Paydirt

29

Martin Kingsley drummed his fingers impatiently on the table top. He was sitting at a cafe on Lincoln Road, waiting for the lights to be adjusted so they could get on with taping a Super Bowl spot for Fox Sports, and as usual, it was hurry up and wait. Television, Kingsley fumed, was one big waste of time. If he didn't enjoy the spotlight so much, he would say to hell with all those morons waving microphones at him.

From the corner of his eye, Kingsley saw a figure in black move through the throng of tourists in shorts and pastel shirts at the sidewalk cafe. The figure disappeared, but a moment later, Kingsley felt a tapping on his shoulder.

"Hello pardner," Houston Tyler breathed into his ear.

Kingsley jumped. "Jesus! You startled me, Ty. What are you doing here?"

"Working on my suntan," he said with a sickly smile that twisted his purple scar into a crescent. He was wearing black denim jeans, black cowboy boots, a black leather belt with metal studs and black silk shirt with silver buttons. He looked like a bald Zorro without the mask, and Kingsley was aware of people staring.

"You want tickets for the game?" Kingsley asked, hoping to get rid of him. "If you'll stop by the hotel later-"

Tyler barked out a laugh. "Why the hell would I want to watch a bunch of overgrown men jumping on top of each other for three hours?"

Kingsley didn't have an answer. The sudden appearance of this madman had jarred him. "I just thought as long as you were in town…"

"I came to watch you, Martin, and to collect my due. Super Sunday. I just don't want you to forget."

Tyler reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a fat cigar with a tapered tip that looked like the Cuban Diplomaticos number two. "Doctor told me to stop smoking, but if I'm in Miami, how the hell can I resist?" He pulled a long-stemmed wooden match from the same pocket, lifted a leg and struck the match on the heel of his boot, then set the flame to the cigar. After a deep pull, he exhaled white smoke into Kingsley's face. "Care for one, Martin?"

"No, I quit."

"Good for you. When I was in prison, I dreamed of good cigars and fine brandy. Hell, it was so real, I could smell it and taste it. But then, in my dream, I'd sip the brandy and it tasted like vinegar. I'd put the match to the cigar, and it exploded in my face and caught me on fire. I'd just lie there, unable to wake up, watching my nose and lips melting in the flames."

Tyler was threatening him, Kingsley thought, and enjoying it.

"Fire's an awful purgatory, Martin. Luke said it in the Good Book: 'I am tormented in this flame.' It's the bottomless pit of Revelations. It's a boiling lake of fire."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Kingsley felt nailed to his chair, petrified like the biblical pillar of salt.

"We're headed there, Martin, you and me both, for all eternity. The only question is when."

"We're ready, Mr. Kingsley," an associate producer called out from a tangle of cables and lights.

"In a minute," Kingsley said. He turned to his ex-partner. "I'll have your money, Ty."

"I know you will, Martin. You'll scrape and claw your way up the cliff to keep your toes out of the boiling sulfur, but that tide will keep on rising." He turned and disappeared into the crowd.

Hours later, Kingsley sat across a table from Vinnie LaBarca. He'd called the mobster just minutes after wrapping the TV spot. Something from their last conversation kept gnawing at him like a squirrel at an acorn. He had asked Vinnie LaBarca how he could be so sure Dallas would cover the spread.

"Trust me, you're better off not knowing."

But he just had to know. Someone was crashing the Big Dance, and he didn't have a clue. Could someone on Denver be taking a dive in the Super Damn Bowl? Jeez, that would be like Rommel laying down for Patton.

Now, Kingsley and LaBarca were sharing stone crabs and secrets in a private room at Joe's on South Beach. Vinnie was spearing some meat from a claw and talking at the same time, telling Kingsley to relax.

"It's all taken care of, a done deal," Vinnie said.

It had better be. A psychotic ex-partner was waiting to use a flame thrower on him if it didn't work.

"I feel like we're in this together, Vinnie, and I'm just not good at being a silent partner," Kingsley said.

LaBarca toyed with his French fried sweet potatoes and seemed to think about it. He was wearing a beige Armani suit with a peach t-shirt underneath, a Miami Vice look popular 25 earlier. His face softened, and he said, "Awright, awright, it's ain't complicated. It all goes back to jocks betting, an old story. Hey, remember Paul Hornung. The league doesn't know what to do with guys who bet on the games. You remember Art Schlichter, the Colts QB suspended for gambling? He was a compulsive, so what'd they do? They sent him to a rehab clinic in Las Vegas. He liked the town so much, he moved there!"

