“I want out,” I told Chenza.
We were sitting beside her pool, drinking margaritas. I thought they were a sissy drink, but frozen tequila and lime went with the nachos her housekeeper had whipped up. Loaded with jalapeños, onions, cheese, and salsa, Josie's nachos were hot as lava.
“I've been wanting out for a long time.”
She licked salt from the margarita glass. “You want to be on the Strip.”
“Yeah, I want the Strip. I've outgrown Halliday's. I've been there for over six years. It's been good for me, but I've felt hemmed in for a long time. I wouldn't leave as long as Con needed me, but he's buying into Morgan's renovation plan. It's going to be a disaster, but that'll be their heartburn. I've put enough of my time and blood in.”
“You don't just walk in and start running a Strip casino, it's not like getting a manager's job in a supermarket chain with a thousand stores. How many clubs are there, eight or ten?”
“I don't want to run one; I want to own one.”
“Ahhh.” She licked more salt. As I watched her lick the rim of the glass, I understood where she got the practice for the amazing things she did in bed with her tongue. “You must have been skimming more at Halliday's than I thought.”
Paying myself “bonuses” for twenty-four/seven and increasing it in other casinos had gotten me a nice nest stake, but it would be chump change on the Strip.
“I was thinking about your pal Mr. Wan. You told me he was interested in buying a casino in the Caribbean. I've got a couple bucks, enough to buy in for a few points, but not what you'd need for a place on the Strip. I could help him put a deal together and run it for him. If I got the place going good, who knows, maybe the Strip will be next.”
“That's interesting.”
“Why?”
“Wan's coming into town and he asked about you.”
“Is he being cheated again?”
“I don't know. But he wants to meet with you. Knowing Mr. Wan, it has something to do with money.”
Â
Trouble was brewing at Halliday's, and it wasn't just the interior decorator with the pink leisure suit and gold earring Morgan brought in from Manhattan to walk around the place and say, “Oh dear, that simply has to go.”
The revenues from the table games had been coming up about twenty grand a month short for the past couple of months. That wasn't much of a deviation, even for Halliday's. A good run of luck could create it, but it was a consistent thousand bucks a day for twenty-some days of each month. What bothered me was the consistency. My nose told me that a dealer or croupier was skimming or giving away the store. I had a security manager, but Con and me still had the best noses for cheating in the business.
People always find ways to cheat casinos, and it was a full-time job keeping up with the schemes. Scam artists like Windell cheated slots with slugs, wires to trip payoffs, magnets to tilt the reels. But the biggest losses were in the gaming gamesâblackjack, roulette, craps. Sometimes it was just skillful players, but we made little distinction between cheats and skilled playersâboth took our money. When someone got too lucky, even if we didn't see a gimmick, we quietly told them their play was too rich for the house and asked them to take it elsewhere.
The biggest problem was dealers conspiring with players. A good dealer can shuffle a deck to create a “slug” of cold cards, cards that haven't been shuffled. A slug is a set of unshuffled cards arranged for the player to win. The dealer buries the slug in with the other decks and when the cards start coming out of the shoe, the player in on the scam knows what cards will be dealt and when to increase bets.
It is impossible for a pit boss to spot this sort of thing. It can only be done by studying the surveillance tapes and even then it is often hard. I caught one dealer using a slug by standing back and watching his hands as he shuffled. He was good, Embers would have been proud of him, a real card mechanic, but what threw him off was the bull's
tail didn't wag: Halliday's cards have a bucking bull on the back; as the cards are shuffled, the tails fly in a blur. Watching the deck through the dealer's fingers, I could see a stationary tailâthe top card on the slug that wasn't being shuffled.
Another scam was the dealer signaling to a player the value of the hole card in blackjack. Sometimes dealers do this by accident. We called it “spooking.” A team of card sharps would spot a careless dealer. One player positions himself at a spot behind the dealer where he gets a peek at the hold card and then signals the player at the dealer's table. People even try “peeping” at the hole card with a miniature camera.
