The Wheel is Fixed

by James M. Fox

  I grinned at her. “Quite a speech. As it happens, lady, you take the pot. I don’t have any use for these blitzkrieg boys either. Some of them are very fine technicians, but the style is only a fad, and not even a popular one with the public at large. The average hotel orchestra can’t afford to touch it. What’s your favorite piece?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked at me wide-eyed, puzzled. “Do you mean mood-music, when you’re alone and you put something on the record player, just to sit and listen? I’ve almost worn out my Gershwin albums that way.”

  “You talked me into it,” I said cheerfully, jumping to my feet and dragging her with me, pouring on the eager animation. It was the wrong approach, by a mile, but the deal was getting on my nerves. I needed a peek at my hole card, and I needed it fast.

  Across the pool, Eve Garand smiled upon us benignly and wiggled her fingers, like mama supervising the kiddies at play. In the bathhouse, the Blüthner shimmered in all its garish carnival splendor; the nacreous panelwork appeared almost grotesque. Lorna shrank away from it as if she expected it to bark at her.

  “Oh, golly. Just what the psychiatrist ordered!”

  I laughed, rather hollowly, and spread a towel on the bench, but she wouldn’t sit down. She stood just inside the door, huddled in her beach wrap, watching the proceedings with an expression of helpless dismay.

  “Me and Oscar Levant,” I said, flipping the cover off the keyboard and striking the opening clarinet glissando of “Rhapsody in Blue.”

  For the first few minutes I thought it came off pretty well. She couldn’t have made it easier for me than by mentioning Gershwin herself, and I don’t play any simplified special arrangement of the “Rhapsody” either—I do Grofé’s full orchestra score with all the trimmings, or as nearly as it can be done by one musician with ten fingers and two feet. There is a real difference between a pianist and a man accustomed to conduct from behind the piano, the way they see and interpret a piece of music; one is preoccupied only with his own instrument, while the other is so used to deal with two dozen at a time that he attempts to transmit them all to his audience—brasses, wood winds, strings and percussion—the staccato sting of the muted trumpet, the velvet moan of the saxophone sextet, the horselaugh of a trombone through the hat, the massive crescendo of a carefully disciplined ensemble moving for the climax. With all of these I could still hold my own; there were no embarrassing slips or misfires; my spadework of the afternoon before duly paid off its dividends, and the Blüthner responded satisfactorily enough. To an extent and for a while I even managed to recapture something of the old, almost forgotten enjoyment familiar to every performer—that peculiar showman’s thrill when someone is watching and listening, anyone at all who is capable of applying the palms of both hands to each other.

  But very soon I knew it was no use. I was playing the right notes, in the right combinations, with commendable technique and with all the approved display of supposedly effortless brilliance, and still I might just as well have saved myself the trouble. Somehow the music sounded like a demonstration of a shiny new pneumatic drill on raw concrete. It was rapid, clamorous, and highly efficient; it did the job and proved the operator’s skill and clearly showed him to be interested only in making a sale.

  Cold perspiration broke between my shoulder blades in defiance of the blaze of sunlight streaming in through the big picture window behind my back. The keyboard suddenly grew slippery and seemed to recede out of my reach; the flowery cadenza I was working on dissolved abruptly into dissonance. I managed something like a short, hard laugh and dug for a cigarette in the pockets of my robe.

  “Sorry,” I said, surprising myself by sounding casual about it. “All refunds at the box office, please. The maestro is indisposed today.”

  She hadn’t moved an inch from where she was standing, still with her wrap pulled tight around her, as if she were afraid of catching a chill in that heat, but now she removed her cap and shook out her gleaming dark locks. The gesture is one few girls can accomplish gracefully, but she made it appear like a carefully styled figure from a modern ballet.

  “You do have rather nice hands,” she observed gravely, regarding me without so much as the hint of a smile.

  “My mother’s. She was a concert harpist, of all things.”

  She took a step or two and gingerly touched the Blüthner’s glossy panelwork. “You’ve lost her?” she asked me in a small, quiet voice.

