Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 1 & 1, January/February 2012

The Penthouse View Joseph S. Walker

Who else was there the first time I heard Jocko tell his story about Jake, and the Giant, and the penthouse elevator? I want to say Yuri, which would make it a while back, since it’s been three, four years since Yuri tumbled off the wire in one of the casino circus acts. Alec was probably around, the slick young con man’s face getting lost in folds of fat. Maybe Freddie G., the doorman at the Sands who hustled bigger tips singing and jiving as the tourists rolled in. There’s a floating group of us who gather in the bars off the main rooms as our shifts end. Whatever we had been, we’re just menial labor of one kind or another now. We don’t play the slots or sit at the tables or go to the shows, but we’re wired in. We drink and tell stories — Vegas stories — and hope that’s all we’ll ever need.

Vegas is all story, really. Bugsy Siegel looked upon the barest, driest, most useless piece of land in the country and told a story about glamour and excitement and money, and lo, it came true. It exploded in wood and cement, metal and glass across the sands, though there was always enough sand left to cover the bodies that fell along the way. That’s the legend, anyway, and we put a lot of stock in legends. We live inside them. The story was always there, bones beneath the flesh, the skeleton giving form to the dream in the desert. Air conditioning is the dream’s breath. The chilled metallic air and the click of ice cubes in short, squat, thick glasses — oh, the story is sweet in the details. Smooth green felt that cards and dice glide over, men in tailored suits, and neon everywhere. Bill Cosby is in the lounge for the dinner show, or there’s Redd Foxx after midnight for the daring. Doyle Brunson and Amarillo Slim stare each other down at the Horseshoe, surrounded by showgirls in sequins and smiles. Business trips with willing secretaries and steaks the size of home plate, and running beneath and around and over it all money, rivers of it, nickels by the bushel and hundred dollar bills by the bale. Everything you really need to know about the story is in Sinatra’s undone bow tie hanging against the breast of his tuxedo shirt.

Some of the old-timers, like Jocko, say all of that is gone now, but I think the new Vegas, the Disney Vegas, the pyramid and pirate ship Vegas, is still built on the bones of the old one. The DNA is there, even if the slots take debit cards and they pipe in the sound of coins cascading out. Every slob in a Steelers T-shirt and cargo shorts, trying to remember the odds card he studied on the plane, feels the Rat Pack standing behind him as a UNLV dropout slides the cards out of the shoe. They can build their roller coasters and put Celine Dion on the marquee, but there’s still a pit boss and his eyes are still slate, and given his choice he’d throw Celine Dion off the building and cut the brakes on the coaster.

So we tell the stories, taking them out of our pockets like kids swapping baseball cards. A lot of the stories are the ones you’d expect about Frank, and later Elvis, and unmarked graves in the desert, and a roll of the dice that moves millions of dollars and a platinum blonde from one guy to another. Some of the stories are about guys like us, though, guys who just came to try to be some part of it, and those are the ones Jocko likes the best, the ones he gathers together and treats gently and cultivates. They’re his desert orchids, I guess. His favorite is this one about a guy called Jake. Me, I don’t like Jake so much, for one simple reason: the girl. Lord knows I understand the lure of that neon glow on the horizon, but it takes a special kind of maniac to bring your thirteen-year-old daughter to this town and think anything good will come of it.

Jake started out an elevator technician in some fertile part of some state out east, someplace flat and unbroken except for the exclamation point of a twenty story building where they design and test and manufacture elevators. Well, what the hell, somebody has to. There are so many damned little jobs that no kid ever wants to grow up to do and yet somebody does. Nature and a vacuum, I guess. Jocko’s got nothing to say on what got Jake into working on elevators, spending his life traveling up and down and never getting anywhere. He’s got nothing to say about where Jake’s daughter came from or what happened to the wife, if there was one. As far as Jocko’s concerned the story begins when Jake decides he’s had enough, tosses the girl and a couple of suitcases in the car, and points himself west. He’s clear on one thing, though: Jake purely loved that girl of his. He wanted to give her the world, the life he never had, and the only way he saw to do it was with a deck of cards.

Jake’s game was poker, which buys him some cred — at least he wasn’t one of those fools who thinks he’s gonna get a yacht with a lucky run at a craps table. These were the days before anybody played poker on TV, back when you couldn’t go into any bookstore and find a dozen guides to reading tells and how to play pocket kings on the button, when cards were cards and not pixels on a screen. The pros back then were purely self-taught. They came up out of the Houston oil fields and backroom games in Brooklyn speakeasies, and they tended to be lean, hard men who weren’t above carrying a switchblade in a sock. They’d play anywhere, but Vegas was the gravitational center of their universe.

