The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  I nodded in understanding. “Please try to feel as secure as you can. The amount of money we’re talking about here is negligible to me since I got involved in the oil business, so I have no reason to be setting you up.”

  “I really don’t think you do, either,” he said.

  “The ninety-odd thousand will have to be left in the room,” I said. “You do understand that, right?”

  “Oh, sure,” he replied. “It will be.”

  “Okay. You’ll all leave the room around breakfasttime. The guys I’m sending will know when it’s time to go. You just do what they tell you to do, and everything will fall into place.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Just one other point about this business of testifying later on … How would you like a second witness?”

  “That depends,” I said. “How good would he be?”

  “As good as me, and he could back up my story.”

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  He gave a dismissive shrug. “Nothing to tell. He’s my partner on the job, Charlie Needam. I’ve known him all my life, and we’ve pulled some pretty big jobs together. He won’t stool on anybody he works with, but this is different and he’ll go for it. He’s smart, he can hold it together on the stand. But it’ll cost you another fifty thousand.”

  I thought quickly. A second witness was infinitely better than just one. If he could pull it off. But I didn’t know if Tobe could pull it off either, though I had no reason to think he couldn’t. For all I knew, he might be the greatest actor since Barrymore. Or he might be a bumbling fool on the stand. It was just a chance I had to take. “Sure,” I said. “You each get the first half after you talk to Crowder, then the other half after the trial.”

  “Fine. You won’t be disappointed in the guy. See, I ain’t done a job since I got out of the pen ten years ago. I mean I been hewing the straight and narrow right down the line. Charlie ain’t been quite so clean, but he ain’t got no arrests in the last few years either. So…”

  “So on paper you both look pretty good as witnesses.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, the two of you go over the story I cooked up and make sure you’ve got it down right. Don’t make every little point agree, though—”

  He grinned and held up his hand to silence me. “Please. Me and Charlie know how to run out a story.”

  A few minutes later we walked out to our cars and shook hands in the bright sunlight. “The only thing that still worries me,” he said, “is that long trip back home with the money. That’s when you’re always the most vulnerable.”

  “I told you that you can relax from the moment my two men get to the door. Believe it.”

  He shook his head in doubt. “I don’t see how.”

  I smiled at him and put my hand on his shoulder to give it a reassuring squeeze. “Because the guys you’re going to be traveling with will have documents identifying them as high-level employees of the United States government.”

  “Aw, man … That’s real dangerous,” he said. “Using bogus government IDs is hard to pull off.”

  “Tobe, these papers aren’t bogus,” I said, looking him right in the eye. “They’ll be the real thing, and so will the guys carrying them.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  August turned into September and soon October was upon us and the leaves began to turn. The days were still warm, but the occasional cool front blew in and put a bite into the night air. In the middle of the month the drought broke, and for two weeks it rained every day. The Donner Basin became a quagmire, and the new residential districts that had sprung up on the edges of town were little better. Few of their streets had been paved, and some of them became nearly impassable. The deluge transformed Nanny Goat Gully into a surreal nightmare world where each sunset brought legions of drunken roughnecks to slop and whore and fight in its ten acres of knee-deep mud. Had it not been for the Rangers’ horses, law and order would have ceased to exist there.

  On September fourth the pipeline from Odessa was completed and the wells began going online. For three months the Texas & Pacific Railroad had been running several tank trains out of town each week, and we had received a few royalty checks, but with the coming of the pipeline our income shot up to a point that the numbers ceased to have any meaning to me. Della hired an accountant and we began paying the IRS quarterly. Meanwhile, she was looking for places to invest outside the oil industry.

  During those months we made two trips to Dallas so she could spend some of the money on winter clothes. Then one night during the last week in October a phone call came from Chicken Little. “We need to get together,” I heard him say as soon as I picked up the receiver.

  “Sure,” I said. “When and where?”

  We agreed to meet that coming Wednesday at the Fan Tan Club on Greenville Avenue in Dallas, a joint that had long been a hangout for hijackers, cardsharps and pimps. Back during the war business had taken me there several times, and I’d always found the clientele amusing. Della and I drove up on Tuesday afternoon and took a small suite at the Adolphus. That evening we had a light dinner, and then danced the night away to Harry James and his band at the Mayflower Ballroom.

  When I awoke late the next morning Della was already out shopping. I had an early lunch at a Greek café a few doors down the street, and then whiled away the time until my meeting. When I arrived at the Fan Tan I found Little in a booth near the rear, a pint of whiskey in a brown paper sack near his elbow. In those days sale of liquor by the drink was forbidden in Texas, and taverns could only offer their customers beer. Private clubs like the Cottonwood Country Club were exempted from the law, something that caused a fair amount of resentment since working stiffs couldn’t afford private club memberships. Anyone who wanted to drink the hard stuff in his favorite bar had to “brown bag it” and bring his own. This meant you had to order what was called a setup, which in most cases was nothing more than a glass of ice and some soda. A setup often cost as much as a civilized mixed drink would have in a place where one could be legally sold.

