Lucky at Cards

by Lawrence Block

  “You look lovely,” he said in his office. “Come on, I’ll take you downstairs and introduce you to Perry. Then I’ll move out of your way and you two can see what develops.”

  Black Sand Syndications had a large office on the seventeenth floor of the same building. We took an elevator downstairs and Murray introduced me to Carver. He was a hefty man, bald on top, with innocent blue eyes and a firm jaw. His handshake was strictly dead-fish but his eyes took me in quickly. Murray made some jokes that weren’t particularly funny, and I showed my capped teeth in a smile, and Carver wound up taking me to the Downtown Merchant’s Club for lunch.

  We had martinis first. Then I ordered a ham steak and he ordered an open turkey sandwich. He told the ancient waiter to bring us another pair of martinis. The drinks came, then the food. We ate and drank and made small talk. We were working on coffee before he said the first word about business.

  “Know anything about syndicates, Maynard?”

  "A little.”

  “Suppose you tell me what you know. That way I won’t feed you a lot of information you’ve already got under your belt.”

  I played parrot for ten minutes. I regurgitated the library’s store of information and told him just what a syndication was and just why it was a good investment for certain people. I told him the potentials above and beyond the tax-sheltered return, mentioned a few syndicates that had converted into common-stock corporations, and generally ran off at the mouth. The blue eyes became progressively more interested as I steamed along. By the time I was finished, Carver was beaming.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You actually know the field, don’t you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Where did you learn all that? Murray mentioned you were in Chicago before you came here, said something about a plastics firm. You in investments before that?”

  It seemed like a silly time to lie. Perry Carver was a man who had pushed into a new field and was doing nicely in it. I guessed he’d be more impressed by quick learning ability than experience. I told him I hadn’t known a thing about syndicating a few hours ago, but picked it all up by reading a few books. For a few seconds he just stared at me. Then he started to laugh.

  “I’m a son of a bitch,” he said. “You know what I have to go through to find a salesman who knows his rear end from third base? I’ll tell you, Maynard, I look at about twenty applications a week. None of them know the first thing. They just want to make money, that’s all. And the damned fools don’t know anything and can’t learn anything. I tried to set up a training program to drum a few facts into their heads. Didn’t work at all. I’ve got three decent salesmen working out of an office that could support ten of them but I can’t find seven more worth putting behind a desk. You already put together more than any of those lardheads got out of the program. Can you sell?”

  “I think so.”

  “Suppose you had a young fellow who told you he was more interested in growth than income. What would you tell him?”

  He gave me a cigarette and a light. I took a drag, blew out smoke. “I’d tell him ten percent was more growth than he could expect to make in the market, and with a lot less risk. And I’d tell him that Glickman went from seven-and-a-half to thirteen or fourteen over-the-counter after conversion to a stock issue, and I’d name a few other syndicates that showed comparable performance.”

  “Right,” he said. “Suppose your prospect was a widow with twenty thousand dollars in a savings bank. She’s afraid of risk. What do you tell her?”

  “That the risk is low because she’ll be owning a piece of real property, not just a bag of dreams. And that the difference between four percent and ten percent is the difference between eight hundred dollars and two thousand dollars annually.”

  “You’ve got a job,” Perry Carver said.

  I had a job. He took me back to the Rand Building and gave me a desk next to the water cooler. He wrote out a check to me for five hundred dollars as an advance against commissions to be earned in the future. He handed me twenty cards from the prospect file, gave me a stack of letterheads and told me where to have business cards printed up.

  “Make as many calls as you can,” he said. “You rarely sell anybody on the first trip—that’s one of the reasons I wanted to feed you an advance. I won’t expect results right off the bat. If you run out of dough, just holler. And feel free to hit any side prospects you want. Don’t be reluctant to sell your friends. The package we’re handling now is an attractive one. New York office building, Madison Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street. It’s a hundred percent rented and the distributions are personally guaranteed by the general partners for the first five years. It yields eleven percent. See what you can do, Bill.”

