The Wheel is Fixed

by James M. Fox

  The other one intently consulted her mirror in the execution of a major and much-needed repair job; her open purse on the bar was bulging with chips. “What do you care, hon?” she demanded soberly. “He’s dishing it out, isn’t he? What do you want, blood?”

  “No, but she does,” said the first one balefully.

  “The old bag who’s with him, you mean? I think it’s just an act. That little shrimp clinging to her shirttail, somebody told me he’s her husband. They came all together in the same party.”

  “Nuts. She’s trying to skin him alive, and he loves it.”

  The second blonde abandoned the powder puff long enough to toss her tonic down the hatch in one quick, practiced motion. “Jealous, hon?” she inquired sweetly.

  “Jealous, schmealous! Three hundred thousand they pay him for singing a couple of lousy songs in a picture. And they say with him all you need is a good fast line that winds up, ‘Ah-ah, mustn’t touch—’”

  I coughed discreetly, but they were both too preoccupied with their troubles to realize that this was not the little girls’ room. “Give him time,” said the one with the mirror, carefully adjusting her lashes. “He’ll still be here next week, he’s having so much fun losing his dough. What gets me is the little guy making like he don’t know the score. Now, angel face,” she mimicked nastily, sniffing in disgust.

  Her companion giggled without amusement. I slipped off my stool and wandered back into the main salon. Rita Jones was holding court at the big chemin de fer table, off to the left in the double window bay. She wore the white peekaboo dress, and she was pouring on the charm, like a musical comedy actress on première night with a tough audience to satisfy. On one side Burt was making himself small in her shadow, slumping way down in his chair, looking sulky and resentful; on the other sat a squat, solid, middle-aged citizen in cream-colored slacks and a scarlet lumberman’s shirt, open at the neck. He was very dark, with the plump, oval, olive-complexioned physiognomy, the gleaming, romantic hazel eyes and the tooth-flashing smile typical to the average successful Latin. It was a face that should have been easy enough to recognize, except for the fact that it was normally displayed to its public with the mouth open wide and dispensing a reasonably effective brand of spaghetti-style jive.

  My first impulse was to get out of there but fast. I wanted no part of Mr. Alfredo Vanni, famous Metropolitan Opera baritone and motion picture star. Then halfway to the door I thought better of it. Maybe it was plain curiosity that made me turn back, or some fool idea about finding out exactly what I was up against. The excuse I trumped up for myself was that I wanted to make sure Lorna Ryan wasn’t there, although I knew she wouldn’t be.

  The chemmy table was even more crowded with spectators than the other facilities of the house, and the game appeared to have plenty of zip. There were a lot of those coarse blue hundred-dollar markers scattered about, and many patrons did not even bother with them, casually tossing in the long green straight from the hip. The banker’s shoe was really traveling; no one seemed able to hang on to it for more than a couple of coups, and no one seemed willing, for that matter; after watching a few minutes I soon realized that what everybody wanted was to get it back into Vanni’s hands as quickly as possible. He was the only one who would put up a thousand a crack, and it was decidedly comical, the tacit conspiracy they had among themselves not to call banco on him. Instead there would be a scramble on to cover his money, more or less equitably, the way buzzards have to live with each other, and just as promptly the cards would roll over and bite off his arm. He’d get back some of his losses in peanuts while the shoe steamed around another fast circuit, but the instant it pulled up before him, bang!

  He didn’t seem to mind a bit, or to be at all aware of how they were ganging up on him. He would throw back his head and laugh from the belly, like a bass drum, every time he got stung, and roll his fat black cigar from one corner of his loose-lipped, cavernous singer’s mouth to the other. He would openly hold hands with Rita Jones, playing up to her studiedly sinuous coquetries, and not quite so openly neck with her under the table when he judged they were, for the moment, out of the focus of general observation. Then he would briefly pretend to ignore her altogether and concentrate on the game with a mock-ferocious scowl, or plunge into a long-winded anecdote, complete with expressively histrionic gestures, while the houseman made up the shoe again and collected the table fees. The whole performance was by no means one that made him look silly, or particularly gullible. It all came perfectly natural to him; he was very much accustomed to being the center of attraction like that, accustomed to sounding off and enjoying his own popularity and picking up the check for same.

