The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (16 page)

‘No shit?’

‘I caught the ball wrong. But don’t worry, I can still work.’ I circled my index finger and thumb, snapping them together like a crab’s claw.

‘If you say so.’ He ran a hand over his shaved scalp. ‘Listen, why don’t you come on inside? Let’s talk some more.’

TWENTY-THREE

So much for talking. Maurice had me wait in the white living room while he placed a telephone call elsewhere in the house. There wasn’t anything other than white to look at. I had no television or magazines to distract me from my thoughts, and since my thoughts were mostly unwelcome, it didn’t help my nerves a great deal.

After sitting and playing with my thumbs for a time, I turned my attention to the wristwatch I’d stolen. I was impressed that Maurice had spotted it, but then again, it was fairly distinctive. It was smaller than a modern wristwatch, though not as small as a woman’s timepiece.

I slipped the watch from my wrist and wound the mechanism backwards until I felt resistance, and then I raised it to my ear and listened to it tick. The second hand seemed to be moving again, sweeping past the black roman numerals on the pearlescent dial. I checked the time on my digital watch and set the wristwatch to match. Then I buffed the face on my shirt and slipped it back on. Messing with the watch was probably a bad idea. It just reminded me of how much time I was losing.

Another ten minutes went by before I heard engine noise outside the house, followed by the soft percussion of car doors closing. Footsteps and a two-tone doorbell beckoned Maurice back to the room. He was still wearing his white silk robe and pyjama pants, not to mention his wrap-around sunglasses. True, it was light and airy inside his home, but it wasn’t
that
light.

He opened the door and the identity of his guests left me suitably underwhelmed – Kojar the lofty trapeze artist and his gap-toothed, knee-high pal.

‘This guy,’ the diminutive one squeaked, and pointed a stubbed finger at me. ‘Yeah, we seen him all right.’

He had on the same bright yellow sneakers and crumpled jeans as he’d worn the previous night. His T-shirt was black again, but it featured a different rock motif – a human skull with flames burning through the eye-sockets. He cupped his chin and tapped his yellow sneaker against the floor.

‘So you’re a housebreaker, huh, guy?’ he piped.

‘I prefer “gentleman thief”.’

‘And last night, that wasn’t your room?’

‘My, you do catch on quick.’

Kojar rested a plate-sized hand on his miniature friend, as if to hold him back. ‘You find Josh?’ he asked, in his stilted Euro-English.

‘I’m still looking for him.’

His companion crossed his stubby arms. ‘Yeah, how come?’

‘I’ve been through all this with Maurice,’ I said. ‘And I’m pretty sure he must have told you some of it on the telephone.’

‘Maybe I wanna hear it myself.’

‘Likely as not you do. What’s your name, anyway?’

His eyes darkened beneath his uni-brow, but he didn’t answer me.

‘Christ, his name’s Salvatore,’ Maurice cut in. ‘Sal to you and me. He’s from New Jersey. And this here is Kojar. He’s from Croatia.’

Kojar squared his shoulders and lifted his chin, as though he was standing on the top step of a medal platform waiting to hear his national anthem. He had on a blue tracksuit with white piping along the arms and legs, and he wore flip-flops on his huge feet. His big toe alone was enough to intimidate me.

I looked at Maurice. More accurately, I looked at his blackened sunglasses.

‘You said you wanted to talk.’

‘In my office.’

I followed the three of them along a white hallway into a smaller white room. There was a white gloss desk positioned in front of a circular window that looked out over the corner of the pool. The walls were hung with framed show posters, including the advertisement I’d seen for the revue of the Fate of Atlantis.

The three men gathered around a glass table in the middle of the room. In the centre of the table was a white cardboard model of a building complex – the kind of thing an architect might put together to give a client a better understanding of how a project could turn out. The complex was made up of three separate tower blocks, joined together by a much lower building that appeared to be around three storeys in height. Surrounding the base of the complex were a number of white cardboard trees, a line of miniature white cars and a scattering of tiny white people.

To my right, Sal was on tiptoes, pressing his nose close to the structure. I thought about giving him a boost onto the table in case he wanted to stomp around the cardboard world like he was Godzilla.

