“That’s right,” I said. I reached out a hand to touch her cheek, and it was warm and soft and it didn’t move away, but the gesture didn’t touch anything deeper than skin, either, so I had to put the whole thing into words. For both of us, maybe.
“It just wasn’t in them,” I said. “They had tried to swindle Prescott out of his land, and when that didn’t work they tried to break him in business. Put him in a more receptive mood. And when that didn’t work either—and we know now that it sure wasn’t going to—I don’t doubt for a moment that they would have thought up something even meaner, because that’s how things were with them, whether we can prove it or not. No doubt about it. But Dana, you have known those two men, or known about them, for most of your life. So ask yourself, could either of them do murder?”
“Well, during the war…”
“A lot of things happen during a war,” I said, more sharply than I had intended. “But try this: Make a picture in your mind of J. J. Barlow or Edward Watrous actually, personally, killing Pres Prescott.”
She gave it her best shot. I could see it going on inside her, and I knew when she came to the part where Barlow, in his wheelchair, and Watrous, with his immense belly, tried to physically subdue the Steelers’ former wide receiver. Her mouth twisted with the effort of suppressing a laugh, and after a moment it broke through anyway.
“Oh, all right,” she said. “Have it your way—they couldn’t have done him. But Vollie…”
I shook my head emphatically.
“Deputy Vollie Manion is a certifiable crazy from dingoville,” I said, “and there is murder in him, and if anyone in this town was capable of killing Pres Prescott—could handle the physical end as well as the emotional side of the job—it would well and truly be him. But the question that neither Frank Ybarra nor I can answer is why.”
Her response was instant: “Money.”
I just looked at her.
“Well, why not?”
“Can you,” I said when I thought she was ready to listen, “imagine either Barlow or Watrous paying that hulking menace to kill someone?”
“Maybe…”
I shook my head. “No way,” I said. “No way on this earth or the next. I have played cards with the two of them, and I even had a chance for a little conversation with Barlow later, and while he didn’t strike me as competition for Albert Einstein, he’s a long way from being Mortimer Snerd, and I’d guess Watrous at about the same mental capacity. So even if one or both of them really did make up their minds to have Prescott killed, can you see them putting themselves in the hands—in the power, forever and ever—of Mr. Deputy Vollie Manion? Can you really?”
The shine of certainty that had been on her face flickered briefly, and was gone. But she wasn’t quite ready to concede anything.
“Well, who the hell knows?” she said. “A weirdo like Vollie, maybe he just did it because he thought it would please someone. I mean, he’s still the little boy who liked to step on baby mice…”
I waited for her to think it through.
“Oh, all right, then,” she said finally. “We don’t know enough yet. But we can’t just let it go.”
“Of course not,” I said. “But first things first: When I said someone was going to pay for what happened to Prescott, I meant financially as well as all the other ways. And the first installment on the financial end comes, I think, tonight.”
She took a deep breath, putting her feelings about Vollie Manion aside for the moment and relaxing against the car door. You could see her mind at work around the edges of the proposition—pulling a thread here and worrying a knot there—while her hands lived a life of their own, dragging a single Marlboro from her purse and setting fire to the end of it without conscious volition.
“The poker game,” she said.
I nodded. “The poker game.”
More thought, and a deep lungful of smoke that finally brought full awareness of what she was doing. The gray pungency whooshed out of her in a pattern that was somewhat shaped by a really imaginative curse, and she killed the glowing tip of the cigarette in the car’s ashtray.
But she had done her thinking and made up her mind, and side issues were not about to distract her.
“Okay,” she said. “The money’s the first step. But just don’t let’s forget there is going to be a second one…”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that.
Back at the motel, I pulled the little skate into my own parking stall, unlocked the door to the room, and stood aside for her to go through it ahead of me. But she hung back.
Disappointment was more poignant than I would have expected.
This was really one hell of a woman.
“You mean it’s all over so soon?” I said, trying to keep it light. “Usually they stay right up until I try to borrow money.”
She stuck out her tongue.
“Borrow all you can find,” she said, “and sing Irish ballads while you’re doing it. But save it. I’ve got some unfinished business to take care of. In my own room.”
“If it’s another boyfriend waiting over there,” I said, “I’ll pull out his mustache, hair by hair.”
“He has a beard.”
“It’ll go, too!”
“And three big brothers…”
“They die!”
“And three big sisters.”
“We…negotiate.”
That finally got a laugh. “You would, too, you bastard. No, it’s just a letter I need to write. I’ll see you later.”
I groaned. “I’ll be playing poker later.”
“Then I’ll be here when the game is over.”
And with a quick peck on the lips she was gone, tocking away down the sidewalk on three-inch heels and giving me the benefit of a deliberately exaggerated hip motion with each step.
I went into the room and locked the door and took a shower, turning the tap gradually to full cold.
They say it helps. Sometimes.
The phone rang just as I was toweling, and I picked it up quickly, thinking it might be Dana. But it was someone named George Goodhue, from Amarillo, and I had to think for a moment before I realized that this would be Dee Tee’s bank messenger.
