Sucker bet - James Swain [35]
Mabel laughed out loud when she found it. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“What’s that?”
“He lives on Miami Beach.”
Saul Hyman lived in a retirement village in north Miami called Sunny Isles. He had to be pushing eighty, and Valentine imagined him doing what most old guys in Florida did: going to doctors, going to the track, and ogling the pretty girls who dotted the landscape like palm trees.
“Would you like his phone number?” Mabel asked.
“How did you get that?” Valentine asked.
“I typed his name into a search engine called whitepages.com.”
Valentine scribbled the number down. “While you’re at it, give me Gerry’s number in Puerto Rico.”
Mabel gave him the hotel’s number, and Valentine wrote it beneath Saul’s. His son was honeymooning at the Ritz-Carlton with his pregnant bride. Nothing but the best for his boy, especially when his old man was paying. “Listen,” he said, “have you ever watched that TV show, Who Wants to Be Rich?”
“Once in a while.”
“Victor Marks scammed it. I’d like to figure out how.”
“As in cheated it? I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Why not?”
“I read in TV Guide that the security on the show is like Fort Knox.”
“Talk to you later,” he said.
14
Gerry Valentine’s father had been yelling at him since he was a kid.
It had started when Gerry had gotten caught selling marijuana in the sixth grade, and had continued until a week ago, when he’d hit his father up to pay for his honeymoon. Twenty-three years of yelling, and always over the same thing: Gerry didn’t listen.
Gerry didn’t deny it. He marched to the beat of his own drummer, always had, always would. Take the night before in the hotel casino. For years, his old man had told him not to gamble in the islands. “The regulation stinks,” his father liked to say, “and there’s no one to gripe to if something seems fishy.”
Only, Gerry hadn’t listened. Yolanda had gone to bed early, leaving him with the evening to kill. Taking the last of the money his father had lent him, he’d gone downstairs to give Lady Luck a whirl.
The hotel’s casino was small and European in flavor. Gerry knew enough to avoid playing roulette, the Big Wheel, and Caribbean stud poker—which were games for suckers—and he also steered clear of the craps table, which gave a player decent odds if you knew what you were doing. The only other game that gave you a chance was blackjack, and he found a vacant seat at a table with a hundred-dollar minimum.
Having grown up in Atlantic City, he knew a thing or two about the game. The only smart way to play had been published in a book by Edward Thorp called Beat the Dealer. Thorp had doped out a system that he called Basic Strategy. It was as exact a science as algebra.
Sitting beside Gerry was a cruise-ship drunk. The drunk wore an ugly parrot shirt dotted with catsup and a green avocado-like substance. Belching into his hand, he said, “You Puerto Rican?”
“Italian. What’s it to you?”
“Sorry. With that tan, you look Puerto Rican.”
“You got something against Puerto Ricans?”
“Puerto Ricans aren’t allowed to play in the casino,” the drunk said defensively.
“Says who?”
“Says the government. They just want us tourists playing.” The drunk lowered his voice. “If you ask me, I think it’s because they’re too stupid to understand the rules.”
Yolanda was Puerto Rican. Had he been on his home turf, Gerry would have smacked the guy in the head. He glanced at the dealer. He was an effeminate Puerto Rican with olive skin and wavy hair. He didn’t say much, but in his eyes a fire was burning. He heard the drunk, Gerry thought.
His father had told him to never play with a pissed-off dealer. But what could the dealer do? A pit boss was watching, and the cards were dealt out of a plastic shoe. Deciding to go against his old man’s advice, Gerry had stayed put.
That had been his first mistake.
The dealer had cleaned out everyone at the table. Because Basic Strategy required intense concentration, Gerry had noticed the inordinate number of small cards being dealt. Small cards