  I stayed at my desk all afternoon. I called prospects, mailed prospectuses at them, told them to look them over and that I would call in a day or two for an appointment. I made notations in an appointment calendar, jotted down trivia on each of the prospect cards. I mailed propaganda to the men in the poker game—Sy Daniels, Harold Barnes, all of them. Maybe I got carried away. That night I dodged a dinner invitation and took myself to a steak house. It was a small club with wood paneling on the walls and big leather chairs around polished oak tables. There was a crowd at the bar. I took a table in back and polished off a thick sirloin with a baked potato. I drank scotch first and brandy afterward and smoked a few cigarettes.

  After dinner I sat there and thought about Murray Rogers. I’d been dodging the issue all afternoon. It was easy to become wrapped up in the new job and forget all about the real purpose, especially easy because I liked myself better as William Maynard, bright young salesman with Black Sand Syndications. I liked that man better than Bill “Wizard” Maynard, a slick sharper who was sleeping with another man’s wife and planning to send that man to jail.

  I went back to the Panmore and picked up some sleep. In the morning I made a few calls and set up two afternoon appointments. I had a bite sent up from the coffee shop down the street and ate at my desk. Then I stopped to see Murray.

  “I wanted to get in touch with you earlier,” I said, “but I’ve been busy as hell.”

  “I spoke to Carver. Congratulations, Bill.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You really swept Perry off his feet. He was impressed, and he doesn’t impress that easily. Think you’ll like the work?”

  “I think so.”

  He drummed the desk top with his fingers. “Time for a hand or three?”

  “Just barely.”

  He took out the cards and we played a few hands of gin. I let him win a few dollars and I paid him. He boxed the cards and put them away. I took my cigarettes from my jacket pocket. There was a key on the top of his desk about midway between us. The key to his office, I guessed. I shook the cigarette pack clumsily and three or four of the cigarettes jarred loose and bounced across his desk. The two of us reached for them and scooped them up, and by the time they were back in the pack his key was in my pocket. The hand is quicker than the eye, gentlemen. A little misdirection is a dangerous thing.

  There was a little booth in a parking lot on Washington Street where they made duplicate keys while-u-waited. I had the locksmith knock out a copy of Murray’s key and put it on my key ring. Then I was ready for my appointments.

  It was the right kind of afternoon. I kept my two appointments and both prospects were perfect ones.

  The first was a fellow about my age, a cautious type who functioned as a bookkeeper. His mother had died a month or two ago and he had come into twenty-five thousand dollars worth of insurance money. He was earning seventy-five bucks a week, he wanted a second income to make life a little fuller, and he was scared to death of the stock market. My pitch on the eleven percent return appealed to him. He might have been good for the whole twenty-five grand, but I told him not to throw all of his eggs in one omelet. I sold him a pair of five-thousand dollar units and told him I’d keep my eyes open for the next good package that came our way.r />
  The second prospect didn’t have that kind of money to play with. He was a little older, and his capital was savings, not insurance windfall. He liked the idea of tax-free income and took a half-unit at twenty-five hundred dollars. He wrote me his check and I returned to the office to report to Carver.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “You’re terrific.”

  “I didn’t have that much to do with it,” I said. “They were pretty much pre-sold.”

  “Knock off for the rest of the day, Bill. Drop your hotel and find an apartment. And don’t try to dodge taking credit where it’s due. Don’t give me that pre-sold crap. You made the calls and you closed the sales. You’re a wizard, Bill.”

  Wizard, I thought. Sure, I thought. That’s what I am—a wizard. Also a magician.

  I thought I’d tell Murray about the sales and did. I accepted the congratulations and told him I’d see him at the game later that evening. When I left his office the key was right back on his desk where it belonged. He had never missed it. I had a copy and he had the original back and he didn’t know a thing about it.

