Jackpot (Nameless Dectective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Why?” DeFalco asked. “Who’s Burnett?”

  “Nobody you’d know.”

  “If what you’re working on has news value, I want first crack at it. Guaranteed.”

  “You’ll get it. Guaranteed.”

  “Give me a day or two,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. What can you tell me about the Megabucks progressive slots in Nevada?”

  “Multicasino computer network, operated by an outfit called International Game Technology. More than fifty casinos in fifteen cities hooked into it.”

  “Legitimate, I suppose?”

  “Oh, yeah. Strictly.”

  “Big payoffs?”

  “Potentially huge. Depends on how many silver dollars or tokens you feed in before you hit the jackpot. Some guy lined up four sevens at the Cal-Neva in Reno a couple of years ago and took down six point nine million. Biggest jackpot in gaming history.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any way for an individual to rig one of those slots?”

  “Christ, no. Some hacker might be able to devise a jackpot program, but he’d have to go through too many safeguards to get it into the system. In the old days, when you had the reel slots, there were plenty of ways to gaffe a machine. Hell, some manufacturers did it themselves, on order from their customers to keep payoffs down. That’s where the term ‘one-arm bandit’ comes from.”

  “Uh-huh.” So much for off-the-wall theory no. 2.

  “First slot machine was invented right here in San Francisco,” DeFalco said, “just over a hundred years ago. Bet you didn’t know that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “In 1887. Guy named Charley Fey, had a machine shop on Howard Street. Called his first slot the Liberty Bell. It had three reels—horseshoes, spades, diamonds, hearts, and bells. Took a nickel, paid off up to twenty nickels if you lined up three bells. He rented them out to a bunch of saloons on Market, the Embarcadero, and the Barbary Coast. Fey had a lock on the slot machine business for twenty years, until a Chicago manufacturer, Herbert Mills, invented the first iron-cased slot—”

  “Joe, you’re wasting all of that on me. You know so much about gambling, why don’t you write a book?”

  “I am writing one,” he said. “Comprehensive history of gambling in the U.S. I’ll have it done this year.”

  “Good for you. Send me a copy when it’s published.”

  “Like hell I will. You cheap bastard, you can go out and buy a copy just like all my other friends.”

  After we’d rung off, I tucked the contract into an envelope and locked up the office. Jerry Polhemus was the person I wanted to talk to now. He was the vault: he had at least some of the answers hidden away inside himself. Find a way to unlock him and I’d have them too. But when I got to his building on Ninth Avenue, he wasn’t home. Or if he was, he was not answering his bell.

  Allyn Burnett lived in Glen Park, not far from Diamond Heights; I made her apartment building my last stop on the way to Kerry’s. She was still home, and she signed the contract and gave me a check to cover the first two days of my employment. But she didn’t have any answers to the questions I asked her. Her brother had never mentioned the names Manny or Arthur Welker, or Ekhern Manufacturing. No, as far as she knew he had never gambled exclusively at the Coliseum Club in Reno or the Nevornia in Stateline; he’d said something to her once about liking to club-hop because he felt it changed his luck. And she was amazed when I told her that he’d evidently taken his jackpot winnings in cash; she had “absolutely no clue” why he would have done such a thing.

  Dead end for Saturday.

  Tomorrow I would try to connect with Jerry Polhemus again —and see if I could crack him wide open.

  Chapter 8

  ON SUNDAY MORNINGS I like to stay in bed late. Read the paper with my coffee, the only day I bother with it; one day out of seven is all the current events I can stand. Read a book or a pulp magazine, watch an old movie on TV or on tape. It’s especially nice if Kerry is there, too, because Sunday morning is a good time for making love or just sharing space. And it’s best of all when we’re in her bed because it and the room always smell clean and fresh, scented with her perfume. My bed has a vague musty smell, even with clean sheets, that I have never been able to identify. The effluvium of fifty-seven years of hard living, maybe.

