The Up and Comer (19 page)

My playing experience was limited to the occasional game back in college, as well as a couple of sit-ins with the grinders down in Atlantic City.

Footnote *Old-line New Yorkers will remember that the restaurant used to go by a slightly different name: Keens Chop-house. I never knew officially why they changed it, though I had a hunch that some marketing consultant probably sat down with the owners at one point and explained that they could capture more of the ever-lucrative, expense-account-toting, meat-eating male demographic if they dropped the "Chop" in favor of "Steak." Never mind that the place had been called Keens Chophouse for roughly a century. Such was the restaurant business on the island of Manhattan that you'd do pretty much anything if it meant even a mere .07 percent increase in gross receipts.

While that and a token could get me on the subway, I knew enough not to waste my time sizing up the competition as we were eating. There was no point. Only when we got down to dealing the cards could anything worthwhile be gleaned. That was the beauty of poker. The Great Equalizer. It didn't matter if you hailed from the mail room or the boardroom, were handsome or butt ugly, the game was the game and you either played it well or you didn't.

The seals of two brand-new decks were broken promptly at 8
p.m.
Buy-in was for three grand. (Thus the envelope of thirty hundreds Jack had given me at the office.) Were I to need more chips over the course of the evening, it was explained to me that a personal check made out to cash was the accepted procedure. Indeed, the rich were always good for it. As for the betting, antes were twenty-five dollars a pop and there was a fifty-dollar ceiling on all raises until eleven-thirty. After that, things were to get a little funky, with pot-limit stakes for the last half hour bringing the game to an agreed-upon end at midnight. It was kind of like a metaphor for life. You could spend the majority of it playing all your cards right, but one wrong move at the wrong time, and like that, you could lose everything.

As for the aforementioned players...

Paul Valentine was the one sitting to my immediate left, the same Paul Valentine as in Valentine & Company, one of the city's premier public relations firms. You name the government official or Fortune 500 company and odds are that Valentine at one time or another counted them among his clients. The word
access
comes to mind. (For sure it had come to Jack Devine's mind.) Valentine was tall, with a Catholic-school posture that made him seem that much taller. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a half grin that seemed to imply he knew something good that you didn't. No doubt he did.

Moving clockwise, there was New
York
magazine cover boy Danny Markelson. Entrepreneur extraordinaire. One record label, two Soho art galleries, and a host of other right-brain-inspired ventures across the country. His latest coup had been developing a line of trendy supermarket-bought pastas intended to create — in addition to huge profits — racial and religious harmony. The Payos Pasta (fusilli) was a big hit. But my favorite by far was the black squid ink fettuccine, or Rasta Pasta, as it was called. Pretty ingenious. Though it may not have played well in Peoria, in every bustling metropolis the folks were literally eating it up. An avid sailor, Markelson had the look down to a tee. Jeans, docksiders, Polo shirt, gold Rolex. It all matched perfectly with his curly blond, unkempt hair, two-day growth, and Revo-stenciled tan face. If the guy had looked any more relaxed, I would've felt the need to check for a pulse.

To Markelson's left was Steve Lisker, portly CEO of BioLink, the genetic-engineering company. Gruff, hard-nosed, and abrasive. An SOB with a Ph.D. I liked him instantly. A year back Lisker had gotten wind that a certain well-known publication was about to run a critical expose on him claiming that his scientists had already successfully cloned a human embryo. Lisker placed a call to Jack and Jack sprang into action, threatening to plague the parent company of the publication with everything from lawsuits to locusts. Needless to say, the article never saw the light of day. Which is not to say that it wasn't 100 percent accurate. Only that it wasn't in one of our paying clients' best interests.

Next to Lisker sat Jack in his Brioni best, and finally, to Jack's left and my immediate right, was Davis Chapinski. Bought Microsoft at eleven in the eighties, Cisco at fourteen in the nineties. Fucking Nostradamus. If it hadn't been for the fact that he had a face only a mother could love, I would've been insanely jealous.

