Queenpin (3 page)

It was going to be like my coming-out party. And the getup really mattered. There was a way you had to look at the track. That’s what she said. Tasteful picture hats, spare makeup, a few good pieces of jewelry, nothing flashy. Don’t want to stand out too much, don’t want to be picked out in a big crowd. She took me to her apartment in a sparkling high-rise in the city. She had a walk-in closet big enough for a pair of chairs and a smoking table, big enough for rows and rows of satiny, lustrous fabrics, from gauzy to thick brocade, eggshell to midnight blue. And next to this finery, she had a long row of stiff, tailored suits in pastels. These she wore to the races.

“You save the golds, the patterns, the lipstick red for carpet joints, or for your own time. You want to play uptown at the track, dolly. With the wad you’ll have, you gotta look like class.”

So she took me to the big department store downtown, the one with all the mirrors and twinkling chandeliers. Bought me three fine suits—cream, oyster white, periwinkle blue. The skirts hit well below the knee but still fit snug in the right places, because she was no fool. You had to play that angle too, she said. Get a second glance from the high rollers.

She watched me in the three-way mirror of the dressing room. She was smoking a long, gold-tipped cigarette, leaning back in the lounge chair.

“Honey, I got the legs, but your ass is your ticket,” she said, waving her finger to get me to turn around. “And that rack won’t hurt either.”

I looked at myself in the mirror. I could see her behind me, leg swinging. I could see her watching.

On the way home, she told me that my sugar blond dye job had to go. Too late for the hairdresser, she did me herself, peeling off her doeskin gloves. I sat in a chair in front of the kitchen sink, leaned my head back far, and she plunged her jagged-emerald-covered hands through my hair again and again, turning ratted blond into smooth honey brown. I remember looking up at her, into her eyes, husk of creased skin hanging over them. Heavy-lidded like a snake. She’s figuring something now, I thought. She never stops running the odds.

We sat in her living room late into the night and she schooled me. Boy, did she school me. She talked to me, low and cool, for hours, never losing her ramrod posture, never raising her voice above her near-whisper. She told me all I had to do was go down to the Casa Mar bullring and place dime bets on a few choice horses. Taking out the racing form, she went through the Friday races and wrote “place” next to some horses and “show” next to others.

“You don’t want to hurt the odds, so never bet to win,” she said. “You spread the money around and bet to place and show and you get a return on investment at least seventy percent of the time.

That’s the stuff. More important, the dough gets cleaned and the tax men only see racetrack winnings.”

She explained it all and made me tell it back to her to see if I understood. Oh did I.

When I was kid, once a year my dad’s boss, Mr. Risniak, would invite all his drivers and their families to his big house over in the gold heel part of town. There were frankfurters and hamburger sandwiches and games for kids and the parents all got soused. Mr. Risniak wasn’t around too much. He’d usually make an appearance midway through, standing by the barbecue with his sunglasses on, talking discreetly to a few of his favorites, never my old man. I remember thinking he sort of looked like a movie star or a singer in his maroon sports jacket with that poker face. Once, when I was about twelve, I was sitting by myself eating a plate of Jay’s potato chips and he came over and sat down across from me. He was drinking out of a tall glass with a lime and ice and he smoked one thin brown cigarette after another.

“Murray’s kid, right?”

I nodded.

“So, you get along with your dad?” he said.

I looked up from my paper plate and nodded again.

“Good people,” he said. “Your dad, he’s on the road a lot though,

huh? You miss him?” “Yeah,” I said, looking over at the badminton net. I didn’t know

how to talk to men yet.

A moment later. “You’re what, thirteen?”

“Next month,” I said, wiping salt from my chin.

“You’regonna be a woman before you know it.”

I could feel my face reddening.

“That’s when the trouble starts.” He grinned, white teeth dazzling. “I married my wife when she was sixteen. She already had lots of boyfriends. You will too.” He took another sip, then looked back at me. “You ever have a drink?”

I shook my head.

“Not champagne at a wedding? Well, wine at communion.”

I nodded, trying to meet his eyes.

“Wanna taste?” He nudged his glass towards me on the picnic

table, looking around, as if for witnesses.

I stared at the clear glass, tinged with the green of the lime. I pushed my finger against the sweaty side, feeling the cool of it.

