by Mark Joseph
An amateur holds the deck in one hand and deals with the other, a natural and comfortable way of handling cards. When those two hands belong to a professional, the odious practices of a mechanic—second dealing, bottom dealing, switching, and marking cards—are difficult to detect except by another skilled card sharp. To negate suspicion, an honest pro lays the deck on the felt and snaps cards off the top with one hand, turning cards into projectiles with precise trajectories perfected by thousands of repetitions. In stud, every up card is accompanied by the ceremonial incantation of its value, and Bobby automatically intoned, “A nine to Charlie, a ten to Nelson, a king to Alex, a six to Dean, and another king to the dealer. First king bets.”
Alex noticed that Bobby barely looked at the cards, focusing instead on the players. He imagined Bobby’s mind working as he soaked up data and built a book on his opponents. When Bobby said, “First king bets,” he was looking directly into Alex’s dark glasses as though the opaque lenses were as transparent as the smoky air. Bobby was scrutinizing every action and reaction. A poker face wasn’t enough. A poker body was more like it.
Alex glanced at his hole card and dropped a blue chip into the pot.
“One hundred dollars on the first king.”
“Not for me,” Dean said, turning over his card.
Bobby checked his hole card, a second king, and then leaned over the table to stare at Alex’s big pile of chips. “Looks like you’re the big winner so far,” he said. “I’ll see your hundred and raise a hundred.”
“Good-bye,” Charlie declared.
“Likewise,” Nelson said.
“I’ll see your raise,” Alex said.
“Two players,” Bobby said. “Next card. A queen to the first king, and a ten to the dealer’s king.”
“One hundred again.”
“I’ll raise a hundred,” Bobby said.
Alex smiled. “Not going to fool around, are we?” he said. “I’ll see your raise and raise another two hundred.”
At that moment Bobby realized how much he wanted to beat Alex Goldman, and that was different from merely wanting to win. He was engaged, and in his long, checkered history as a poker player, engagement had been a recipe for disaster. Looking at Alex’s cards, he suspected the Wiz either had a king in the hole, in which case there were no more kings in the deck, or he had a queen and was trying to buy the hand.
“I’ll call,” he said. “There it is, pot’s right. Fourth card coming out. Another queen for two queens showing, and a second ten to the dealer.”
“Interesting,” Alex said. “Very interesting. Three hundred on the queens.”
Bobby’s two pair, kings and tens, were good enough to beat a pair of queens but not three. His instinct told him Alex had a third queen in the hole, and ordinarily he’d listen to his hunch and fold. Not this time.
“See your three hundred and raise three.”
Alex considered the possibility of raising four thousand dollars and blowing the game wide open less than ten minutes after they started. Instead, he took a drag on his Lucky and put three blues in the pot. “Call,” he said dispassionately. “Let’s see the last card.”
Silently chastising himself because he hadn’t raised enough, Bobby dealt Alex an eight and himself a third ten, giving him a full house and a lock on the hand.
“Three tens are high,” he said and swiftly placed two bumblebees in the center of the pot. “One thousand on the tens.”
“Ooo,” Nelson warbled. “Gettin’ right to it.”
“The Wiz has three queens sure as shit,” Dean said. “He has a king, and Nelson had the fourth ten. There’s only one card in the deck that makes Bobby a winner and that’s a king in the hole for a full house. What are the odds on that?”
“It’ll only cost Alex a grand to find out,” Nelson said with a hollow laugh.
Alex smiled. “You know what they say,” he said. “It’s better to be lucky than good. I fold. Take it.”
Bobby gathered in the pot, thinking both he and Alex had misplayed the hand. If they were going to dance around the past all night, he would’ve been better off letting Driver take him all the way home. There was no way around it. Serious cards were out of the question until the air was cleared, not of smoke, but of Shanghai Bend.