That was the table.

"Seven-card stud, high spade in the hole splits the pot," said the PR man, Valentine. With his last shuffle he placed the deck to his right, directly in front of me. I promptly cut the cards and prepared myself yet again for his carnival routine of ascribing a catch phrase to each and every card he dealt up. Tremendously annoying. Particularly because he had this overwhelming compulsion to rhyme everything. "The eighter from Decatur, the five to stay alive, the six just for kicks…." I'm sure Valentine thought he was entertaining. Much as I'm sure a Vegas lounge singer thinks of himself as entertaining.

With two down and one up dealt to everyone, I peeled up the corners of a ten of spades and a three of diamonds. Jesus. With my six of hearts door card I was blessed with yet another intriguing combination of nothing. Ten, three, six, off-suit. It didn't get much worse than that. Though with the way my cards were running, I didn't want to speak too soon.

Not only was I unlucky, but my head wasn't exactly at the table — not a good thing when you're playing high-stakes poker. I looked down at my chips. The three grand Jack had staked me was nearly depleted.

But it's not every day you decide to kill someone. At least, it wasn't for me. It is every day immediately afterward, though, that you think about it. Every waking moment, to be exact. After stumbling out of that Irish pub and crawling into bed forty-eight hours prior, I'd woken up the following morning with a few sobriety-induced reservations. I pushed them as far out of my head as I reasonably could.

The decision to do it was one thing. How to do it and get away with it was something else. I needed a plan and fast, but the only relevant experience from my chosen profession was back-stabbing. Too messy. If I was going to pull this off, I was going to need something more clever and a little bit cleaner. As to what that would be, though, I hadn't a clue.

For two days I had racked my brain, and for two days I had come up with nothing. The end of the week was quickly approaching — deadline for when I had to get back in touch with Tyler. I considered the idea of trying to buy a few more days for myself. Trouble with a certain money transfer, I'd tell him. There was a chance he'd buy it. Unfortunately, there was a much greater chance that he wouldn't. Plain and simple, time was running out for me.

Think, Philip, think.

That's when I heard it. Jack's voice. It was a couple of hands later and his turn to deal. He took a puff of his Hoyo de Monterrey, positioned the deck in his palm, exhaled, and announced, "Five-card draw, one-eyed jacks and the suicide king are wild."

Of course! Suicide. That was it. I'd make Tyler's death look like a suicide. If done right, it would be an open-and-shut case. After all, Tyler had tried it once, so he was predisposed. He had motive. Who wouldn't believe that he was capable of trying to kill himself again? It was so logical. Perhaps the only stretch, especially for those familiar with Tyler's knack for failure, was that this time he was actually going to succeed with it. But hey, everyone gets lucky at least once in life, right?

I was still thinking of Tyler's impending suicide when Jack finished dealing five cards to everyone. I picked mine up and looked at them. For the first time that night I liked what I saw. Meanwhile, Jack pulled out his silver IWC pocket watch and realized that eleven-thirty had come and gone. "Gentlemen, I do believe we're now playing at pot-limit stakes," he declared.

It was Chapinski's initial bet. "Check," he said.

On me. "Check, as well," I said.

To Valentine. "Open for a hundred," he said, splashing the hundred and fifty already in the pot from the antes with a lazy toss of chips.

Markelson didn't hesitate. "Make it two-fifty."

"You call that a bet?" said the CEO, Lisker. "That's not a bet.
This
is a bet." He counted out five hundred in chips. "I see the two-fifty, and I raise another two-fifty."

"Uh-oh, here we go," said Markelson.

He was right. You could feel the adrenaline snowballing. A fast one thousand sat in the center with five hundred owed by Jack if he wanted to call. He wanted to. Said Jack, "You guys are gluttons for punishment."

The betting was back around to Chapinski.

"'Pinski, that'll be a half-grand to play with the band," rhymed Valentine.

