King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  “Preacher?”

  Having guns pointed at my sternum is not exactly a novel experience for me. But I have never gotten to the point where I enjoy it.

  “If that thing is loaded and cocked,” I said, “please aim it somewhere else.”

  The arms relaxed, suddenly boneless, and the weapon—hammer back in firing position, sure enough—bounced a little against the pillows as the big hand let it dangle by the trigger guard.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Couldn’t have put it better myself.

  Greg Winchell, honest motel clerk and classic car buff, departed a minute or two later, rejoicing in possession of another of Suleiman’s thousand-dollar bills.

  I wondered, irrelevantly but aloud, where he was getting them.

  “Mad money,” he said, starting to pour both of us a drink but thinking better of it and turning on the hot plate under a pot of coffee instead. “I keep a few taped to my skin. In a strategic place.”

  I thought it over and couldn’t help asking.

  “Where?”

  The eyes were an obsidian wall. “In a spot,” he said, “where you will never find them.”

  And let it go at that.

  The coffee began making noises almost at once, and Suleiman handed me a cup—black and pungent—without comment. It was horrible. An inferior brand of powdered stuff probably furnished free by the management of the motel. No chicory. And reheated to a state of acid potency that would probably have done wonders for the toilet bowl.

  I swallowed it with deep satisfaction and held out the empty vessel for more.

  “Angela got antsy when you didn’t come back from the sit-down with ’Dita,” Suleiman said, launching into synopsis without preamble. “I tried to talk her out of it, but I guess you know how much good that would do.”

  I did.

  “She said she was going to find you and find her daughter—and that was that. I waited an hour or two and then got a bit restless myself and decided to move. Just in time, too, from what young Winchell tells me. Seems he had visitors about an hour after I got out of there, and the place has been watched ever since.”

  My radar blipped. “And they didn’t spot the kid taking off in that neon-light party wagon of his?”

  Suleiman shrugged and even offered the hint of a smile. “One way or another,” he said, “I think our young friend will make out in this world. He’s the boss’s son. Parents own the Plush Seashell. So, no one’s much surprised when he takes off in the middle of the day and comes back when he feels like it. And besides, he tells me he parks the red Caddy in a security garage a few blocks away. Drives one of the company cars going and coming.”

  “He’s been here before, then?”

  “Regularly.” Suleiman poured the dregs of the coffee into my re-emptied cup, filled the pot with tap water, and put it back on the hot plate. “I didn’t want to leave the area with you and ’Dita out of pocket but going out for meals or groceries didn’t seem like such a good idea.”

  “So, he’s been feeding you?”

  “A Care package daily—deli stuff and bread and butter—plus the newspapers and the kind of gossip that doesn’t ever get into print. Which reminds me: I think your idea about breaking Gideon’s money machine is starting to work . . . ”

  Suleiman filled me in while I used his shower and eased back into my own clothes. Angela had brought both suitcases when she came to the Plush Seashell, and he had brought them along when he went into hiding.

  Just as well.

  I explained that I wanted to look like myself when I walked into the South Bay Casino.

  “Say what?”

  Suleiman’s train of thought sidetracked, and he sat waiting for me to repeat the words he was sure he didn’t want to hear.

  “So far,” I said, toweling the hair dry and brushing it into something close to civilized order, “I have been shadowed through the streets of two cities, tapped, burglarized, mugged, drugged, arrested, interrogated, kidnapped, threatened with death, and sent on a guided tour of the controlled-substance archipelago . . . not to mention a few ancillary goodies I don’t think I want to go into for the moment.

  “Old friend, enough is enough!

  “If someone’s getting in a few licks for the good guys now, I think we ought to be there to watch the fun at the very least . . . ”

  Suleiman put his head in his hands and made swearing noises.

  The casino lot was considerably more crowded than I remembered it, and no one seemed to be on duty at the valet parking stand. We found an empty slot at the corner farthest from the main entrance and took our time getting to the door.

  But nobody seemed to be interested in us.

  “Seems like a lot of business for this time of day,” Suleiman remarked, checking out the heat waves beginning to rise from automobile roofs. “Funny. I always thought poker players didn’t come out till the sun went down.”

  I laughed.

  “The amateurs don’t,” I said. “Especially here in California. But for the professionals—and the addicts—the big hand is always on the twelve and the little hand is on the three and it is dark outside the door.”

  He let his mind pick at it for a minute, trying to find something to get a tooth into, and finally gave up with a frustrated shake of the head.

  “Meshugah,” he said.

  I surely couldn’t argue with that.

  Nobody seemed to be watching the main entranceway, and the Dutch door to the little security office that had allowed a guard to give all comers a quick scan was locked up, top and bottom.

  So was the door to the manager’s office, I discovered when I gave the knob a surreptitious shake.

  But the bar and the little coffee shop were doing more business than they seemed to be able to handle comfortably. And the casino floor was packed.

  With faces I recognized.