  The game was at Ken Jameson’s house. Ken was the one who headed an insurance agency. He was a few years younger than most of the other players, just about my age. He had a wife and three young kids and a house in the suburbs. We sat around the dining-room table and played poker. Ken’s wife was a pretty girl who had sprung full-blown from the forehead of some slick magazine editor. She took care of the kids, put them to bed, and parked herself upstairs in front of the television set for the evening. She didn’t venture into the dining room except to say hello. She wouldn’t have recognized a bottom deal in slow motion.

  If we had played at Ken’s house that first night, I would have been in New York a day later. There would have been no electric contact with Joyce Rogers, no job with Carver’s outfit, no dark mystery of frames and set-ups. Life is a hellishly iffy proposition from beginning to end. There are always a million sneaky little variables, and any one of them can send you spinning in another direction entirely.

  We played, and I didn’t cheat. My restraint was not easy to maintain at first. But I managed, and at nine-thirty I was about fifteen dollars in the hole. I pushed back my chair, straightened up. “You’ll have to excuse me for about an hour,” I explained. “I’ve got a call I have to make, a plant foreman over on the East Side. This was the only time I could arrange to see him.”

  “That’s a hell of a note,” Murray said. “We were just starting to take a few dollars away from you.”

  “I’ll be back before eleven. I’ll lose in a hurry to make up for it.”

  “A real go-getter,” Sy Daniels said. “Don’t you know the rules? No business on Friday nights. Just poker.”

  I laughed, left and boarded the Corvair. I started the car and pulled away and headed back into town. There was no foreman over on the East Side. Correction—there were probably a few hundred foremen over on the East Side, but none of them interested me at the moment. I had other plans.

  I drove the car, smoked a cigarette. That was a nice thing about my new job—it gave me a free and easy sort of schedule. I could knock off work whenever I pleased if I had something else going, and at the same time I could invent a business appointment whenever I needed an excuse. I needed one now.

  The car seemed to know the way. I finished my cigarette and pitched out the butt. In the morning I would have to see about finding an apartment—the Panmore could run into money if I stayed there any length of time. And pretty soon it would be time to turn the rental back to Hertz and make a down payment on a car of my own.

  I made a final turn, drove part of the way down the block. I eased the car over to the curb, braked, killed the ignition. I walked fifty yards or so to stand in front of a big brick ranch on a large plot. There were a few lights on. The garage door was open and I could see a Caddy convertible parked there. She was home.

  The night was cool, clear. At the front door I poked the bell. My Dog Has Fleas, the chimes played.

  Joyce Rogers opened the door. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened and she started to say something, but I pushed her inside and drew the door shut and stopped whatever she was going to say with a kiss. I held her close, felt the sweet warmth of her fine body against mine. I unpinned her chestnut hair and it fell free. I ran my fingers through it.

  “We’ve got about an hour,” I said. “Let’s not waste it.”

  8

  “You’re crazy, Wizard. Insane!”

  "Why?”

  “Right here? In his own house? It’s not safe, Wizard.”

  “He’s at the game,” I said. “He won’t be leaving. And the girls will be out for awhile yet.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He mentioned it during the game. Don’t worry about it, Joyce. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “But—”

  “Or don’t you want me?”

  “Oh, God!”

  I reached for her, caught her by her shoulders. She held back for a moment, then fell against me, all warm and trembling. I ran my hands over her body and her flesh quivered.

  “The bedroom—” Joyce started to say.

  We never made the bedroom. There was a couch on the other side of the living room, but we didn’t reach there, either. I kissed her and she tossed her arms around my neck and clung to me like ivy to a stone wall. The stone wall melted and we sank to the floor and held each other close.

  I put my hand under her skirt and touched the silky perfection of her thighs. Her legs opened and I stroked her high on the inside of one thigh until she was moaning hysterically. She pushed me aside and yanked her skirt up around her waist. I took her panties off. She fell back on the floor, her eyes rolling, her forehead dotted with perspiration.

