The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  “Yes sir, I remember it,” I replied.

  “Good. My point being that there are some people in high places who occasionally value my ideas, however ignorant and countrified they might seem to you younger folks.”

  “Your point is well taken, Colonel,” I said dryly. “Now, what about Robillard?”

  “It all started with a young banking examiner,” he began, his voice now shorn of its bumpkin inflections. “It seems that he got his tail in a crack with some gambling debts, then he went to…”

  After he’d finished ten minutes later, I asked, “How long can you hold off on this?”

  “How long do you need?”

  “Late November?” I asked hopefully, my fingers crossed.

  I could almost hear the tiny little gears spinning in his great dome of a head as he quickly considered. “I don’t see why not,” he finally said. “The charges haven’t even been filed, but the bank examiner has already made a deal for five years probated. I don’t figure Robillard is going anywhere.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said with relief. “But will the bank examiner keep quiet?”

  “Son, there’s no limit to what this young fellow will do to keep out of the pen. He’s heard some stories about this state’s correctional facilities, and he didn’t like ’em.”

  “Thank you once again, Colonel,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it,” he replied. “As you probably know, my main interest in this matter is Robillard’s close relationship with Will Scoggins. That man is a disgrace to law enforcement. But people like them eventually outsmart themselves, don’t they?”

  “Indeed they do,” I replied.

  “You take care now, you hear?” he said, all hayseed once again. “Keep ol’ Bob Crowder honest for me.”

  I hung up the phone and sat there on the sofa with my mind racing. I must have stared out the window for ten minutes before I finally made up my mind and reached for the telephone again. It seemed as though it took me forever to get through to Chicken Little. “We need some more men,” I said as soon as I had him on the phone. “Not for our project, but for something else I’ve got in mind that same night.”

  “Lord help my time, boy.… What kind of fellows are you talking about?”

  I told him.

  EIGHTEEN

  Little had to come down to southern Oklahoma for business that week. We agreed to meet Wednesday at a little bootleg beer joint on the Red River north of Bonham in Fannin County. “I talked to a couple of boys in Kansas City,” he said. “But the deal is going to have to look pretty sweet to get them involved. I mean, there are jobs everywhere they could do, but…”

  “How does about two hundred thousand sound?” I asked, grinning. “That’s a conservative figure.”

  “Shitfire!” he said. “In a town that size? I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “The oil boom, Little. Plus Christmas.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “You’ve heard me mention my friend Ollie Marne? Well, Ollie talks a lot.”

  “Hell, Marne ought to know if anybody knows,” he said, and drained his beer.

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “Cops know those things. And before I forget, there’s one other change in plans I need to mention.”

  “Yeah?”

  I told him and he shrugged as though he could care less. “This way will be a lot easier on you,” I said. “And safer. Like this, Robillard stays around to reap the fruits of his labor, so to speak. And you don’t have to…”

  He shook his head and waved his hand in dismissal. “That don’t make any difference. I can do it one way or the other. It’s your decision, but don’t modify this thing on my account.”

  “I know that without being told, Little,” I said softly. “So do you think these guys will go for it?”

  “Hell, I feel pretty sure they will. When do we do it?”

  “The same night as the poker game. I can come up with a couple of moves to make it easier. But what’s to stop them from doing it on their own time and cutting us out once they find out where it is? That worries me.”

  He looked at me for a moment, his pale blue eyes cold and remote under the brim of his fedora. “They know better than to fool with me that way. There ain’t no profit in that for nobody.”

  “Okay. I’ll take your word for it.”

  “How does the split go?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “You can get whatever you want out for your trouble, but as far as I’m concerned they can have the rest.”

  He leaned back in the ratty little booth and laughed like I’d never seen him laugh before.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I say something funny?”

  He finally got control of himself and pulled out his handkerchief. “That’s going to be a new one on them,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “They’ll be flat bumfuzzled. They’ve never done a job with a man who worked for free.”

