Lucky at Cards

4

Outside, something was heading north on Main Street with its siren open. It was either a police cruiser or an ambulance, I couldn’t tell which, but it was making a hell of a lot of noise. I crossed to the window and stood there straightening my tie and trying to see what it was. But it had passed out of view by then.

I turned to Joyce. She was dressed now, and she was trying to manage that chestnut hair back into its French roll. I walked up behind her and kissed the back of her neck. She spun around and put her hands against my chest.

“I suppose only a dentist like Seymour Daniels would look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m a dentist at heart. I still want to know why you came here this morning.”

“Because I missed you, Bill.”

I gave her a funny look. She finished playing with her hair, took a cigarette, lighted it. “I missed you,” she said again. “Oh, not you in particular. Men like you. People like you. I’ve been married to Murray for almost three years and I’m still not used to it. Life had more of a kick to it before. I didn’t spend it cooking meals and entertaining business friends and going to dances at the country club. I stayed up late and slept late and lived hard. I was hungry all the time. Hungry for people, hungry for things to do. That’s what I missed.”

“Don’t you like what you’ve got?”

“No.”

“It must be a hell of a lot easier,” I said. “No worries about money or law. Good whiskey to drink and expensive clothes to wear.”

“I had that before.”

“All the time?”

“No. Some of the time.” Joyce looked at her feet. “Listen, of course it’s easier. That’s not everything, Bill. Dying is the easiest thing in the world, just lying down and dying and never having to hustle again. And being married to Murray Rogers is a lot like dying. The kick is gone. There’s no motion, no excitement.”

Maybe I’d been too close to broke to feel sorry for anybody with a world full of money. Whatever it was, it must have showed on my face. She saw it.

“Bill, you could have stayed hooked up with a card mob. It’s safer that way, isn’t it?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t like to work for somebody else,” I said. “I wanted it a little freer than that. Hell, when I dealt for Guiterno I was just a well-paid hired hand.”

“Now do you understand?”

I nodded. “Cheer up,” I said. “He’s not a kid any more. He’s around fifty and he’s worked hard all his life. He’s a good twenty years older than you are. He won’t live forever. You’ll be a young widow with a pot full of dough and a lifetime to spend it in.”

And then she was laughing. It was loose, hysterical laughter. She threw back her head and her whole body shook with the laughter, and she kept going until I grabbed her by the shoulders and calmed her down. Then she looked straight in my eyes and started to laugh again.

“So funny,” she said. “So very funny.”

“What is?”

“Everything. That’s what everybody thinks—I’ll stick it out and I’ll be a rich young widow and everything will be great. That’s what I thought, Bill. Murray let me think so. I should have made him put it in writing, damn it.”

I didn’t get it.

“He’s richer than God,” she said. “He’s also a lawyer, and he’s got a very pretty little will drawn up. One hundred thousand dollars goes in trust for me. I get the income from it until I remarry or move out of town. If I do either, the trust is dissolved and the principal is divided between those two rich-bitch daughters of his. They also get the rest of the estate over and above the hundred thousand, and that comes to so much that they wouldn’t even miss that hundred thou. I get the house, too—but I don’t get to own it outright. The trust owns it. I live in it rent-free. If I remarry or move away from this city, I lose the house along with the money.”

“So you don’t get a thing?”

“Nothing. Maybe five or six thousand dollars income from the trust, if I want to spend my life rotting. Oh, something else, and you’ll love this part. If I’m still unmarried and living here on my fiftieth birthday, then I get the principal of the trust, the whole happy little pie. But by then I’ll be too old to do anything with it. Isn’t that cute, Bill?”

It was cute, all right. Joyce had married him for a soft touch, and he had fixed it so that the soft touch ended the day he died. I asked her what would happen if she divorced him.

“Divorce a lawyer?” She shook her head. “That’s like fighting city hall, Bill. I wouldn’t get a nickel. No, there are only two things I can do. I can leave him flat and go back to the old life without taking any of his money along. Or I can keep it up the way it is and hope he lives forever. The will’s unbreakable, of course. He knows how to make a will unbreakable.”

She checked her make-up in the mirror, seemed happy with what she saw. She turned to me and gave me a kiss, and I caught her in my arms and messed up her lipstick all over again. Her arms held on tight.

“Damn it,” she said.

“You could come with me, Joyce.”

“And live on what?”

“Other people’s money, for a starter.”

“Why not Murray’s money?”

“Let him keep it.”

“I gave him almost three years,” she said. “Do I write them off now? Throw it up and say to hell with three years? You don’t get that many years, Bill. You have to hold onto them, make them swing for you. I don’t want to throw three of them away.”

