“Right before we spoke, I got a phone call from Special Agent Romero of the FBI,” Mabel explained. “He told me that Tony and Gerry have gotten on the wrong side of a notorious mobster, and are in danger.”
“So they couldend up dead, like in my dream,” Yolanda said.
“Yes.”
Yolanda tickled the baby’s stomach and made her giggle. The baby was named Lois, and resembled Tony’s late wife, whom she’d been named after. As a result, Yolanda had Tony and Gerry wrapped around her little finger, yet rarely took advantage of it. Lifting the baby to her shoulder, she said, “I suppose I should call them, and ask them to come home, but somehow I have a feeling that they’d both tell me they’re okay, and not to worry. Am I right?”
Mabel sunk down into a chair. Yolanda was right. Tony and Gerry weren’t going to be forced out of a case by anyone.
“Besides, think of the long-term consequences if I ask them to come home,” Yolanda said, patting the baby’s behind.
“What long-term consequences?”
“I’d be drawing a line in the sand,” Yolanda said, “and telling Tony and Gerry that I’m not willing to let them work under certain situations. If I did that, they might as well close Grift Sense, and go into some other line of work.”
Mabel swallowed hard. She hadn’t thought of it that way. “I see your point.”
“Good. I suggest we take another tack.”
“Which is?”
“Maybe we can help them solve this case, ” Yolanda said.
“How are we going to do that? We don’t know anything about it.”
Yolanda handed her the baby, then dug a piece of folded paper from her pocket. Yolanda was big on writing things down, and unfolded a page filled with notes.
“Oh yes, we do,” the younger woman said.
They went into Tony’s office with Mabel still holding the baby. She’d raised two children of her own, and looked back fondly at the experience, even though she hardly heard from either of them now. One day, they’d have children of their own, and start calling her more regularly. It was how it had worked with her mother.
“I spoke with Gerry last night,” Yolanda said, laying her notes on the desk. “He told me the key to solving this scam was at the Atlantic City Medical Center. His friend Jack Donovan stole something from there that’s being used to invisibly mark cards, and Gerry is trying to find out what it is. Well, I think we can help him.”
“How?” Mabel asked.
“The first thing Gerry has to realize is that things get stolen from hospitals, and never get reported to the police.”
“Why’s that?”
“Hospitals are no different than anywhere else,” Yolanda said. “Stuff disappears, including narcotics and prescription drugs, and the police never hear about it. People internally know about it, but that’s where it stops.”
The baby was starting to squirm. Mabel put her on the floor, and watched her crawl away.
“Bad for business?” Mabel asked.
“Worse than bad,” Yolanda said. “If the state medical board hears that a hospital is losing drugs to thieves, they might pull the hospital’s license. As a result, thefts routinely get hushed up. Gerry can’t rely on anyone working at the Atlantic City Medical Center to be truthful in regards to what Jack Donovan might have stolen from them.”
“So the hospital is a dead end,” Mabel said.
“Not necessarily. Oh, better grab the baby.”
Lois had crawled across the floor and was drooling on the newest addition to Tony’s collection of cheating equipment. It was a crooked roulette wheel, courtesy of the famed London Club, that’d hired Tony to determine why they were losing on the wheel. Using a computer software program, Tony had analyzed a week’s worth of winning numbers, and determined that half were coming up too often. He’d gotten the casino to take the wheel apart, and remove all the screws holding the metal separators between the winning numbers, called frets. It was discovered that the threads of these screws were thinner than normal, and offered less resistance when hit by the spinning ball. The casino had arrested the roulette repairman, who’d immediately confessed to the ingenious crime.
Mabel scooped the baby up. “Why not necessarily?”
“If the hospital isconfronted by the police about a theft, they’ll help in the investigation, for the same reasons I just explained. The hard part is getting enough evidence for the police to feel comfortable doing that.” Yolanda glanced at her notes on the desk. “Right now, we know the following: Jack Donovan stole something from the hospital, which he hid inside a metal strongbox under his bed. The strongbox was missing after Jack was murdered, leaving everyone to assume that the murderer stole it. Now, here’s the interesting part. Gerry saw the murderer coming down a stairwell in the hospital, right?”
“Correct,” Mabel said.
“But the murderer wasn’t carrying a strongbox, a duffel bag, or anything at all,” Yolanda said. “Gerry said his hands were empty.”
“Maybe the murderer took the secret out of the strongbox, and put it in his pocket.”
“I don’t think so. We know the secret is dangerous, which is why it was kept inside the strongbox in a duffel bag. I have another theory as to what happened to Jack’s secret.”
Mabel rocked the baby against her chest. She sensed that Yolanda had found something that everyone else had missed. Something hiding in plain sight, to use one of Tony’s favorite expressions.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I think George Scalzo stole it,” Yolanda said.
Mabel blinked. She knew a lot about Scalzo, courtesy of Special Agent Romero. Scalzo had murdered Skip DeMarco’s mother, a prostitute, in order to get custody of DeMarco when he was a little boy. Scalzo would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
“If that’s true, then Scalzo was in the hospital during the murder,” Mabel said.
“I think so,” Yolanda said.
“You don’t think he would have sent one of his men?”
“Scalzo wants his nephew to win the World Poker Showdown,” Yolanda said. “Do you think he would have trusted one of his men to steal the scam from Jack’s room?”
Mabel considered it, then shook her head. “No, he would have done it himself.”
“So my theory makes sense,” Yolanda said.
“It makes perfect sense,” Mabel said. “If we can put Scalzo in that hospital, he’s an accomplice to Jack Donovan’s murder.”
“Most hospitals require visitors to sign in at a reception area,” Yolanda said. “There might be a record of Scalzo being there.”
Mabel handed Yolanda the baby. Yolanda didn’t know enough about crooks to know that most of them never used their real names. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t prove her theory. Special Agent Romero had said that the FBI was watching Scalzo twenty-four hours a day. The FBI would know if Scalzo was at the hospital that night.
Romero’s number was written on a slip of paper on the desk. Mabel punched the number into the phone, then looked appreciatively at Yolanda.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” Mabel said.
29
“What fucking happened?” Scalzo whispered. “I don’t know,” DeMarco whispered back.
“You don’t know?”
“No, Uncle George. I don’t know what happened.”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” his uncle whispered, his breath hot on his nephew’s neck. “A guy named Skins Turner just beat you out of a monster pot, and took a third of your chips away from you. You’re no longer in first place.”
“I know, Uncle George.”
“So tell me how Skins did it,” his uncle said.
“I told you, I don’t know,” DeMarco replied.
DeMarco and his uncle and Guido were standing on the far end of the poker room, next to the wall and away from the other players and mob of spectators. The tournament took a fifteen-minute bathroom break every two hours, and the players ran like lemmings to the johns. DeMarco had instead gone over to be with his uncle, whose voice hinted that he was on the verge of losing control.