Was it foolish of Jake to feel that gravity and think he could be one of them? I imagine him winning break-room games played with cards greasy and soft around the edges from being handled by working men, then advancing to weekend games in homes where the host would peel the cellophane off a fresh new deck to start the proceedings. He realized gradually that he had a skill none of the others were aware of, that even when he lost he understood why while everybody else chalked it up to dumb luck and poured another drink. Eventually, somebody told him about a regular floating game, played a couple of times a month in a suite at the best hotel in town, and he saved up for a few weeks until he had the buy-in. After the first time he didn’t need to save up. A game like that would be visited once in a while by a pro working the routes between Vegas and AC, and it was the pro who spotted something in Jake and dropped a word in his ear: you could make a living at this. Maybe he was trying to be a nice guy, or maybe Jake pissed him off and he decided to throw him to the sharks.

Whatever happened, it got Jake in the car. He was making more money now with the cards than he’d ever made doing honest work, and there’s no surer way to twist a man than that. He had a couple of suitcases and a stake, and of course the girl. Jocko says she was a sweet young thing just about to turn fourteen when Jake hit Vegas, a redhead with playful eyes who was only too happy to go on an adventure with Dad. Jake’s dreams were all about building that daughter of his a life where she’d never know hardship or cold. Probably, he never even wondered what her own dreams were. If Jocko knows the daughter’s name he never says it, though sometimes he describes her, looking out the window as Jake cruised down the Strip and told her this was their new home. She’s just the girl, and Jocko really hardly seems to know she’s in the story at all.

So, Jake got a cheap apartment and parked her in the nearest school and went looking for a table. This is the point in the story where Jocko likes to settle in, lean forward, and curl a hand around his drink, and start talking about Jake’s games. It reminds me of an old song you probably know — “Stagger Lee,” Lloyd Price, 1959. Price used to sing it here in town to the tourists who couldn’t get tickets for Elvis. Price’s version, though, is just a slicked-up riff on “Stack O’Lee,” a folk song about a murderer that dates back to New Orleans way before the first World War and has hundreds of versions. Point being, I read somewhere once that Dr. John can sing “Stack O’Lee” for an hour straight and never repeat a verse. That’s what it’s like listening to Jocko talk about Jake’s Las Vegas poker career — endless variations on a theme. You can’t blame the man. Jocko’s a former card player himself. He’s been dealt every conceivable poker hand thousands of times, but he’s still fascinated by every card that gets flipped. You’ve got to be that way when you’re a gambler, and though he hasn’t touched a chip in years, Jocko will die a gambler. You’ve got to believe that the next card might just be the magic one you’ve been looking for your whole life, and you’ve got to go back over the stories of every hand you’ve played or heard of, looking for the key that will tell you how to solve the game forever.

If his listeners don’t care about cards, though, Jocko is capable of cutting to the chase, which is pretty much what you’d expect. Jake hit the ground running, and at first his little Midwest stake seemed like it would never stop multiplying. Every table he played at poured chips into his pocket. He bought presents for the girl, made sure she was dressed nicer than any of her new friends, took her to see the big shows, and tipped big when the hospitality girls ushered them to primo comped seats. Got himself a new car, started dressing like a gambler dressed in those days: shiny fabrics, narrow ties. And oh my yes there were women, and they were more than happy to hang on his arm. For a while Jake was living the story, living the dream. Vegas has a way of letting people do that for a while — years, sometimes.

Jake got about two, Jocko figures. Two years before the cards went sour on him. When it happened he fought it, and he was good enough to keep things moving through sheer force of will a little longer, but a graph of his liquid stash would tell the story clear enough — the sudden surge when he hit town, the long rising line of success, the slight downward slope that gathers momentum, the frantic lunges upward that get shorter and briefer. He hid it from the girl, tried to hide it from himself.

There’s no way most people will ever understand a slump like that — the desperation, the denial, the thousand small lies you tell yourself every day. It’s a roll of cash with a twenty on the outside filled out with singles, a pair of socks worn for a solid week because they might be lucky. As it goes on it feels less and less like luck and more like judgment. Tourists make calls on you they simply shouldn’t be able to make, obliviously smashing their way through intricately constructed bluffs, while men you’ve beaten a hundred times suddenly see your cards better than you can. That was the most frightening thing to Jake. He’d always been able to read his opponents like they were playing their cards face up. As his panic grew he found himself, night after night, staring across two yards of green felt at a man and having no idea on God’s earth what the son of a bitch was holding. He might as well have been playing roulette. Russian style.

