King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  But it got me into the conversation all the same.

  “The records they sent you,” I said, “must be a little out of date. I quit the priesthood; hung up the collar and knee pads a long time ago.”

  “But they still call you Preacher.”

  I shrugged.

  “A lot of people called Spangler Arlington Braugh ‘Robert Taylor,’ ” I said. “And quite a few thought Roy Fitzgerald was really named ‘Rock Hudson.’ ”

  “But they didn’t neither one of those people own a little church up in the mountains and preach in it every Sunday.”

  Well, all right, then. So, his information was better than I’d thought and he probably had a smirk or two coming. Maybe even at my expense. But my head still didn’t seem to be working as well as it might and I still felt as frisky as an amputated leg, and the conversation didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  “Okay,” I said. “You win. I’m Holy Joe the Highwayman in disguise, and you’re the Sword of Divine Justice. So, let’s hear the charges you were talking about. And set some bail.”

  But he changed the subject.

  “The Reverend Gideon Goode,” he said, apropos of nothing that had gone before, “is the best thing that ever happened to this town. And to me.”

  I could believe it. South Bay City had been in trouble for quite a while.

  “Town and me both was going to hell in a hand basket a few years ago,” he continued. “I’d been in the MPs in the ‘Nam and always wanted to do police work, but the best I could get was security guard for a chain store over in Torrance. And this town—my Lord! I grew up right here in South Bay City, and never wanted to live anyplace else. But between the dope and the dirt and the taxes they run me out, and I was living down the road in Lomita when the change happened.”

  Another pause, but there was a shine in his eyes that looked familiar and I knew he wasn’t done.

  “Someone told me some Bible-thumper or other had bought the old South Bay Plaza hotel and moved in, but I didn’t really pay attention until I heard this same feller had talked the city fathers into turning the old bowling alley up on the hill into a poker palace. Then I come to see. And stayed. Went to talk to him and went to work for him, handling security for the casino—and then I was chief of police.”

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  The shine left his eyes and they squinted suddenly.

  “You know,” he said in a voice that was probably intended to sound dangerous, “you got a smart mouth onto you, Mr. Preacher-Man.”

  “I’ve had complaints about it.”

  His temper was short and the options were all his. But after a tense moment or two of effort that must have been expensive, he managed to control the anger, which was just as well for me. Jawbone was all I had to offer just then. And it wouldn’t have been nearly enough.

  “But this time,” he went on when the dark things had finally stopped wrestling in the arena behind his face, “you come off lucky.”

  That was nice to know.

  “This time,” he said, “you get your clothes back and there’s no charges, and we release you in the custody of your friends.”

  “Friends?”

  “Angels,” he said, smiling the smile of peace and good fellowship. “The angels are here—one of them waiting out front for you. Right now! Blessed be . . . ”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Matthew, still recounting Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, offers a useful set of guidelines . . .

  TWENTY

  My first impulse was a stupid one. I wanted to shout and protest and demand my right to consult a shrewdness of ACLU lawyers. Right now.

  Help!

  I’m being kidnapped!

  But the conversation with Chief Thurloe D. Thurmond had given me a clear idea of how far that would get me in South Bay City, so instead I thanked him for his courtesy and walked out of his office and followed the waiting escort officer down the hall. With my mouth shut.

  Clothes—Good Old George Armbruster’s, minus the belly padding and one of the socks—had been left piled on a chair in another bare little room like the one I’d spent some time in earlier, but this time the doorknob turned when I put my hand to it after changing, and no one tried to stop me as I wandered back in the general direction of the front booking desk.

  My ideas were not especially constructive—something idiotic about trying to escape as soon as we were out of the vicinity of the police station, or at any rate before Jackhandle Jack’s minions could get me inside the hotel. But even at the time it seemed unlikely. The truth was that I might have been hard-pressed to escape from a really determined bucket of flatworms just then, and even the job of walking from the back of the station house to the front was a chore requiring intense and specific concentration.

  I estimated my chances at zip.

  Especially when I saw who was waiting there.

  “Greetings, brother!”

  The angel come to fetch me loomed tall and dark and powerful among lesser mortals, and I stood silent as he signed the release forms in triplicate and then hustled me toward the door with a come-along grip that left no room at all for argument.

  Suleiman.

  “Blessed be,” he said. “And let’s not keep the Master waiting.”

  The pseudo-African’s smile never wavered as we got into a lime-green Pontiac station wagon with a familiar ankh stenciled on the side and drove away from South Bay City’s shiny new civic center, and he was careful to keep our speed within legal limits as he made the first turn in the direction of Gideon’s headquarters. But something seemed to be bothering him all the same, and he speeded up suddenly when the twin of the car we were using passed us going in the opposite direction.

  “This car,” he said, “is hotter than Mama’s horseradish pie. Had to coldcock one of Jack’s damn angels to get it, and I think a couple of the guys in that other Gideon-wagon spotted us.”

  He turned a blind corner and spurted a block the wrong way down a one-way street and turned again before bringing the Pontiac to a shuddering stop behind a nondescript Toyota sedan.

