Deadman's Bluff - James Swain [46]
Gerry nodded. His father believed in giving first-time offenders a pass, provided they were truly repentant. Everyone involved in this case had been. The floor manager appeared at the entrance to the restaurant, and motioned to them impatiently. They settled the bill, then came out to where the floor manager waited.
“You’ve got clearance,” the floor manager said.
Bally’s surveillance control room was the heart and soul of its security operation. Housed on the third floor, it was a windowless, claustrophobic room filled with the finest snooping equipment money could buy. The room was kept at a chilly sixty degrees, and each technician wore several layers of clothing. The floor manager led them past a wall of video monitors to a master console in the rear of the room, where a short, bespectacled man wearing a gray turtleneck sat with his fingers clutched around a joystick.
“They’re all yours,” the floor manager said.
The floor manager left, and Marconi introduced himself, Davis, and Gerry. The man at the console removed his glasses and quizzed Gerry with a glance.
“You Tony Valentine’s son?”
“Sure am,” Gerry said.
“Your father taught me the ropes,” the man said. “We used to say your father could see a gnat’s ass and hear a mouse piss. How’s he doing?”
“Great,” Gerry said.
“Glad to hear it. My name’s Lou Preston. I hear you want to watch some tapes.”
Gerry explained the blackjack scam with the baseball cap to Lou Preston. When he was finished, Preston’s head was bobbing up and down.
“So you think there might have been more cheaters wearing these caps,” Preston said. “Can you give me an approximate time when this took place?”
“Around four o’clock this morning,” Marconi said.
“What exactly did the caps look like?” Preston asked.
Marconi took the cap off his head and gave it to Preston. Preston placed the cap beneath the reading light on his console, and spent a few moments examining it.
“Let’s see if we can find this cap in our digital library,” he said.
Preston began to type on the keyboard on his console. Like most large casinos, Bally’s used digital video recorders to continuously tape the action on the floor. It was a far cry from the old days, when the tapes in VCRs had to be switched every hour. Within seconds, four tapes appeared on a matrix on Preston’s computer screen. Each tape showed a different man in the casino wearing a baseball cap while playing blackjack.
“These four gentlemen were playing blackjack in our casino at four o’clock this morning,” Preston said. “Is one of them your guy?”
Marconi pointed at the guy in the right-hand corner of the matrix. “That’s him.”
Preston dragged the cursor over the picture and clicked on it. The picture enlarged to show a guy in his early fifties wearing a Yankees cap and smoking a cigar. He wore his shirt open, and hanging around his neck were several thick gold chains.
Preston did some more magic with his cursor, and the baseball cap became the only thing on the screen. He struck the ENTER key, then leaned back in his chair.
“In sixty seconds we’ll know if your hunch is correct,” he told Gerry.
The hard drive on Preston’s console made a whirring sound. Marconi and Davis looked confused, and Gerry guessed they weren’t up to speed on the latest technology being employed by casinos to track cheaters. Pointing at the baseball cap, he said, “Lou just burned an image of this cap into his computer. He’s asked the computer to take a look at all recent tapes, and see how many similar caps turn up. Within a minute we’ll know how many there were.”
“I thought that took hours,” Davis said.
“Used to take hours,” Preston corrected him. “We now use Kalatel DVRs to record digitally. It’s light years faster than before. We can search the tapes for anything we want.”
“Beats using a catwalk, huh?” Gerry said.
“Personally, I liked the catwalks,” Preston said.
“Gave me plenty of exercise. They did have their drawbacks, though. One time, I was on the catwalk with a camera with a zoom lens, trying to photograph a cheater switching dice. There was a two-way mirror in the