  I grinned. “Just tell them that steering jobs is a hobby of mine.”

  That set him off again. “Boy, you are a sight!” he finally managed. “When this is all over I got to tell Annie that one.”

  “And you say these men are good at what they do?” I asked.

  “Hell, this one fellow I talked to is maybe the best in the country.”

  A few minutes later we parted. “Hobby,” he muttered, still laughing as he climbed into his car.

  NINETEEN

  The next week I suffered anther annoying setback. In the early days of the oil boom the leasing activity and drilling had spread westward across the Donner Basin from the site of the original Coby Smith strike. At Della’s insistence I had leased 260 acres three miles down the basin from the maiden well that was owned by a crippled cotton farmer named Elijah Kraft. I’d paid a hundred dollars an acre for the lease, but now land surrounding Kraft’s was going for five times that. I’d had more than one opportunity to sell or sublet the lease at a tidy profit, but I’d held on to it, convinced that oil would eventually be found under the whole basin. Then, in the middle of an otherwise fine week, Della got a call from Manlow Rhodes asking me and Andy to both come to his office at the bank. The young lawyer beat me there, and when I walked in his dark eyes were burning and his face was a mask of pure rage. “You’re not going to believe it,” he said as soon as I walked in the room.

  “What?” I asked.

  “This,” Manlow Rhodes said, and pushed a piece of paper across the desk toward me. I picked it up and gazed at it in disbelief. It was a certified check from Elijah Kraft for something more than $24,000.

  “I don’t understand,” I finally said.

  “Maybe this will help,” Rhodes said with a grim smile, and handed me another piece of paper. “It’s photostatic copy of a deed of trust for the tract of land you leased that was executed by Mr. Kraft three years ago in behalf of Clifton Robillard as trustee for the Mercantile State Bank. It appears that Mr. Kraft borrowed five thousand dollars against his farm at that time, and that about a year ago he fell delinquent in his payments. Which makes sense, considering that he broke his back eighteen months ago. As I’m sure you know, when one borrows against real property in this state one signs a deed of trust that is held in abeyance and only executed in the event that the conditions of the loan agreement are not met.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s basic real-estate law.”

  “Correct. And this other photostat I have here is the notice of foreclosure that was filed with the county clerk’s office about a week before your lease was signed.”

  “I get it now.…” I began.

  “Not completely, you don’t,” Andy said, pulling a red leather-bound ledger from his briefcase. “I checked that particular title twice. You see, I keep a journal of everything I do to clear each title. The last thing on my checklist is ‘Recent Filings.’ That means I look through all the instruments that have come into the clerk’s office but which have not yet been recorded in the official public record. See t
his?” he asked, pointing at an entry with a date and time beside it. “At that time nothing was present in the clerk’s office to indicate that foreclosure was in progress on this tract.”

  “I don’t doubt you, Andy. But what happened?” I asked.

  “I spoke with Robillard on the phone yesterday,” Rhodes said. “He claims that Andy merely neglected to check the unrecorded instruments, but I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  “Damn right,” Andy said.

  “Shortly after I talked to Robillard,” Rhodes continued, “I had Wallace Reed look into the matter. It appears that once Mercantile Bank had secured title to the Kraft farm, Robillard worked out an arrangement whereby a gentleman named Simon Van Horn would purchase the mineral rights from the bank for a sum sufficient to pay off Kraft’s original loan and let the farm itself revert to Kraft and his family.”

  “And that amount was?” I asked.

  “Around three thousand dollars.”

  “But why in the world didn’t Kraft pay off the note at the bank with some of the money I gave him for the lease?”

  “He claims that he did, and I don’t doubt him. He deposited the draft, and as soon as it had cleared, he mailed a check to the bank along with a letter asking for a release, which never came to him.”

  “Mail?” I asked.

  Rhodes shook his head sadly. “A lot of these old farmers operate that way. I’ve lent money by mail any number of times.”

  “But what happened to his check?” I asked.

