The Money Game

by Michael A. Smith

  Near the front entrance, a woman with a mop and bucket was cleaning the hardwood floor. In the dining room area, another woman ran an electric carpet cleaner back and forth over the spot where the other gunman fell.

  About then, Richey stepped through the crowd.

  Marshon took his friend to one side. “Tell me again about this guy, Richey.”

  “He came to work at Biederman’s about a week ago. That’s all I know about him. I did vouch for him when security told me he wanted in.”

  Marshon whirled on Ace and asked, in an accusatory tone, “How’d you know this was going down? You hadda know!”

  Ace shook his head at Marshon’s stupidity. “Oh, you think I was involved, which is why I killed those two would-be robbers? You don’t look that stupid, Marshon. I happened to see the exchange between the fat girl and these two. It was obvious. Your security shudda seen it, but they was all too busy runnin’ their mouths and checking out the local tail. So, yeah, I made a decision to get involved and take them down. Why? Well, they coulda shot me, too, you see. They damn sure would have shot anybody who tried to stop them, right? All you people standing here trying to blame this on me could be dead! Now, I’ve had enough of this shit! I want my knives back and one of those free drinks you promised, Marshon. Otherwise, I’ll call the cops myself!”

  Ace walked toward the bar and everyone cleared a path for him and a space at the bar.

  Marshon looked clearly irritated at being talked down to, but he nevertheless followed Ace to the bar, where Ace asked the bartender for a Budweiser. “Regular, none of that light shit.”

  Marshon crowded in beside him. “You’re right, Ace. You pulled our bacon outta the fire. I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. I’ve just never seen anything like it in my life and I thought I’d seen in all. I owe you. What can I do for you? You want a job at The Wheel, you got one. You’d make one helluva security consultant, man!”

  Ace smiled broadly. “I’ll think about that, Marshon. Right now, free drinks are good enough.”

  “You sure?” Marshon asked.

  Ace reconsidered. “Can you spot me a couple hundred so I can lose it back to you on the roulette wheel? You already cleaned me out once, but I’m still hopeful.”

  Marshon pulled a wad of bills from his pants pocket and peeled off five one-hundred dollar bills. “Small enough payment, man. You think of anything else, let me know. I mean it. I take care of those who take care of me.”

  Ace took his Budweiser bottle and started toward the tables, which were full again, as if the gamblers had just taken a short break. The music also had cranked back up.

  Ace stopped, turned and said to Marshon, “I’ll figure out something and get back to you another day, Marshon. I figure you got a full plate right now. Just remember to have Jemmy give me back my knives when I leave.”

  Richey walked to where Marshon stood at the bar, and said, “No wonder you’re thinking about making a change.”

  “No shit. And now I got to worry about Ace Semanski.”

  “I’ll dig into his background on Monday. You worried about blackmail?”

  “I’m worried about everything. You know I’m superstitious, right? I believe bad luck begets bad luck.”

  “That ain’t true mathematically, Marshon, and if it happens that way, it’s a coincidence.”

  Richey went back to his duties and Widja reappeared with the same question for Marshon that he had asked before. “You wanna call the cops?”

  Marshon mentally ran scenarios and calculations before coming to a conclusion. “No, call that funeral home director who stops by now and then. Coleman McCarthy. Have him pick up the bodies. Then get with what’s her name — Bellamay — and find out the names of the robbers, and who their kin are. We’ll be talking to them later.”

  “You got it, Marshon.”

  Everything seemed under control, but Marshon, gambling czar of the city’s East Side, indeed was superstitious. No matter the gaming mathematics that he and Richey knew so well, Marshon believed that bad luck ran in threes. As it turned out, he was right; worse things loomed on the horizon.

  3/End Of The Line

  Monday afternoon, Richey Stanton arrived at his “regular” job as second shift warehouse manager for Biederman’s Food Products, a canning factory located in an industrial park on the outskirts of the southwest suburbs.

