by Colin Dexter
By half-past ten Virgil K. Perkins Jnr. had lost one thousand dollars, and he sat there crumpled up inside his chair. It wasn’t as if he was short of friends, for the large audience had been behind him all along, just willing the old fellow to win. And it wasn’t as if anyone could blame our nimble-fingered Lukey anymore, for it was Virgil himself who had long since been dealing out his own disasters.
Not any longer, though. He pushed the deck slowly across the table and stood up. “I’m sorry, old girl,” he says to Minny, and his voice is all choked up. “It was your money as much as mine …”
But Luke was leaning across and he put his mighty palm on the old boy’s skinny wrist. And he speaks quietly. “Look, pop! You’ve just lost yourself a thousand bucks, right? So I want you to listen to me carefully because I’m gonna tell you how we can put all that to rights again. Now, we’ll just have one more hand—”
“NO!” (The little lady’s voice was loud and shrill this time.) “He won’t! He won’t lay down another dollar, d’you hear me? He’s just—he’s just a poor old fool, can’t you see that? He’s just a gullible, poor old—” But the rest of her words were strangled in her throat, and Virgil sat down again and put his arm round her shoulder as she began to weep silently.
“Don’t you want to get all your money back?” Luke’s voice is quiet again, but everyone can hear his words.
“Don’t listen to him!” shouts one.
“Call it a day, sir!” shouts another.
Says Luke, turning to all of them: “Old pop, here, he’s got one helluva sight more spunk in him than the rest o’ you put together! And, what’s more, not a single man jack o’ you knows the proposition I’m proposin’. Well?” (Luke looks around real bold.) “Well? Do you?”
It was all silence again now, as Luke looks across to Virgil and formulates his offer. “Look, pop. I’ve been mighty lucky tonight, as I think you might agree. So, I’m going to give you the sort o’ chance you’ll never have again. And this is what we’ll do. We’ll have just one last hand and we’ll take two points off my score. Got that? I pick up eighteen—we call it sixteen. And just the same whatever score it is. What do you say, pop?”
But old Virgil—he shakes his head. “You’re a good sport, Luke, but—”
“Let’s make it three off then,” says Luke earnestly. “I pick up twenty—we call it seventeen. OK? Look, pop!” (He leans across and grips the wrist again.) “Nobody’s ever gonna make you any better offer than that. Nobody. You know something? It’s virtually certain you’re gonna get all that lovely money right back into that wallet o’ yours, now, isn’t it?”
It was tempting. Ye gods, it was tempting! And it was soon clear that the audience was thinking it was pretty tempting, too, with a good many of them revising their former estimate of things.
“What d’you say?” asks Luke.
“No,” says Virgil. “It’s not just me—it’s Minny here. I’ve made enough of a fool of myself for one night, haven’t I, old girl?”
Then Minny looked at him, straight on, like. A surprising change had come over her tear-stained face, and her blue eyes blazed with a sudden surge of almost joyous challenge. “You take him on, Virgil!” she says, with a quiet, proud authority.
But Virgil still sat there dejected and indecisive. His hands ran across that shock of wavy white hair, and for a minute or two he pondered to himself. Then he decided. He took most of the remaining notes from his wallet, and counted them with lingering affection before stacking them neatly in the centre of the table. “Do you wanna count ’em, Luke?” he says. And it was as if the tide had suddenly turned; as if the old man sensed the smell of victory in his nostrils.
For a few seconds now it seemed to be Luke who was nervy and hesitant, the brashness momentarily draining from him. But the offer had been taken up, and the fifty or sixty on-lookers were in no mood to let him forget it. He slowly counted out his own bills, and placed them on top of Virgil’s.
Two thousand dollars—on one hand.
Luke has already picked up the deck, and now he’s shuffling the spots with his usual, casual expertise.
“Why are you dealin’?”
Luke looks up, and stares me hard in the eye. “Was that you just spoke, mister?”
