Dead Man's Hand

by Otto Penzler

  She used part of his money to buy a padlock for her bedroom door, a fancy one with a key. She used the balance to buy a lava lamp from Spenser's Gifts at East Point Mall. At night, her homework done, she watched the reddish orange blobs break apart and rearrange themselves. Even within that narrow glass, there seemed to be no limit to the forms they could take. Her father stewed and steamed about the lock, saying she had no right to lock a room in his house. He also criticized the lava lamp, saying it proved she was on drugs because what sober, right-minded person could be entertained by such a thing.

  But for all he complained, he never tried to breach the lock, although it would have been a simple thing to pry it off with a hammer, not much harder than slicing through a set of guitar strings. He was scared of her now, just a little, and incapable of concealing that fear no matter how he might try.

  It was a new sensation, having someone scared of her.

  Sofia liked it.

  A Friendly Little Game

  John Lescroart

  I am a cop. I don't believe in repressed memory.

  Or I could say that because I'm a cop, automatically I don't believe in repressed memory. It comes with the territory. Certainly it could never happen to me.

  Then I started having the dreams—really, the one dream.

  I'm enclosed in some small, dark place. I'm young, under ten. There's a strong cigar smell. Don't let 'em tell you there's no smells in dreams. The smell is so strong and so real that I wake up and, wide awake, put my nose in the sheets that are crumpled all around me.

  Then there's the sounds—all this awful disco music playing behind men's tight laughter and a kind of staccato rhythm of monosyllabic words: check, in, fuck, out, fold, raise. They get louder as the dream goes on. (Jen tells me I scream them out, too, sometimes.)

  Suddenly it's hot, now, where I am. When the noise and the heat get to be too much, I push on the wall next to me. The wall burns my hand, but it opens anyway, and for the rest of the dream I'm aware that my hand is burned and it hurts. But as soon as the closet opens, everything goes quiet, though it's still hot.

  My dad is sitting alone at a table. He's not moving, just staring out in front of him. I go up to him and he still doesn't move, so I touch his arm. He's much bigger than he was in real life, towering over me. Or maybe I'm crawling on the floor. Anyway, he turns on his own and then falls onto me. Dead and cold.

  And I wake up, sometimes crying, always gasping for air, smelling cigar smoke. The last couple of times I had the dream, I told myself (in the dream) to try and wake up before I got to Pop. But that never worked out.

  I want to be clear. This was an actual dream every time, not a daydream. It was always in the middle of a real sleep at night. I wasn't in some semihypnotic state trying to recover some memory, or to get to something I had unknowingly buried in my subconscious, which I don't believe people can really do. No, the dream just came at me, night after the one particular night when it first showed up, until it wouldn't let me be until I figured out what it might mean.

  It started a night or two after a training weekend we had in Las Vegas, where a bunch of us decided to sit in at a table of Texas Hold 'Em. I lost my $100 buy-in before my seat got warm. Then I went up to my room and barfed, and I thought that was the end of it.

  But, as it turned out, it wasn't.

  As a general rule, and for a few good reasons, I don't gamble with cards. First, there's the old saying "Lucky at cards, unlucky at love," and early on, just out of the Academy, I placed my big bet where it mattered most and got lucky with Jen. (That's she years ago. Now we've got two kids—Kyle and Larry, and she's big with the girl we wanted.) If it meant even the finest chance of losing her, I didn't want to get lucky at cards.

  Second, call me rigid, but in spite of the Internet and ESPN, private poker games remain illegal almost everywhere, including San Mateo, where I live. How am I supposed to enforce laws that I break myself? What kind of an example does that set for my kids?

  Third, money is an issue, and my mom always told me never to gamble with what I couldn't afford to lose.

  Finally, and maybe most important, I really just don't have much of a temperament for the game—in college, I'd sit in on a poker game once in a while, but I'd get literally sick with tension if I found myself in a big pot—big in those days being maybe twenty dollars. I'd barf back then, too. Here's a free life lesson: Something makes you barf, avoid it.

  I had the dream for the first time the night after I got back from Vegas. About six weeks later, after maybe a dozen terrified wake-ups, Jen and I went downstairs and wound up sitting hip to hip on the couch with our hot chocolates. "It's got to be something about your dad," she said.

  "Except that I barely knew my dad."

  Aaron, Sr. was killed in a home robbery when I was nine years old. I was staying at my neighbor's down the street, and my mom had gone away to her sister's to help with the birth of what turned out to be my cousin Emmy. Evidently whoever had cased the house for the burglary thought it was going to be empty. When they broke in, Pop tried to stop them, and paid with his life.

  It's probably one of the main reasons I decided to go into police work—take bastards like that off the street.

  Since we'd had the kids, Jen had come to have some faith in what I'll call nonverbal communication. It wasn't quite ESP—it didn't involve anything supernatural or religious. It was more like a preternatural awareness of those closest to us. Mostly her with the kids, specifically, but I can't deny my own feelings of hyper-awareness, both with her and the kids, that sometimes felt like mind reading. I think it's just what "tuned in" to your kids means, but Jen had come to believe it extended out to a slightly larger radius. Now she said, "Your dad's trying to tell you something."

