The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  I closed and locked the door and turned to Della. “Let’s go get some breakfast,” I said.

  When she stood, I gathered her into my arms and pulled her close. I stroked her hair softly for a minute and then gave her a light, delicate kiss on the lips.

  “What’s this for?” she asked.

  “I just felt like holding you for a minute,” I told her.

  “You’re always so gentle,” she said and kissed me in return. “Maybe a little too gentle, sometimes.”

  “Get dressed,” I said. “I’ve got to go make a phone call and tell Chicken Little the sky’s falling.”

  THREE

  Two days later Della and I met Icepick Willie and Chicken Little for breakfast in the coffee shop of the Weilbach Hotel. Little was a whip-thin man of almost seventy, about five nine, with cornflower blue eyes, pale skin and a fine-boned face. Dressed in a neat double-breasted suit and a dark fedora, he had a spare, self-contained quality about him, like a man who kept all his ducks in a row. His real name was Herbert Crosley Little, and his nickname had nothing to do with any lack of courage. As a point of fact, I never encountered anyone in my years of wartime service who had more nerve than he did, and I met Wild Bill Donovan several times. What had earned him the name Chicken was the fact that he was known all over the country as one of Oklahoma’s premier breeders of gamecocks.

  Little had been born in Oklahoma’s Cookson Hills on a gully-washed fifty-acre farm that was almost too poor to grow weeds. As a child he watched his parents work themselves nearly to death trying to feed and clothe five children, all the while hewing dutifully to the letter of the law, both civil and scriptural. One evening when he was seventeen years old he lay exhausted in bed after twelve hours spent plowing knee-high cotton and contemplating a mule’s ass from behind the handles of a Georgia stock. At that precise moment he decided that he would never again farm unless he was in the penitentiary and men were standing over him with guns. Having no education and no chance of acquiring any, he concluded quite coldly that his fortune would have to be made on the far side of the statute books. Soon he found a way to do it and still live with himself. Always an observant student of human nature, Little came to realize at an early age that some laws simply made no sense, going as they did against both the popular will and human nature. He believed that regardless of whatever ordinances well-meaning fools in Washington or Oklahoma City might choose to pass, one way or another men would contrive to enjoy the pleasures of whiskey, gambling and loose women. A southerner by both ancestry and temperament, he venerated women far too much to ever traffic in their flesh. Consequently, the only avenues left open to him were whiskey and gambling.

  He had a few other interests as well, and a decade and a half earlier one of these interests had landed him in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City for two years where he’d bunked three cells down from an intense young man named Charles Arthur Floyd. Before he left the pen, Chicken Little told Floyd that he should give up armed robbery, that it was a dead-end road, and he even went so far as to offer him a job. But Pretty Boy chose to disregard the advice, and within a few years he fell riddled with bullets from the guns of FBI agent Melvin Purvis and his posse.

  Icepick Willie was Little’s physical opposite—a big pink blur of a man, soft and sloppy in a cheap gray suit and a dingy shirt whose cuffs were soiled and frayed where they protruded from beneath the sleeves of his coat. On his head he wore a threadbare tweed golfing cap pulled low over a pair of small, darting eyes the color of stagnant water. In his early fifties, he had a high, thin laugh that always seemed to have a hidden source, as though it sprang from some secret inner knowledge that he possessed and others didn’t. I didn’t know his real name and didn’t know anyone who did. I’m sure it was on a police blotter somewhere, probably several somewheres, but I’d never bothered to try to find it. I’d been told that he was a peculiar individual, but the raw indifference with which he looked at Della almost made me shudder. This wasn’t the reaction she usually drew from men, but she was of no more interest to Willie than a fireplug would have been. I’d never heard of him having anything to do with boys either, so I could only assume that whatever lighted his fires, it wasn’t human. Which made no difference to me or my purposes. This was the first time I’d ever done business with him, and I intended for it to be the last as well.

