Mr. Lucky (23 page)

41

V
alentine led Gaylord into the kitchen and fixed a pot of coffee. The sergeant fell into a chair, his body language indicating that the last thing he wanted to be doing on a Sunday night was dealing with a murder. That was the problem with homicides. They always came at the wrong times.

Valentine excused himself, went into the bathroom, and called Mabel’s house on his cell phone. His neighbor answered and, hearing the concern in his voice, quickly assured him that she, Yolanda, and his granddaughter were safe and sound.

“We’re taking precautions,” Mabel said. “Don’t worry.”

“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” he said.

When he returned to the kitchen, the coffee had finished brewing and Gaylord had laid several folded sheets of fax paper out flat on the kitchen table. Valentine saw yellow highlights on every page, along with notes written in meticulous script in the margins. The sergeant waited until he had a steaming mug in his hand before speaking.

“You mind my asking you a personal question?”

“What’s that?” Valentine said.

“Why go back to work after retiring? The money?”

“My wife died. She used to keep my social calendar.”

The sergeant stared into the depths of his drink. “There’s a message there, isn’t there?”

“It’s nothing you can prepare for,” Valentine said.

Gaylord looked up at him. “The loss of a spouse?”

“Loneliness.”

The sergeant put his mug on the table. He hadn’t even tasted it. Picking up the fax paper, he read from it. “The manager of a 7-Eleven about fifty miles north of here found a body behind his store an hour ago. The victim was a Hispanic male, late thirties, about six feet tall and a hundred and ninety pounds. He’d died from a gunshot to the forehead. The policeman who arrived on the scene said the victim was still warm when he touched him.”

“No ID?”

“No. His pockets were picked clean. And get this. His fingerprints were gone. Burned away with some type of acid.”

“They didn’t take out his teeth, did they?”

“I already figured out who he is.” Something resembling a smile crossed Gaylord’s face. He probably got the opportunity to solve a real crime about once a year. He picked up his mug and sipped his coffee, extending the moment. “I figured the guys who dumped him weren’t driving around with acid in their car. I contacted the major credit-card companies and asked them to pull up any recent purchases of acid at any home improvement or auto-parts stores in the past few hours. I cast a net of a hundred miles from the 7-Eleven.”

And hit pay dirt,
Valentine thought. Since 9/11, creditcard companies had become one of law enforcement’s biggest allies. If a cop knew a suspect’s purchasing patterns, he could follow the suspect across town or across the country.

“I got a number of hits,” Gaylord went on, “but one stood out. A man named Angel Fernandez purchased a can of boric acid at a Home Depot about thirty miles from the 7-Eleven a few hours ago. He also bought cleaning fluid. He paid for the items on his Visa card.

“Now here’s the interesting part. The credit card was a corporate card issued to employees of a company called AGM. Stands for Asset Growth Management. They’re out of New York.”

“Sounds like a brokerage house,” Valentine said.

“They are. I got Visa to send me the names of the other AGM employees who have cards.”

Gaylord spun one of the faxes around. It was from Visa and contained the names of fifteen people. One name had been highlighted in yellow: Juan Rodriguez. “You said the guy you shot was named Juan, so I assumed this was him.”

“Did you check to see if he had a record?”

Gaylord handed him another fax. It was a rap sheet for Juan Rodriguez and included a grainy mug shot. It was the same guy Valentine had shot in Ricky’s driveway.

“He’s a drug dealer,” Gaylord said. “Works out of Miami, connected to several cartels in Colombia. You shot a real bad dude.”

Valentine felt the invisible knot in his chest loosen. Gaylord was telling him to forget the rubber bullets; he’d shot a menace to society. He pointed at the remaining faxes on the table. “Can I look at these?”

“Be my guest.”

Valentine read the page with the names of the AGM Visa cardholders. His eyes locked on a name at the top. “Stanley Kessel,” he said. Gaylord read it upside down.

“Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“Was he before your time?”

Gaylord shot him a hurt look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Stanley Kessel is from Slippery Rock. He’s a childhood friend of Ricky Smith’s. Mary Alice Stoker said Stanley once stole money from her purse. Said he was a bad apple.”

Gaylord gave it some thought. Had his brain been an engine, Valentine imagined he would hear the gears shift. “Stan Kessel. Yeah, I remember that little weasel. In his senior year, he got caught stealing the answers to the SAT tests. They had to cancel the tests in the whole state. I heard he moved to New York, made a killing in the stock market.”

“Does he have family here?”

“His parents are long gone.”

