by Jim Thompson
The waiter brought him a fourth drink, set it down in front of him with a very deliberate gesture. Agate stared at him coldly, and the waiter asked him if he would like to see a menu.
Agate said that he wouldn’t. What he wanted was a telephone, and he wanted one now. “Right now, understand. Let’s see a little service around here!”
His eyes glittered triumphantly as the waiter scampered away. He took two long gulps of his drink. He waited in aloof silence while a phone was plugged in at the booth.
In his many years with the bank, he had had frequent contacts with prominent and powerful Houstonites, Zearsdale among them. He was invariably in the role of a glorified messenger boy on these occasions, but he did not remember them that way now. Rather, in the roseate present, he saw himself moving among these people as a friend rather than a flunky. They were his pals and he was their pal, and naturally Jake Zearsdale would want to give his pal Lee Agate an option to buy stock at two-fifths of its market value.
Perf’ly understan’ble, right? Right? Ri—
Nope, wasn’t right. Not now, maybe later. But Jake Zearsdale had to be called, all ri’, al ri-ut! Had to be called about ol’ pal Mitch Corley.
Agate straightened himself again. The importance of what he was about to do impressed itself on his sodden brain, demanding all the effort of which he was capable. And getting an outside line, he dialed and spoke into the phone very carefully.
A secretary answered him, passed him on to an executive secretary, and thence, to an executive secretary of an executive assistant. Finally, almost ten minutes after he had placed the call, he was connected with Zearsdale.
He was beginning to fog up again by then, and he virtually guffawed into the phone. He choked it off, mumbled a blurry, “ ’Scuse me, Mr. Zearsdale.”
The line was silent for a moment. Then, his voice harshly musical, Zearsdale said, “Certainly. Who is this please?”
“Dis is duh guy dat called you las’ week,” Agate said. “About Mitch Corley, r’member. Called you last week ’bout Mitch—hic—Corley, I’m duh—”
“Would you mind speaking a little louder, please?” Zearsdale said. “We seem to have a bad connection.”
“Cert’nly”—Agate raised his voice. “Said I was duh guy dat called you las’ week about Mish—Mitch—”
“Louder, please. And just a little slower.”
“I said,” said Agate, enunciating as clearly as he could, “that I was the guy who called you last week about Mitch Corley. ’Juh get me that time?”
“Mmm, yes, I believe I did,” Zearsdale murmured. “Do you have some more information on him?”
Agate shook his head firmly. Then laughed in self-deprecation as he realized that the negative could not be seen. “Little joke on me,” he explained to the phone, and explained the jest in detail. Zearsdale laughed politely.
“I’m a little crowded for time,” he added. “Perhaps you’d better tell me why you are calling.”
“Wha’? Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure,” Agate mumbled. “Jus’ wanted to say I was all wrong ’bout Mitch. Checked into it m’self an’ found I’d made a terrible mistake. Hesitated—hic—’bout callin’ yuh, but figgered man makes mistake oughta be big ’nough to admit it.”
“I see,” Zearsdale said thoughtfully. “I see.”
“ ’Mean it,” Agate insisted. “ ’S’all wrong. Based on unr’lible information. Checked it out m’self an’—”
“Possibly. Just possibly.” Zearsdale’s tone was judicious. “But I’m inclined to think that you’re not telling the truth. I’m quite a student of voices and you don’t sound at all sincere.”
“Oh, yeah?” Agate glared belligerently into the mouthpiece. “Now, you lissen t’me, buddy—”
“Shut up,” Zearsdale said.
“Huh? What’d’ya mean shut—”
“I mean to shut up, and you’d better do it,” Zearsdale said. “You’d also better stop drinking. You can’t handle it. You’re a big enough damned fool when you’re sober.”
Agate’s mouth was suddenly very dry. His lips moved in a silently futile attempt at speech.
“Now I’m going to give you some advice,” Zearsdale continued. “I wouldn’t take your word for anything, so I’ll find out the truth about Corley myself. Meanwhile, he is not to know that you have spoken to me. You will make no attempt to warn him. If you do, I’ll make you the sorriest man in Texas, and that’s a promise, Mr. L. J. Agate.”
