Ladies of Chance

Chapter 11

Walla Walla got me through the ornamental iron gates leading to the huge palm-shrouded structure on Weston Avenue. There was another uniformed guard at the door. Walla Walla wasn’t enough for him. I had to mention Lucile and Stormy before he pressed a button and let the heavy doors swing open.

There was a swanky foyer just inside. Potted palms, and girl attendants who were dressed and looked like houris. A lounge and bar opened off the foyer. A wide arch led into a vaulted space that must have once been a ballroom.

There must have been a hundred bridge tables in that one room. Half of them occupied early in the evening when I went in.

Concealed lighting shed a soft glow over the room. A cathedral-like hush hung over the tables.

That was my first impression. Strolling down among the tables gave me a different feeling. Women are lousy gamblers. There’s nothing light-hearted about a game of chance among women. No cheerful sallies across the table. No mirthful laughter while the cards are being shuffled and dealt.

They don’t enjoy gambling. It just isn’t in their natures. They play to win. Their fingers are avid, their eyes calculating.

There were a few men scattered among the women players. Pretty poor specimens of my sex. Two distinct types. Cold-eyed and predatory. Effeminate weaklings.

Every foursome — each member of every foursome — would have repaid a psychoanalyst’s close observation. The one common denominator was greed. Human greed. The distinguishing characteristic of our civilization.

I wouldn’t have given two cents for our civilization as I strolled through the room. Goddamn it, it was enough to make a sane man sick at his stomach. You could see that most of the players had plenty of money. A large percentage of them must never have known want as the word is commonly used.

I’m no tin god, but a demonstration of human greed always gets my goat. It wasn’t so much that any of them wanted money as it was that they wanted to take it away from someone else. A desire to feed their ego at the expense of another. Brotherly love didn’t stand a chance in that joint.

I wasn’t particularly interested in the bridge playing. There wasn’t much to be learned about the workings of the syndicate in that room. An attendant told me I could find anything I wanted upstairs.

I went up a curving stairway to an upper hall where my feet sank into the soft carpet. There were nude statues in little niches along the hall. The hum of voices, the drone of croupiers, the rattle of dice came from rooms leading off the hall.

I peeked into some of them as I went by. Women by the hundreds. Expensively dressed, jeweled women. With tense, strained faces.

There were roulette tables drawing a big trade, and faro layouts fringed by a small group of the initiate. The crap tables were getting a big play, and I paused to watch a horse-faced hussy spit on the cubes and roll them out imploring for a “natural.” She didn’t get her natural, and the houseman raked in a pile of crumpled bills that would have fed a coal miner’s family for a month.

There weren’t any fillies hanging around the crap table. They were all women old enough to have known better.

It’s funny to see how the different types go for different ways of losing their money. I’ve noticed the same thing among men.

Ninety per cent of the bridge players were women in their thirties. Slender, poised, well-gowned women. Wealthy sophisticates.

Roulette seemed to draw the youngsters — and the women not so obviously wealthy. There was more naivete displayed on the faces watching the little ball go around the wheel. Less sophistication and more unconcealed eagerness. Older, dumpy women, with their petticoats showing as they leaned over the tables to push their money onto numbers or combinations.

The crap layouts seemed to appeal to another distinct group. Lorgnetted dowagers threw away all their dignity moaning for the dice to “do them right.” Watching them, I got the impression that they would have liked to have hung their corsets up to the chandelier and really gotten hot.

There were chuck-a-luck tables in another room, red-dog, poker, and black-jack dealers. The chuck-a-luck layouts were getting a fair play. Two or three red-dog and black-jack games were taking money from women who didn’t know any better; but the two tables set aside for the devotees of the grandest sport were deserted.

A woman sat at one of the tables, smoking a cigarette and fiddling with a deck of cards. There wasn’t even a dealer on duty at the other table with the neon sign, POKER, overhead.

I went over and sat down in one of the chairs in front of the woman dealer. She had white hair and gentle eyes. She reminded me of my grandmother who used to set out cold buttermilk and a crock of cookies when we visited at her Indiana farm.

I said: “Not much doing tonight?”

“Hell no.”

Coming in her gentle voice, it was as much out of character as if Lily Pons had come on the Met stage and sung Frankie and Johnny.

I said: “Deal me a hand of stud. Maybe I can start a game for you.”

“You’ll have to buy some chips, Mister.”

I took out a billfold. “How do they run?”

She squinted her gentle eyes at me. “The whites are a buck; reds are two; the blues, five and the yellows, ten.”

I peeled off three twenties. “I’ll go you those.”

She counted out some different color chips and pushed them across to me. Her white fingers shuffled the cards deftly and dealt them. My up-card was high.

“Your bet, youngster.” Her voice took on a metallic timbre. She dangled the butt of her cigarette from an unrouged underlip and watched me as I pushed out a couple of whites.

“Quite a joint,” I mentioned as she flipped out two more cards.

Her eyes slid over my face. “Your first time here?”

“Yeh. I didn’t know there was a place like this in the city.”

“It’s all right.” We bet and she slid out a couple more cards.

“Reminds me of Reno — having so many women customers.”

Her face lighted up. “And I jumped out of Reno when the women came flocking in for divorces.” Her tone carried more meaning than her words.

I turned over a pair of jacks and took the pot. “Were you... dealing poker there?”

“I’ve been dealing poker all my life.” She passed out hole cards and gave me an ace up. I bet a red and she turned over. I said, “You must have had an interesting life.”

“You’ve been in Reno? Ever hear of Ace-High Lil?”

I hadn’t, but I said I had.

“I’ve dealt in every big-time house in the West,” she boasted.

