Every Man a King

20

It was one of the few times in my life that I overslept. The stone house was quiet as a tomb and the idea of being concealed by the earth itself dispelled all fear.

I showered, shaved, and dressed in a dark suit I’d brought along to Atlanta. That done, I was ready to go downstairs.

There Oliya was seated in the blue chair — knitting. She had on a bright yellow, loose-fitting jumpsuit, her feet tucked up under her.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, Mr. Oliver.”

“You can call me Joe,” I allowed. “I just wondered why you were so familiar.”

She smiled, gave a quick nod, and went back to her knitwork.

I ventured out to the kitchen, where I made coffee and canned toast.

Twenty minutes later, back in the living room, the stocky fingers of my bodyguard were still furiously at work.

I sat and watched her for a while.

“Today,” I announced. Int-Op 17 put down her needles and cloth. “I won’t be needing you because I’m not doing anything that has to do with the situation you’ve been hired for.”

“I could come along anyway,” she offered.

“I’m gonna go see a couple of old friends. You being there just wouldn’t work.”

Looking at me, she nodded and kept on looking.

“Maybe I could do something else for you.”

“Not really. You got that special skill set. I wouldn’t wanna dull it down with grocery shopping and laundry duty.”

Oliya smiled using her teeth and then went back to her woolly task.

Before leaving, Mel had shown me around his underground domain. Off the kitchen there was a small armory stacked with hunting rifles, shotguns, semiautomatics, fully automatics, and one or two specialized firearms designed for assassination. The arsenal had everything from Teflon to poison bullets. In an upstairs closet there was a chest of Morgan silver dollars, all of them shiny and dated from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

A few hours after Mel had left me he sent a text that said, E-key in mag-case under back front wheel. There was a photograph of a six-year-old nut-brown Kia Soul attached to the text. The car was pictured in the area where Mel had parked his limo.

So, I counted out 250 silver dollars, bid good day to my bodyguard, and headed out to a very special place.

Sometimes, when one finds oneself cheek by jowl with a brick wall of indeterminate height and thickness, it might behoove that clandestine traveler to turn away to seek access less daunting. So I ventured out from the Bronx to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The address was not far from Roger Ferris, though the neighborhood was not nearly as posh.

That’s one of the things I like about New York — rich and poor are never that far apart. Walking down the street, living one block over, or descending the subway stairs — New Yorkers of every class are continually rubbing shoulders.

The six-story walk-up apartment building was on Seventy-Seventh Street. I walked up the dozen or so stairs of the stoop and looked for her name among the buzzers.

“Yes?”

“Hi, Loretta. It’s Joe Oliver.”

“Oh. What do you want?”

“To come upstairs and talk to him.”

“Is he expecting you?”

For some reason I never was bothered by Loretta Gorman’s rudeness. She was a liberal New Yorker and therefore, despite her whiteness, she had little tolerance for cops or ex-cops. And since she had moved in with her boyfriend, her patience had worn even thinner.

“No, he’s not,” I said, “but I’m sure he’d like to see me.”

Silence. I was sure she had gone to her boyfriend trying to talk him out of letting me upstairs.

Maybe three minutes later she said, “Okay, then. Come on up, I guess.”

The buzzer screamed and I pushed the door open.

The one-lane staircase snaked all the way to floor six, apartment 27.

I had to knock. She kept me waiting a few minutes more before opening up.

Ms. Gorman stood five and a half feet with a sleek figure and blond hair cut short. She wore skinny black jeans and a pink T-shirt. Her eyes were an impossibly light blue. It would be hard to make eyes that lovely challenging, but Loretta managed it.

She blocked the doorway the way I had with Oliya.

“Hi,” I said.

“He’s been tired lately,” she replied. “Don’t take too long.”

“Okay.”

That should have been enough but she was stuck like glue to the doorjamb.

“The case is over, right?” she asked. “I mean A Free Man is gone, isn’t he?”