  Richey had a designated parking place near the ramshackle wood building. Hourly employees parked their vehicles in a large lot. Most were pickup trucks, some of which had tires as high as the roof of Richey’s Honda Civic.

  The powers-that-be had been threatening to close the factory during the entire three years Richey had worked there. The two-story building was considered a fire hazard and had been so cited numerous times by the Fire Marshall. The payment of fines coupled with minor repairs allowed the company to continue production. Furthermore, Biederman’s assembly line machinery was broken down and worn out, much like its employees.

  Richey entered the building through a side door on the main floor, divided between the canning operation and the warehouse. Administrative offices occupied the second floor of the seventy-five-year-old building. There was no passenger elevator. As he walked through the mixing, cooking and canning areas, Richey nodded at a few people he knew. It was impossible to talk above the noise of metal clanging on metal as the cans made their way along the chain-driven assembly line. He grimaced as a heavyset, bearded worker ignored rulings posted on the wall and dipped a hairy, tattooed forearm into a vat of grape juice, pulled out a thermometer and noted the temperature. The building had the smell of over-cooked vegetables. Richey never ate or drank any of Biederman’s products.

  When they had been part of Campbell’s Soup Company a decade ago, Biederman’s made a comprehensive line of canned foods and drinks. Just before Richey signed on, a group of local entrepreneurs bought the plant and decided to make a limited line of soups and juices, as well as pork and beans, and market their products regionally to grocery stores. Their unadvertised canned goods bore a generic label, and the wholesale price became the industry minimum in parts of the Midwest. Biederman’s was marginally profitable, but the tax benefits, especially regarding depreciation, made it a good investment for the short term.

  Because they were a marginal operation, persistent rumors of a shutdown made it difficult to hire competent employees who planned to stay longer than a week or month. Biederman’s paid minimum wage for workers asked to do dangerous work on the assembly line and heavy lifting in the warehouse. The majority of employees worked less than 40 hours a week so that they didn’t qualify for benefits available to full-time employees, including health insurance. As a result, management compensated for the constant employee turnover by allowing a temporary employment agency to have an office on the premises. The agency placement officers skimmed employee applications, ignoring previous firings, warnings of mental instability and/or prison sentences. In effect, as Richey often said, wryly, Biederman’s hired anybody whose pulse and I.Q. both averaged out to about 70.

  In fact, that’s the reason they hired Ace Semanski, despite his having a prison record and being in violation of his parole terms, which required him to stay in Michigan for a period of two years. However, Ace never bothered to report those details, and no one checked. In addition, he transposed two of his Social Security numbers, figuring he’d draw several weekly checks before that became an issue. Initially, he planned to be gone after that.

  As he walked into the warehouse, Richey glanced to his right where part of his crew had gathered to gossip before the whistle blew, signaling the start of work. A conveyor belt emerged through an opening in the wall and funneled labeled cans into a machine that belched black smoke as it packed and sealed twenty-four cans to a cardboard carton. As a result, the air in the warehouse had a sooty feel and smelled like hot glue. Some employees liked to stand next to the machine and inhale the fumes, after which they were high and even less effective during their shift. Wo
rkers from the day shift transferred the sealed boxes to wood pallets. Forklift operators moved the pallets to staging areas in the warehouse, and second-shift employees loaded the boxes onto trucks or railroad cars shoved down a spur line.

  Richey’s corner office had large windows on two sides so he could monitor activity in the warehouse and on the docks. As he sat behind his desk and reviewed the work roster, Richey sipped from a plastic bottle of tonic water laced with vodka. As usual, he was short-handed in the warehouse and many of those present were undependable slackers. His finger ran across the name of Ace Semanski. About that time, the knife thrower appeared in the open doorway.

