The Disciple of Las Vegas (8 page)

Ava got to the restaurant at exactly one o'clock. From the entrance she scanned the room for a powder-blue sweatsuit. When she didn't see one, she asked for a table for two by the window. She put the envelope that contained the information from Cousins and Edward Ling on the table and then sat for ten minutes watching float planes land and take off from the marina in the harbour.

A server was placing a pot of jasmine tea on the table when Ava saw a silver BMW pull into the lot. It was a high-end Series 5 or 6, and the driver was wearing a powder-blue sweatsuit. It was the kind of car she would expect the only daughter of wealthy Chinese parents to drive. She was no stranger to the breed. Not all of them were spoilt, arrogant, and manic about acquiring the latest fashion in clothes, cars, shoes, and purses. But more than enough were.

When Ava saw the BMW, she assumed Maggie Chew would fit the bill. But as she watched the short, pudgy girl walk into the restaurant, the image disappeared.

Ava stood up, and when Maggie saw her, she walked towards the table with her head down, her eyes fixed upon her unlaced white running shoes.

“Thank you for coming,” Ava said.

Maggie raised her head. Ava saw that her skin was marred by bright red pimples high on her cheeks and small pits beneath them. Her eyes were large, with dark circles around them. “I didn't think I had much choice,” she said.

“Shall we order?” Ava asked, a believer in the calming quality of the dim sum ritual.

“I don't know how much I can eat.”

“What would you recommend?” Ava persisted.

Maggie picked up the dim sum menu. “The sticky rice is good . . . the chicken feet in black bean sauce . . . turnip cake.”

“How is the har gow?”

“I prefer the shrimp-and-chive dumplings.”

When their order had been taken, Ava poured tea for Maggie. Maggie tapped her middle finger gently on the table as a sign of thanks.
She has manners
, Ava thought.

“I'm sorry I had to reach you through Auntie Lily. I tried Edward Ling first.”

“Aunt Lily is just about my mother's closest friend, and my mother can't stand Edward Ling. Besides, when he called last night, he insisted on talking to my father and didn't even mention your name.”

“Did he speak to your father?” Ava asked.

“No. I told you, my father is not in a state to talk to anyone.”

“Maggie, do either you or your mother know what's happened to your father?”

“My mother knows that something has gone wrong with the business, but she isn't interested in all the gory details. She couldn't handle them anyway. I'm a bit stronger.”

“So you know something? I mean, you know what happened? You know the details?”

Maggie closed her eyes, squeezed them tightly, then shook her head. “I've spent the last week at my parents' home trying to keep my father sane and trying to get my mother to stop crying,” she said, waving a hand to indicate her sweatshirt. Ava noticed the cuffs were badly frayed. “I usually don't dress like this, but I haven't been getting much sleep and I've let myself go. When you called, I was at my condo getting some clean clothes to take back to West Van. That's where my parents live.”

“The British Properties?”

“Yes. That was my mother's choice.”

“And I hear you're a student.”

“Law school. My father's wish.”

“I'm an accountant.”

“I know; Louis told me. He said you were hired by Uncle Tommy's company to look into some missing money, and he was shocked when he met you. Young, good-looking, female, capable — not my Uncle Tommy's normal type of employee. Louis said some of the people in Manila were actually afraid of you, that you have some amazing connections.”

Ava didn't want to talk about her connections. Instead she patted the envelope that held her paperwork.
There isn't much point
, she thought,
in being coy
. “The money that's missing — your father took it. I have all the records here.”

Maggie's eyes flicked over the envelope. “I know he did,” she said.

Ava blinked. “Well, since you know,” she pressed, “I'd like you to tell me why he did it. And I'd like to know where the money is.”

The turnip cake arrived. Maggie Chew slathered chili sauce on a slice and bit into it. “Why haven't you gone to my uncle with your information?”

“How do you know I haven't?”

“Because if you had, there's no force on earth that would keep him from descending on my father, with every ounce of malice and viciousness he could muster. There are only two things he cares about: his position in the family and his money. When it comes to family, my Uncle Tommy talks a good story, but the reality is that he thinks of it as
his
family. He thinks that everyone should be grateful to him — the oldest son, the trailblazer — for whatever they have in life, and should express their thanks by being obedient, subservient, and loyal as a dog. Then there's his money — he's married to it. My father and my uncle in Hong Kong were supposedly partners in the business, but the truth is, all the purse strings are held tightly by Uncle Tommy. He decides how much money they need and then doles it out as he sees fit.”

“You've obviously done a lot of thinking about this,” Ava said.

Maggie laid down her chopsticks. “It's all I've thought about for the past week. My father has committed two cardinal sins. He's stolen from my uncle's precious money hoard and in the process he's betrayed the family. I'd be surprised if Uncle Tommy didn't want him dead.”