I nod. “Yep. It was me. And I wanna know why it is you think you got some goddam right to deal them cards—because you don’t deal ’em straight, brother. You flick ’em off the top and you flick ’em off the bottom and for all I know you flick ’em—”
“I’ll see you outside, mister, as soon as—”
“You’ll do no such thing,” I replies quietly. “I just ain’t goin’ to be outside no more tonight again—least of all for you, brother.”
He looked mighty dangerous then—but I just didn’t care. The skin along his knuckles was growing white as he slowly got to his feet and moved his chair backwards. And then, just as slowly, he sat himself down again—and he surprises everybody. He pushes the deck over the table and he says: “He’s right, pop. You deal!”
Somehow old pop’s shaking hands managed to shuffle the cards into some sort of shape; and when a couple of cards fall to the floor, it’s me who bends down and hands them back to him.
“Cut,” says pop.
So Luke cuts—about halfway down the deck (though knowing Lukey I should think it was exactly halfway down). Miraculously, it seems, old Virgil’s hands had gotten themselves rid of any shakes, and he deals the cards out firm and fine: one for Luke, one for himself; another for Luke, and another for himself. For a few moments each man left them lying there on the top of the table. Then Luke picks up his own—first the one, and then the other.
“Stick!” he says, and his voice is a bit hoarse.
Every eye in the room was now on Virgil’s as he turned over his first card—a seven; then the second card—a ten. Seventeen! And all you’ve got to do, my friends, is to add on three—and that’s a handsome little twenty, and the whole room was mumbling and murmuring in approval.
Every eye now switches to Luke, and in the sudden tense silence the cards are slowly turned: first a king, and then—ye gods!—an ace! And as Lukey smiles down at that beautiful twenty-oner the audience groaned like they always do when its favourite show-jumper knocks the top off the last fence.
And where, my friends, do we go from there? Well, I’ll tell you. It was Lucy who started it all immediately Luke had left. She pushed her way through the on-lookers and plunged her hand deep down between those glorious breasts of hers to clutch her evening’s tips.
“Mr. Perkins, isn’t it? I know it isn’t all that much; but—but if it’ll help, please take it.” About seven or eight dollars, it was, no more—but, believe me, it bore its fruit two-hundred-fold. It was me who was next. I’d taken about thirty-five dollars on the coach and (once more hitching the old briefcase higher under my arm) I fished it all out of my back pocket and placed it a-top of Lucy’s crumpled offerings.
“Mr. Perkins,” I said sombrely. “You should’ve been on my coach, old friend.” That’s all I said.
As for Virgil, he said nothing. He just sat back all crumpled up like before, with Minny sobbing silently beside him. I reckon he looked as if he couldn’t trust himself to say a single word. But it didn’t matter. All the audience was sad and sullenly sympathetic—and, as I said, they’d had their fill of Louis’s vintage wines. And I’ve got to hand it to them. Twenty dollars; another twenty dollars; a fifty; a few tens; another twenty; another fifty—I watched them all as these clean-living, God-fearing folk forked something from their careful savings. And I reckon there wasn’t a single man-jack of them who didn’t make his mark upon that ever-mounting pile. But still Virgil said nothing. When finally he stumbled his way to the exit, holding Minny in one hand and a very fat pile of other people’s dollars in the other, he turned round as if he was going to say something to all his very good friends. But still the words wouldn’t come, it seemed; and he turned once more and left the cocktail bar.
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nbsp; * * *
I woke late the next morning, and only then because Luke was leaning over me, gently shaking me by the shoulder.
“Louis says he wants to see you at half-past ten.”
I lifted my left arm and focused on the wrist-watch: already five to ten.
“You all right, Danny?” Luke was standing by the door now (he must have had a key for that!) and for some reason he didn’t look mightily happy.
“Sure, sure!”
“Half-past, then,” repeated Luke, and closed the door behind him.