“His name is at the top. My guess is, this is his company. Why do you think he sent four thugs to intimidate Ricky Smith?”

“Because Stanley’s involved.”

“Has to be,” Valentine said.

As a kid, Valentine had admired a man in his neighborhood named Ralph Coker. He was a plumbing salesman and always drove nice cars. Coker’s son Eddie and Valentine had played together. One day, Eddie had taken Valentine to his father’s office. There had been a desk and a phone. Nothing else. “Where’s your father’s chair?” Valentine asked.

“They don’t give him one,” Eddie said. “They want him out selling.”

Gaylord’s office at police headquarters reminded him of Ralph Coker’s. A desk, a phone, a computer, and no chair. There was a chair against the wall, and Valentine guessed it was for guests. He sat in it while Gaylord worked his computer. The sergeant’s thick fingers were a blur across the keyboard. The computer responded with beeps and funny noises that, put together, resembled music.

Gaylord went into NCIC, a national registry of criminals that every law enforcement agency in the country could access. He typed in Stanley Kessel’s name and hit enter.

“Don’t you ever sit down?”

“Yeah. In the car and in front of the TV. This is exercise.”

NCIC came up with nothing. Gaylord went to Google and again typed in Kessel’s name. This time, he got a number of hits, and Valentine watched him scroll down the list, then select one and click on it with the mouse.

“You were right,” Gaylord said. “Kessel is the president and founder of AGM. I found a story from the
Wall Street Journal
about him. Says he’s a self-made millionaire. Specializes in market making, whatever the hell that is.”

“That’s a broker who takes companies public on the stock market.”

“Must be lucrative.”

Valentine leaned back in his chair. He felt the cold from the concrete wall seep into his neck. It cleared his head and let him see the real picture. Stanley Kessel was a smart guy who’d started his own company. Ricky Smith was a loser who stayed home and played loud music. Stanley was running the show, not Ricky.

“How many miles from here did you say they dumped the body?” he asked.

Gaylord lifted his eyes from the computer screen. “Fifty. Why?”

“Can you do a record search of the nearby towns?”

“Sure. What am I looking for?”

A house on the edge of town, or a large apartment. Someplace where the larcenous citizens of Slippery Rock could congregate and practice ripping off a casino. Every gang had one.

“A place in Stanley Kessel’s name,” he said.

42

S
tanley Kessel owned a house on a two-acre lot on the outskirts of Slippery Rock. Or rather, his company did. Gaylord knew the place but hadn’t been there in years.

“Can’t believe he’s been right here under my nose and I didn’t know it,” Gaylord said as they drove down a dirt driveway. The house was on a dead-end street with no streetlight. Gaylord killed the engine of his car and sat perfectly still. It was nearly 1:00
A.M
. He’d gone to a judge’s house and gotten him to sign a search warrant.

He started to climb out, then glanced sideways at Valentine. “Stay here.”

“You don’t know what you’re looking for,” Valentine said.

“You don’t think I’ll recognize cheating equipment if I see it?”

“You don’t know what cheating equipment is.”

Gaylord’s chin sagged. “So what do you suggest I do?”

“Deputize me. Then I can’t taint the crime scene.”

Valentine could tell that Gaylord wasn’t thrilled with the idea. He raised his right hand, just to goad him. Gaylord shook his head and swore him in.

They got out and stared at the house in the darkness. It was practically falling down, with a patchwork shingle roof and shutters hanging on one hinge. The front porch creaked unhappily as they stepped on it. Gaylord put his face to the glass cutout in the door. Finding it locked, he said, “Step back.”

“You going to kick it in?”

“No, I’m going to blow it down.”

Valentine smiled. It was the first funny thing he’d heard the sergeant say.

“Try the back door,” he suggested.

“Why?”

“It’s obvious no one used the front much.”

Gaylord mumbled under his breath and walked off the porch. He was packing the weight but could put it into high gear when he needed to. As they came around the house, a motion-detector light went off, the bright orange light shining directly in their faces.

It took a moment for Valentine’s eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw that the lawn behind the house was littered with broken refrigerators. Gaylord shook his head.

“The town will pick this stuff up, free of charge.”

Valentine got close to the machines and realized his eyes were playing tricks on him. They were slot and video-poker machines with their guts ripped out.
The gang wanted to steal a jackpot but couldn’t figure out how,
he thought.

Gaylord tested the back door and found it locked. He punched out a pane of glass with the butt of his automatic and stuck his hand through.

“Hold on,” Valentine said.

