James Swain: Gift sense

"You're late," he groused to the FedEx driver at nine-thirty. Taking the clipboard from the driver's outstretched hand, he hastily scribbled his name.

"Got stuck behind a funeral procession," the freckle-faced driver explained, exchanging the clipboard for a padded envelope. "It's that time of year. Got to run. Stay healthy, Mr. Valentine."

Valentine froze in the doorway as the orange, white, and purple van sped away. What was the driver insinuating-that old people died in bunches like leaves falling off a tree? Florida, he'd discovered on retirement, had two things in great abundance: nice weather and lots of mighty stupid people.

The envelope was from the Acropolis Resort amp; Casino in Las Vegas, and he tore it open, remembering his chat the day before with a moronic pit boss named Wily. A player had taken the Acropolis for fifty grand and Wily had begged Valentine to look at the surveillance tape to see if the guy was cheating. He'd sounded desperate, so Valentine had said yes.

The envelope held a video cassette, a check, and a note. Most pit bosses had never graduated high school, and Wily's scrawl was barely legible. From what Valentine could decipher, Wily thought the dealer was involved. Pit bosses always thought that, and he tossed the note into the trash.

Popping the video into the VCR, Valentine settled into his La-Z-Boy. Black-and-white images materialized on his thirty-six-inch Sony. A fuzzy young lady was dealing blackjack to an equally fuzzy man. The Acropolis was one of the oldest joints in Las Vegas and needed to get some updated surveillance equipment or risk losing its license. He fiddled with the tint control and the picture gradually took shape.

Watching surveillance videos was a unique experience. The cameras filtered twice as much light as the human eye, and as a result hairpieces looked like rugs, cheap suits took on zebra stripes, and women wearing red dresses became naked. It was like entering the Twilight Zone.

Soon Valentine found himself yawning. Normally, the tapes he viewed were action-packed and filled with plenty of people. That was how most casino scams worked, with someone causing a distraction while three or four members of a "mob" did the dirty work. This tape was different. One guy, playing alone at a blackjack table, was winning hand after hand. Valentine studied his play, then the sweet-looking blonde doing the dealing. Everything looked legit, except how the guy seemed to know exactly when to take a hit and when to stand.

Twenty minutes later, Valentine still had no idea what was going on. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought someone was putting him on. No one on the planet is that good. Stopping the VCR, he retrieved Wily's note from the trash. The pit boss had written Dealer flashing? and underlined it. Valentine knew when a dealer was flashing her hole card to a player, and the blonde on the video wasn't doing it. Wily was dead wrong.

But that didn't mean something crooked wasn't going down. The guy on the video was winning way too much. Grabbing a pad and pencil from his desk, Valentine knelt on the floor so he was a foot from his TV, then hit Start on the VCR.

"Okay, mister," he said as the tape started to roll, "let's see what you've got."

The guy had plenty-so much so that Valentine soon nicknamed him Slick.

For sixty minutes, he kept a record of Slick's play, noting every time he won, lost, or played to a draw with the house. Slick's strategy was erratic, at times plain dumb, yet he won way more than average. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was, how much over average? A few percentage points could be attributed to luck; anything over that meant darker forces were at work.

When Slick had played one hundred hands, Valentine added up the X's beneath his three columns: fifty-eight hands won, thirty lost, twelve tied. Nearly a two-thirds winning percentage. That was unreal.

He went to his desk and booted up his PC. It was time to do the math. A program called Blackjack Master filled the blue screen. Blackjack Master simulated the game of blackjack with any strategy a person chose to play. Once the strategy was entered, the program would play it for one million hands, then spit out the odds. Several updated versions had come out over the years, but Valentine had stayed loyal to the original. So what if it was slow? It got the job done, and that was all he wanted from a computer.

Slick liked to hit on seventeens when the dealer was showing a ten, and Valentine decided to run it as a separate strategy, just to see where it got him. Blackjack Master Simulation A. Set number of hands (1,000,000) B. Clear statistics C. Fix player total (17) D. Fix player's first card (10) E. Fix dealer up card (10) F. Begin/continue simulation G. Display statistics by hand type H. Display statistics by adjusted count I. Display card deal statistics J. Print statistics K. Write statistics to disk L. Simulation log file M. Return to first menu

Done, he hit Enter, then listened to his hard drive whir. A minute later, Blackjack Master made its opinion known.

It was a bad strategy, producing worse odds than if Slick had stayed pat, and not drawn a card. His eyes shifted to the numbers on his pad. According to his less-than-scientific calculations, Slick had won seventy percent of his hands in this situation.

Unreal.

The other strategies played out the same. Blackjack Master gave them the thumbs-down, yet Slick managed an impossibly high winning percentage. You had to be smoking something to believe that a player could maintain these percentages over the course of several hours' play. Which meant Wily was right about one thing. Slick was definitely cheating. The question was, how?

Valentine ate lunch the same time every day, standing over the kitchen sink wolfing down a sandwich while gazing at his postage stamp of a backyard. Sometimes he listened to the radio, big bands on 106.3, but not often.

Tony, he could hear his wife say, sit down. It's bad for your digestion to stand while you eat.

Old habits die hard, he'd say. You walk a beat, certain things stay with you.

You haven't walked a beat since being promoted to detective, she'd reply, the lines coming out like a Honeymooners skit. That was twenty-five years ago.

Twenty-five years? he'd exclaim, shaking his head in wonder. God, it feels like yesterday.

He sipped a Diet Coke while thinking about his conversation with Wily. The pit boss had called Slick a nut; now he knew why. Slick hadn't just cheated the Acropolis, he'd rubbed everyone's face in it. No hustler with half an ounce of common sense ever did that. It just wasn't healthy.

But there was another dynamic that was equally disturbing. Even if Wily didn't know what Slick was doing, he still should have barred him once his winnings started to mount. Nevada casinos were private clubs that reserved the right to prohibit anyone from playing. It wasn't commonly done, but this would have been a smart time to exercise the option.

Only Wily hadn't. He'd let the casino's losses get out of hand, which meant either he was a total jackass or he thought Slick was on a lucky streak that would eventually run its course, and the Acropolis would win its money back.

Suddenly the soda didn't taste so good. Something was wrong with this picture. Then it hit him like an anvil: Professional hustlers were like nuns when it came to exposing themselves. Slick had broken a cardinal rule of his own profession.

Why?

Mabel Struck materialized on his back stoop, looking tropically resplendent in her orange polyester slacks and high-wattage parrot shirt. Seeing the Tupperware container between her liver-spotted hands, Valentine realized that, bless her heart, she'd brought him dinner.

"Anybody home?" she said, nose pressed to the glass. "Hey, Tony, I can see the TV on. You sleeping on the job again? Wake up, sonny boy."