  When we finished breakfast, I gave Della the keys to the Lincoln and she headed off to find a bookstore. “Let’s get some fresh air,” I told the two men.

  We strolled through the hotel lobby and out onto the street. “Classy place,” Willie said. “Is this where the game’s gonna be?”

  “This is it,” I replied with a nod.

  The Weilbach had been built in the last decade of the nineteenth century by a cattle baron who wanted his town to have a first-class hostelry. It was fourteen stories tall, faced in sand-colored native rock with walls better than two feet thick. The lobby ceiling was a vast dome forty feet high, covered in Tiffany glass. The furniture throughout was heavy mahogany and walnut Victorian, upholstered in leather and velvet. Brass and marble were everywhere.

  Its history had been spotty. The beef industry was just beginning to recover from the Great Blizzard and Die-Up of 1886 when a bad drought in the 1890s destroyed the cattle market once again. Thus the hotel opened in a grim economy and barely managed to limp along until World War I brought a munitions plant to town. It fared well in the false boom of the ’20s, but fell on hard times after the Crash of 1929. For a few years during the Great Depression it was closed, its windows shuttered and its doors boarded up. With World War II came the airbase and rising beef prices. It reopened under new management, and once more its tile floors rang with the sound of boots and spurs. Generals and high-level Washington bureaucrats bellied up to the Longhorn Bar alongside defense contractors and prosperous ranchers. Loud talk and hard laughter were heard in the lobby, and every night the dining room was packed with successful, well-heeled men and their glittering women. Once the war ended, trade fell off and now it was struggling like the dives of Buckshot Row. I’d been told that the poker game upstairs was a steady source of welcome income for the hotel, with the management collecting a thousand dollars each weekend for the lease on the suite, a figure that didn’t include drinks and food.

  “When?” Willie asked once we were on the street.

  “Probably four or five months,” I told him.

  “Shit,” he replied. “Why wait that long?”

  I threw a nickel on the counter of a sidewalk magazine stand and picked up a copy of the Dallas Morning News. Then I turned to face him, meeting his hard stare squarely. “Because I said so and I’m the one who’s steering this deal. And because I know what I’m doing.”

  “Maybe you got cold feet and just want to put it off as long as you can,” he said.

  “Willie,” Little said, his voice soft, “you don’t want to talk like that to my friend. On that front he’s paid his dues if anybody has.”

  Icepick Willie glanced at the smaller man. “I just don’t see no reason to screw around for so long, Chicken Little,” he said.

  “Then you need to get out and let me find somebody else,” Little said. “We’re going to do it his way if it takes a year.”

  We walked on down the sidewalk. The day was bright and the smell of spring was in the air. There were new cars on the street, and the shop girls had abandoned their winter drab for the bright flowered prints that were fast becoming popular that year. A half block away the marquee of the Realto Theater advertised Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Dark Passage.

  “What’s your hurry?” I asked Willie. “It’s not going to cost you anything but a little waiting and a couple of trips down here from Little Rock. Other than that, you just go on about your business and we’ll let you know in plenty of time when it’s going to happen.”

  “I just like to move things along,” Willie said belligerently. “And I don’t see no need to wait no six months.”<
br />
  I stopped and turned to face him once more. “No, that’s not the problem. The problem is that you like to push and bully because it’s your nature to do so. But you need to be aware from the beginning that it will not work with me.”

  “Better listen to what he’s telling you, Willie,” Little said.

  Willie’s face flushed. “Okay, hotshot,” he said. “We’ll do it your way, but just remember what the preacher says: payday someday.”

  “Yes, payday always comes, does it not?” I said with a lighter heart than I felt. By confronting the man so directly I had made an enemy of him. Afterward I would have to watch him. But for now I judged it better to have an enemy who would follow instructions than a friend who wouldn’t.

  “I’ll be back down here in a couple of months,” Little said. “I’m going to check into the hotel and spend some time there looking things over.”

  “Better not make it on a weekend,” I told him. “There’s no point in your being around when the game’s going on.”