"I don't get it. What's that have to do with-"

"Bear with me. Now, there's another old story, too. This one goes back to the Black Sox scandal, maybe even back to the Olympic games in Greece for all I know. Players throwing games or shaving points. Kentucky basketball in the fifties, Boston College in the seventies, Northwestern in the nineties. Now you combine these stories, and what do you get?"

"What?"

"You get Mike Skarcynski."

"The Denver quarterback?"

"Yeah. He's a compulsive gambler. He already had a bookie when he was a sophomore at Pitt. Would hit the race tracks, too. Gambled away his signing bonus, got some psychological treatment, was caught betting with a bookie on League games two years ago."

"I never heard anything about it."

"His lawyers worked out a deal the Commissioner. He hadn't been betting on Denver's games, so the Commish gave him a hush-hush talking to, no press releases, no nothing but a warning. Now here's where it get's good. If he's ever caught betting on a pro football game again, he'll be suspended for a year, and if he's ever caught betting on one of his own games, it's life! Out the door. Whoosh!"

Vinnie made a soaring motion with a fork full of creamed garlic spinach.

"I still don't get it," Kingsley said. "You got him to bet on the Super Bowl."

"Nah, he's done all the betting he's gonna do this season," LaBarca said with an undertaker's smile. "I got him to throw the Super Bowl."

"What!"

LaBarca leaned over the table, closing the distance between them. He spoke in a whisper even though no one else was in the room. "Like I told you, he's a gambling junkie."

"I get it," Kingsley said. "He owes you money, and you're holding his chit."

"Hell no. He's a great gambler, cleaned house a couple of weeks early in the season, probably won three or four hundred thousand for the year."

"Then, how…"

"He uses a bookie in Boston who's a Denver fan and would never do anything to hurt the QB, but he's gotta lay off some of the bigger bets with a guy in Atlanta who works for me, and one day the Atlanta book is throwing his weight around and says, 'you know who you been losing to?'"

"And he tells your guy it's Denver's quarterback."

"Yeah, and my guy has to come to me to cover the bets, so he's pissed that he's dropping a bundle to someone who shouldn't be betting anyway and whose information on injuries and inside stuff is better than ours."

"And you decide to take Skar down?"

A waiter came into the room and cleared the table. Both men declined the offer of key lime pie. Kingsley's appetite was whetted, but not for dessert.

"I buy some insurance," LaBarca said, when the waiter had left. "When the bets get even bigger, my guy tells the Denver bookie to have Skar deal directly with him. We record the calls, then when Skar wins a bet, I have a guy video the hand-to-hand transfer of money. The video's so good you can see Ben Franklin's pictures on the bills. So what I'm saying is that I got Mike Skarcynski's pecker in my pocket."

"He's agreed to…" Kingsley couldn't even bring himself to say it. The possibilities sent waves of excitement through him like the torrent of crude oil in massive strike.

"I convinced him that it's better to lose one Super Bowl," LaBarca said, and get to play another six or seven years, than to be disgraced and unemployed for the rest of his life."

"Then it's a lock," Kingsley said.

"That's what I been telling you."

"I should get some more money down on the game," Kingsley said aloud, but more to himself than to LaBarca.

"Every last cent you got," Vinnie LaBarca said.

Later that night, the paperwork with Bobby Gallagher was completed. Kingsley laid out 5.5 million bucks without putting up a dime. He escrowed two per cent of the team's stock, which covered the bet because the team was worth far more than $275 million, indicated by the transaction. In reality, there was no market for a minority interest in the team, so the stock was essentially worthless until the team was sold, and Kingsley had no plans to sell it.

Even if he lost the bet and the two per cent, a family trust would still own ninety-eight per cent. On Christine's thirty-eighth birthday, just 10 days away, 49 per cent of the stock now in trust would go outright to her. The Kingsley family would control ninety-eight per cent of the stock, no matter what, and a two per cent minority shareholder could not expect dividends, profits, or even free popcorn, as long as Martin Kingsley was running the show. He had snookered Robert Gallagher again, win or lose.

But I'm not going to lose, Kingsley thought. He would win and get rid of both burrs under his saddle. Let Houston Tyler take his money and crawl into the night to die. Kingsley didn't want to see his deformed face again. But Bobby Gallagher was something else again. Kingsley wanted Bobby there when the clock ticked down to zero, when every drop of blood was drained from him. There is nothing quite so satisfying, Kingsley thought, as looking into the eyes of a man you have vanquished.