Lucky at Cards hcc-28

by Lawrence Block

  Ken Jameson started dealing a hand of draw, and I was on his left—I raked in the cards for the shuffle. It was easy to leave three sevens on the bottom of the deck, easy to let them stay there during the shuffle. I had a bust in the draw hand but I played it anyway, wound up with just as much of a bust and folded. Then I gave the cards to Jameson for the cut.

  He cut the pack. I took a cigarette, lighted it. I picked up the top half of the deck and set it back on top of the bottom, nullifying the cut. By that time Jameson didn’t remember which way he cut them and nobody else was paying attention. I tossed in the ante and dealt seven-card stud, giving myself trip sevens off the bottom. On the sixth card I bought an outside pair and took the pot with sevens full over Lou Holman’s flush and Sy’s straight. It was a big one.

  It looked like a nice evening.

  I was busy losing a hand when I heard footsteps on the stairs and glanced up. I saw the legs first—long and slender, and a skirt ending at the knees. I folded my cards and had a look at the rest.

  She wasn’t quite beautiful. The body was perfect, with hooker’s hips and queen-sized breasts and a belly that had just the right amount of bulge to it. The hair was the color of a chestnut when you pick the husk from it. She had the hair bound up in a French roll. It was stylish as hell, but you started imagining how this female was with her hair down and spread out over a white pillow.

  The face was heart-shaped, with a pointed chin and wide-spaced eyes. Green eyes. There were little tension lines in the corners of those eyes, and there were matching lines around her mouth. Her mouth was a little too full and her nose was a little too long, and that’s why I said she wasn’t beautiful, exactly. But perfection always puts me off. There’s something dry and sterile about an utterly beautiful woman. This one didn’t put me off at all. She kept me staring hard at her.

  “Hello, Joyce,” everybody said. She gave everybody a big smile and moved across the room toward us. I glanced at Rogers. He was watching his wife with that special expression a man has when he’s letting his friends survey a very desirable possession of his. She leaned over him, gave him a kiss on the side of his face. He put a hand on her hip and patted her.

  “Sue just called,” she said. “She’ll be at the sorority house until late. She has a test of some sort she’s cramming for.”

  “Jenny home yet?”

  “She won’t be home for hours, Murray. Her date’s taking her to a dance and then to a party afterward.”

  She squinted at his cards. “How are we doing?”

  “So-so.”

  “Who’s winning the money?”

  “Ed’s ahead,” Rogers said. “And so is this son-of-a-gun Sy brought along. He plays a good game.”

  She regarded me. Her eyes seemed to smoke, or maybe I had too good an imagination.

  “Beginner’s luck,” I said.

  “My husband’s not much for social graces,” she said to me. “He hasn’t introduced us yet.”

  Murray laughed and introduced us. She gave me a funny smile, then asked if anyone would mind if she watched a few hands. No one minded. She took the empty chair at my left. Somebody shuffled the cards and started dealing. Murray gave Joyce a cigarette.

  She let me light it for her, took a long drag, set the cigarette down in the ashtray. The filter tip was red from her lipstick.

  She stayed for two rounds. I dealt five-card stud on my deal, took a peek at the top card after the first round was dealt. I had a five up and a king in the hole, and the top card was a king. I called the bet, then dealt seconds to the four other players and saved the king for myself. I brought an extra pair later in the hand and won a medium-sized pot.

  She stubbed out her cigarette a few hands later. She stood up slowly, gracefully, walked around to Rogers and put her hand on his. Her fingers were long and slender.

  “I’ll come down in a few hours,” she said. “I’ll bring you boys something to eat.”

  He told her that was fine. She turned to go upstairs and the game continued while I tried to figure out how a girl who couldn’t be more than thirty could have a daughter in college.

  The answer wasn’t that hard to dope out. It came out by itself a little later. Joyce was Rogers’ second wife. The first Mrs. R. had died five or six years back and two years after that Rogers had married Joyce. He said something to the effect that she was a terrific mother to his kids, and I sat there and tried to make myself believe it. I couldn’t. The hips, the eyes, the walk—she suggested a lot of things, and maternity was not among them.

  But she was only another broad and Rogers was only another mark contributing to the fund for the enrichment of William Maynard. Maybe she made me hate him a little, because after she hiked up the basement stairs I thought how unfair it was that a hefty old lawyer like Rogers should have something that nice while I spent my nights alone. A deal later I punished him, did it without making a nickel for myself in the bargain. I dealt him a pat straight and gave Ken Jameson a four-card flush. Jameson didn’t play cards like an insurance man. He stood heavy betting to buy a card to the flush, and I made sure I dealt him the card he needed. Murray lost heavy on that one.

  She came downstairs an hour after that. It was around midnight, maybe a little after. The older daughter was home from the sorority house and she had already been downstairs to meet us and kiss Murray good night. Then Joyce appeared with a tray of sandwiches, ham and swiss on rye, and Murray took out bottles of Dutch beer from the bar refrigerator. I had a sandwich and a bottle of beer. They made a good combination.Joyce Rogers sat in the odd chair again, relaxed in it like a cat in front of a fire. She asked who was winning and Murray laughed humorlessly.