  This should have been a fine Sunday morning, because it started off in Kerry’s bed. But it didn’t turn out that way. At nine-thirty she got a call from Jim Carpenter, one of her bosses, who wanted her to come down to the agency for some kind of emergency meeting on one of her accounts. Even when you’re a senior copywriter, you don’t say no to the boss; so she went. There had been a time when I was jealous of Jim Carpenter, because he was handsome and suave and well-mannered and an impeccable dresser—all the things I’m not—and because I knew he had a letch for Kerry and had made more than one sophisticated pass at her. I wasn’t jealous anymore, though. If she had wanted Jim Carpenter, she could have had him at any time during the three months I was chained to that cabin wall—for comfort and strength, if for no other reason. But she hadn’t wanted him or any other man; she had remained faithful to me. I’m damned if I know what a woman like her sees in a man like me, but I am eternally grateful for her love. Now more than ever.

  After she left, I tried to finish reading the paper. Then I tried watching a creaky Bowery Boys comedy on TV: silly stuff at the best of times, but I like the Bowery Boys and Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers and all the other old comedy teams because their humor reflects a simpler, more innocent time. Slapstick antics had no appeal for me this morning, however. Nothing did, with Kerry gone and things on my mind.

  At ten-thirty I abandoned the bed for a shower. At eleven I left the apartment with half a cantaloupe and a glass of orange juice nestling in my stomach. And at eleven-twenty I parked my car just up the street from Jerry Polhemus’s apartment building on Ninth Avenue.

  There was a two-car garage under the building, right of usage probably going to the tenants who had been there the longest. One of the doors was up and parked in front of the opening, trunk lid raised, was a dark-red Mercury Cougar of recent vintage. The license plate read JERSCAT, which I translated to mean “Jerry’s Cat.” Polhemus was nowhere to be seen, nor was anybody else who might be a resident of the building.

  I got out into an icy wind that smelled of fog and salt-damp. The fog had rolled in thickly this morning, was blowing overhead in scudding tatters; the day felt like one in the middle of January. Hunched inside my overcoat, I wandered around to the rear of the Cougar.

  An old leather suitcase was wedged inside the trunk, opposite the spare tire. I looked at it for a couple of seconds and then walked inside the garage by two paces. No other car occupied it at the moment. At the far right, beyond a cluttered storage area, a passageway led to the rear of the building. From back that way, I heard the sound of footsteps on wood—somebody descending a flight of stairs. Utility stairs, probably, that would lead up through some kind of airshaft and provide a second means of access to all three flats.

  The footsteps were Jerry Polhemus’s. After a few seconds he came hurrying out of the passageway, dressed in Levi jeans and an air force bomber jacket, lugging a small duffel bag and a suitcase that matched the one in the Cougar’s trunk. He stopped short when he saw me standing there and let the suitcase down hard, as if it might have slipped out of his grasp. Even in the half-light inside the garage, I could see the look of sudden fear that pinched his features.

  He said, with the shrill edge to his voice, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “That’s not a very friendly greeting, Jerry.”

  He had nothing to say to that. I waited a couple of seconds for him to pick up the suitcase or to come my way without it, but he didn’t do either one. So I moved ahead to where he was.

  “Going on a trip?” I asked him.

  “That’s my business, not yours.”

  “Depends
on why you’re going. Wouldn’t have anything to do with me, would it?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Come on, I’m the one who reopened the can of worms.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “David Burnett’s suicide.”

  “I told you, man, I don’t know anything about that—”

  “Sure you do, Jerry. You know a lot of things you don’t seem to want to talk about. The ten thousand dollars Dave gave you from his jackpot winnings, for instance. How come you didn’t mention that yesterday?”

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  “Then there’s the fact he took his winnings in cash. How come he did that, Jerry?”

  He did some rabbit-gnawing at his lower lip. Didn’t say anything.

  “And then there’s the Mob,” I said. “Dave was mixed up with those people and I think maybe you are too.”

  That one rocked him pretty good. His head jerked, his eyes bulged; fear-sweat put a sheen on his cheeks. In convulsive movements he leaned down to take hold of the suitcase, then straightened again.

  “Get out of my way,” he said.

  “Not until you give me some straight answers.”

