Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  “I didn’t kill my husband and you didn’t kill your wife. The only monument either one of them needs or can ever have is for us to go on living our lives the very best way we can. If you think you can see it that way, then fine and dandy and I am glad I met you and let’s go find some breakfast.

  “And if you can’t, well, I am still glad I met you. But lover, I want you to pack up your spare socks, shirt, and undershorts and find somewhere else to roost.”

  As therapy, it was direct and rough and I think I was a little bit resentful at the time because Maxey was taking over the role of wise and steady counselor, which I had considered to be my very own turf.

  But she was right, of course, and hearing it from her was somehow more effective than saying it to myself.

  It did not entirely stop the dreams.

  And the sneaky little worm of guilt still crawled around in the background waiting for more food.

  But it served as a kind of watershed for me, marking the day I finally began to shrug off the lethargy that had hung so heavy since leaving the hospital: the day I started to seek a direction without relating it directly to my wife’s death or to my lingering feelings of guilt.

  A beginning. Small, but very, very necessary.

  “Yes, sometimes I still dream about Sara,” I said, giving Maxey an answer to the question that had triggered my sudden rush of memory. “But not the midnight war-games you may remember. Quieter dreams now. And lately I’ve had trouble seeing her face.”

  She nodded with understanding. “Same for me,” she said. “Even when I’m awake, the face I see when I think of Bart is from a photograph. The real one’s gone. Faded away. I can hear his voice if I try hard—though I almost never do—but the face, no way. And I don’t think it’s just because of being with Sam.”

  I waited for her to go on with that, but she didn’t, and I certainly wasn’t going to get a better opening to ask the question I’d had in mind for the past half hour.

  So I took a deep breath and let fly. “Speaking of Sam,” I said, “just who the hell was that we identified as him back there at the hospital?”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Yet, what would King David say of this trust of ours?

  Or Paul the Apostle?

  THIRTEEN

  The ability to accept reality, no matter how inconvenient, had always been one of Maxey’s more outstanding qualities.

  And she still had it. Anyone else might have tried to bluff the moment through or walk away in anger without answering, and I think both alternatives crossed her mind.

  But we knew each other too well.

  “His name,” she said with an air of composure that must have been expensive, “was Terrence Lyle McDuff, if that means anything to you. Probably not. He was an actor. I spotted him three years ago, playing second leads in a dinner theater company that was passing through Morocco. He was a ringer for Sam and he’d been around long enough to know he was never going to make it big as an actor.”

  “Sam hired him?”

  “As a double, yes. Someone to confuse the opposition, Sam said, and leave him free to move around without anyone knowing where he really was. The resemblance was almost scary, and it got better with a little work on the hair color and one session of plastic surgery.”

  She looked at me expectantly.

  “It was the feet,” I said.

  “Oh...shit.”

  “A fluke. It’s been a long time, and I didn’t spot anything—well, not anything I’d really have picked up on anyway—playing cards with him all night and all morning. Sam must have filled him in pretty well on me?”

  The last was a question, and she nodded absently, waiting for me to tell her the rest of it.

  “What went wrong,” I said, “was when they called us into the room and you were busy telling them yes, it was Sam. I was standing at the other end of the bed, and the sheet had been pulled up too high. I could see the feet, and...you remember, I was in the hospital with Sam...”

  She nodded again, and not at all absently this time. Maxey was annoyed. With herself. “And so you’d be sure to remember what kind of a wound Sam Goines was being treated for,” she said.

  “Right. He’d been hit in the leg. Two holes in the thigh, one in the calf—and one round that had chopped a couple of toes off his right foot.”

  “Christ.”

  “Him, maybe. But Sam for sure.”

  We sat in silence for a while, thinking our own thoughts. But I had more questions to ask, and they were important. To me, anyway.

  “Where’s Sam, Maxey?” I said.

  She didn’t answer at once and I still couldn’t reach her wa to see what was really going on inside, but I think she wanted to tell me to go to hell, and if she had, I couldn’t have blamed her much. But she didn’t.

  Instead, I was astonished to see tears forming at the corners of her eyes, as the carefully manicured hands clutched white-fingered at the edge of the table between us.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. I wish to God I did, but I don’t. I don’t! He’s sitting out there...somewhere...playing some kind of game I can’t understand, except that it scares me to death.”

  One of the tears got too big for its base and rolled unnoticed down her cheek.

  “Old lover mine,” she said, “I think my smart, rich, powerful, and famous husband is planning to have me killed.”

  That took more than a little explaining, and Maxey spent the next few minutes filling me in—with a brief hiatus for the arrival of the meal we had ordered.

  Fear didn’t seem to have affected her appetite.

  But what she told me seemed to indicate that she had real cause for concern.

  For openers, she was convinced Sam had been behind the killings at the Scheherazade.

  “He rigged it for sure,” she said. “Set it up with that mercenary soldier son of a bitch he’s had hanging around for the past few months.”

  “The one they call Colonel Connor?”