  “Oh yes. In ’39, a traffic accident.”

  “Your father, too?”

  “He was killed in action,” I said, without frowning at her. “Château-Thierry. I never knew him.”

  She nodded, as if I’d made a point, and it occurred to me then that she was actually exploring common ground between us, perhaps even trying to find an excuse for my bumptiousness. The notion would have embarrassed me beyond speech, if I could have afforded the luxury of embarrassment.

  “Let’s do the town tonight,” I offered brusquely. “There’s a pretty good show at the Cactus Patch, and you must be tired of the atmosphere in this old ladies’ home by now.”

  “I couldn’t possibly.”

  There was nothing coy or demure about her refusal, and nothing apologetic; it was a simple statement of fact, the way a carefully brought-up child would decline to accept a piece of candy from a stranger, and it got nicely under my skin.

  “Why not?”

  “So many reasons. There are some letters I’ve got to answer, and I’m expecting a telephone call after dinner.”

  “Of course,” I said, fairly nastily. “You must have a lot of friends.”

  “Don’t you?” She was the very picture of wide-eyed serenity.

  I wanted to pick a fight with her so bad I could taste it, and sometimes you can get results that way much more quickly than by sticking to routine and playing the gentleman, but all I managed to deliver was a muttered remark about being fresh out of friends who’d expect me to sit by the phone all evening. All that got me was one gracefully trimmed eyebrow slightly raised.

  “This is a business call,” she told me coolly.

  “I see. But you made it sound as if I were trespassing on private property.”

  The words seemed to hang resonantly in the air between us as if they were echoing a hundred times off the walls, yet for the effect they had on her she might not even have heard me. “Perhaps later this week,” she said, brightly specious. “If I’m still here. Will you excuse me now? I think Eve wants to go in and change for dinner.” She waited at the door for me to open it and walked away from me across the hot blue tiles, calmly unhurried, showing me a quick, conventional smile of dismissal over her shoulder.

  I stood in the doorway, smoking and staring after her for a long time. It was near dusk when I got back to my bungalow, and the vast chorus of the crickets was already trying out for pitch and harmony. I sat on the bed for a while, still in my trunks and robe and with the sweat mucous and clammy on my back. The round sightless face of the phone on the night table leered at me through the shadows. It took me half an hour and half a dozen false starts before I could pick up the receiver.

  From Bel Air, across a hundred and twenty miles of desert and orange groves, came the hoarse Irish bass of the pug in chauffeur’s leggings. It recognized me and turned to a faintly derisive familiarity. “Yeah, Bailey… He ain’t here. How’s that? Nah, they’re all out to dinner some place. Any message?”

  “When do you expect him?” I demanded uncomfortably.

  “You’re asking me, fella. If he don’t wind up at the beach place, he could get in by two or three, but I wouldn’t disturb him then if I was you. Something I can do for you?” He waited for me to answer, patiently enough. “Whatsamatter, Jack, you in trouble or something?… Hey, wake up, will ya, what goes?”

  “No trouble,” I told him wearily at last. “Just tell the boss I think I’ve got things pretty well under control. I’ll call again in a day or two.”

  “Okay, fella. I’ll tell him. That al
l you want?”

  “Yes, that’s all.”

  “Okay, I got it. Take your time, huh? No hurry.”

  I hung up on this cheerful note and sat brooding some more, bickering with myself. It occurred to me that I might just as well have been consistent and asked him to make that photographer get out of my hair with his stalling act over the phone, to keep the girl lined up for me on the big fellow’s orders. If it was the photographer. I made a noise of disgust and stumbled into the shower, dressed, and wandered out to the courtyard where my dusty old Ford huddled meekly in the dark among the sleek long Cadillacs and Lincolns.

  Chapter Eight: SHAKEDOWN

  THE Tahquitz Casino looked honest, all right. It clearly had too much of an investment to protect, and too much invested in protection.

