Deadman's Bluff - James Swain [75]
Gerry examined the cloth bags. They were subs, a device used by crooked employees to steal chips. The mouth of each sub had a flexible steel blade sewn into it, with an elastic strap attached to both ends. The sub was worn in the pants, between the underwear and belt line. The crooked employee would palm a chip off the table, and by sucking in his gut, drop the chip into the mouth of the sub. The move took a second, and was invisible if done properly.
Gerry put the Kepplinger and the subs back into the paper bag. Angelo Fountain had just told him some thing important. This tailor had so much work, he couldn’t handle it all. A one-man factory.
“The police would like to talk to this tailor,” Gerry said.
“They going to send him back to prison?” Angelo Fountain asked.
Gerry shook his head. “Making cheating equipment isn’t against the law. They just want to ask him who ordered the baseball cap.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all, Mr. Fountain. They just want the name.”
Angelo Fountain got a pad of paper and a pencil from the kitchen. He wrote the tailor’s name and address on the pad, his handwriting painstakingly slow. Then he tore off the slip and gave it to Gerry. They shook hands in the foyer.
“Tell your father I said hello,” Angelo Fountain said.
Gerry and Vinny stood on the front porch buttoning their jackets, the wind blowing hard and cold off the nearby ocean. Davis and Marconi were at the curb, the car’s windows steamed up. Gerry guessed they would drive straight to the tailor’s address, and pressure him. That would put them one step closer to stopping George Scalzo’s operation in Atlantic City, and putting a bunch of hoodlums in prison.
“You need to take your father away for a while,” Gerry said.
“Why?”
“Just to be safe.”
Vinny looked back at the house and shuddered from something besides the cold. “My father and I don’t happen to get along, in case you didn’t notice.”
“He still talks to you, doesn’t he?”
“Meaning what? You and your father didn’t talk?”
“Not for a long time,” Gerry admitted.
Vinny lit up a cigarette, blew a cloud that hung over their heads. “So what changed?”
That was a good question. Up until six months ago, his relationship with his father had been no better than Vinny’s and his father’s. But it had done a one-eighty since he’d gone to work with his father. Now they talked in civil tones and ate meals together and even shared a few laughs. It wasn’t perfect, but if he’d learned anything in his thirty-six years on this earth, few things in life ever were.
“Me,” Gerry said. “I changed.”
35
Valentine folded his cell phone and dropped it in his pocket. He’d been barred from the tournament. It didn’t seem possible, and he tried to guess how many millions of dollars he’d saved Nevada’s casinos since be coming a consultant. Fifty million, and that was a low estimate. And this was how they repaid him. The leper treatment.
“The news wasn’t good, was it?” Gloria asked.
“You’re a mind reader,” he said.
They were still standing beside the cage of noisy parrots in the lobby. Gloria put her hand on his wrist. She was a toucher, something he’d always found attractive in a woman. The lobby noise made it hard to talk, but she tried anyway.
“I hope it wasn’t about your son,” she said.
“No, Gerry’s fine. At least the last time I checked.”
“He’s sort of unpredictable, isn’t he?”
“That’s a nice way to put it.”
“Was it about the job?”
“Yes. The governor has barred me from stepping