I’d met Mr. Lamont Charles when investigating a murder a few years before. He was in a nursing home at the time. Loretta had worked as a volunteer there.

“All over,” I assured her. “This is just a friendly visit. You know that man of yours is like a great Greek philosopher. He’s got answers to any question you could imagine and many more that you don’t have words for yet.”

Defeated by kindness, Loretta moved back from the door and I eased into the apartment.

“Come on out here, Officer,” came a musical tenor from the veranda.

“Here I come.”

“Honey,” the man’s voice added, “can you bring out some bourbon, a glass, and some ice?”

“You shouldn’t be drinking,” she said to the air.

“That’s why I only asked for one damn glass. You know the detective likes his whiskey.”

“Okay.”

The veranda was nine or ten feet wide and six deep. There were flowering plants along the lattice metal wall and an ornate table inlaid with blue and red Moroccan tiles.

Maybe sixty, he was leaning against the wrought-iron railing, wearing a deep red housecoat with a royal blue T-shirt underneath. The pose was pure 1930s. William Powell considering his next quip. Humphrey Bogart’s wry but comfortable stance in the face of insurmountable odds. Only, for Lamont Charles this was not an act. With skin black and lustrous as tar, his smile was a starry palate. He’d lived the lives of the characters that populated Depression-era films. Born in Acres, Mississippi, he’d chopped cotton until his father left and his mother died. Then he wandered down to New Orleans and played blackjack, stud poker, banco, and even the slot machines in back rooms, gin joints, and whorehouses, first in Louisiana and then around the world. He was banned from the main floor of every casino in Vegas, not for cheating, not even for counting cards, but because he was the luckiest man on earth — so dubbed by almost every gambler who had the bad luck of sitting across a gaming table from him.

He turned from the view of the Hudson to regard me. Letting one hand loose from the railing, he almost fell but then righted himself.

Grabbing hold of the back of a nearby cast-iron chair, Lamont worked his way around until he could fall back on the cushions.

When I’d met him, the professional gambler was triplegic, with only his right arm functional. He lived fairly comfortably in that convalescent home. Loretta was a nursing student doing an internship there. That’s where she got to know Lamont. Even after she took a paying job, Loretta dropped by every week or so. She’d fallen in something beyond love with him. She took him out of that nest of senility and got him so that he could stand upright and even take a step or two. His left arm was weak but he could use it to steady an object while his right hand did the work.

In the beginning Loretta took extra shifts as a nurse at New York Presbyterian to pay for Lamont’s doctor bills and their rent. But for the last year, on the first day of every month, Lamont and Loretta have gone down to Atlantic City for a game literally run by kings.

“How you doin’, Detective Oliver?” he greeted. “Have a seat.”

“You know I haven’t been a cop for nearly fifteen years,” I said as I settled.

“Once a cop...” he insinuated on an airy smile. Then: “What you got in the satchel?”

It was a slender blue briefcase I’d found in the blue bedroom. I laid the case on Moroccan tile, then opened it to reveal 250 shiny silver disks.

“Oh my God,” Lamont said, his eyes alight with the promise of treasure.

“You got the cards?” I asked him.

“Blackjack?”

“Just what I had in mind.”

“Loretta,” the luckster called out.

“Yeah, baby?”

“Bring me out a hundred ones.”

“Okay.”

“There’s more than twice that here,” I said.

“I see,” he assured me.

From somewhere in the folds of the housecoat, my friend brought out a blue deck of Bicycle Standard playing cards. Mr. Charles’s face glistened with the fever of gambling. Somehow he managed to shuffle the deck using the good hand and the infirm one.

Blackjack. It was the first word of an ancient incantation that sometimes allowed a poor man or woman to dream about deliverance. Lamont grinned at those cards.

We played for nearly three hours. I do believe that he could have beggared me in forty-five minutes, but Lamont was having a good time, wanting to savor the feeling of victory.

After letting me take a pot or two, the hustler asked, “You want another drink, Officer?”

“No, thanks.” I looked up to see him smiling.

