I said nothing, and he met the $1,500, and then threw another $1,500 in on top of it.
I called his raise and tapped the table for cards. He drew a six and my card came up a five. He was beaten, though he didn’t know it yet.
He looked over at my stake. “You’re in this hand pretty deep for a fellow who came in the door so light, aren’t you?” he asked. “What have you got left over there? About four thousand?”
“Pair of kings still bets,” the dealer said.
Robillard’s eyes were a pale, icy blue, and I looked right into them for perhaps ten seconds and said, “Pair of kings checks.”
He glanced over at my stake again, and said, “You know, college boy, I could buy this hand right now. I think that little stack of bills in front of you is about all you have.”
“But you don’t know how much I have in my pocket, Mr. Robillard,” I answered politely.
“I know how much I’ve got,” Wilburn Rasco said, and reached into his coat. He pulled out a long, thick wallet that bulged with currency and threw it over on top of my stake. “There’s about ten thousand dollars there, son. And you can owe me. You just use as much of that as you need to.”
Robillard turned his head to regard Rasco. “What do you think you’re doing, Wilburn?” he asked.
“It’s been done here before, and you know it.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Rasco replied. “But I’ll tell you what ain’t been done. Nobody buys pots at this table. This may be a no-limit game, but the understood rule has always been that you don’t go over a man’s table stake unless he’s agreeable to the bet. And then you take a marker for the difference if you win. That, by God, is the way we’ve always done it, and I’ve been playing in this game for twenty-five years.”
Rasco’s voice held a cold fury. Whether his anger came from some old insult he’d suffered at Robillard’s hands or whether it sprang from the bad manners the man currently concealed beneath his velvety demeanor I had no idea.
“Thank you, sir,” I told him, and looked across the table at my opponent. “Now, Mr. Robillard … one way or another, I’m going to get to see that jack you have in the hole,” I told him politely. “So you need to either bet or check. Unless, of course, you want to fold.”
“I wasn’t going to try to buy it,” Robillard said smoothly as he counted out $2,500 and carefully dropped it on the table. “I was just commenting on the possibilities.”
I thought about raising him by throwing Rasco’s whole wallet onto the table, but there was some chance he might fold. And at that point it was worth more to me to see his hole card. I handed Rasco’s wallet back and pushed my own money into the pot. “Even call,” I said.
The room was silent. Robillard made no move to touch his cards. “I believe I’m the one who called,” I reminded him.
His eyes never left my face as he reached down and slowly turned over the jack of hearts.
“Not quite good enough,” I said as I flipped over my third king.
He smiled when he saw the card, but his eyes said that the loss had pricked his ego badly. Excellent. That had been my intention.
The hand we’d just played told me that he was a mediocre gambler. Unless, of course, the whole thing was contrived with the eye to bigger takings down the road. And that could well be the case. I know because I’d done things equally complicated myself. Even when the table is straight and free of cheating, poker is a game of chicanery and deceit. The basic mechanics and rules can be learned by an intelligent child in an afternoon or less, but a lifetime is not enough to master it in the heart where it’s really played.
Several years earlier I’d been trapped on a long train trip with nothing to do, and I’d fallen into a card game with four older men. One of them was a sixty-year-old preacher who refused to play for money. We managed to round up about a thousand matches and divided them up four ways. And for the life of me I couldn’t beat that old preacher at five-card stud. I won a few hands, but after about four hours of steady playing he finally cleaned me and his two friends out. Besides being a superb player, he was as good a card mechanic as I ever met. He rightly concluded that even in a friendly game where no money was at risk, I wouldn’t let him get away with cheating me directly when he had the deal. So several times he stacked the cards to let one of the other players beat me, then siphoned the stakes away from them with his superior playing skill. It had been an amusing experience that cost me nothing and taught me something about human nature.
I’d paid no attention to his name when he first introduced himself, and following the lead of the other two I’d simply called him Reverend. As I rose from the table he reached over and clasped my shoulder in a fatherly grip. “Young man,” he asked, “did you ever hear of a fellow called Cornbread Broussard?”
“Sure,” I answered. “He was from south Louisiana, and he got that name because he didn’t like light bread and wouldn’t eat it. Back about thirty years ago he was considered the king of the stud poker players here in the South.”
He pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to me. It read “Reverend Victor Broussard, Thibodeaux, Louisiana.”
“That was me,” he said, “in the days before I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior.” He gave my shoulder another fatherly squeeze, and said, “You ought to quit this game boy. It’ll kill a man.”
Broussard might have gotten religion, but it hadn’t rid him of the killer instinct a good poker player needs. I doubt that he ever worked harder for any of the fortunes he’d won and lost in any of the plush New Orleans gaming rooms where he once played nightly than he did for those worthless matches that night on the train. He lusted after victory regardless of the stakes, and to him the matches were little more than a means of keeping score.
