The Scam (4 page)

“Good evening to you both. I am Niles Goodwell, manager of player relations.” Goodwell took a slight bow and whispered to Nick. “Your credit is good here, sir, up to five million.”

“What's your table limit for blackjack?” Nick asked.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“What are your chip denominations over ten thousand?”

“We have twenty-five-thousand, fifty-thousand, and one-hundred-thousand-dollar chips.”

“We'd like a table to ourselves. We'll each start with one million to get warmed up,” Nick said. “Half in twenty-five-thousand chips and half in fifty-thousand chips.”

“Make yourselves comfortable.” Goodwell gestured to a blackjack table where a young woman stood, smiling warmly at them. “I'll be right back with your chips.”

They went to the table. Kate sat to the dealer's left, what blackjack players called “first base,” and Nick took the seat to the right, known as “third base.” A waitress came by to offer them drinks. Nick ordered a martini. Kate settled for a Coke. Goodwell brought them their chips on a gold platter.

“Good luck,” he said, stepping away, but lingering close enough to keep his eye on the action.

Nick smiled at the dealer. “Let's have some fun.”

I
f Nick had chosen craps, Kate would have been lost, but she figured she could handle blackjack. The goal, for both the player and the dealer, was to get as close as possible to twenty-one without going over. Simple, right?

Nick placed fifty thousand dollars on each of the three betting circles on his side of the table. Kate did the same on her two spots and broke into an immediate sweat. There was
a lot
of money on the table. Money for which she was more or less accountable.

The dealer smiled and patted the table. “Good luck.”

She dealt the cards from a six-deck shoe. There were two cards dealt face up for each of their five playing positions. The dealer showed a four.

Kate had a sixteen on one of her hands and a seventeen on the other. She decided to stand.

Nick had a nineteen, an eighteen, and a twenty.

The dealer flipped her hole card. It was a six. The dealer dealt herself another card. It was a ten, giving her a total of twenty. The dealer winced politely, and swept up their chips.

Poof. Their two hundred fifty grand was gone.

It wasn't Kate's own money, but she couldn't help thinking of all the things that she could have bought with it. A house in Las Vegas. Or a Lamborghini Gallardo. Or fifty-four thousand In-N-Out double-double cheeseburgers. Instead they had bought two mighty expensive drinks.

“With the way things are going we could be done early and need a couples massage,” Nick said to Kate. “Do you remember the conversation we had in the elevator?”

“Vividly.”

“And?”

“And I think I'll stick with the game for a while longer.”

After a half hour of play, Nick and Kate were up $1.5 million, and Kate was into the game, riding on a steady drip of adrenaline and her competitive nature. She put $250,000 down on each of her spots, and at the bar behind them, Goodwell picked up the receiver on a red telephone and made a call.

One floor below the casino, at the end of a long hallway, behind a door marked “Customer Relations,” a wall-mounted telephone rang. Evan Trace stepped out of the shadows and answered it. His face was meticulously unshaven and the sleeves on his handmade monogrammed white shirt were neatly folded up to the elbows.

“This is Trace.”

“We've got a couple whales up here,” Goodwell said. “Nick Sweet and Kate Porter. They've taken a blackjack table and are betting two hundred and fifty thousand a hand. They're up one and a half million at the moment and they don't show any signs of slowing down.”

“What do we know about them?”

“They came into town from L.A. on a private jet, walked in the door with five million dollars in cash, and booked the presidential suite for the night,” Goodwell said. “That's it.”

“I want to meet them.”

“I thought you would,” Goodwell said.

“Invite them to my private dining room for a drink when either they've tapped out or we have.”

Trace hung up the phone. He wasn't concerned about the couple winning, even if it added up to tens of millions of dollars. He was a firm believer that his profits came from the winners, not the losers. The winners always came back for more, giving up what they'd won and then some. He knew that from personal experience, which brought him back to the task at hand.

He turned to the center of the windowless room. The only furniture was a stainless steel workbench and the chair behind it. They were placed under the room's single light fixture, a naked bulb that hung on a wire from the ceiling. A sandy-haired man in his late twenties sat in the chair. He was good-looking enough to be a model, or at least he had been before the beating. His eyes were swollen nearly shut, his lips were split, and his nose was bleeding.

Trace stepped up to the table and looked down at the terrified man. “You made a mistake, Stan.”

“I know that,” Stan said, his voice wavering, and glanced fearfully to his right, where another man stood in the shadows. “Mr. Garver can stop hitting me now.”

Garver was also in his shirtsleeves and was wiping Stan's blood off his huge, meaty hands with a towel. His face looked like a head of cauliflower, the result of the beatings he'd taken prizefighting in his youth. He also had thick calluses on his walnut-sized knuckles, the result of the beatings he'd inflicted in the forty-odd years he'd spent in customer relations.

“I run an honest casino,” Trace said. “Sure, we give the players free booze to make them careless, but we never cheat them. We expect the players to treat us with that same respect. You didn't do that, Stan. You cheated.”

“I've had a run of bad luck and I'm deep in debt,” Stan said. “I couldn't wait for my luck to turn. So I nudged it along. It won't happen again.”

Garver spoke up. His voice sounded like each word was serrated and scratched his throat on the way out. “Show Mr. Trace your hands.”

Stan placed his shaky hands on the table. He had long, slender fingers and manicured nails. Trace examined them and nodded with appreciation. Garver slipped back into the shadows.

“They're very nice. You take very good care of them, Stan, and that's smart. Your fingers are the tools of your trade.”

Garver returned to the table. He'd picked up a wooden mallet somewhere. It was chipped from age and heavy use.