The only thing he had to be thankful for was that the girl hadn’t noticed. She still thought her daddy was the king of the town, and he never wanted her to think any different. He couldn’t see anything in other cardplayers’ eyes anymore, but he still saw adoration in hers.

Then came the night when she kissed him on the cheek and went to bed, and he sat at their kitchen table staring at nothing, knowing it was all gone. In two weeks they’d be on the street, and as far as the girl knew everything was fine. She lived in her own world of high-school intrigue and spinning 45s, and as much as he loved her, he knew she wasn’t the type to ever notice that Daddy’s lady friends didn’t come around anymore or that his shiny gold watch had vanished. Jake only saw one way out — or rather, he saw two ways, but he wasn’t going to have her come out in the morning and find him.

The next day after he dropped the girl at school he sold the car and the few other trinkets he had left. Taken all together it was just enough to buy him a seat in the game, the one game, the biggest game in town: the Giant. Now, the Giant is a story all on its own. Legend has it that Bugsy himself started the game and that it’s been going ever since, day and night for better than eighty years now, twenty-four hours a day, the grand high mother of all underground games. Sometimes it moves from place to place, when a building is demolished underneath it. Sometimes half the seats are filled with bodyguards marking time while their bosses catch a nap. There are always nine seats. The game is always no-limit Texas Hold’em. There are always men at the edge of the room, waiting for a chair. They say Phil Helmuth waited three days for a seat once and then lost a quarter of a million dollars in ten minutes. They say Richard Nixon was given a seat out of courtesy when he was president and held his own for three hours against some of the best in the world. They say a lot of things. It’s the Giant, the closest thing this blasted desert has to sacred ground.

Who knows why Jake wanted in? He’d never played in the Giant before, and selling the car gave him enough of a stake to get into plenty of safer games. Of course, it was those safer games where he’d been losing his shirt, and a desperate man does funny things. Something got it in his head that the Giant could save him, that the sheer Vegas legend magic of it was the way to turn his long backslide around. So he left a note for the girl and found the game and put his name on the list, and then he spent fifteen hours leaning against a wall, sipping ginger ale, watching, and waiting. And finally, close to three in the morning, a guy from Ontario who hadn’t been in a pot for hours looked at his watch and stood up and walked away, and the dealer beckoned Jake in.

Every player at the table watched him with flat disinterest as he took his seat. His hands arranged the chips in front of him without conscious thought. For the first time in years he felt like an amateur. He wanted to take a deep breath, roll his shoulders, set himself to the task, but showing nerves like that to this table would have just been a slower way of opening his veins. He gave the smallest of nods to the dealer and two cards whispered their way over to him. He cupped them reverently in his hands, not looking until his turn to act came around. Pocket jacks. He was off and running.

For two hours Jake held his own in the game of games. His stack grew, not spectacularly but satisfactorily. His breathing got a little easier, his shoulders a little looser, though out of long habit he didn’t let any of that show. He began to think he’d turned the corner when he took down a nice pot on a pure seat-of-the-pants bluff, and it was as he was gathering in those chips that the man he’d just beaten stood up and the Pole sat down.

Several of the men at the table shifted uneasily.

Jake had seen the Pole before, of course, even sat at a table with him for a hand or two back near the start of his Vegas run. He knew as well as the others what it meant when the Pole sat down. The Pole — his real name a mash of harsh consonants nobody could decipher — was the pro’s pro, a poker playing machine who’d ruled Vegas for a decade. For the last five years of that he’d lived in a penthouse at the Star with a private elevator and eleven rooms and a rotating cast of hookers. As far as anybody knew he never left town, and he didn’t even play that often. Twice, maybe three times a month he descended to sit among the mortals, always wearing a rather cheap brown suit and the darkest pair of sunglasses anybody had ever seen. He rarely talked, almost whispering when he did have to say something, and he never stood up from a table with less money than he’d had when he sat down. He played slowly, simply staring down at the cards neatly lined up between his hands until the moment he was called upon to act, at which point his head would swivel up toward his opponent and he would simply stare, silent and still as a gargoyle, and with the glasses it was impossible to tell if he was staring at you or behind you or maybe just dozing off These days half the people at a poker table wear shades, but back then it was a rarity. A lot of people with ice-water blood got nervous when the Pole’s lenses swung in their direction.