I gave him the room number and was careful to wait beside the door to get him inside as quickly as possible.
But he was nonchalant.
An attaché case with double combination locks was in his right hand, and the left was in the pocket of his suit coat, and it stayed there even after the case was open on the bed and I signed a slip of paper acknowledging its receipt.
You don’t win at poker by missing details, so I asked him about it.
“Just a precaution,” he said easily. “You’re not dressed quite as Mr. Price said you would be.”
I glanced down and saw what he meant.
Dee Tee would have described a skinny gent in preacher black. I was skinny enough, but was wearing only the trousers I had pulled on in haste after the shower.
“Mr. Price said there was one sure way for you to identify yourself,” the messenger went on. “He said I wouldn’t have to tell you what it was.”
I laughed. “In a changing world,” I said, “it is nice to know that some things never change and that one of them is Dee Tee Price.”
The messenger smiled politely, but didn’t make any other moves—and kept his left hand where it was—until I had reached up and unscrewed the prosthetic eyeball from its socket and held it in my hand.
Then he relaxed.
“Just for the sake of conversation,” I said, turning away to put the glass eye back where it belonged, “what would have happened if I hadn’t been able to do that?”
“My orders were to open fire at once and keep it up until you stopped moving.”
I looked at him in wonder, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. He would have done it.
“When you are carrying a million dollars in cash,” he said, “you absolutely do not take chances.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
The ending of our verse from Isaiah, with its warning to those who would leave their fellow man no place, spells out the fate of those who will not heed: “…That they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.”
This is the living death prepared for those who, for whatever reason, would deny space upon the earth to others—that they stand, at last, alone…
TWENTY-NINE
Few people ever hear—and even fewer understand—the special language that is the inner fabric of high-stakes poker.
It is a colloquy in silence.
But J. J. Barlow and I held a five-hour, six-million-dollar conversation in that tongue at the Farewell Country Club that night. We were the only ones who heard the words. We were the only speakers. And when it was done, we alone knew it for a dialogue of rare and classical merit…
I had come to the club at the appointed time, with the double-locked attaché case in one hand and the legally executed deed to Prescott Helicopters, Inc., in my breast pocket. I was calm and rested, ready to play as well as I could for as long as it took.
But Barlow was late.
Pemberton had arrived on time. Of course. He entered the clubhouse on the stroke of eight, looked around for the others, nodded in my direction, and sat down to stare silently into space while he waited.
Dr. Woodbury came through the door a few minutes after Pemberton, accompanied by a younger man whom he introduced as a visiting colleague, a surgeon from Amarillo with a passion for high-stakes poker.
We recognized each other at once.
I had played against him and beaten him regularly in Las Vegas, Reno, and Tahoe. So had most professionals. He was known in poker circles as one of the most dedicated of the “Red Board” players—losers who enjoy public bleeding over their losses. I wondered if his Amarillo friends knew about this little quirk of character, and wasn’t especially astonished when he pretended that we were meeting for the first time. It was sad and it was silly, and I wondered whether he might find some good reason to disappear before the game began. But he surprised me and stayed to play.
Tiny Watrous arrived a few minutes behind the doctor, sidling through the wide doorway with an effusion of good cheer and heading directly for the bar, followed by the car dealer who had been at the poker table with us earlier in the week.
That left only one seat empty.
The usual old-friends banter of a fading small-town day washed around me as I sat at a table in a corner of the lounge, nursing a glass of iced mineral water and keeping the toe of my shoe in close contact with the satchel of cash.
It was exactly $100,000 short of containing an even million now.
I had counted out that amount, in centuries, and folded it carefully into an envelope, which I slipped into the breast pocket opposite the one where I was carrying the Prescott deed. The two packets made a comfortable but just visible bulge in the coat. That was fine with me. I wanted both to be noted by the man I had come to challenge.
But after I’d waited more than half an hour, he still hadn’t arrived, and the car dealer suggested we start without him.
I felt a little pang of disappointment. I had been primed for victory or defeat…but not for armistice. Still, Tiny Watrous would be in the game, and I consoled myself that I might very well strop my razor on his ample hide while waiting for the main action to begin.
We sat down and exchanged some of our dollars for chips.
A few glances were exchanged, and one or two eyebrows twitched, but there were no objections when I counted the full $100,000 onto the table and set up a neat row of $500 gray chips beside the reds, whites, and blues on the table before me. Rules of the table-stakes game prevent a player from buying the pot simply by having more money to risk than another player. He can raise only to the limit that an opponent is able to match, using the money or chips he has when the hand begins. If you need more, go get it after the hand ends and before the next begins.
Nonetheless, I could feel the covert measurings as we cut for deal.
Watrous won. He riffled, scattered, cut, riffled again, shuffled twice, handed the deck to me to cut, and announced that the game tonight would be seven-card stud—high only—if that was agreeable to all. It was, and we had already tossed in the ante for our first cards when J. J. Barlow arrived in a confusion of apologies and explanations.
