The Specialists (6 page)

A year earlier Dehn had opened an account as Arthur Moorehead at the Shippers’ Bank of Seattle. He had closed out the account within a week, but somehow or other he had never destroyed the checkbook. He wrote out a check now for $2,500 and used it to open his account.

The bank official said something tentative about waiting a week for imprinted checks.

“Oh, of course,” Dehn said. “You’ll want to wait until my check clears in Seattle. No problem. I won’t need to draw on this account for the time being.”

It would take the check at least ten days to bounce back to New Cornwall. And by that time the bank would have more important things to worry about than Arthur Moorehead.

After the last of the forms had been filled out, Dehn asked about a safe deposit box. They only had a small selection, he was told, and there was a waiting list for the larger boxes, but a small one might be available. Was that satisfactory?

Dehn said it was. The officer went away, came back, smiled, and led him down the stairs at the rear. There was a massive gate at the foot of the stairs, with an eye beam between the stairs and the gate. A guard came into view when they broke the beam. He and the bank officer nodded to each other, and the depressed a button to release an electronic lock. Inside was the bank’s own vault and, to the left, a few dozen feet of wall space given over to individual safe deposit boxes.

In a curtained booth Dehn opened the box and took from his attach
 case a thick manila envelope sealed with heavy plastic tape. He put this in the box and watched as the guard locked it away. The envelope contained a stack of newspaper cuttings.

He left the bank and drove to the motel where he had registered earlier as Moorehead. On a sheet of motel stationery he began sketching the bank’s floor plan. A rough sketch was all he wanted now. When he saw Giordano’s photos, the two of them could work together on it and produce something more detailed.

He left the motel room. A beautiful day, he thought. Perfect for golf. He got into his car and headed north out of town, then cut west on Route 4. When he saw the driving range, he pulled off the road. He took his driver and his spoon from the trunk and bought a bucket of balls.

He hit eight balls before he lost interest entirely. He topped the first one, caught the next two nicely, then sliced the rest. He left the remaining forty-two balls in the bucket on the rubber mat and put his clubs back in the bag and locked the trunk.

He drove another half mile down the road to a gas station. The pay phone was set up for direct-dialing. He dropped a dime in the slot and called Tarrytown.

Giordano hung the last of the prints up to dry. There were sixteen of them and almost all of them had come out sharp and clear. His camera was a Japanese job about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and he had loaded it with a very fast film. He studied the pictures now and was reasonably pleased with them. He had enlarged the negatives to four-by-five, and could have made them still larger without too much loss of definition, but he felt they would do.

He poured his trays of chemicals down the sink and went upstairs. Helen Tremont was at the kitchen table reading a magazine. “Oh, Louis,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come up. You walk like a cat.”

“I hope I didn’t startle you——”

“Not at all.” She smiled. “You’re finished already? That was fast, wasn’t it.”

“The darkroom’s a pleasure to work in.”

“Yes, Walter spent hours on end down there. You’ve seen his nature photographs. He did some marvelous things. He always said it was the only hunting he cared for. Do you do very much photography yourself?”

“Not anymore. I did for a few months, but then I realized I had a cabinet full of prints that I never looked at once I’d developed and printed them, and I sort of lost interest.”

“I suppose that can happen.”

“And I wasn’t an artist at it. I got to be competent, and then I never got to be anything better than competent, so from that point on it got dull for me. The only part I ever really enjoyed was the darkroom work. That’s still a kick, you know, putting the film through the bath and seeing what you come up with. This batch turned out fine.”

“Roger will be glad to hear that. He’s upstairs, if you want to go up. Oh, what’s wrong with me? You’ll have a drink?”

“I’d like some coffee, if there’s any made.”

He stayed with her and drank the coffee in the kitchen. They talked about hobbies and travel, but Giordano had trouble keeping his mind on the conversation. When he was done with the coffee, he went up to the second floor and found the colonel in the library.

“The prints are drying,” he said. “They came out fine.”

“Good. I just spoke to Frank. He opened his account with no difficulty and managed to lease a safe deposit box. He had a look at the vault. No photographs, of course.”

