Fair enough.
I nodded, and he pushed all four of the $250,000 parcels into the betting.
Your hand still look good to you, Preacher?
I glanced down at my cards and decided it did. I had a fair idea of what he was holding now, and his chance of improving was roughly as good as mine. But I had one advantage, and it came down to something Cherokee Bill Bear said to me years ago, a moment or two before he broke me on what had looked like a good even chance.
“I got ’em,” he had said, “and you got ’em to git.”
And that was the situation facing J. J. Barlow now, because I absolutely did not believe that he had two more tens at the bottom of his hand. Or another king, either.
I counted one million in cash onto the table beside his envelopes, and Pemberton dealt the next two cards.
Barlow got the eight of clubs.
I got the nine of diamonds.
He pushed in the envelope with the “$2,000,000” and waited to see what I would do: This is the big one, friend. No more hands after this unless you pull out right now. Still game?
That eight simply couldn’t have been any more help to him than the nine was to me. There were still two cards to come. But nothing had changed. This was still poker.
I picked up the Prescott envelope and laid it carefully alongside Barlow’s bet: Game as I’ll ever be. So let’s find out.
We were both all in now. Not a dollar and not a scrap of paper remaining beside either of us. So there was no point in keeping the hole cards concealed. Barlow flipped his to reveal the queen-jack combination I’d been expecting. I showed the table the threes that made a trio with their exposed brother.
And Pemberton, his forehead now—incredibly—agleam with perspiration, dealt the cards.
Barlow got a king.
I got an ace, and I could almost hear the snap of teeth as his jaw clamped shut.
“All right,” he said aloud, with no audible trace of the pressure he must have been feeling, “let’s see the final cards, then.”
Pemberton, perhaps flustered or perhaps from habit, dealt them facedown as he would do in completing a normal hand. I turned mine to show the five of diamonds. No improvement, but I still had the trio of threes.
Barlow could beat me with an ace, a nine, or even a king.
He hesitated for a moment, his hand on the card, and then turned it faceup in the middle of the table beside the huge pot.
It was the queen of spades…
Barlow’s reaction was minimal—a small, cold smile and a shake of the head. His eye caught mine for a moment, but there was no hint of despair or even of sadness. A game, he seemed to say, is only a game. Perhaps there will be others.
He was one hell of a man. It must have cost him a lot.
And he paid without a murmur.
But Tiny Watrous simply didn’t have the price. The final, losing card was still on the table and no one seemed to have recovered sufficiently to pick it up or to start the task of raking away the money, chips, and envelope when the fat man told us what the final hand had meant to him.
His mouth opened and a small apologetic sound emerged. Not a word, exactly, but an unmistakable cry for help. His hand leaped spasmodically to the center of his chest, and his head turned beseechingly toward the old friend and physician beside him at the table. But before Woodbury could react, Watrous’s eyes closed and the huge body rolled out of the chair to land with a crash beside the table where his world had just come to an end.
A BENEDICTION
The peace of God, which passeth all understanding…
THIRTY-ONE
Dr. Woodbury did his best.
Pemberton went to get a medical kit from the trunk of the doctor’s car while I helped rip the coat and shirt away from the chest to reveal the deep scarring of major surgery. There was no pulse and no heartbeat, and I think Woodbury knew what had happened was beyond repairing, but he told me to call for an ambulance while he started cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Looking for the phone, I got a surprise.
The Red Board loser from Amarillo was asleep in the lounge, a half-empty glass of something dark beside his chair.
I wondered, fleetingly, what he was doing there.
Remembering that Woodbury had introduced him as a brother physician, however, I detoured on my way back from the phone to tap his shoulder. I made it gentle. If he was drunk enough to need a major effort, he was too drunk to help. But his eyes popped open at once and came to sharp focus on my face.
“Wha…?”
“Are you really a doctor?” I asked.
He blinked and considered telling me it was none of my damn business. But I think something in my face told him that wouldn’t be a good idea. So he didn’t.
“Cardiology,” he said, squirming to sit up. “I just play poker sometimes to…because…” He lost the thread and I couldn’t help him find it.
“Dr. Woodbury could use some help,” I said. “In the card room.”
He blinked again, and I could feel him pulling parts of himself back from a great distance, but after a moment he heaved himself out of the chair and moved without a word in the right direction.
It was too late, though, and I think it had been so from the first. Tiny Watrous’s body, naked to the waist, lay on the floor, and Dr. Woodbury was no longer astride it.
A long-nosed syringe—probably a heart-injectable stimulant—lay empty and expended on the table beside the fat man’s abandoned playthings.
“Nothing at all?” said the poker-losing heart specialist from Texas.
Woodbury shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Not even a single-beat reaction. I think something important must have ripped loose in there.”
“Mind if I…?”
“God, no! You’re the chest cutter, not me. But I was there five years ago when they did the bypass.”
The younger man nodded absently, looking at the scarred chest, but reached out to accept the stethoscope Woodbury offered and then knelt beside Watrous’s immense form.