“Do you know how much money your father appears to have taken?”

“He said it was more than fifty million dollars.”

“You say that so calmly.”

“It's so big a number it hardly seems real.”

“Where is it?”

“It's gone.”

“How can more than fifty million dollars just disappear?”

Maggie picked up her chopsticks and plucked a chicken foot from the bamboo steamer. Then just as quickly she put it back. “I really don't think I can eat.”

“Me neither,” Ava said. A lump the size of a grapefruit was lodged in her chest. Any hope of a giant fee had been quickly dashed. “Tell me what happened.”

Maggie closed her eyes again. “My mother told me last week that my father had been acting strangely for months. I was so busy at school that I hardly saw them. She told me she would nag at him about what was wrong but he wouldn't talk to her. He'd just retreat into his office at the house and spend hours on the computer playing online poker.”

“It's popular these days.”

“That's hardly the word for it,” Maggie said. “It's become a life-sucking addiction. That's how he lost the money.”

“Oh no, please don't tell me that,” Ava said, struggling to believe it.

Maggie opened her eyes. The tears welling in their corners were threatening to spill over. “I know it sounds absurd. I know it sounds absolutely insane and improbable,” she said.

“You're saying he lost fifty million dollars playing online poker? How is that even possible?”

“He was playing no-limit Texas hold'em at a table where the minimum blinds were $1,000 and $2,000. You can't sit at a table like that without a starting stack of at least $100,000, and according to my father he normally started with $200,000.”

“Still —”

“And then multiply that by five, because that's how many tables he would play at one time.”

“A million dollars in one sitting?”

“Sometimes more. If he lost he would just reload,” Maggie said, wiping her eyes. “It started, I think, slowly. He began with his own cash but he quickly ran through that. When it was gone, he dipped into company money — always, he swears, with the intention of winning the money back. Of course, he never did, and it just got worse and worse. Some weeks he lost close to ten million dollars.”

“He didn't always lose, did he?”

“No, just most of the time. Enough of the time.”

“Then why didn't he stop?” Ava asked, realizing the second she did that it was a stupid question.

“He was addicted.”

“Of course,” Ava said softly.

Maggie Chew sensed doubt in the reply. “No, really, he was. He became completely irrational.”

“Then what was all this nonsense with Costa Rica?” Ava asked.

“The Costa Rica thing is, I think, part of a bigger puzzle. Ava, would you believe me if I told you that my father was cheated?”

In her own life Ava had heard more than enough of the lies and rationalizations that helped the Chinese gambler sleep at night. “I would like to,” she said.

“I think he was.”

Ava sat quietly. The lump in her chest stopped throbbing.
Money that was gotten illegally is money that needs to find its way home
, she thought. “I'll need more than your opinion.”

Maggie stroked her right cheek. “We'll have to go to my condo in Yaletown. There's a guy named Jack Maynard you need to talk to. He can explain what went down, or at least what he thinks went down. If you believe him, you can come back to West Van with me and I'll let you sit with my father.”

“Why would you do this?” Ava said slowly.

“If the money was stolen, then you can get it back, right?”

“And what makes you think I can do that?”

“Louis Marx — he heard them talking about you. He said that's what you do. He said you're the best.”

Ava nodded and thought,
One phone call
.

“Okay,” she said. “Let's go to Yaletown.”

Yaletown was on the opposite side of downtown Vancouver from Ava's hotel. Once an industrial area, its proximity to False Creek had been a lure for developers in the late 1980s. The rows of brick warehouses had been converted into trendy offices and loft apartments that sat on top of restaurants, art galleries, bars, and boutiques.

“The parking spot costs me five hundred dollars a month,” Maggie said as she pulled her car into the underground garage off Mainland Street. “I have classmates who spend less than that on accommodation.”

They took the elevator to the top floor of the four-storey building. As Ava entered Maggie's open-concept loft she was struck by the living area's sixteen-foot ceilings and ten-foot wall-to-wall windows that flooded the space with light. The kitchen counters were empty, the walls were bare, and the only furniture in the living room was a beige leather couch and matching chair and a glass coffee table.

“We'll call Jack from my study,” Maggie said, motioning Ava to follow her.

Ava walked into the room and was visually assaulted by piles of books and paper strewn everywhere. Pictures of Maggie's family covered every wall and framed the flat-screen television. Empty mugs and glasses lined the windowsill next to the desk, which held a large Mac. Ava stood by as Maggie leafed through some papers spread over a loveseat. “Sorry for the mess. I kind of live in here,” she said. She held up a sheet of pink paper. “Here we are.”

“Just a second,” Ava said. “Before you call, why don't you tell me a little about Jack Maynard.”

“Sure. Do you want to sit down?”