“His memory’s almost as good as a camera.”

“Yes. He’ll be here sometime this evening to go over the photos with you. And Howard was on the phone earlier. They hope to get on the ground of the Platt estate tomorrow. They’ve laid the groundwork and should have something for us tomorrow night if all goes well.”

“Yes, sir. Uh . . . as far as this evening is concerned——”

“Yes?”

Giordano hesitated. “Well, I did make a dinner date with one of the tellers. I don’t have to show up if you think it’s more important to meet with Frank tonight, but I thought it might be worthwhile to develop that contact. She’s just a teller, of course, but she might know a lot about bank routine.”

“Yes, of course.” The colonel turned away for a moment, his brow furrowed in thought. “A dinner date,” he said suddenly. “You only went there to change a bill, didn’t you?”

“Yes, a twenty.”

“And it was crowded, and of course the girl must have been rushed.”

“Yes, sir, she was.”

“And you still managed to date her?”

“Well . . . ”

The colonel chuckled softly. “I see,” he said. “I gather you’ll be spending the night in New Jersey, then?”

Giordano fought against the rush of blood to his face. It was bad enough to be short and skinny and nearsighted. Why the hell did he have to blush? “She seems like a quiet sort of girl,” he said. “I don’t know, I mean, I——”

The colonel spun his chair back, wheeled himself over to his desk. “I think you’re quite right, Louis. You should develop this relationship. A dinner date, you won’t have very much time, will you? I could call Frank and suggest he make it tomorrow. No, that’s not good. Will those prints be dry by the time you’re ready to leave?”

“Easily.”

“Good. Bring them up before you go, and I’ll go over them with you so that I know what they are. Then Frank and I can work together on them. I think that should do well enough. You’ll have a look at his scale drawing tomorrow. Just give me a call when you know where you’ll be staying.”

“The Cavalier Motel on U.S. One.”

“Oh?” The colonel raised an eyebrow. “Did you take the room before you met the girl or after? You don’t have to answer that, Louis.”

Giordano blushed furiously. “I’ll check those prints,” he said, and fled from the room.

TEN

Manso started out at six thirty. He went to four restaurants on the list and had a drink at each of them. He drank Bloody Marys because he could drink them almost indefinitely without feeling the vodka they contained. He nursed each drink for about fifteen minutes, then left and drove the rented Plymouth to the next place on the list.

After four restaurants and four drinks he was hungry. The fourth restaurant was a steakhouse in Clifton named for the ex-prizefighter who functioned as its maitre d’hôtel. Photos of other fighters covered the wall behind the bar. There were elaborately framed oils of boxing matches in the dining room, and the menu featured such items as Jake LaMotta Open Tenderloin Sandwich and Fried Chicken à la Sugar Ray Robinson. There was also a Jersey Joe Walcott Special, which turned out to be a combination of lobster tail and sirloin.

The fighter didn’t own the restaurant. Like the three others on Manso’s list, it was one of Albert Platt’s places. He didn’t really expect Platt to show up, but it seemed worth a try. From what he had seen of Platt in Vegas, he had a taste for night life and enjoyed being seen. Most gangsters liked to show up at their own restaurants.

Manso knew a lot about gangsters. When they flew him back to the States, he had close to three grand in his pocket and he took the whole roll straight to Vegas. He won the first three nights straight and had the feeling that he had found the only sensible way in the world to make a living. The fourth night he stepped up to the crap table of the Sands with $8,500 on his hip. By midnight he had run it up to twenty thousand, and at a quarter to three in the morning he had a fifty-dollar bill in his shoe and no chips at all in front of him.

An assistant manager bought him breakfast, told him to forget his hotel bill, and bought him a bus ticket to L.A. Manso cashed the ticket at the bus station. He took a five-a-week room in downtown Vegas and got a job in an automatic car wash. He spent every night at the downtown casinos. He played as small as he could and never lost more than five dollars in a night. Most of the time he watched.