‘So, er, what is this?’ I asked.

Maurice raised his hands and flipped his sunglasses up to rest on his scalp. It was the first time I’d seen his eyes. They were blue-green in colour and strikingly alert, like the eyes of a jungle predator.

He watched me closely for quite some time, and I began to wonder if perhaps the cardboard model was about to split in two so that a dummy missile could emerge from a concealed silo in one of the towers. And sure, while it wouldn’t have completely shocked me to learn that Maurice was the owner of a snow-white feline, I somehow didn’t picture him as a megalomaniac with a cunning plan for world domination.

‘So what, is this the model for a new casino?’

Maurice eyed me with suspicion, as though I’d made an impossible leap of logic.

‘Well, is it?’

He held my gaze for a few beats more, as if he was debating whether to share one of the foremost secrets of the ages. Then he waved his hands above the model in a circular fashion, as though summoning a mystic force.

‘This is Magic Land.’

Oh boy. Just as I thought things couldn’t get any weirder . . .

‘Magic Land?’

‘The name, it may change,’ Kojar offered, with a pragmatic heft of his shoulders.

‘Huh. So your big secret is that you want to build a casino with a magic theme. Which I guess is where this all ties in with Josh.’

Maurice withdrew a slim white baton from the sleeve of his robe. He pointed it towards the rear quarter of the squat central building.

‘Magic Land is a casino entirely dedicated to the art of magic. It will house a museum devoted to the greatest illusionists of all time.’ He moved the pointer to the opposite side of the structure, where a circular appendage seemed to bulge out like a white cardboard hernia. ‘It has a state-of-the-art, two-thousand-seat auditorium. The magician who headlines at this theatre, in this casino, will have the greatest magic show of all time.’

Maurice raised his baton in the air and pressed it against his lip ring. He gazed at me hawkishly, as though I couldn’t possibly fail to comprehend the significance of it all.

‘
Right
. But what are you saying exactly? Did Masters run away because he didn’t want the Fisher Twins to know he was planning to quit?’

Sal thumped his fist down onto the glass table. ‘Enough with the questions. Just let Maurice explain.’

‘I’m trying, believe me.’

Maurice tapped his baton against his lip piercing. He wanted to be careful. The move had all the makings of a nasty accident.

‘You’ve heard of juice, right?’

‘Fruit juice?’

He exhaled and closed his eyes. ‘In Vegas,’ he began, in a studied tone, ‘if you have juice, you have influence. Juice is power.’

‘Oh, okay.’

‘The guys who made this town, they brought the juice. Guys like Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Benny Binion. Serious guys.’

I think he meant mobster guys. I was tempted to ask if I should take notes and if there was likely to be a mid-term exam, but somehow I sensed that now wasn’t the time.

‘If you want to build a new casino in Vegas,’ Maurice went on, ‘you need juice.’

‘And a heck of a lot of money, I’m guessing.’

‘Money, sure. But plenty of people want to invest in Vegas. Finding money is the easy part.’

Kojar and Sal nodded along. Funny. Getting hold of cash wasn’t proving that easy for me.

‘And the hard part?’

‘Clearance. To build a Strip casino from scratch in this town, a major casino like Magic Land, requires a whole lot of clearance.’

‘And to get clearance you need juice?’

‘That’s the deal.’

‘So how do you get this juice?’

‘There are ways,’ Sal cut in.

‘I may need a little more detail than that.’

Maurice knocked his baton against the edge of the table. ‘The traditional route? You need to be part of a network. People you can rely on, folks you can call on. Maybe you need some muscle. You’ll always need green.’ He shrugged. ‘Have all of that behind you, and you have a reputation. You have juice.’

‘You’re talking about the Mafia.’

The three men flinched, and Kojar shot an instinctive look out through the circular window, as if he feared that a mob sharpshooter with a sniper rifle and a listening device was on the other side of the pool.

Maurice waved a hand at me. ‘Cool it on that talk.’

‘Why? Is saying the “M” word in Vegas like mentioning the title of
The Scottish Play
in a theatre?’

Maurice looked at me blankly. Evidently, he’d never produced a Shakespearian tragedy.