  “Hell, they sat on it to see what was going to happen with the field,” Andy said. “Then when it got good they tore up the check and bribed some sorry son-of-a-bitch in the county clerk’s office to backdate the filing of the foreclosure notice.”

  I looked at Rhodes. He gave me a slight nod. “I imagine that’s about how it happened.”

  “But why did they even bother to let him have the farm back?” I asked.

  “Goodwill,” Rhodes answered. “They were betting that if the old man got his surface rights back he wouldn’t mount any sort of legal challenge to the foreclosure. Besides, that farm’s not worth more than twenty dollars an acre without the minerals, but it will grow a little cotton and that’s about all poor Kraft understands anyway.”

  “So they swindled the old fellow out of thousands of dollars’ worth of minerals for a pittance,” I said.

  “Yes,” Rhodes replied. “That’s exactly what they did. And to me the proof that Kraft is telling the truth about mailing them the payment is the fact that he sent his daughter in here yesterday with the remainder of your money in this certified check. If he’d been dishonest, he could have simply spent it all, and your only practical recourse to recover it would have been a civil suit. Besides, he says that he wants to pay you back the two thousand that he spent.”

  “That’ll be the day,” I said. “No way I’m going to take that old man’s money. But above and beyond the loss of a valuable lease, I just hate for him to get treated like this.”

  “So do we all,” Andy said. “But I don’t see a thing we can do about it.”

  I didn’t say so at the time, but there was something I could do about it. There are two ways to hustle a man, whether it’s at poker or pool or anything else. You can play poorly and let him beat you and thereby convince him that he’s the better player. All the while, of course, you’re setting him up for the one big hand or game where you skin him alive. This is the obvious way, and seasoned players have learned it and are duly skeptical of losers who keep wanting to up the stakes. There’s a second technique. It’s much harder to pull off, and it can only work on a certain type of individual. But it is the way of the true artist. You beat him more times than he beats you. You don’t beat him really badly in most cases, but you stay ahead. Yet you do it in such a way as to convince him it’s luck and not skill. And while you’re doing it, you crow just a little about your success, you take on an arrogant demeanor that’s aimed at his testicles, and you make it a contest of manhood. If he’s the right sort of man, and if you do your work properly, when the time comes you won’t have to set him up; he’ll do it for you and beg you to give him a trimming.

  Like his friend Simon Van Horn, Robillard was a man who laid his ego on the table every time he placed a bet. And while the amounts we gambled for meant little to either of us, the act of losing diminished his manhood in his own eyes. Consequently, he was prime meat, and though he didn’t know it yet, he was one hog I was going to scald very thoroughly before it was time to scrape him.

  TWENTY

  A record drought began in the middle of June. For weeks on end the sun bore down while farmers scanned the skies for signs of rain with dwindling hopes. The land baked. Crops withered in the fields and cattle ate the grasslands down to the roots. Those ranchers who could afford it leased pasture in the less arid eastern part of the state where there was still grass to be found. Those who couldn’t were faced with the grim prospect of having to sell off parts of their herds in a plunging market. Two cattlemen committed suicide that summer, and each time I went by the bank the lobby was full of ranchers and cotton farmers waiting to see Manlow Rhodes. He helped those he could help; the others he could only turn away, knowing full well that in some cases his refusal amounted to a death sentence. The bank’s reserves hovered just above the legally required minimum for months on end, and as the oil money came in as deposits he sent it back out as loans. Through it all he remained steady and silent.

  The air itself became dirty as the trucks that rumbled incessantly through the county kept the roads churned into a cloud of dust that settled over everything. A shirt collar was filthy by noon. Laundry that was hung on clotheslines to dry came back into the house as dirty as it had gone into the washtub. Women ceased going out in their best clothes, and white dresses and blouses were no longer seen on the streets. I cleaned the filters on the air conditioners every day and Della bought the most powerful vacuum cleaner she could find and used it almost continuously, yet the dust still crept in and settled everywhere.

