Wild Card

Albert Einstein had said that the only way to win at roulette was by stealing chips. The player in question wore a polyester leisure suit, and had his left arm in a cast, which he rested on the table. He placed fifteen single bets of a hundred dollars on the layout. The croupier spun the ball, and the guy in the leisure suit’s number came up, putting him ahead by two grand.

“What doesn’t look right?” Valentine asked.

“Guy picked up his drink with his broken arm,” Fossil said. “I broke my arm once, and I couldn’t pick up a thing. And look how he places his bets. He always bets fifteen numbers that are together on the wheel. He knows something.”

Valentine saw where Fossil was headed. He went to a desk and picked up a house phone. Calling the floor, he got the head of security for roulette, and told him he wanted the player with the cast pulled into the back room, and held for questioning. Hanging up, he returned to the wall of monitors, and saw their suspect place fifteen more bets. The croupier set the wheel spinning, then spun the ball.

As sometimes happens at roulette, the ball hopped out of the wheel and flew through the air. It landed squarely on the suspect’s cast, where it remained stuck.

“He’s got a fricking magnet,” Fossil declared.

Valentine placed another call to downstairs.

“Arrest the croupier while you’re at it,” he told the head of security.

The croupier’s name was Alberto, only everyone called him Al. Al had been hired away from a casino in San Juan, where roulette bordered on high art. He sat in a plastic chair in the casino’s detention room, and pulled nervously on his droopy moustache. His partner with the cast sat in the next room, hollering for a lawyer.

Valentine read Al his Miranda rights. Then he made Al stand up, and empty his pockets. He was carrying the roulette ball he’d switched off the table. He looked disgusted with himself, and Valentine got the feeling he had something on his mind.

“You want to talk?” Valentine asked.

“Yeah. You got a butt?”

Valentine got him a cigarette and a light. Then he pulled a tape recorder out of a closet, checked the battery, and turned it on. Al took several drags and started talking.

Al was drinking at a bar when Larry, the clown with the cast, had approached him. Somehow, Larry knew that Al had gambling debts he couldn’t pay. Larry had a solution: He would wear a powerful earth magnet in a cast, and Al would switch the roulette ball for one with a steel core. The winnings would be split fifty/fifty.

“You ever commit a crime before?” Valentine asked.

“Never,” was Al’s reply.

“You were a law-abiding citizen until Larry approached you in the bar?”

“Yup.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

Al stared at the room’s concrete floor. He wore a wedding ring, and Valentine wondered how his wife would react to the news that he’d been arrested for cheating. Al hadn’t thought out the consequences, and now he was going to pay for it.

“I saw all that money passing by night after night, and I just wanted to reach out, and touch some of it,” Al said. “Know what I mean?”

“No I don’t. You sure you’ve never been arrested before?”

Al dragged hard on his cigarette. “Check it out if you don’t believe me.”

Al’s story checked out. Valentine was surprised. He had assumed that when employees went bad, it was because they’d come to the job that way. Jobs weren’t supposed to turn them bad. Al’s work folder said he made three hundred and fifty dollars a week, and was required to pay for his own clothes, which included a tuxedo shirt, fancy cummerbund, necktie, and dress pants. He also had to keep his shoes shined and his hair neatly trimmed. He worked an eight-hour shift, with a five minute break every hour. New Jersey’s politicians had touted the thousands of terrific new jobs the casinos would create for Atlantic City. Al’s job sounded anything but terrific.

Valentine went to his office, and typed out an Incident Activity Report. As he pecked away, it occurred to him that the scam Al and Larry had pulled not only ripped off the casino, but also the other players at the table, as it had denied them a fair game. At the bottom of the report was a space for notes. Normally, he left it blank. He typed in the words Throw the book at these guys and pulled the report from the typewriter, and scribbled his name across the bottom.

He spent the next hour sorting through the correspondence that had accumulated on his desk. He’d asked the records clerk at the station house to do a background check of Vinny Acosta, the hood they’d seen with Micky Wright, and later with the Hirsch brothers. The clerk had done the check, and Valentine pulled a handful of stapled pages from an envelope, and read Vinny’s rap sheet.