Deadman's Bluff - James Swain [49]
“I need a favor,” Valentine said.
“I’m busy,” she said curtly.
He dug out his wallet and stuffed a twenty into the tip glass on her tray.
“Name it,” she said.
He borrowed her pen and a frilly cocktail napkin. On the napkin he wrote:
HEY GEORGIE, YOUR BOY IS GETTING TRASHED IN THE LOBBY
He handed it back to her. “See the guy that looks like Don Corleone?” He pointed across the room at Scalzo. “I want you to give him this.”
The waitress walked away with a bemused look on her face that made him think of his son’s crack about him playing cops and robbers. She delivered the note. Scalzo read it, then crumbled the napkin into a ball. He motioned to his bodyguard, and they marched out of the poker room.
It was the opportunity Valentine had been waiting for. He edged up to the feature table, and pushed his way through the crowd until he was in front. A new hand was about to begin, and he stared intently at the table. The tournament had gotten nailed several days ago for employing dealers with criminal records, and he watched the dealer at the table shuffle the cards. The shuffle looked fair, as did the cut that followed it, but something about the dealer’s body language wasn’t right. The dealer, who had a walrus moustache and a square jaw, looked apprehensive. It could have been the presence of the TV cameras, but Valentine’s gut told him otherwise.
Each player got two face-down cards, and the dealer sailed them around the table in a slow, deliberate manner. It was slower than any deal Valentine had ever seen, and he found himself staring at the dealer’s hands. The dealer’s right hand, his dealing hand, was completely stiff. That wasn’t normal.
Finished, the dealer placed the deck on the table. Dealers who used sleight-of-hand to cheat were always conscious of their manipulations. No matter how good they were, they knew that a trained observer could nail them. As a result, there was always a moment of truth after the cheating was done.
The dealer looked up. There was hesitation in his eyes. He glanced into the crowd of spectators and saw Valentine. He swallowed hard.
Gotcha, Valentine thought.
Valentine had always liked movies when the cavalry showed up to save the day, and felt an adrenaline rush seeing Pete Longo and three uniformed cops come barging into the poker room. They were moving fast, the uniforms having unsnapped the harness on their revolvers. He wondered if they were going to nail DeMarco, or the dealer, or both of them. It was about time.
The crowd was slow to get out of their way, and Longo flashed his silver detective’s badge to hurry them along. Valentine stared at the dealer, and saw a look of panic distorting his face.
Longo came up to the tournament director, and the two men had a talk. Part of the director’s job was to act as an MC, and announce when players had won hands. To do this, he used a hand-held microphone, which he now raised to his face. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to have a five-minute recess. Dealers, please stop your games and reshuffle. Thank you.”
Longo and the three uniforms had broken away from the tournament director, and were coming around the table. The dealer had pushed his chair back and placed both his hands palms down on the felt, a sure sign that he’d been arrested before. Longo walked past the dealer and directly toward Valentine while barking an order to the uniforms. Reaching into his jacket, Longo removed a pair of handcuffs from the clip on his belt.
“Tony, you’re under arrest,” Longo said.
“For what?” Valentine said incredulously.
“Two counts of second-degree murder.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Valentine said.
“Like hell I am. Lift your arms into the air.”
The crowd was giving the police plenty of room now, and Valentine felt their hostile stares. He’d arrested hundreds of people in his life, and had always wondered what it felt like. Now, he was going to find out.
He lifted his arms into the air, and a uniform frisked him. Then his wrists were handcuffed behind his back. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but that didn’t