The mention of his name was like a purgative to Agate. He was abruptly very sober, more frightened than he had ever been in all his fear-filled life.
“W-What,” he croaked. “What are you going to do?”
“Do?” said Zearsdale, and his voice was almost lilting. “Why I’m going to invite Mr. Corley to have dinner with me.”
He hung up.
Agate hung up. He looked at his drink, started to reach for it, then jerked his hand back as though it had touched a flame.
He had better go back to the bank, he guessed. No, he had better go home. No, he had better go—go—?
The waiter approached, still deferential from the last time Agate had barked at him. Agate straightened himself, patted the thin hair on his scalp, assumed an impressive frown, opened his mouth to speak, and vomited all to hell over everything.
16
The day had been hot and humid; a muggy, sweltering day; and one seemed on the point of boiling in his own perspiration. The kind of day that is not quite so “unusual” as the city’s civic organizations would have one believe. Those organizations may admit that Houston’s weather occasionally leaves something to be desired. But they hasten to point out, and with some truth, that however unpleasant the day, the nights are delightfully cool. To someone unaccustomed to the climate, the delightful coolness may bear a striking resemblance to frigidity. And as Mitch had pre-prandial drinks with Zearsdale, he was grateful for the low blaze in the fieldstone fireplace.
The fireplace was in the kitchen of the Zearsdale home. Zearsdale, in shirt sleeves and a butcher’s apron, had led him back to the kitchen immediately upon his arrival, and they were now seated at a large wooden table—one of those sturdy utility tables such as one sees in restaurant kitchens—and drinking a very authoritative ale from pewter mugs.
The oil man sighed on a subtly happy note, brushing ale-foam from his mouth as he looked around the huge beamed room. “I think I’d live in here if I could move a bed in,” he said. “There’s something about it that makes me feel relaxed and at peace with myself.”
“It’s a lot of kitchen,” Mitch smiled. “I know I’ve never seen anything like it outside of a big hotel.”
“And you never will,” Zearsdale said, nodding toward the range which ran practically the width of the room. “Three cooks can work at that at the same time. You could run five thousand meals off of it in a day if you had to.”
“I can believe it. You do a lot of entertaining out here, I suppose?”
“Practically none.” Zearsdale shook his head. “I just happen to like a big, well-equipped kitchen. I like to see it and be in it. I’m not married, and any entertaining I do is usually done at the club. But still…well, I suppose it goes back a long way. How about you, Corley? What kind of home life did you have as a boy?”
Mitch said that he hadn’t had much in the accepted sense of the word. “We always lived in hotels. My father sold various kinds of intangibles, and my mother worked with him.”
“They must have hit it lucky somewhere along the line.”
“Pure luck, I’m afraid,” Mitch said deprecatingly. “I don’t know too much about it, since I was just a kid at the time. But I know they sunk a lot of money in things that never panned out.”
Zearsdale poured more ale for him, remarking that their backgrounds were not dissimilar. “We ran the cookshack for drilling crews. My mother and I did, rather; my dad usually got some kind of little job flunkying around the rig. A drilling rig runs twenty-four hours a day, of course, which mea
nt that we had to serve meals around the clock. I don’t think my mother and I ever got to sleep more than two hours in a row.”
He shook his head, remembering, his eyes wandering over the room’s extravagantly elaborate equipment. “We did all the cooking on a four-burner oil-stove, and we lived and slept in the same room we cooked in. We…well, never mind. There’s nothing very interesting about drudgery.”
“It’s a good story,” Mitch said. “I’d like to hear it.”
“Well,” Zearsdale shrugged. “I’ll keep it short then…”
The owner of a wildcat lease on which they were working (he continued) had become deeply in debt to them. So deeply that by the time the well was drilled in—a gusher—they owned a large share of the property. Borrowing money from friends, he tried to pay them off for the actual cash amount of his debt. When they refused, he wangled a secret agreement with the pipeline company.
