Lucky at Cards

14

I spent Sunday night in the little neighborhood tavern where Joyce and I had swigged Black and White and first doped out the way to separate Murray Rogers from his money. I went to the bar sort of by accident. There was dinner in a diner, then aimless driving while the sky went from gray to black in a slow fade. I kept driving, and I worried about Murray and played games guessing how much he knew, and the Ford found that particular bar. There was a handy parking space, I had a thirst. The Ford rolled into the space and I found a stool for myself in the bar.

The same bartender was on duty, the same show on television. I finished one drink and let the bartender pour a new one for me. He took a dollar away and brought back a shiny quarter. I picked it up, held it between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. I moved my right over it, letting the coin drop into my palm at the last minute. I plucked empty air with my right hand, made a fist.

“Pretty,” the bartender said.

I had forgotten he was there. He was looking at my hands with something approaching interest.

“Do it again,” he suggested.

“It’s nothing.”

“Lemme see.”

So I did it again.

“Jesus,” he said. “Could swear it’s there.” He tapped my right fist. I opened it, empty, then opened the left one and showed the coin.

“Again,” he said. “If I don’t see it this time, the house buys a round.”

This time I did take the coin in the right hand. He thought he had it cased and tapped the left one. I showed him he was wrong. He clucked admiringly and poured a fresh shot in my glass.

“That’s a talent,” he said.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s a real talent,” he said. “Try it again for a buck?”

So what the hell. I was quick and smooth this time and when he tapped the left hand I opened it and the right hand at the same time. There was no coin in either hand. He stared at me.

“Try your shirt pocket,” I said.

He didn’t believe it. But he looked, finally, and there was the quarter, gleaming brightly. It’s not a hard move. A little business with the right hand takes his eye out of the picture, and a quick flip from the left hand puts the coin in his pocket. He was leaning forward, so it was easy to drop the coin in without his feeling anything. He shook his head in amazement and gave me a dollar.

“Jesus,” he said. “You do this for a living?”

“It’s just a hobby.”

“You’re good at it, though. Real good.”

After a while he left me alone. He refocused on the television show and I again lapped at my drink. I sat there and thought about a lot of things. I tried to figure out Murray’s angle, and I tried to figure out just how I was going to play things with Barb, and I tried to figure out what the hell I was doing in this town. I didn’t come up with any answers. Maybe there weren’t any.

On Monday morning Murray Rogers left jail. I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang and Joyce told me he was on his way home. I told her to be careful, she asked of what, and I mumbled something and put the phone down. Be careful of everything, I thought.

I had some calls to make, some people to see. There was a pack of index cards on my desk, all of them typed out neatly and precisely, and there was a long sheet of legal-size yellow paper with a dozen more names and addresses copied down in someone’s neat handwriting. I thumbed through the cards and surveyed the yellow sheet of paper and decided I didn’t want to call anybody. There were three morning and afternoon appointments listed in my date book. I called two numbers, cancelled out. The third party didn’t answer.

I shrugged him off and closed my datebook and left the office. I settled behind the wheel and drove about at random. After a while I hit a red light, stopped for it, lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter.

The job, the life, the world—weren’t working. It was a good job, something I could do, something that brought in the money. And it was a good enough life in a good enough world, and for anybody else, maybe, matters would have been fine.

But not for me.

You see, when you’re a freelance operator on the periphery of the underworld, you never have to worry about dropping into a bind. You aren’t confined, aren’t tied down in the least. My business card, if I had one, would go something like this:

WILLIAM MAYNARD

card mechanic and hustler

No Fixed Address

No fixed address. Got a frail hanging on your neck, a broad who won’t let you go? Pack your toothbrush, slide into your car, go. Go anywhere because every town has men in it who play cards for money, every town has an angle ready for an angle player. Anybody giving you a hard time? Your room rent overdue? A batch of debts scattered around? Anything like that?

Pack the toothbrush, pile in the car, scram.

You start to function in those terms. Even if you’re legit—a traveling show biz type, a carnie roustabout, a salesman on the road, an outdoor construction worker—even then you tend to operate in this manner. You become used to living your life on the move, and when a situation turns sour you run from it and into something better. But if your life runs on illegal tracks to begin with, you find it just that much easier to work this way. Scruples never come along and trip you up. If you’re a con man, or a card cheat, or any sort of a thousand hustlers, you’re fully accustomed to milking the parks and hunting greener pastures.