  “Him. I don’t know if Sam meant to kill Danny DiMarco. Can’t think of any reason why he’d want to do that. But Terry McDuff was a different thing. I’m sure as I’m sitting here with you Sam meant him to die—and found some way to get that nurse in there to finish the job when he looked like he could live through it and wake up enough to tell someone what was going on.”

  “But why should he want to kill his double?”

  Maxey’s eyes had changed color. The tears were gone, and it was as if they had washed out some of the deeper tones of violet, leaving them a lighter and less unusual shade. It was a phenomenon I remembered, one that had always fascinated me, like so many other things about Maxey.

  “Terry was becoming a problem instead of a solution,” she said. “He was a good enough actor, lots better than anyone had ever thought. No one ever so much as blinked when he impersonated Sam. But he couldn’t live it on a full-time basis. He started drinking a lot, and when Sam called him on that and put the fear of God into him, he seemed to stop and get along without it...”

  “But,” I prompted.

  “Yeah—but,” she said. “A couple of months ago Sam found out Terry was doing cocaine. The new kind they call crack. Super-addictive, and a head will do anything to get more when he’s running short.”

  I nodded, beginning to see the pattern.

  “So you think Sam couldn’t just fire him. Let him go?”

  “Not with the kind of memories Terry had in his head,” Maxey said. “I think he set up the game to kill him. And I think he got me here to Las Vegas for the same reason.”

  I thought it over but couldn’t make it fit.

  Not Sam. And not Maxey. Whatever it was between the two of them had been too real and too sudden not to have a downside, of course. That would only be natural. But...kill Maxey?

  No way.

  I remembered the day I had introduced them; Sam had just completed the second or third of the arms deals that established h
im as a credible factor on the international scene, and he had come to Las Vegas to look me up for a celebration.

  Two weeks later they were married.

  Maxey had been a bit wary about telling me what had happened; we were still living together, though I had been away on business—a trip to Alaska for a medium-sized game of hold ’em—and she thought I might not understand.

  The hell of it was, I did. Too well.

  We had never lied to each other, never tried to make what we had together the great and all-consuming passion of a lifetime. We liked each other and valued each other and were happy together and each supplied certain emotional and other qualities the other seemed to need.

  I was beginning to come to terms with the man I was rather than the one I had always supposed myself to be. Taking the first steps along a road I’ve followed ever since. Maxey’s world had settled, too; the loneliness and aimlessness that are the most common problem among people who spend their lives in the midst of crowds were at bay. I was there when she needed someone not to talk to.

  We supported and comforted and healed each other, and were there for each other in the most basic way as well.

  Love?

  Well, it sure wasn’t hate.

  But all the same, there had never been any talk about making things permanent, and by the time Sam came to town we had passed the emotional point where such a thing was likely. It would have ended. Sometime.

  So while I wasn’t exactly overjoyed to discover that I was on my own again, and thought it had all been pretty sudden, and was maybe just a little bit irked with Sam for moving into territory that was clearly occupied—even though not actually staked—by an old friend, I wasn’t really too angry. Or surprised.

  The three of us even had a kind of impromptu wedding breakfast together at the airport just before they boarded a plane back to Sam’s new headquarters in Europe, and the looks and the smiles they gave each other were enough to remove any lingering doubts I might have had. Maxey had never looked at me like that.

  I had managed to lay hands on a little sack of rice, and threw a handful or two as they started down the jetway...and that was the last I saw of them.

  Until now.

  So I just couldn’t make it fit.

  Ten years can make a difference and hate is not really the opposite of love and men and women really do kill the people they are married to. But...Sam and Maxey?

  “No way,” I said, back in the present and sure of my ground.

  The food arrived, and we spent the next few minutes portioning out its various parts and applying the hoisin sauce and fiddling around with scallion brushes. But I knew it was only an intermission, a time to show proper respect for something of value. Maxey would explain in her own good time.

  And she did, about the time the tea was ready to pour.

  “Sam changed,” she said, tasting the flower-scented brew and favoring it with a smile of pleasant memory.

  “So I noticed,” I said with a bit more acid in my voice than I had meant to be there.

  “More than that,” she said. “You weren’t there to see it. I was.”

  I sipped my tea and waited for her to go on.

  “At first, it was just the frantic activity I’d expected, marrying a man in his business. It wasn’t nine-to-five and I hadn’t thought it was going to be and the truth was that the pace suited us both. Being apart made getting back together that much better, and if it wasn’t a whole lot like most other marriages, that was all right, too. Tell me the truth, lover: Can you see me barging around to PTA meetings with a station wagon full of kids? Or Sam in a scoutmaster’s uniform?”

  Well...no.

  “So, all right. Things were good between us and with the business, and the people we knew were bright and interesting and fun. And rich. Say it out loud, so we won’t have to talk around it: rich!

  “That counted with me.

  “Oh, sure, I loved Sam all right. There was a strong physical attraction right from the beginning, and that powerful drive and energy that just always seemed to come off him in waves. He’s not the type who would ever have to chase women, any more than you are, my one-eyed seducer of stray show girls. And it was more than physical between us; we were right for each other and we both knew it.