Ava sat on the loveseat. Maggie took the office chair and rolled it closer. “He's a young guy, late twenties maybe, and he's a professional poker player. Believe it or not, he graduated from MIT with a master's in math. He started playing, strictly online, while he was in university, and he discovered he was very good at it. He's well known in the professional gambling world. A couple of the poker magazines rate him among the top twenty online players in the world.”

“How much did he tell you he lost?”

“Just under six million, and there were two other regulars who lost in the three- to four-million-dollar range.”

“Not as severely damaged as your father.”

“They're professionals, not addicts. They knew when to stop.”

Ava nodded sympathetically. “I remember when my mother made my sister and I sit in the car in a casino parking lot for five hours while she lost her monthly household allowance playing baccarat. My sister asked her why she did it, and she said that she just couldn't help herself.”

“My father took my mother and me to Vegas once, dropped us off in a room, and then disappeared for four days. She said he almost lost the house.”

“If this Jack Maynard is so good, how did he lose all that money?”

“That's exactly what he's going to explain to you.”

“One other thing before you call him,” Ava said. “I know next to nothing about Texas hold'em poker.”

“You understand something about poker, though?”

“Just the basics. I mean, I know how the hands are ranked.”

“We'll look online,” Maggie said.

She turned on the computer and clicked an icon that looked like a waterfall. “This is The River, the gambling site that my father and the others played on.” She signed in and opened up a page that listed table after table of hold'em poker options. She hit one that read
$10/$20
. “We don't have to gamble at a table to be able to watch it. Jack told me that when my father and the others were playing, there would be several hundred onlookers. Morbid fascination, I guess.”

There were six people at the table, each with an avatar. “People don't use their real names?” Ava asked.

“No. Jack played under the name Brrrrr, and my father was Chinaclipper.”

“Then how did they get to know each other's real identity?”

“Maynard was so famous that everyone knew who was behind Brrrrr. My father was just an anonymous player until he and Maynard and some of the others began to share personal information on the chat line. Over six months they got to know each other quite well.”

As Maggie was speaking, Ava watched the play of cards and quickly began to understand the basics. Each player got two cards, face down. Five cards were then turned face up in the centre — first three, and then one and one. Players bet after they had received their first two cards, then after the first three cards were turned over, and then again after each of the single cards was exposed — four betting rounds in all. Players could use any of the seven cards to make a five-card hand.

The table she was watching was no-limit hold'em. That meant that players could bet every dollar they had in front of them at any given time. She was amazed by how quickly some of the pots grew. At the $10–$20 table they were watching, two pots were raised to more than a thousand dollars each. She began to grasp the multiples that must be involved at tables with antes of $1,000 and $2,000.

“Let's call Maynard,” Ava said.

Maggie punched in the number and turned on the speaker. “Maynard lives in Virginia,” she said.

“Hello? Is that you, Maggie?”

“I'm here, Jack. I have you on speaker phone. I'm with that woman I mentioned to you this morning. Her name is Ava Lee.”

“Ms. Lee,” he said.

“Call me Ava.”

“Maggie tells me you're some kind of special accountant.”

“I guess you could call me that.”

“She says you recover money for people.”

“Sometimes I can, but not always.”

“Just how do you that? Get it back, I mean.”

“Persuasion,” she said.

He laughed, more disbelieving than amused.

Maggie interrupted. “Jack, I don't think we need to quiz Ava. Why don't you start by explaining to her what happened.”

She could hear him breathe, and in the sound she felt his tension. A bottle cap popped. “Have one for me,” Maggie said.

“I've been drinking every day for the past couple of months. I need to stop,” he said.

“Talk to me,” Ava said, pulling out her notebook. “But before you do, please understand that I have only the most rudimentary knowledge of poker.”

“I'm a pro,” Maynard began. “I've been playing poker for a living for the past five years, mainly online. I was putting in a minimum of eight hours a day, five days a week.”

“You use the past tense,” Ava said.

“I'm giving it a break — the losses crippled me. I need to rebuild my self-confidence, and my bankroll.”

“Where did you play?”

“On several sites, but in the past year I played primarily at The River. There was always good high-stakes action there.”

“Maggie mentioned the amount of money her father gambled. Is that what you mean by high stakes?”

“Yeah. There were about fifty of us who played for those kinds of stakes on a regular basis. And then of course people were always coming and going, testing their talent at a higher level. Those were the ones we usually took to the cleaners.”

“‘Talent'?”

“It isn't just a game of luck when you're playing poker for that kind of money. Maybe in the short term luck will hold, but over the long haul your ability to read people — to understand who you're playing against and what their tendencies and habits are — sometimes matters more than the cards you're dealt. And then there's the mathematical element, which is one of my strong points. I can get into it if you want, but it gets complicated.”

“No, I believe you. The thing is, if talent prevails, how did you and your friends lose all that money? Did you run into someone more talented?”

“No fucking way,” he said, his voice rising.

“Is that ego talking?”