Skilled dice mechanics used crooked diceâbeveled, loaded, shaved, or otherwise gaffedâin a dozen different ways to cheat. You even had people who try to cant a roulette wheel. We got hit by a group of astrophysicists, the Einstein mafia we called them, who used physics to determine the area a roulette ball would drop into. They used hidden cameras that transmitted to a van in the parking lot, where a computer used the data to predict the winning numbers. They busted their bankroll trying it.
Most cheaters had one thing in common: They gave themselves away by changing their bets, suddenly upping their bet when the gaff comes into play. And that's what made the current situation so frustratingâthe security people hadn't spotted any suspicious betting patterns.
I was in the security room viewing surveillance tapes when Morgan came in breathing fire.
“I need to talk to you, now!”
“Wait just a minute.” I was concentrating on the tape of a roulette croupier. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong, but my Geiger counter alarm was working again.
“No, I can't wait. How dare you bar me from the counting room? Who the hell do you think you are?”
I jerked my head back at her and told my security manager, “Tell her why she's barred from the counting room.”
Rod cleared his throat. The employees were all terrified of her. “Owners and their families aren't allowed in the counting room.”
“And when did Mr. Riordan make that rule?”
He cleared his throat again. “I think it's a regulation made by the
IRS or the state people, ma'am. It's to keep them from skimming.”
“That's it. Look,” I said to Rod, “the croupier's using a false cup.”
The roulette croupier had a small round tube that looked like a stack of five-dollar chips. When he pulled in bets, he would bend over his chip pile and fill the cup with four hundred-dollar chips. He would eventually pay off a bettor who was playing odd and even with what appeared to be four five-dollar chips, with four hundred-dollar chips in the false stackânot a bad racket.
“Bust them,” I told Rod.
Morgan had her arms folded and was still fuming, ready to explode at me, as soon as she figured a way to blame me for the antiskimming rules. I took a firm grip on her arm and pulled her toward the conference room we use for private interrogations.
“Take your damn hands off me!”
I shut the door and pushed her against the wall. She started to step around me but I took her hands and pinned them behind her back so she couldn't move.
“Don't you ever talk to me like that again in front of the help.”
“Let me go. I'm going to tell Arthurâ”
She was breathing heavily, her breasts moving up and down with each breath. I looked at the fire in her eyes. “Fuck Arthur! Tell him this.” I kissed her long and hard on the mouth. She resisted like a trapped animal grappling to get free but then I felt her body relax and she stopped struggling. I kissed her again but this time she didn't resist. I was so tight against her body I could feel her jutting nipples on my chest.
“Let go of my arms.”
I released my grip on her and we both stared at each other for a moment.
“How dare you!” she said.
“You've been hot for me from the first time you saw me.”
“Well, I'm not anymore, you bastard. I've changed.” She walked toward the door, straightening her dress. “I've had better.”
Like hell she had.
“Bitch,” I yelled after her as she slammed the door.
“Wan is a gangster, is that what you're telling me?” I asked Chenza, as I sat behind the wheel of my new car, a Jaguar XJ12.
We were on our way to meet with Wan at Caesar's Palace. Big shots in town drove Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. I chose the Jag because it was exotic and different. Like Chenza's Aston-Martin. It was another element in making me a class act.
“Just as Hong Kong's owned by the British, Macao's a Portuguese colony the size of a postage stamp on the Chinese mainland. It's been Portuguese for four or five hundred years but remains predominantly Chinese.”
“How come the Reds haven't taken it over?”
She shrugged. “Ask Wan. I suppose they will someday. Anyway, the place is overrun by triad gangs. Italy has the Mafia, the Japs have their Yakuza, and the Chinese have the triads. They're like the others, but more dangerous and aggressive. After the Chinese Communists won the mainland, fleeing criminals and Nationalist soldiers formed triads in Hong Kong, Macao, and Formosa. Before the fall, Wan was important in Chiang Kai-shek's armyâhe ran some sort of Gestapo. He called his group the Dongchang, or Eastern Depot, after an old-time Chinese Imperial secret police unit. He escaped to Macao and set up a triad there and later expanded to Hong Kong.”