“Go on,” he whispered. “Just one taste, though.”

I kept looking at it, thinking. Then on some kind of hard impulse, I grabbed the glass with both hands and brought it to my lips. It ran down my throat.

Water. It was water with lime.

Mr. Risniak laughed hard, even slapping the table. I set the glass down and pushed it back to him. My face was burning. He took off his sunglasses and looked at me.

“I thought so.” He grinned.

I can’t say I wasn’t scared, making the hour drive to the big track the next day. Sure, I had the props, I had the drapery, down to silk handkerchiefs in my purse and silk underwear under my new suit, its basting stitches scarcely out. And I had the scratch in nice, clean bills. But I didn’t have her attitude, her steel. I felt like a kid knocking around in her mother’s high heels.

But I followed orders. I did everything exacdy as she said. I checked out the morning line to make sure the odds were where we wanted them. I placed the bets, polite and brisk with the teller. I was careful not to lock eyes with any of the regulars, the daily bettor types who knew the score. “You don’t ever want to be seen with one of them,” she told me. “Eyes are everywhere at the track. Your cherry is our big advantage. Let’s keep it intact as long as we can.”

It was during the second race that I noticed the man watching me. I tried to play it casual. I watched the action. I listened for the call and marked the winner on my racing form. I took out a compact and powdered my nose. But as I peered in my compact, I could see him still watching. A smooth-faced man of about forty-five in a blue linen suit and straw boater, smoking a cigar.

He stayed behind me, eyes on me, for the next four races. By then, it was past time for me to take wing. Teeth gritted, jaw set, I stood up, trying hard not to wobble, to let my eyes dart, to show I even noticed him. But then he got up too and I felt something twist in my stomach. Was this it? My first real gig and I’m fingered?

“That’s a nice hat you have, miss,” he said, standing in the row behind me.

“Thanks,” I said, turning slightly, tucking my purse tight under my arm. “I’ll tell it you said so.”

The man grinned but showed no sign of moving on. Too knowing for a fella looking for a pickup, too smooth a linen suit for a cop. I hoped.

“You play the ponies regular?”

“No, but I love horses,” I said, playing it as easy and as unimpressed as I was with the tipplers who used to hang out by the back office at the Tee Hee. “You know about girls and horses, don’t you?” I added, as if with a wink.

“Only what Catherine the Great tells me,” he smirked, waving his racing form. “Who’d you put your bills on?”

This sure didn’t feel like idle chatter. I didn’t like what it felt like. I swallowed hard and hoisted a smile. “A drib here, a drab there. Mostly, I just like to show off my hat.”

“Can’t blame you for that,” he said, tipping his own boater toward me. I was glad my new hand-span sunglasses stopped him from seeing my eyes. Was he a racing commish official? Some kind of private dick? Not a cop, I kept telling myself. Cops don’t rate those wing tips.

“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, careful to smile. “I have to be going.”

“Hot date?” He lifted his eyebrows. “Who’s the lucky horse?”

“All my horses are lucky,” I said, turning to walk away, playing it

calm, loose, carefree.

“I’ll bet they are, honey,” he called out after me as I made my way down the grandstand, slow and easy, like the old lady herself. I knew he was watching me the whole way.

By the time I got to the car, the dapple of sweat on my temples had spread and I spent ten minutes sopping myself with pressed powder and catching my breath. What I wouldn’t give for a half a gulp of good whiskey, I thought. I took off my slippery sunglasses and caught a look at my eyes in the rearview.

Goddamn, kiddo, can you go the distance or are you just a tease?

I drove straight to her apartment, like she asked. She was there, a pirate’s, cache of jewelry spread on her coffee table. Sitting next to her was a balding man in shirtsleeves, a gem scope in his hand. He was holding up an egg-shaped sapphire. Next to him on the table was a small saw blade and some needle pliers.

She tilted her head toward the bedroom and followed me in, not bothering to make introductions.

“Those the rocks I brought back from Rennert Falls last week?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything, headed toward the phone. I sat down on the bed, tried to keep a poker face. I hadn’t gotten pinched. I’d placed the right bets. Wasn’t that enough? How could she know I’d been made anyway? Had I been made?