  “But the money still made a difference. At the risk of shattering any illusions you might still have about me, dear old darling, let’s admit right here and now that I don’t think for a moment that I’d have married Sam Goines if I hadn’t known he was rich and going to get richer.

  “Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Lover, you knew me pretty well, knew what I came from. And where.

  “I may not have known exactly what I wanted. And maybe I still don’t; kind of hard to tell sometimes. But from when I was about four years old, I sure knew what I didn’t want.

  “I didn’t want to stay in Detroit.

  “Rich or poor, no Detroit.

  “And I didn’t want to live the kind of life my ma or my aunts or my uncles or any of the rest of my family did, working their tails off for chicken feed and looking like old men and old women at thirty and dying all worn down to nothing at about fifty.

  “Not for Maxey.

  “The marriage to Bart was really a mistake; one of the things that hurt worst after he was dead was knowing it wouldn’t have lasted if he’d lived and feeling kind of relieved at not having to tell him so.

  “There—that’s something you never heard from me before, and it’s true and it’s been eating at me for a long time.

  “The nurse’s training and then, later, working in shows here in Vegas were all part of that same thing. A way out. And Sam was the final step, the guarantee that I would never have to see Detroit again except maybe under the wing of a jet airliner thirty thousand feet overhead...”

  It was a long speech and Maxey took a moment to catch her breath while I tried to form the words to tell her that very little of what she’d said was really news to me—and that it was neither unusual nor as totally negative as she seemed determined to make it. But she wasn’t done.

  “So, all right,” she said. “Maxey got what she wanted, and a man she might really have been able to love, besides.

  “Only things began to change. In a few years, Sam had all the money anyone on earth could want. More than he could spend in ten lifetimes, even with me to help. But he isn’t the kind who can just quit and spend it and live happily. He had to find something else to want...and he did.

  “He wanted power.

  “Not just the kind most people are after, the sense of being in control of their own lives and being able to handle most of the jolts and zaps that come along. That’s normal. A part of being human.

  “But the kind of power Sam Goines was after was something else, and I think it may have started a long time before I knew him. Back during the war, or maybe even before that...”

  She paused again, but instead of interrupting I found myself looking into a mirror that I hadn’t known was there. I saw my own face, but there was another behind it—someone I barely remembered. He was listening. And thinking.

  “Suddenly we were up to our hips in politicians,” Maxey said. “Sam had always tried to stay away from them before; whenever he could, he dealt only with the designated buyers—war ministers or defense secretaries or chiefs of staff or whatever the local money-minding hoodlum called himself.

  “But now we were traveling around the world hobnobbing with presidents who hadn’t been elected and kings who used to be lieutenant colonels and lunatics whose people thought they were God and who had finally got around to believing it themselves.

  “What was worse, he was beginning to act like them...and think the way they did.

  “The power he was after was the kind they had. Only bigger. He knew, he could see, what it had done to them, but either he didn’t care or he didn’t think that would happen to him and I could never get him to see that it was happening already.

  “I couldn’t take too much o
f that. Weak stomach, I guess. So finally Sam was making those trips by himself, and I was moving around the world more or less on my own. We saw each other sometimes. By appointment—the way he asked me to meet him here in Vegas. But even when we got together we had less and less to say to each other.

  “There was no big scene. No real split. We never talked about divorce.

  “But the marriage was over.

  “And then I met Harry...”

  Maxey stopped talking and waited for me to react to that, and at first I didn’t think I was going to.

  It had been a long time.

  But then the feelings came, of course, and I was both surprised and disappointed to discover that quite a few of them were growing out of a sour little patch of emotional turf reserved for jealousy.

  There had been a sense of loss, yes, when she married Sam Goines. But it was tempered by the fact that I liked and respected Sam and thought they might be happy together—and, just possibly, by the unacknowledged sense that whatever had been between us was slowly but discernibly moving in the direction of habit and even staleness.

  This was something entirely different, and I found myself forming a mental picture of Harry: large, attentive, and predatory; costumed, perhaps, as a ski instructor or the kind of military officer who thrives on embassy or guard-of-honor duty. Or maybe tricked out in Guccis and gold chains as one of the “film producer” types that Europe seems to crank out by the oily job-lot lately.

  And then I laughed.

  It was the wrong thing to do and the wrong time to do it, and I could see Maxey beginning one of her rare slow burns. But I couldn’t help it. The situation, and my immediate embroidery on the facts, was just too obvious—and grotesque—to rate anything else. I was behaving like the kind of injured husband that even the dumbest romance novelists have retired to the dust heap. Disgusting. And too comical to ignore.

  “What’s so damn funny?” Maxey inquired in a voice I knew was both controlled and dangerous.

  “Me,” I told her honestly, and explained.

  Her expression had softened by the time I was done, and I thought that the wa I still couldn’t quite reach was almost back to room temperature. But there was still the tiniest hint of constraint as she continued, and I posted it. Warning: a point not to be passed if I was interested in staying on good terms with her. And it was becoming more and more apparent to me that I was interested.