  I played at the Weilbach nearly every weekend, and soon came to be accepted as a regular. I clashed a few more times with Clifton Robillard in those weeks, and I was beginning to wear on his nerves. I never mentioned the Meese or Kraft leases, and neither did he. Finally, during the second weekend in August my chance came and I bore down on him hard. With a little help from the cards I managed to trim him of $17,000 between Friday night and the wee hours of Sunday morning. Several thousand of it was a result of the natural attrition that occurs when an inferior player confronts a superior one. He lost a number of small pots simply because I knew the odds better than he did and outplayed him. Then an opportunity came and I hit him hard. It was a hand of five-card stud, and I would like to be able to say that I won it because the gods favored me. But the gods had nothing to do with it since I’d dealt it to myself some twelve hours earlier on my own coffee table at home.

  Every week a bonded courier delivered fifty new decks of playing cards to the hotel from a novelty company in Dallas. Half of these decks had blue backs while the other half were red. Whenever a player called for new cards, a deck of the color opposite the one then in play would be handed over by the porter whose responsibility it then was to count the cards in the discarded deck. Once he was satisfied that no one had held any cards out to run into the game later, he tore the discarded deck in two and threw it away. The previous weekend I’d simply pocketed one of the red decks when the porter was distracted.

  It’s easy enough to run in a cold deck when you’re the dealer, but it’s also dangerous to win a big hand by doing so. It is somewhat more difficult to cold deck a game when it is another player’s turn to deal, but it can be done; every stage magician pulls off more difficult illusions every time he performs. The only practical time is when it’s your turn to cut the cards. For my plan to work, it also depended on a certain number of players in the game. If there was one too many or one too few at the table, the order of the cards wou
ld be thrown off and the hand would be useless. I also wanted as few players as possible in the game at the time I sprang my trap. The more players at the table the more chance that someone would stay for a round or two with a poor hand and throw the order of the cards off. I chose five players as the average number at the table in the early hours of the morning, and fate gave me the extra bonus of Zip Zimmerman’s absence. Zip had been my real worry because he was the one player likely to stay in the hand for a round or two while holding junk in the face of good cards. About 1:00 A.M. everything fell into place and I slipped the cold deck into the game on the cut.

  After the first two cards were dealt, Robillard had the ace of diamonds showing, and I knew he had a second ace in the hole. I held the jack of hearts on top, and he bet a modest $500. The other three players folded, and I pretended to deliberate for a few moments, then called him. On the next round he drew the queen of spades and I drew the eight of hearts. He bet $1,000 and I raised him a $1,000. Surprise showed on his face, but he met the raise and tapped the table for cards.

  His next card was the queen of clubs. Mine was the seven of hearts. The dealer called my possible flush and Robillard’s pair of queens. Robillard checked, no doubt hoping to sucker me into betting since he had the ace of spades in the hole, which gave him two pair. I tried to feign relief as I also checked. On the final card he drew his third ace and I drew the ten of hearts. The dealer called his two pair and my possible flush.

  My opponent took another quick peek at his hole card, then looked across the table at me and smiled. “I’m willing to believe you have that flush, my friend,” he said. “So I believe I’ll just check.”

  He hoped I had the flush, he should have said. And he was sandbagging me in hopes that I’d bet heavily so he could raise me. I wasn’t hesitant in satisfying him on that score. There was a total of $6,000 in the pot, and I matched it. Robillard leaned back in his chair thinking he had me beaten since his third ace gave him a full house, and he wanted to savor the moment. When I dealt the hand that afternoon at home I had intentionally added a pair of queens to go with the aces rather than a pair of numbered cards. Against a flush they didn’t make the hand any stronger than a pair of deuces would have, but such is human nature that face cards always seem bigger and inspire confidence, especially when paired with aces. And I wanted him just as confident as possible. “That’s a nice strong bet,” he said. “But I believe I’m going to have to raise it.”