Crooked Hearts

by Patricia Gaffney

  He was Obman, he told them—a name he liked to use because in Russian it meant trickery and deceit. The tall, skinny, bald-headed fellow to his left was Burgess; next to him was Sharkey, hard and sullen, with thick lips and a thin cigar; then Wyatt, fat and jolly, sporting an old-fashioned Prince Albert coat and striped trousers; and finally red-haired Rusty, freckled and vacant, with an irritating habit of clearing his throat. Burgess and Wyatt were pals; they worked for the same photographic-equipment manufacturing company. Rusty knew them because his cousin’s wife married Wyatt’s brother’s something or other—Reuben stopped listening and didn’t catch it. The wild card was Sharkey; like Reuben, he’d invited himself into the game. Nobody knew him, nobody could vouch for him. He claimed he was staying at the hotel, though, and the bartender was letting him run a tab. Reuben guessed that was some kind of endorsement.

  He had a bad moment when a new man, apparently an acquaintance of Rusty’s, wandered over to kibitz and bum cigarettes and—Reuben was mortally afraid—offer to sit in the game. Visions of having to start all over somewhere else filled him with gloom, for a seventh player would completely muck up the carefully arranged cooler hidden in his inside coat pocket. But his luck held; the man’s cronies at another table called him back over, and he drifted away with a wave and a wink in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  About that time, Grace made her entrance. Reuben kept his eyes on his cards, pretending not to see her. Everybody else saw her, though. Conversations halted; dice fell silent; cards lay forgotten. Rusty finally kicked Reuben in the calf to get his attention. “Will you look at that?” he demanded. Wyatt said, “Mmm-mmm-mmm,” as if he’d just bitten into a warm piece of pie. Burgess pretended to fan his face with his cards. Sharkey said something so explicitly vulgar even Reuben felt a jolt of revulsion. His antipathy to Sharkey, whom he’d disliked on sight, intensified, and he was glad. Sometimes he needed an edge, a personal motivation when he was about to shear a sheep. And if everything went right, Sharkey would be sheared the closest, because he was sitting in the sucker seat.

  She wasn’t really beautiful. That too came to Reuben with a jolt, for up to now he’d believed completely in the illusion of beauty she deliberately fostered. But it was a trick. She tossed her hair, looked deeply into your eyes, smiled her suicide smile—she acted beautiful, and by sheer nerve and sleight of hand she made you believe she was. You never saw the flaws because you were too caught up in the trick, the mystique; seduced by the patter, you were watching the wrong hand.

  The degree of courage an act like that must require took his breath away.

  She glided up to the bar, oblivious to the interest her entrance had aroused, and asked for a drink. Her wine-colored dress fit her like a tight, tasteful glove, and Reuben congratulated himself again on his generosity in springing for it. The bartender set a tall glass in front of her; from here it looked like more lemonade. Before she could get her money out, the longhaired cowboy standing next to her shoved a quarter at the bartender, leaned in close, and said something to her out of the side of his mouth.

  Looking directly at him, she said something back. The cowboy grinned, shuffled his feet, and straightened his collar to please her.

  Her style wasn’t to freeze a man out with an ice-cold stare and a cutting remark—although Reuben knew from experience she was capable of it. No, what she did was warm you to death with her huge blue eyes and the sincerity in her sly, sexy mouth, that tentative smile trembling at the corners so sweetly, so kindly, you wanted to take her home and spend the rest of your life trying to make her laugh. She was the most natural bunco runner he’d ever met.

  She asked the bartender a question, and he pointed at a table of gamblers across the way, then at Reuben’s table. Taking her drink with her, she sauntered over to the first group. There were five of them—one too many, or Reuben might have joined their game, instead of this one because they looked a shade richer. They all wanted her to sit down. She demurred, with some excuse that made them bark with laughter. They resumed their game at her insistence, but they looked self-conscious, sitting straighter in their chairs, refraining from spitting, slicking their hair back when, she wasn’t looking.

  “Are we playing poker or not?” Reuben queried, clacking a short stack of chips on the table impatiently. Everybody but Sharkey grinned and looked sheepish and went back to the cards. Sharkey scraped his chair back from the table and walked over to talk to Grace.