  Richey looked warily at the powerfully built man with the long black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. A bad case of teenager acne had pockmarked his face. Ace’s skin had a faint yellowish tint as if he hadn’t been in the sunlight for years. When he stripped off his shirt to work inside a boxcar, even his hardened fellow workers looked in awe at his upper body, which was all muscle, large blood veins and prison tattoos. There were several wicked-looking scars on his back and ribs. Ace’s hands and knuckles were extra-large, and it hurt to think about how it would feel to be hit by one of his fists.

  “What can I do for you, Ace?”

  “Just wondering where you wanted me this evening, boss.”

  Richey motioned him to step into his office. “Close the door.”

  “You want to talk about Friday night?”

  “Yeah. What are your thoughts?”

  Ace laughed. “Thoughts? I killed those two guys, lost all my money and Marshon’s money at roulette, had a couple of beers and left. What’s to think about?”

  Richey’s mouth dropped open, as he obviously was taken aback by Ace’s devil-may-care attitude regarding manslaughter, justified or not.

  “Does Marshon want something from me? You said he was your friend. Did he ask you to talk to me?”

  “We’re good friends,” Richey responded, emphatically. “I’ve worked for him at The Wheel full-time for nearly four years, and part-time now and then since, like over the weekend.”

  “Great sideline, I’d guess? He must have some real juice to keep the cops at bay, huh?”

  “Yeah, and something like what happened Friday night could shut him down permanently — if it gets out.”

  Ace laughed and cracked the knuckles on his right hand. “Hey, man, don’t worry about me. I don’t snitch to the cops. Besides, they’d charge me with something, since I didn’t report what happened.”

  “Good, that’s all I wanted to hear. What’s your background, Ace? You got relatives here, or are you just passing through?”

  “I worked construction most my life. I can operate some heavy machinery — forklift, backhoe, grader. I may stay here awhile, but I’ll likely move on sooner rather than later. Depends upon my opportunities, you know.”

  Richey smiled weakly, since it wasn’t what he had wanted to hear. “Okay, then. Do me a favor. Don’t talk about what happened at The Wheel. If you need anything, see me first. Marshon’s busy right now taking care of things, but he won’t forget you. Understand?”

  “That’s great, Richey. It’s good to make friends after being in town for only a few weeks.”

  Richey opened the door, walked outside his office and stood in front of a bulletin board. He took a clipboard from a hook. “I can put you on a forklift tonight, Ace.”

  “That’s good duty. Thanks, Richey.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Richey replied. “I changed forklift operators every night last week because no one can do the job correctly.” He handed the clipboard and attached paperwork to Ace. “The printout is organized by product and production week, covering the last month. Each product, like grape juice, has its own two-letter code. Grape Juice is GJ. The other codes are printed here. They appear on each box, telling you its contents. The two-letter code is followed by four numbers. The first two denote the month — zero nine is September, for example — and the last two, the day of the month. Products are organized in the warehouse under signs. See ʼem up on the far wall,” Richey said, pointing.

  Ace squinted. “Yeah, grape juice, chicken soup, pork and beans, and so on.”

  “There’re thirty-two cartons on a pallet. The printout for the evening will tell you how a product is going to ship, whether by truck or rail, and the spot on the dock where you put the pallet. Understand?”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “Start with the oldest pallets in terms of production date and move ʼem. Then, check and initial the box on the printout, indicating you moved that product canned on that date to the proper loading spot.”

  “Doesn’t sound too hard.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Ace walked off and Richey turned to the other workers that had begun to gather outside his office and check their posted assignments. One of them stepped forward and gave Richey a look of utter confusion, even panic.

  “Whadaya want me to do, Richey?” asked James Robert Long, known to everyone as Country. Richey recalled that he was Ace’s new buddy.

  “Maggot patrol, as usual, Country.”

  Cans left beyond their shipping date, as well as those improperly sealed, regularly exploded inside the cartons, especially during the summer months when the warehouse felt like a greenhouse. As a result, Richey had created the “maggot patrol.” Two workers roamed the warehouse, checking boxes stacked on pallets waiting to be shipped. Boxes with large stains on them indicated a can had exploded. The workers pulled out that box, put it on a handcart and wheeled it over to a central table, where they opened the box and disposed of the exploded can or cans. They put the maggots in a metal can, doused them with lighter fluid and set them on fire. The workers then assembled twenty-four good cans of that particular product, put them into a new box, sealed it, and put the box back on the pallet. It was not a task prized by the warehouse workers.