  “I know that,” he said with a smile.

  I looked at Willie and smiled and tried to make my voice as pleasant as possible. “You see, there’s an ebb and flow to poker games like this one. A rhythm. Sometimes there’s twice as much money on the table than there is at others. And then…” I shrugged. “Nobody knows why, but something happens, and for one magic moment they take on a life of their own, and then there’s three, four, maybe five times as much. You just have to catch that rhythm. Besides, I’m the one who’s going to be doing all the work.”

  By Willie’s flat stare I could tell my little lecture had been lost on him. He wasn’t interested in the poker game any longer. Nor did he care about the fine, sunny spring day or the pretty girls in their pretty print dresses. With him it was high noon on Testosterone Street, and he was the gunslinger come to run the sheriff out of town.

  “Need a ride back to your place?” Little asked me, breaking the silence.

  I shook my head. “I’ve got some things to do, then I’ll catch a cab.”

  We shook hands in front of a Rexall drugstore a block down from the hotel. Willie smiled a beaming smile that was meant to look false and gazed at me with his muddy, lifeless eyes. “Payday someday,” he whispered.

  Needless complications. If they got too burdensome, I could make a call to Washington and Willie would be dealt out of the game.

  “Take your time, son,” Chicken Little told me in parting. “And let’s do this thing right. Three months, six months. It’s all the same to me.”

  I had no intention of waiting any longer than I had to, but our plans were soon sidetracked by something neither I nor anyone else could have foreseen that fine April morning. Even as we sat down to breakfast an old wildcatter named Coby Smith was drilling an oil well on a bleak, hardscrabble piece of land fifteen miles west of town. He’d bought the lease for fifty dollars and a 1935 Reo truck he traded to a nearly bankrupt rancher who hoped the ancient, wheezing vehicle would get him and his family to Texarkana, where he had the prospect of a job. Coby was in almost as bad a shape. He was dead broke and so overdrawn at the bank that he was ashamed to go to town where he might be seen. He had only enough diesel left to drill for two more days with a rig that was a piece of junk he’d cobbled together from smaller pieces of junk. His men hadn’t been paid in a month, and one crew had quit him completely. Now he was reduced to running two twelve-hour towers a day and working as derrick man on the evening shift.

  About the time I parted from Willie and Little the drill stem reached a depth of 4,162 feet in the Dalhart Sand Formation, and its Hughes Tool Company bit broke through into a pool of oil slightly bigger than Manhattan Island. The well blew in, and in a matter of minutes high grade crude oil was spewing a hundred feet above the derrick top in one of the biggest gushers in West Texas history. Within hours the great Donner Basin Boom of 1947 was on and everybody, myself included, wanted a piece of the action.

  FOUR

  Della hadn’t returned to the cabin when my cab pulled in at the tourist court. After I’d paid the driver, I unlocked the door and went on through the bedroom to the kitchenette, where I plugged in my traveling percolator. It had just quit bubbling when Deputy Marne knocked on the door. This time around things were a little more friendly between us, free of the tension that had marked our first meeting. And why not? I had him on the payroll now and we both knew it. “Coffee?” I asked after I’d ushered him into the room.

  “Sure.” He took it black and hot and unsweetened and drank it in quick little sips, his small eyes glowing with pleasure. “Say, how tall are you anyway?” he asked.

  “Six four,” I told him.

  “Jeez!” he replied.

  People often ask that question, and most of them are surprised that I’m not even taller. I think it may be because at 210 pounds I’m such a large-framed man. Or it may be because my hair has gone prematurely silver and they don’t expect to see a thick pewter-colored mop on a man obviously in his forties. Or maybe they’re just snoopy and it’s one of those personal characteristics deemed socially acceptable to comment on. Who knows?

  We both liked our coffee scalding hot, and we let the conversation lapse until our cups were empty.

  “I think you’re in,” he said at last. “You just gotta go talk to one guy.”

  “Who?”