  “The rich get richer,” he said, pointing at me. “And the poor get second-best hands.”

  “You’re winning, Bill?”

  “I’ve been getting good cards,” I said.

  I was up close to two hundred by then. The game figured to be good for another yard, maybe more and maybe less. I didn’t want to push hard any more. It probably wouldn’t be necessary. When you move out in front of a game you have a psychological edge that amounts to almost as much of an advantage as a good false shuffle. The losers tend to follow your lead and fold when you push them. Nothing succeeds like success, and nobody wins like a winner.

  But you get habits. Even honest players generally manage to peek at the bottom card on the deck when they’re dealing. I do it all the time, just automatically. So when I was dealing a hand and the bottom card gave me a full house, I dealt it to myself. It’s a little harder coming off the bottom than it is to deal seconds, but I had been doing it all night. I filled my boat and took the pot over three fives.

  “Murray,” she said, “you haven’t brought me flowers in the longest time.”

  “What brought that up?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking. I remember when I lived in New York a boy I was seeing brought me roses every day. He bought them for half a dollar from a dealer in the subway. They were the nicest roses.”

  Rogers laughed. “Well,” he said, “the next time I’m in New York—”

  “That’s right,” she said softly. “It would have to wait until then, wouldn’t it? Because there aren’t any subways in this town, and it would be impossible to find a subway dealer here.”

  I dropped a whole stack of chips to the floor. It was just as well, because it gave me a chance to compose myself while I hunted around and picked them up. It would be impossible to find a subway dealer here. Her patter was just a load of nonsense unless you happened to know the language. Then it was right on the beam.

  A subway dealer is the sharp’s term for a mechanic who can deal off the bottom of the deck, just as a man who can deal seconds is called a second dealer or a number-two man. So she was telling me plenty of things in a few meaningless sentences. She was saying that she had tipped to me, that she had seen the card scurry off the bottom of the deck just as cute as you please. And she was telling me that she knew the
language, that she knew things about poker that you couldn’t find in Yardley’s book on the subject.

  But she wasn’t telling tales. She was playing little games with me, sitting there at my left and watching me take her husband’s money away from him without a whisper. She wouldn’t dream of mentioning it to him. And she wouldn’t dream of letting me think she didn’t know about it. She had to put a small bug in my ear just to keep her hand in.

  We broke at two-thirty. I cashed in three hundred ten dollars worth of chips and wound up a cool two hundred eighty dollars to the good. Ed Hart was up thirty or forty dollars. The other five men went for sixty to seventy bucks apiece. It was a hard hit but nothing harder than any of them could afford.

  “Back next week, Bill?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I’ll be long gone by then. Now that Sy’s put my teeth back together, I ought to get on down to New York and see about setting up some job interviews.”

  “Be a shame to lose you,” Lou Holman said. “We ought to get a chance at taking our money back.”

  “This isn’t a bad place to live,” Rogers said. “It’s a good size for a city, big enough to be interesting and small enough to be fairly friendly. You don’t have any ties anywhere, do you?”

  “None.”

  “Never married?”

  “Once,” I said. “It didn’t work out.” Which was true enough, and which was something I rarely talked about. Or thought about if I could avoid it.

  “You could probably make a good connection here,” Rogers resumed. “New York’s a fairly cold place, despite the florists my wife seems to be nostalgic about. There are some plastics outfits here—I don’t know much about them, but there’s probably somebody around who could use a good man.”

  “Don’t talk him into it,” Harold Barnes said. “It’ll cost us money to keep him in town. He plays too strong a game.”

  “Hell,” Murray said, “I just want a chance to get it back.”

  We had a laugh or two over that. I put my winnings in my wallet and Murray showed us to the door. Sy Daniels insisted on giving me a ride to the Panmore and I didn’t argue all that hard. He wanted to talk about poker but I switched the conversation around to Mrs. Murray Rogers. He drove through empty streets with a smelly cigarette in his mouth and he talked about her.

  “She’s a lot of woman,” he said. “That’s not hard to see, is it?”

  I muttered something noncommittal.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “To be perfectly frank, I thought Murray was being a damned fool when he married her. He’s around fifty, you know, and she’s almost twenty years younger than he is. That’s a lot of distance. When a middle-aged man falls for a younger woman he can wind up looking like a jackass. Especially when the woman looks like Joyce does.”

  “But it’s working for him?”

  Sy grinned. “He looks happy, doesn’t he? We all figured she was marrying him for his dough. He’s got a lot of it, Bill. A good tax man writes his own ticket these days and Murray is damned good. But you can’t ask for more devotion than that girl has shown him. She cooks for him, she doesn’t work overtime spending his money, she doesn’t play around. And she’s a pretty sweet girl. He was right and we were wrong, Bill. He got a good deal.”

  At the hotel Sy asked me himself if there were any chance I would stay in town for a while. I told him I didn’t honestly know one way or the other. If he had asked me that afternoon, I would have told him I’d be on the first plane to New York in the morning. But that was a long time ago.

  I shook hands with him, thanked him for the game and for the ride. Once in my room, I counted my money, putting aside two yards in my hiding place in the dresser.

