She came downstairs an hour after that. It was around midnight, maybe a little after. The older daughter was home from the sorority house and she had already been downstairs to meet us and kiss Murray good night. Then Joyce appeared with a tray of sandwiches, ham and swiss on rye, and Murray took out bottles of Dutch beer from the bar refrigerator. I had a sandwich and a bottle of beer. They made a good combination.Joyce Rogers sat in the odd chair again, relaxed in it like a cat in front of a fire. She asked who was winning and Murray laughed humorlessly.
“The rich get richer,” he said, pointing at me. “And the poor get second-best hands.”
“You’re winning, Bill?”
“I’ve been getting good cards,” I said.
I was up close to two hundred by then. The game figured to be good for another yard, maybe more and maybe less. I didn’t want to push hard any more. It probably wouldn’t be necessary. When you move out in front of a game you have a psychological edge that amounts to almost as much of an advantage as a good false shuffle. The losers tend to follow your lead and fold when you push them. Nothing succeeds like success, and nobody wins like a winner.
But you get habits. Even honest players generally manage to peek at the bottom card on the deck when they’re dealing. I do it all the time, just automatically. So when I was dealing a hand and the bottom card gave me a full house, I dealt it to myself. It’s a little harder coming off the bottom than it is to deal seconds, but I had been doing it all night. I filled my boat and took the pot over three fives.
“Murray,” she said, “you haven’t brought me flowers in the longest time.”
“What brought that up?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking. I remember when I lived in New York a boy I was seeing brought me roses every day. He bought them for half a dollar from a dealer in the subway. They were the nicest roses.”
Rogers laughed. “Well,” he said, “the next time I’m in New York—”
“That’s right,” she said softly. “It would have to wait until then, wouldn’t it? Because there aren’t any subways in this town, and it would be impossible to find a subway dealer here.”
I dropped a whole stack of chips to the floor. It was just as well, because it gave me a chance to compose myself while I hunted around and picked them up. It would be impossible to find a subway dealer here. Her patter was just a load of nonsense unless you happened to know the language. Then it was right on the beam.
A subway dealer is the sharp’s term for a mechanic who can deal off the bottom of the deck, just as a man who can deal seconds is called a second dealer or a number-two man. So she was telling me plenty of things in a few meaningless sentences. She was saying that she had tipped to me, that she had seen the card scurry off the bottom of the deck just as cute as you please. And she was telling me that she knew the language, that she knew things about poker that you couldn’t find in Yardley’s book on the subject.
But she wasn’t telling tales. She was playing little games with me, sitting there at my left and watching me take her husband’s money away from him without a whisper. She wouldn’t dream of mentioning it to him. And she wouldn’t dream of letting me think she didn’t know about it. She had to put a small bug in my ear just to keep her hand in.
We broke at two-thirty. I cashed in three hundred ten dollars worth of chips and wound up a cool two hundred eighty dollars to the good. Ed Hart was up thirty or forty dollars. The other five men went for sixty to seventy bucks apiece. It was a hard hit but nothing harder than any of them could afford.
“Back next week, Bill?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I’ll be long gone by then. Now that Sy’s put my teeth back together, I ought to get on down to New York and see about setting up some job interviews.”
“Be a shame to lose you,” Lou Holman said. “We ought to get a chance at taking our money back.”
“This isn’t a bad place to live,” Rogers said. “It’s a good size for a city, big enough to be interesting and small enough to be fairly friendly. You don’t have any ties anywhere, do you?”
“None.”
“Never married?”
“Once,” I said. “It didn’t work out.” Which was true enough, and which was something I rarely talked about. Or thought about if I could avoid it.
“You could probably make a good connection here,” Rogers resumed. “New York’s a fairly cold place, despite the florists my wife seems to be nostalgic about. There are some plastics outfits here—I don’t know much about them, but there’s probably somebody around who could use a good man.”
“Don’t talk him into it,” Harold Barnes said. “It’ll cost us money to keep him in town. He plays too strong a game.”
“Hell,” Murray said, “I just want a chance to get it back.”
We had a laugh or two over that. I put my winnings in my wallet and Murray showed us to the door. Sy Daniels insisted on giving me a ride to the Panmore and I didn’t argue all that hard. He wanted to talk about poker but I switched the conversation around to Mrs. Murray Rogers. He drove through empty streets with a smelly cigarette in his mouth and he talked about her.
“She’s a lot of woman,” he said. “That’s not hard to see, is it?”
I muttered something noncommittal.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “To be perfectly frank, I thought Murray was being a damned fool when he married her. He’s around fifty, you know, and she’s almost twenty years younger than he is. That’s a lot of distance. When a middle-aged man falls for a younger woman he can wind up looking like a jackass. Especially when the woman looks like Joyce does.”
“But it’s working for him?”
Sy grinned. “He looks happy, doesn’t he? We all figured she was marrying him for his dough. He’s got a lot of it, Bill. A good tax man writes his own ticket these days and Murray is damned good. But you can’t ask for more devotion than that girl has shown him. She cooks for him, she doesn’t work overtime spending his money, she doesn’t play around. And she’s a pretty sweet girl. He was right and we were wrong, Bill. He got a good deal.”
At the hotel Sy asked me himself if there were any chance I would stay in town for a while. I told him I didn’t honestly know one way or the other. If he had asked me that afternoon, I would have told him I’d be on the first plane to New York in the morning. But that was a long time ago.
I shook hands with him, thanked him for the game and for the ride. Once in my room, I counted my money, putting aside two yards in my hiding place in the dresser.
Then I undressed and stood under the shower, letting a stream of hot water soak some of the tension out of my body.
A long poker session exhausts anyone. If you play worth a damn you have your mind on every player, throughout every hand, and you wind up sitting in one position on a not-all-that-comfortable chair until your rear end aches just as much as your head does.
If you’re a mechanic, you wind up twice as exhausted. You don’t just have to play your cards. You have to make sure you obtain winning cards, and you have to watch out every second that nobody sees what you’re doing. I was dead and my nerves were on edge.
The shower helped and, when I was finished with it, the bed had never seemed more comfortable.
Of course I didn’t fall asleep right away. I lay under the covers in the dark room and listened to occasional traffic noises outside my window. And I thought about something lovely, something with green eyes and chestnut hair and a body that looked warm, inviting.