“How do you know all this stuff? Does Wan talk in his sleep?”
She burned the back of my hand that was on the center gear shift knob with her cigarette.
“Don't be crude. Wan used to bring along a dancer that worked at one of his clubs. She told me all about Wan.”
I didn't risk more burned skin by asking if the dancer had talked in
her
sleep. Chenza's taste in sex was eclectic, to say the least. She recently fired her housekeeper and hired a brother-sister team to replace
herâthey both looked like Jackie Chan in a wig. I always had a fascination for feminine faces of the Orient, women with golden skin and almond eyes that conveyed the mystery of temple doors. Of course, I immediately gave the sister the once-over and got a chewing out by Chenza that left me with the impression she was more concerned about the girl's unfaithfulness than mine. Sure as hell, she was doubling her pleasure and balling both of them.
“There's a war going on in Macao for control of the gambling. Like Vegas, the place is a tourist area, with the main industry being gambling, hotels, and organized crime. Only the Jewish and Italian thugs in Vegas are pussies compared to triads who were cutting each other's throats back when Europeans carried stone axes.”
“So does Wan have an interest in any Vegas casinos?” I asked.
“I don't think so.”
“I can see why he has to use someone else's casino to wash his money. The feds and state gaming people would gut him like a stuck pig if he tried to buy into this town. Not to mention the hard boys from Chicago and Jersey who consider Vegas their private turf.”
“Whatever he wants to see you about, you can be sure there's money in it for us,” she said.
I didn't miss the “us” bit. “Don't you ever think about anything besides money?”
“I'm dominated by the same two things you are. What's in my pocket and what's between my legs.”
Â
Mr. Wan was waiting for us in his lavish VIP suite. I found out from Chenza that his full name was Wan Kin Yung, and that the way the Chinese do it, Wan was his last name. When I was a kid, Betty's boyfriend Hop told me everything was backward in China because they were upside down from us. I guess he had it right.
Ling, the dark-suited sumi-soldier who clung to Mr. Wan like a shadow, was seated next to him. I didn't bother saying hello to LingâI never heard him speak one word.
“For my new casino in Macao, I want to introduce some Las Vegas features, perhaps similar to what you did for Halliday's. This casino is for tourists and low-end gamblers from Hong Kong.”
We discussed comps, contests, and other things I had done to make Halliday's friendly to the average Joe. Wan struck me as a man of
secrets, layers of them, like one of those Russian dolls you opened up to find one after another hidden inside. I had the impression that he wanted something more out of me than just giving his casino a Vegas feel. I asked him about it but didn't get a straight answer.
“I do have a problem in Macao,” Wan said. “A matter of small importance but annoying nonetheless.”
He survived Mao, the fall of China, the triad wars, and had the annual income of a small country. That meant he didn't have any “small” problems. Any problem that couldn't be solved with a bullet probably needed the United Nations.
“So much skimming goes on by employees in Macao casinos, it is the equivalent of an organized-crime syndicate. To control the thievery, I had a computerized system installed. The system monitors our slot machines and table games, keeping a running total of our wins and losses.”
“I'm not familiar with the system,” I said. “We don't have anything like it in Halliday's.”
“Yes, I know. It is a British system. The team who set it up in a London club are in Macao running the system and working out what they call âbugs'.”
“What are the bugs?” Bugs had a double meaning for me. A “bug” in gambling was a gimmick that aided cheating. A “bugged” slot did not pay off fairly.
“Technical problems with the system. I have no interest in them. My concern right now is that my revenues have dropped millions since the system was installed, a system that was intended to reduce thefts.”
“You have any suspects for the thefts?”
“Hundreds of them. Naturally, Mr. Riordan, I will make it well worth your while to come to Macao and give my casino a Vegas ambience. In a few months you could earn more than you would in several years at your present employment. Have you ever been to the Far East, Mr. Riordan?”
“Does eating at Lo Fat's Shanghai Café count?”