

Robbie J held a receiver to each ear.

He spoke into one phone: “Gimme the Bulls first half, over oh one minus the oh nine for two dimes.”

Then the other: “I’ll take the Heat over the eighty-nine flat for a dime.”

In between confirming one bet and making another, he slid a three-ply ticket from the pile in front of him and jotted down the name of the office with whom he bet, the bet itself, and the
amount he bet to win. With the motion of someone throwing a Frisbee, he tossed his tickets one by one to Dink. Over the table the tickets flew, their top and bottom pages fluttering like moth wings. Two thousand, five thousand, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of bets soared toward Dink. In one quick motion, Dink snatched the tickets out of midair as though they were pesky bugs.

I lost track of where I was on the rundown and hung up on Bush in midsentence.

“What’d he have on Morehead?” Dink asked me.

“Who?” I said.

“Morehead,” Dink repeated.

“I didn’t call Morehead,” I said.

“No, moron,” said Robbie J. “Morehead’s a football team.”

“Morehead’s a college,” Dink corrected.

“The office you just called, what did they have on Morehead?” Robbie J asked.

I looked down at the tiny boxes on my sheet. They were all blank.

“Forget it, we missed it.” Dink yelled. “Call Fort Knox. Fuck, we’re on the wrong side. Go! Go! Go!”

I didn’t have Fort Knox programmed to my speed dial so I picked up the phone and pretended to call a bookmaker just to make it appear as though I was doing something.

“Beth, you gotta say who you’re calling so no one else wastes their time calling the same office. Okay?” Dink said.

“Okay,” I said.

The computers beeped, along with the fax machine. One of the fourteen phones rang. I had no idea which one.

“So?”
Robbie J snapped and I nearly jumped out of my seat. His hand gripped the receiver so hard his knuckles turned white. He was waiting on me to make a call.
“Who are you on the phone with?”

“Uhm,” I said, and hung up.

I found the ringing phone. It was Tony, prepared with his rundown, calling from a men’s bathroom inside the Stardust casino. The Stardust was the preeminent Las Vegas sports book because it
was the first sports book to post the day’s lines. For professionals like Dinky, these lines—calculated by handicappers but untested by the market—were pure potential. Any mistake, any miscalculation or oversight—maybe the line didn’t take into account the college quarterback who stayed up till two in the morning downing tequila shots—was begging for a smart bettor to take advantage of it.

Gamblers called these virginal lines the early lines and there wasn’t a wiseguy in the country who didn’t want to get down on them. To protect itself from getting hammered by the smart bettors, however, the Stardust managers limited the number of bets they took before they had a chance to adjust their lines. It was a first come, first served setup to bet the early lines and competition became so fierce that some gambling bosses paid homeless people to sleep in the Stardust sports book. The homeless player wasn’t making a bet, he was just staking claim to a position in line until ten to eight, when the regular runner moved in, slipped the bum twenty bucks, and took his place in the line. Eventually, in preparation for the next day’s odds, the homeless players began camping out on the sports book’s purple-and-green-flowered carpet at seven at night. The managers put an end to the situation by incorporating a lottery. Get here at a quarter to eight, guys, they told the runners, and draw a number from a hat.

“Gimme Dinky,” Tony said, and I handed Dink the phone.

The televisions cut to a breaking news story. With September 11 just a month behind us, news flashes and terror alerts had become commonplace. Still, we held our breath and looked to the TVs with apprehension. The anchorman reported that letters laced with anthrax had been discovered in Reno.

“Reno?”
I said. “We better warn Louise.”

“I think Louise is safe at the sports book,” Dink said.

Close-up images of Osama bin Laden in his white turban appeared on the television. Another clip showed him walking along a mountainous brown-gray desert with an AK-47 hanging across his chest.

“Guy’s livin’ in a cave. That must be a real riot,” Robbie J said.
He punched a skinny red straw into the foil of his protein-drink box.

“How much is the reward for capturing him?” I asked.

“Twenty-five million,” Robbie J said.

“Think of what we could do with that kind of money!” I said.

“I’d invest in the Yankees to win the World Series,” Dink said.