  He was a big, ugly, lumbering son of a bitch, and Reuben didn’t like the way they looked together, her neat and fair and petite, him hulking and drooling like a gorilla. It was fine as long as he kept his hands in his back pockets and inflicted his oafish flirtation on her with nothing but his tongue. But when he wound one of his long ape’s arms around her waist, Reuben’s sense of humor went into a decline, and his interest in the scheme they’d set in motion started to thin.

  He should’ve known she could take care of herself. With a little dance step that got Sharkey’s hand off her, timed perfectly with a dazzling smile that made sure he never even noticed, she moved him, without touching, toward his own table—and the look on his. blockish face said he thought it was his idea.

  “This here’s Miss Wanda LaSalle, boys, and she’s gonna sit down with us and play some cards. Anybody object?”

  Far from it. Into the chorus of hearty “Hell, no’s,” Reuben threw in a querulous, “Well, personally, I don’t cotton much to playing cards with women.”

  Sharkey removed his cigar, spat a speck of tobacco on the floor, and told him he didn’t cotton much to playing cards with smart-ass needle dicks with bad attitudes, and that Reuben could shut the hell up and deal or get the hell out of the game. Feigning sullenness, Reuben tipped his hat over his eyes and slid lower in his seat.

  Grace took the chair Sharkey had dragged over and wedged between his seat and Wyatt’s. It was the right position, the place she had to be or the trick wouldn’t work, but Reuben still didn’t like it. “What’s the game, gentlemen?” she asked sweetly. Rusty told her, and she said, “Oh,” with just the right note of disappointment. What would she rather play? they asked anxiously. Well, she allowed, hopeful smile flickering, her real favorite was seven-card stud. Seven-card stud it was, the men declared, over Reuben’s surly objection that stud was a sissy’s game; next they’d be calling one-eyed jacks wild, he complained, and betting hair pins. Nobody paid any attention to him.

  She bought two hundred dollars’ worth of chips right off the bat, which had a slightly sobering effect on the boys’ playful mood. They offered her the first deal, though, without cutting for it. Her hands on the cards were dainty, a trifle clumsy—but not too much; she shuffled the way most women ran: like girls. She was a real piece of work.

  Betting heavily, she lost every hand.

  Rusty felt terrible; Burgess and Wyatt tried to cheer her up; even Sharkey offered to switch to high-low. But she took her losses like a man, and stayed in the game to the bitter end—or until it was Reuben’s turn to deal. He passed her two crimped jacks and another from the bottom of the deck, one up and two in the hole. She ran out of chips on sixth street, and only stayed in for seventh because everybody else checked. Except for the lone jack, she had garbage on the board, and Reuben couldn’t help her; with this deck, the last card could be anything. Sharkey raised Burgess’s twenty-dollar reraise, and the bet was to the lady. When her hand went hesitantly to the angel pin on her bosom, Reuben closed his eyes in relief. It meant she had something good, something better than three jacks. It meant she couldn’t lose.

  “This brooch is solid silver, gentlemen,” she announced. “Lordy, my luck’s got to change sometime.” She fingered her river card hopefully. “My brooch to see your raise, plus another forty?” she offered, lacy lashes fluttering. She’d stuck the brooch close to the tip of her breast; she ran two soft fingertips back and forth across the angel’s flowing hair, absently brushing her nipple with each pass. Sharkey swallowed and gaped, hypnotized. Rusty could
n’t stop clearing his throat.

  “Yeah.” “Sure.” “Forty, okay.” “Fine with me.”

  The pot burgeoned. It took her a long time to unpin the brooch and add it to the kitty, but nobody complained.

  In the showdown, her pocket card turned out to be a matching nine. “Jacks full,” she announced happily. Reuben swore and threw his hand in without showing. Burgess, Wyatt, and Rusty did the same, although with better grace.

  “Well, I’m damned,” muttered Sharkey, staring at the cards, trying to believe it. He had king trips showing, probably drawing to a full house of his own. He stumped his cigar out hard, hawked, and spat into the cuspidor.

  It was wonderful how Wanda LaSalle’s luck changed after that. With her brooch on the table beside her, “for luck,” her stack of chips rose higher and higher and higher. The game heated up; pot limits and table stakes went by the board. Wyatt, the jolly fat man, turned out to have deep pockets and a penchant for chasing trips or two measly pairs all the way to seventh street and losing big. Burgess was a fish too, but not as reckless. Everybody enjoyed picking off Rusty, who bluffed like a kid with jelly on his mouth.

