Lucky at Cards (4 page)

4

Outside, something was heading north on Main Street with its siren open. It was either a police cruiser or an ambulance, I couldn’t tell which, but it was making a hell of a lot of noise. I crossed to the window and stood there straightening my tie and trying to see what it was. But it had passed out of view by then.

I turned to Joyce. She was dressed now, and she was trying to manage that chestnut hair back into its French roll. I walked up behind her and kissed the back of her neck. She spun around and put her hands against my chest.

“I suppose only a dentist like Seymour Daniels would look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m a dentist at heart. I still want to know why you came here this morning.”

“Because I missed you, Bill.”

I gave her a funny look. She finished playing with her hair, took a cigarette, lighted it. “I missed you,” she said again. “Oh, not you in particular. Men like you. People like you. I’ve been married to Murray for almost three years and I’m still not used to it. Life had more of a kick to it before. I didn’t spend it cooking meals and entertaining business friends and going to dances at the country club. I stayed up late and slept late and lived hard. I was hungry all the time. Hungry for people, hungry for things to do. That’s what I missed.”

“Don’t you like what you’ve got?”

“No.”

“It must be a hell of a lot easier,” I said. “No worries about money or law. Good whiskey to drink and expensive clothes to wear.”

“I had that before.”

“All the time?”

“No. Some of the time.” Joyce looked at her feet. “Listen, of course it’s easier. That’s not everything, Bill. Dying is the easiest thing in the world, just lying down and dying and never having to hustle again. And being married to Murray Rogers is a lot like dying. The kick is gone. There’s no motion, no excitement.”

Maybe I’d been too close to broke to feel sorry for anybody with a world full of money. Whatever it was, it must have showed on my face. She saw it.

“Bill, you could have stayed hooked up with a card mob. It’s safer that way, isn’t it?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t like to work for somebody else,” I said. “I wanted it a little freer than that. Hell, when I dealt for Guiterno I was just a well-paid hired hand.”

“Now do you understand?”

I nodded. “Cheer up,” I said. “He’s not a kid any more. He’s around fifty and he’s worked hard all his life. He’s a good twenty years older than you are. He won’t live forever. You’ll be a young widow with a pot full of dough and a lifetime to spend it in.”

And then she was laughing. It was loose, hysterical laughter. She threw back her head and her whole body shook with the laughter, and she kept going until I grabbed her by the shoulders and calmed her down. Then she looked straight in my eyes and started to laugh again.

“So funny,” she said. “So very funny.”

“What is?”

“Everything. That’s what everybody thinks—I’ll stick it out and I’ll be a rich young widow and everything will be great. That’s what I thought, Bill. Murray let me think so. I should have made him put it in writing, damn it.”

I didn’t get it.

“He’s richer than God,” she said. “He’s also a lawyer, and he’s got a very pretty little will drawn up. One hundred thousand dollars goes in trust for me. I get the income from it until I remarry or move out of town. If I do either, the trust is dissolved and the principal is divided between those two rich-bitch daughters of his. They also get the rest of the estate over and above the hundred thousand, and that comes to so much that they wouldn’t even miss that hundred thou. I get the house, too—but I don’t get to own it outright. The trust owns it. I live in it rent-free. If I remarry or move away from this city, I lose the house along with the money.”

“So you don’t get a thing?”

“Nothing. Maybe five or six thousand dollars income from the trust, if I want to spend my life rotting. Oh, something else, and you’ll love this part. If I’m still unmarried and living here on my fiftieth birthday, then I get the principal of the trust, the whole happy little pie. But by then I’ll be too old to do anything with it. Isn’t that cute, Bill?”

It was cute, all right. Joyce had married him for a soft touch, and he had fixed it so that the soft touch ended the day he died. I asked her what would happen if she divorced him.

“Divorce a lawyer?” She shook her head. “That’s like fighting city hall, Bill. I wouldn’t get a nickel. No, there are only two things I can do. I can leave him flat and go back to the old life without taking any of his money along. Or I can keep it up the way it is and hope he lives forever. The will’s unbreakable, of course. He knows how to make a will unbreakable.”

She checked her make-up in the mirror, seemed happy with what she saw. She turned to me and gave me a kiss, and I caught her in my arms and messed up her lipstick all over again. Her arms held on tight.