A late customer and some late news.
And he had stopped to get some things out of his own safe-deposit box.
He turned a bland but cool-eyed stare on me. Would we give him time to buy a few chips—he glanced, not casually, at my line of grays—and get into this hand?
Silence and an offhand laugh from Tiny Watrous gave consent. The Red Board loser from Amarillo went looking for his third drink of the evening while Barlow counted out some of the things he’d found in his safe: The line of gray chips he bought just matched my own. And there was a bulge in the breast pocket of his coat that seemed familiar, too.
It’s nice when everyone knows the same rules.
I nodded a greeting as he neatened up his stake, and our conversation began.
But at first we didn’t really say much. Others at the table had come to play poker, too. We were all in the same game, and most of the preliminary hands were simply sociable, friendly moves intended to keep the party polite and interesting.
Barlow took about $700 from the Amarillo loser, backing an innocuous low pair against the Texan’s possible straight and picking up another unexciting low card on the next round. He watched while the visiting fireman gradually hanged himself waiting for an inside jack that he needed to fill his hand.
It never came, of course, and they went into the final betting round with the loser trying to bluff and then throwing in his cards with a stagey groan when the banker finally showed three fives and two sixes against what everyone at the table already knew was a bobtail straight.
Barlow raked in the pot without comment. The lighting of the room kept some important parts of his face in shadow, but I thought I detected a hint of weariness around his mouth and in his motions.
Sounds from the loser were far easier to interpret. The anguish was horrendous; he called for still another bourbon and branch water, and we knew it would end shortly—the drinks and the financial drain would finally claim their due—but you could already see jaws clenching here and there around the table. A little stylized lamentation goes a long way. And the irritation was directed as much at Dr. Woodbury for having invited such a clown into the game as the offender himself.
I paid no attention and neither did Barlow. We had other things on our minds, and the very next hand gave us a chance to start saying a few of them in a way that was audible only between the two of us.
The deal had come to Barlow, and I stayed in the pot past the first round, pushing in $1,000 to back a concealed king-queen. He looked at the bet—sizable, perhaps, but not too unusual for this game—and met it, driving everyone else out of the pot and leaving us head to head.
My first open card was another queen; his was the ace of hearts.
I drummed my fingers for a moment, making sure I had his full attention, and then pushed $10,000 into the center of the table, a move that could have been roughly translated: I had a long nap this afternoon and I’m feeling lucky tonight. How about you?
Barlow looked at the money, looked at me, counted out twenty of the gray checks in a double stack of ten, played with them for a while, stroking and recounting, and then threw in his cards instead of meeting the bet: Haven’t been sleeping too well of late myself, and I feel like an amputated leg.
I raked the pot over to my side of the table and kept my eyes on it, stacking and arranging the various denominations, while putting out feelers to test the emotional responses around me. With two exceptions, they returned only the echoes of astonished bemusement.
Something was going on…but what?
Even the compulsive loser from Amarillo found himself distracted, at least momentarily, from
his own woes.
The exceptions were Barlow and Watrous, and I took an extra moment or two for a deeper probe into the fat man’s unguarded consciousness.
But my first perception had been true.
His wa registered only the pure, timorous chill of helpless fear.
On another day, in another world, I might have pitied him, and in another life I might have felt compelled to try to heal the hurts and the heartsickness that had left him in such a condition. But this was not that day and not that world and not that life, and my only reaction in the here and now was to make a mental note to bet him into the wall the next time I caught him trying to bluff.
The deal passed to Pemberton, and my two down-cards were nothing, and I dropped out to watch Watrous and Woodbury haggle over a $400 pot that the doctor finally won on a sadly underplayed trio of tens.
Several more hands—two complete rounds of the table—passed before Barlow and I had another chance for serious discussion, and it came with me in the forced-bet trapping position just to the left of the dealer. This time I was holding jack-ten concealed with a nine of clubs showing and picked up another club, the six, on the next round, and Barlow decided it was time to take some of my money.
He had the king-seven of hearts showing and he offered $300 on the proposition that they were the visible evidence of a flush: Guts, Preacher?
I thought it over and tossed my garbage into the discard: All the guts I need, friend. But very, very little stupidity.
But it was catnip for the Amarillo loser. He met Barlow’s $300, stayed to the final round, and finally pushed in his entire bankroll behind what absolutely had to be two pair—queens and jacks—with an ace kicker.
Barlow’s inner sigh was almost audible as he uncovered the other two kowboys that had been his original hole cards, and cupped his hands possessively around the pot.
The visiting loser sat for a moment in silence and then began to swear, noisily but not expertly.
Woodbury put up with it, sharing our mutual disgust, for about sixty seconds and then rose abruptly to his feet. “Speak to you for a minute?” he said in an unmistakable tone of command. The loser followed him into an adjoining room trailing complaints that continued for a moment or two after he passed through the door and then stopped with the suddenness of a lightning bolt.
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