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Authors: Eric Wight

BOOK: The Last Hand
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“No, and I don't think I'll look anymore for a while.”
They were at the door now. “How long ago did this happen, this change of nights?”
“Hang on.” She returned to the living room and reappeared with a large leather bag from which she dug out her appointment book. “I dropped out in February. You'll have to ask Sylvia Sparrow or your friend Joe Lichtman about Jerry, but I have the feeling he lasted another couple of months. Wait a minute. I can do better than that. Yes, he called me and asked if I had found another group—I hadn't–let me see, a month later. He was nice enough to say that my going had made a hole in the old group. But that's all. Sorry. I thought I might have the exact date written down, but I don't. Sorry.”
“If you come across it, or any other detail that you think might help, call me. I'm really collecting all the names I can get. Here's my card. Ask for me or Constable Smith.”
 
 
“We're not making much progress, are we, sir?”
Salter slumped down to rest his chin on the desk and looked across at Smith, who had just sat down on the other side. There were several reasons why Salter preferred to work by himself, and now he had a new one: to avoid having an assistant for whom he had to find work and who made comments like that. It was like going fishing
with Seth when the boy was eight and having the boy point out at the end of a long blank day that everyone else on the river was catching fish, so how come the Salters weren't?
“What have you been doing?”
“Knocking on doors, like you told me.”
“Get anywhere?”
“No more news of our hooker. But a couple more people remembered the car, once I mentioned it.”
“Car?”
“You remember an old fella with arthritis looking out his window saw a toffee-colored car parked on the street a few times lately, and once, the driver, a woman in a headscarf, walking along looking at the block,” Smith reminded him.
“Not on the night that matters, though.”
“No, still, I thought it was worth finding out about. I got a better identification from one person. He called it milk-chocolate colored, and said it was a convertible Volkswagen Golf with a sand-colored top. Sounds pretty distinctive, so I ran it past the parking enforcement office and they are going to get back to me if any of their patrol people remembers it.”
“I told you, someone on surveillance, or even just someone trying to make up their minds whether they want to live on the street. A woman seeing if it feels safe at night. Any other ideas?”
“I think we should have another look at the girls on Jarvis Street.”
“Barlow and Jensen never saw anyone who looked like Pussy-in-Boots?”
“No, sir. But I think it's like in Glasgow. Every tart on the street knows the Vice Squad, and the only time they will cooperate is when one of their own has been attacked. Even then they are more afraid of the pimps than they are of us. But if you get another Jack the Ripper,
then
they cooperate. But not for a simple disappearance, not until they know who is disappearing them. We need a new approach.”
“Smitty, I'm sorry to tell you that I am playing poker with a bunch of lawyers tonight, but you go down to the red-light district by yourself. Make up a story, so they won't know you're one of us. With that accent, you could get away with any story. Tell you what,
go down to Goodwill and buy yourself a coat, a foreign-looking one, tweed with a belt, make yourself look like an immigrant just off the boat. Then go down Jarvis looking for your sister.
“Did you ever see
The Picture of Dorian Gray?
The movie? In one part a sailor is going round the dives in Limehouse in Victorian times, looking for his sister who he believes is in the thrall of some filthy bastard who is having his dirty way with her. Try that.” Salter sat back.
Smith said, “I don't think that would work, sir. Perhaps I could rent a kilt? Maybe not. I'm not sure which side the big safety pin goes on. You've given me an idea, though.”
“Good. Tell me about it tomorrow.”
“Oh, there was a call from a Jane Rudd. She's thought of something that might help us.”
“What?”
“She said she preferred to speak to you herself. Here's her number.”
Salter dialed the number unexcitedly. He did not anticipate that Jane Rudd had any revelations to offer.
“I've thought of something,” she said. “After you left it came back to me that once Jerry and I had a conversation–can I speak confidentially? Privately?”
“I thought you wanted to tell me something. I can't promise to keep it to myself if it's useful.”
“Wait until you've heard it.”
“Try me, then. Our offices are regularly swept for bugs. We worry about the mob listening in.”
“This is
personal
”
“Go ahead.”
“One night, after we had made love, we were exchanging lovers' histories. Do you know what I mean?”
