“Go up to your surveillance control room and take a look at some tapes,” Marconi said.

“Gaining entrance to that room takes a fricking act of Congress,” the floor manager said. “I need to tell the people upstairs what this is about.”

Marconi took off the cap, and showed the floor manager the rim. “This cap was used to scam your blackjack tables. We want to watch the tapes of the guy who was wearing it. Think you can arrange that?”

The floor manager muttered something unpleasant and left. Casino people were fiercely territorial, and tended to bang heads with cops as a matter of principle. They went into a coffee shop to wait.

“Do senior citizens rip off casinos?” Marconi asked a few minutes later.

Gerry had ordered coffee and was gulping it down to stay awake. “Seniors can be as bad as anyone else. My father nailed a gang who were stealing six figures a year.”

“What were they doing, putting slugs in slot machines?” Marconi asked.

Gerry shook his head.

“Fudging their Keno cards?” Davis asked.

Gerry shook his head again. “It was a bus scam. The tour operator was in cahoots with them.”

Cops liked to think they knew everything when it came to crime. Davis and Marconi traded looks, then stared Gerry down.

“What the hell’s a bus scam?” Davis asked.

Gerry put down his coffee. “The casino was paying a tour operator ten dollars a head to bus seniors in twice a week. The seniors had a larcenous streak, and told the tour operator they’d inflate the count if he’d split the money with them.”

“They stole six figures doing this?” Marconi asked incredulously.

“Yeah. The tour operator was bringing in ten buses, twice a week. The count on each bus was being inflated by ten heads. That’s two grand a week.”

Marconi and Davis dealt with bad people every day, but this seemed to bother them. If Gerry had learned anything working for his father, it was that gambling made people do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do. He finished his drink.

“How did your father nail them?” Davis asked.

“My father was working the casino on another case,” Gerry said. “He happened to walk outside, and saw the tour operator throwing unopened box lunches into a Dumpster. He mentioned it to management, and was told the casino gave each senior a boxed lunch as part of the deal. My father went outside, and counted all the boxes in the Dumpster. That’s when he figured out what they were doing.”

“Did the seniors go to jail?” Davis asked.

“No one went to jail,” Gerry said. “The tour operator gave his share back, and did community service. The seniors had spent theirs, so they worked it off at the casino.”

“That your father’s idea?” Davis asked.

Gerry nodded. His father believed in giving first-time offenders a pass, provided they were truly repentant. Everyone involved in this case had been. The floor manager appeared at the entrance to the restaurant, and motioned to them impatiently. They settled the bill, then came out to where the floor manager waited.

“You’ve got clearance,” the floor manager said.

Bally’s surveillance control room was the heart and soul of its security operation. Housed on the third floor, it was a windowless, claustrophobic room filled with the finest snooping equipment money could buy. The room was kept at a chilly sixty degrees, and each technician wore several layers of clothing. The floor manager led them past a wall of video monitors to a master console in the rear of the room, where a short, bespectacled man wearing a gray turtleneck sat with his fingers clutched around a joystick.

“They’re all yours,” the floor manager said.

The floor manager left, and Marconi introduced himself, Davis, and Gerry. The man at the console removed his glasses and quizzed Gerry with a glance.

“You Tony Valentine’s son?”

“Sure am,” Gerry said.

“Your father taught me the ropes,” the man said. “We used to say your father could see a gnat’s ass and hear a mouse piss. How’s he doing?”

“Great,” Gerry said.

“Glad to hear it. My name’s Lou Preston. I hear you want to watch some tapes.”

Gerry explained the blackjack scam with the baseball cap to Lou Preston. When he was finished, Preston’s head was bobbing up and down.

“So you think there might have been more cheaters wearing these caps,” Preston said. “Can you give me an approximate time when this took place?”

“Around four o’clock this morning,” Marconi said.

“What exactly did the caps look like?” Preston asked.

Marconi took the cap off his head and gave it to Preston. Preston placed the cap beneath the reading light on his console, and spent a few moments examining it.

“Let’s see if we can find this cap in our digital library,” he said.

Preston began to type on the keyboard on his console. Like most large casinos, Bally’s used digital video recorders to continuously tape the action on the floor. It was a far cry from the old days, when the tapes in VCRs had to be switched every hour. Within seconds, four tapes appeared on a matrix on Preston’s computer screen. Each tape showed a different man in the casino wearing a baseball cap while playing blackjack.

“These four gentlemen were playing blackjack in our casino at four o’clock this morning,” Preston said. “Is one of them your guy?”

Marconi pointed at the guy in the right-hand corner of the matrix. “That’s him.”

Preston dragged the cursor over the picture and clicked on it. The picture enlarged to show a guy in his early fifties wearing a Yankees cap and smoking a cigar. He wore his shirt open, and hanging around his neck were several thick gold chains.

Preston did some more magic with his cursor, and the baseball cap became the only thing on the screen. He struck the ENTER key, then leaned back in his chair.

“In sixty seconds we’ll know if your hunch is correct,” he told Gerry.

The hard drive on Preston’s console made a whirring sound. Marconi and Davis looked confused, and Gerry guessed they weren’t up to speed on the latest technology being employed by casinos to track cheaters. Pointing at the baseball cap, he said, “Lou just burned an image of this cap into his computer. He’s asked the computer to take a look at all recent tapes, and see how many similar caps turn up. Within a minute we’ll know how many there were.”

“I thought that took hours,” Davis said.

“ Usedto take hours,” Preston corrected him. “We now use Kalatel DVRs to record digitally. It’s light years faster than before. We can search the tapes for anything we want.”

“Beats using a catwalk, huh?” Gerry said.

“Personally, I liked the catwalks,” Preston said.

“Gave me plenty of exercise. They did have their drawbacks, though. One time, I was on the catwalk with a camera with a zoom lens, trying to photograph a cheater switching dice. There was a two-way mirror in the ceiling, and as I tried to photograph the switch, the cheater stared straight up at me. I must have leaned on the mirror, because dust was falling down on his head. Needless to say, he ran like hell.”

The hard drive had stopped whirring, and Preston hit ENTER again.

“Bingo,” he said. “Four matches.”

They huddled behind his chair, and Preston pulled up each match the computer had made. Four men, all Italian, with ages ranging from late forties to late fifties, wearing jewelry around their necks or hands, and wearing Yankees baseball caps.

“Looks like a casting call for The Sopranos,” Marconi said.

Gerry felt a hand on his shoulder, and glanced at Davis.

“Good job,” Davis said.

Preston e-mailed copies of each man’s image to the Atlantic City Police Department to be checked against its database of known criminals. Then he escorted his guests through the surveillance control room to the door. As Marconi and Davis walked into the hall, Preston turned to Gerry.