"You gotta be fucking kidding me!" he answered, chucking his cards into the center. Chapinski and his sphincter were out.

My turn. For sure, they all thought I too would fold. Hell, I didn't even have enough chips in front of me to call the bet. I did a quick count. Exactly four hundred on the felt. After mulling it over for a second, I reached for my checkbook. Despite my not being the first to have done so that evening, a certain quiet fell over the table. In that moment, I felt like I could read everyone else's mind.
Poor kid; in over his head and he doesn't even know it.

It was beautiful.

As I was making out the check, I glanced over at Jack. He knew what he paid me as an attorney at Campbell & Devine, and he knew who I was married to. Losing the hand would sting, but it wouldn't exactly put me on food stamps. Still, he looked uncomfortable. It was his invitation that had brought me to the game, and I could see in his face that, just like at the office, he felt somewhat responsible for what happened to me.

So imagine his face, and that of every other bigwig at the table, when I finished signing my name on the check and announced that I wasn't merely calling. I was raising. The pot limit, no less. I slid my remaining four hundred in chips into the center and placed a check for eleven hundred dollars right next to it.

Pow.

Valentine, who had started the whole thing with his initial hundred-dollar bet, dropped instantly. All eyes shifted to Markelson. He was two-fifty into the pot and owed another twelve-fifty if he wanted to call. He looked at his cards again. Clearly he thought they were good. How good, however, was the question. Ten seconds later, he too was south.

Lisker. Maybe he had the makings of a great hand. Or maybe his earlier boasting, "That's not a bet.
This
is a bet," made folding out of the question. Regardless, after a slight pause, he counted out the thousand he owed and tossed the chips in.

Finally, it was Jack's turn. He was already five hundred into the pot, and though you never wanted to throw good money after bad, his decision seemed the easiest. Or at least he made it look the easiest.
 
The thousand he owed had already been counted out by him. Into the pot it went. The grand total so far: five thousand dollars.

The hand was now Jack, Lisker, and me.

Jack put down his cigar and picked up the remainder of the deck for the draw. He looked at me.

"I'm all set," I told him, prompting a few relieved chuckles from those who had dropped.

Meanwhile, Lisker took one card and Jack exchanged two for himself. I waited and watched as both of them looked to see if their hands had improved, not that I would know either way by their expressions. Maybe someone like Jessica had a tell. No chance in the world with these guys.

It was my bet first. There would be no check and raise this time. Only a check — for the pot total of five grand. Announcing the amount, I placed it on top of what had come to look like the Ayers Rock of chips.

Joked Markelson, "Nothing like a friendly game of poker, eh, boys?"

Lisker looked me in the eyes. "I think you're trying to buy it," he said. "I think you've been tanking it all night to bluff out a big one. Pretty slick, kid."

Odds were he didn't believe a word of what he was saying. A reaction. That's all he wanted from me. A laugh. A look down. Anything that might give him a better read on my hand. Five thousand dollars told him it was worth a shot. Though by that point it was becoming more and more obvious that the money was the least of what this hand, or the whole evening for that matter, was all about. A fact that Jack was all too willing to admit after a few more seconds of waiting.

"You know, it would be a hell of a lot faster if we just grabbed a ruler and whipped our dicks out," he said.

It was classic Jack. Funny, but with a purpose. In this case, getting Lisker to put up or shut up. As it turned out, it was put up.

Lisker removed an alligator skin-covered checkbook from inside his suit jacket along with a stainless-steel Montblanc. "Call," he said.

"Wow...." said Markelson, half under his breath.

Valentine, eyes wide, spared us any rhymes and remained silent.

As for Chapinski, he muttered something about it being a huge pot and resumed counting his chips.

I looked at Jack. I knew what he was thinking. If he was to call and lose, he'd be out a fair amount of money. If he was to call and win, I'd be out a fair amount of money. Assuming that he'd feel guilty if I got my clock cleaned by him and his cronies, even if he won he would in a way be losing. I sensed an exit strategy in the making.