“That must have been plenty different from this.”

“God’l’mighty, yes. Women don’t belong in a gambling joint.”

“Would you rather deal to men?”

“God yes. The tougher they came, the better I liked to deal to them. Thirty years ago, when I got my start in Silver City, a dame couldn’t sit in on a game. Stud or draw was a man’s game from the word go.”

“Those must have been good days.”

“They were hell-roaring days, Sonny.” She had a little frill of white lace around her neck. It bobbed up and down as she sighed reminiscently. “I’ve sat in many a game where a million dollar mining claim was won and lost.”

“That sort of thing just about went out when the mines played out.”

“Oil was next.” She won a small pot from me. “I followed the boom-towns from Tampico to Signal Hill.”

“And ended up here?”

“Ain’t it hell?” She sighed gustily. “I get plumb ashamed of my profession when I look around me and watch these women trying to be good sports and not knowing how.”

“Why don’t you get out of it? You must have a pretty good stake laid away.”

She shook her head dolefully. “A gambler’s stake. I’m stuck here... drawing down a salary and glad to get it.”

“Where do all these women come from?” I asked her as she won another small pot from me.

She looked at me levelly out of her gentle eyes. “It don’t pay to get too curious, stranger.”

“I wondered how you got so many women and kept the men out.”

“That’s the kind of play the boss caters to.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d last long under cover. Women usually squawk when they lose.”

“Women that play here don’t.” Her voice was preoccupied and grim.

I took a chance and leaned across the table. There was no one near us. “I didn’t come here to gamble. I’m looking for a girl.”

“You better hope to God she’s not here, Sonny.”

“But she is. She has been. I’ve just learned that she’s been coming here a couple of months.”

“Then she won’t be here now... unless she was awful well-heeled.”

“That’s the hell of it. She wasn’t. She... had a thousand dollars I’d given her to buy furniture... for the apartment we were going to move into after we got married.”

Ace-High Lil patted my hand. “Maybe she’s lost it and is afraid to tell you.”

“But I can’t find her. She’s disappeared. I’ve been away for two months and haven’t heard a word from her for three weeks.”

“H-m-m.” Lil withdrew her hand and dealt another round of stud. “What’d she look like?”

I made the description so indefinite that it might have fitted any one of a hundred habitues of the place.

“That don’t help much,” Ace-High Lil murmured. “Your bet, Sonny.”

“Could I find out from the manager?”

“I wouldn’t.” Lil hesitated, then went on slowly. “Maybe you’d best forget all about your girl.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like as not you’ll be better off if you don’t find her.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“I’m desperate. You seemed to me the sort of person who might help.”

Ace-High Lil sighed and shook her head. I noticed her hands were shaking too. “I’d be glad to help, Sonny, if there was anything anybody could do.”

“Don’t talk in riddles. I’m beginning to wonder...”

Ace-High Lil nodded somberly. “This is a filthy joint, Sonny. There’s goings-on here that I don’t like to think about. That’s a laugh, you’ll say. You think I’ve seen my share of dirty doings in the mining camps and oil fields. I’m telling you that I feel lower down than a snake’s belly to be having any part in the game the way they play it here. Be goddam’ glad if you don’t find your girl, Sonny. You won’t want her, I’m thinking.”

I pushed back my chair and got up. “I’ll find the guy running this joint and I’ll choke the truth out of him with my hands.”

Ace-High Lil caught my hand and held it with surprising strength. “And get yourself tossed out in the street with a bullet in your guts or your throat slit? Don’t be a fool. Seeing Stormy wouldn’t help. He takes his orders. It’s that hellcat that gives the orders. Get to her. Maybe I can help you. Come back tomorrow night. And beat it now. You’ve been talking to me long enough. None of us are allowed to get familiar with the customers.”

I said: “I’ll wait... until tomorrow night,” and turned away from her table.

There it was again. Another mysterious allusion to the woman behind the scenes. The woman who gave Stormy his orders.

I felt good as I went out of the room. But I was treading on mighty thin ice, what with my different story for every person that would listen to me. If any two of them got together, hell was liable to pop.

The women were ganged up three deep around the roulette tables. I stood on the fringe and looked at their faces. Youngsters of sixteen and up to thirty. Any one of them might have been the fictitious girl I had told Ace-High Lil about.

I made up little stories to go with each face. This was a college girl away from home and losing the money that would take her back.

This; a sensuous little hussy from the cornstalk country who knew how to get plenty more money when the fat roll in her stocking went to the house.

A couple of smooth dolls that should have been on a yacht.

Someone’s kid sister. Not a day over fifteen. Blonde and eager.

An abrasive red-head, catching a too-red underlip between sharp teeth as the ball bounced out of her number.

A willowy divorcee getting rid of some man’s alimony.

A tall brunette whose lips quivered and whose attempted smile was ghastly as she turned away, clutching a beaded purse in desperate fingers.

I watched her move across the room. She stopped near the door, fumbling inside her bag.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the croupier watching her too. A single light blinked over the door. I moved toward the girl, not knowing what I expected.

She dropped her bag on the floor, lifted her hand toward her lips.

A uniformed attendant came from somewhere and knocked her hand away. A little bottle dropped to the rug and spilled its contents there.

He had his arm around her shoulders, his hand clamped over her mouth. It was clear that this wasn’t anything new to him.

I followed as he led her out and down the hall. No one else seemed to have noticed. He took her to a paneled door at the end, turned the knob, pushed her in and said something, pulled his head out and closed the door.

I strolled into the crap room until he came down the hall and went into another door. I waited three minutes, then went down the hall to the paneled door and went in without knocking.