“Damn it,” she said.

“You could come with me, Joyce.”

“And live on what?”

“Other people’s money, for a starter.”

“Why not Murray’s money?”

“Let him keep it.”

“I gave him almost three years,” she said. “Do I write them off now? Throw it up and say to hell with three years? You don’t get that many years, Bill. You have to hold onto them, make them swing for you. I don’t want to throw three of them away.”

“It’s worse to throw them all away.”

She was clinging to me and her face was pressed against my throat. She sagged, and I held onto her to keep her from crumbling. Then I felt her chest swell as she gulped in air. Her breasts were tight against me. I let go of her and she straightened up.

“I started to fall apart,” Joyce said.

“Forget it. You’re all right now.”

“I’d like to stick with you. Live with you, travel with you. You’re my kind of people, Bill.”

I didn’t say anything.

“But I like his money. I have a big thing for his money. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to put the two together?”

She let that one hang in the air for a few seconds. Then her face changed and she gave me a fast smile. She did a patchwork job on her lipstick, tossed her purse over her arm.

“I’ve got to run,” she told me. “I’m supposed to be downtown on a minor shopping spree. I’ll have to duck into a department store and buy a few sweaters in a hurry, then get back to our little ranch-style castle. Will you be staying in town for a while, Bill?”

“I suppose so. I don’t have any place to go.”

“I thought you were going to New York.”

“So did I.”

She looked at me, and her lips parted in a pout a little subtler than the Marilyn Monroe pose, but not much. “Then we’ll be seeing each other,” she said. "Goodbye, Wizard.”

After she left, I took the elevator down and let the hotel barber shorten my hair. When he was finished, I was a little less shaggy and a little more ex-Ivy League. I stopped at the desk on the way through the lobby and picked up my bill. The room clerk took my money and said something pleasant when I told him I’d be sticking around for awhile. I left the hotel and took a walk along Main Street.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to put the two together?
Not two, though. Three. Joyce and the money and me. We three, we’re not a crowd. We’re just a starry dream.

There was a classic answer to the classic problem.

The problem read Boy meets Girl, Girl has Rich Husband, and the answer read, Boy kills Husband, Boy gets Girl and Money. But we didn’t fit the classic problem. If we killed Murray we didn’t win anything but the electric chair. If he died, there was no money for the weeping widow.

It was just as well. The heavy-handed touch is not exactly the hallmark of the card mechanic. The brute type doesn’t bother slipping a deck of readers into the game or filling a flush from the bottom of the deck. The brute type takes his mark into a handy alleyway and hits him on the head with something heavy.

A mechanic is just a con man. He cons with a deck the way another man cons with a pool cue or a pair of wrong-way dice or a portfolio of Canadian moose-pasture stocks. And a con man plays the game with certain rules operating inside of his head. The direct approach is not on the preferred list.

Sometimes matters are ridiculous. When I had been dealing for Guiterno, we had a game set up for a Texan who liked to play big-money blackjack. That’s a dealer’s-control game—if you can deal seconds, and if you use marked cards or know how to do top-card peeks, you can make your mark lose every hand. A wide-hipped hooker steered the Texan to our game and he was the only live one in the crew. I was dealing and there were four of five shills playing with Guiterno’s money. It was all set up for the Texan.

And the Texan had been stoned to the gills on charcoal-filtered bourbon. He moved into the room where the game was floating, plumped himself down in the seat we had carefully kept open for him, and slapped a wad of long green on the table. He was so blind he couldn’t see the spots on the cards. He didn’t know where he was or what he was doing there, and we could have pocketed his money and put him out to pasture in the middle of the street without worrying about any mess in the morning. He wouldn’t remember a thing.

But we took his roll one hand at a time, and we kept playing hand after goddamned hand until fifty-four yards of his money had made the pilgrimage from his side of the table to our side. I even dealt hands to the shills, and the shills played out the hands religiously, and we took that Texan’s money just the way it says in the book, hand by hand and bet by bet. A few times he bet a hundred dollars on a card and lost and paid off with two bills stuck together. And I very honestly separated the bills and gave one back to him so that he could lose it on the next round.

We had cleaned the Texan according to the con man’s code, such as it is.

So it was just as well that Murray Rogers wouldn’t solve our problems by dying, or by being killed. Because I wasn’t trained for that kind of action.