“Like, when was the first time you did it, that kind of thing?”
“More or less. We got on to prostitutes, and I asked Jerry about his experience with them-I thought all men had some experience with prostitutes. He said he never had, and he never would have. He said he could not imagine rutting away for ten dollars a minute–that was his phrase, ‘rutting away.' I think that's conclusive, don't you?”
“Of what?”
“It's at least an objective verification of what I said, that whoever this woman was, she certainly wasn't hired by Jerry.”
“Sounds like it, all right. Thanks very much.”
“Are there any other developments?”
“Not public ones. Don't hesitate to call me again if something strikes you.” Salter put the phone down and looked up at the waiting Smith. “That was an old bedmate of Lucas's who says there's no way he would have paid for it.”
“You believe her?”
“I believe she is giving an honest opinion, and I believe in this case she may be right.”
“This part of your hunch?”
“That's right. I don't believe Pussy-in-Boots was a hooker, either. But what that one …” he pointed at the phone “ … was really calling about was to find out how we are getting on. Trying to get into the loop, like Calvin Gregson, and everyone else.”
“In the meantime, I should go back down to Jarvis Street and keep looking?”
“That's right.”
“In case … ?”
“In case anyone asks if we looked properly. I'm keeping your nose clean, Smitty.”
“And your own, sir.”
“Me? I don't give a shit. With me it's just personal.”
“W
e go to a different house each week,” Bonar Robinson said, as he let Salter in. “That way we don't wear out our wives' welcome. Well, their acquiescence.”
“They go out for the night? The wives?”
“They can stay home if they are very quiet.” Robinson laughed to show he was joking. He seemed slightly excited, as if the presence of a policeman, even one more or less off duty, had energized him. “We're in here.”
He led Salter through to a large room furnished like the lobby of a hotel, one of a superior chain. The two couches, the three armchairs, the broadloom, the shade the walls were painted, all fell within a narrow color range from wheat to cafe au lait. Even the pictures fell within the spectrum, all three scenes of a deserted seacoast in summer. Two enormous gilt-framed mirrors confirmed the impression of a traveller's rest. Half a dozen men were sitting around, waiting. There was no sign of cards.
“Introductions, then,” Robinson said. He stood in the center of the room, looking over his glasses at each man in turn as he held Salter's elbow and revolved him slowly. “Scott Mercer; Larry Holt; Brian Davis; Andrew Cutler; Craig Lister.”
The establishment, thought Salter. One of them, anyway.
“I told them you were coming and asked if anyone knew you, but our lawyers avoid criminals if possible and Scott and Brian work for investment companies and Craig is an investment broker, so your
paths have not crossed, except for Larry, I understand.” Salter and Holt nodded to each other but said nothing.
“This is kind of unusual, isn't it, Staff Inspector?” Andrew Cutler said. “We were questioned once before …”
Salter jumped in. “I'm new to the case, sir, and I need to make my own inquiries.”
“No, no, I realize that. But I mean, isn't it unusual to see us all at once? Normally you take us one at a time, don't you, so you can compare our stories and see who is lying?” Cutler smiled genially, civilized, one member of the club to another.
“Is that what they did last time?”
The speaker looked around for confirming nods. “A couple of detectives came round to each of us at work. One asked questions and the other watched to see if we were pissing our pants.”
“I could do that, but I thought I'd accept the report they already made. It seemed pretty thorough. What I'd like now is for you just to hear what I have to say, then respond by calling me tomorrow, if you can think of anything that might help me. I imagine you are as eager to find this killer as I am. And the sooner the better. The longer it goes, the more likelihood there is that all of you, and Flora Lucas, and anyone else who knew Lucas, will find themselves featured in one of the papers, and I assume you don't want that, so here's what I want to know. Do any of you know enough about Lucas's very private life to make sense of this hooker? You know about her?”
They all nodded, embarrassed.
“We heard,” Robinson confirmed.
“So, question number one, do you have any confirmation in what you know about Lucas that he would have hired someone like that? Question number two is, if he didn't hire her, what was she doing there? She knew where to look for his apartment. Could it have been a joke? A practical joke? Nothing to do with Lucas, except that he got killed. I'm really just eliminating a remote possibility, because if she was hired as a joke by anyone here or known to you, someone would have come forward with her name and address. Wouldn't they? Now we have to find her, and we haven't any idea where to look.