“Gentlemen,” he said, eyes flat and neutral, “this is bullshit. I’m not sure what this is, but it isn’t a card game. A week ago Nelson calls on the phone and says a construction crew dug up some old bones on the Feather River. That’s all I know, and that got me here. Tell me why I should care, or I’ll cash in and go back to Reno.”
16
Dean squeezed a chip so hard it cracked loud as a pistol shot. Startied, Alex banged a knee against a table leg and all the neatly stacked chips crashed to the felt.
“Damn!”
“Watch it!”
“It’s about fucking time,” Dean growled. Digging furiously into his bag, he yanked out a month-old edition of the Marysville Register, the river town’s weekly newspaper, and slapped it on the table.
“If you need a reason to care, you can start with this,” he hissed, veins bulging in his forehead.
Page one featured a story entitled “The Queen of Hearts” and a haunting photograph of a skull with a levee and river in the background. Clucking and nodding, Bobby read the brief article and said quietly, “Tell me about the card.”
“That was a shock to all of us,” Charlie said.
“I’m afraid I tossed the card into the grave, but I never mentioned it,” Alex confessed. “That alone could send me to prison.”
“That wasn’t very smart for a genius,” Bobby sneered, flashing a glance of disdain at Alex who smiled in return. Bobby asked Dean, “What else did they find?”
More agitated than the others, Dean was steaming, ready to burst like an overheated boiler. He hunched his chair closer to the table, leaned over on his elbows, thick fists knotted under bushy chin, and turned deliberately from Bobby to Nelson. “You tell him, Lieutenant. What did they find?”
Lighting a cigarette, Bobby caught a glimpse of the photographs of their old heroes and quickly looked away. The images only served to remind him that fear and ghosts were closing in.
“They found nothing,” Nelson answered calmly. “The Yuba County Sheriff has a playing card with no fingerprints and a skeleton with a cracked skull that was in the right place, that’s been in the ground the right amount of time, and is a female of the appropriate age.”
“Have they identified her?” Bobby asked.
“No. They’re mystified.”
“Will they?”
“Probably not,” Nelson replied, shaking his head.
“Why not?”
Nelson hesitated. The answer to Bobby’s question was in his briefcase, but he wasn’t ready to reveal the documents until he had some indication of how Bobby would react to that information. He looked to Alex for confirmation, not to dissemble but to delay, and Alex nodded.
“Because the evidence will fall through the bureaucratic cracks,” Nelson explained. “The Yuba County people are competent, but they don’t have the resources to push an investigation very far even with help from the state. They know she wasn’t a local girl because they have no unsolved missing person reports from that era in the surrounding counties. It’s just not going to happen.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“We have to do the right thing, Bobby.”
“The right thing? The right thing? What the hell is the right thing?”
“That’s what we have to decide.”
“If they can’t identify her, you don’t have to do diddly squat. And even if they do, so what? What’s to connect her to you?”
Dean spoke up. “If doing nothing is the right thing, then that’s what we’ll do. In any case, we ran away from it then, but we can’t now.”
“Why not?”
“It’s hard to say, really. Do you believe in redemption?”
“Ha!” Bobby scoffed. �
�I don’t believe in anything. Belief is for suckers. What a load of crap.”
“Listen,” Dean said, suddenly stern. “We haven’t seen you since the night she died. You took off and never came back. Ever since, the rest of us have met every year to play cards, yes, but the real reason we get together is to assure each other that another year of silence has gone by. None of us has ever talked about Shanghai Bend, not one word to anyone, but there was always a joker in this deck, a wild card, an unknown, and that was you. We never knew—and still don’t know—if you talked. I’ll tell you about belief, and you tell me if I’m a sucker. I believe you’ve never given away the secret. I believe it because if you had, there would’ve been serious repercussions, and that hasn’t happened. But Bobby, right now, I want to hear it from you.”
“That’s it? That’s all you want from me? To know if I shot off my mouth?”
“That’s a start.”
“I didn’t come here to be interrogated.”
“And we’re not here to question you,” Alex said. “It’s the other way around.”