“What happened?” he demanded.
Woodbury took a deep breath and looked at the rest of us, wanting someone else to explain. But no one spoke.
“I don’t know, exactly,” he said. “The game was almost over—which reminds me, what are you doing here, anyway, Tom? I thought you were going to take a cab back to town.”
“I was.” The voice was abstracted, its owner concentrating on the work at hand. “But I went to the bar first and had a drink. And another. And I think I fell asleep.” He paused for a moment and looked up at his friend. “I owe you an apology, Bow,” he said. “I let you bring me here in all good faith, and I should have warned you that sometimes I don’t handle myself very well when I gamble. It’s a problem of mine…”
He was talking to the other doctor, but his eyes were on me and he wanted to say something more. Woodbury was embarrassed, and cut him off in midsentence.
“We’ll forget it,” he said. “As I was telling you, the game was almost over. But a lot of money had changed hands in the final pot—millions! I don’t know exactly what was going on, but when the hand was over, Tiny seemed to take it personally. As though it was his own money.”
Pemberton cleared his throat to break in. “It was,” he said. “Part of what was lost here was Tiny’s. But it was my fault, Bow. My fault that it happened. That I let it…”
The doctor looked at the cadaverous attorney as though he had just lost his mind. “How…?”
“I am—was—Tiny’s lawyer,” Pemberton said. “And J. J. Barlow’s. And Marilyn Prescott’s, too, as of this morning. But not his…”
He nodded in my direction, and the doctor followed his glance for a moment, but then turned back to hear the rest.
“…and I tried to play God,” Pemberton continued. “J. J. and Tiny were in a land deal, a big one, here in the county. I knew about it, and I realized before I took on Mrs. Prescott as a client today that there could be a conflict of in
terest. The pair of them wanted Pres Prescott’s land. But I thought I could keep the two things separate. Work to the advantage of both sides.”
Pemberton looked at me, but I had no comfort to offer.
I knew his intentions had been good. But I had also known, or suspected, that he would do exactly what he had done. And I had used the knowledge.
“I told J. J. about the Prescott Helicopters sale,” he said. “I didn’t know until we got here tonight that you were planning to use it in the game. But J. J. must have known…”
His voice trailed off as he looked around the room, discovering something I had noticed when I returned from the telephone.
J. J. Barlow was gone.
“Why the hell would he leave?” Dr. Bowering demanded. “Tiny Watrous was his best friend, and he was lying here on the floor…”
I thought I knew. But I kept my mouth shut and turned to look at the table. The money and chips were just where they had been when Watrous collapsed, but the envelopes containing real-estate documents were stacked neatly aside, bound by a single rubber band. Covering them was yet another envelope, smaller, with the return imprint of the Citizens National Bank of Farewell in its corner.
It appeared to be sealed, and a single name—Preacher—was written on its face in Barlow’s hand.
“He couldn’t stay,” Pemberton said when the silence following the doctor’s words became too heavy. “J. J. Barlow is a man with perfect manners. He wouldn’t want to be around after a party’s over.”
The lawyer’s glance was cool and sure. He had reached the same conclusion as I—and was going to do the same thing about it.
But the doctor didn’t understand.
“I’d like to know,” he said, “just exactly what in hell has been going on here tonight. And I would like to know about it right now, if you please.”
Pemberton drew breath to explain, but was interrupted before he could say the first word.
“It’s him!” the doctor from Amarillo said. “He’s the one. I tried to tell you before, Bow, but you wouldn’t listen to me. Well, maybe you’ll listen now.”
No one seemed to know how to reply.
It was as though there were two men crouching there beside Tiny Watrous’s body—one of them the sure and scientific cardiologist who had wanted to save the big man’s life, the other a self-flagellating hysteric who could emerge when the button “poker” was pushed.
It was the hysteric who continued: “This is the Preacher, and people think he’s honest because he tells them he’s a professional gambler before they start to play. But don’t let the nickname or the black suit fool you. This man is death. This man is the devil! People come apart—people die—around him. By God, do you think this man here is the first…?”
I stood still and let him have his say, partly because I understood that he had to get the words out one way or the other, and also because he was too close to the truth as I know it to bother splitting hairs.
He wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard before.
Or said before, to the mirror.
“When we were introduced tonight, I pretended not to know him,” the Texan went on, “and it was wrong of me. I know that. But the minute I saw him I knew something was going to go wrong. It always does. Only it never seems to go wrong for him. I’ve played against him in Vegas, Reno—lots of places. And in all those games do you know how many times I have beaten him? Never. Not even once. No one has ever seen him lose. Not one time. And don’t try to tell me it’s because he’s so good at the game or I’m so bad. There’s something wrong with a man who wins all the time!”
Myths grow like bindweed around anyone who learns to play the game of poker well enough to make his living at it, and myth is, by definition, a compound of lies and exaggeration. But this was a whopper of purest ray serene. Despite the circumstances, I found myself hard put to suppress a laugh.
