Maggie was so good at her appointed task that Mason wanted to stay in that card room just to watch her work. Since he had some work of his own to do, he pulled himself away from there and made his way to the next deck up. Along the way, he spotted a few overmen who watched him carefully without making a move to get in his way. Mason tipped his hat to the enforcers and moved along until he got to a short, narrow hallway filled with doors numbered one through ten.
Someone stepped out of door eight: a short man in a crisp black suit with a silver chain across his midsection. He nodded to Mason, checked his watch, and hurried down the hall. Not long ago, Mason had been that fellow with the uppermost priority being getting to the next card game. Soon he might be that fellow again. For the moment, however, he was the fellow who broke into another man’s room with bad intentions in mind. Fortunately this wasn’t Mason’s first go-round in that role.
According to Dell the barber, the door Mason wanted was number six. He tried the knob, hoping against hope that his job would be easy. The door was locked. “Oh well,” he muttered while reaching around to the small of his back. “Nothing good ever comes easy.”
He pulled the dagger from its hidden scabbard without making a sound. The tip of the blade was scratched along a section that was less than an inch long, and when he stuck the blade into the door’s lock, he imagined he’d add a few more imperfections to the metal. Rather than look at what he was doing, Mason shifted to stand sideways so he could watch the hallway in case anyone happened along at the wrong time. He didn’t need to see his hands to know what was going on down there. He could feel the blade grinding against the lock’s mechanism, which told him everything he needed to know. After guiding the dagger farther, he was able to twist it and open the door.
“Sometimes,” he whispered while entering room six, “I wonder why anyone bothers to lock these.”
Even though he’d been perfectly satisfied with his own room, Mason had been well aware it was small. Compared to Vernon’s accommodations, his were spacious. The bunk folded down from the wall and was held in place by a chain at the upper and lower corners. Beneath the bunk and sticking out a little bit was a flat chest with a smaller lock embedded in its front panel. A small table folded out from the wall below a porthole like a miniature version of the bed, but was supported by a wooden post that fit into notches cut into the wall as well as the bottom of the panel. A small chamber pot was in one corner of the room, and that was all there was to see.
“No wonder he plays so much faro,” Mason said. “He doesn’t have enough room to stay in here for long.” He rubbed his hands together and said, “All right, then. This shouldn’t take long.”
The first place where Mason set his sights was the chest below the bunk. Of course, it helped that there wasn’t much of any other place for someone to hide something in that cabinet of a room. Before raising the bunk, he lifted the paper-thin mattress and ran his hand along every inch of the frame. That took all of five seconds, but at least it put his mind at ease when he folded the bunk up and held it in place with a leather strap hanging from the wall that connected to a hook on the edge of the bunk.
Mason squatted down to get a look at the chest. It was about two feet wide and less than half of that in height. The size of the lock was suited for a key the size of one that might unlock a set of handcuffs. He knew how to pick a smaller lock like that one, but he didn’t have the tools with him. “Eh, to hell with it,” he grunted as he jammed the dagger’s blade beneath the lid and used it as a lever to force it open. Inside, the chest was filled with some folded shirts, a few neckties, and some pairs of wool socks. Mason went for the socks, felt them, and found they were empty.
“Hope springs eternal,” he sighed before putting the socks back.
Before he started emptying the chest, he felt along the interior of the lid. It was lined with a thin layer of felt, which brought a smirk to Mason’s face. Using the dagger once again, he sliced along the inner edge of the lid so he could peel away some of the lining. Stashed under there were five gold coins stamped only with their weight in grams as well as several impressions made by the teeth of men looking to gauge their authenticity.
Since the felt had been undamaged before he got there, Mason guessed those gold coins were Virgil’s holdout stash. If things went badly, every gambler kept a private bankroll tucked away to get them on his feet again. As far as he knew, none of the games on the Jack paid out in gold, which pointed once again to those coins being Virgil’s backup. Mason set them down next to the chest and started emptying the clothing onto the floor as well. After removing the socks, two shirts, and three ties, he hit bottom.