She dialed and spoke into the receiver.

“So? …Yeah? …Yeah? …That so? … Okay Thanks, Harry.” She

hung up and looked at me.

“I think I did it okay, Gloria,” I said.

She stared at me. I tried to stop my chin from shaking. Why

couldn’t I be like her, have her ice?

“Everything went like you said,” I added, taking off my hat, poking myself with a pin.

“Did you talk to anyone?”

“As little as possible, like you said.”

“Any fellow approach you? Try to play the wolf?”

“No,” I said slowly. “One fella tried to make conversation. I don’t know who he was. He asked who I was betting on. I didn’t give him anything. And I left.”

She folded her arms and kept her eyes locked on me for a few long, long seconds. Then finally, she said, “You did good, kitty.”

I couldn’t fight off the smile. “It was okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding slow, like a sports coach might do. I felt like the star quarterback.

“So I go back?”

“Tomorrow,” she said, tossing me a meaty stack of rubber-banded bills. “But next time, scale back the flirt routine. All Harry can gab about is you and your horses.”

I looked at her. It fell into place for me and I saw what a stooge I still was. The man in the boater was a plant, testing me. Christ.

But I’d passed, right? I’d passed. The next test wouldn’t be planned by her. It’d be out there, out there in that hot glitter, and I’d have to sink or swim by it.

∞◊∞

There were a lot of regular parts of the job, placing bets at the small tracks, moving goods, passing information, making deliveries to and from the casinos. That was my favorite. I loved the swank carpet joints in the big city. I didn’t have to go much to the grimy betting parlors in town, or the grind joints filled with suckers, the kinds of places made for low rollers who gave it all up the minute they had it in their pockets. They had regular boys with swollen arms to take care of those rougher places. But the bosses wanted me at the casinos because I stood for Something, like Gloria did. I stood for a class operation. Me, the dingy issue of a vending machine man. The girl in the Orion dress who’d been taking the bus to a chump job just a few months back.

I’d show up at the joints late. I’d head to the manager’s office, collect wads of cash all earmarked for the pad. At first, she just had me bring it all to her. I didn’t know where it ended up. Eventually, I began helping her make the rounds with it, mostly to the PD, the district attorney’s office. There was a complicated formula based on rank and pull and you never let the low-level boys know what the higher-ups were getting, or who else was on the pad.

No one ever gave me a hard time, but every night I’d get invitations, either from the casino fixtures, the bulls, or the hard boys at the door. At first, I was too scared even to one-step with them, to give them back a little of their patter. But the better I got, the more I was willing to toss it around. At least with the prettier, slicker ones. I had a weak spot, right off, for the worst of them. The ones that still had faces worth looking at. The ones without the dented noses or cauliflower ears. Mostly, I had it for the cruising gamblers who didn’t rate with the big boys, just threw them their money every night like some nonstop tickertape parade. They were the smooth ones and I didn’t mind a little dance with them.

“So I’m guessing you’re the soft spot at the end of the day for some very sugared daddy.”

“I’m not so soft.”

“I could rub you some round edges, you give me half a sec.”

“I bet you could. From the way you’ve been chasing losses all night, I can see you’re a born grind.”

“I can take being called a grind player long as I got some odds on seeing you grind a hurdy-gurdy for me one of these eves.”

Yeah, okay, it wasn’t Lunt and Fontanne. If these fellas could really give you a line, they wouldn’t be at a casino every night, losing their shirts.

Besides I never let it get far. At the toniest joints, I’d once in a while let a butter-and-egg man buy me a steak. For his troubles, he’d get a dry kiss on the cheek. And when it paid, I went on dates with the high-stakes gees. But I never laid for one. I really felt like I could keep coasting like this, above everything. She taught me how you could move through it all and not let your feet sink in it. Not let your fine snakeskin stick in their muck.

You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.

We were sitting in her plush pink and gray living room. I remember looking at her under the milky cast of the brass wall sconces, looking at her while she passed on pearls of wisdom (You always want to know the strategy behind it, honey. You do things for them without knowing why, there’s nothing in it for you.) and I’d think maybe I was getting to see what she was like back in 1945, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, slinging those gorgeous stems one across the other and making hay while times were good.