Lucky at Cards

6

She dropped me at the avenue. I picked up the rental and headed for the hotel, then changed my mind and took a left turn. I drove through the Negro neighborhood and into the old Polish neighborhood, and I sat on a stool in a tavern and drank boilermakers for a few hours. The tavern was painted a bright yellow on the outside, and the interior was done in equally bright red and blue. It was enough to blind you. I drank slowly and steadily, tossed a handful of nickels into an illegal pinball machine, tossed a handful of dimes into a legal bowling machine, and had a sandwich of Polish sausage on black bread.

It was a cool and windless evening. I didn’t want to think about Murray Rogers or Joyce Rogers, and if I had gone back to the hotel I would have thought of little else. The Polish tavern was a handy escape. I bought the first two drinks myself, and then I taught a pair of steelworkers how to play the old match game, and after that they did most of the buying. In the end I was drunk enough to have trouble fitting the key into the car’s ignition, but still sober enough to drive it once I had the key business mastered. I reached the hotel and fell asleep when I touched the bed.

In the morning I showered and shaved and put on a clean suit and a sincere tie. I had breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs. I was a little bit hungover but the food and the coffee took away the bite. I winked at the waitress, left a good tip, and found a phone booth.

It was around ten. Main Street was heavy with traffic and the buses were rolling along and smelling up the air. A batch of teenage girls, lipsticked and jean clad, were oohing over a department store’s window display. I turned into the phone booth, sat down, dropped a dime in the slot and called Murray Rogers at his office.

“Bill Maynard,” I told the girl. I dangled on the line while she told Rogers who was calling, and then he was giving me a large hello.

“I’d like to see you this afternoon,” I said. “If I could.”

“Trouble?”

“No trouble. I still haven’t made that trip to New York. I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d like to hang around here, find a niche for myself and get settled.”

He was enthusiastic, told me he hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d like to see me stay in town. “I’ve got a luncheon appointment,” he said. “It will tie me up from one until about two-thirty. But any time after that is fine.”

“I’ll be up around two-thirty, then.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll see you, Bill.”

The main library was on Panmore Square near the hotel. I felt a little out of place there. The card sharp doesn’t lead a life that keeps him in the literary swim; I knew a blackjack dealer in Vegas who thought Mechanix Illustrated was a card sharp’s manual with photographs, for example. But I made myself at home and took a run through the card catalogue, jotting down a few titles on a yellow slip of paper. I gave the slip to an auburn-haired librarian named Lenore Something-Or-Other, and she handed it to a beady-eyed page, and he brought me half of my requested books a few minutes later and explained that the other half were out somewhere. I carried the books to a table and skimmed through them. I picked up an idea here, a notion there. Ideas and notions with a purpose. Because we had managed to hit on the right way to have our cake and eat it, too, the perfect ploy for moving Murray out of the picture without our letting go of his money. It was simple, really.

We would send him to jail.

At a quarter to two I gave the books back to stack and left. I grabbed a hamburger and coffee and didn’t even try to cheat the cashier. Murray Rogers had an office in the Rand Building, which was as close as the city came to a skyscraper. The building was some twenty-eight stories tall and his office was on the twenty-fourth floor. I rode up in an express elevator and walked in through a frosted-glass door with his name on it. A pair of green leather chairs framed a table piled high with old copies of Fortune and Esquire.

There was a receptionist sitting behind a heavy oak desk. She was neatly starched and crisply antiseptic. I gave her my name and she put it on the intercom. I heard Rogers’ voice tell her to send me in. She pointed me at another frosted-glass door with his name on it and the word Private as subtitle. I stepped inside and he stood up and we shook hands. I passed up a cigar, accepted a drink. I sat down and we smiled earnestly at each other.

“So you like it here,” he said. “I’m glad to hear that, Bill. Have you been looking for work?”

“Not exactly, Murray. I’ve been feeling my way around.”

He nodded. “Sy said something about you—uh, sort of checking out the classifieds. What are you looking for? Plastics?”

It was time to drop the plastic front before somebody realized that I couldn’t tell my acetate from a hole in the ground. “I’m not exactly sold on plastics,” I said. “That was my last job, but I haven’t really spent that much time in the field. And I don’t see any real future in it myself. You need a strong engineering background or some grounding in chemistry to rise close to the top. Otherwise it’s just a sales slot forever without much room to grow.”