  The tall, dignified-looking party at the corner table was Cherokee Bill Orso (né William Standing Bear), whose reputation for alligator-blooded poker expertise, won as a member of the Army of Occupation after World War I, and was still intact as he approached his ninety-third year. All the seats at his table were occupied, but most of the chips seemed to be neatly piled at in front of him.

  Closer to hand was a table, also full, where I picked out Texas Dolly and the Sailor—both apparently doing a little better than well—while Armadillo Skinny’s anteater-hide boots were propped casually under a table close to the fire exit. The tilt of the match in the side of his mouth told me all I needed to know about the hand he was backing to the full extent of the not inconsiderable bankroll showing on the table . . . which, I noted with no little interest, was not entirely expressed in chips.

  I made a quick visual check of the other tables, connecting with several more old friends along the way, and discovered that this open use of cash seemed to be general. Which led to two separate, but related, conclusions: There was more action here and now than the casino was able to cover with its own chips; and my idea was working.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Your life is not your own, and it is not a gift. It is a conditional possession; a loan which must one day be redeemed.

  The message, therefore, is clear:

  TWENTY-NINE

  The game of poker is constantly reinventing itself.

  There is no official rulebook, and people who talk about playing the game “according to Hoyle” are either using the term loosely as a shibboleth for orthodox behavior or displaying ignorance.

  British barrister Edmond Hoyle (1672–1769) wrote a book describing three card games—whist, piquet and quadrille—and purporting to set down official rules for playing them. He never heard of poker (an ancestor called bluff was first mentioned in a couple of game books published nearly a century later) and would likely have been appalled at some of the fatuous nonsense associated with his name nowadays. For unlike such pastimes as bridge and chess, whose by-laws have been set forth by international rule-ma
king societies with the power to certify and decertify “official” regulations and adjudicate disputes, the rules of any game of poker are just what the players agree to when they sit down at the table.

  Nonetheless, there are a few primary assumptions and conventions that form the framework of the game from coast to coast: The game is played with a deck of fifty-two cards, the deal moves around the table clockwise, and players get their cards one by one, not hand by hand.

  Five to seven players is considered optimum for getting the most out of the game, because it’s virtually impossible to play any variation of draw with more hands than that, and seven card stud would be entirely out of the question.

  Rank of hands is determined by mathematical probability: It is easier to catch two pair than three of a kind. A full house beats a flush for the same reason.

  And repeated betting out of turn will earn you a fat lip just about anywhere.

  Just common sense . . .

  Operating a poker casino, on the other hand, is a technically complicated business venture with rules and logic all its own. Laws governing such undertakings vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But the underlying facts of gaming life do not—which is why I was so surprised to find the basics being ignored at the South Bay Casino, until I found out that amateurs were running the show. Nobody was going to stomp in blowing a whistle; Gideon had seen to that when he took control of the town’s police force. But the results were inevitable all the same.

  Hanging out a sign that promised “No-Limit Action” in a place like that is like handing an atom bomb to Attila the Hun.

  Especially when you’re using shills.

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked when I’d seen enough.

  Suleiman had been staring, fascinated, at the nearest table where a bearded man I knew as Treetop Terry Loogan had just taken a pot containing several thousand dollars away from a team of house shills on a cold bluff, and Suleiman’s mind still seemed a bit detached from the real world.

  I suspect he may have been considering a radical mid-life career change.

  “From what Greg Winchell tells me,” he said when the sound of my voice finally found its way to an unoccupied nerve center, “your friends started drifting into South Bay about a week ago. Mooched around talking to people and sitting in on low-stake games for a day or so . . . and then moved in with all the money in the world.”

  I glanced in the direction of the cashiers’ cages.

  Casino operation resembles banking in that the teller doesn’t necessarily have to keep enough cash on hand to pay every single chip he may have in circulation. In most cases 30 or 40 percent is more than enough, especially in a place like South Bay City, where a lot of the chips moving out of the cage are claimed by shills who are not expected to convert them back into real money.

  But banks are vulnerable to runs.

  And so are casinos that get too greedy. No amount of exterior pressure can keep a legitimate poker operation from winding up in the black; its owners are simply renting space, equipment, and personnel to the people who actually play the games. The house bankroll is never on the line because no one at the table is playing for the house, and even if shills are being used, they are limited in the amount they can win or lose in the course of a single day. No real risk.

  Avarice, however, can turn any winning operation into a loser. Especially when paired with a generous helping of purblind ignorance.

  And Gideon’s people had a lot of both.

  “The part I don’t understand,” Suleiman said, his attention drawn again to Treetop Terry’s table, “is how you figure this is going to do Gideon any real, immediate damage.”

  The game was seven card stud, and Terry had made a point of letting the other players see that he’d taken the last pot on a bobtail straight. They were betting into him now, sure they had his game figured, ready to follow through to the final card and clean him out.

  And they might do it, too.

  But I had played against Terry more than once and would have been willing to make a fair-size side bet that the pair of tens he was showing had at least one brother in the hole—with something else waiting back there to fall on the unwary opponent like a tree.