  From the road all they gave you was a couple of palm trees, a small purple neon sign and a distant perspective of the sprawling Western country-club-style brick pavilion at the end of a quarter mile of driveway. From the parking-lot you got a showcase view of the glass-enclosed patio bar, discreetly illuminated in low key, something like a high-budget movie set for a dude-ranch comedy under rehearsal, with a sprinkling of extras in resort-type evening dress drifting about. From the gate to the parking-lot they had you all fenced in, the way cattle are guided to the slaughter pen; on wheels or on foot, you went where they’d laid out a course for you between six-foot-high steel trelliswork screened all over with climbing roses in full bloom. Under the rustic front-door arch a pair of strapping flunkies in gold-embroidered bullfighter jackets and Mexican sombreros functioned unobtrusively to sort out the socially undesirable and the potential tommy-gun artist.

  Inside, they stopped fooling around and hit you over the head with about a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of top-class interior decoration, the cyclamen-drapery and forest-green-morocco-leather school, the Picasso-type murals, and the imitation Brancusi sculpture on polished teakwood pedestals. They were so sure of themselves and so determined to preserve the tone of the establishment that there wasn’t as much as a single slot machine in the big salon, and conversation stayed down to a murmur even at the crap tables.

  But the atmosphere was there, and the pressure stuff, like a charge of high voltage in the air, invisible though you can smell it and hear it clanging in your ears and feel it pricking your skin all the time—no matter where you go, the bookie joint behind a Main Street cigar store, the bingo palace on the boardwalk at Ocean Park, the locker-room poker game at the Uptown Athletic Club, it doesn’t make any difference. Some people don’t notice it and remain unaffected, they claim; they’re the ones who talk about how it’s only money and no harm in taking a little flutter once in a while. But the money has nothing to do with it. The money is just a convenient symbol, a tallying device. It’s the pressure that counts, like the kick of a Heroin shot, and this involves nothing as simple as sweating out the risk of going broke or the chance of getting rich bucking the odds. The house knows, of course, and will maintain correctly that it is in the business of selling entertainment. It merely happens that for some of us this particular form of entertainment works out in a somewhat debilitating manner.

  They had three roulette setups going full blast when I came in, and a fourth just opening up to take care of the overflow crowd around the others. I had to stop my hands from hurting me making fists, and my feet from making a spectacle out of me running. That made me miss the last available seat—a woman in a wispy cloud of voile and gold sequins who looked surprisingly like Dorothy Lamour slammed a voluptuous white shoulder into my shirt front and grabbed the chair away from me with all the accomplished finesse of a veteran quarterback.

  The croupier favored us with a glance that was mildly disapproving. He was a small, grizzled old man with a bristling gray toothbrush mustache and a mottled, liver-spotted complexion, who held himself ramrod-erect in his shabby tuxedo of a very old-fashioned cut, like a long-retired French colonial officer. He accepted one of my two remaining hundred-dollar bills without quite shrugging it off, peered at it briefly to check for slush marks, and slowly pushed across a stack of ten octagonal magenta chips. To pick them up I had to jostle the woman in sequins, who was spreading herself all over the board, scattering her own chips on a dozen numbers. The wheel was already spinning, the ball whispering dryly in the groove.

  I forced myself to relax. The only way to play roulette is on a hunch, a lucky inspiration; the game is the exact opposite of betting on the races where you’ve got to depend on form and advance information. To my surprise, I didn’t feel any hunches, or anything much at all, except a vague sort of notion that the red was coming up and due for a run. I almost had to talk myself into testing it out with a single chip, and then when I dropped it on the board the ball was already clicking home and the old croupier disdainfully snapped back my bet with a flick of the rake. “Rien ne va plus, M’sieu—”

  “Sorry.”

  The number was thirty, red. The woman who looked like Dorothy Lamour was on it, à cheval, but she’d lost more on other bets than she could cash in on that one. I had to jostle her again to pick up my lone rejected chip, and she glanced up at me with a scowl of irritation. Already the ball was racing down the groove again; the house did not believe in wasting time. Palm Springs has only from Christmas to Easter to shake you down.

