Under the Cheaters Table

by Etta Faire

  Richie pushed Feldman away from the table. His beady eyes were already reddening. “I heard you might be thinkin’ about that, but I said, ‘No, Feldman would tell me.’”

  Drew looked down at her feet. “We’ll talk about this later,” she said, walking away.

  Richie wasn’t done. He shoved Feldman against the table. “Who you selling the bar to, Felds? Cause the only one here able to buy it is the only one here who would be very bad for business.”

  “For your business,” Doc said. Richie took a step toward him and Doc backed away.

  Feldman waved them both off. “I’m gonna go check on my brother. You guys’ll work out a deal, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sure we will too,” Richie said. “Or this place is toast. And I am not one to be messed with. I got people everywhere. So many connections on so many levels. They’ll do anything I want. Burn this place to the ground if I gave ‘em the go ahead.”

  His voice faded out as Feldman passed into the hallway. Burn this place to the ground…

  Richie’s own house had burned to the ground while he was in jail, a suspicious fire. I wondered now if he’d set it himself.

  Boyd and Chance were coming out of the back room as Feldman was going in.

  “Thanks for your help, fellas,” Flo said.

  She was standing at the nightstand, tugging off her earrings. She ran a hand through her short blonde hair then, when she saw Feldman in the doorway, motioned toward the bloody lump in her bed. “Who could ever have guessed a drunk losing his free pass to drink would be so angry about it?”

  Feldman bit back anger. “It’s better this way.”

  “Never said it’s not. You just can’t be surprised, is all.” She pulled off her dress shoes next as Feldman stood watching her.

  She walked toward him, one shoe off, one on. “I work better without an audience,” she said, closing the door. Before she closed it all the way, she stopped and pointed down the hall at the dent in the wall from the horse. The dent was still there but the horse was missing.

  Feldman muttered curse words again.

  “Anybody could’ve taken that thing while you were fighting with Terry,” she said. “Hell, Terry could’ve taken it before the fight, thinking it was funny. It’s one of those things in life you just have to laugh off.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he said, looking her up and down.

  “Nothing’s ever easy,” she said, closing the door.

  It was dark in the club after I fast forwarded through much of Feldman’s memories. They were mostly of people staggering drunkly off to bed, and there wasn’t anything more with the horse after that. Apparently, after the fight, hiding a bank around the bar had lost its fun for whoever was doing it.

  Doc and Feldman were the only two still up. We leaned against the bar. Most the lights were off, causing Doc’s face to take on a ghostly hue illuminated by the couple lamps dangling over our heads. He raised his glass. “To the dream,” he said. “May we all find it for ourselves someday.”

  “Or die trying,” Feldman replied, raising his glass of beer and taking a sip. “It’s gonna be strange, coming here as a customer.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re a good friend. I’ll only charge you double.” He took another slow sip off what was probably a gin and tonic and let it linger on his tongue before swallowing. “Please tell me you don’t regret selling.”

  “No. It’s time for me to move on. Gonna help Terry find his dream, whether he likes it or not. The drunk bastard. He’s too young to give up like he’s doing.”

  “And what about you? You gonna settle down?”

  “I’m too old not to, I guess. Whatever settling down means. Pretty sure it means giving up.”

  “You’re forty-two. You talk like you’re seventy-two.”

  “And you talk like I’m twenty-two. It’s time for me to realize where I’m at in life. You’ll be better at runnin’ this joint than I ever was. Richie and Terry walked all over me. It’s hard to turn a profit when you’re as soft as a doormat.”

  “And that’s what I wanted to discuss with you earlier,” Doc said. “Richie.”

  Feldman shrugged and chugged his beer. “I’m sure you two will reach an understanding.”

  “He hates me.” Doc drank slowly, savoring every moment. He squeezed the lime into his glass and swished it around. “He blames me for everything, you know? For you selling the bar. You should’ve heard him when you left. He accused me of blackmailing you into selling. Just because that’s what he’s capable of…”

  Doc closed his eyes as he talked. He opened them again, but barely. They were little slits. “Every time he loses, he blames me. He blamed me for that horse race way back when. We all lost a bundle when you talked us out of betting on the favorite. But he blamed me. Blamed me for never having a date in high school, for failing algebra twice, because I wouldn’t let him cheat off me. And now, he blames me again. It’s always everyone’s fault but his own.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Feldman said. I could tell our eyes were getting heavier too.

  “I think I need to do something drastic.” Doc said. “Something big, to show that awful dick I will not be trifled with.”

  Feldman laughed. “Go to bed, Doc. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Something very, very ruthless and unsettling,” he said then staggered off toward the hall. “But I’m certainly not paying for police protection. Not from that guy. I told you to make sure he knew that before I bought the bar.”

  “Blue room,” Feldman reminded him. “Blanche is waiting in the blue room.”

  He staggered into the doorway before making it to the hall. And I realized, through Feldman’s blurry vision, that the drink we just had was likely drugged.