The company contracted to take the oil, being legally bound to. But payment was to be upon delivery; at such time, that is, as the pipeline was connected with the well. It soon became apparent that that time was not going to come as long as the Zearsdales retained their share. There was one delay after another. Delays that were an obvious ploy in a game of freeze-out. But there was no money to go into court and prove it.
“My dad was all for settling—he wasn’t a very strong man, I’m afraid…” A contemptuous note crept into Zearsdale’s voice. “But my mother had other ideas. He wouldn’t go along with them, so she and I handled it ourselves. We had to, you know, Corley? Here a great wrong was being done, and the law couldn’t touch the people who were doing it. So we had to. I was fourteen years old at the time, but it’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten: That the strong people of the world have an obligation to that world. That’s why they have been made strong, you understand. To crack down hard when they see someone getting out of line…”
“Mmm, yes. Very interesting,” Mitch said. “But just what did you and your mother do?”
“Well…” Zearsdale chuckled. “No one could prove that we did anything, Corley. They didn’t even suggest that we did. It was put down as an accident, and it really raised holy hell. You see, that was ranching country out there. Rolling grasslands with cattle grazing as far as the eye could see. When the fire broke out—and my mother and I were a long way off, naturally—”
“Fire?” Mitch stared at him. “Do you mean you—you—”
“Fire. From the seepage around the well. It wouldn’t have happened if the pipeline had been connected as it should have been, so they were held liable for the damages. Ten million dollars, plus another hundred thousand to have the fire put out. On top of that, we collected our pro rata share of the cost of every barrel of oil that had burned.” Zearsdale chuckled again. Grimly. “There was no more stalling after that. No more trouble. From them or anyone else.”
He had Mitch accompany him into a large walk-in refrigerator to help select their dinner steaks. He cooked and served them expertly, and fortunately Mitch was very hungry. Otherwise, he might not have been able to ignore the picture which their odor aroused in his mind: a picture of charred grasslands, littered as far as the eye could see with the smoking carcasses of cattle that had been roasted alive.
After dinner, Zearsdale washed and dried the dishes, politely but firmly declining Mitch’s offer to help. “I’m an old pro at this, Corley, and I kind of like to keep my hand in. God knows I’ve got plenty of hired help if I didn’t choose to do it.”
Mitch assumed that the servants had been let off for the evening. But Zearsdale said they had never been on.
“They need time of their own as well as I do. Aside from that, most of them are getting along in years—they’ve been with me since my mother’s time—and I wouldn’t want to keep them up late.”
He stripped out of his apron and dried his hands on it, shaking his head to Mitch’s remark that he was very generous with his servants.
“No. No, I’m afraid I’m not, Corley. It isn’t possible for a man to be generous when he has a half-billion dollars, which is my estimated net worth. He’s lost his capacity to be touched by what he does, you know. He has no personal identification with it. There’s neither a sacrifice in giving away a million nor a gain in making one. Now, I do try very hard to be fair, and I think I succeed most of the time. But you’ll find a lot of people who would disagree. Such as,” he grimaced distastefully, “our cheating friend, Birdwell.”
The memory of the prematurely gray man, his easy laughter, the obvious liking of the people around him, moved Mitch uneasily. “I can’t help feeling sorry for him,” he said. “I almost wish I’d kept my mouth shut about his cheating.”
“I feel sorry for him, too,” Zearsdale said gravely. “He’s thrown away a fine career. He’s dragged his family down with him. But he did it, not I nor you. We can’t ignore wrong, Corley, and we can’t reward people for doing it.”
“But he had a good record with you, didn’t he? He’d been with you for a long time.”
“He had a very good record,” Zearsdale nodded, “and he’d been very well rewarded for it. Now, if I reward a man for being good, and believe me I do—I’ve given anonymous help to many people who have no connection with my company—then I must punish him for being bad. Or don’t you agree with me?”
Mitch hesitated, looking into the thick-lipped face with its sharp, cold eyes—utterly sincere eyes. Looking away again.