A glint of understanding crept into Bobby’s mind. “You’re thinking about turning yourselves in,” he said quietly.
“That’s right. That’s one option.”
“That’s letting you off easy.”
Charlie looked at Alex who shrugged as if to say, we thought it would be like this. Dean’s nostrils flared with impatience, and Nelson sighed.
“Bobby,” the policeman said. “We think you’ve always believed that we killed her.”
“You’re God damned right. I know you did.”
“We need to know what you intend to do now that they’ve dug her up.”
Stunned, with decades of rage rising in his throat like bile, Bobby thought he was going to be sick.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” he said vehemently, pointing an agitated finger at Nelson. “I used to know you, Chinaman, but I don’t anymore. You’re a cop. Somebody in the boonies dug a body out of the ground, and if I were to say, ‘Yeah, these guys killed this girl,’ that’s it. Case solved, and we all go to jail. To hell with that. I don’t have anything to say to you. I came here for a card game.”
“What about the Yuba County Sheriff?”
Bobby moved as though he were going to get up and leave.
“Wait a minute, please,” Alex said. “There’s no reason to be in a hurry. You may have nothing to say, but we do. We’re in this together, pal. We’re a royal flush, remember? If we hang, we hang together.”
“That’s right,” Nelson said. “I’m not a cop at this table. I’m just the ten of diamonds. My job is on the line here.”
“We all have a lot to lose,” Charlie said. “Careers, reputations, families, fortunes, the works.”
Bobby shook his head. “Why risk it then? You can’t bring her back. I can’t believe you got me here to tell me you’re going to confess. That’s really crazy.”
“Before you decide we’re out of our minds, you need to know what we know,” Dean said, the big man’s tone quiet, intense, and considerably more sober than earlier in the evening. His fierce eyes scanned the table, looking first at Charlie who nodded and rattled the ice in his drink, at Nelson who raised his eyebrows, and Alex who touched the brim of his hat in salute. Then Dean leaned deep into the table and stared at Bobby who for the briefest instant looked like a deer caught in headlights.
“When you first came in you called me a billboard, and you were right,” Dean said, eyes locked on Bobby’s every twitch. “I look like I belong in a freak show, but it’s a disguise. We’re all in disguise, because everything we’ve done since that night has been an attempt to hide what we did. I live with that every day. Every morning I wake up crazy, split in two. Half of me wants to be so fucking righteous just living is an act of repentance, and the other half wants to be so crazy it doesn’t matter what I do. I don’t know how to put it into words, but I think you can understand what I mean. You see, Bobby, I live right on the Feather River only a few miles from Shanghai Bend, and I’ve been waiting all these years for her bones to see the light of day.”
Bobby stammered, “Jesus Christ. Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Guilt. Horrible, convoluted, twisted guilt,” Dean said with a shrug that was more like a full body convulsion. “Maybe it isn’t obvious because it wasn’t so obvious to me at first. I can understand how you, and Alex as well, live far away from where it happened and never want to go there, but I couldn’t stay away. When I came home from Vietnam, I couldn’t stop thinking about what we did at Shanghai Bend, and I started visiting the river—to fish, at least that’s what I told myself. Steelhead, salmon, shad, catfish—didn’t matter, I was compelled to be there. I got to know a few people, made some friends around Marysville, and, anyway, about twenty years ago there was a major flood that washed out an old mining camp. All of a sudden there were all these exposed skeletons and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was only a matter of time before that old river coughed up its most desperate secret, and when that happened, I had to be there. So I found a place, started a business, married a local girl, and waited.”
Dean sighed heavily and took a long pull of rum before going on. “We buried her, man, and that was wrong, but I never had the guts to dig her up. I’ve been waiting for someone else to do it, or the river to do it, like it was fate or destiny, and if it did happen, I wanted to know right away. I had a plan. I was going to kill myself. That’s right. I was going to blow my head off with a shogun, but when it did happen, and they pulled her out of the ground six weeks ago, I lost my nerve. Maybe that was wrong, too. I suppose so, but there you are. This thing has eaten me alive, and I want to put an end to that.”
