King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  The old fishing pier was in ruins, and the storefront city hall had been condemned as earthquake bait, and the fire department needed a new truck that wouldn’t break down on the way to a fire. Streets were beginning to disintegrate under the daily pressure of increasing usage by heavier vehicles, and the interurban trolley that had kept at least a part of the traffic at bay had been abandoned at the crocodile-smiling insistence of freeway advocates and passenger-bus builders.

  Redevelopment was the obvious answer. But there was a snag. Other cities’ annexations had left them with large areas that were later occupied by such industries as the TRW computer complex, Rockwell’s space-vehicle assembly plant, a silicon-chip factory or two, and assorted think tanks. But South Bay City’s incorporated limits could boast not one square meter of industrial tax base, so the bills for upgrading the pier and building a shiny new city hall–fire department–police headquarters were invoiced directly to the town’s merchants and individual homeowners—with predictable results.

  South Bay City’s central location among the welter of beach towns had made it a desirable location for one or two major department stores, five car dealerships, three chain drugstores, and a couple of supermarkets, and even the growing dearth of customer parking hadn’t been sufficient to drive these businesses away.

  The sudden tax increase was more effective. Within a year the department store buildings were vacant, three of the dealerships were gone, the drugstore chains had moved, and one of the supermarkets had a “Will Remodel to Suit Tenant” sign in its empty front window.

  The market was leased after a month or two to an enterprising art major from UCLA who opened up a combination coffee house and gallery on the premises. The term “hippie” hadn’t been coined yet. But “beatnik” had, and it was applied forthwith to the establishment’s clientele by the town’s remaining merchants, several of whom finally decided to relocate their own enterprises rather than try to reach an accommodation with their city’s new substratum.

  Quite a few of South Bay City’s more affluent residents followed in a kind of general exodus, and real-estate prices began a slow but steady slide that not even the increasing demand for seaside property could seem to stem. And worse was to come. The end of the beatnik decade was also the beginning of the hippie years, with their concomitant of narcotics and narcissism, and the storefronts that had been vacant blossomed suddenly in a weed growth of head shops, pornographic bookstores, and old-clothes emporia that drove out whatever few legitimate businesses had managed to survive. Beachfront houses that had been mansions were cut up into unhandy apartment units that were rented to seedy-looking couples, all of whom seemed to have at least a dozen “cousins” who moved in the first night, and the crime rate soared suddenly to levels unmatched in the vicinity—especially on those weekends when outlaw motorcycle gangs decided to have a little fun with the acidheads while smashing a few storefronts just to keep in practice.

  Other law-enforcement agencies in the vicinity quietly cut the South Bay City police out of their electronic information net, and federal narcotics agents designated the little beach town an “abandoned area” where enforcement was impossible in the face of wall-to-wall corruption.

  It was to this charming seaside venue that Mr. and Mrs. George Armbruster, late of Cleveland, Ohio, came to begin the golden years of early retirement.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  So did the Old Man of the Mountain, who offered Islamic paradise in return for murder.

  SEVENTEEN

  The real estate agent I’d contacted didn’t want to rent us a house in South Bay City.

  Ethics.

  And compassion, too, I think—though it left her in a difficult position professionally. The job required her to represent renters and sellers to the best of her ability, but she seemed to stick at the point of installing innocents from Ohio on that particular bit of beachfront.

  Subtle hints and innuendo hadn’t kept us from looking at the two-story house she admitted was open for seasonal rental three blocks south of the pier, and I could see her struggling to collect the moral force required to do what she had decided was her plain duty as a member of the human race.

  I sympathized and wished I could take her off the hook.

  But I couldn’t.

  She was a youngish woman with the prematurely roughened complexion of an inveterate beach dweller, and I wasn’t surprised to hear her say she’d been born in South Bay City and had grown up less than a block from where we were standing.

  “But I moved out,” she said, abandoning subtlety at last in favor of conscience, “when my house was burglarized and trashed for the third time in two weeks. Don’t come back, even to show property, any oftener than necessary. Look at the other houses and apartment buildings up and down the Strand—that’s what we call this concrete boardwalk along the beach—look at the bars over all the ground-floor windows. And even some of the ones on the second floor. That ought to tell you something.”

  And it did.

  “Pretty,” I said with the bubble-brained smile I’d been cultivating as a part of the Good Old George persona. “Kind of Spanish-like. Used to sell a lot of fancy stuff like that . . . way back when I still had to work for a living.”

  I followed it with a kind of inhaled bray of self-conscious laughter, the audible signature of the premature retiree, and was relieved to see her decide she’d had enough.

  Conscience had been satisfied. The Armbrusters were beyond help.

  Take the money and run . . . before the Realty Board hears about your scandalous conduct.

  Moving in didn’t take much time.

  There was a little trouble about accepting an out-of-state check for the security deposit (resolved with a quick phone call to the bank in Cleveland; always nice to have helpful friends, especially the rich kind) and an inventory of furnishings I didn’t bother to read because Good Old George simply wasn’t the suspicious type, and a few minutes later Angela and I were carrying the suitcases in from the garage.