Now I was starting to put down roots. A job, sure and steady. A bank account. An apartment with a lease. A circle of friends, most of whom had been born in the area, and who would die there. A girl, a boss, a friend, a friend’s wife—

I was in the Ford and the Ford was hurrying along Main Street past Olga Road. A while ago we had crossed Cherry Avenue, the city line around there. If I stayed on Main Street long enough I would wind up in the state capital some three hundred miles away. Or, if I made a right turn in a quarter mile, I could take the big ribbon straight on to New York, a few hundred miles of perfect roadway. I didn’t even need my toothbrush. Toothbrushes aren’t all that hard to come by, and I had never developed any great sentimental attachment to mine. Just swing the wheel soft right, pick up a ticket at the toll gate—

But I couldn’t, and that was the hang-up. Not now, not with Murray’s case all up in the air. So far no one had given me much of a second glance. If I skipped town now, someone would start thinking.

I pulled the Ford off the road, lit another cigarette, smoked a little of it. When the traffic thinned out I whipped the Ford around in a U-turn and drove back into town.

I made my apartment in time to answer the phone. I picked it up, said hello, sat down in a chair. It was Murray, and for a second or two the sound of his voice threw me. I’d almost forgotten that he was out of jail now.

“You’re a hard man to find,” he said. “I tried you at your office. No luck. Been keeping busy?”

“Fairly busy.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Listen, Bill, I’d like to talk to you. Got anything doing right now?”

I didn’t, but I had no overwhelming desire to rush over there. “I’ll be tied up for an hour or so,” I said.

“And after that?”

“I’ll be free.”

“Good. I’d ask you to come over here, but I’d rather go some place where we can be alone. I’m not under house arrest, you know. I’m just supposed to stay within city limits, something like that. Where can you meet me?”

“Anywhere.”

He thought it over for a moment. “There’s a little lunch counter at Washington and Plum,” he said. “Sort of a central location, and the coffee’s not bad. All right with you?”

“Fine with me.”

“About an hour?”

“Right.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”

I hung up and found a bottle of Cutty Sark with a little left in it. I poured a small shot and tossed it down. Murray Rogers wanted to see me. I didn’t know why.

The hour dawdled along. I smoked a few cigarettes and listened to mood music on the radio. I had another shot of scotch. Then it was time to go. I found Washington and Plum. The lunch counter was diagonally across the street from me on the northwest corner next to a drugstore.

I crossed Washington, waited for a light, crossed Plum. I stepped into the lunch counter and sat down on a plastic-covered stool and leaned on the Formica counter. I asked for black coffee and a ham sandwich. The coffee steamed in front of me about the same time Murray appeared.

No jailbird he. He was wearing a suit some expensive tailor had made. There was a fresh white carnation in the buttonhole. His tie had the Countess Mara crest, his shoes had a mirror shine, and the smile on his face would have done justice to an upstate politician. Confident eyes, a firm stride, a quick and strong handshake.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said to me. “Just coffee, and black,” he told the counterman. He eased himself on to the stool next to me, took a cigar from his jacket pocket, cut the tip, put it in his mouth and lit it. He blew out a cloud of smoke. We both sat there. He watched the smoke and I tried to guess what this was all about.

He said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you, Bill. But I’m worried.”

“About what?”

“About Joyce. Have you seen her at all?”

Easy now. “Once or twice, since—”

“Since I was arrested?” I nodded. “Then you probably know what I’m getting at,” Murray said. “How did she seem then?”

Anxious to be laid, I thought. And worried that you, Murray, might wiggle off the hook.

“She seemed all right,” I said. His eyes were studying my face. “A little—well, worried, of course. But she didn’t believe you were guilty and she was sure everything would work itself out.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.” He chewed on the cigar, puffed on it, blew out another cloud of smoke. We were riding two levels, I thought suddenly. There was something underneath everything he said, something I could only half hear. “She didn’t know I was guilty,” he said softly. “That’s it right there, in a nutshell. Now she knows.”

I didn’t have anything to say.

“She’s in a bad way, Bill. Maybe she’s worrying about what’s going to happen to me. Maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe she can’t accept the fact I killed Milani. Whatever it is, it’s changed her. And I don’t like it.”

“How do you mean?”

“She’s tense and nervous and depressed. The tension and the nervousness—that’s understandable, that’s not so dangerous. But the depression bothers me. I’m afraid of it.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid. Afraid she might—might do something rash.”