  “One t’ousand dollar’!”

  He didn’t have much of an accent, but he had fun laying it on, low-comedy fashion, the dressing-room scene in Pagliacci. There was the usual scuffle and flurry to cover. I barely managed to get the two chips on the line that Max had so thoughtfully refunded me. Burt Jones was high man for two hundred bucks. He reached for the cards, reluctantly, as if they were likely to burn his fingers. He peeked under the corners, frowned bleakly and turned up six-deuce of spades.

  Mr. Alfredo Vanni released a hearty chuckle, waved his cigar in a royal command for silence and gave us the old stage business of studying his hand, rolling his eye, and showing us his first card, a queen of clubs. The second might still have been an eight, or even a nine, but I knew from his manner that the pattern was simply repeating itself, and several players were already grinning acquisitively in anticipation.

  “Baccarat,” announced the houseman, formally and without interest. The little wooden rake captured the bank and sent chips flying in all directions of the compass. The tall young Navy lieutenant next to Burt Jones cashed his fifty, mopped his brow with a sweat-soaked handkerchief, rose uncertainly, and wandered off in obvious search of liquid refreshment. I slipped into his seat, quickly enough this time to beat the competition by inches, and picked up my own modest profits.

  The second card had been a queen of diamonds—

  The shoe started traveling again, and we had us another round of taking in each other’s washing. Not a single bank ran over a hundred dollars. Rita Jones had recognized me, and she blinked at me occasionally, like a cat who’d seen me put the cream away in the icebox. Burt chose to ignore me altogether, contenting himself with running a nervous hand through his skimpy gray hair and glumly watching the game. I was winning steadily, without getting much of a boot out of it; by the time the shoe arrived in front of me I had something just under three hundred in chips stacked up.

  Somebody said, “Shoot the works,” in a bored tone of voice, and pushed out the stack, rather clumsily, so that a couple of chips fell off the top. It took me a second or two to realize that the voice and the nonchalance were my own. I was looking at a dozen pair of lifted eyebrows here and there, and listening to a sudden raise in the mumble of general conversation. It took them a little while to cover me—I’d caught most of them more or less off guard. A matronly brunette in a classic black chiffon that put most of her capacious, angrily tanned bosom on display across the table had been the first to grasp opportunity by the forelock, and was in to me for a century. I dealt myself deuce-three and watched her hesitate almost imperceptibly before she dropped the marker on her cards.

  I smiled at her fondly, and slipped an ace of spades from the shoe, as if all it took was a matter of pushing the right button. The mumbling stopped abruptly; the little rake swooped down and exposed her king-five and went to work for me. “Bets, please,” intoned the houseman, not quite shrugging his shoulders.

  The rush was already on. The big Italian in the scarlet shirt took a sudden interest and got on the line with three coarse blue chips. It was the first time he had noticed me at all, and the smirk he bestowed upon me was strictly from Figaro good-naturedly kidding the village squire. I didn’t like that, for no very good reason, and hurriedly inspected my hand, and showed him a natural—the nine of hearts
, with the jack to give it body.

  He threw up his arms and laughed his formidable belly-laugh. There were a few polite titters joining in, but the crowd was watching me narrowly now, waiting to see the color of my skin. I had eleven hundred and sixty dollars’ worth of chips and bills before me, and they rather expected me to back out. I wanted very much to drag about half, but the rules don’t allow it; in chemmy you put up or shut up. Burt Jones shot a glance in my direction that could have meant anything—curiosity, warning, pity, contempt.

  “Let it ride,” I said loudly, surprised that the sting wasn’t there, or the chill between my kidneys.

  “Banco,” said Mr. Alfredo Vanni, promptly and with considerable emphasis, as if this was exactly what he had been waiting for.