“What the hell?” he grumbled.
The chest wasn’t large, but it should have been able to hold more than that. Mason knocked on the bottom while looking at the outside of the container. By his estimation, only half of the chest’s storage capacity was being used by the clothing. He shook his head.
“Virgil, Virgil, Virgil,” he said while feeling along the edges of the chest’s interior. “If you’re going to give one of these a false bottom, you need to make the compartment a bit smaller. That way,” he added as his fingertip grazed along a notch in the front edge of the chest’s bottom, “it’s not so easy to spot. I should have a word with you when this is through.”
The tip of the dagger came in handy yet again. This time, he just needed to loosen the panel at the bottom of the chest to pry it loose. It came off with a small amount of convincing to reveal several neatly arranged stacks of money. Mason’s heart skipped a beat. He put the dagger away so he could sink both hands into the treasure trove just to feel all that cash for himself. “I never get sick of this,” he sighed. He dug his hands in a little deeper with the intention of pulling as much of the cash out as possible. Instead he found something else.
“What have we here?” Mason said as he removed a good portion of the cash.
It turned out the stacks of money had been piled in a way that created yet another hidden space. Situated on the true bottom of the trunk with stacks of cash all around were two devices. One was a rectangular metal box that was open on the top and had a steel rod running all the way through it. The rod was connected to a knob on one end and was built to hold two dice in place so they could be shaved.
“Very naughty,” Mason said while running one finger along the dice. Sure enough, they’d both been shaved along specific edges so that when they were thrown, they were likelier to roll a certain way. Someone with enough practice could tip the odds significantly in their favor. It was a crude method of cheating that relied mostly on switching the shaved dice with the ones being used at the craps table being set up for a fall.
The second device was much smaller. A short ivory handle was connected to a small iron cage that was just large enough to hold a single die in place. Holes in the cage corresponded to pips on the die, and a small spike sharpened to a point at one end was used to bore a hole into the pip. That hole could then be filled with something heavy like metal shavings or lead and painted to look as it had appeared before. When the loaded dice were rolled, they would favor the weighted side, which meant the number on the opposing side would come up much more often than not.
No matter how many cons he might have run in his years of scraping by to earn a living, Mason couldn’t tolerate someone who cheated at dice. Those were the same heavy-handed idiots who rigged roulette wheels or picked another man’s pockets while he was busy with a woman. There was no skill involved. No finesse. No style.
Mason rarely needed to cheat any longer, but he knew the amount of practice involved with being able to sway those odds. The tricks needed to skew a poker game were similar to sleight of hand used by stage magicians, and those men were considered artists. Being able to shuffle a deck of cards while keeping them in the same order was a skill. Picking cards out using only a sense of touch that had been honed finely enough to detect the weight difference of face cards versus number cards was extraordinary. Rigging dice only required tools.
Since he was already squatting, Mason hunkered down a bit farther and brushed his hand against the floor. What could easily have passed for grit or flecks that had fallen from the bed frame or chains now struck Mason in a whole other way. Judging by the amount of scrapings and metal shavings lying around, Virgil had been quite busy in his room to improve his chances at the craps tables.
“Now, this explains quite a lot,” Mason said. “Makes things a whole lot easier too.”
Greeley had been correct when he said that most, if not all, professional gamblers cheated in one way or another. When a gambler got caught at cheating, he had to accept the consequences. For Virgil Slake, his consequences were a lot better than if he’d been caught by Greeley’s overmen.
Outside, footsteps knocked against the floorboards.
“I’ll leave your coins, Virgil,” Mason said as he began stuffing his pockets with cash. “That way you’ll at least have something to get by with for a while.”
The footsteps came to a stop and someone in the hallway tugged on the handle of Virgil’s door.
Mason hurried to collect two more fistfuls of cash before standing up. His hands were still in his pockets when the door was opened by a man who most definitely wasn’t Virgil Slake.