  “The president of your bank, old man Rhodes. My contact fronts for him. That was a nice chunk of money you moved in here. My guy says as soon as the draft clears you’ll be a pillar of the community in this town.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  He gave me one of his quick, braying laughs. “At least you will be as long as your money lasts, anyway.”

  “Isn’t that the way it works everywhere?” I asked.

  “That’s about the size of it, buddy. Now I gotta go.” He hopped to his feet and went to the kitchenette where he rinsed his cup and put it in the sink. I started to like him a little then. It said something about the man that he didn’t expect me to clean up after him.

  “Hold it a minute,” I said. “I need to ask a couple of those little favors I mentioned yesterday.”

  “Ahhh…” he said, his hard little eyes suddenly full of suspicion.

  I shook my head and gave him an easy smile. “Calm down and don’t worry. I told you I won’t ask you to do anything you wouldn’t do for a friend anyway.”

  “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  “Della couldn’t get a card at the public library because we don’t have a permanent address yet. But they said if some solid citizen like yourself could call and vouch—”

  “Say no more. It’s done. I’ll drop in on my way back to the office,” he said, brightening a little. I guess he thought I was going to demand his boss’s head in a bucket. That might come later, but by then he’d be ready to serve it up to me with trumpet flourishes.

  “And she thinks maybe she needs glasses, so I hoped you might know a good eye doctor.”

  “Scopes,” he said without even thinking. “Dr. Scopes. He’s in the Wayland Building, downtown. My kid’s nearsighted as hell and he’s the doctor we use. Best in the city.”

  “And we want to get a house. Do you know a good realtor?”

  I knew he would. Guys like him always know where to get it and who to get it from. He quickly pulled a notebook from his inner coat pocket and scribbled in it for a minute. “My brother-in-law,” he said, as he tore off the page and gave it to me. “He’s a straight-up guy. Deacon in his church and all. You thinking about buying?”

  I shook my head. “I want to lease. Hopefully we can find something that’s partly furnished.”

  He nodded. “He’s the man to see. I’ll call him and tell him to treat you right, deacon or no.”

  “Thanks.” I followed him to the door.

  “By the way,” he said. “Did you hear what’s happening out west of town?”

  I shook my head.

  “Word is some old guy brought in a big gusher. I thou
ght I might drive out and take a look myself. Nobody ever heard of oil in this county till today.”

  “Gusher? When?” I asked with interest.

  “Hell, right now. The thing blew in just a little while ago.”

  “Where is it exactly?”

  “Just go west on Route Nine and you won’t have any trouble finding it. Probably be a line of cars headed that way. One of the patrol guys said half the county is out there already.”

  I stuck out my hand and we shook for the first time. His grip was firm and dry. “Hey,” he said, turning back just outside the threshold. “I told everybody down at the office that Harvard line of yours. Got a big laugh.”

  “I’m a clown, all right,” I said with a big, sappy grin. “Say, did you ever hear the one about the traveling salesman and the two-headed farmer who had twin daughters?” I asked.

  A few seconds later both of us were roaring with laughter. After I’d given him a parting slap on the back and watched him walk to his car, I glanced down at the piece of paper he’d given me. The realtor’s name was just a name, but the sheet was personalized at the top. It read “Detective Ollie Marne” and gave a phone number. So his first name was Ollie. I liked that. It fit him. I folded the paper and put it in my wallet, then watched him climb behind the wheel and drive off. Something told me that Ollie Marne was going to be one of the best investments I’d ever made.

  When he was gone, I went back in the cabin and unpacked and hung three suits I’d picked up at the freight office on my way home. I’d ordered them at a Memphis tailor’s three weeks earlier—two dark blue of slightly different shades, one a charcoal gray, all three pinstriped, and all three made of summer-weight wool. I had to have my shoes custom made because my feet were size thirteen, D width. Since the first loafers hit the market, I hadn’t touched a shoestring except on the rare occasions when I wore a tux.