‘We don’t talk about it no more,’ Sal explained. ‘We’re trying to make Vegas a respectable town.’

‘Tell that to the Fisher Twins. They threatened to have me killed.’

Maurice nodded. ‘They have the juice to do that.’

‘Well, how did they get it? They don’t look like gangsters. Even the guys dressed as gangsters in their casino don’t look like gangsters.’

‘That’s what we wanted to talk to you about.’

I was all set to hear more when we were interrupted by a strange buzzing noise, accompanied by an odd little ditty. The tune sounded electronic, like the chirping of some deranged, robotic bird. I frowned in confusion, but the noise grew steadily louder, the chirruping repeating itself over and over. Then I realised that everyone was staring in my direction, and shortly afterwards it occurred to me that the noise was coming from my back pocket.

Victoria’s mobile
.

I reached for the stupid contraption, opened it and grimaced at the illuminated screen.
Withheld Number
. I didn’t think that now was the time to function as Victoria’s answering service, so I pressed the button with the tiny red handset on it and cut the connection. The screen went dark and the handset quit buzzing and tweeting.

‘Sorry about that,’ I said, and pocketed the phone. ‘You were saying?’

Maurice looked down at Sal, then up at Kojar, then back at me. He placed his hands in the pockets on the front of his robe. I really wished he’d pull the material across his chest and cover himself up – I’d just about had it with being winked at by his left nipple.

‘The Fisher Twins have a juice list.’

‘A juice list?’ I repeated.

Maurice nodded. So did Sal and Kojar.

‘And what exactly does a juice list do?’

‘It contains every dirty little secret about anybody with a role to play in Vegas. It tells you the politicians who take kickbacks and the lawmakers who cheat on their wives. It tells you who’s dirty on the State Gaming Commission, who you can bribe to obtain your casino licence, which folks in city planning might crack under pressure, which newspaper hacks have a soft spot you can exploit.’

‘I see. And how did they come to have this list?’

‘Private investigators, mostly. They hired a whole team before they moved into town. They identified key people and had their investigators dig information on them until they found dirt.’

I thought of Terry Ricks, watching over Victoria back at Space Station One. He’d struck me as a capable and resourceful man – the type who might excel in an intelligence-gathering role. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he’d been involved in work of that nature.

Maurice smiled a lazy smile, and quite suddenly his eyes looked entirely benign. ‘The Fisher Twins are smart. They knew the kind of money they could make here, but it’s tough for an outsider to get a foothold. They needed to rig the odds.’

‘So they developed a blackmail dossier.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘And if you want to build Magic Land, you need a list just like it.’

‘We need a list
exactly
like it.’

Maurice loaded weight onto his words, watching me quite calmly. Kojar and Sal watched me too. I felt a surge of electricity in my fingertips (even the dud ones) and ran my tongue over my lips. My lips felt a good deal drier than my armpits.

‘Josh was meant to get you the list,’ I said.

Maurice nodded.

‘And he hasn’t delivered, or Sal and Kojar wouldn’t have been looking for him last night.’

He nodded again. ‘You mentioned he wanted you involved in a job.’

‘Right. And you think he wanted me to steal this juice list?’

Sal was fussing with the cardboard model, pinching one of the miniature trees between his finger and thumb. Kojar was rocking on the balls of his feet, like he was practising his balance. Maurice removed his hand from the pockets of his robe and fiddled with his lip piercing.

‘You want in?’

‘That depends. How much does it pay?’

‘How much do you need?’

I turned my response over for a few moments. There was only one sum of money that would make any difference to me, so it seemed senseless to try for anything else.

‘One hundred and forty thousand dollars.’

A nerve twitched in Maurice’s cheek. ‘Okay,’ he said, at length. ‘Let’s talk details.’

TWENTY-FOUR

Eight-thirty in the morning, and people had long since gravitated back towards the grey felt jungle in Space Station One. The croupiers and cocktail waitresses appeared fresh-faced and alert, the carpets were vacuumed, the slots gleaming, the air newly perfumed and low on cigarette smoke. Even the table limits had been re-set, and tourists destined for home were pausing to stake their last remaining chips before wheeling suitcases away.