  I turned back to face Suleiman and shook my head.

  “Can’t last much longer,” I said. “Look over my shoulder. At the cashiers’ office.”

  Only one of the barred windows was open now, despite the heavy action in progress, and all chip-sellers seemed to have vanished from the casino floor. The last time I’d been in, house rules mandating use of chips for all transactions at the tables had been posted on a king-size board mounted on the wall above the cage, but it had been taken down, with nothing but a rectangular discoloration to mark its former position.

  The lemony panic-odor of baked bread seemed to fill the room.

  “They out of money?” Suleiman inquired.

  “Yes and no,” I said. “My guess would be that there’s more than a million in cash in there right now, so in that sense they’re all right.”

  “But?”

  “But I’d also guess they put out the last of their chips quite some time ago and that those chips all went to house shills, to cover what they’d lost backing the house policy of unlimited raises on the final round of betting.”

  Suleiman digested this with solemn concentration.

  “And the shills went right on losing.”

  It was a statement, not a question, and I nodded. Always nice to have bright friends.

  “So,” I said, “the next time the shills came to the cage for a refill—catch-up money, they call it in the trade—the house had nothing to offer but cash.”

  “The cash that should have been held to redeem the chips.”

  “Right. But they couldn’t say no, because without the shills in action the games would die. And the minute that happens, all of the players not working for the house will be over at the window, wanting their money.”

  “And that, dear heart,” he said with something fierce and elemental alive suddenly in the depths of the black eyes, “will be the end of the line for Gideon Goode. Incorporated. And the Temple of the Eternal Flame! Finito, Benito. Adios, amigo!”

  I nodded again, sharing the mood.

  “Dear John. I sent your saddle home . . . ”

  But the end came sooner than expected.

  Armadillo Skinny took a break and stopped for a minute on his way back to the table.

  “Hey, there, y’Bible-thumpin’ peckerwood! Seems like some crazy kinda little ole turkey shoot y’all got started here.”

  “Nice to see you having fun.”

  He favored me with one of the slow, eye-squinting, down-homely smiles that have been known to put unwary citizens so far off guard as to bet with him on such unlikely propositions as frog jumping, cockroach racing, or the number of bearded men who will pass a given point on the street in downtown Amarillo.

  “Nex’ time I see you,” he said, “remind me to slip a rattlesnake in your pocket and then ask you for a match.”

  I smiled him right back. “Wouldn’t work,” I said. “You did that the last time—and the snake died.”

  Skinny snapped his fingers and tsk-tsked.

  “Dang if I didn’t forget!”

  “Dang if you didn’t.”

  We subsided, the social amenities attended to. and Skinny lit one of the small, violent cigars he says cause only stomach cancer—slower, and therefore a better bargain than the throat or lung form.

  “All the fellas seem to be doing pretty well . . . ”

  I allowed I’d noticed the same thing, and we spent another moment or two surveying the continuing action on the casino floor. The last of the cashiers’ windows had closed now, and even the long-legged waitresses assigned to supply the players’ beverage-and-light-snack requirements appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  “How much longer you reckon?” the Skinny One inquired, fixing his attention on a table where
the Sailor had just enticed a hopeful shill into backing his three exposed jacks (with the fourth already in the discard) for two raises that put his whole stake into the middle of the table, against the Sailor’s two low pair.

  “Well, I do declare,” Skinny said, as the Sailor turned up the spare trey that transformed his hand into a full boat, “don’t it beat all how some folks just seem to have all the luck?”

  He shook his head in mock wonderment, and I caught the near-subliminal wink as he stilted away toward his own table.

  Even Suleiman saw the joke.

  But the shills didn’t, and the one who had just handed Sailor his last few dollars seemed suddenly disoriented when he got up to make another trip to the cashier’s window and found it closed against him.

  He hammered on the bulletproof glass, damaging his knuckles but still getting no response.

  And then the shill decided to use his voice.

  “Hey, in there,” he shouted. “Hey . . . !”

  It wasn’t much of a shout. But it didn’t have to be. The atmosphere of the casino had been changing by degrees, like a teakettle gradually building pressure, and the minor disturbance was like an old-fashioned cook’s rap on the side of the pot that finally brings the water to a boil.

  Activity in the big room came to a stop as all eyes turned in the shill’s direction.

  The silence was almost total.

  And more than he could bear.

  “Closed,” he said. “Nobody . . . in there . . . ”

  He might have said more, and there might have been a general rush to verify the evidence of his eyes. But before any of that could happen there was a new diversion—this time from the corridor behind us.

  “Blessed be!” a familiar voice barked with the authority of a marine drill instructor.

  “Blessed be!” another voice echoed, higher pitched but equally commanding.

  Suleiman’s reaction was a little ahead of mine; I think he recognized the voices first. But we turned almost simultaneously—and what we saw brought us both to the kind of halt that admits no possibility of further movement.