  But Sharkey was the man Reuben longed to stuff. He was a lout, but he wasn’t stupid. Whether he was a sharp remained to be seen, but he hadn’t lost his caution yet. The game had gotten very loose and very fast, but Sharkey still played it close, calling and betting in monosyllables, eyes hooded like a lizard. And his regard for the lovely Wanda was entirely too warm for Reuben’s taste, manifesting itself in hot stares, crude lip-licking, and even a quick grope under the table once, the scope of which Reuben wasn’t able to assess from his vantage across the way. But it rankled.

  If he’d had any doubts about Grace’s ability to win consistently in a relatively square game, she laid them to rest in minutes. She was shrewd, patient, unpredictable, and fearless—and lucky. She could read a bluff like a newspaper, and perpetrate one as convincingly as anybody he’d ever played with. Most important, she had a professional’s attitude toward money, which meant thinking of the chips as abstractions, worthless as pebbles or pinto beans until the game was over. If you had too much respect for money, you were done for.

  In between hands, she asked the boys about their lives. They were shy at first, then amazingly forthcoming. The atmosphere started to resemble a fire-hall social more than a high-stakes poker game. She spun them a fascinating tale about learning to play cards from her father, the late Mr. LaSalle, who’d dropped dead at the faro table in a Virginia City saloon last year, leaving her with nothing but his favorite dice and the few simple gambling skills she possessed. It was a difficult life sometimes, and not very respectable, she knew, but a girl on her own had to get along somehow.

  The bare bones of the story were completely incredible, but not a man among them doubted it. She was just so damn good.

  She had sharp timing, too. At almost precisely the same moment Reuben decided it was time to move on to stage two, she sent him the signal. “Looks like I win again,” she chortled, gathering in another pot on her own deal. “I haven’t had so much fun since Aunt Aggie’s drawers fell down at the covered-dish supper.”

  “Hold it.” Reuben’s hand shot out and snagged her wrist. “I want to see those cards.”

  “What? Let go of me. Let go!” She made a grab for her discarded hand, but he beat her to it, scooping up all seven and fanning them out, squinting at the backs, then the fronts.

  “Ha! I knew it! Look at that queen—see that?”

  “What?” “I don’t see nothing.” “What the hell!”

  They didn’t want to believe it, but there it was, big as life: a pinhole right through the black ruff around the queen’s neck. Reuben had put it there himself two hands ago with his new ring.

  “She did it with her brooch,” he accused, pointing at the silver pin by Grace’s elbow. “It’s been there on the table since she first bet it. She’s marking the damn cards with it.”

  “That’s not true! I never cheated in my life!” She glanced around the table, desperate for support. If they’d had nothing to go on but her angel’s face, they’d have rendered a unanimous acquittal in three seconds flat. But there was the queen, stuck through the throat, and there was the brooch, six inches away; she’d even been fiddling with it off and on during the game.

  “Look at this,” Reuben said, clinching it. “She did it to the heart, spade, and club queens too. She marked every damn queen in the deck.”

  “I didn’t!” She pressed her hand over her heart. “I’m innocent, I swear. It must’ve been somebody else, or—or else they were already marked and you just noticed.”

  Reuben snorted.

  “Please—I wouldn’t do it, I couldn’t. Don’t you believe me?”

  Burgess and Wyatt shifted in their chairs, intensely uncomfortable. Rusty’s ears turned red and his freckles popped out. Sharkey stared at her hard, petting his mustache and scrolling his lips. Nobody spoke.

  “Well, gentlemen.” Her mouth trembled and her dainty hands shook, but her voice stayed steady and wonderfully sad. She pushed her winnings into the center of the table, brooch and all, and stood up. “Thank you for your company. And now … I’ll say good evening to you.”

  It was the tears that did it. They glittered on her lashes, refusing to fall, turning her eyes into blue pools of poignant suffering. Between the tears and her heartbreaking dignity, they were all goners.

  “Wait,” growled Sharkey. He grabbed her elbow and held her still. “Somebody else could’ve marked ’em.”

