Loaded Dice (10 page)

What the hell,
he thought.

Fifty minutes later, Lucy was up five grand.

Wily had said that Lucy had won a total of twenty-five grand, which meant she’d beaten them for five hours
straight
. Valentine found himself shaking his head. Somehow Lucy had changed the game’s odds to be in her favor, and she was cleaning them out.

He killed the power on the VCR. Then he went onto the balcony and stared down on the neon city. The Strip had kicked into high gear, and he tried to guess how many people were down there. Five thousand? Ten? It was like trying to guess the number of ants in an anthill. Inside, he heard someone knocking on his door.

He crossed the suite and stuck his eye to the peephole. Wily stood outside, an empty cocktail glass in his hand. He looked three sheets to the wind.

Valentine hated drunks. His father had been one, and slapped him around when he was a kid. Then he’d grown up and paid his father back. In people who drank he saw weakness, and little else.

He let Wily in and offered him a chair. The head of security reeked of scotch, and he tried to keep the contempt out of his voice.

“What’s up?”

“Look at the tape yet?” Wily asked, smothering a belch.

“Yeah. I’m surprised you let her play so long.”

“You think she’s cheating?”

Valentine thought back to the tape and chose his words carefully. “It’s definitely not on the square. She always wins the big hands. Did you notice that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Whenever Lucy Price doubled down, she won. Whenever she split pairs, she won. That’s why she beat you silly. She won the important hands.”

A pained expression crossed Wily’s face. “You tell Nick that?”

“I haven’t told Nick anything. My guess is, you saw her reading the Basic Strategy card and pegged her a sucker. When she won a few grand, you credited it to beginner’s luck. When she got
way
up, you figured she was on a hot streak and would eventually fall back to earth. Am I right?”

Wily stared into his glass. He seemed surprised that it was empty.

“You should have been a mind reader,” he said.

Valentine found himself feeling sorry for him. Bad losses often cost security heads their jobs. He said, “Forty-nine out of fifty pit bosses would have done the same thing you did, and let Lucy Price continue to play.”

Wily brightened. “Is that what you’re going to tell Nick?”

“Yes. Tell me something. Did you interrogate the dealers who worked Lucy’s table during her streak?”

“I did better than that,” Wily said. “I had them polygraphed.”

“And?”

“They came out clean.”

Valentine leaned back and stared at the drunken head of security. Novice blackjack players did not win twenty-five grand placing five-hundred-dollar bets. The odds just weren’t there for it to happen. He hated to be stumped, and this had him stumped.

“I need to talk to this woman,” he said.

Wily gave him a scornful look. “How you going to do that?”

Valentine thought about the little dance on the balcony that morning. He couldn’t deny the magnetism he’d felt when he’d held her in his arms. But that wasn’t going to stop him from figuring out what she was doing. If Lucy was cheating, he would make her pay.

“Easy,” he said. “I’ll call her.”

He had no trouble getting Lucy’s phone number. She was a slot queen, and played in slot tournaments held by the large casinos. That meant her name, address, phone number, and preferences were stored in their databases. Calling around, he’d gotten a casino he did work for to give him Lucy’s number. It had been easy.

She had three numbers: work, home, and cell. He nestled the cordless phone into the crook of his neck and debated which to call. There was a chance she was in a local hospital under psychiatric observation, but more than likely she’d been released and was home. Las Vegas was bad that way. It had the highest suicide rate in the country, yet the treatment that everyone subscribed to was to ignore the problem.

He decided to call her house. An answering machine picked up, her voice bright and cheery. “Well, hi there. You caught me at a bad time. Wait for the beep, and don’t forget to leave your number. Bye.”

The beep came a few seconds later. Clearing his throat, he said, “This is Tony Valentine calling for Lucy Price. We met this morning at the Acropolis. I was hoping—”

His words were interrupted by a piercing sound.

“This is Lucy Price,” a woman’s voice said.

“Hello,” he said stiffly.