Jake probably should have stood up. Just as he’d brought himself back to life somebody had gone and tossed a rattlesnake on the table. Still, it wasn’t a tournament, winner take all. There was no reason he had to get into it with the Pole. The two of them could just harvest what the table had to offer, a couple of predators among the prey. Professional courtesy. That’s how high Jake was flying: He imagined that the Pole would see him as an equal. He almost nodded at the man. If the Pole had the faintest notion who Jake was, though, he gave no sign. He simply bought his chips, put his hands flat on the table, and waited. Bear traps do that too — just wait until somebody comes along to spring them.

It was like somebody flipped a switch. As soon as the Pole’s first hand was dealt, Jake’s luck died. He was getting good cards, but any poker player will tell you that the cards are the least important thing. What matters is how you play them — and how the table plays you. Sometimes a good hand is the worst thing in the world because you have to play it, knowing all the time that a better hand is out there. Time and again Jake looked up from his cards to find the utterly blanks lenses of the Pole’s sunglasses turned his way, and every time it happened the Pole did exactly what Jake didn’t want him to do — called if Jake was bluffing, folded if he had the goods. He was doing it to everybody else at the table too, of course. Maybe Jake just imagined that the lenses were turned his way more often, that every pot he coveted ended up in the Pole’s hands. Paranoia, born of better than twenty-four hours of little food and no rest. Maybe it was just that.

There’s a thing that happens to gamblers, sometimes, when they start losing. Jocko calls it the death spiral. It’s the same thing that happens to some people when they look down from a high place and hear the little voice telling them to step out into the air. By the time the Pole had been at the table for an hour Jake was in a death spiral. In this state a gambler sheds all his years of experience, everything he’s learned, and starts playing more and more wildly, leaving behind discipline and logic, hoping to hit that Hail Mary. Past a certain point he no longer wants or expects to win, even. On some level losing has become inevitable. Losing fast, maybe, at least won’t hurt as much.

Let me cut to the last verse of “Stack O’Lee.”

Jake was down to a quarter of what he’d sat down with when there came a hand that only he and the Pole bought into. The Pole had been the big blind, in the hand already before the cards were even dealt, and Jake called, holding a suited ten and nine. The flop came out three aces. The Pole’s long middle finger tapped mildly against the table — he was checking. Jake immediately went all in. From a pure poker point of view this was absolutely the right move. He was down to a very short stack and by representing the fourth ace he could take this pot, which was small but would keep him going a little longer. The only way the Pole could possibly call was if he was holding either the missing ace or a pocket pair big enough to risk against a bluff. It was a chance Jake had to take. He pushed in his chips and looked across the table, his face sculpted marble.

Once again the Pole’s head swiveled up, the lenses pointing at Jake, and as they locked into place Jake felt a sucker punch land in his midriff. The thought slid into his mind like a blade: He knows. He sees. Jake suddenly knew, as certainly as he knew his own name, that the Pole knew he was bluffing, knew he didn’t want a call. And this knowledge was followed by another thought, just as cold, just as certain: It’s the glasses.

The Pole called.

Jake’s fingers were numb as he flipped his cards over. The Pole turned his over almost regally: a three and a Jack. Jake was conscious of a ripple around the table as everyone took in the cards. He didn’t bother watching the last two cards came out, and as it happened they made no difference. The dealer’s arm swept out and Jake’s last chips, the very very last trace of his Vegas money, was gone, absorbed into the Pole’s stack. Somebody nudged Jake and he stood up, letting some new player slip into his chair.

Jake didn’t care about any of it.

He was transfixed. The glasses. He was sure of it. The glasses were — what was he thinking, now? Magic? His mind skittered away from the word. Rigged, maybe. Some kind of advanced glass or something, that let you read blood pressure from six feet away. Science — all right, or magic, who cares? The glasses, it was the glasses allowed the Pole to see — not to see the cards, no, not that — the man. The glasses allowed the Pole to see the man. What he feared, what he hoped for. Call, raise, fold. What did the man across the table want you to do? That was all you had to know, really, wasn’t it? Dazed, Jake moved back against the wall, standing almost behind the Pole, where he wouldn’t have to see those lenses again. He watched the game for two hours. In that time he did see the Pole lose the occasional hand — well, after all, sometimes, no matter how good you are, just exactly the wrong card is going to come out on the river. What he never saw, not once, was the Pole doing what his opponent wanted him to do. He never bit on a bluff. He never called against the nuts. Not once.

It was the glasses. Had to be.