“Guilt,” Bobby said, drawing out the word. “Maybe you should blow your fucking head off, Dean.”
Dean’s linebacker’s eyes with flaming whites and bristling pupils bore in on Bobby like laser beams. “After what I just told you, you want to be a smart-ass?”
A tremor swept through the room. Bobby was rocketed back to the instant before detonation, and he took a deep breath to keep from exploding again.
“No, I don’t want to be a smart-ass. I want to be smart,” he said hoarsely, almost hoping the big man would attack. With the knife concealed in his right sleeve, the fight would be quick and deadly. “I came here to play cards, and now I feel like I should have brought a lawyer. You killed her and buried her so you could have a normal life, and now you feel guilty. Fuck you. See a shrink.”
Dean rose half out of his chair, shaking an impassioned fist.
Bobby smiled. “Come on,” he said.
“Take it easy, Dean,” Charlie said. “Easy, big guy.”
Dean sank back into his chair, grabbed one of Alex’s cigarettes and lit it. “Shrinks, lawyers, fuck that,” he said, voice trembling with contempt. “It’s up to us and no one else.”
“Look, Bobby,” Charlie said, “the only reason for you to trust us is that we trust you. We were all drunk that night, and we’re all equally guilty, and we all have everything to lose.”
“We’ve waited thirty-two years for you,” Dean said. “Some years we felt betrayed because you never showed, and other years we’ve just been sad. What we did fucked us all up, not just you. This isn’t about you; it’s about all of us. If you want to walk away again, so be it, but you already tried running to the other side of the planet, just like I did, and I doubt that worked any better for you than it did for me. What we did, and what it did to us, is in our hearts and we carry it wherever we go. We have a chance tonight to be clean and honest, not with anyone else, not with shrinks or lawyers or any of that, just us here at this table. Hey man, you’re the ace of diamonds. When we were eighteen, you were my hero, big, bad Bobby McCorkle. You taught me how to be. That’s worth something, isn’t it? What do you say?”
One way or the other, they were offering him release. “Heroes are accidents,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “I’m a gambler. The only thing I ev
er did was risk my neck and get away with it, but I guess you can only get away with so much for so long. So what you’re really telling me is that if we hang, we hang together.”
There were silent nods all around the table. Alex picked up the blue deck, shuffled, and flipped over the top card, the four of clubs, then quickly turned over the following three cards, all fours. The next card was a joker.
“A wild card,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Fancy that.”
He picked the joker off the felt and methodically tore it to bits.
“Are you leaving or are you gonna stay?” he asked.
Emotions rioted inside Bobby’s head, but in the midst of the chaos one thought stood out: He wasn’t going to allow himself to be charged with murder, tried, convicted, and sent to prison, perhaps to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit. No doubt lethal injection would end the torture he’d inflicted on himself for the last three decades, but he’d go down fighting. He’d hear them out, and if they truly wanted to turn themselves and him in, no one would leave the Enrico Caruso Suite alive. It would end right there in the Palace Hotel.
“I think it’s Charlie’s deal,” he said. “What’s the game?”
17
“Where’d that joker come from?” Bobby asked, annoyed at himself for missing Alex’s sleight of hand.
Alex made a clown face, snatched off his hat, peered inside and replaced it on his head. “What joker? I didn’t see any joker. Did you fellas see a joker? There’s no wild cards in this game. Deal ’em, Charlie. Let’s play.”
He winked at Bobby who leaned back in his chair, pensive, wondering where the next blast would come from in this minefield masquerading as a poker table.
Charlie picked up the red deck and promptly mis-shuffled, sending cards flying in all directions. Dean couldn’t resist the urge to needle. “Nervous, are we?”
Charlie twisted in his chair and let fly a vicious backhand in the direction of Dean’s head. Reacting swiftly, Dean tilted his chair and Charlie’s fingers whizzed by his nose, missing by an inch.