Bin Laden vanished from the TV screen and in his place appeared Las Vegans who claimed to have served some of the 9/11 hijackers during a trip they made to Vegas earlier that summer. A teenage employee at Hungry Howie’s said the hijackers ordered a pizza from him “with the works, minus the ham.” An Alamo Rent A Car employee explained that he had rented one of the hijackers a brand-new Chevy Malibu, complete with a Triple A discount. At the Olympic Garden, reporters interviewed strippers who had lap-danced for one of the hijackers. “Some big-man terrorist,” said a sarcastic brunette in a push-up bra. “He spent about twenty bucks for a quick dance and didn’t even tip.” When asked what the hijackers looked like, the girls quickly exclaimed, “Cheap!”

How does Sin City appear through the eyes of Islamists? Tonight at seven
.

Louise called from a pay phone outside the Peppermill casino. Her voice shook, not with fear of anthrax, but with elderliness, and she began her rundown. “They have the Seattle Seahawks minus three …”

By lunchtime we were up thirty-three grand.

After a frenzied four-hour shift, we drove to the Red Rock country club to watch the afternoon games at a friend of Dink’s who was also a professional gambler. Along a brick driveway lined with Corvettes, Jaguars, and luxury SUVs, Dink parked his Altima. We walked beneath an outdoor chandelier, through a marble-floored foyer, up a wrought-iron spiral staircase, and onto the second floor, which overlooked the eighteen-hole Arnold Palmer–designed golf course. Opened French doors led to the friend’s office, commonly known as the Den of Equity.

Ten middle-aged men of all moods, sizes, and smells fraternized around the den, fiddling with their sports tickers and talking shop.

“You guys are gonna think I’m full of shit,” said a man with hair plugs, who seemed to be at the center of conversation. “But I met this girl. Redhead. Big tits, no kids …”

With just a few exceptions, these men had known each other since they were in their twenties. In New York, they had played in the same card rooms and were regulars at the track. They remembered each other’s first cars and first wives. They had watched each other go to prison for tax evasion, bookmaking, and race fixing. They’d seen each other flush at the final table at the World Series of Poker and so broke that they couldn’t pay their electric bill. Through the years, they had bet each other thousands of dollars on things as meaningless as whether or not the winner of the spelling bee would be wearing glasses and as consequential as the results of their prostate exams. When they felt that one gambler was in over his head with a girl who was spending fourteen thousand dollars a pop on pocketbooks, they held a gold-digger intervention.

Michael, the Den of Equity’s host, was a short, grumpy old man who looked like he’d just downed a glass of curdled milk. He was reputed to be a ruthless bettor, but he couldn’t manage to turn on any of his state-of-the-art appliances. He hired assistants to teach him how to use the mouse on his computer. When he couldn’t find the TV’s volume button, he asked friends to come over and help. His office, however, was so spectacular—the gambling books in the mahogany bookshelves, the valuable Brooklyn Dodgers paraphernalia, the four flat-screen televisions built into the wall cabinet—that the friends and assistants never left. Thus, the Den of Equity became the game-day hangout and Dink saw it as a great place to introduce me to his friends.

“Everyone!” Dink said, hoisting up his shorts. “Meet Beth, the newest Dink Inc. employee and Flip It aficionado.”

Falafel, an Israeli backgammon player, was the only one to say hello.

Noticing that the host was looking at me, I smiled.

“What?”
he snapped.

Dink and I sat on a couch in the corner. “Your friends don’t like me,” I whispered over the noisy televisions.

“They like you,” Dink said, loudly. I shushed him.

“They like you,” he whispered. “But they barely tolerate women. I guess I kind of forgot that.”

Beautiful day in Wisconsin, the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens against the Green Bay Packers. Hello everyone, what a great matchup we have for you today
.

With no interest in the games, and feeling unwelcome, I stayed at Dink’s side and opened my mouth only to eat chocolate-covered strawberries when they came my way. When it came to sports, I enjoyed baseball the most and I had my favorite players—Pedro Martinez and Vladimir Guerrero. Before I met Dink, I had never watched a hockey game; now that I was beginning to understand the rules and becoming familiar with the players, I found the sport exciting. But I loathed football, an animosity that brewed at Florida State, where I had had classes with some of the players. During lectures, they’d blast their Walkmans and rap to themselves while popping zits on their shoulders. When I was a little girl, I always watched football on the couch with my dad. I’d had a crush on Jim McMahon and when he ran onto the field I’d hold up a homemade sign that read “I
you Jim! Do the Super Bowl shuffle!” But Florida State and the obnoxious tomahawk chop, which stayed in my head for years, ruined the sport for me.