“No fucking way.”

“So who was winning when you were losing?”

“There were two of them. Their poker names were Buckshot and Kaybar. They never played together at the same table, but we never thought that was strange until we started looking back. We also never found out their real identities, which is also strange, because ninety-five percent of the guys knew each other.”

“Just those two were winning?”

“No, but they were by far the main beneficiaries of our supposed bad run.”

“Maggie tells me you believe you were cheated.”

“I'm certain of it.”

“How can you be so sure?” She heard paper rustling in the background. “Is there someone there with you?” she asked.

“No, I'm alone. I'm just going through my notes.”

“So, again, how can you be so sure?”

“I'm a math grad and so is Felix Hunter, who played under the name Felix the Cat. Like I said before, mathematics plays into this, and understanding the basic math of no-limit poker is fundamental to playing well. I mean, there are odds attached to every hand, risks attached to every bet, but let me say that the way we lost ran completely counter to the laws of probability.

“At first I wrote off my losses as just a run of very bad luck. It doesn't matter how good you are — everyone hits bad streaks, and I thought I was just going through a particularly long one. But when it continued and I kept losing to those same two guys, I started to think that maybe it had nothing to do with luck. I talked to Felix about it first, and he felt the same way. So we backtracked. We traced the hands we had played over the past few months. When you look at just one hand, it doesn't mean a thing; two aces can lose to a two and four at any given time, and even a number of losses like that can be rationalized. But when we looked at literally thousands of hands, we saw a very clear pattern.”

“You have all those hands on record?”

“Of course. All the hands are displayed after they're finished, and I have software that stores and files them by date and time. I mean, this is my job, the way I earn my living — I apply myself to it. Going back and studying how you played a hand or how you played against a certain individual, that's the only way you can improve. So, yeah, I had the hands, and so did Felix.”

“So what did you find?”

“We were cheated.”

“How?”

“We think — no, we're convinced — that they could see everyone's hole cards.”

“The two cards turned face down?”

“Yeah. We think they could see all the cards on the table.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“I'll try to keep it simple,” he said. “Basically, they knew exactly when to bet heavy and, just as important, they always seemed to know when to fold. And bluffing either of them — well, it was impossible. It didn't matter how much money you bet, they always called and they always won. I'm looking at a hand I lost more than a hundred thousand dollars on. I had an ace of clubs and the king of hearts, a great starting hand. The flop was the three of spades and an eight and nine of hearts. I raised. Buckshot called me. On the turn, the fourth card was a ten of hearts. So now there was a possibility on the board of a straight and a flush. I raised again. He called. The river card was the two of clubs, which didn't change anything. There was fifty thousand dollars in the pot; I bet another fifty. It was a huge bet even for a bluff. He had to give me credit for having a straight or a flush, or at the very least a high pair or even two pair. He called, and when his cards were exposed, he was holding the three of diamonds and the six of spades.

“He won a hundred thousand dollars with a pair of threes. Do you have any idea how unlikely that is? He called a fifty-thousand-dollar bet with garbage, and into a board that nearly every poker player in the world would think had him beat. And let me tell you, it wasn't the only time.”

“Yes, I can see the improbability of it,” Ava said.

“Another thing Felix picked up on was the number of hands they played. It was an inordinately large percentage, and it stuck to a pattern. They seemed to want to see just about every flop, the way Buckshot did with the three and six that beat me. They played rags — cards such as a deuce and seven of different suits, the very worst starting hand in poker — all the time. They'd call the opening bet and even call raises so they could see the flop. In reality, your opening two cards don't mean much until the next three cards are flopped and your hand starts to take shape, but there are hands like the deuce and seven that are so bad statistically that hardly anyone ever plays them. These guys were playing them all the time, and naturally, when they got lucky, they cashed in in a big way because the other players never gave them credit for starting with cards that bad.

“When Felix pointed that out to me, I went over the data myself and found something else. Buckshot and Kaybar seemed to fold before the flop every time someone else had a monster opening hand — a hand such as two aces or two kings, which is really difficult to beat. And what I also noticed was that they folded against those hands even when the other player didn't raise before the flop. We call that slow playing. When you have a big hand and you want to maximize it, you bet small to avoid scaring off the other players. Both Felix and I did that often enough. The thing is, when we looked at the numbers, guess what?”

“I have no idea.”

“I had pocket aces or kings more than eighty times during that losing stretch. Felix had them more than a hundred times. On nearly every single occasion, those guys folded before the flop. It didn't matter how little or how much we bet, they folded. Can you imagine, statistically, what an anomaly that is? It's fucking impossible that they'd fold that many hands. They had to be seeing our fucking hole cards. There isn't any other explanation.”

Ava could feel Maggie's eyes on her. “Jack, if you're so certain about this, why haven't you done anything about it?”

“I tried.”

“And?”