The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  At first there was a great cry of misery from the assembled lease hounds. But since speed is everything in an oil boom, both they and the operators they worked for soon saw the wisdom of paying Della the premium price of several hundred dollars for a precleared and certified title rather than wasting valuable hours rooting it out of the records themselves. By then the irreplaceable Mona was making the queenly salary of three hundred dollars a month, and Andy was rolling in the money. It finally dawned on the two of them that their long-postponed marriage could take place, and Della and I attended their wedding at the synagogue in Odessa. Their honeymoon, a gift from us, was a three-day weekend in the Bridal Suite of the Weilbach. Monday morning they were both back at work.

  Wallace Reed was as good as his word. Four days after I signed the note at the bank, he called the office to tell me that I needed to see an oilman named Layton Osborne from Tyler. Osborne and I met the next afternoon in the Weilbach’s Longhorn Bar. He was a boisterous, heavy-bodied old wildcatter who had made untold millions in the great East Texas boom of 1930. He’d already been out to look over the lease and he liked it. After giving my papers a cursory examination, he took at face value Andy’s written opinion that Havel’s title to the place was sound.

  “So what you want from me is drilling costs and fifty-five thousand to pay off your note, and for that I get an undivided half of all the royalties.… Is that right?”

  “That’s the deal.”

  He held out a thick, meaty hand that seemed as big as a slab of bacon. “Have your lawyer draw up the papers. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

  “That’s fine with me,” I answered. “Where are you headed?”

  “Hell, I’m going back to East Texas to find us a drilling rig. There aren’t any available in this whole country out here. Don’t you worry, though. We’ll be making hole within a week.” He quickly drained his beer. “Ain’t this fun?” he asked, giving me a parting wink.

  He was back in two days at the head of a convoy of trucks from Mustang Drilling Company out of Tyler. Before closing time that day our papers were signed and my note was paid off at the bank. Within twenty-four hours the rig was up and the well spudded in. It was a good well, and by the time it came in three weeks later the whole east end of the basin was leasing for a thousand dollars an acre. Frequently fistfights broke out in farmers’ yards as lease hounds beat one another senseless over small tracts of land that a month before would have sold outright for twenty dollars an acre, mineral rights included.

  Della got her library card, but she didn’t have the time to read. She did manage to get by to see the eye doctor and he confirmed that she needed glasses. It took a week to get them from the optical lab in Dallas, but when they arrived I gave them my immediate stamp of approval. They were rimless with gold earpieces, and they looked especially fetching when she wore them and nothing else.

  TEN

  The weekend came and I made my first appearance at the Weilbach poker game. There had been a bit of lingering concern in the back of my mind that my newfound greed born of the oil boom was distracting me from my original purpose for being in town. Even though I wasn’t facing a deadline, I had other people counting on me, people whose respect and goodwill I valued and did not want to lose. So it was with a special eagerness that I showered and shaved that Friday afternoon. After I’d toweled myself dry, I donned one of my new blue suits. It was double breasted, with wide, pointed lapels, and it fit perfectly; the tailor had done his work well. I picked a tie of dark maroon that matched the suit’s pinstripe and knotted it around the collar of one of the stiffly starched cotton dress shirts I’d had custom made in a small shop in Manhattan. I folded back the French cuffs and selected a pair of gold-and-onyx cuff links out of the box on the dresser. With the addition of a matching tie pin and a fine Wimberly Panama hat, I looked like a prosperous executive. But I wasn’t an executive; I was just a gambler who dressed like one because I’ve always believed that part of the psychology of winning at cards is rooted in looking better, smoother and fresher than your opponents.

  Della had packed my overnight bag with a spare shirt, tie and underwear, along with my razor and a few necessary toiletries. About dawn Saturday I would catch a few hours’ sleep, then shower, shave and change into the fresh clothes and be ready for another round at the table. Before we left the house, she made a couple of those minuscule adjustments to the knot of my tie that women always seem compelled to make, patted down my lapels, and I was ready to go. Fifteen minutes later she dropped me off in front of the hotel.