“That’s right, son,” he said. “Alcohol is poison for the serious gambler.”

After that exchange he won fourteen out of the next sixteen hands.

Loretta had come to the sliding glass door of their terrace. She stayed inside, watching intently from shadow. Now and then Lamont would look up at her, his eyes expressionless.

I could feel the potency of their connection. There was a hunger between them. Somehow this want was satisfied by him playing and her looking on.

I didn’t know exactly why I was there. Lamont didn’t know anything about petroleum bootleggers or alt-right warriors. He didn’t have any contacts that would have helped me. But he was a prodigy of calculated risk and had spent his life in the hazard lane of a race to the death.

“You ever play two hands at once?” I asked when I’d lost half of Melquarth’s dollars.

“Sure,” Lamont said to his hand. “Sometimes I’ll buy two places at the table. It’s a good way to understand who you playin’ against by competing with yourself.”

That was an interesting idea, but I was after something else.

“I mean have you ever played at two different tables at the same time — against different opponents?”

“I don’t use the word opponent in cards. It’s not straightforward like chess is. What makes gambling fun is the element of luck. You could be your own worst enemy or the cards might just fall your way.”

“I get what you mean.”

“Hit me.”

I did.

He glanced at the card and then at me.

“You pat?”

I nodded.

“Twenty-one,” he murmured.

Showing me the cards, he then raked in a thirty-six-dollar pot.

It was his turn to shuffle.

“But what if you were playing at two different tables at once and you had to win at both to take the antes?”

“Whoa,” he crooned as he cut the deck with one hand. “That would be a great game. I don’t know how you’d do it. I mean, three people sitting at the same table is like that in a way, but... that extra hand would hurt you.”

He offered me the cut.

I waved it off.

He dealt.

I lost.

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “If I lose either hand, then I lose it all.”

“If you were in some crazy situation like that, you could go at it like most gamblers, I guess. I mean, you could just go for broke and hope for the best. Problem is if you go for broke that’s usually where you end up.” Lamont was looking into Loretta’s eyes as he spoke.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. “Is there another way?”

“The wild card.”

“What if this game doesn’t have a wild card?”

“Every game got a wild card.”

“How does that work?”

“I was playin’ this guy down in the Keys one time. I was too much with the rum and he was just good enough to take advantage. Almost all my money was on the table and my cards tallied seventeen. It was a strong number but I knew he probably had a face card behind his nine.”

“So what did you do?”

“I smiled.”

“Smiled?”

“Smirked, really. Usually when I play, nuthin’ shows on my face. It’s not no act. I concentrate so hard on the cards or dice or that little ball that I ain’t got no energy to mug. And that there was my wild card. He knew he could beat me. He knew he probably would. But when I gave that brief grin he started to worry. He said, hit me, and that was it — the wild card had won.”

“How did you know that just a grin would push him?” I asked.

“You never know, Detective. You never know. If you wanna know you shouldn’t be at the table. If you wanna know, really you shouldn’t even be alive.”

I glanced at Loretta as he said those words. The thrill went through her like an icy breeze.

“I think the game’s over, Officer,” Lamont said.

“I still got seventeen dollars here.”

“I see, but a good risker knows not to leave a man totally broke. It’s mean and it’s bad karma too. ’Cause, you know, gamblin’s a game, not a war.”

“Are you tired, baby?” Loretta crossed the threshold into the light.

“I am.”

“Well, I guess it’s time to go.” I stood up feeling a little stiff after so many hours’ play.

“I hope I was helpful,” Lamont said. “I’m’a put these dollars up on my trophy shelf and hand ’em out to little kids at Halloween.”

Loretta walked me out. On the way she looped her arm with mine.

When we got to the door she leaned into me, saying, “You should come by more often, Joe.”

“Really? I got the feeling you didn’t approve of me.”

“I’m sorry. I just get into protective mode. But... you make him feel alive.”

“He’s a good man.”

“I know. I’m having his child.”