Llona had frozen again. Those eyes! That ugly little man! She was sure he had seen her! He had looked straight at her! But he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t reacted at all. Why? Llona could only suppose that he must be nearsighted or something. She dared to take another step.
Manny looked up blankly. There was a naked woman there. Damned females! Always interfering with a man’s poker! Why the hell couldn’t they stay home where they belonged? Manny looked down at his cards again. Now, what the devil was with Irv? Was this one of his bluffs? And what the hell was he going to tell his wife when he got home? Nuts to that! He’d worry about it when the time came. For now he was going to enjoy the game. Damn women!
Llona scurried a few more steps.
Irv’s ears registered the pad of her footsteps. He looked up. A naked woman. Irv blinked. A naked woman. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. A naked woman. Pretty damn nice-looking, too.
Irv looked at the other men around the table and started to say something. He decided against it. None of them seemed to see this naked beauty. Irv told himself he must be seeing things. He must be getting senile. He’d heard of things like that. He remembered a conversation he’d had with a man about his own age only the other day.
“Don’t you ever get the yen for a woman?” the friend had asked. “Old as we are, don’t you ever feel like you’d like to get one of these hot young things between the sheets?”
“Sure I do,” Irv had answered. “Sure I do.”
“Well, what do you do about it?”
“Nothing. I don’t do anything about it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because if I did, if I made a pass at some young girl, she’d probably cry.”
“So what? Let her cry.”
“Yeah. You’re right,” Irv had agreed. “But the trouble is that she’d cry and I’d cry, too.”
Irv had practically no regrets about his life-—-about the things he’d done, the sins he might have committed, or the things he hadn’t done, or the sins he hadn’t committed— but that conversation had expressed one regret he ‘did have. It wasn’t much fun being too old to be able to do anything about the desires he probably shouldn’t have had in the first place. Still, there was always poker, and Irv didn’t really mind sublimating with it.
Only now it seemed the sublimation wasn't working. That naked woman! The one the others didn’t seem to see! His mind must have conjured her up, and Irv feared for his mental stability. Still, he half-congratulated himself, if he’d dreamed her up, for an old coger he’d certainly done a good job. She was as voluptuous as any girl he’d known during a satisfactorily misspent life. Irv took another long, appreciative look and sighed to himself. And he looked back at his cards without saying anything to the others about his vision.
Llona scurried a few more steps. This brought her into the range of Nick’s eyes. He caught her from the corner of one of them, a fleeting impression, peripheral and blurred. “What do you want?” he muttered without turning.
“Just let me think a minute,” Manny replied. It was his turn to see the raise. “Don’t rush me.”
“Not you,” Nick told him. “Her.”
“Her who?” Elmer looked around, but now Llona was out of his range.
“The broad,” Nick muttered again. “Chambermaid or something. But we didn’t call for anything.”
“Oh,” Elmer said, satisfied to let it go at that so that the game could continue.
But Irv wasn’t satisfied. “Then you saw her, too!” he said excitedly to Nick.
“Sure. She’s right there.” Nick jerked his thumb off to one side.
Llona crouched down behind an armchair.
“Where?” Manny asked, not really caring. “I don’t see anything.”
“I saw her,” Irv said. “But where’d she go?”
“Saw who?” Elmer asked, annoyed.
“The broad. The broad,” Nick told him. “Damn hotel is always sending these maids around when you don’t need them.”
“Do they always send them around without any clothes on?” Irv asked mildly.
“What are you talking about?” Nick said. “Of course she had clothes on.”
“No, she didn’t,” Irv insisted.
“Sure she did. Don’t be ridiculous. What would a broad without clothes be doing in my room in the middle of a poker game?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Irv told Nick.
“Wait a minute,” Manny said. “I think Irv is right. She didn’t have any clothes on.”
“Can’t we just forget about it and play cards,” Elmer whined. “Are you in or out, Manny?”
“I’m in.” Manny saw the raise. “And Elmer’s right. Come on, you guys. Let’s play cards. Our eyes must be playing tricks on us. That’s all.”
“That’s what I thought before,” Irv said. “But then Nick saw her, too.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Nick said. “Yeah, I saw her. So let’s settle this once and for all.” He laid his cards face down on the table. “I’ll have a look.” He started to stand up.
Frightened, Llona sprang up from behind the armchair and bolted for the door to the hall. She opened it, peered out, and then stood framed in the crack of light coming from the hallway for a moment. She’d seen the hotel detective still fumbling to open the door to the room next door with his passkey. Llona turned to face the men at the poker table, found no help in their astounded glances, and turned back to peep out the door again. The detective had opened the door. He stepped through it. Llona quietly tiptoed out behind his retreating figure and closed the door noiselessly behind her.
Her leaving brought a simultaneous reaction from the four poker players. Stunned, they had stared at her nudity framed in the doorway. Now that it had vanished, they reacted.
All four sprang to their feet, upsetting the table. Cards and chips went flying. The biggest pot of the night was forgotten. The hand was tossed to the winds.
Llona had proven that even the most addicted poker players can be shaken out of their obsession with the game!
Chapter Nine
THE TELEPHONE shrilled out doomsday and woke Ruby Gardner up that morning. The young blonde opened her baby blue eyes and rolled over to answer it. The movement revealed a slim body with plump breasts and shapely legs. The sunlight streaming through the window high-lighted her charms through a diaphanous nightgown.
“Hello. Oh, hello, Bill darling.” Her pleasant, farmgirl face dimpled as she recognized the voice on the other end of the line. “I was just dreaming about you.”
She listened a moment.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” she said throatily. “It was a very sexy dream. But then I have so much delicious data to base my dreams on . . . What? . . . Oh, all right. I’ll be serious. My you sound grumpy. Go on. Tell me what’s so important that you have to get me out of bed at the crack of dawn to talk about it.”
Ruby listened to the voice in the receiver for a long time and her dimples slowly disappeared as she listened.
“Wait a minute,” she interrupted. “Wait just a minute. This is all too fast for me. What do you mean we’re getting too serious? Isn’t it a little late for that conclusion? Of course we’ve gotten serious. I thought that's the way you wanted it. You said-—”
Ruby stopped talking again as the voice interrupted and crackled in her ear.
“But—"’ she said finally, forcing herself not to sob. “But you said you loved me, Bill. You said you loved me, and I believed you. If I hadn’t, I would never have let you —“
Another pause. A short one.
“A man gets carried away when he’s making love to a beautiful woman,” Ruby repeated. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to me, Bill. Aren’t you forgetting how you talked me into—- I see . . . Ancient history, huh? . . . Past and done with . . . How easy it is for you, Bill.”