  Only three of them—and one of those brand new.

  I closed the back door behind me, remembered to lock it, and turned to find her regarding me with an expression I couldn’t read. But she didn’t leave me in suspense.

  “My God, lover,” she said in a voice of appalled wonder, “is that what you’re really going to be like in a few years?”

  It was a good question. And it deserved a good answer.

  But the phrasing was complicated and turned out to be the kind of thing where demonstration is part of the context. It took us nearly an hour. Even after we finally got to the bedroom.

  We hadn’t bothered to disguise Angela—early retirees with younger second wives are not precisely a novelty in southern California—so she’d needed fewer additions to her basic wardrobe. But a quick scan of the beach scene told us she would need a bathing suit somewhat different from the high-fashion don’t-go-near-the-water item she’d picked up at the shopping mall, so we set out a few hours before sunset to find one while treating ourselves to a low-profile walking tour of the town.

  It offered a few surprises.

  Riding through the streets in an automobile is one thing; covering the same territory afoot is quite another.

  The last time I’d seen South Bay City, the streets had been dirty and a policeman with two buttons off his uniform jacket and a cigarette in his mouth had been directing traffic at a main intersection where the traffic light was broken. But the lights all seemed to be functioning normally now, and the streets were fresh from the attentions of a mechanical sweeper I could see still at work along the Strand. And the only police officer in evidence was a fresh-faced youngster in military-press suntans riding a parking meter enforcement wagon.

  It made me wonder if our scruple-ridden real-estate lady was really abreast of recent developments.

  A saleswoman at the Pier Avenue store where Angela found the kind of string bikini she thought would blend with the local scener
y supplied an explanation, however, without being asked.

  “I suppose you’ll be trying your luck up at the poker,” she said, ringing the sale and handing the bag to Angela, but looking at me after noting the Ohio driver’s license I’d handed her along with the credit card.

  I blinked, trying to field the question while remembering to be Good Old George. But Angela had her own part down cold.

  “Oh, you can count on it,” she said, affecting the bored-but-resigned air of the Understanding Wife. “I wanted to go to one of the other towns—Santa Monica, maybe, or even Malibu; you read so much about it in the Hollywood books and the magazines—but George found out they had poker here in town, and nothing would do but we had to come here the moment we sold the store back home.’’

  I grinned doggily, playing up.

  The saleswoman nodded. “It’s made a real change here in town, I can tell you,” she said. “I mean even a year ago you’d never see a couple like you—nice people, not freaks—coming into the store.”

  “Really?” Angela prompted on cue. “Why is that?”

  The saleswoman sighed. “Well,” she said with the air of a survivor recounting dangers past, “you see, the store—this one, I mean—has been here since just about forever and it seems like I’ve been working in it at least that long. But we’ve got good middle-price-range sports clothes lines, you know, and the kind of customers who buy things like that just weren’t coming here. To South Bay City, I mean. Before.”

  “Before?”

  “Before things changed.”

  “You mean before the town opened up a poker casino?”

  “Well, yes. The casino. But of course, they’d never have had anything like that if it hadn’t been for the Temple of the Eternal Flame. And the Master.”

  Angela’s eyes flickered and I had an instant of misgiving, wondering if the whole idea of bringing her here had been a terrible miscalculation. But the voice was steady.

  “The Master?” she said with a puzzled little smile. “I’m sorry—I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

  “Gideon,” the saleswoman supplied.

  “Gideon?”

  “The Reverend Gideon Goode! Surely you must remember him as a little boy? On the television, preaching sermons he said God put into his mind and healing people, right along from when he was just six years old.”

  Angela did her very best Lulu Light Bulb impression.

  “Oh,” she said brightly. “That Gideon. I thought he quit. Or grew up or something.”

  “Oh, he surely did,” the saleswoman said. “Everyone forgot about him, and I’ll have to say I was surprised—and a little concerned, too—when he moved here and started, well, just taking over. But no matter what anyone tells you, he’s been the best thing ever happened to this town.”

  That needed explanation, so we stood still with our mouths closed and listened.

  “The first thing was the old hotel,” she said. “The South Bay Plaza. White elephant there on the beachfront. Been standing empty with even some of the windows broke for years, and the council was always going to tear it down, but it was too expensive even to do that. So, the first anyone knew about Gideon was when he bought it from the county—it had been taken over for taxes years back, and they never could get a buyer before—and a contractor moved in with a big crew of people to start fixing it up.”

  She paused for breath and to allow herself a nostalgic little chuckle. “I remember some folks here in town—and I was one of them, believe you me—really felt sorry for the man. Thought he would wind up broke for sure, like all the rest. But he seemed to have plenty of money. From somewhere.”

  I thought I detected a little glint in Angela’s eye at that, but our talkative saleslady didn’t seem to notice.