I still felt very tired, and I was conscious that the back of my head was aching—and that’s unusual for me. Nothing to drink the night before—well, only the odd orange juice that Lucy had … orange juice …? I fell to wondering slightly, and turned to look at the other side of the bed, where the sheet was neatly turned down in a white hypotenuse. Lucy had gone—doubtless gone early; but then Lucy was always sensible and careful about such things …
I saw my face frowning as I stood in front of the shaving-mirror; and I was still frowning when I took the suit off the hanger in the wardrobe and noticed that the briefcase was gone. But I’d have been frowning even more if the briefcase hadn’t gone; and as I dressed, my head was clearing nicely. I picked up the two thick sealed envelopes that had nestled all night under my pillow, put them, one each, into the pockets of my overcoat, and felt happy enough when I knocked on the door of Louis’s private suite and walked straight in. It was ten thirty-two.
There were the usual six chairs round the oblong table, and four of them were taken already: there was Luke, and there was Barty; then there was Minny; and at the head of the table, Louis himself—a Louis still, doubtless, no more than four-ten, four-eleven in his built-up shoes, but minus that garishly striped blazer now; minus, too, that shock of silvery hair which the previous evening had covered that large, bald dome of his.
“You’re late,” he says, but not unpleasantly. “Sit down, Danny.” So I sat down, feeling like a little boy in the first grade. (But I usually feel like that with Louis.)
“You seen Lucy?” asks Minny, as Barty pours me a drop of Irish.
“Lucy? No—have you tried her room?”
But no one seemed much willing to answer that one, and we waited for a few minutes in silence before Louis spoke again.
“Danny,” he says, “you’ll remember that when we brought you into our latest li’l operation a few months back I figured we’d go for about a quarter of a million before we launched out on a new one?”
I nodded.
“Well, we’re near enough there now as makes no odds—a fact perhaps you may yourself be not completely unaware of? After all, Danny, it was one o’ your jobs to take my li’l Lucy down to the bank on Mondays, now wasn’t it? And I reckon you’ve got a pretty clear idea of how things are.”
I nodded again, and kept on looking him straight in the eyes.
“Well, it was never no secret from any of us—was it?—that I’d be transferrin’ this li’l investment o’ mine over to Luke and Bartholomew here as soon as they—well, as soon as they showed me they was worthy.”
I was nodding slowly all the time now; but he’d left something out. “Lucy was goin’ to be in it, too,” I said.
“You’re very fond of my Lucy, aren’t you?” says Minny quietly.
“Yep. I’m very fond of her, Minny.” And that was the truth.
“It’s not bin difficult for any of us to see that, old girl, now has it?” Louis turned to Minny and patted her affectionately on the arm. Then he focuses on me again. “You needn’t have no worries about my li’l daughter, Danny. No worries at all! Did it never occur to you to wonder just why I christened this latest li’l investment o’ mine as the ‘Lulu-Bar Motel’?”
For a few seconds I must have looked a little puzzled, but my head was clearing nicely with the whisky, and I suddenly saw what he meant. Yes! What a deep old devil our Louis was! The Lu-cy Lu-ke, Bar-tholomew Motel …
But Louis was still speaking: “I only asked you down this mornin’, Danny, because I was hopin’ to wind it all up here and now—and to let you know how much I’ve bin aware o’ your own li’l contribution. But—well, it’s all tied up in a way with Lucy, isn’t it? And I reckon” (he looked at Luke and Bart) “I reckon we’d better call another li’l meeting tonight? About eight? All right?”
It seemed all right to all of us, and I got up to go.
“You off to town, Danny?” asks Louis, eyeing the overcoat.
“Yep.” That’s all I said. Then I left them there and caught the bus to the station.