“And you want something with a future.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that goes with settling down,” Murray said. “A man can drift around and take things easy for just so long. Then it all seems empty that way. It’s fine when you’re young and not so fine as you get older. A wife and children and a home become very important then.” He chuckled. “I suppose I sound pretty fatherly, don’t I? I’ve got a few years on you but not enough to play papa. Uncle, maybe.”

Uncle was better, I thought. The other way was too damned Oedipal—sending the old man to the pen and marrying Mama. And Joyce made a lousy mother figure.

“I’d like to give you a hand,” Murray Rogers said. “Maybe I like the idea of guiding someone else toward success. It would be a source of vicarious pleasure, I think. I’ve already made my own success. It would be nice to watch a younger man do the same thing.”

It sounded sincere enough but there was an undercurrent of smugness that irritated me. I don’t know. Maybe I was searching for reasons to hate the man. But he was telling me how tidily he had made his own pile and was at the same time operating under the tacit assumption that with his guidance I couldn’t help doing well for myself. That kind of attitude is one of the privileges of the successful man. I still resented it. We spent an hour and a half figuring out a job for me. I invented mythical experience and awarded myself a mythical college degree. By the time we were finished he had managed to figure out half a dozen spots for me, all of them with room for advancement and none of them paying less than ten grand a year for a starter. Nothing less would have been considered—I was going to be a friend of his, a hand in his poker game, a member of his country club. Naturally I couldn’t be expected to live on his scale, but I had to come close enough to be a suitable member in his social circle. Ten thousand dollars a year was minimal.

Besides that, the occupation had to be socially acceptable in that class. I couldn’t be a salesman on a used-car lot, couldn’t pump gas, couldn’t fix broken bicycles. The professions were out because I didn’t have the training. What was left was high-level selling or some phase of management—something like that.

And Murray did manage to hit six or seven jobs that fit. The whole thing threw me a little, to tell the truth. The country is filled with people fighting their way up the shaky ladder of success, studying nights to move from eighty-five to ninety bucks a week. And just because I happened to know a guy casually and because he knew a lot of other people, I could step into a slot that would be worth ten to fifteen grand a year, all with no previous experience and no aptitude more far-reaching than an ability to make intelligent conversation and a good poker personality.

It was all so much a violation of the Horatio Alger ethic that I paid an undue amount of attention to it. But I had time to lead the conversation where I wanted it, which was toward the colorful career of one Murray Rogers, attorney-at-law. That was the point of the whole interview. I was going to need a job if I was going to spend time on our little gambit, but more important I was going to have to know a lot about Rogers. Enough to find the hook that would send him to jail. If he had actually done something criminal, that would be ideal. The ideal, however, was a little too much to hope for. All we really needed was a good iron-clad method for framing him.

Because jail would be perfect. He could be jailed for anything, just so long as it didn’t carry the death penalty. It didn’t much matter how much time he spent in the tank. Once he was there, we had it made with no sweat at all. She could either milk his holdings so that his cash was in our pockets by the time he got out, or she could divorce him. It didn’t matter how great a lawyer he was if he were in jail. Convicts can’t bargain from a position of strength. There wasn’t a court in Nevada that wouldn’t give her most of his dough on any grounds she wanted to name.

I learned a lot of things about him that afternoon. I learned that he made his money on his own, that he built himself up from nothing. I learned that he had a few law grads who researched his cases. I learned that he and Ed Hart frequently worked in tandem, with Hart preparing returns and Murray fighting out the legal hassles. I learned the names of a few of his clients, and I found out what local restaurants he preferred, and I found out that he had his hair cut at the Statler barbershop. I learned all this and more, but I didn’t learn anything that gave me an angle.

I also learned just how much he hated to lose.

Around four he opened the top drawer of his desk and dragged out a deck of cards. He riffled through them a few times and looked up at me.

“You play gin rummy, Bill?”

“I used to. I haven’t played in awhile.”

“Care to play a game?”

“Sure.”

“Say a quarter of a cent a point?” He grinned. “I’m hustling you, fellow. Gin’s my game. But I’ve got to try and make up for that beating you handed me at the poker table.”

He was still thinking about the poker game. That was the kind of man he was—he wasn’t used to losing, not at anything. In business or cards or love, he was used to coming out on top.

We played one set, Hollywood, spades doubled, the works. Gin is a subtle game, and he hadn’t been kidding when he said it was his game. It’s a funny thing about gin—everybody who plays it thinks that he’s fairly good at it. You’ll find men who will admit that they’re lousy bridge players, or mediocre poker players, or bad golfers, or whatever. You’ll never hear anyone describe himself as a lousy gin player. God knows why.