  The shape of the red on the board suddenly reminded me of that king of diamonds I had enclosed with Lorna’s scarf. But in cards the king’s number is 13, obviously unlucky, and black on the roulette layout. Still, it was a hunch, if it did amount to betting on myself by symbol. I reached over and dropped two chips on thirteen, which happened to be vacant. I meant to make it five, but something checked me. Then at the last instant, with the ball already whirring down the slope of the wheel and skittering off the chromium ridges, I hurriedly reached once more and pushed the bet over on red 12, the queen’s number, and vacant, also. It was a silly thing to do, and I’d never gone back on myself like that before, but it got done somehow. It didn’t even strike me as anything very odd, or make me feel especially excited.

  The little ball bounced back off the wheel, skirled around in another complete circuit, bounced again, and dropped quietly to rest. The croupier’s rake pointed, nonchalantly, swept the board and returned briskly, pushing a stack of seven big square blue chips towards the center. The woman with the predatory white shoulders started to pull them in.

  “Excuse me, please,” I said, carefully polite. “My bet, I believe.”

  The look she gave me came straight out of the Deep-freeze locker.

  “Were you speaking to me?”

  “Yes, ma’am. With your permission. Those are my chips you’re picking up.”

  “They are not.” She did not even sound particularly indignant about it; her tone was more contemptuous than anything. “And if you don’t mind, I wish you’d kindly move away from here. I can’t bear people leaning over me.”

  The croupier, two fingers poised over the wheel, regarded us with a coldly venomous displeasure. “One moment, M’sieu, ’dame,” he murmured, holding up his free hand just above the shoulder, as if in admonishment.

  “One moment yourself,” I said. “What’s the big idea? You should know who won if she doesn’t.”

  He stared right through me, stolidly, as if I were not there at all. Of the crowd around the table no one had even bothered listening to us; the board was already covered with bets on the next spin. He glanced at it in quick appraisal and released the ball. An arm in a white mess-jacket sleeve sliced under my elbow and pulled me around.

  “Well, whaddayaknow,” said a crispy cheerful voice in my ear. “The pride of Hollywood and Vine. Mister Bailey. Well, gee whiz!”

  If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought he was actually glad to see me. He was a full head taller than my own six feet, and as lean as a whip, with a darkly tanned, darkly saturnine professional hoodlum’s mug creased into a smile of greeting that looked almost genuine. His manner of guiding me a
way from that table and out of the room into the patio gave every appearance of the courteously sociable, but his grip on my arm was one I couldn’t have broken without a roughhouse on the spot.

  “Nice going, Max,” I said bitterly. “They need your talents, if that’s how they’re operating here.”

  “Aw, now, Mister Bailey, relax! Don’t you know better’n to argue with the ladies?” He was beaming on me now as he released my elbow, clapping me on the back like an older brother dispensing the punch line of a dirty limerick. He winked at me and palmed two ten-dollar chips with a flourish, slipped them into my breast pocket, and playfully knuckled my chin. “All square now, see?” he chortled. “No hard feelings, huh, Mister Bailey? How come you down here, you slumming or something?”

  “If I told you,” I said, “you wouldn’t believe me, Max.” His smirk widened to the point of obscenity.

  “Aw, now. you know me, Mister Bailey. I’m just a pushover for class. Remember me to the boys at Louie’s, will ya?” He started to stroll away and winked again over his shoulder. “Don’t change your bets, and don’t mess with the ladies, please, sir,” he aimed at me as a parting shot.

  I hung on the bar for a while, nursing a Tom Collins instead of my grievance. I’d been around the mulberry bush too often and too long to be startled by the incident, and for some obscure reason the money did not seem to matter very much. I wasn’t even in any great hurry to return to the game room, where normally nothing could have stopped me from plunging right back in.

  Two hard-faced young blondes in almost identical black satin dinner pajamas came striding in and planted their feet on the brass rail beside me. They ordered bourbon, straight; their bearing was rather like that of a couple of otherwise conscientious workmen taking a break in the middle of a heavy afternoon. “That wop!” one of them protested with a funny mixture of disparagement and awe.