  “You drive,” he said, tossing me a set of keys and moving quickly toward the passenger side of the Toyota. “I’m too conspicuous.”

  He was all of that, no doubt, and I didn’t argue. But I didn’t understand, either. Events were moving at high speed, and my brain was still in freeze-frame.

  Never mind. Just do it . . .

  A wide-bowed key opened the door and unlocked the ignition of the little Japmobile, and I managed to get it started while Suleiman arranged himself out of sight in a cramped and kneeling attitude on the floor, with his face buried in the imitation leather of the passenger seat.

  The position was familiar and I couldn’t resist: “ ‘Our Father, which art in heaven . . . ’ ”

  He swiveled his smooth-shaven head far enough to the right to fix me with one baleful eye. “Boot it, dear heart,” he said.

  And I did. Slowly and carefully, along a route he seemed to have selected beforehand that took us well beyond the city limits of South Bay City.

  But without apology.

  For me it was the first sure sign of ego-resurrection, the revived urge to needle a defenseless friend.

  As soon as we were across the line in Torrance—with no pursuit visible in the rearview mirror—Suleiman ended his devotions and we switched positions to let him drive.

  I thought about asking him the first of several thousand questions then. But he shook his head before I could frame the first.

  “Later,” he said. “When we’re inside.”

  Coast Highway turns east and changes character at the Palos Verdes peninsula. Seedy cafés and bicycle shops give way to restaurants where dinner for two lasts four hours and will be questioned by your accountant, and hotel-motels that offer a peculiar combination of at-your-door parking and twenty-four-hour service available nowhere else in town.

  Suleiman wheeled the little Toyota through
the entranceway and around a circle to a row of detached cottages at the rear of something called the Plush Seashell, and turned off the engine.

  “Now,” he said, “perhaps we talk a little . . . ”

  Inside, after doors were locked and rooms checked and rear exit inspected, Suleiman waited not on ceremony but went directly to the wet bar in the living room, where he poured himself a powerful persuasion of scotch and tossed it down his throat, neat.

  “Jesus . . . shit!” he said when he was able to talk again.

  That summed it up as far as I was concerned.

  He gestured with the bottle and looked in my direction, but I shook my head—a little regretfully—and waited with something like patience while he poured himself another three fingers, mixing it this time with a respectable amount of soda.

  “To answer your questions in order,” he said then without prompting. “One, I found out you were in trouble from my sister. Two, I decided to help because any enemy of Gideon’s is a friend of mine. And three, I suspect it was not the most intelligent move I ever made.”

  I nodded understandingly. “Probably not,” I said.

  “Probably not. And before we go into details or discuss ways and means, let me ask: Did you come down here alone?”

  “Uh . . . ”

  “If you didn’t, and if your traveling companion is by any wild chance named Angela Palermo, may I suggest that we make it our first order of business to get her out of harm’s way? If I know my brother-in-law—and I do—his angels will be just as interested in talking to her as to you, dear heart. And that is very damn interested indeed!”

  Angela answered the newly installed telephone at the beach house on the tenth ring, just in time to save me from a heart attack and sounded sleepy.

  “Bastard,” she said. “Wait up all night for you . . . ‘n’ then you ring the phone the minute I get to sleep!”

  But she came to life quickly enough at the first mention of Gideon and offered no resistance to my suggestion that she dress and join us at once. She even remembered to write down the phone number of Suleiman’s suite, in case the car wouldn’t start.

  I put the phone down and stood staring at it for a moment.

  “She’ll be fine,” Suleiman said.

  “Yeah.”

  “They know she came south with you, but they don’t know where you were staying.”

  That brought us back to square one.

  “Your sister?” I said.

  “My sister. Perdita.”

  Suleiman stretched his length back against the cushions of the foam-rubber divan and I could see him forcing the muscles to relax, one by one.

  “The guy who was tailing you when you left my place in San Francisco,” he said, beginning what promised to be a long explanation. “That was what finally made me decide to do something I’d been putting off for weeks. Months. Ever since this—thing—with Gideon began, I’d been toying with the idea of installing an extra tap on all our phones. Especially ’Dita’s.”

  The realization that the street outside his place of business had become a playground for Gideon’s private storm troopers, however, had provided a needed spur.

  “And at just the right moment,” he said. “ ’Dita was gone on some errand or other for about an hour during the afternoon after our interview, and I used the time to have a second—very private—tap installed on the lines. Which is how I found out they were tracking you.”

  Suleiman’s eavesdropping had kept him informed of events almost as they happened: the fate of the angel-tick who had been sent to follow me in San Francisco, the subsequent scatter-search of the house at Glen Ellen, and finally my own emergence in the role of Good Old George Armbruster, retired hardware merchant and loser extraordinary, sniffing around in the semi-sacred precincts of the casino.

  “The idea for the ambush,” he said, “was my sister’s. As was the biblical citation I understand was inscribed on your chest—to make sure that you understood the retaliatory nature of the act.”

  It sounded about right.

  “And you decided to mix into a cockroach-rumble like that?”