  Except for the few years the Weilbach was boarded up during the Depression, the game had been held in the Plainsman Suite every weekend for over half a century. It had lasted through two world wars and a lot of history, and in that time it had acquired certain customs and conventions. It began at 6:00 P.M. each Friday afternoon and ended at precisely 6:00 A.M. the following Monday, or as soon after that time as the hand then in play was finished. Around nine on Friday night the porter called “Split the rent!” and the players who were present at that time were expected to divide the payment of the rent for the suite among themselves. It was then their responsibility to collect from later arrivals their share of the tab, though in recent months the game had run a surplus of several thousand dollars from which the rent was paid when the porter made the call. To try to shirk one’s share of the rent was considered bad manners, and anyone who did it too often would be dropped from the game.

  Each player who arrived was also asked to “feed the jenny” before he sat down at the game. This meant that he had to throw fifty or a hundred dollars into an ancient wooden cigar humidor called the jenny. This money went to pay the bill for food and drinks and to tip the personnel of the hotel for the service. The jenny also ran a surplus, and the service people were tipped generously.

  The Plainsman Suite consisted of four bedrooms, a spacious living room, two bathrooms and a kitchen, all located on the top floor of the old hotel. The furniture was heavy and the carpets thick. Near one corner of the living room sat a round gaming table big enough for eight players. Its top was covered in green felt, and the chairs that ringed it were deep and comfortable. Nearby stood an elaborately carved rosewood sideboard that functioned as a bar. In the center of the room there was a long, deep sofa and a handful of plush armchairs. One of the Weilbach’s waiters was assigned to the suite, and on weekends a cook was kept on duty around the clock in the kitchen.

  The game itself was dealer’s choice, but the types of poker permitted were limited to draw and five- and seven-card stud. Draw was rarely played anymore, and five-card stud was preferred by most of the players over the seven-card version, though perhaps every fifth or sixth hand was seven-card. It was a pot-limit affair, which meant that no bet could exceed the amount of money that was already in the pot. Theoretically it was a table-stakes game, meaning that no player could buy a pot by forcing a player out of the hand with a bet greater than the stake that player had before him at the time. However, this convention was a gentleman’s accord rather than a fixed rule, and had been broken in the past, but only on the agreement of both players.

  The regulars were a mixed lot. On that first visit the most interesting was a colorful fellow named Zip Zimmerman, a mining heir in his fifties who was chauffeured in each Friday from El Paso in a Cadillac limousine that was equipped with a bar and a leggy redhead. Zimmerman had been losing heavily for years, and it was said that the earnings from his gold and silver holdings piled up so fast that he had a hard time reinvesting it. He played a wild, swashbuckling and senseless game, sometimes plunging heavily when he held nothing and often folding when the odds were in his favor. He was there simply to have fun, and when he won an occasional big hand it was a matter of luck more than skill. He could well afford it, and the tension of the game never penetrated below his surface.

  The rest of the men at the table were local businessmen and cattleman, and while some of them were at least fair hands at poker, only one of
them was truly skilled. He was a quiet, courtly rancher named Wilburn Rasco, a smallish man in his late sixties, with a fine-boned face and weathered skin. A superb player, he was able to dissociate himself emotionally from the game, and when he dealt he handled the cards with a smooth precision. A gentleman to the core, he never crowed over his victories. When he lost he always smiled, but when he won his face remained blandly impassive.

  I played on through the night and got a few hours’ sleep Saturday afternoon in one of the bedrooms. Then I went back to the table until Sunday morning, when I decided to call it quits and phone for a cab. The cards never heated up and I won only eighteen hundred dollars that weekend. But that was fine. I wasn’t there to get rich. Or to have fun either, for that matter, though I must admit I enjoyed the calm smile I got when I turned over the third of three tens against a pair of aces showing in a hand of five-card stud and raked in seven hundred dollars of Wilburn Rasco’s money.