  I sat down across from the old man and ordered a bottle of Falstaff and a glass of ice. “What’s on your mind?” I asked.

  “I’ve been studying on this matter, and I think we need to bring in another man. For our project, I mean.”

  I was surprised by the change in plans at this late date, but I could see no reason to object. “Do you have somebody lined up?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do,” he said, his fedora bobbing up and down as he nodded. “The boy has just come back home to Oklahoma. Like I told you, I didn’t have too much to choose from and that’s why I brought in Willie. But this kid is as solid as they come. His name’s Lum Shamblin. He’s Otis Shamblin’s middle son. You remember me mentioning Otis, don’t you?”

  “Sure. You say he’s steady?”

  “As a rock. He fought in Europe in the last war and won a bunch of medals. Great big fellow, and tough as a stump, too. I was considering adding somebody anyway when he come to me. He was in a terrible tight for money, so I went ahead and advanced him five thousand to get him out of his bind, but he knows you have the final say. If you veto him, then the five thousand will be just between me and him.”

  I thought it over for a few seconds, then nodded. “It’s a sound idea. We probably should have planned on three men from the beginning.”

  “That’s my notion too. It’s been kinda nagging at the back of my mind all along that we were going too light. I’ll stay downstairs with the car. That’s the one thing that had been worrying me.… Leaving that car down there without somebody in it.”

  “I trust your judgment on this, Little. That’s why I came to you in the first place. But it means a smaller split for you and Willie.”

  “Like I told you, I never was a hog about money. Hell, I’d do this for nothing and be proud of it.”

  “Is Willie okay with the change?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He knows it’s a good move. And he understands that since this oil boom come in the tak
e is going to be a lot bigger than we expected in the beginning. Besides, I think he’s in this as much for the fun as for the money anyway, no matter how much he bitches about being broke.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. “I’m aware that he’s a little peculiar.”

  “So when do we do it?” he asked.

  “The last Saturday in November,” I said.

  “What date is that?” Little asked.

  “The twenty-ninth.”

  “Good. Annie’s birthday comes on the twenty-fifth, and it wouldn’t do for me to miss that. But we need to make sure Robillard’s going to be there.”

  “He’s always there. Or at least he has been since late spring. I’m not worried about it. Besides, I’m going to ruffle his feathers enough the weekend before that he wouldn’t miss the opportunity for revenge no matter what.”

  “Now about Tobe … Were you going to meet with him again beforehand?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it,” I said. “We could if he wants to, but everything is going to be set. There’s going to be some diversion for the cops that night. That’s already planned out.”

  “Good. I don’t think he’ll be wanting another meeting. He knows his business, and he don’t need no supervision.”

  The waitress was back with my beer and a small glass of ice along with an empty shot glass and a bottle of 7UP for Little. He handed her three dollars and examined his glass carefully in the club’s dim light. Taking out his handkerchief, he gave it a through and careful wiping down. “Don’t that beat all?” he asked. “You have to pay a dollar for a nickel sody water just so you can sit here and drink your own whiskey out of a dirty glass. This damn joint must be run by criminals.”

  * * *

  That night Della and I had a bad dinner and saw an even worse comedian at a gaudy, overpriced place called the Singapore Supper Club. The Singapore had opened earlier that year and become fashionable in the months since, though I couldn’t see why. We left in the middle of the comedian’s act and caught Harry James’s last set at the Mayflower. The next morning we got a late start home. When the valet brought the car around to the front of the hotel, I tossed the keys to Della and told her to drive. My legs were worn out from dancing and the rest of me was worn out from other things. For some reason Dallas always made that woman as wild as a young mare.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The next Friday I began to hammer away at Robillard once again. At this point it was no longer crucial to my plans, but since we discovered Lisa the Leak I’d come to enjoy being a thorn in his side.

  He’d brought a new girl to the suite that evening, this one a blonde. She was a tall number with long legs and a pair of perky breasts beneath a low-cut white cocktail dress. Her skin was flawless, and her face was a perfect cameo marred only by a smug, cat-in-the-cream smirk and a pair of blue eyes that were void of either character or intelligence. As soon as she arrived, she made a spectacle of herself by loudly insisting that the porter mix her up something she called a Teeny-Tune, a concoction that turned out to be a sort of reverse martini made with five parts of vermouth to one of gin. While Robillard gambled, she lolled around on the sofa like an overindulged poodle, drinking her Teeny-Tunes and flipping through the stack of fashion magazines she’d brought with her.

  There had been a change in the way the game was played. Back in the heady days before the Depression, the management of the Weilbach had commissioned a Chicago manufacturer of poker chips to make a custom set of chips stamped with the hotel’s name. These chips had recently emerged from the office safe, and one of the hotel’s bookkeepers had been hired as the banker. It was his job to sell the chips to players from a special valise that had been built at the same time the chips were minted. The valise also had a ranked compartment like a bank teller’s drawer into which a player’s money went when he bought into the game. Not only did using chips instead of currency make the play more convenient but it centralized much of the cash in the room into one location.