“You think there’s something behind the door?”

“You said Kessel was a weasel. You want to put your life in a weasel’s hands?”

Gaylord stepped away from the door. “No.”

Valentine went into the garage behind the house and came out with a piece of rope. He tied the rope around the doorknob, then walked into the yard. He handed Gaylord the end, and the sergeant gave it a sharp tug. The door banged open, followed by a loud
thwap
! An arrow flew through the back door. Its path took it directly between where Valentine and Gaylord were standing. Both men heard its whistle as it flew by their heads.

The arrow went into an oak tree in the backyard with such force that Valentine could not pull it out without snapping it in two. Drawing his sidearm, Gaylord said, “Thanks for saving my life,” and marched into the house. Valentine saw a light come on and followed him into the kitchen. It was a square room with a yellowing linoleum floor. Sitting in the room’s center was a crossbow strapped to a metal chair. Tied to the trigger was a bungee cord, which was also tied to the back door.

Valentine had never seen a crossbow except in the movies. It was a fierce-looking weapon. He decided he’d be happy if he never saw one again.

He cased the downstairs. The rooms were sparsely furnished and covered with a coat of dust. The upstairs was the same, with box springs lying on the bedroom floors. Returning to the kitchen, he said, “I didn’t find anything. Does this place have a basement?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“I live in Florida. We don’t have basements.”

“I’m sure it’s got one.”

“Then it must be hidden, because I can’t find it.”

Gaylord banged on the walls. Inside the pantry he found a hollow wall and pried it open with his fingernails. Cold air blasted their faces. He stuck his head into the space, then found a light string and tugged on it. A naked bulb came on. Valentine peeked over his shoulder and saw a stairway descending into the basement. Gaylord started to go down, and Valentine touched the sergeant’s shoulder.

“Can I go first?”

“Let me guess. You don’t want me touching anything.”

“If you don’t mind.”

Gaylord let him go first. The air in the basement was extremely cold, and Valentine felt a chill go through his body that went straight to his toes. At the bottom of the steps, he paused to stare and felt the sergeant bump into him.

“Pay dirt,” he said under his breath.

The basement resembled a small casino. On one wall was a blackjack table with two chairs; in the room’s center, a roulette table and betting layout; on the far wall, a regulation-size craps table. On the floors around each of the tables were dozens of chalk Xs. Gaylord pointed at them and said, “Looks like a dance recital.”

Valentine went to the blackjack table. It had been bugging the hell out of him that he couldn’t figure out how Ricky had won every single hand of blackjack he’d played at the Mint. He’d never met a scam he couldn’t figure out, and he’d decided that it was because it was a tape.

So he stood a few feet away from the blackjack table and just stared. There were only two chairs, one for Ricky and one for someone else. He remembered back to the tape. An elderly woman with white hair was at the table. She had fronted Ricky his initial stake. Was she also involved?

He stared at the table for a full minute. Everything looked normal, except the pack of Lucky Strikes sitting on the right side of the table. If he remembered correctly, the elderly woman had smoked like a chimney. He stared at the position of the cigarette pack. It was directly beneath the shuffle machine. The Mint used shuffle machines at their blackjack tables, as did many Las Vegas casinos. Shuffle machines sped the games up and made them more profitable.

Valentine had never liked shuffle machines for the simple reason that cheaters could also get their hands on them. The one on the table was called a Shuffle Master. It could shuffle eight decks of cards at once. It also had a unique feature. After the decks were shuffled, the Shuffle Master inverted their entire order, one card at a time. The machine did it at lightning speed, but the inversion was still visible if you stuck your nose to the face of the machine. Or if you stuck a camera beneath the machine.

He picked up the pack of Lucky Strikes. It looked normal, but felt heavy. He popped the lid and stared at the miniature camera inside. Then he examined the top of the box. The camera’s eye was part of the bull’s-eye pattern on the front.

Hanging from one of the chairs was a lady’s handbag. He opened it and found a receiving device inside. He heard Gaylord come up from behind him.

“What did you find?”

Valentine handed him the pack of Lucky Strikes. “The camera inside the cigarette box recorded the order of the cards inside the shuffle machine. The information was sent to a computer. The computer had a software program that calculated how to play the cards so that the house would lose every hand.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Ricky constantly switched the number of hands he played. One round, he played one hand; the next he played three. The software program told him to do that.”

“How did he get the information?”

Valentine tapped the chair with the woman’s handbag. “The lady sitting next to him received the information. All she had to do was stare into her handbag. She communicated to Ricky with some kind of code.”