I couldn’t find Victoria. She wasn’t playing blackjack and she wasn’t trying her luck at roulette. I scanned the keno pit and the sports book and the slots. I even checked the food hall and the winding queue for the breakfast buffet and the crowded coffee and pastry outlet, but found no sign of her.

I moved back to the gaming-tables and did my best to locate Estelle, but in all likelihood, she’d finished her shift and left for the day. I thought about calling Victoria’s mobile, and then I remembered that it was still in my pocket. I considered contacting the Fifty-Fifty and asking to be connected to the telephone in Victoria’s room. It seemed like a sensible move, but before I could do anything about it I felt a hand grip me by the shoulder and haul me around.

‘Looking for someone?’

Ricks stood with his fists on his hips and the tails of his blazer hooked behind his forearms. The whites of his eyes had yellowed, as if he was low on vitamins as well as sleep. Greyish stubble had grown up on his jowls, blurring the lines of his goatee and giving it a smudged effect to go along with his eyes. There was a fuggy, decayed stench to his breath, and when he exhaled it took a good deal of self-control not to cover my face with my forearm as though a canister of tear gas had been tossed at my feet.

‘I’m trying to find Victoria,’ I said.

‘We have her in a room.’

I felt my nose crinkle as his breath washed over me once more. ‘A hotel suite?’

‘That’s funny,’ he told me. ‘She’s asking for you.’

There was nothing futuristic about the back room set-up at Space Station One. The room Victoria was detained in was as close to a prison cell as you could get without adding bunk beds, graffiti and a seven-foot man-ape called Crusher. The door was constructed from painted metal, with a wire-glass insert about the size of a hardback novel and a multi-pin lock that would be a real challenge to pick. Fortunately, Ricks had the appropriate key on a sizeable ring, so there was no need to test myself.

Victoria was slouched in a grey plastic chair at a grey plastic table that had been fixed to the grey concrete wall. The Houdini biography was open in her hands, and when we entered the room she laid it carefully down onto the table with the pages splayed.

She offered me a tired smile, then raised her hands to clear her hair from her eyes. I noticed that she’d acquired some yellow plastic bracelets to go along with her blue cocktail dress.

‘Handcuffs.’ I shook my head and clucked my tongue at Ricks, as though he’d let himself down very badly.

‘It’s fine, Charlie,’ Victoria said. ‘The dummies left me here reading my Houdini book. In another three chapters, I’ll be able to release myself and sneak out through that door.’

Ricks grunted, and stepped around the table to approach Victoria. He was carrying a cardboard folder in his hands, and he set the folder down onto the table before snatching at Victoria’s wrists and raising her arms above her head. He parted her hands and used a gadget from his trouser pocket to snip the cuffs away.

Victoria rubbed the skin of her wrists, wincing at the red striations that had appeared. I sat across from her and chucked her under the chin.

‘Okay?’

‘Never better.’

‘You look tired.’

‘So do you.’ Her eyes slid sideways. ‘So does Mr Ricks, for that matter.’

‘Did they treat you okay?’

‘Well, I didn’t get the room upgrade I requested.’

I gave her hand a squeeze and she squeezed back. If we hadn’t been sitting in a detention cell with a security agent watching over us, it might have passed for an affectionate moment.

She said, ‘You didn’t answer my mobile.’

I thought back to the withheld number that had appeared on the screen when I’d been inside Maurice’s office. ‘Bad timing, I’m afraid.’

‘You said you’d only be gone five minutes.’

‘That was the plan.’

‘They took our money,’ she told me, and swallowed hard. Her eyes were getting a little swimmy. ‘Every last dollar. I’m sorry, Charlie.’

‘Oh well. House always wins, right?’

She bowed her head and sniffled, and I was just reaching for a hanky when I saw that Ricks had passed one across. Victoria accepted it with a murmur of gratitude, and while she dabbed her eyes and blew her nose, I leaned one arm over the backrest of my chair and faced up to her knight in shining armour.

‘So, let’s hear it.’