  “Okay, Richey, but I just don’t understand why we gotta take the white worms out of the boxes?”

  “We have to replace the exploded cans because the buyer paid for twenty-four good cans,” Richey patiently told Country. “And, they don’t want maggots crawling around their store, getting into other food products.”

  “Where do maggots come from?” Country asked Richey.

  “Whadaya mean?” Richey asked, looking up at the simpleton, who was about six-eight and two-sixty. He wore a dirty green John Deere cap, the same jeans, and plaid, long-sleeved shirt he’d worn all week. He reeked of body odor.

  “How do the little white worms get in the boxes?”

  “They’re larvae that hatch from fly eggs.”

  Country looked monumentally perplexed. “What are larvae?”

  Richey said, slowly, “White worms. Just get on with it, Country!”

  Richey went back to his office to complete some paperwork and have several more “tonics.” He kept a bottle of Absolut locked in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet. Periodically, he poured out about a third of a twelve-ounce bottle of tonic water and refilled it with vodka. He kept his vodka/tonic water bottle on ice in a small chest that also contained a sandwich and an apple. Lately, he didn’t bother to eat much and had been steadily losing weight.

  Until about six o’clock, Richey circulated among his staff, solving problems, such as opening a jammed boxcar door, arbitrating arguments among workers, and escorting one employee to the medical office after a box of cans fell on his foot. Of course, the worker wore tennis shoes rather than steel-toed boots, as required by his employment contract.

  At six-thirty, the whistle blew again, signaling a half-hour unpaid lunch break. During that thirty-minute period, Richey ran a gambling operation out of his office called “The Private Lottery,” although most players simply referred to it as The Richey.

  Bettors, which included about fifty employees at any given time, purchased one or more two-digit numbers from 00 to 99, usually for $2.50 each. Richey had the numbers printed in black on red poker chips
. Players drew chips out of a fish bowl. The 50 cents was Richey’s administration fee, and the remainder became the betting pool. It was admittedly small potatoes representing the general financial plight of Biederman's employees. The winning number matched the first two digits of the state lottery’s “Pick Four” drawing, held six days a week at eleven p.m. The usual $200 Richey pot had four prizes: $100, $50, and two $25-dollar winners. The single-ticket odds of twenty-five-to-one to win back your bet at least tenfold made The Richey one of the best bets in town for the money. All players had favorite numbers, of course, and Richey tried to devise a system to accommodate them, but it was an administrative hassle and led to endless resentment and arguments. At least once a month, Richey held a “high-stakes” game in which tickets cost five bucks.

  It made Richey a minimum of $250 a week under the table, which had helped finance his son Ethan’s college education. That, and the money he made working some weekends at The Wheel. Unfortunately, Richey’s only kid thought his old man was simply a loser.

  Davron, one of the canning line cooks, pimp-rolled into Richey’s office and threw his money and numbers onto the desk, as if it were a requirement of his job. “The onliest one who wins at this game is you, Richey.”

  “That’s right,” said his buddy, Fax, whose speech seemed limited to punctuating Davron’s remarks.

  “Now, The Wheel, that there’s a real game, and I picked me up some real change there on Saturday night.”

  Richey knew that was a typical gambler’s lie and he directed a withering look at Davron, who got the message and looked away. The first and only rule of The Wheel was that no one talked about The Wheel, else Marshon would be around to talk to them.

  “So if you fuckin’ niggers don’t like this game, quit playin’,” Ace said, pushing his way into the small office. Everyone gave way to the tall man with the scary-looking physique and eyes.

  Davron didn’t want to appear intimidated. “Suck my dick, redneck,” he said to Ace.