  Chapter 26

  You Gamble. You Lose

  I fast-forwarded through his memories just a bit, past him finishing the beer and staggering around, picking things up while he muttered to himself that he wasn’t the maid around here.

  It was much easier now that I was in control. That I pictured Feldman’s memories as nothing more than the pages of a textbook that I could skim through for the most relevant parts.

  I stopped and rewound when I realized Feldman had just mindlessly picked up a book from the floor by the bar.

  He was laughing that he wouldn’t have to pick up after drunken jerks anymore. His days of bartending, serving, and cleaning were done.

  The book he picked up was Golden Promises.

  That did not seem like a coincidence. I slowed down the action so I could catch the name on the cover: Jeremy Mortimer.

  Feldman pushed open the kitchen door, setting the glasses into the sink, tossing the book in the trash.

  He turned on the water to wash the glasses, but turned it off again. His eyelids were too heavy, his vision too foggy.

  I tuned into his thoughts, which were all just how tired he was, how he would finish things in the morning.

  As he turned to head to bed, in the shadows of the darkened room, he saw it again.

  The horse was on the card table, staring at him. He closed his eyes, and opened them. It was still there. He stumbled over to the table.

  “What in the hell…” he repeated over and over, slurring his words, his ears stinging with anger.

  But when he concentrated on the horse, the thing blurred into two images. Two horses that fogged around each other. His stomach churned and he rested a hand on the table to steady himself.

  “You’re lucky we’re snowed in,” he said to the inanimate object. His voice sounded muffled and jumbled in our mind. Feldman had been drugged, all right, probably sleeping pills. I tried to think back on everything the man had consumed. But then he’d had more drinks than food. We never even tasted that chicken.

  He continued, talking to the horse. “I’d chuck you into the snow if I could open that damn door.” He picked up the bank and looked around for a hammer or a bat, anything to smash the thing to pieces, knowing full well that wouldn’t wor
k. The bank was two sides of solid metal, held together by a long, thick bolt. And he was too tired. So very tired. Even holding the horse took way too much effort.

  It dropped from his hand, landing with a thud onto the table. He didn’t even check to see if it had dented the wood. Who cared? Wasn’t his table anymore.

  He plopped down next to the horse, almost missing the chair, his breathing erratic, his heart pounding into his chest. That’s when he saw a thin ribbon draped across the horse’s back, that seemed to end in the coin slot, right by the horse’s neck.

  Finally. He thought. Here was the joke. The punch line. He looked around the room to see if he could spot the jokester waiting in the shadows to spring out and say, “Gotcha” as soon as he pulled the ribbon out and whatever was on the other end popped out. He guessed it was probably a dime-store fake spider or roach or something.

  They probably thought he’d be afraid. He wasn’t.

  He couldn’t see anyone even though he knew someone had to be there.

  He turned his blurred attention back to the horse. Pulling on the ribbon, he was barely able to maintain concentration. Something was at the end, just like he thought. But it seemed to be a note attached by a safety pin. He bit his lip as he angled the pin and the ribbon just right so he could maneuver it out of the slot.

  When he pulled it out, I realized the note was more unusual than Feldman had described. He unfolded the small paper. It hadn’t been handwritten or typed. The words had been cut from what looked like the print from books, and pasted onto the paper.

  I quickly tried to make sure my own conscience was separated from Feldman’s. He was drugged but I was not. And this was the time I needed to concentrate on the details so I could see how this ended.

  He squinted and read the words out loud. You gamble. You lose.

  From there, things went dark. Someone from behind must have thrown a small blanket or cloth over our head while yanking our chin back, snapping our neck into position. The force was immediate and swift, and Feldman was in no condition to fight against it.

  I tried to get a sense of things. The smell and scratchiness of the fabric. Whether the killer was left or right handed. Anything to ground myself to the details.

  I heard it first. The “chuck” sound you hear in horror movies when someone gets stabbed and you wonder how much of the sound would actually be real and how much was manufactured in the studio. A lot of that sound is real.

  And I knew right away this was a life-altering cut, deep and undeniable. Pain shot through the numbness of the sleeping pills. Intense, red-hot pain that I knew must’ve been coming from my neck but I could no longer tell.

  Every part of me wanted to end this and go back to Gate House, but I forced myself to live through it. This was someone’s life. Someone’s death. And the least I could do was stay here and help this jackass figure things out.

  The blade was still in my neck. I felt it along my clavicle. I looked down, through the edge of the pillowcase over my head. It was upside down but I could still see the handle. RM.

  I could no longer swallow, or breathe properly. Weird, gurgling noises came from my throat as I thrashed my arms wildly around, trying to pull the thing out. But the perpetrator seemed prepared for that. The knife twisted into my throat farther and farther, wider and deeper.

  And as everything went dark and I knew we were done, I felt an odd connection to Feldman I hadn’t felt before.

  I knew him better. And he knew me.

  A male voice in the distance said, “What the hell…” just as we blacked out.