Any poker player can get broke. And I do. Regularly.
Twice in the past year I had been cleaned out by rank amateurs who were having a good run of cards and playing them better than they ever had, or ever would again, in their lives. Such reverses are a predictable hazard of the business—one that is beginning to be recognized even by the Supreme Court and the Internal Revenue Service—and they happen to the very best.
And anyway, I’m not the very best. Except on certain nights…
“You invited him here”—the Texan was raving now, actually shaking a finger at Dr. Woodbury—“and when I finally spoke up to warn you, suddenly I was in the wrong and a sore loser and had had too much to drink and ought to go back to town. Well, how do you feel about it now? Now that…this…has finally happened?”
The doctor’s face was reddening with rage, and I could feel the heat of it rising in him, but the answer came instead from the lawyer standing beside me.
“We think,” Pemberton said in cadenced tones that contrasted sharply with the word-flood we’d heard from the Texan, “that you are a sore loser and you’ve had too much to drink and you ought to go back to town.”
Woodbury’s sudden flare of anger was back under control now, and he continued the reply. “This man came to Farewell at the invitation of someone all of us know and trust and respect,” he said. “He told us the truth about his profession from the first, and he behaved decently and he was good company. He plays poker for a living, and he wins at the game. Of course he does. No one but a fool continues to play when he can’t…or won’t let himself…win.”
The last sentence had been carefully aimed and fired for effect, and it hit dead center.
The Texan’s wa winced away from the blow and cooled suddenly to room temperature and below, while his mouth opened to reply and then closed on the words that had been jostling for release.
We stood in silence, waiting for the ambulance, but it didn’t come for a while.
I occupied the time by sorting the stacks of currency and arranging them tidily in the attaché case. There was a little room left after I was done, and I used it for the packet of deeds, liens, and sales agreements. I wondered if the bank messenger was anxious about the money. Probably not. Despite his obvious willingness to kill to protect it while it was in his care, it wasn’t his and he was probably sleeping the sleep of the just, secure in the knowledge that it was someone else’s responsibility for the moment.
I counted the cash end of my winnings and made out a deposit slip for my own bank in California.
The messenger would be going home a bit heavier than he had come and, the Texas loser’s suspicions notwithstanding, I was considerably relieved to know things had turned out that way. This hadn’t felt like a losing night for me, and it hadn’t turned out to be one, either. But Dee Tee had loaned me the million—hadn’t bought a part of my action—and if I’d wound up with the shorts I’d have had the job of finding some way to pay him back. Dee Tee is a friend, not a contributor.
Tiny Watrous’s death was a sorry commentary on the value too many people place on money.
It is not worth dying for.
But reality is in there, too. Having money can free you to do things you enjoy most, put you in a position to be helpful to friends, and even cause some people to listen to your ideas who might otherwise prove impervious to all logic and reason.
Its lack has never made anyone happy yet.
And I was still solacing myself with such thoughts—using them to build a barrier against the nagging suspicion that the Texas loser just might have been right about a few points—when the telephone rang in the lounge and the overnight waiter went to answer it.
He entered the card room a moment later and spoke quietly to Dr. Woodbury.
The doctor’s face went very still.
“Thank you,” he said. The waiter left the room and the doctor turned to face us.
“That was the hospital,” he said. “They called to tell us that the ambulance has been delayed. There’s an accident blocking the access road to the club. Someone missed the turn wh
ere the road joins the highway. Ran into a power pole and the wires touched off the…gas tank. It set everything afire.”
He paused, and his face was a decade older in as many seconds. “They…said it was a Rolls Corniche…”
We got there as quickly as we could, of course, but there was nothing to be done.
The ambulance that had been dispatched for Tiny Watrous was still on the other side of the barrier, waiting for crews from the electric company to arrive and cut off the high-voltage current so that the raffle of power lines could be moved from the roadway.
But the Rolls’s impact had skewed it free of the tangle, and it lay on its right side, turned 180 degrees from the roadway. County fire crews were on the scene and had managed to reach the car on foot.
It was dangerous for them to work in the vicinity of the writhing, sparking power lines. But they had somehow managed to put out the fire and were now at work on the left door of the car, using a specially built hydraulic jack to push the roof far enough away from the hood to allow them access to something that was wedged, blackened and hideous, in the driver’s seat.
Something that had been a man.
A BENEDICTION
(CONTINUED)
Keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord…
THIRTY-TWO
Most of the night hours were gone by the time the various law enforcement agencies of eastern New Mexico were finally through with us, and even then there were still plenty of loose ends flying around.
Everyone wanted to get into the act.
You could hardly blame them. J. J. Barlow and Edward Watrous had been two of the best-known and most powerful figures in that town or that county or that vicinity of New Mexico. For them both to die on the same night—and after taking part in a poker game that was already taking on the patina of local legend—was better fare than the Farewell gossip mills had been offered for a long, long time.
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