  “Get out of my way!”

  I’d panicked him more than I intended. When I didn’t move he swung the duffel bag at my head—swung it hard enough and with such suddenness that it caught me flat-footed and staggered me sideways. He hit me again, the son of a bitch, on the side of the head with greater force, and that blow sent me reeling into the storage area shelves. I went down hard, half cockeyed with pain, boxes and other objects tumbling around me. I got my arms up just in time to prevent a bicycle wheel from opening up my scalp, maybe concussing me; a sharp edge ripped through three layers of clothing and gashed my forearm.

  By the time I pulled my legs under me and blinked my eyes back into focus, Polhemus had thrown the suitcase and duffel bag into the Cougar’s trunk and was rushing for the driver’s door. There was a rage in me that bordered on bloodlust; in that moment I wanted to hurt him, too, I wanted to hurt him bad. I lunged to my feet, into a stumbling run that brought me to the driver’s side of the car just as he scrambled inside and slammed the door.

  He might have tried to lock it, except that the window was halfway down; instead he threw himself across the bucket seat on the passenger side and clawed at the dash. I dragged the door open, leaned in, got a grip on his jacket with my left hand. I would have hit him with my right but he’d had enough time to open the glove compartment and paw inside, spilling out cassettes for the car’s tape deck; he twisted around with something in his hand—a gun, a damn Saturday night special—at the same time I yanked on his jacket. He shoved the gun into my face so that I was looking straight down the bore, began screaming at me in a voice as high-pitched as a terrified child’s.

  “Get away from me, get away from me, I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off?”

  There was a frozen segment of time—three or four seconds—during which I came close to doing something crazy, because I still wanted to hurt him and I didn’t care that he had a gun or that his hand was shaking and the thing might go off even if he had no intention of using it. Reason came back with a jolting sensation that was almost physical. I let go of his arm then, the way you’d let go of something hot, and withdrew from the car so abruptly, I whacked my head against the window frame and gave myself another instant of double vision.

  Polhemus lifted up on the driver’s seat, still pointing the Saturday night special at me, his hand still shaking and his eyes still wild with his fear. “Back up, get away from the car!” he said in that shrill child’s voice.

  I backed up. Ten feet down the sidewalk, fifteen. I was shaking too, now.

  He switched the revolver to his left hand, started the Cougar’s engine, gunned it. Then he rolled his window up, not taking his eyes off me; locked the door, reached over to lock the other door, and threw the transmission into gear. Without looking up-street or down, he popped the clutch and sent the car yawing out of the driveway, tires laying down forty or fifty feet of burned rubber; almost sideswiped an oncoming van and two parked cars before he had the Cougar under control. He made a skidding turn uphill on Noriega and was gone except for the fading noise of his engine and squealing tires.

  I stood there on the sidewalk, arms flat against my sides. There were people around now, white and Asian faces peering out of windows, from doorways, from inside the garage. Voices lifted and fell—phantoms muttering gibberish in the fog. It was another few seconds before I could move. I walked to my car and got inside and sat waiting for the shaking to quit.

  I would have hurt him, I thought. If he hadn’t had the gun, I would have hurt him worse than he hurt me.

  That frightened me more than the Saturday night special had. During those long weeks shackled in the mountain cabin, I had developed a capacity for violence: I had been prepared, eager, to kill my abductor when I found him. But I hadn’t done it, when the moment of confrontation finally came, because of his motives and because of circumstances, and so by not killing him I believed that I had rid myself once and for all of the desire to commit mayhem. Now I knew that I hadn’t, not quite. It was as if a new element had been added to my makeup—one comprised of equal parts of steel, which made me stronger, and atavism, which made me weaker. As long as I was aware of it and took pains to avoid situations like the one with Polhemus just past, I ought to be able to control it. And maybe expunge it completely in time. But what if I was thrust into another desperate situation, as unexpected as this one, and I was unable to hold myself in check?