“Do you believe in kismet, Mister Valentine?”

“It’s Tony. No, not really.”

“I do. I’m sitting in front of my computer, staring at your Web site.”

He didn’t know what to say. Putting up a Web site had been Mabel’s idea. Good for business, she’d assured him, and cheap. Only it made him uncomfortable as hell when he was on the phone with someone and she told him she was staring at his Web site.
Trying to trip me up?
he wanted to ask.

“So what do you think of my Web site?” he asked when they met for breakfast at ten o’clock the next morning.

“The graphics are cool. And the articles you wrote about casino cheating for
Gambling Times
were interesting, too,” she said. “I never realized that there was so much cheating going on.”

He was finding it hard to take his eyes off her. He’d woken up mad as hell that he hadn’t heard from Gerry. But those feelings had disappeared when he’d set eyes on Lucy. She was a symphony in blue—a powder-blue pantsuit, a blue bow in her hair, and light blue eyeliner. Had the Web site mentioned blue was his favorite color? If not for the dark circles beneath her eyes, he would have found her beautiful.

He plunged a fork into his egg and watched the yolk burst. He had suggested breakfast, having remembered an advice column in a newspaper saying that it was a neutral meal. Lucy had agreed, and now they were sitting in the recently opened breakfast shop at Caesars Palace. She poured skim milk over a bowl of granola, then raised a spoon to her lips.

“How much is Nick paying you to check up on me?” she asked.

He blinked. Her voice hadn’t changed, but her eyes had.

“Nothing. I’m doing it as a favor.” Her eyes were burning a hole into his face, but she was still eating. He bit into his toast and said, “It’s an interesting case. You believe Nick robbed you, and Nick thinks you cheated him. Nick’s a square guy—I’ll vouch for his honesty. So that would mean you’re a cheater. Only I watched a surveillance tape of you playing blackjack, and I don’t think you are. Which means both of you are wrong.”

Lucy’s spoon hit her bowl with a
plop
. “How’s that possible?”

“Someone else is involved. What’s the expression? Playing both sides for the middle? I think that’s what is going on here.”

“Which makes me a dopey dame who got suckered and didn’t see it coming,” she said, standing and throwing her napkin into her bowl. “Thanks a lot, Tony.”

Embarrassed, he stood up. Only his pants didn’t come with him. He grabbed them by the waist and tugged. She smirked inconsiderately.

“Airline lost my luggage,” he said stupidly.

“So buy yourself another pair. It’s called shopping. Ask your wife.”

His mouth went dry. “Who told you I was married?”

“Your Web site has your name, and your son’s.”

“My wife died of a heart attack two years ago.” He saw something in her face change. A chink in the armor. He said, “She used to buy my clothes, pick out the colors. I don’t think I own anything that she didn’t buy me.”

“Except those pants,” Lucy said. “You an odd size?” He nodded and she said, “So was my ex. Look, Tony, I don’t know where this conversation is headed, but all I really care about is getting my twenty-five thousand dollars back. If you can’t help me, then shove off.”

Her voice had turned harsh. This was Lucy the gambler, and he didn’t like it.

“That’s pretty inconsiderate,” he said.

“Just because you talked me off that balcony doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”

“I wasn’t helping Nick when I met you,” he replied.

She had to think about what that meant. His breakfast was getting cold, and he sat back down, picked up his fork, and resumed eating. To his surprise, so did she.

The best thing about getting old was you appreciated how precious time was. They decided to start over. Lucy went first.

She’d grown up in Cincinnati. At seventeen, she drove to Las Vegas with her belongings tied to her car, became a dental hygienist, got hitched, had two kids, got divorced, and lost custody to her ex. She’d played slot machines for relaxation. She called her current financial situation “a setback.”

Then it was his turn. His life was no movie—he’d been a doting husband, a good cop, and a so-so father, according to his son—and she stopped him when he’d said he was retired. “I know this is none of my business, but how old are you?”

