McFinn was saying, “Even if there is something between Jack and Lily, what does it have to do with the reasons — either of the reasons — I hired you?” He paused and then blinked. “Unless you think one of them—?”
“I don’t think anything at this point,” Quincannon said.
This was an evasion, but McFinn accepted it and let the matter drop. As he twitched away, a ripple passed through the crowd. Lady One-Eye had won another hand, this time with a spade flush over the Saint Louis Rose’s high two pair. Someone within Quincannon’s hearing said that it was the fifth pot in a row she’d taken. He glanced up at the ceiling mirrors. Early on, the pile of red-and-blue chips had been tall in front of the Rose; in the past hour it had begun to dwindle there, to grow on Lady One-Eye’s side. One or two more large pots and she would have picked the Rose clean.
Lady One-Eye shuffled the cards for another deal, her long fingers manipulating them with practiced skill. According to the story she’d told McFinn, a buggy accident ten years ago had claimed her left eye and damaged her left hip so that she was unable to walk without the aid of her gold-knobbed cane. But she considered herself fortunate because her hands were her livelihood and both had come through the accident unscathed. Her handicaps, in fact, had won her sympathy and support among the sports who frequented gaming halls such as the Gold Nugget. Even hard-bitten professional gamblers, who considered it bad luck to play against a one-eyed man, had been known to sit at a poker table with Lady One-Eye. Only once, though, in most cases, for their luck with a one-eyed woman generally turned out to be just as bad.
Five-card stud was her game, the only game she would permit at her table. And the table here was hers: she rented it from McFinn, paying a premium because alone on the raised platform she was the Gold Nugget’s central attraction. She had occupied the table for four weeks now, ever since she and her brother and her husband had arrived in Grass Valley at the end of May. Their previous whereabouts were unknown, though the fact that all spoke with a noticeable Southern accent tended to support McFinn’s contention that they were originally from New Orleans.
Already word of Lady One-Eye’s prowess and phenomenal luck had spread wide. She never refused a game, even for low stakes; and so far she had not lost a single high-stakes match, once relieving a Sacramento brewer of $1,100 on a single hand of stud. Some said she was a better mechanic than such sporting queens as Poker Alice, Madame Moustache, and Lurline Monte Verde. A few claimed she was the equal of Luke Short, even of Dick Clark.
At least one was afraid she might be a cheat to rival George Devol, the infamous Mississippi River skin-game artist. That lone skeptic was not a victim of her talents, fair or foul. He was the one person, other than the Lady, who had benefitted most from her presence in the Gold Nugget: Amos McFinn.
McFinn ran a clean establishment. He had to in order to remain in business. Grass Valley — and its close neighbor, Nevada City — were no longer the wide-open, hell-roaring mining camps they had once been. Now, less than four years from the new century, they were settled communities with schools, churches, and Civic Betterment Leagues. There was a move afoot to ban gambling in both towns. So far McFinn and the other gaming-parlor operators had managed to forestall the efforts of the bluenoses; but if it came out that a female tinhorn had been working the Gold Nugget with impunity for the past month, especially if she were caught cheating during one of her public performances, it might just give the anti-gambling faction enough ammunition to shut down McFinn’s operation.
This was one reason why he had hired Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. Lady One-Eye had increased the number of his customers and thereby his profits; he couldn’t afford to send her packing on a fearful hunch, without proof. He had to know for sure before he could act, and as quickly as possible given the other reason he’d sought detective help.
That reason was potentially even more disastrous. Five days before, an anonymous note written in green ink had been slipped under the door of the room Lady One-Eye shared with Jack O’Diamonds in a lodging house behind the Gold Nugget. She had found the note and taken it to McFinn, who in turn had brought it to Sheriff Hezekiah Thorpe. But there was little the law could do. The note might well have been the work of a crackpot, all blather and bunkum. On the other hand, it might be just what it seemed: a thinly veiled death threat.
Quincannon had examined the note in Thorpe’s office shortly after the Nevada County Narrow Gauge Railroad, which linked Grass Valley with Colfax and there joined the Southern Pacific line, had deposited him in this mountain community. It read:
The good citizens of Grass Valley don’t want your kind. We have got rid of bunko steerers, confidence sharks, sure thing men, thimble riggers and monte throwers and we will get rid of common card shaprs and there men too. Leave town in 48 hours or you will pay the price and pay dear when you least expect it. I mean what I say. I have fixed your kind befor, permenent.
Crude language and spelling, and poor penmanship as well. It might have been written by a near-illiterate with a misguided moral streak; this was McFinn’s assessment. But Quincannon wondered. It could also have been written by someone educated and clever, with a motive for wanting Lady One-Eye, Jack O’Diamonds, or both dead that had little or nothing to do with their professions. At any rate, they had ignored the warning and the forty-eight-hour period had passed without incident. If the note writer carried out his threat, particularly if he were to carry it out inside the Gold Nugget, McFinn would be ruined as effectively as if Lady One-Eye were exposed as a cheat—
“Three pretty little fives! The pot’s mine, dearie!”
The Saint Louis Rose’s loud, coarse voice echoed through the hall. Quincannon frowned and glanced up at the mirror above the poker table. The Rose was dragging in a small pile of red-and-blue chips, Lady One-Eye watching her stoically.
“Two in a row now and more to come,” the Rose said to a knot of bearded Cornish miners on her left. “My luck is changing for fair, gents. It won’t be long before all the red and blue are mine to fondle.”
The miners sent up a small cheer of encouragement punctuated by ribald comments. Most of the onlookers, however, remained Lady One-Eye’s champions. Like them, Quincannon wished the Rose would close her mouth and play her game in silence. Listening to her plume herself was an irritation and a distraction.
The deal was Lady One-Eye’s. Without speaking she picked up the deck. Quincannon again studied her dexterous fingers as they manipulated the cards, set the deck out to be cut, then dealt one card facedown and one faceup to the Rose and herself. If she was a skin-game artist, he reflected, she was in a class by herself.
The professionals she’d cleaned during the course of her career would have caught her out if she had been doing anything as obvious as dealing seconds, dealing off the bottom, switching hole cards, or using a mirror or other reflective surface to reveal the faces of the cards to her as she dealt them. She could not literally have had anything up her sleeve, for the long sleeves on her high-collared dress fit tightly about her wrists. Nor could she have employed table bags or any of the other fancy contraptions manufactured by the likes of Will & Fink, the notorious San Francisco firm that specialized in supplying gimmicks to crooked gamblers. Because of the raised platform, and the fact that a woman played upon it, the table wore a floor-length green skirt; but the skirt was kept drawn up until Lady One-Eye took her chair and play began, thus allowing potential players to examine both it and the table if they chose to.