Ricks twisted his lips, as if he was tasting around the various ways in which he could begin, and then he reached inside his blazer and removed a clear Ziploc bag. He tossed the bag onto the table and awaited my reaction. I lifted the bag and stared at its contents, working an elaborate shrug.

‘You recognise that?’ he asked.

I checked on Victoria. She peered at me from beneath her fringe, her eyes smoky and vague. It was hard to read anything from them.

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s my ring.’

‘Your ring?’

‘My lucky ring, to be exact. I asked Victoria to wear it when she was playing blackjack.’

‘Lucky ring.’ Ricks shook his head at the words and ran his hand over his oily scalp. He freed the bag from my fingers and emptied the ring into his nut-brown palm. ‘It’s a damn twinkle.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘A twinkle.’ He gathered the ring between his forefinger and thumb and pointed the flattened face towards me. ‘An improvised mirror. Your friend here was playing blackjack and she had the ring angled so that she could read the dealer’s cards.’

I squinted at my warped reflection in the polished surface of the ring. My head looked out of proportion – my cheeks bloated and eyes swollen, as though I’d just stepped out of an orbiting shuttle without my spacesuit on. Even so, I had to admit that I could see myself quite clearly.

‘Well I never. This is the first time I’ve noticed that the surface is reflective.’ I blinked, as though utterly mystified. ‘I’m sure Victoria hadn’t noticed it before, either. Right, Vic?’

Victoria contemplated me for a long moment, then shook her head almost imperceptibly.

I offered Ricks a neutral smile. ‘It’s a little unfortunate if this is all you have.’

‘She was past posting.’

‘Past wotsying?’

‘Posting. At the roulette-table.’

‘You’ll have to forgive me, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

Ricks snarled and rested his bunched fists on top of his cardboard folder. He leaned his weight onto his fists until his knuckles popped and then he sighed his morning breath all over me.

‘She was staking triples. Three blue chips, five dollars each. Only, when she hit a number straight up she pulled a switch. Suddenly she had two blue chips sitting on top of a two-hundred-dollar black marker.’

‘That was my bet,’ Victoria told him, in a manner that suggested it wasn’t the first time she’d run the argument.

‘Oh, sure. And it just so happened that the one time you hit your number was the one time when you laid that particular stake. That exact pattern of chips.’

‘I was lucky.’

‘Yeah? Maybe it was your ring.’

Victoria steepled her fingers and pressed her fingertips to her lips. Colour flushed her cheeks. ‘As I’ve already said a number of times, you should ask the croupier if you don’t believe me. He didn’t have a problem with my bet, and neither did his pit boss. At least, not until you came over and started levelling accusations.’

‘You want me to pull the tape? You want us all to watch the move?’

Ricks pushed his face towards Victoria and held it there. I heard a faint whistle as he inhaled through his nose. I didn’t envy Victoria the outbreath she was about to experience.

‘So I ran your passport through our system,’ he added, curling his lip. ‘Made an interesting connection.’

Victoria grimaced and backed away from Ricks, as if he was a drunken Lothario in a pick-up bar.

‘I told you I knew a guy called Alfred Newbury,’ he said. ‘One of the best casino cheats I ever met. He’s your father, right?’

I heard myself scoff.

‘Er, Starsky, I hate to tell you this, but Victoria’s father is a High Court judge.’

His head swivelled and he beamed a disarming grin. His teeth gleamed quite brilliantly against his dark skin.

‘No, friend. You’re thinking of his nickname.’

Ricks slid the cardboard folder in front of me as if he was laying down a winning hand at the end of a marathon poker game. I delayed for a moment before opening it. The folder contained a number of printed pages. Clipped to the top page was a headshot of a distinguished-looking gentleman with thick white hair and a bushy, snow-white beard. His gaze was bold and discerning, but there was a mischievous sparkle in his eyes, as if he’d known at the moment the image was captured that it would one day be clipped to a typeset report just like the one in Ricks’ folder.

I lifted the photograph clear of the page. Beneath it was a printed sheet listing some personal details. Name, age, date of birth, permanent address. The report gave the man’s home town as St Albans, near London, and it stated that he was married to a woman called Joyce.