Take a man who’s just lost everything and show him the keys to the world, the genie’s lamp, the pot of gold. The response is automatic, Pavlov ringing need’s bell. It was the thought that echoed through Jake’s head again and again as he watched: Gotta have ’em.

Gotta.

Jake had never held a gun in his life. He tried to imagine cornering the Pole in some alley and demanding the glasses, and his brain flicked the picture off like a bad TV show. What alley, where? The Pole hardly ever left his penthouse, certainly didn’t wander through a lot of dark alleys. The Strip is kind of short on dark alleys. Burgle the penthouse, then? Again he couldn’t see it. Easy enough to get in, since he knew the place had that private elevator entrance, and Jake could still do anything he wanted with an elevator. Surely, though, the Pole never went out without the glasses, and if the Pole was there then Jake was right back to the gun he couldn’t picture in his hand. And then, of course, it was suddenly obvious.

Elevator.

Damned few people ever die in elevators. It turns out that, mile for mile, they’re the safest form of transportation ever invented. A modem elevator is pretty well impossible to crash. It’s got multiple cables, each capable of holding its weight several times over and protected by various fail-safes. It’s got brakes that kick on automatically if it starts to fall. There’s really only one way to convince an elevator to crash — and that’s to be the guy who designed it not to.

As soon as the thought crossed his mind Jake pivoted off the wall and dashed from the room, holding a hand over his mouth like he suddenly had to puke. He couldn’t risk the Pole looking at him and seeing what he wanted, which was an hour in that shaft before the Pole went home. He didn’t know how much time he had, how much longer the Pole would sit at the table. The Star was a block down the strip and Jake ran the whole way, thinking about the tools he would need and where to find them. Maintenance would have them — probably in the basement. Locked up? Maybe, but not very securely because who the hell would ever want them, and because there were so many more attractive things to steal. Find the tools, take the main elevator as high as he could, get out onto the roof — easy, the Star had a pool on the roof. Once there, find the little shack that marked the top of the Pole’s elevator and go to work.

By the time he got to the Star, Jake had the actual process — what wires and cables to cut, and where, and how to get around the backups — mapped out in his head. The hard part, the part that would make it a long, slow job, would be making it look like an accident. It was as he was breaking into the shaft twenty minutes later, having found the necessary tools just where he’d expected to, that he thought about how many enemies the Pole must have made over the last ten years. That was good; it would go a lot faster since there was no reason in the world to disguise it.

Five hours later the Pole walked into the front door of the Star. He nodded to the doorman and walked to the private elevator, tastefully screened from the rest of the lobby by a bank of ferns. The car that had brought him down was waiting there, unmoved since he’d gotten out of it. The last conscious act the Pole ever took was getting in and pushing the button for the top floor. The doors closed and the car rose nine floors at its usual stately pace — then plunged twelve rather more rapidly, turning the Pole into a whole new kind of Vegas legend.

Jake was waiting in the lowest subbasement, crowbar at the ready. The only thing that could go wrong now was for the glasses to be smashed, but he’d seen the aftermath of crashes before, and he knew that heads usually survived, the bodies below acting as giant spongy shock absorbers. Such was the case here. When the impact came it nearly knocked him off his feet, and he had a nasty moment when the crowbar seemed to get jammed in what was left of the doors, but in the end he was able to reach into the mangled box and pluck out a pair of sunglasses that could have been brand new, except for the odd spot or two of blood. Jake wiped them off and put them on, still warm from the dead man’s skin. He could hear shouts in the distance, feet pounding down the stairs. He hid around the corner and peeked out at the two casino security men who were the first to arrive, and as they came into view he saw, as though it was stamped on their foreheads, what they wanted: for nobody to have been in the box.

I don’t believe in the glasses, of course. Magic glasses that let you see what people want? Nothing would be handier in Vegas, but it’s all just part of the story. I can’t say whether Jocko believes in them or not. He certainly acts as though he does when he tells the story, especially when he gets to the end and describes Jake living just a year or two later in the penthouse that had belonged to the Pole. The way Jocko tells it, Jake still played, but just a few times a month; he was already getting too old to climb all those stairs. His daughter was still with him, still beautiful, still devoted, and every time Jake opened the door to one of her dates he saw exactly what the man wanted written in bold font and explicit detail across his face.

As far as Jocko is concerned Jake is a Vegas hero, one of the minor deities of the desert pantheon, the gambler who figured out how to beat the game. I wonder if it ever occurs to him, though, that sometimes Jake must have looked at his daughter, and seen what she wanted, and what she feared, and that it’s hard to see any way that works out to a winning hand.