I smoked a few cigarettes, stopped at a few diners and lunch counters for coffee. I thought about packing a suitcase and catching the plane to New York, but I didn’t think very seriously. I knew damned well I wasn’t going to do it, and I knew why.

Joyce Rogers hadn’t come to my room for a quick tumble and a chorus of
Auld Lang Syne
. And I wasn’t staying in town for another grab at her sweet brass ring or another poker session with Murray and Sy and the boys. We were both looking for an angle, the same angle. An angle that would give Maynard the Magnificent a pile of money and a green-eyed girl with hair the color of chestnuts.

The angle had to be there. All I had to do was find it.

5

I returned to the hotel in time to pick up a message from Sy Daniels. The terse little slip said I was supposed to call him. I put the call through from my room and reached him at his office. He wanted me to have dinner over at his place. It didn’t especially appeal but I seemed to be locked into it; I couldn’t very well turn him down two days running. I accepted the invitation with a certain amount of enthusiasm and he told me to drop over to the office around five-thirty and he’d give me a lift.

“Never mind,” I told him. “I rented a car a few hours ago. I may be in town a few days and I’d just as soon be able to drive myself around.”

I took down the address he gave me and the instructions on finding the place. I tucked this valuable information away in my wallet and found the Hertz outfit. A tired old man with cigarette-stained fingers took a long look at my driver’s license and condescended to rent me a car.

I asked for a stick shift. He had a hard time getting it through his head that I didn’t want automatic transmission and kept telling me that Hertz paid for the gas anyway. I told him I liked to feel as though I were doing the driving. Finally he gave me the car I wanted and wrote me off as an enemy of progress.

I took the car out and drove it around to get the feel of it. It was a piece of tin with nothing much in the engine department, but I didn’t feel much like a Gran Prix contender myself. I just drove.

Half of my mind worried about the driving. The other half fooled around with a green-eyed girl and her rich husband. Renting the car had been a commitment, if one were needed. I wasn’t going to catch a plane to New York, I was going to stick around, me and my tinny rental, and something was going to happen.

We couldn’t kill him. He had to be alive, and he had to have the money taken away from him. Well, I’d been taking money away from men for years. But I wasn’t going to beat Murray Rogers for a few hundred thou with a deck of cards. When a man worth somewhere around a million can pick a kick out of buck-limit poker, he doesn’t exactly fit the high-roller class. So my talent as a mechanic wasn’t going to be all that helpful.

There were a few possibilities. Murray Rogers could flip his lid and be committed to a funny farm. That would leave him alive and keep his loaded will from going into effect, and it would heap the money in Joyce’s warm little hands. If he went nuts, in short, she could divorce him without any trouble and obtain the kind of settlement that would let us sit pretty—maybe half to her and half to him for the girls, or something along those lines. Or, she could just find a way to divert the dough from her pocket to ours. That would be easy with him out of the way for awhile.

Two ways, then. A con that would strip the dough from Murray or would hit a way to ease him out of town long enough for Joyce and I to obtain control of the money. It was comforting to figure it all out that way, but that was about all. The chance of Murray going insane spontaneously was remote enough, and the chance that we could drive him nuts was just as far-fetched.

The traffic became progressively thicker, and by the time it was jammed up tight it was time to head for dinner with Daniels. My car swam through traffic like a salmon heading upstream. I followed Daniels’ directions without being lost more than once, and I parked in front of his house at a quarter after six.

Dinner wasn’t bad. Sy Daniels had a wife who was evidently trying to buck Joyce in the youth department. And failing, not surprisingly. Mary Daniels dyed her gray hair back to what she wished were its original color, and the ash-blonde result didn’t fit her complexion at all. Her eyes were older than the rest of her face and her girdle faded in the two-way stretch. But she kept a nice home and cooked a good meal and hadn’t picked up the annoying habit of flirting with her husband’s friends, which was nice. We ate brisket and roasted potatoes and asparagus tips, and afterward we sat around in the living room and drank scotch on the rocks.

The conversation roamed around, but it took on a definite tone in the course of the evening. Sy asked me if I were looking for work. I told him I’d gone as far as probing the classifieds with a pencil and checking off things that looked remotely possible. Later Mary wanted to know how I liked the town. Sy said something about how a man needed to put down roots after a certain amount of rambling around. Mary dragged some broad into the conversation and hinted that she could fix me up if I were interested.