The counterman brought Murray’s coffee and my ham sandwich. I took a bite and sipped at my coffee. I put the sandwich down, turned, looked at him.

“I’ve only been out of jail a few hours,” he said. “Maybe things will change. I’ve tried to perk her up, tried to reassure her that there’s nothing to worry about, that Nester figures we have a good chance to get clear on temporary insanity. If she were just worried about me, I could probably talk her out of the mood she’s in. But I think there’s something else.”

“What?”

He took a long sip of coffee. He didn’t look at me when he talked. “Joyce came from a less than ideal background,” he said. “I suppose you know that.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well,” he said. “At any rate, she’s extremely conscious of social position, has been ever since we were married. I’m no psychiatrist, Bill, but I’ve got enough sense to know she feels insecure in the position she’s gained through marriage to me. And now she sees that position as shaky. She thinks we can’t hold up our head in this town any longer. She sees her whole world crumbling around her, and the result is a pretty terrifying depression. I’m afraid of it, to tell you the truth. Afraid of what she might do.”

I didn’t answer him. Everything had a funny ring to it, an odd feeling. I felt as though our roles had been reversed. I was supposed to be the one on the inside while he was swimming in dark waters. But everything was getting scrambled. I had the uncomfortable feeling he knew things I didn’t know, and that I was way off in a corner somewhere. Depressed? Anxious about her social position? It didn’t sound much like Joyce. Maybe she was putting on an act for his benefit, maybe he just had things ass-backwards. But I couldn’t help getting the impression he had somehow taken the ball away from me.

“Bill, I shouldn’t have bothered you. I don’t know what you can do—”

“That’s what I was wondering.”

“Unless you could talk to her,” he said. “You might have some influence over her.”

“Me?”

He nodded. “She seems to think a lot of you. You must have made a good impression on her.”

“I hardly know her,” I said.

He let that go right on by. “She has a bottle of sleeping pills,” he said. “Or had. I—I took them out of the medicine chest, spilled them into the toilet and threw the bottle away. That’s how worried I am.”

“You don’t think—”

“That she’ll kill herself? I certainly hope not. But I don’t know what to think any more, Bill.”

We batted it around for ten or fifteen minutes. The conversation ran out of gas and I made up something about another appointment and having to run. I caught the check, he argued, I paid, he left the tip, we left the restaurant. He crossed to his car and I to mine and that was that. I returned to my office long enough to cancel a couple of appointments and retrieve a few things I wanted from my desk. Perry Carver and I tossed some small talk at each other. Back at my place I broke the seal of a fresh bottle of Cutty Sark. Then I sat in a chair and tried to get some thinking done.

One fact emerged. I was finished with this town and it was finished with me, for all practical purposes. My working for Perry Carver had been a kick at the beginning, more because the job was something new than because of anything else. Now the job wasn’t new any more. And jobbing Murray Rogers had been exciting enough in a sort of scummy way, but that too was finished with now. He had been neatly boxed, and whether or not he got off without a jail sentence, Joyce would have what she wanted. She could divorce him with no trouble at all and could pick up a healthy settlement in the process.

And my part of the proceeds? Gone and forgotten, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want Murray’s money now and I didn’t want Murray’s wife. I wanted to do what a grifter does when the setting turns sour. I wanted to take off.

Hell, I could do it. Murray was nailed to his guilty plea, and to Joyce it didn’t much matter if I stuck around or not. A day, two days—time to clean out the bank account and pay off the money due on the Ford and straighten myself out with Perry Carver. And then I could leave. No hits, no runs, no errors—well, maybe a few errors, come to think of it. And a great many men left on base.

So I’d drive out Main Street in a day or two, and this time I would take that right turn at the Thruway entrance, and pick up the ticket, and drive the four hundred miles to New York. And after two hours making the rounds of a few right places I would make the proper contacts and work the proper connections and get ready to spend the rest of my life doing what I was evidently born to do—plucking pigeons and shearing lambs with false shuffles and crimp cuts and hold-outs and second deals.

But there was something I had to take care of first, a bridge that had to be burned correctly. I waited until it was about the right time. Then I picked up the phone and dialed the number.

She answered right away.

“Barbara,” I said. “This is Bill.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Are you busy tonight?”

“No.”

“Dinner? I’ll pick you up around six?”

“Fine,” she said.

I put down the phone and wondered just how I would tell her that she wouldn’t be seeing me again.