SIXTEEN
The tension in the room was broken, and everyone but Zimmerman and Northcutt rose from the table for a break. I poured a cup of coffee from the pot at the bar and made myself a sandwich at the buffet table. One of my other rules is that I never drink when I gamble. Not even so much as a bottle of beer or a single glass of wine. Nor do I smoke, though I will occasionally chew on a cigar.
I’d just taken the first bite of my sandwich when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Wilburn Rasco smiling at me. “That was good playing,” he said with a broad smile.
“Thank you. And that was a very generous move you made. If he’d overbet me I would have been sunk. I didn’t have the money to meet him.”
“I knew you didn’t.”
“But why did you do it?” I asked. “Not that I’m ungrateful, but I am curious.”
“For one reason, Clifton can be a real horse’s ass sometimes, and I wanted to set him back on his haunches. Besides that, Manlow Rhodes asked me to look after you up here.”
“He did?” I asked, surprised.
Rasco nodded, a broad smile on his face. “Yeah, he said you couldn’t stay out of trouble, gettin’ thrown in jail and whatnot.”
“He told you about that, did he?” I asked, and felt my face stretch into a grin in spite of myself.
“Hell, everybody knows by now. But don’t worry. To most of the decent folks in this town, getting crossways with Will Scoggins is a badge of honor.”
“You and Mr. Rhodes are friends, I take it.”
“For fifty years. There’s not a better man in this county, even if he is awful stiff-necked about what he considers sin.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“Why, just damn near everything that’s any fun,” he answered with a laugh. He shook my hand and drifted over to the bar, leaving me pondering the hand I had just won. Some time back I saw a movie in which two supposedly top-notch poker players went head-to-head. At the climax of the game one spotted the other’s tell. It was the man’s habit to eat cookies as he played. At last the hero noticed that his opponent ate his cookie in a certain fashion whenever he was bluffing. I had to laugh.
To me it didn’t even make good theater because no truly competent gambler has a tell that obvious, and if you spot one that’s so blatant in a player of high reputation, then the behavior is intentional and you are being set up. Real tells are subtle and usually involve tiny mannerisms and expressions that are not even under the conscious control of the player. I wondered if the whole thing tonight with Robillard had been calculated to give me a false tell. I hoped so. Considering what I knew of his past, I’d expected better from him than I’d seen that evening.
A few minutes later the game resumed. I stayed with it until about four the next morning, then grabbed a few hours’ sleep in one of the bedrooms. The play slowed down during the day Saturday though I was able to slowly increase my stake to something over ten thousand dollars. At six that evening I excused myself and met Della for dinner in the hotel restaurant.
“Having fun?” she asked.
I smiled across the table at her. “To tell you the truth, I’m having the time of my life.”
“Winning?”
“I’ve doubled what I brought in here. How about you? How’s your weekend going?”
“I’ve been reading.”
“You mean you actually took the day off?” I asked. I was surprised that she hadn’t been to work. Since the boom began she had kept the office open on Saturdays because of the demand.
“Yes. I think it’s okay to relax a little now. We’ve made it.”
“Made what?” I asked.
“Our fortune. We are now financially secure. We wouldn’t even have to wait for the pipeline if we didn’t want to. We could sell out now for enough to live good for the rest of our lives.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
She shook her head and looked across at me quizzically. “Do you have any idea what we’re going to be worth when the leases we hold now all get drilled and into production?”
“I have no idea,” I said honestly.
“Then I think I’ll keep it to myself. If you knew, you might decide to take your half and leave me for some wild woman.”
“Della, what would you say if I told you that you’re the only wild woman I’m ever going to need?”
* * *
I played the rest of the evening Saturday but was unable to engage Robillard again. Howard Northcutt and I went head-on in a couple of good hands, and I won about $1,500 from Zip Zimmerman in the wee hours of the morning.
It had become the custom of late for some of the players to bring call girls into the suite, and the bedrooms were often in use. It was obvious that the security on the game was getting more lax as time went by and new players were admitted to the table. From the time the oilmen began to arrive in town there were always a few sexy women lounging around the suite, though I could rarely tell who they were with. Late that Saturday night Clifton Robillard brought up a lush-bodied brunette. As soon as we’d all had time to admire her and envy him, he took her into one of the bedrooms. I was to learn in the coming months that he consumed women at an impressive rate for a man his age.
About five that morning I excused myself from the game and left. It had been a profitable weekend, both financially and in terms of my ultimate objective. For a while I’d felt a sense of residual guilt that I was letting myself get sidetracked with the oil business. I had other people counting on me who had financed my trip to town and who had an interest in my eventual success.
I was also pleased to see the women coming to the suite; their presence fit into my plans quite nicely. The only thing left to do in the weeks ahead was to play my usual game and bide my time until the moment was right.
SEVENTEEN
That Monday morning I ran into my first real snag in the oil business. The week before I’d made a verbal agreement to lease 217 acres that lay about five miles from what oilmen call the fairway, by which they mean the centerline of the field where the oil is most abundant. The tract was something of a long shot, but the geologist’s report indicated that the extremity of the field was probably at least a mile beyond the place I was interested in.