“Sixty-three.”

“I would have guessed fifty-three. I’m fifty-two.”

He saw her smiling. It was starting to feel like a date, and he decided to put the conversation back on track. “After my wife died, I started consulting. Back when I was a cop in Atlantic City, I had this knack for catching cheaters. I could pick one off the floor, even if I didn’t know what he was doing. Hustlers call it grift sense.”

“How can you spot a cheater, if you don’t know what he’s doing?”

“Cheaters are actors. They know the outcome, so they have to fake their emotions. That’s the hardest part of the scam.”

“You can tell the difference between a realie and a phony?”

“That’s right.”

“So what am I?”

“A realie,” he said.

He saw her smile again, and motioned to the waitress for their check.

They left the coffee shop. Of all the joints in Vegas, he had a soft spot for Caesars. There was live entertainment everywhere you looked, plus beautiful statues, Olympian wall art, and a staff that made visitors feel special.

They stopped at the Forum Shops. A sign for the
TALKING ROMAN GOD SHOW
said the next performance was in ten minutes. He’d seen the show before. Animatronic statues of Roman gods narrated a wacky story to the accompaniment of lasers and booming sound effects. It was brainless, yet lots of fun.

They found an empty bench. Lucy sat sideways, her knee almost touching his. It was hard to believe she was the same woman he’d met yesterday. She’d bounced back quickly from the edge of despair.

“How can you tell I’m a realie?”

“I don’t think Sharon Stone could fake the emotion I saw on the tape of you winning at blackjack,” he replied.

For some reason, this made her laugh. “Okay. If you could tell by the tape that I’m not a cheater, then why did you want to talk to me?”

She was grinning like a cat, and he wondered if she was trying to trap him into admitting there was an ulterior motive in him inviting her to breakfast. There wasn’t, so he answered her honestly.

“Because there are two things bothering me.”

Her smile faded. “Oh. What are they?”

“The first is the simple fact that you started with ten thousand dollars, and you ended up with twenty-five thousand of the casino’s money.”

“So? Aren’t people allowed to win sometimes?”

“They are, but not like that.”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitated. Lucy was a gambler. Most gamblers thought they understood the games. They did, when it came to the rules and strategy. But few understood the math, especially when it came to winning and losing. In that department, just about everyone who gambled was a sucker. He stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

He bought stationery in the gift shop. When he returned to the bench, a guy with a bad dye job and lots of gold chains was putting the moves on Lucy. Seeing him approach, the guy shrugged and left. Valentine sat down and tore the plastic off the paper.

“All right,” Lucy said, “show me why I’m not supposed to win.”

He drew a chart on a piece of paper. It was the same chart he used when he gave talks at Gamblers Anonymous. Finished, he turned the paper upside down. Her eyes locked onto the page.

She lifted her eyes from the page. “Is this for real?”

“Afraid so,” he said.

“But how can the casino’s edge increase? Doesn’t it always stay the same?”

“For each hand, yes.”

“So the edge doesn’t change.”

“No, but it eats into your bankroll. The edge gives the casino one-point-four cents of every bet you make. You lose gradually, which makes your objective of doubling your bankroll impossible. The more bets you make, the worse it gets. It’s what pays for this place, and every other place in town.”

“The edge,” she said.

“That’s right. Over the long haul, you can’t beat it.”

“Only I did. Did I get lucky?”

He pointed at the top of the chart with his pen. “Luck is betting all your money on a single hand. The first bet, you’re playing nearly even with the house. If you win, that’s luck. You played for five hours, and won over fifty percent of your hands. Luck had nothing to do with it.”

She drew back into herself, not sure where the conversation was headed. “You said there were two things bothering you. What’s the second?”

He hesitated. Lucy caught it, put her hand on his knee and dug in her nails hard. Grimacing, he said, “Your story sounds like a fairy tale. You never played blackjack before. Well, why did you play? My guess is, someone talked you into it.”