  The crowd delivered a collective hissing noise of disappointment; it had almost forgotten the word, and it wanted its share of the kill. The big Italian pushed out some chips, produced an old-fashioned black morocco pin-seal wallet, and peeled off a crisp new bill. He made quite a production out of kissing it good-by, dropping it on the stack, smiling at me, and caressing Rita Jones’s plump white arm all the way up to her neck.

  I felt myself taking stock and trying to subdue the dizziness behind my eyes. This was not really money, but it was a lot more than I’d had a shot at for a long, long time, and the tantalizing part of it was that it would amount to just about enough of a stake to spring me. With a couple of thousand in my jeans I could be over the hills before morning, buy me a filling-station in Kokomo, Indiana, and stay out of trouble for a spell. Oh, golly! Just what the psychiatrist ordered. The Ryan girl’s cool, childish little voice rang clearly in my ears.

  “Banco is made,” said the houseman with a trace of irritation.

  I glared at him and slid cards from the shoe across the table’s slick green baize. My jovial opponent examined his hand and winced elaborately, as if the naked blade of a dagger had been shown to him. I was looking at a six myself, blankly, and waiting for him to make up his mind.

  He flashed me another big mouthful of brilliant white teeth. “Ah, Santa Maria, you ’ave me over zee barrel, signor!”

  “You want a card?”

  “Si, si, I do. If you please.”

  The seven of clubs—it was still pretty much a fifty-fifty proposition, because the rules allow only the bank to draw to six or seven, and the odds against improving a six are themselves around three to one. I hesitated, squeezed a sickly grin into my lips, and pushed back the shoe.

  I knew he had two queens again before he got around to turning them over. For a moment the table seemed to rock under my elbows, and the crowd’s instant relapse from dead silence into a buzz of conversation sounded like distant waves breaking on the beach. I was up on my feet before the little rake had finished removing the pile of chips before me. Nobody paid any attention, except for a half-dozen spectators without seats, who were converging on mine in a hurry. Mr. Alfredo Vanni had immediately lost interest and was once more concentrating on the lady in the white peekaboo dress. Burt Jones had the shoe and carelessly tossed in his fifty-dollar minimum.

  The two hard-faced blondes had left the bar when I drifted back there with the tide. The Filipino who had served me before took one look at me and came up with a double Johnnie Walker. He did not leave the bottle, but he kept it handy. My wrist watch said 10:35.

  A full two hours later I was still sitting there. Not drunk, not sober, not anything in particular. My normal reaction to a lot of Scotch is to doze off, but in this case I wasn’t the least bit sleepy, and the faculty that might be facetiously referred to as my mind had remained very clear indeed—much too clear for comfort. The woman who looked like Dorothy Lamour had made an entrance, ordered a whisky sour, recognized me, and flounced out again without paying the check. Max Gonzalez, the bouncer who liked class, had lounged by a couple of times, winking at me, happy about seeing me relax. New faces, and several old, familiar ones had come floating in and out of my limited range of vision. By one o’clock the Filipino had grown a little slow on the trigger.

  “You are tired, maybe, señor? I get someone to drive you home, hah?”

  “Get someone to pour two jiggers of Scotch into my glass,” I told him coldly.

  He nodded and made the customary bland, inscrutable Oriental face for me and wandered back to the cash register. I saw him reach for the wrong no-sale key, the one that would only bring Max in again to get whimsical with me. I got up and strolled out through the big salon, unhurriedly but without looking anywhere except straight ahead.

  Outside the sharp desert night air cut through my smoke-filled lungs like a knife. The scent of the climbing roses on the fencework along the walk to the parking-lot gate reminded me of a broken perfume bottle. There was plenty of moon, chalk-white and sneering frostily, lording it over an ashen sky. Somehow I got rolling, out of the lot and down the driveway and on the road, without so much as scraping gears or being struck by a bolt of lightning.

  The Fiat caught up with me just short of the Onowanda Park intersection. It had headlights as bright as airport beacons and a horn that blared the first five notes of “O Sole Mio,” but loud and strictly on pitch. It had a special, custom-built, open phaeton body that glistened as black as a praying mantis, and a great big brute of an engine that whispered like a wheat field in the breeze, and a colored chauffeur in a powder-blue Cossack dolman with silver piping. It pulled past and away from me like a sigh of disgust, slowed perfunctorily for the stop sign at the crossroads, and bore left toward town going ninety in no special hurry.