It was all as homey as a Norman Rockwell cover, and I was the only one who knew what was wrong with this picture. They had life all planned for me. I would pick up a good job—there was a hint to the effect that one of Sy’s friends could probably come up with something if I decided to get off the plastics merry-go-round—and I would meet a nice girl who was hubby-hunting, and I would buy a house in the suburbs and play poker every Friday night and join the country club and fish for bass at the lake and otherwise spin in their social circle.

All in all, it wasn’t an illogical notion on their part. From their point of view the notion was perfectly feasible and desirable. But what they didn’t know was that I was staying in town because I was hung on somebody’s wife. This would have jarred them. My thing with Joyce killed their rose-covered dream for me. And if I broke it off with Joyce and folded the hand I’d be out of town like a shot.

And, to carry it a little further, if Joyce and I found a way to keep Murray Rogers alive but irrelevant, and if I won the girl and the money, girl and I would have no particular use for Sy and Mary and they would have less use for us. So there was quite a bit wrong with Rockwell’s cover. But the scotch was good and the company was pleasant and I stayed there until nearly midnight. Then I drove the Corvair back to the hotel, let the doorman put it to bed, and rode upstairs to do the same for myself. It took a good hour before I fell asleep. My mind kept taking things and turning them over and over, making up fresh problems and looking for answers that didn’t seem to be there.

I slept, finally. I had a bad dream, but in the morning I couldn’t remember what it was about.

I called her a little before noon. The voice that answered didn’t sound like hers. It was younger, softer. I said, “Mrs. Rogers?”

The voice said, “Just a minute.” Then there was an offstage, “Joyce! Telephone!”

A few seconds later another voice said “Hello,” and this time it was the right one.

“You sound lovely this morning,” I said. “Who was I talking to before?”

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Hewlitt,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about my monthly statement. It came this morning.”

“There’s somebody in the room with you.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”

“Can you get away this afternoon?”

“I really don’t think so, Mr. Hewlitt.”

“Tonight?”

“Well, that’s possible, I suppose.”

“Name a time.”

“There’s a charge for eight dollars and thirty cents here that I really don’t understand.”

“Eight-thirty tonight?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Where?”

“Well, I’m not sure exactly. I can’t say, Mr. Hewlitt.”

“You want me to pick a place?”

“That’s right.”

“My hotel?”

A pause. Then: “I should think there would be a better way than that to handle the matter.”

I thought for a minute. “There’s a bar at Main and Utica,” I said. “Southwest corner. I’ll be there at eight-thirty. Drive by and give a honk.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’d appreciate that.”

“I wish you were here now, Joyce. I’d like to rip your clothes off and pitch you onto a bed.”

“Yes,” she said, calmly, levelly. “Yes, of course. Certainly.”

I spent the afternoon in a movie. It was a Sunday, so Rogers was probably home, and that no doubt explained why she couldn’t get away during the afternoon. The monthly statement routine had sounded a little less than brilliant to me—not too many credit managers make adjustments on Sunday morning. But that was Joyce’s problem. I had the feeling that there wasn’t anybody in the room with her anyway, that she was just exercising a talent for melodrama.

The movie was dull. I walked out somewhere in the middle of the last reel and went across the street to a lunch counter. I had a hot pastrami sandwich on rye and a cup of black coffee. The check came to eighty-five cents or so. I left a quarter on the counter for the waitress, then carried my check to the cashier. I gave her a ten and she handed me my change.

The rest was almost reflex. My fingers tucked the five down and held it so that it stayed out of sight while my palm was up. It all happened in one quick movement while I was reaching with my other hand for a toothpick. Then I picked through my change and told the frayed blond cashier that she had made a mistake—I had given her a ten and she was five bucks short. She stared at the bills and coins in my hand, then at the fresh ten on the register. She shrugged her bony shoulders in puzzlement and gave me another five. I stuffed everything in a handy pocket and stepped outside.

Cheap, I thought. Cheap and shabby. I walked back to the hotel and picked up the car and tried on the way to figure out why I’d picked the girl for an extra five dollars. I didn’t need the money. Maybe my action had been force of habit. Maybe I had been showing off to myself, proving how much faster the trained hand is than the untrained eye.