I recalled Victoria mentioning that she’d grown up in the London commuter belt, and I knew for a fact that her mother’s name was Joyce. And hell, I couldn’t deny that there was a likeness about the face in the picture and the features of my good friend Victoria. I nudged the folder aside with a dismissive snort.

Ricks said, ‘He was known as The Judge on account of he always knew when to make his move, plus when to quit. Guy worked Europe, mostly. The Riviera. Monaco. Spent some time in Eastern Europe. He didn’t play Vegas often, and so far as anyone knows he hasn’t been back here in years. I tracked him my second year in the job. He ran a crew at the Sahara and hit us for a couple hundred thousand. Got away with it too.’

‘That doesn’t sound like a member of Victoria’s family.’

I fixed on Ricks’ eyes. His pupils danced left and right, as though he was running calculations in his mind.

‘Oh, he’s her father, all right. Looks like he passed on a few pointers, too. Maybe we should try to get a hold of him, see if he’s feeling mighty proud?’

Victoria’s head snapped around as though she’d been jabbed in the neck with a pointy stick.

‘You can leave my father out of this.’

Ricks grinned, and showed her his palms. ‘Well, what do you know? Seems I was right all along.’

‘You have some dirty allegations,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Oh, that’s something, coming from a lousy crib-man.’

I put my head on my shoulder and did my best to appear bemused. ‘I’m a writer, Mr Ricks. I think perhaps you’re confusing me with the lead character in some of my mystery novels.’

‘Oh, come on, you think we didn’t check you out back at the Fifty-Fifty? You think we don’t have access to your records?’

‘Record,’ I corrected him. ‘A single, youthful mistake. Nothing more.’

It was Ricks’ turn to scoff. He poked a finger at my lap. ‘You want that I should ask you to turn out your pockets again?’

No, that wasn’t a suggestion that I was altogether keen on. For one thing, I had my burglar tools on me. But worse still, I also had Josh’s wallet.

‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude to point?’

‘Guess she was too busy teaching me not to steal other folk’s possessions.’

‘That’s enough,’ Victoria said. ‘Can’t you just tell us what it is that you want?’

‘Want?’ Ricks straightened and cupped the back of his neck. ‘Gee, I don’t know. I guess I want you to quit cheating my casinos.’

Victoria scraped the legs of her chair backwards and stood abruptly. She paced to the far wall in a measured fashion and pressed her hands flat against the painted surface. She kicked the toe of her shoe against the plastic skirting board.

‘Am I right in thinking that you know about the ultimatum we’re facing?’ she asked.

‘He knows,’ I said.

She turned her head and scowled hard at Ricks. Her back was arched and her teeth exposed. She looked like a cat with its hackles raised – one that was ready to pitch itself into a claw fight.

‘Hey,’ Ricks said, and raised his spread hands like a shield. ‘I don’t only work for the Fifty-Fifty. My agency watch over a number of resorts. This here is one of them.’

‘Oh, really? And what hours are you required to work? Because forgive me if I’m mistaken, but I was beginning to form the impression that this was personal to you.’

‘Lady, I don’t punch in and out. My job doesn’t work that way. I’m employed to stop casino cheats. You were cheating one of my casinos.’

‘Because our lives are in danger.’

Ricks sucked his lips inside his mouth and shook his head, as though the situation wasn’t playing out in the way he’d intended. He rested his hands on his hips and looked towards the ceiling. His tone dropped to something approaching confidential.

‘For the record, miss, I happen to believe your father was one classy guy. Maybe the best casino man I ever went up against. And maybe I’m not altogether comfortable watching his daughter pull the kind of routine that would make her old man blush. Leastways, not with a petty housebreaker who’s too dumb to know when he’s in over his head.’

I guess I should have been offended by his assessment of my abilities but right at that moment I was rather more interested in his attitude towards Victoria’s dad.

‘You have the money Victoria won,’ I said, speaking carefully, as though there was a voice-activated bomb in the room and I was doing my best not to detonate it.

‘She cheated that money.’

‘That may be,’ I told him, in the same measured tone. ‘But the fact is this casino hasn’t lost anything. So there’s really no harm done.’

‘Is that so? You expect me to believe you haven’t been tossing guest rooms for the money you need?’