  I started to turn right for home, then changed my mind on a sudden crazy impulse and wrestled the wheel around again. The Ford obediently rattled along in pursuit of the black convertible, which was already little more than a distant pinprick of lights along the highway. For thirty seconds or so those lights continued to recede before their beams shifted abruptly, slashed off the pavement at an angle, disappeared briefly behind a greasewood copse, and twisted half-circle into the grounds of a sizable Monterey villa on the edge of town.

  The Ford coasted limply past the mouth of the driveway while I snarled at myself for making like a square from Delaware. There was nothing in this for me—I was just wasting time, effort, and gasoline, tagging along after a guy who owed me nothing and who had a perfect right to rent himself a Palm Springs mansion while his favorite girl friend was staying at a near-by hotel on what she fondly imagined to be a professional engagement. I’m expecting a telephone call after dinner. A business call—

  I shrugged and tooled the car around and hightailed it back to the Hacienda del Sol, a comfortable ten-minute drive. When I pulled into the courtyard a small yellow Buick coupe with California plates cut in ahead of me on two wheels and careened drunkenly into its parking-slot, bumping the wall. The Joneses climbed out of it and wandered off into the compound, not touching each other.

  They were gone before I entered the park, but a light snapped on in their bungalow when I passed it, and there was a clatter of Venetian blinds being adjusted, immediately followed by the muffled wrangling of their voices.

  It did not occur to me to be intelligently interested in the conversation; it was partly the Scotch and partly the ordinary curiosity of human nature that made me stop on the lawn under the window and bend an ear. Not much of it came through the blinds, or made any sense. There was none of that angel-face stuff, but in snatches it didn’t at first sound like more than a routine bedtime argument.

  “… overplayed your hand again…”

  “… think you’re so smart. It worked out all right, didn’t it?”

  “… his way of giving us the brush-off. Can’t tell until tomorrow. The way you handled it, we may have trouble keeping him in line.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. You’ve got to play up to these spicks to get anywhere.”

  “… don’t like the looks of it. This character big-eyeing the Ryan doll…”

  “… that linthead? He seems harmless enough to me.”<
br />
  “… following us around? You remember what Doc said. If they’d catch us muscling in…”

  “They don’t know us, honey.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Here, gimme a hand with this trunk, will ya please?”

  He was coming too near the window to suit me. I crept away from there behind a yard of frown and quietly crossed the greensward. The moon was still sneering at me, and the chorus of crickets sounding off in a steady and dryly sardonic refrain. From my own front porch I saw no lights anywhere except in the adjoining bungalow. The bedroom blinds were up, and there was movement behind the screen. I stared at it hard, blinking when darkness closed in suddenly with an audible click of the switch, and then I realized that the girl in black lace pajamas had been Lorna Ryan, retiring for the night.

  Chapter Nine: A NOSY OLD WITCH

  ON Thursday morning not even the mockingbird in the olive tree outside my window could wake me up in time for breakfast. The blinds in the bungalow next door had been drawn against the sun, and the air-conditioning intake gadget on the roof was humming. The colored boy from Room Service came whistling behind his caddy across the lawn and brought me two aspirins, an omelet, and a pot of black coffee. That gave me just about the strength to change my shorts and stagger on out to the pool.

  Mrs. Eve Garand reclined on a steamer chair under the third umbrella from the left, the one with the red-and-white polka dots. She wore baggy old corduroy slacks and the halter from a two-piece bathing-suit decorated in a somewhat faded green fig-leaf design. Oddly enough this kind of sartorial anarchy became her pretty well and served somehow to temper the hard long lines of her toast-brown body, the almost masculine arrogance of her lean, hawk-nosed features. But her hand wave was as much of a royal command as any gesture currently on tap in the Western Hemisphere.

  “Sit down, my friend. I shan’t wish you good morning. You look as though you might resent it.”