  The tall man shrugged and downed the rest of his drink in a single chug.

  “Beats trying to keep score,” he said.

  Angela arrived shortly after Suleiman had poured himself yet another scotch and soda, and I could see she wanted one herself. But she shook her head when the offer was made.

  “Maybe later,” she said. “When this craziness is over.”

  Good thinking. I handled the introductions and brought her up to date on recent events. She took it all in with minimal expostulation and only one or two questions. Suleiman said nothing, but I could see his eyes admiring the view. Not that I blamed him. To the contrary.

  “The thing now,” he said, throwing the meeting open to new business, “is to consider ways and means . . . ”

  Angela was for frontal assault. “Hire a few hard boys,” she said, “and go to the mattresses!”

  Suleiman and I both laughed. For different reasons.

  “A lady of enterprise and stern resolve!” he said, and she acknowledged the compliment without comment.

  But my contribution got a wan little smile. “The old don,” I said, “would have recognized his own true daughter.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “You’re so damn smart, let’s hear how you want to go about it—keeping in mind that my little girl’s somewhere in that damn hotel of his.”

  So, I told her.

  The plan had been forming in my mind ever since Willie Axe told me about the way shills were used at the poker casino, and the morning’s detour through ambush and arrest and isolation and ongoing recovery had acted somehow to crystallize the various components and bring them to the point of action. I thought it had a chance.

  Better, anyway, then a declaration of street warfare.

  But convincing people with little knowledge of poker and an emotional need for immediate action was something else again. Halfway through the second paragraph, I could see Suleiman framing the first of what had to be a long list of objections. But it never quite made it past the threshold of sound, and by the time I was done, a reluctant acceptance had formed in the place the demurrers had occupied.

  Angela wasn’t quite so sure.

  “It’s not the money we’re after,” she said. “It’s people. Terry. And the Soameses . . . ”

  I drew my breath to explain, but it was Suleiman who answered first. And with the right words.

  “Misdirection,” he said. “Stage magicians use it and so do politicians. Make you watch what’s going on over there so you won’t realize what’s happening over here—declare war on poverty so you won’t notice they just declared war on Cambodia; show you an arms reduction agreement so you won’t pay too much attention to a stock market collapse. An old and honorable stratagem.”

  “And you think this will fake Gideon out of position?”

  I wanted to give her an unequivocal yes, but it wasn’t that simple and I owed her something closer to the truth.

  “It’ll give him a few extra things to think about,” I said, “and he’s got a lot on his plate already. It’s a juggling act, and the idea is to make him drop one or two of the little gold balls.”

  She nodded slowly, but full acceptance came slowly—and for a reason I hadn’t expected.

  “All right,” she said finally. “I’d still rather break in there with a carload of button men and clean the place out, starting with their capo. But you’re right; that’s probably my father talking, not me. So, we’ll try it your way. Because if there’s one person in the world I think could psych Gideon out, it’s you, Preacher.”

  Suleiman understood at once and gave her a quick smile and a little salaam of appreciation.

  But I didn’t get it. So, Angela spelled it out for me.

  “Gideon’s you,” she said. “Or anyway a version of you that might have existed under other circumstances—and I wonder, really, how differen
t the conditions would have had to be. I think you can understand him, figure his reactions before they happen, and maybe get a move or two ahead, because Gideon Goode is Preacher gone sour. Turned inside out.”

  “And that,” Suleiman added, with all humor gone from his face, “is yet another reason for caution. Here is a two-edged sword, my friend: Your own ability to anticipate Gideon has a mirror image in his ability to foresee the moves you might make, so walk carefully. And guard your back.”

  In the next few hours I ran Suleiman’s hotel phone bill up into the three-figure category and beyond, with calls to Reno, Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas, Houston, Dallas, Atlantic City, and—via cable and microwave uplink—to Monaco, Rome, Paris, Istanbul, Panama City, Rio, London, and various islands in the Caribbean.

  Not all the people who answered were poker players per se, and not all expressed immediate enthusiasm.

  But in the end, the lure I dangled before their eyes was irresistible, and the only refusals were from an old friend who had broken both legs trying to impress his brand-new Swiss ski-instructor girlfriend, and another who said he would like to lend a hand but the police in Turkey were harder to bribe than he had been led to expect and he might be staying on in their country for an extended period.

  Late breakfast was ordered from room service and delivered while we waited for some of the calls to be completed, but no one seemed to be much interested and it went back almost untouched except for the coffee.

  By the time the last contact had been made, everyone seemed to have gained markedly in confidence—and Angela even found the spirit for a minor barb.

  “It’s a damn good thing,” she said, “that you didn’t go into politics. A man who can flimflam people that much without cracking a smile would be downright dangerous!”

  “It’s all in the training,” I said. “Remember—I’m a divinity school graduate!”

  Suleiman thought it was the funniest thing he’d heard all day.

  But the hilarity was an ephemera. And it vanished, leaving a renewed ambience of uncertainty, with the next ring of the telephone. Suleiman answered, listened a moment without speaking, and then handed the receiver to me.