  “Now,” she moaned. “Now, now, right now, Bill, now, now”

  No kisses, no sweet caresses, no little bits and pieces. I fell on her like a tree.

  There was all that aching, all that need, and it exploded for us like a truckload of nitro on a cobblestone road. There was nothing soft or gentle, nothing remotely sweet about our love-making. What we had was something you couldn’t deny or postpone, something you could never push out of the way or ignore. And it was not the sort of blissful idyll that would evolve easily and naturally into a pattern of three or four pleasant bangs per week in the master bedroom of a split-level shack. Fires that burn with the Bill Maynard-Joyce Rogers type of flame don’t simmer down.

  Which could have been a hint, a clue, a flashed card. But maybe I wasn’t looking.

  Afterward she pulled on her panties and pulled down her skirt and we sat on the couch and talked. She had most of my story already from Murray. I gave her the rest and slipped her a quick summary of the plan of action. She liked it. Her approval showed in her eyes, bright and excited.

  I lit a cigarette. “Of course,” I said, “we could forget it.”

  She said nothing, and that noncommittally.

  “I’m all set up in business,” I told her. “I even enjoy my work. I could just stick to my job and make enough money to keep me happy. And you could go on being Murray Rogers’ loving wife. We’ve both got it fairly soft, you know. We’re not in an especially desperate situation.”

  “And keep seeing each other like this?”

  “Why not?”

  “And never try for the brass ring? And stay tied up like this? You like your work because it’s temporary, Wizard. It’s part of the act, not something you’d have to be doing for the rest of your life. You might not like it so much that way.”

  I avoided her eyes. The whole routine had started out as a joke, but somehow or other I had been saying things I partly meant. After all, I did like the work. And the idea of jobbing Murray Rogers was becoming less attractive the better I knew him.

  “It was just a gag,” I said.

  “Was it?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a bad kind of joke, Wizard.” She took one of my hands in both of
hers. “This is too big for me to joke about it, Wizard. I’m in this all the way. We’ve both got to be in it all the way.”

  On the way back to the game I tried to concentrate on driving the Corvair. That wasn’t easy. I kept telling myself that my semi-pitch to Joyce about playing our future straight had just been a gag. I was no real estate syndicator. I was a sharp, a quick-money boy, a guy whose world spun faster than the rest of the planet Earth. I wanted the fast money and the fast action and the fast women. Hotel rooms, ashes on the floor.

  Back at the game I complained about a stupid foreman who couldn’t understand anything no matter how long you hammered it into his skull. I played poker until the game broke up around two-thirty and I wound up forty-five dollars in the hole. Then I drove back to the hotel and slept.

  I looked at three apartments before I found the one I wanted. It was on College Street—two rooms and a bath and kitchenette, all furnished in Early American ugliness. The wallpaper was floral and the rugs were imitation Orientals. What the hell, I was renting the place, not buying it. The apartment might not be designed to turn on an interior decorator but it was roomy and comfortable and convenient and that was all I wanted. I paid a month’s rent, talked my way out of signing a lease. I moved my stuff over from the hotel and I was in business.

  By midafternoon I had given back the Corvair to the Hertz people and had put a hundred dollars down on a two-year-old Ford. It wasn’t exactly a dream car either but it was way ahead of the Corvair and the payments were only a tiny gouge per month. At three o’clock I drove downtown and parked in a lot a block from the Rand Building. I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor.

  Black Sand’s office was closed Saturdays but Carver had given me a key and had told me to use the office any time I felt like it. I unlocked the door. Nobody was around. I rearranged some junk on my desk just to show I had been there, then left to climb seven flights of stairs. It would have been easier to use the elevator, but elevator operators occasionally remember people and I didn’t want to be remembered. I was tired by the time I hit the twenty-fourth floor. I leaned against a wall and let my breathing go back to normal.