“Well,” he said, “I should think that would be a very uncomfortable responsibility for you. Like being God, you know.”
“Yes,” Zearsdale agreed gravely, “that’s exactly what it is. Like being God.”
The intent eyes remained on Mitch for a moment, and Mitch fought down an almost irresistible impulse to laugh. He was half-inclined to believe, for that matter, that he was expected to laugh—that the oil man had been giving him a dead-pan ribbing.
Take that bit about setting an oil well on fire. Now, that didn’t ring true, did it?
Zearsdale suddenly grinned, remarking that they didn’t have to solve all the world’s problems tonight, now did they? “Thought any more about that stock option?” he added. “Think you’re going to be able to pick it up?”
“It doesn’t look that way at the moment.” Mitch shook his head regretfully. “I don’t fully understand the picture, but I seem to be involved in a long-term investment program. I couldn’t pull out at this point without losing practically everything that’s been put into it.”
“I see. I think I know what you mean,” Zearsdale said casually. “Well, do you feel up to a little fun?” He simulated a man shooting dice. “Like to roll the bones a little?”
“Whatever you say,” Mitch smiled.
He followed Zearsdale to a sunken recreation room, and the oil man got brandy for them from a long saloon-type bar. Then, as Zearsdale excused himself (“to go after ammunition”), he wandered over to the dice table. It was a regulation, gambling-house crap table, marked off for field, pass, come, craps, and so on. In the ceiling above it, and approximately the same dimensions, was a mirror. Mitch was idly puzzled by it—why a mirror over a crap table? He picked up the dice from the green felt, and made a few throws with them. Zearsdale returned, slapping two thick sheafs of bills together—new one-hundred-dollar bills with the bank’s band still around them.
“Warming up on me, huh?” He laughed roguishly. “Well, we’ll see about that. Want to tee-lee for firsts?”
Each of them rolled one of the dice. Mitch got a six. Zearsdale matched it.
Mitch threw a five next time, not wanting to look too good. Zearsdale came back with a six. He picked up both dice and shook them.
“Put a name to it, Corley. A buck—two bucks?”
“A couple of bucks will be fine,” Mitch said, and he dropped two hundred dollars on the table.
“Two into that,” Zearsdale said, and he laid down a packet of the hundreds.
He rolled the dice. They came up craps—snake-eyes. Si
nce he had had no point, he lost the bet but kept the dice. “Shoot the four bucks,” he said, and came out with a big seven.
Again picking up the transparent cubes, he glanced at Mitch. “Eight or any part, Corley.”
“Eight,” Mitch nodded, and he dropped more money on the table.
Zearsdale sixed on the next roll, and fell off a few rolls later with a seven. He chuckled, good-humoredly, tapping the sheaf of bills.
“Sixteen into me, my friend. Want to shoot it?”
“Sure,” Mitch agreed. “Shoot it all.”
He was still intent on making it look good, so he rolled a point rather than passing. The point was ten, and he came right back with a—seven!
He could hardly believe it for a moment. How in the hell could it have happened? He could think of only one reason, and that reason was not nearly so far-fetched as it seemed.
The rich do get richer, the majority do, often with no apparent effort on their part. Them that has gets. The same quality which led them to their original getting continues to prevail in their favor. Perhaps there is a better name for that quality than luck, but no one has ever heard it.
Of course, Mitch could admit the possibility that he might have goofed; he had done it before to the tune of much bigger losses. But always before he had sensed the slipping of his control, the momentary short-circuit between his brain and his fingers. This time, however, he had had no such feelings.
He had called for a ten, certain of its arrival. And the devil had jumped up at him.
Still, he hadn’t lost anything yet. He had been shooting with Zearsdale’s money. So despite a certain uneasiness, his gambler’s conviction that skill can never beat luck, he agreed to another doubling of the bet.
“Sure,” he said, piling bills onto the green felt. “Thirty-two’s a nice round number.”
“Here we go,” Zearsdale said, and away he went.
With a six-five, a six-ace, a five-two, a four-trey, an eight, another eight, and another eleven…