  The only drawback had been that the man who was the object of my trip to town wasn’t present at the table that weekend. But I wasn’t worried; he was a regular and he’d eventually show up. Then the real game would begin.

  ELEVEN

  I’d been working with Ollie Marne’s brother-in-law trying to find us a place to live, but there was nothing left to lease in the whole town. So we bought. It was a nice three-bedroom house of sand-colored brick, built back in the 1920s on one of the few shady streets in town. There was nothing special about the house from an architectural standpoint, but it had been centrally air-conditioned the year before, and this was its main selling point as far as we were concerned. Della had left Mona in charge of the office that day, and we were getting moved in on a Saturday morning when Ollie Marne stopped by.

  “My man treat you right?” he asked.

  “You bet he did. We were lucky to find this place.”

  Della had bought three rooms of furniture in Midland the day before, and the delivery men were there unloading it under her direction. I went inside and got Marne and me each a cup of coffee and brought them out on the porch.

  “You been playing poker?” he asked.

  “Just once,” I told him. “I’ve had my mind on other things.”

  He glanced at Della, who’d just bounced out into the driveway in a pair of white tennis shorts and a sleeveless blouse. “Don’t blame you,” he said. He quickly drained the hot brew and looked around with the empty cup in his hand. “Want me to go put this in the sink?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Just set it on the floor. It might be best to stay out of Della’s hair right now.”

  “Good thinking. So if you haven’t been playing cards, what have you been up to?”

  “Oh, buying a few leases here and there,” I remarked casually.

  “Buying oil leases, huh?” He shook his head sadly. “A little guy like me never can afford to get in on nothing like that.”

  He’d said it merely as a statement of fact, a bare reciting of what to him was an immutable law of nature, and his voice was free of the resentment such utterances usually carry coming from men of his class. I put my arm around his shoulders and walked him out into the street.

  “Ollie, my good man, how would you like a chance to grab a piece of this oil boom?”

  He looked up at me and then tilted his head a little to one side in thought. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  I shook my head slowly. “No, I’m not. Tell me something.… Do you stay bought?” I asked.

  “Usually. Why?”

  “I want you to think for a while about where your loyalties really lie, and then we’ll have another talk in a couple of days.”

  He turned to face me, his expression as free of deceit as it was of malice. “I can tell you right now,” he said. “They’re with my wife and my kid and my pocketbook. That may sound hard, but that’s the way it is.”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t sound hard at all. A man’s got to take care of his own. But what about your friends?”

  He shrugged. “I got buddies. I don’t know that I really have any friends, if you get right down to it.”

  We were at his car. “Ollie, it may be that you’ve been without a friend too long. I think things are going to be looking up for you from now on.”

  I opened the car door for him and patted him on the back. “You think about it and I’ll see you in a few days.”

  As he drove away, I saw him look back in the mirror, staring at me as I stood in the middle of the hot, sunny street. A few weeks earlier I’d reeled him in. Now I was about to stuff him and hang him on my wall.

  * * *

  He was back the next Monday. Della was at the office, and I’d risen late and was in the middle of my morning coffee when the doorbell rang.

  “I’ve decided that you’re right,” he said as soon as I closed the door behind him. “I need a friend.”

  “We all need friends,” I replied sympathetically. I got him seated and poured him a cup of coffee.

  “What exactly are we talking about?” he asked.

  I brought out my briefcase and spread out the plat of the east end of the Donner Basin. “Right here,” I said, pointing with my pencil. “This is the old Havel farm. Almost nine hundred acres. I’ve got it under lease, and we are just finishing the first well. What I’m going to do is give you two percent of the mineral rights on the lease.”

  He gazed at the plat for a moment, then looked up with a puzzled frown on his face. “I don’t get it? Why me? What do I have to do for you on my end?”