  "I don't think so, hon. We've got about five thousand years of history and no verified sign that anybody's ever come back and delivered a message from the dead. I can't believe Pop would be the first."

  "All right, then," she said. "You're trying to tell yourself something. But it's about him. Doesn't that make sense? You owe it to yourself to find out what it is."

  "And how do I do that?"

  She shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe talk to somebody?"

  "A shrink? There's no way I need to see a shrink."

  "I didn't say anything about needing one. But you started with these dreams..."

  "This dream."

  "Okay, this dream. You started with this dream the day after you got back from Vegas, where you got sick after playing about five hands of poker..."

  "Maybe I'd had too much to drink."

  "Two beers?" She held up a hand. "Now you're waking up yelling, 'Fold,' or 'Call,' or 'Raise.' Clearly, whatever's going on, it's something about your dad, and somehow poker's part of it, too." She reached across the table and took my hand. "Aaron, look, you're a cop. All I'm saying is investigate it. That's what you do. This thing's eating you up. If you ever want a good night's sleep again, you've got to get to the bottom of it."

  Suddenly, her permission—more than that, her suggestion—made it seem less weird. I wasn't going out trying to interpret a dream. I wasn't buying into a repressed memory. I was merely investigating because that's what cops do.

  My mother, Abby, had remarried, and for almost twenty years now had been with my stepdad, Neal Farber. Because of the ghosts, after the marriage they'd moved into Neal's place a couple of blocks from where Pop had gotten shot, and they still lived there. Early on the morning after Jen and I had our talk, I showed up in uniform, my hat in my hand, at their place to talk to my mom—already up and dressed for school where she taught fifth grade. What a class act, I thought, as I often did. Diamond earrings and tailored suit, hair done and face made up—a sign of respect to her "kids." She'd often say, "Respect them and they respect you back." I love the woman.

  "Well, this is a pleasant surprise," Mom said. She held me by the shoulders and came up to kiss me. "How's my handsome baby this morning?"

  "Most
ly, your baby's thirty years old, Mom, and feeling every year of it."

  "Lucky you," she said. "You think thirty's tired, try fifiy-two."

  My mom, by the way, still qualifies as a babe. Blond, great figure, flawless face. Jen, who is no slag heap herself, thinks it's unfair. Like the rest of the world, it probably is. I smiled down at her and kissed her back. "It looks like you're holding up."

  "Actually, I'm fit as a fiddle, knock wood," she said. "Do you have time for a cup?"

  "I thought you'd never ask."

  After years of making what was quite possibly the worst brewed coffee in the universe, Mom had suddenly become an espresso junkie, proud owner of one of those newfangled machines like you see in Starbucks that can make a couple of cups at a time. In a flash, we were sitting across from one another, sipping a really delicious cup from cat-themed mugs. Nero, her black cat, was stretched out on the kitchen counter between us.

  "Now," she said, "to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" She reached over and gave me a tap on the cheek. "And it is a pleasure. I don't get to see enough of you and my grandchildren."

  "We're only two blocks away, Mom. The door is always open."

  This was true, though somehow Mom and Neal didn't seem to find the time to visit too often. I attributed it mostly to some unnamed tension between Jen and my mother, although it might equally well have been the similarly unspoken disconnect between Neal and me. I didn't think he was that bad a guy, really, but he just wasn't Pop and he never could be. I didn't really blame him if he didn't try too hard to get closer to me anymore after the hard time I gave him in the early years. He knew it wasn't going to happen, no matter what. We were where we were with each other—in orbit around my mother, never close, sometimes far apart.

  But I wasn't there to fix the family dynamic, so I pressed right on. "Actually, I've got a question that I don't know who else could answer. About Pop."

  Immediately, her pretty face fell into a frown. "Your father? What about him?"

  "I've been having this dream." I gave her the short version: the cigar smell, the phrases from poker games, my burning hand, Pop's death. "I just wonder if any of that sings to you."

  She put down her mug slowly. "What are you doing with this, Aaron? Are you reopening his case?"

  "Not really. Certainly, nothing formal. I'm trying to figure out what the dream means at this point. If that leads me to something, I'll try to follow it. But right now, it's just something that keeps waking me up."

  She twirled the cup slowly on the counter, her eyes somewhere far away. "It's so funny you should mention that," she finally admitted. "I mean, in connection with his death. I don't think I ever thought about it in that context."

  "What?"

  "The cigar smell." Suddenly her eyes were back with me. "But it was very much there."

  "Where? What do you mean?"

  "Home. I mean the day I came home after, well, after ... when I first walked into the house. The smell was still overpowering. You know that stale two- or three-day-old cigar stench. I've always hated that smell."

  "Me, too. But you didn't think it had anything to do with Pop's death?"

  "No. Why would I think that? Do you?"

  "No. My only connection to it is in the dream. So what did you think it was?"

  "I thought since I was away ... he knew I hated that smell in the house, but while I wasn't there, he must have got up a game. He always smoked cigars when he played poker."

  "I never realized he even played poker."