“No, no, no.” Stan started to lift his hands from the table but Garver shook his head, warning him against it, so he stopped. He left his hands where they were but looked imploringly at Trace. “Please don't.”

“I'm doing you a favor. Twenty years ago, I was the guy in that chair. Garver broke my hands with that mallet. It changed my whole outlook on life,” Trace said. “Now I own a casino and he works for me. I owe it all to that night.”

Trace held his hand out to Garver, who gave him the mallet, and then pinned Stan's wrists to the table with his massive hands.

“You don't have to do this,” Stan said, pleading. “I promise you that I will never cheat again.”

“I know you won't,” Trace said, raising the mallet over his head. “Think positive. Maybe I'll end up working for you someday.”

Nick and Kate played blackjack for three more hours. At one point, they were up by $3 million. But by the time it was over, they'd lost all of their winnings and were out of pocket another $2 million.

Kate's adrenaline drip had slowed to barely a trickle, and she was thinking more about cheese puffs than blackjack.

“Do you think the buffet is still open?” Kate asked.

“You're hungry?” Nick asked.

“Ravenous,” she said. “I could eat two million dollars' worth of crab legs and tiny key lime pies.”

“I like this side of you.”

Goodwell approached the blackjack table. “Pardon me. If you're done for the night, Mr. Trace would like to invite you to his private dining room for drinks.”

Nick glanced at Kate, then back at Goodwell. “If he'll throw in a couple of steaks, we'll be there.”

“How do you like your steaks prepared?” Goodwell asked.

Trace's private dining room was behind an unmarked door near the high-limit parlor of the casino. Goodwell opened the door for Nick and Kate and waved them through. They stepped into an atrium that was filled with tropical plants and flowers. A sleek Plexiglas-bottomed bridge arched over a koi pond and into the wood-paneled dining room decorated with contemporary artwork. Kate looked down at the pond as they walked over the bridge, taking note of the silver-green fish. They were about five inches long and had red bellies. Piranha, she thought. More appropriate to the setting than koi.

Trace was waiting to greet them on the other side of the bridge. He wore a midnight blue silk tux jacket, a white dress shirt, skinny jeans, and black crocodile loafers.

“I'm so glad to meet you. I'm Evan Trace.”

“We appreciate the invitation,” Nick said. “It was an unexpected treat.”

“I could say the same about the two of you,” Trace said, smiling at Kate, his attention momentarily caught by the red dress. “It's not often that people we don't know walk in off the street, book our best suite, and gamble millions of dollars.”

“Surely you don't know everyone with money,” Kate said.

“Everyone but you,” Trace said.

A table near the atrium was set for three, and a bottle of red wine had been decanted.

Trace pulled out a chair for Kate. “I've taken the liberty of choosing a bottle of wine from my private reserve. I hope that's okay.”

“I'm sure it's lovely,” Kate said.

Lovely,
she thought. She had actually said
lovely.
Good Godfrey, she sounded like a lady.

She was facing the dining room and looking across the table at the artwork on the walls. All large abstract paintings and a familiar painting of seven dogs sitting around a table playing poker. She'd seen the picture a thousand times before. It wasn't something she'd expect to see in Trace's private dining room.

“I like that you've included the painting of the dogs playing poker,” Kate said. “It adds some whimsy to your collection.”

“A print of that painting was on the wall in the motel room I rented when I first came to Vegas. But what you see there is the original oil painting, created in 1903 for a cigar advertisement. I bought it to always remind me of how I got started.”

“How did you end up in the casino business?” Nick asked.

“I like to say it was a sign from God,” Trace said. “I'd gone bust as a gambler in Vegas, so I headed for Palm Springs to be a tennis instructor. I was driving across the desert when my Chevette broke down. It was a thousand degrees outside. I had to walk miles to the nearest gas station, which was this wooden shack in the middle of nowhere run by this grizzled old Indian. I staggered in, sunburned and thirsty, and the old coot welcomed me to the sovereign Chuckwalla Indian nation, total tribal population: one. I had a revelation then and there.”

“You saw a vision of a casino,” Nick said.

“That's right, my sign from God. My burning bush. Once I proved that the old coot's obscure tribe was real, that his barren patch of desert was truly their ancestral land, and that he was the one Indian left, raising the money to build a casino there was no problem.”

The butler brought their steaks to the table and, while they ate, Trace talked about running the Indian casino, selling out his shares once it was a huge success, and using his profits to build Côte d'Argent.

“That's quite a story,” Nick said.

“What's yours?” Trace asked.

“I'm an international entrepreneur,” Nick said.

“I see. And what type of entrepreneurial endeavors do you favor?”

“You could say I'm a professional gambler, only not at cards,” Nick said. “I invest in business ventures of various sorts around the world and hope that they work out. Fortunately for me, they usually do.”

“What sort of ventures?”

“Moneymaking ones that involve considerable risk,” Nick said. “The risk is almost as important to me as the profit potential.”

“You're being vague,” Trace said.

“Yes,” Nick said. “I am.”

Trace shifted his attention to Kate. “And you? What do you do, Ms. Porter?”

“While Nick's busy looking for the next big thing, he forgets to take care of the last big thing and everything else that's going on in his life. That's my job. I manage the details.”

“I get bored easily,” Nick said.

“As do I,” Trace said, his eyes drawn to Kate's cleavage.

Trace redirected his focus and cut what was left of his steak into tiny, bloody squares. “I hope, at least, we've managed to keep you entertained so far at Côte d'Argent.” Trace tossed the squares of meat into the koi pond, and the water churned like it was boiling. The piranha swarmed on the meat in a feeding frenzy.