  I stared squarely into his dark little eyes. “Anything I ask you to do, Ollie. Anything. That’s the price.”

  “What do you mean by that? What are you trying to get me into here?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing you haven’t already been doing for certain other people in this town, only now you’ll be doing it for me, and you’ll be getting paid decently for it.”

  He rubbed his face in thought. Then he reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a small flask. Quickly he poured a shot into his coffee and knocked it down in two fast swigs. He offered me the flask and I shook my head.

  “How much money are we talking about?” he asked.

  “The well came in over the weekend, and we’ve got three more planned. The geologists are saying now that the whole basin literally floats on a sea of oil. It’ll take a few days to get the casing in this well, and then Brown and Root will take another three or four months to extend the pipeline down here from Odessa. After that the wells go online and you can expect a royalty check that will amount to between eight and twelve hundred dollars a month, every month, just like clockwork. And it will go up as new wells are drilled.”

  “Jesus Christ! For that kind of money—” He broke off and stared at me, his eyes big.

  “I know,” I said with a nod. “It’s a brand-new Ford every six weeks, if that’s what you want. Or a lot of other nice things for your family.”

  “How long will it last?”

  “The geologists say twenty years, at least.”

  “My kid could go to a good college.”

  I had him and I knew it. I didn’t need to say any more, but I’d been at this kind of thing so long that I had developed a longing for finesse, a desire to do things with a certain élan. An urge to gild the lily, some might say. So I asked about his child. “You keep talking about this kid of yours.… Do you have a picture of him?”

  “Her,” he corrected me, and pulled out his wallet. “My daughter.” The photo he showed me was of a remarkably pretty little auburn-haired girl about ten years old whose good looks were marred only by the thick glasses she wore.

  “She’s a beauty,” I told him honestly.

  “Smart, too,” he said, beaming at the compliment as he returned the photo to his wallet.

  “So, do we have an agreement?” I asked.

  “How do I know I’ll really be getting what you say I’m getting?”

  “We’ll go to Dallas on your next day off, to one
of the oldest law firms in the town. Fletcher and Reese. You check them out between now and the time we go. They’ll sign a contract to represent you on this transaction, so they’ll be your lawyers, not mine. Then they’ll look over my paperwork. If it suits them, and it will, they’ll draw up a deed and I’ll sign it. The title to the mineral rights is guaranteed by a title insurance company here in town. You’ve got that and the reputation of the lawyers. So when do you want to go to Dallas?”

  He didn’t have to be told that we were going to use an out-of-town lawyer to keep our business private. “We’re working ten days at a stretch with all this new stuff going on here in town,” he said. “I’m not off till a week from tomorrow. How about then?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “But why me? What…” His voice trailed off.

  “Why you in particular? Because you’re a bagman for Will Scoggins and he’s just about the most corrupt sheriff in West Texas. Which means you know where all the bodies are buried and who’s sticking it to whom at any given time. Also, you can open certain doors for me quickly. To get the same level of services from somebody else I’d have to deal with either Scoggins or the chief of police. They would cost me more, and I couldn’t trust them as much because they have their own rackets going, and they wouldn’t need me nearly as badly as you do. And maybe it’s also because I have a soft spot for pretty little girls with thick glasses whose daddies want enough money to send them to college.”

  I paused and let what I’d said sink in. “So are we on for the deal?” I finally asked.

  He thought a few more seconds and then nodded with a shrug. “Sure. It’s the only chance I’ll ever get at a thing like this. But the one thing I don’t understand is how you know I’ll deliver my part.”

  “Ollie, I want you to look at me and think hard. This is very important, so take your time to decide. Do you really want to try to screw me?”

  He stared at my eyes for so long I thought he’d gotten lost in them. Then he gave me a slow shake of his doughy head. “No,” he said in a voice that was almost a whisper. “No, I don’t want to do that, do I?”