  She shrugged. "And almost never at home, at least after the first time when we reached an understanding. But he had an irregular group he played with once in a while. He loved the game. And when he got invited, he'd go, even though it meant no kissing when he got home." She smiled at what must have been a tender memory. "One of my stupid rules I've come to regret. I should have kissed him every chance I got." Shaking herself from the reverie, she seemed to remember her coffee, and picked up the mug. "But I never thought the cigar smell had anything to do with the break-in. Do you think it does?"

  "I've got no idea, Mom. I'm working with a dream here. It's a little nebulous."

  "Well, at the time, I just realized that he must have had a game there, but I didn't think any more about it. Other than that if I'd known, I promised myself I wouldn't have gotten mad at him." She touched a fingertip to the bottom of each of her eyes, blinked away the sudden glassiness. "It's funny," she said after a sharp inhale and exhale of breath, "now I'd let him play every day if it would bring him back. Cigars or no cigars. No offense to Neal, I mean."

  "No. Of course not," I said. "None taken."

  "I mean, Neal can be a fine man, too, when he tries to be. You know that. And it's just that your father was ... he was very special. And us never getting a chance to say good-bye. It's not something you really get over."

  "No. I can see that." I let her recover for a minute before I talked again. "So, Mom, who do you think Pop would have invited over to play?"

  The question brought her up short. "Oh, God, Aaron. I don't know. You're talking over twenty years ago."

  "I know. You and Pop had friends, though, right? Who were they back then?"

  But Mom was shaking her head. "Social friends, Aaron. Couples. We were in the couples-with-kids crowd."

  "Maybe some of the other dads liked to play poker. Or maybe Neal?"

  "No. Neal doesn't play at all. He lost a fortune once and learned his lesson." Sighing, she seemed lost for a moment. Suddenly the tragic but clean-and-uncomplicated death of her first husband had become problematic. She looked up at the wall clock and back at me. "I've got to get to work, Aaron. How about if I think about this today and give you a list tonight? It's a little upsetting."

  "It is, I know. Tonight would be fine, Mom."

  She was getting up, grabbing both mugs automatically, moving toward the sink. "Meanwhile, you could ask the Tompkins and Cortipassos. Oh, and the Waylens. One of them might remember something." She turned around to face me, her face now drawn with worry. "You don't really think one of them might have had something to do with your father's death, do you?"

  "I don't know, Mom. I just don't know. Somebody did, and whoever it was, they never caught him."

  Terry Anders was the inspector who'd worked the case. Retired now, he was working in his home garden on the flats behind the Hillsdale Mall when I caught up to him on my lunch break. It was late May, the day had grown warm, and Terry was a sight in work boots, Giants cap, khaki shorts, and a tank-top T-shirt. With his protruding stomach, it might have more accurately been called a basketball-top T-shirt. He had about twelve rows of young corn and stood facing me, leaning on his hoe, immune to the sun beating down on us. "Yeah," he said, "I wondered when that one was going to get to you."

  "It got to me right away, Terry, but there didn't seem to be any mystery. Now there might be." I saw no point in mentioning the dream to a fellow cop. I knew what my own reaction to that would have been in other circumstances, and didn't want to even start to have to explain. Spur of the moment, I decided to lay it off on my mother who, I told Terry, had suddenly asked me about the cigar smoke and poker. "Granted, it's slim and none. But hey, it's my mom. I've got to ask."

  "Sure. No sweat. Speaking of which." He wiped the perspiration from his forehead with his baseball cap. "Let's go find us some shade."

  On a small covered patio by the back door, we sat in lawn chairs. Terry filled up a couple of mason jars with cold hose water, and that's what we were drinking. "So," he began, "what do you want to know?"

  "Just what you eventually got."

  He drank and shook his head. "You know, I'm ashamed to say, not much. It was pretty much a cut-and-dried B&E. You check the file yet? The pictures?"

  "No. Records can't dig it out for another day or two. So I thought I'd come to the horse's mouth first."

  Terry laughed. "Horse's ass is more like it. Okay, give me a minute." Sitting back, Anders did a darn fine Nero Wolfe impression�
�eyes closed, lips puckering in and out, huge gut rising and falling. "The shooting was on the stairs, your dad maybe coming down from the bedroom. He was wearing pajama bottoms. The bed was unmade, so maybe he'd already gotten into bed, then heard something. There was a metal softball bat on the stairway, too—maybe the nearest weapon he could grab. The shots were through a pillow to kill the sounds."

  "What got stolen?"

  His eyes still closed, Terry nodded. "Wallet, watch. Your mother reported some jewelry. That's about it."

  "Jesus! And Pop gets himself killed over that?"

  "Hey," Terry said, "all the guy needed was his next fix. He probably got it."

  "You think that was it?"

  Terry cocked his head. "You don't?"

  "I don't know. It's damn slim pickin's if the guy went in thinking the house was empty, which is the explanation I'd always heard."

  "It could have been that, true. But it could just as easily have just been a junkie hitting a dark house at random. And either way, your dad being there put a crimp in the plan. The guy took what he could as fast as he could and lit out."

  I lived with that for a second before asking, "You see any sign of a poker game?"