“Finally, does anyone know how Lucas usually spent his Friday nights? Somebody told me that when you tried to reschedule an evening like this, Lucas was available any night except Friday but he never said why. Does anyone know why?
“Jerry might just have been going along with the crowd, Staff Inspector. The rest of us are married, except for Larry, who might as well be, and our wives don't like being left alone on Friday nights. I don't know that Jerry was unavailable. He just never questioned that Friday was a bad night for the rest of us.”
“That's probably it, then. But would each of you call me tomorrow, even if you have nothing to say, so I can tick you off the list.”
“You can't fool us, Staff Inspector. You have a message on Jerry's tape from the killer, don't you, and you want to compare our voiceprints.”
Salter smiled. “Is that what they're called? So write me a note.” He stood up.
“Care to stick around for a game, Staff Inspector?”
The question came from Robinson, but the others had been waiting for it. They sat watching him expectantly. Salter wondered if they had bet among themselves what he would say.
“There are clear regulations about playing cards with suspects, sir. But since none of you is under suspicion, then, yes, I'd like to.”
The tone of mock pomposity Salter affected for this remark covered his excitement. It was a long time since he'd played poker, and he told himself that the reason he said yes was because he wanted to get a feel for Lucas's cronies, to get a feel for who would be most helpful. They were all smart and successful, but who were the sensible ones? Still, it was the prospect of a game of poker that was making him sweat slightly.
“Heigh-ho,” said Mercer, the one who had joked about voiceprints. “Off to work we go.”
Robinson led the group out of the room, through the adjacent dining room and across the garden by way of a covered glass corridor lined with gardening hardware and plants growing in pots, into a small separate building at the end of the garden. “My den,” Robinson said.
All the equipment was laid out on a large table covered in green cloth. Seven chairs were placed around the table; a chest of poker chips stood on a side table.
“Be warned,” Robinson said to Salter. “You are up against a bunch of sharks here.”
“I know what you are,” Salter said, “but can you play poker?”
“You'll pay for that,” Robinson said. “Now, these are one-dollar chips, these are fives, tens and twenties. No, no, I'll just keep a tab. Three hundred each to start off, buy more when you need them.” He issued everyone a pile of chips, and they sat down to play. It was dealer's choice, and they played a succession of different games, all the way from straight stud to “best five of seven: black twos, red sevens and the queen of spades wild.”
Salter made no attempt to divine his opponent's minds, merely playing his own cards in the early part of the evening as erratically as possible so that if and when he got a really good hand it wouldn't be obvious. Thus very early he folded a full house as soon as someone else bet, clumsily throwing in the cards face up, and then two hands later took a single ace up against three hands that stayed in, which cost him eighty dollars.
Sometimes by accident he seemed brilliant, but on the whole he looked like someone who had never played the game before. By eleven o'clock he had been down as much as five hundred and up two hundred at various points, but now was fifty in the hole. Not a bad night, he thought. He had brought a thousand with him to make absolutely sure he had the wherewithal to sit at the table no matter what size the game was, and he was enjoying himself. He was playing poker again. And now he would start playing for keeps, fairly sure that he had not been sussed out yet.
Something else was happening. From the time the first hand was dealt, Salter had been aware of communication flickering about the group, messages below the level of speech. He had tried to brush aside the feeling, assuming it was a fairly natural result of his being an outsider. They did not exchange glances exactly; rather, they seemed to avoid each other's eyes as they worked to set him at his ease. It was the absence of family jokes that he noticed in the end,
all the little joshing remarks you would expect among a group that had played together for a long time.
The feeling did not go away; by eleven o'clock it had jelled into a suspicion that he was being set up in some way, accompanied by the further feeling that the agreement among them had not quite jelled, or had not been adequately rehearsed. Twice two of them left the room, one after the other, apparently to visit the washroom, and returned looking as if they had had a meeting of some kind, speaking rather too loudly as if to blot out their unease. Whatever they're up to, he thought, they aren't much good at it.
Once, Salter asked, “Was Lucas a good player?”