  The game ground on. Toward midnight Robillard gave the blonde some money and told her to get herself a room for the night. After extracting a promise from him that he’d follow shortly, she left in a blizzard of chatter, taking her magazines and a large shaker of Teeny-Tunes along with her. I was not sorry to see her go. At 1:00 A.M. the game recessed for a few minutes. I quickly ate a sandwich and had just returned to the table with a cup of coffee when I heard Robillard call for a bourbon on the rocks. A few seconds later he took his place opposite me, drink in hand.

  “Been back to the cockfights?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Not my meat.”

  “Strictly a card man, huh?”

  “That’s about the size of it. And speaking of cards, I’ve just been sitting here thinking about something you and I were talking about a while back. Do you remember me telling you that I’d played with Hermann Göring at one time?”

  He gave me a slight nod. “Yeah…”

  “Well, I thought you might find it interesting that I knew several other Nazi bigwigs. Did you ever hear of a fellow called the Butcher of Prague?” I asked.

  “Can’t say that I have,” he answered casually.

  “He was a fellow named Reinhard Heydrich.”

  “I see,” he said, and took a sip of his bourbon. His hand was steady and his eyes never left my face. “I don’t recall the name, but I never took too much interest in all that business.”

  “Heydrich was a fascinating man,” I continued, ignoring his apparent uninterest in the subject. “I don’t know that I ever encountered a more remote individual.”

  “Who’re you talking about?” I heard Wilburn Rasco’s voice boom out behind me. He’d just returned to the table with a drink and a cigar.

  “Reinhard Heydrich,” I replied. “I played cards with him once.”

  “You knew Heydrich?” he asked with surprise.

  “Yes sir, I did. I worked for the State Department in the late ’30s, and was stationed in Berlin for a couple of years.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  I gave him friendly smile. “No reason you should have. But speaking of Heydrich, some people say that if Germany had won the war, he would have been Hitler’s successor. After spending an evening with him I’m inclined to agree. He was the most ruthless man I’ve ever met. He built up a thing called the SD, which was an intelligence unit within the SS, a sort of secret police inside the secret police, and he had something on everybody, including Himmler, and maybe even Hitler himself. Later on he was entrusted with setting up the system for transporting and exterminating the Jews.”

  “How on earth did you happen to meet a fellow like that?” Rasco asked.

  “Through a mutual acquaintance. Somewhere along the way Heydrich discovered poker, and he’d become fascinated with the game. For a while in the late ’30s he played every chance he got. Since I had a reputation in diplomatic circles as a good card player back in those days, I was invited to his home for dinner and a quiet game afterward with him and a couple of his top assistants.”

  “So you were actually in his house?” Rasco asked.

  “Yes, and the man was a very congenial host. He was in his thirties then, tall and slim and blond. The perfect Nazi physical type. He was married to a semiaristocrat named Lina Von Osten, and as one might expect she was a good match for him. Tall, slim, blond. Large breasts, small brain. And she was a fanatical Nazi.”

  “Our young friend claims to have led an interesting life, does he not?” Robillard asked, a measure of skepticism in his voice. By this time Howard Northcutt and Simon Van Horn had returned to the table. “Why, he even says that he once played cards with Hermann Göring.”

  I gave him an easy, indulgent smile. “That’s right, I did. But Göring wasn’t in Heydrich’s league, either as a card player or as a man. You see, Göring was little more than a self-indulgent opportunist, and with him brutality was an offhand, casual sort of thing. But Heydrich was a different matter. And he had a hidden purpose in invitin
g me to his home that evening, just as he had a hidden purpose in almost everything he did.”

  “Oh, really?” Van Horn asked, intrigued.

  Robillard laughed a velvety laugh. “Oh, hell, Simon … He’s pulling your leg. Don’t you know that?”

  “What makes you think so, Mr. Robillard?” I asked, my voice casual.

  “I have a hard time seeing a man who once hobnobbed with all kinds of important Nazis showing up at an Oklahoma cockfight with an old yokel like Herbert Little.”

  I treated him to a cryptic smile. Picking up the cards, I gave them a quick Scarne shuffle, then cut them smoothly with one hand a couple of times and set them on the table in front of him. “I’m a man of many parts, my friend. And I believe it’s your deal.”

  “You said that Heydrich had some hidden purpose in inviting you to his house,” Van Horn said. “What was it?”

  “You see, I was considered something of a rogue in the department. Gambling and all that sort of thing. Such people usually need more money than they have, and this led him to believe that it might be possible to recruit me into a sabotage network he was setting up here in this country.”

  “You mean they were active over here even before the war started?” Northcutt asked in surprise.

  “Oh, certainly. Heydrich had begun making contacts as early as 1936. Hitler never intended to fight the United States, but Heydrich knew the time would come when they would have no choice. His main interest was sabotage. The Nazis were very active in Texas and Louisiana, primarily because of the petroleum industry and all the chemical plants up and down the Gulf Coast. He had grand notions of blowing them all up. He also hoped to put the Port of Houston out of the game by sinking a half dozen big vessels in the ship channel.”

  “How close did they come to doing it?” Northcutt asked.

  “I’ve been told that they came closer than anyone likes to admit.”