Sometimes matters are ridiculous. When I had been dealing for Guiterno, we had a game set up for a Texan who liked to play big-money blackjack. That’s a dealer’s-control game—if you can deal seconds, and if you use marked cards or know how to do top-card peeks, you can make your mark lose every hand. A wide-hipped hooker steered the Texan to our game and he was the only live one in the crew. I was dealing and there were four of five shills playing with Guiterno’s money. It was all set up for the Texan.
And the Texan had been stoned to the gills on charcoal-filtered bourbon. He moved into the room where the game was floating, plumped himself down in the seat we had carefully kept open for him, and slapped a wad of long green on the table. He was so blind he couldn’t see the spots on the cards. He didn’t know where he was or what he was doing there, and we could have pocketed his money and put him out to pasture in the middle of the street without worrying about any mess in the morning. He wouldn’t remember a thing.
But we took his roll one hand at a time, and we kept playing hand after goddamned hand until fifty-four yards of his money had made the pilgrimage from his side of the table to our side. I even dealt hands to the shills, and the shills played out the hands religiously, and we took that Texan’s money just the way it says in the book, hand by hand and bet by bet. A few times he bet a hundred dollars on a card and lost and paid off with two bills stuck together. And I very honestly separated the bills and gave one back to him so that he could lose it on the next round.
We had cleaned the Texan according to the con man’s code, such as it is.
So it was just as well that Murray Rogers wouldn’t solve our problems by dying, or by being killed. Because I wasn’t trained for that kind of action.
I smoked a few cigarettes, stopped at a few diners and lunch counters for coffee. I thought about packing a suitcase and catching the plane to New York, but I didn’t think very seriously. I knew damned well I wasn’t going to do it, and I knew why.
Joyce Rogers hadn’t come to my room for a quick tumble and a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. And I wasn’t staying in town for another grab at her sweet brass ring or another poker session with Murray and Sy and the boys. We were both looking for an angle, the same angle. An angle that would give Maynard the Magnificent a pile of money and a green-eyed girl with hair the color of chestnuts.
The angle had to be there. All I had to do was find it.
5
I returned to the hotel in time to pick up a message from Sy Daniels. The terse little slip said I was supposed to call him. I put the call through from my room and reached him at his office. He wanted me to have dinner over at his place. It didn’t especially appeal but I seemed to be locked into it; I couldn’t very well turn him down two days running. I accepted the invitation with a certain amount of enthusiasm and he told me to drop over to the office around five-thirty and he’d give me a lift.
“Never mind,” I told him. “I rented a car a few hours ago. I may be in town a few days and I’d just as soon be able to drive myself around.”
I took down the address he gave me and the instructions on finding the place. I tucked this valuable information away in my wallet and found the Hertz outfit. A tired old man with cigarette-stained fingers took a long look at my driver’s license and condescended to rent me a car.
I asked for a stick shift. He had a hard time getting it through his head that I didn’t want automatic transmission and kept telling me that Hertz paid for the gas anyway. I told him I liked to feel as though I were doing the driving. Finally he gave me the car I wanted and wrote me off as an enemy of progress.
I took the car out and drove it around to get the feel of it. It was a piece of tin with nothing much in the engine department, but I didn’t feel much like a Gran Prix contender myself. I just drove.
Half of my mind worried about the driving. The other half fooled around with a green-eyed girl and her rich husband. Renting the car had been a commitment, if one were needed. I wasn’t going to catch a plane to New York, I was going to stick around, me and my tinny rental, and something was going to happen.
We couldn’t kill him. He had to be alive, and he had to have the money taken away from him. Well, I’d been taking money away from men for years. But I wasn’t going to beat Murray Rogers for a few hundred thou with a deck of cards. When a man worth somewhere around a million can pick a kick out of buck-limit poker, he doesn’t exactly fit the high-roller class. So my talent as a mechanic wasn’t going to be all that helpful.
There were a few possibilities. Murray Rogers could flip his lid and be committed to a funny farm. That would leave him alive and keep his loaded will from going into effect, and it would heap the money in Joyce’s warm little hands. If he went nuts, in short, she could divorce him without any trouble and obtain the kind of settlement that would let us sit pretty—maybe half to her and half to him for the girls, or something along those lines. Or, she could just find a way to divert the dough from her pocket to ours. That would be easy with him out of the way for awhile.
Two ways, then. A con that would strip the dough from Murray or would hit a way to ease him out of town long enough for Joyce and I to obtain control of the money. It was comforting to figure it all out that way, but that was about all. The chance of Murray going insane spontaneously was remote enough, and the chance that we could drive him nuts was just as far-fetched.
The traffic became progressively thicker, and by the time it was jammed up tight it was time to head for dinner with Daniels. My car swam through traffic like a salmon heading upstream. I followed Daniels’ directions without being lost more than once, and I parked in front of his house at a quarter after six.
Dinner wasn’t bad. Sy Daniels had a wife who was evidently trying to buck Joyce in the youth department. And failing, not surprisingly. Mary Daniels dyed her gray hair back to what she wished were its original color, and the ash-blonde result didn’t fit her complexion at all. Her eyes were older than the rest of her face and her girdle faded in the two-way stretch. But she kept a nice home and cooked a good meal and hadn’t picked up the annoying habit of flirting with her husband’s friends, which was nice. We ate brisket and roasted potatoes and asparagus tips, and afterward we sat around in the living room and drank scotch on the rocks.
The conversation roamed around, but it took on a definite tone in the course of the evening. Sy asked me if I were looking for work. I told him I’d gone as far as probing the classifieds with a pencil and checking off things that looked remotely possible. Later Mary wanted to know how I liked the town. Sy said something about how a man needed to put down roots after a certain amount of rambling around. Mary dragged some broad into the conversation and hinted that she could fix me up if I were interested.
It was all as homey as a Norman Rockwell cover, and I was the only one who knew what was wrong with this picture. They had life all planned for me. I would pick up a good job—there was a hint to the effect that one of Sy’s friends could probably come up with something if I decided to get off the plastics merry-go-round—and I would meet a nice girl who was hubby-hunting, and I would buy a house in the suburbs and play poker every Friday night and join the country club and fish for bass at the lake and otherwise spin in their social circle.
All in all, it wasn’t an illogical notion on their part. From their point of view the notion was perfectly feasible and desirable. But what they didn’t know was that I was staying in town because I was hung on somebody’s wife. This would have jarred them. My thing with Joyce killed their rose-covered dream for me. And if I broke it off with Joyce and folded the hand I’d be out of town like a shot.