  It was ten minutes before the shaking stopped and I felt able to drive. The neighborhood was quiet again, the white and Asian faces gone. No one had called the police, or else patrol cars would have responded by this time. It didn’t surprise me. This was a large city, and in large cities people do not like to get involved. A brief fight, somebody waving a gun, a car racing off with shrieking tires ... no big deal. Happens all the time, that sort of minor disturbance. It takes blood to make citizens holler cop nowadays. Or somebody stealing something that belongs to them; then they set up a howl you can hear for blocks. Everything else is just spectacle, annoyance, or both.

  I drove to my flat in Pacific Heights, because I did not want Kerry to see me like this. Not that I had suffered much in the way of physical damage. Bruise on my left temple, at the hairline, that you couldn’t see unless you looked closely; tears in the sleeves of my overcoat, sport jacket, and shirt; and the gash on my forearm. I put some iodine on the cut, changed my shirt and jacket, and sat in the front room with a beer.

  To keep from thinking about what I might have done to Jerry Polhemus, and what he might have done to me, I tried to get a handle on what had put him on the run. It wasn’t just me he was afraid of. The Mob? Must be, the way he’d reacted when I mentioned the name. But why? What was his connection with organized crime?

  Find him, I thought, find the answers.

  Sure. But where do I go looking? Where would a scared kid like him run to?

  KERRY WAS HOME when I returned to her place at three o’clock. I didn’t tell her about the incident with Polhemus. It would only have upset her, worried her. She was concerned enough about me as it was.

  My problem. One more thing to overcome, one more wound to heal, before I was whole again.

  Chapter 9

  MONDAY was one of the bad days.

  I woke up tense, sweaty, with the room close around me. Residual effect of the skirmish with Polhemus—I knew that, but knowing it did not help me deal with it emotionally. The claustrophobic feeling was worse in the bathroom, and worse yet in the shower; I stayed in the stall less than a minute, went back into the bedroom to towel off. Too quiet in there: I switched on the radio, turned it up loud. Even though it was cool in the room, I was sweating again. I hauled up the window sash, stood naked in front of another day’s worth of the late-spring fog. Sucked in cold air and listened to the sou
nds of the city until I began to feel a little better.

  I dressed quickly, with the window still open and the radio still up loud. The bedside clock said that it was almost eight. Kerry wouldn’t have left for work yet. If I called her, she would come right over, stay close to me, make it easier for me to weather this latest small crisis.

  But I didn’t call her. Not this time, nor the last couple of times. I had been enough of a burden to her the past several months ... a burden much of the time I had known her, in one way and another. She didn’t mind, said she didn’t anyway, but I minded. I loved that woman; I did not want her to be hurt any more. Besides, she had her own profession, her own needs. She had made enough sacrifices for me.

  It was better outside, in the cold, damp wind, with the pulse of the city beating steadily in my ears. I sat in the car for a time, letting the engine warm, sitting perfectly still as I had on Ninth Avenue yesterday. When I was sure I was fit for the road I put the transmission in gear and began to drive.

  Going nowhere, just driving. Down to the Marina, out to Fort Point under the Golden Gate Bridge, through the Presidio and Sea Cliff, up El Camino del Mar, past the Palace of the Legion of Honor and in among the misty greens and fairways of Lincoln Park and down past the Cliff House and then along the Great Highway. Driving slow, careful. Watching the traffic patterns, looking at the people, letting my life glance against other lives so I would not feel alone.

  When I got to Sloat I pulled off into the parking area above the beach and walked over to the zoo. But that was a mistake; the zoo was not a good place for me today, with so many of the animals in cages, and I didn’t stay long. I went back across the Great Highway and down onto the beach. Walked along near the water for close to a mile before I turned back. Cold and blustery here, whitecaps on the ocean, heavy surf pounding at the dirty sand. Not many people around; a man walking his dog, a pair of young gay men strolling hand in hand, a few runners. But there was life in the pounding rhythms of the sea, the constant squawking of the gulls that wheeled above it. The ocean is a living thing; it teems with life, seen and unseen. There is danger in it, yes, and violence, but there is no evil. It is pure and clean. And if you respect it, it bears you no malice. It can even be your friend—an immense, comforting friend.