I left the car on the avenue and found the bar where I was supposed to wait for Joyce. It was a block from Daniels’ office and I’d had a drink or two there one day after a particularly bad session of drilling and grinding. That had been in the afternoon. Now it was early evening and the place was worse than I remembered it. There were a few embryonic derelicts drinking cheap wine and a few young punks getting high from the smell of the beers in front of them. I ordered a bottle of beer and got a cigarette started.

At eight o’clock I started watching the street. I watched for the full half hour. Then a Caddy convertible pulled up at the curb and she hit the horn, right on schedule. I scooped my change from the bar top and left half my beer as a tip. I figured it would be served up as a glass of draft in that kind of saloon.

The Caddy’s door was open. I hopped in, yanked the door shut. She drove a block, made an illegal U-turn and headed uptown.

“I ought to have a trenchcoat,” she said. “I feel like something out of a movie.”

“A bad movie.”

“A vehicle for a shining young starlet,” she said. Her hand left the wheel and went to her hair. “You could tell me how beautiful I look, Wizard.”

“I thought I was Mr. Hewlitt.”

She laughed easily. “Sue was in the room. She was the one who answered the phone.”

“The one who calls you Joyce?”

“She couldn’t call me mother. I’m a hot ten years older than she is. The little bitch hates me, Bill. I’m cast as the wicked stepmother in her little playlet. Jennie isn’t so bad. She’s the younger one. She thinks I’m wonderful because I’m pretty and I dress well and I have bigger breasts than she does.”

“That last doesn’t surprise me.”

“Is that as close as you can come to a compliment?”

I told her I’d do better when we turned into a motel. She said we weren’t going to a motel, Murray was home, she only had an hour or so. I asked her where we were going and she said something about a gin mill where we wouldn’t run into anybody she knew. We stayed with Main Street, turned after a mile or two, and wound up at a little neighborhood tavern just inside the city line. A bar, a television set, a jukebox, three booths. We took the last booth. The juke was unplugged and the television set was tuned to Ed Sullivan. The bartender was watching the show. There were two beer-drinkers in the place and that was all. The bartender glanced our way. I asked for Cutty Sark on the rocks for both of us. He didn’t have any. I tried him on Vat 69 and Peter Dawson and he didn’t have those fellows either. We settled on Black and White. He brought it over and Joyce and I touched glasses and drank. Most of her scotch disappeared on the first swallow. She shivered a little, then let out a sigh. I asked what was wrong.

“Nothing,” she said. “Or everything. I don’t know. Why did you have to come to this city, Wizard?”

“I blew a tire and went off the road.”

“We all went off the road,” she said. “Ages ago. I couldn’t sit still after I spoke to you on the phone. I was all jumpy and nervous, and then Murray got home from some committee meeting out at the club, and I had to sit around, make small talk and let him pat my behind and kiss my neck and put his big hands on me. I never minded it that much before. I could turn myself off, and now and then I could sell myself on the idea that we were in some kind of love.”

She finished the rest of her drink and made rings on the table with her empty glass. I lit two cigarettes and gave her one. Her fingers brushed my hand as she took the cigarette and it happened again just as it had happened in my room at the Panmore. This was not somebody else’s wife sitting across the table from me. This was a woman.

“Bill, I’ve done some rotten things—”

“To hell with that.”

“Let me finish. I’ve done rotten things. I’ve been around. I’ve been all over the map. But I can’t lay two men at the same time, one for love and one for money. I don’t groove that way. I couldn’t wait to get out of that house tonight. I can’t stand the idea of going back to it.”

“Then don’t.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Don’t,” I said. “We’ll take the car and go away. We won’t come back.”

Her eyes were on the empty glass. Not empty; ice cubes were busy melting in it. She didn’t say anything for a few minutes and when she spoke her voice was low and hard.

“For two months,” she said. “Maybe three. Until we hit a hard time and I remember how easy it was to do nothing and live high. We couldn’t make it without money, Wizard.”

After a few more minutes I took our glasses to the bartender and he filled them up again. I brought them back and we drank. She asked me if I’d managed to work up any ideas. I told her that Murray could go insane or skip the country or get himself conned for a fortune.