Mercer said, when no one else spoke up, “I would say he was. I think he won more than he lost. We didn't keep close track.”
“Jerry did,” Cutler said.”He knew what had happened to the last dollar.”
Salter said, “That sounds all right. I feel like I'm sitting in his chair tonight. I'd like to be worthy of him. Deal the cards. Let's see what I can do. I'm glad you didn't cancel the game, out of respect, something like that.”
“We talked about it, but decided Jerry wouldn't have minded,” Robinson said. “Then your deciding to come clinched it. Now, whose cards are they?”
About eleven thirty, Larry Holt made eye contact with Salter and hobbled out of the room, leaning on his cane. After a few minutes, there was the sound of a toilet flushing, and Salter, who had already folded, followed Holt through the door. A small kitchen, obviously no more than a wet bar for parties in the garden, led off from the hall. Beyond it, in an alcove, were two washrooms side by side, from one of which Holt emerged.
Just as he was about to speak to Salter, there were the sounds of someone leaving the den and coming their way, and Holt said, quickly and quietly, “The butter thing,” and affected a cough as Mercer appeared.
Salter went into the washroom, peed, and sat down on the toilet to think. “The butter thing.” What the hell did that mean? Maybe it was a code. Maybe “butter thing” was lawyer slang for “innocent” as
in “butter wouldn't melt in his mouth” like U.S. President Bush, senior's “the integrity thing.” Salter liked the idea of this, but he couldn't make any sense of it. Who was innocent? Of what? Or better, who looked innocent but was really guilty? Of what? But why would Holt betray his friends? What the hell was going on?
The toilet in the adjacent washroom flushed and Salter waited for the sound of steps to recede down the hall, then followed the sound into the card room, his brain squeaking with the problem.
Fifteen minutes later Robinson announced the last hand. “Dealer's choice,” Robinson said. “I'm raising the limit to a thousand.”
The limit had been five hundred. Salter tried not to look too interested. Robinson shuffled and got the deck cut, then jumped up saying, “Hang on, I left my drink in the kitchen,” stepped out, and returned almost immediately with the drink. “Ready,” he called and adjusted his chair to sit square to the table and dealt them all five cards.
Salter, antennae humming, couldn't believe what was going on. A dealer steps out of the room with the deck in his hand and returns and deals? Without asking anyone to cut the cards again? And no one else objecting? With the limit at a thousand, for Christ's sake? What kind of a fool did they take him for? He could call Robinson himself, of course, but now he felt a deep need to see what he could do to avoid being sandbagged, to turn Robinson's little game upside down, and he was forming an idea about where he would find the means.
Salter moved to pick up his hand. Before he could turn the cards over, Robinson leaned over the table and imprisoned Salter's hand on his cards. “One by one,” he said.
“Sorry. Me to lead. I'll bet fifty.” Now he had a third hint. Salter's mind was churning so hard he would not have been surprised if the other players could hear it.
“Blind?” Robinson looked surprised.
“It is the last hand?”
“Yes. Still.
Fifty
. Okay. Fifty it is. I'm in.”
One by one the other players called.
Salter turned over the king of clubs. The four other cards turned
up among them two picture cards, an eight and a six.
“A hundred,” Salter said.
Once more they all matched his bet, and Salter turned up his next card, the king of diamonds.
Two other hands each revealed the beginnings of a possible flush. Robinson now had two jacks. Holt, with a nine and an eight of different suits, folded, catching a look of surprise from Robinson.
“Another king, please,” Salter said, and sipped his drink. Something caught in his throat and he went into a violent coughing fit. After three or four paroxysms, he held up his hand, palm out, unable to speak, and hurried out to the kitchen for a glass of water.
He turned on the tap and looked around the kitchen, trying to identify the sounds he had heard Robinson make when he was supposed simply to be recovering his drink. The chief one was the fridge door; no doubt Robinson had added an ice cube to his drink, and Salter opened the fridge and peered inside. It was an old fridge, probably returned to light duties after a natural lifespan in the main kitchen; high up on the door was the butter compartment, the plastic door hinged on a spring that had become so weak that the door hung open slightly, making it not very effective for keeping the compartment the proper few degrees warmer than the rest of the fridge. The butter thing.

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