“It’s worse to throw them all away.”

She was clinging to me and her face was pressed against my throat. She sagged, and I held onto her to keep her from crumbling. Then I felt her chest swell as she gulped in air. Her breasts were tight against me. I let go of her and she straightened up.

“I started to fall apart,” Joyce said.

“Forget it. You’re all right now.”

“I’d like to stick with you. Live with you, travel with you. You’re my kind of people, Bill.”

I didn’t say anything.

“But I like his money. I have a big thing for his money. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to put the two together?”

She let that one hang in the air for a few seconds. Then her face changed and she gave me a fast smile. She did a patchwork job on her lipstick, tossed her purse over her arm.

“I’ve got to run,” she told me. “I’m supposed to be downtown on a minor shopping spree. I’ll have to duck into a department store and buy a few sweaters in a hurry, then get back to our little ranch-style castle. Will you be staying in town for a while, Bill?”

“I suppose so. I don’t have any place to go.”

“I thought you were going to New York.”

“So did I.”

She looked at me, and her lips parted in a pout a little subtler than the Marilyn Monroe pose, but not much. “Then we’ll be seeing each other,” she said. "Goodbye, Wizard.”

After she left, I took the elevator down and let the hotel barber shorten my hair. When he was finished, I was a little less shaggy and a little more ex-Ivy League. I stopped at the desk on the way through the lobby and picked up my bill. The room clerk took my money and said something pleasant when I told him I’d be sticking around for awhile. I left the hotel and took a walk along Main Street.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to put the two together? Not two, though. Three. Joyce and the money and me. We three, we’re not a crowd. We’re just a starry dream.

There was a classic answer to the classic problem.

The problem read Boy meets Girl, Girl has Rich Husband, and the answer read, Boy kills Husband, Boy gets Girl and Money. But we didn’t fit the classic problem. If we killed Murray we didn’t win anything but the electric chair. If he died, there was no money for the weeping widow.

It was just as well. The heavy-handed touch is not exactly the hallmark of the card mechanic. The brute type doesn’t bother slipping a deck of readers into the game or filling a flush from the bottom of the deck. The brute type takes his mark into a handy alleyway and hits him on the head with something heavy.

A mechanic is just a con man. He cons with a deck the way another man cons with a pool cue or a pair of wrong-way dice or a portfolio of Canadian moose-pasture stocks. And a con man plays the game with certain rules operating inside of his head. The direct approach is not on the preferred list.

Sometimes matters are ridiculous. When I had been dealing for Guiterno, we had a game set up for a Texan who liked to play big-money blackjack. That’s a dealer’s-control game—if you can deal seconds, and if you use marked cards or know how to do top-card peeks, you can make your mark lose every hand. A wide-hipped hooker steered the Texan to our game and he was the only live one in the crew. I was dealing and there were four of five shills playing with Guiterno’s money. It was all set up for the Texan.

And the Texan had been stoned to the gills on charcoal-filtered bourbon. He moved into the room where the game was floating, plumped himself down in the seat we had carefully kept open for him, and slapped a wad of long green on the table. He was so blind he couldn’t see the spots on the cards. He didn’t know where he was or what he was doing there, and we could have pocketed his money and put him out to pasture in the middle of the street without worrying about any mess in the morning. He wouldn’t remember a thing.

But we took his roll one hand at a time, and we kept playing hand after goddamned hand until fifty-four yards of his money had made the pilgrimage from his side of the table to our side. I even dealt hands to the shills, and the shills played out the hands religiously, and we took that Texan’s money just the way it says in the book, hand by hand and bet by bet. A few times he bet a hundred dollars on a card and lost and paid off with two bills stuck together. And I very honestly separated the bills and gave one back to him so that he could lose it on the next round.

We had cleaned the Texan according to the con man’s code, such as it is.

So it was just as well that Murray Rogers wouldn’t solve our problems by dying, or by being killed. Because I wasn’t trained for that kind of action.

I smoked a few cigarettes, stopped at a few diners and lunch counters for coffee. I thought about packing a suitcase and catching the plane to New York, but I didn’t think very seriously. I knew damned well I wasn’t going to do it, and I knew why.

Joyce Rogers hadn’t come to my room for a quick tumble and a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. And I wasn’t staying in town for another grab at her sweet brass ring or another poker session with Murray and Sy and the boys. We were both looking for an angle, the same angle. An angle that would give Maynard the Magnificent a pile of money and a green-eyed girl with hair the color of chestnuts.

The angle had to be there. All I had to do was find it.