He ate out of cans and saved his money. He talked to people, he read books. He thought things out very carefully, and he finally concluded that you couldn’t beat the tables, but he kept going to the casinos and watching the play and betting nickels and dimes while making larger bets in his mind. After a few more months he changed his mind. You
could
beat the tables, but only if you had three things. You needed the knowledge and the capital and, most important of all, the attitude.

Even so, you weren’t likely to beat the casinos’ brains out. But you could learn to tune yourself in, could develop the knack of sensing when your luck was coming so that you could ride the hot streaks and go home the instant they cooled. You couldn’t get rich that way, but if you had a thick enough bankroll, you could do about well enough to live fairly well without working for a living.

It took Manso a long time to save a thousand dollars. When he hit that figure, he was ready. He went back to the Sands. He was in the casino for eighteen hours straight. He would make small bets at the crap table, waiting for the feeling to come, and when it didn’t, he would kill time at a nickel slot machine waiting for the mood to shift. At three in the afternoon, after sixteen hours, he was about three hundred dollars ahead. He was also out of nickels, so he moved on down the line to a quarter machine, dropped in his only quarter, and caught the jackpot on the first shot.

He went straight to the crap table and pushed his luck straight up to five thousand dollars. He couldn’t do a thing wrong. When his roll stood at five grand, he had the dice rattling in his hand and a thousand of his dollars on the table, a limit bet on the pass line and another on the eight. He was set to roll when something happened inside his head, some message reached him, and he held up in midroll and pulled both bets back and dropped a five-dollar chip on the Don’t Come line.

“You’re betting against yourself,” the croupier said.

The dice came up ace-deuce craps. He cashed in five thousand and five dollars. He settled his bill from before and reimbursed the assistant manager for the bus ticket. He was on the next plane to Los Angeles. When the colonel called him, he was working on an assembly line at an aircraft factory and thinking about getting back in the service.

There was never any question in his mind about what to do with the proceeds from the first job they pulled. He had acquired two of the three necessities earlier, the knowledge and the attitude, and now he had the requisite capital. Now, with all of that cash in his kick, it didn’t really matter whether he won or lost.

Since then he lived the ideal life. He drifted from Vegas to Puerto Rico to Nassau and back again. Sometimes he went to Europe, but the casinos there didn’t have it for him. Everything was too formal, too stuffy. He liked the life in the American casinos. Plush, wellstaffed hotels, the best night life in the world, beautiful and eager women, fine food, and action whenever he was in the mood. He won a little more than he lost, and when his luck went sour, he knew enough to stay away from the tables. He didn’t need twenty-four hours a day of gambling. There were enough other things that he liked about the life.

The one thing he didn’t like was the gangsters. You couldn’t have gambling without them, it seemed. They were all over Vegas and the Caribbean. Manso knew some of them enough to nod to and others enough to drink with, and they knew him for a right bettor who didn’t leave much on their tables but who rarely hurt them, either. They thought he was all right He thought they were garbage, but he didn’t let them know it.

Now, at Platt’s restaurant, he carried the remains of his Bloody Mary to a table in the back. He ordered a rare sirloin and a salad and wondered if Platt would show up.

Manso was on his second cup of coffee when the gangster walked in. There were three others in his party. The other man with him was half a head taller than Platt and weighed fifty pounds less. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes deeply sunken, and he walked with his arms tight against his body and a look of incipient death in his eyes. The two girls were blondes in their late twenties, and Manso thought they looked hired. He watched Platt’s girl and wondered if he had played the revolver trick on her.

He finished his coffee and signaled for the check. While he was waiting for his change he saw Buddy Rice at the door. At once he dropped his eyes, rested his forehead on one hand as if in thought. Platt had looked his way twice and had shown no recognition. Platt, though, would not be apt to recognize him; Rice, bodyguard and seeing-eye dog, was supposed to scan rooms his master entered and place the faces he found in them.

Manso raised his eyes again. Buddy was alone at a table on the far wall, positioned so that he could keep an eye on Platt’s table. The waiter brought Manso’s change. He left an unremarkable tip. When the welterweight-turned-headwaiter went over to talk to Buddy Rice, Manso got to his feet and left the restaurant.