I’d always noticed it before: whenever I’d felt a bit guilty about anything it was as if I sensed that other people somehow seemed to know. But that’s behind us now. And, anyway, it had been Lucy’s idea originally—not mine. She’d needed me, of course, for devising the cheque and forging Louis’ signature—for though I’m about as ham-fisted with a deck of cards as an arthritic octopus, I got my own particular specialism. Yes, sir! And Lucy trusted me, too, because I’d been carrying all that lovely money—240,000 dollars of it!—all neatly stacked in five-hundred bills, all neatly enveloped and neatly sealed—why, I’d been carrying it all around with me in the old briefcase for two whole days! And Lucy—Lucy, my love!—we shall soon be meeting at the ticket barrier on number one platform—and then be drifting off together quietly in the twilight …
At a quarter to twelve I was there—standing in my overcoat and waiting happily. (Lucy had never been early in her life.) I lit another cigarette; then another. By twelve forty-five I was beginning to worry a little; by one forty-five I was beginning to worry a lot; and by two forty-five I was beginning to guess at the truth. Yet still I waited—waited and waited and waited. And, in a sense, I suppose, I’ve been waiting for Lucy ever since …
It was when the big hand on the station clock came round to four that I finally called it a day and walked over to look at the Departure Board. I found a train that was due for New York in forty-five minutes, and I thought that that had better be that. I walked into the buffet and sat down with a coffee. So? So, here was yet another of life’s illusions lying shattered in the dust, and yet … Poor, poor, lovely Lucy! I nearly allowed myself a saddened little smile as I thought of her opening up those two big envelopes in the briefcase—and finding there those 480 pieces of crisp, new paper, each exactly the size of a 500-dollar bill. She must have thought I was pretty—well, pretty gullible, I suppose, when we’d both agreed that she should take the briefcase …
A single to New York would cost about fifty or sixty dollars, I reckoned; and as I joined what seemed to be the shorter queue at the ticket office I took the bulky envelope from the right-hand pocket of the overcoat, opened it—and stood there stunned and gorgonized. Inside were about 240 pieces of crisp, new paper, each exactly the size of a 500-dollar bill; and my hands were trembling as I stood away from the queue and opened the other envelope. Exactly the same. Well, no—not exactly the same. On the top piece of blank paper there were three sentences of writing in Louis’s unmistakably minuscule hand:
I did my best to tell you Danny boy but you never did really understand that filosofy of mine now did you? It’s just what I kept on telling you all along. People …
By now, though, I reckon you’ll know those last few words that Louis wrote.
I walked back across to the buffet and ordered another coffee, counting up what I had in my pockets: just ten dollars and forty cents; and I fell to wondering where it was I went from here. Perhaps … perhaps there were one or two things in my favour. At least I could spell “philosophy”; and then there was always the pretty big certainty (just as Louis said so often) that somewhere soon I’d find a few nice, kindly, gullible folk.
But as I glance around at the faces of my fellow men and women in the station buffet now, they all look very mean, and very hard.
NEIGHBOURHOOD
WATCH
Sed guis custodiet ipsos custodes? (But what about
the vigilantes? Who’s going to watch after them?)
(Juvenal, Satires)
“We must never make the criminal the hero, though!” proclaimed Marcus Price, Fellow of All Souls, as he drained his beer and put down his glass with the gesture of a man announcing to the company that he’d bought the previous round himself and whose turn, pray, was it now.
“What about old Raffles, though? Gentleman-burglar and all that. Remember him?”
The speaker was another Oxford don, Denis Stockman, an authority (the authority) on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth century.
“Stole the Crown Jewels or something,” Stockman continued, “then took ’em back when he found out what they were. No chivalry like that these days, eh, Morse?”
“Oh no,” mumbled Morse.
Oh dear! But Morse had only himself to blame. He’d meant to nip into the King’s Arms just briefly that Wednesday lunchtime; and for a start things had looked promising. The one other customer was a very attractive thirty-odd-year-old brunette with sludgy green eyes. She had smiled momentarily as he’d sat down a few feet from her—before turning her attention back to The Times crossword puzzle, in which even as he took his first draught she wrote another word, with her left hand, the middle fingernail marked with a broad, white lateral line, as if she might have trapped it in a door. Yes, only himself to blame …
Almost as soon as they’d spotted him there they’d pounced. How long is it? Mind if we join you? What are you drinking? Morse should, of course, have pleaded urgency in some criminal pursuit. But he didn’t. The prospect of a further pint gladdened his heart, and he heard himself saying, “Best Bitter.”