Another thing, the average Joe thinks that the game is all luck, or mostly luck, and this is wrong. It’s not a test of character like poker or a science like bridge, but a good player will beat a poor player eight sets out of ten.

It is also the easiest game on earth as far as a card cheat is concerned. There are half a hundred small gambits, any of them geared to give you the best of it in the course of a game. Peeks, minor-league deck stacking, a card or two palmed and held out—any of these bits makes the difference in a hand.

I was too interested in Murray Rogers himself to pay too much attention to the cards. If you play the game seriously you have to remember every card and think things out fairly far in advance, and I didn’t want to bother. I played a sloppy game and rigged things just enough to come out six bucks to the good. The son of a gun couldn’t help scowling while he added up the score.

“You play a good game,” he said.

“I was lucky. I held good cards.”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes.” He paid me a five and a one. “We’ll have to do this again,” he said. Afterward I called the local office of Dun & Bradstreet and asked for a full credit report on Murray Rogers. They knew him and said they could have a brief ready the next afternoon. I gave a false name and told them I’d stop by for it.

That was Monday. On Tuesday I didn’t do much of anything besides consuming the standard amount of food and catching a double feature at the movie near the library. Late in the afternoon I went over to D & B to pick up their report. The fee was fifteen bucks, which seemed reasonable enough. But after I paid I riffled through the bills in my wallet. Money was running out again, slowly but steadily. I thought about this on the way back to the Panmore, and then I leaned against the side of a handy building and started to laugh.

It was funny. I needed that job Murray was going to dig up for me. There was a poker game in a few days but I couldn’t afford to cheat in it. If anything, I had to manage to lose a minimum of twenty dollars. When you’re playing for a few hundred grand, you can’t afford to cheat in a dollar-limit game. So I needed a job: I had to have it in order to job Murray properly. In my room I read through the three pages from the Dun & Bradstreet people. Murray wasn’t a bad credit risk, not at all. He owned the house free and clear and he had bought it a few years ago for forty-five thou. He kept about fifty grand in the stock market, mostly in fairly steady stuff with a few electronics issues mixed in for capital gains potential. He owned a lot of real property in the city—a trio of cheap residential hotels on Chippewa, a third of a forty-eight-lane suburban bowling alley, a piece of a new office building on Delaware Avenue. There was money tied up in high-yield syndications, money in a whole host of savings banks, money in his personal checking account and money in his business account. There was, all in all, a lot of money.

I committed sections of the report to memory, then tucked it away where nobody would be likely to trip over it. I went out and had dinner at one of Murray Rogers’ favorite restaurants. Then I wandered downtown and paid a buck and a half to the box-office girl at the Palace Burlesque and went inside to watch the strippers thrust their groins at me.

The strippers were a bore. I had known one once, a second-rater who played some of the Fifty-Second Street tourist traps in New York. She had lived in a three-room walkup on West Seventy-Third near the park, and she had had a ten-year-old boy who wasn’t too clear on what she did for a living. For a period of about a month I shared her bed afternoons while the kid was in school. It had been exciting at first; she was a stripper and strippers are supposed to be exciting—that’s part of the American Dream. But she had been mindless and soulless and dead inside, and in spite of the thousand sexual tricks a thousand men had taught her, she had been every bit as frigid as death. So the strippers were a bore. If they did anything, they reminded me I wanted Joyce. That I needed her.

But there was a magician on the bill. He was around fifty. I didn’t recognize him but his name rang some sort of distant bell; I’d probably heard it when I was in the business myself. His tailcoat was frayed and his face was a map of blue alcohol lines and I looked at him and saw what I might have been if a dark-eyed man in Miami hadn’t had a proposition for me.

A grim prospect. But my watching him made my fingers itch for a tall silk hat and a rabbit to yank out of it. And he wasn’t even very good. He had a lot of stage presence but his moves were fairly obvious and his bag of tricks was a skimpy one. There was only one bit he had that I wasn’t able to figure, a routine involving a batch of Christmas-tree ornaments that disappeared into each other, something like that. And I could tell he wasn’t really essential to the trick. It was just a cute piece of equipment I didn’t happen to be familiar with.

A man nudged me. I turned and looked at him. He would have been a good ad for Alcoholics Anonymous; he was drunk, and he looked unhappy about it. “Say,” he said, “now how do you figure he done that?”

“What?”

“The trick,” he said. “What he did with them balls, making ’em do that and all. Now how could a man go and do something like that?”

“It’s magic,” I said.

“Yeah, but how’s he do it?’

“It’s the wand,” I said.

“It’s something special, the wand?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s magic.”