I’d made an offer of three hundred an acre as a lease bonus, and it was quickly snapped up by the owner, a small, prim, retired bookkeeper from Odessa named Meese. The previous year he’d inherited the land from his wife, who in turn had inherited it from her grandfather. The only problem was that Meese wouldn’t take either a draft or a personal check. I promised him that if the title checked out I’d bring him a certified check Monday.
I went back into town where Della had one of her assistants do a quick emergency search on the title. Then I took her findings to Andy and prevailed upon him to give me a fast opinion. He pronounced Meese’s title good. I was at the bank when it opened Monday to get the check, then I hurried out to Meese’s house, a small, prim structure that matched its owner perfectly. As I pulled into his driveway I almost hit a big blue Cadillac that was swinging out onto the highway. As the car flashed past me I saw that Simon Van Horn was at the wheel with Clifton Robillard beside him. They nodded at me, then looked at one another and broke out into laughter.
“Top of the morning to you, too,” I muttered and gave them an offhand wave.
Meese came out on his front porch at the sound of my arrival. “I don’t believe we can do any business today,” he said as I approached his porch.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well…” he hedged. “Things have changed a little since you were here.”
He took a seat in a big hickory rocking chair. I came up on the porch but he didn’t ask me to sit. “They offered you a better deal, didn’t they?” I asked.
“Who offered me a better deal?”
“Those two birds in that Cadillac,” I replied with a jerk of my thumb back toward the road. “What did they give you? Twenty bucks more an acre? Fifty?”
“Now, you listen here, young fellow … a man has to look out for himself in this old world.”
“My father always taught me that a man has to keep his commitments,” I said.
“You need to remember that we didn’t have anything on paper,” he said, shaking his finger at me like a schoolmarm. “And you know that as well as I do. Just show me anything we had on paper, and I’ll rip up the other man’s check.”
I stared at him silently until he began to squirm just a little. “Three fifty,” he finally said. “I got three fifty.”
“Did you bother to mention that you and I already had a deal?”
“Sure I did! How else do you think I got them to bid up that high? Of course, if you really want this lease bad enough, then you ought to be able to beat three fifty.…” His voice died in the sound of my laughter. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“You’ve already proven yourself to be a lying scoundrel,” I said. “So why would I want to do any more business with you? Do you really expect me to offer four hundred, shake hands again and then come out here in the morning and find out that they’ve gone four fifty? How foolish do you think I am?”
I walked down the steps and was almost to my car when he called after me, “Even the Good Book says the Lord helps those that help themselves.”
I turned and went back up on the porch. Putting my hands on the arms of his rocking chair, I leaned my six-foot-four-inch frame down until I loomed over him with our faces only a few inches apart. He cringed away, his eyes wide with fear. “No it doesn’t,” I said with a big happy grin. “That’s not in the Bible at all. But I’ll tell you what is.… ‘The Lord God of Hosts shall cast down all those who worketh iniquity, and great shall be their lamentations on the day of Judgment.…’”
A half hour later I was back in the office. “No lease?” Della asked. “What happened?”
“Van Horn and Robillard,” I said. “They slid in under us.”
“How did they know we were after that tract?”
“They may not have,” I said. “It could have been just a little unethical business competition, or it could have been Robillard trying to get even for the poker game
this past weekend.”
“What happened at the poker game?” she asked.
“Just what I came here to make happen,” I said. “I humiliated him good.”
“So you think?…”
“Who knows. But please stress to the girls that they need to keep quiet about what goes on here.… Okay?”
“I’ll do more than that,” she said. “I’ll have Mona start keeping an eye on them.”
* * *
Two mornings later I was just about to leave the house when the phone rang. When I lifted the receiver I heard Col. Homer Garrison’s deep voice rumbling ponderously across the miles between me and Austin. “How’s things going out there?” he asked.
“Well, there’s a lot of oil coming out of the ground these days,” I replied.
“So they tell me. Say, son … Are you still hooked up with the New-nited States gumment?”
I paused before answering, my senses suddenly alert. “I’ve maintained a few contacts in the government, if that’s what you’re asking,” I finally replied.
“Hmmmm…” he mused. “I sure do wish I could get a straight answer these days. I’m sort of a yes-or-no kind of man, you understand. Older generation and all that.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “Oh, come on, Colonel. You’ve dealt with the state legislature enough to know sometimes a man just isn’t in a position to give you a yes-or-no answer. That doesn’t stop his heart from being in the right place.”
“No, I guess it don’t. And as far as I know yours always has been.”
“Colonel Garrison, what’s on your mind?”
I heard a deep sigh. “Well, I’ve got a little inside information for you.”
“Information? About what?”
“Clifton Robillard.”
I was instantly wary. “Why would I care about Robillard, Colonel?”
“Don’t you try to shit me, boy,” he said cheerfully. “Do you remember that story in the papers about General MacArthur asking me to come over to Japan to run the MP’s for the occupation gumment and set up a civilian police force for the Japanese?”
The Rogues' Game Page 9