  “Oh, sure,” Reuben scoffed. “Who’s been winning?”

  Rusty cleared his throat. “Maybe they were already like that. How do we know? Nobody checked ’em, we just started playing. Somebody could’ve stamped ’em before—days ago, for all we know. It’s possible.”

  Burgess and Wyatt were nodding their heads, with more hope than conviction. They had the goods on her, but nobody wanted to admit it.

  “Honest to God,” Grace breathed, while a touching, childlike hope began to bloom in her tragic face, “I wouldn’t know how to mark a deck of cards if my life depended on it.”

  More thoughtful nodding. Reuben let some of his scorn go and concentrated on looking doubtful.

  “I say we get a new deck and let her stay in,” Sharkey opined at last. “On a trial basis. We keep an eye on her—which won’t be no hardship,” he leered, giving her elbow a familiar squeeze. “We see anything fishy, we give her the bum’s rush.”

  “Does she get to keep what she won?” wondered Rusty.

  “Can’t have it both ways,” Reuben put in quickly. “Either she cheated or she didn’t. If you let her stay in, you’re saying she didn’t.”

  They couldn’t argue with that. Nobody liked it, but they decided to let her keep her winnings.

  “No,” Grace said, wrinkling her brow adorably. They looked at her in surprise. “I don’t want it if you think I stole it. Take it back and we’ll just start all over.” Now they laughed at her, affectionately, indulgently. They had to talk her out of giving them their money back. “Well, at least take some,” she argued, pouting a little. “Take a hundred each. No, I insist.” And so it was that Grace gave four hundred dollars away—five, counting Reuben’s—and got in return the trust and devotion of four very stupid gulls.

  She took her seat again with murmured thanks to all, and a special smile of gratitude for Sharkey. He turned beet-red and fingered his collar. If he’d been about to suggest that they switch to a different game now, the smile brushed the idea out of his brain like a whisk broom.

  Rusty got a new deck from the bartender, and play resumed. On schedule, Grace began to lose. The men were sorry to see it, since it tended to confirm their worst suspicions; but getting more of their losses back mitigated their disappointment. Sharkey was the biggest winner. The incident seemed to have untied a knot in him, dissolved a clot, and the quickness of the game in the aftermath had him playing just shy of reckless. But it wasn’t only h
im; the fever spread to everybody as the game progressed, and Reuben pretended it had infected him, too. He bet most of his chips on an inside straight draw, and lost to Sharkey’s six-high flush. The fever got hotter. All the money was on the table now, nobody was holding out. The time had arrived.

  Grace knew it too; she darted a subtle glance at him over her hole cards, which she always played from her hand instead of the board. She had about three hundred dollars in chips left, plus her brooch. Rusty gathered the cards up and shoved them to his left. It was Reuben’s deal.

  Between shuffles, he signaled the bartender for another beer. “Anybody else? Wanda, you need another lemonade?” She shrugged and said sure. Reuben passed the deck to Burgess to cut, then paused to light a cheroot. The bartender came over and set the drinks down from a tray. Grace picked up her old glass before he could, to finish off the last swallow in the bottom. She took a dainty swig, smiled at the bartender, and handed the empty glass up to him. He never touched it—she let the glass go a split second too soon and it slipped from her fingers. Reuben had the straight deck between his knees and the cooler on the table before all the glass shards quit rolling on the floor.

  Exclamations, apologies, reassurances. He waited until the hubbub died down before he started to deal.

  Two down, one up. They all liked what they saw. Sharkey had ace high and bet a hundred, the biggest lead in the game so far. An excellent beginning, thought Reuben. Rusty, who had the worst hand in the deal, surprised him by raising thirty bucks, and the bet went around again. On fourth street, Burgess’s pair of queens was high, and he led with another hundred. Nobody batted an eye.

  On fifth street, Sharkey caught another ace. That made two, and one in the hole. His ugly face never changed; he checked his hole card with no visible excitement, like a mother checking a baby’s diaper. But something crackled in the air. Reuben would’ve felt it even if he hadn’t known the cards everybody had, and the cards they were all going to get. Burgess took a third queen, all up, and grinned from ear to ear. Before the betting was over, the pot had grown to eleven hundred dollars, and Wanda LaSalle was almost out of chips.