“Is the dealer involved?”

“The dealer doesn’t have a clue,” Valentine said.

“And they practiced it all right here in Slippery Rock,” the sergeant said. “Well, this should be enough to convict Ricky of cheating.”

“It won’t convict Ricky of anything. There’s nothing illegal about owning crooked gambling equipment. The crime is bringing the equipment into a casino.”

Gaylord shot him an exasperated look. “So what do we do?”

“Find something that
will
convict him.”

Valentine crossed the basement to the roulette table. He spun the wheels and set the ivory ball in motion. The most common way to beat roulette was by gaffing the wheel. This was done by creating a bias in the wheel that would favor one side over another. The other method was to gaff the pocket walls, called frets. Some frets would be gaffed so they’d be more likely to reject the ball, while others would accept the ball more easily. On the betting layout he saw a stack of yellow legal pads. Picking one up, he stared at the rows of figures and mathematical calculations covering the page. In exasperation he dropped the pad on the table.

“Not good?” Gaylord asked.

“They’re using visual prediction.”

Gaylord shouldered up beside him. “Guess that isn’t illegal either, huh?”

He shook his head. “It’s an advantage strategy that predicts the outcome without any outside assistance. The player mentally calculates the ball and wheel speed to estimate where the ball will drop from the ball track. Then, based upon bounce swing—”

“What’s that?”

“An estimate of how many pockets the ball will bounce after it falls. Each wheel is different. So is each dealer who spins the ball. Anyway, the player takes that into consideration and makes his prediction of which numbers are most likely to be winners.”

“How could Ricky Smith do that?” the sergeant said. “He’s not that smart.”

“Ricky didn’t. Another player did,” Valentine said. “That player checked out that wheel days or weeks before. He recorded hundreds of wheel spins and wrote down profiles of the different dealers.” He walked around the table and stood behind the roulette wheel. “That player stood here, did the math, and signaled to Ricky which numbers to bet on. Ricky then quickly bet those numbers.”

“You’ve seen this before?”

“Yeah. It only works if the player doing the predicting is sharp.” Valentine tapped the yellow pads on the table. “This guy.”

“You think that was Kessel’s role? He was real smart in school.”

“Then why did he steal the SATs?”

“Like I told you, he’s a weasel.”

Valentine already knew how the craps scam worked and did not bother to examine the table. Instead, he stood in the room’s center and scratched his chin. Nothing he had found was going to put anyone in jail—except the crossbow, and it was going to be hard to prove who put that in the kitchen.

“Hey, look at this.” Gaylord was standing on the side of the room beside the furnace. He’d found a door and had his fingers on the knob.

“Hold on,” Valentine said. He went upstairs and got the rope. They repeated the door-opening drill, but stood at an angle from the opening. This time, nothing came flying out. Gaylord went in and flipped on the light.

The room was unfinished, with walls made of packed dirt and an uneven concrete floor. In its center was a table that held two TV sets. A chair sat in front of the table, a remote on the seat. Valentine picked up the remote and pressed the power button. Both TVs instantly came to life. On one set was a commercial; on the other, a female newscaster talking sports. Valentine stared at them, not seeing any connection.

His eyes fell on the thirty-gallon garbage bag leaning against the wall. It was the same kind of bag he used at home, with a built-in tie at the mouth of the bag. He crossed the room and untied the top. Inside he saw a few thousand used scratch-off lottery tickets.

“All right,” he said under his breath.

“What?” Gaylord asked.

He extracted a handful of tickets. “Ricky won a fifty-thousand-dollar lottery jackpot, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, a few days ago. Let me guess. He found a winning ticket and figured out a way to cover over the circles.”

“There you go.”

“Ricky then gave the ticket to his friend, who worked at a convenience store,” Gaylord said, “and was planning to repurchase the ticket and then show everyone he’d won a jackpot. Only, he decided to let Roland Pew in on the action.”

“Why do you think he did that?” Valentine asked.

“They’re old buddies.”

Valentine slung the garbage bag over his shoulder. As he started to walk out of the room, he saw Gaylord standing in front of the twin TVs. A horse race was showing on both sets. It was the same race, only being run at different times, the horses at different portions of the muddy track.

“I’ve seen this channel before,” Gaylord said. “It’s on cable. It shows nothing but horse races and equestrian events. My teenage daughter loves it.”

Valentine watched the race end on one set, then watched it end on the other, all the while counting silently in his head. Seven seconds between endings.