  “And then,” she continued, “there was the thing with the poker. That was at election time, and nobody thought there was a chance the town would vote to make it legal here, any more than it had the last five or six times they’d tried to get it through. But they did, didn’t they? And that was that.”

  This time the paired blank looks she got were perfectly genuine. But as before, our policy of wide-eyed silence brought instant explanation.

  “Well, I mean it was Gideon, you see,” she said. “He put up the money for the campaign that got the casino approved and backed the council candidates who were for it. And of course, there was no problem about financing. That was him, too.”

  “Gideon?”

  “Why, yes—oh! I’m sorry. You’re from out of state, so how would you know? But it’s just such an everyday fact of life hereabouts, I suppose I . . . Well, as I say, a lot of people think it’s kind of strange. And there are still some say no good’ll come of it. But the fact is the town’s in partners with Gideon now. With his Temple of the Eternal Flame, anyway. The council owns the property the casino stands on. But Gideon built the place and financed it, and it’s his people who run it. And all of a sudden, good things are starting to happen again in South Bay City . . . ”

  We got out of there a few minutes later and walked back to the rented house in silence, occupied with our own thoughts.

  And mine were doing a clog dance.

  Reconciling the divergent views of the town offered by the two people we had talked to presented no real problem; taste is individual. One of the women didn’t even live in South Bay City anymore, and even the image of Gideon as Citizen of the Year wasn’t too hard to swallow. The man was a trained and professional communicator, after all. Just doing what came naturally.

  But . . . Gideon the poker boss?

  Certain forms of poker have been legal in California for nearly a century, and the state has always had a few towns where the game was played, for money, on the basis of local municipal option, with the individual city fathers assuming responsibility for monitoring the games and collecting a slice of the profits.

  And for most of that time, no one had paid much attention.

  California poker was for little old ladies of both sexes. And for amateurs.

  No real action.

  The problem was that the legislature, in the grand tradition of political nonsense, had legalized the wrong forms of the game. And for the wrong reasons. Responding to pressures from the more ignorant segments of the religious community, it had taken a firm stand against “games of chance,” officially condemning them as sinful and contrary to public policy. Games of skill, however, were to be permitted, even when played for money. And then the fun began.

  Was craps a game of skill?

  No—chance alone dictated the fall of the ivories.

  How about bridge?

  Pure skill—players of talent and experience seemed to enjoy an advantage not attributable to chance.

  Slot machines were chance.

  Horse race betting was skill.

  And poker?

  Well . . . there the lawmakers decided to boggle. The game’s detractors said it was pure chance and cited innumerable examples of the “lucky chump” who simply rode a remarkable run of cards to financial supremacy.

  Poker proponents, on the other hand, called it a game of skill and pointed out that the “lucky” players always seemed to wind up broke as soon as the streak played out, while the players, amateur and professional, who had bothered to learn the game seemed to wind up ahead, year in and year out.

  But poker is not just one game.

  It is many—more than two hundred forms already known and played in one place or another, and new versions turning up every year—divided unequally under two general headings: closed poker, in which all of the individual player’s cards are concealed (known familiarly as draw), and open poker, in which some of the cards are dealt face up (known as stud).

  So, the legislature decided to compromise:

  Draw poker was declared a game of skill—legal.

  But stud poker was declared a game of chance—illegal.

  And everyone went back to sleep for a few decades. Only a few towns went throu
gh the complicated process of setting up a separate enforcement agency and holding the separate authorization election required to license the game in their bailiwicks, and those that did found it hardly worth the effort. Draw poker is a pleasant enough way to pass an idle hour or two, and probably beats daytime television as a brain exerciser. But it’s never been the most popular form of poker because, official legislative dicta notwithstanding, it’s basically a game of chance. And real poker players prefer to rely on skill.

  Stripped to essentials, poker’s popularity rests on the interplay of psychology, betting technique, and card sense. But draw poker leaves the equation seriously out of balance. Card sense is restricted to interpretation of odds based on the number of players at the table, the number of cards drawn, and in some cases the requirement for jacks or better to open, while betting skills can be exercised only in the intervals before and after the draw.

  The result is an almost academic exercise in applied psychology—and pretty weak tea.

  But it was the best California casinos could offer until recent years, when alterations in the state’s real-estate tax laws left a number of small towns scratching for new sources of revenue. Suddenly poker casinos began springing up all over the landscape—and going broke almost at once, as city fathers and would-be gaming entrepreneurs rediscovered the limited appeal of five card draw.

  Various cures were tried: A rummy variation called panguinge brought in a few strays, and pai gow, an old Chinese game resurrected and advertised as a form of poker, was introduced and demonstrated considerable appeal for the state’s burgeoning Oriental population. But most round-eyes just couldn’t get the hang of it, despite mind-bending little booklets issued by management.

  So finally, the casinos went to court.

  And won.

  Without actually going so far as to call the former state of affairs idiotic, the courts overruled the legislature’s long-standing bias against stud poker—and opened the floodgate.