  Then I undressed and stood under the shower, letting a stream of hot water soak some of the tension out of my body.

  A long poker session exhausts anyone. If you play worth a damn you have your mind on every player, throughout every hand, and you wind up sitting in one position on a not-all-that-comfortable chair until your rear end aches just as much as your head does.

  If you’re a mechanic, you wind up twice as exhausted. You don’t just have to play your cards. You have to make sure you obtain winning cards, and you have to watch out every second that nobody sees what you’re doing. I was dead and my nerves were on edge.

  The shower helped and, when I was finished with it, the bed had never seemed more comfortable.

  Of course I didn’t fall asleep right away. I lay under the covers in the dark room and listened to occasional traffic noises outside my window. And I thought about something lovely, something with green eyes and chestnut hair and a body that looked warm, inviting.

  A pretty sweet girl—Sy Daniels had called her that. Also a girl who could spot a damned smooth bottom deal and identify it in card sharp’s code. Who the hell was she? What angle was she working?

  I tossed the questions back and forth and made everything but answers. Then the questions faded slowly to black and I fell asleep.

  3

  Again, the same dream. This time there was a slight variation—I was dealing poker in the same Chicago backroom, there were six of us around a green, felt-topped table, a shaded light bulb hung some eighteen inches above the center of the table, and the room was thick with smoke. I dealt five-card stud. I gave cards to the players—ace of clubs, ace of hearts, ace of diamonds, ace of clubs, ace of hearts, ace of diamonds.

  Everyone was staring at me, eyes angry. I took the pack and riffled through it, and every card in the pack was the ace of spades, the death card. Someone drew a knife, and someone else drew a gun, and I ran through cold dark streets with half the world chasing me—

  The telephone eventually woke me. Before it did, though, I tried to weave the ringing into the pattern of the dream. The telephone kept on ringing until I came up for air and sat up in bed. I was sweating, and I couldn’t manage to catch my breath as I picked up the instrument.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Soft laughter, first. Then: “Did I wake you, Bill?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s me. Weren’t you expecting me?”

  “I suppose I was.”

  "You’re a good subway dealer, Bill. How did you wind up last night?”

  “Ahead.”

  She laughed again. “I want to see you,” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “A block from your hotel. Can I come up?”

  I took a breath. “Give me ten or fifteen minutes,” I said. “I’m not awake yet.”

  I hung up, rubbed my eyes, moved out of bed. My cigarettes were on the dresser. I smoked a butt part way and stubbed it out in the ashtray. Then I picked up the phone and told room service what to send up for breakfast. I grabbed a fast shave, washed up, dressed. I put on a tie and a tweed jacket and tried combing a certain amount of order into my hair.

  The doorbell rang. A waiter brought in a tray loaded down with orange juice, corned beef hash, toast and coffee. I signed the tab and slipped him a buck. I was finished with the food and working on the coffee when the phone rang and somebody told me that a Mrs. Rogers was there to see me. I told the voice to send her up.

  I finished the coffee, started a cigarette. There was a knock at the door. I opened it and the room became perceptibly warmer.

  Joyce wore a tan sweater and a dark brown skirt. Her green eyes were hard and soft at once—emeralds one moment and card-table felt the next. She drew the door shut behind her, then stepped past me and crossed the room to the bed. She sat on it, tucking a long leg beneath herself, while I wished I had taken the time to make up the bed. But she didn’t seem to mind. She had a lot of class, and yet you got the impression she was accustomed to unmade beds.

  “You look puzzled,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know who you are,” I said. “You’re supposed to be Murray Rogers’ devoted wife, young and lovely and sweet. You sat down at the table last night
and watched a few hands and spotted some of the smoothest card manipulation anybody’s likely to see anywhere. You called me on it in gambler’s argot without letting anybody know you tipped to me. And you let me take close to three yards out of the game without saying a word. I don’t get it.”

  She opened her purse, withdrew a flat silver case. She took out a cork-tipped cigarette and put it between her red lips. Just sitting there, she managed to give off more sexuality than a stripper in Baltimore. I struck a match to give her a light and she took hold of my wrist to steady the flame. Her fingers pressed harder than they had to and her eyes held mine. Something happened, with electricity in it. I couldn’t look away from her.

  Joyce said, “Who do you think I am, Bill?”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Take a guess.”

  I crossed to the dresser and stared at her reflection in the mirror. They say every man has a weakness. They say that for every man there’s a woman somewhere in the world who can make him jump through fiery hoops just by snapping her fingers. They say a man’s lucky if he never meets that woman.

  All of a sudden I knew what they meant.

  “Bill?”

  “I think you used to sleep with a gambler,” I said.

  “I used to sleep with lots of men.”

  “Maybe.” I turned to face her. “You got out of it. You latched on to Rogers and married him. Evidently you’ve been playing it straight since then. Last night you watched me cheat and didn’t say a word. You could have queered things. You didn’t.”

  “Honor among thieves?” she said.

  “More.”

  “What?”

  “You could have just ignored me. You didn’t have to let on that you saw the bottom deal. You sure as hell didn’t have to come here today. You want something.”