  Chapter 27

  Finding Your Voice

  I wasn’t even the least bit tired or concerned when I finished my channeling. I strolled into the kitchen, grabbed a bagel from the bag in the bread bin, and began jabbing and slicing it with my dull knife until I eventually ripped it straight down the middle.

  I slipped the pieces into my toaster oven, checking the time on the microwave clock. It was well past midnight. I’d been channeling for the longest time yet, but I wasn’t the least bit worried. I now knew the secret:

  Ghosts can only hold the power you give them in life.

  And I was no longer giving this one any. The other times I’d unintentionally given up way too much of myself.

  I pulled open the fridge and grabbed the cream cheese, thinking about the memories I’d just relived. There had been an unknown voice at the time of Feldman’s death. One he probably hadn’t heard because he might already have blacked out from the pain. The voice was male, and very familiar. It had also come from across the room and it had sounded pretty surprised by what it was seeing.

  I ran the other clues through my head. The note that had been fashioned from cut-out words of a book, probably the Golden Promises book Feldman had picked up when he was cleaning right before his death. At least now I had a name I could look up. I tried to remember it. Jeremy Mortimer. Mortimer. A pretty interesting and familiar name.

  The bagel dinged and the smell of crispy bread filled the room when I opened the oven.

  Regret. Golden Promises. Jeremy Mortimer. J. Mortimer.

  I sat down at the dining room table and pulled open my laptop. Crunching down on my bagel, I looked up Feldman Banking and Trust. There was only a brief history of the company included on the Wikipedia page for Feldman-Martin, the firm it would later become.

  Feldman Banking and Trust was founded in 1850 by Jeremy Mortimer Feldman III after an inheritance from his father.

  The name jumped out at me like a weird cast iron bank.

  “You wrote Golden Promises,” I said to the ghost I knew was here somewhere. “That’s how you knew it couldn’t have been your writer friend from New York harassing you. You were the writer friend. This was why you got so testy. Why you hated rich people and golden promises. Jeremy Mortimer was your secret. He was the side of you that you could never let people know existed. The side you could never truly be. The artist.”

  I really wanted to read that book now.

  But now I knew the murderer was someone who wanted Feldman to make the connection between Jeremy Mortimer and the Kentucky Derby, or regret.

  “Which ones of your friends knew you wrote Golden Promises?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.

  I bit hard on my bagel, thinking about the only other clue I could remember from the channeling, the RM on the end of the knife. Only one person had that monogram. Richard Mulch. But just because the knife has your initials on it doesn’t mean you were the one behind it. Someone could just as easily have wanted to set him up.

  Doc said Richie blamed him for his big loss at the Kentucky Derby even though Feldman was the one who talked him out of betting on the favorite…

  It hit me. I stuffed the last piece of bagel in my mouth and went back to the Kentucky Derby page. The favorite. There was something very unusual about the favorite that year.

  Chapter 28

  The Root of the Problem

  “This might not work,” I reminded Mr. Peters and Rosalie as we made our way down the basement steps of the restaurant the next day. The smell of sulphur was strong again, and grew stronger as we approached the door. I kept my breathing calm, refusing to even consider whether or not I was breathing in time with the thing in the wall.

  I needed to remember I was in control.

  Other than the bandage still around his head and the shaky way he scratched at it, Mr. Peters seemed fine. I could hardly blame him for being nervous, though.

  “I just want to be done with this demon once and for all.” His lip quivered as he rummaged through the pocket of his work pants, bringing out a set of keys. “Thank you so much for trying to help.”

  He seemed sincere. But I still wasn’t sure about him.

  “Well, I, for one, think this is a bad idea. You’re being crazy,” Rosalie said. She casually leaned into Mr. Peters as he unlocked the door. I made a mental note to ask her about the casual-lean-in later.

  “I know. But I think closure is the o
nly way to get rid of both of our ghost problems.”

  The door flung open as soon as Mr. Peters unlocked it like it had jumped from his grasp. The sound of breathing echoed off every wall of the speakeasy.

  And I realized it was worse than ever. The breathing sounds were loud and sticky now, and as soon as I turned my flashlight on, I saw that the hole took up almost two walls, and extended all the way up to just under the ceiling.

  I quickly reminded Mr. Peters and Rosalie to stay by the door, ready to call 911 if something happened. Then, I walked calmly over to the lamp and turned it on, picturing the speakeasy as it had been before things changed, back when it was lighter, calmer, and slightly more pleasant smelling.

  It was all a part of how I planned to maintain control. I couldn’t picture things how they seemed right now, but instead, how they should seem.

  So far, so good. I wasn’t being sucked across the room and nothing was being tossed at me.

  I mentally grounded my feet as I walked over to the bar and picked up the horse from where it had fallen behind it. It looked the same as it had in the channeling, with very little fading.

  Why were the awful things in life always the things made to last?

  I set it down on the bar.

  “When the horse this bank was patterned off of was born, the owners named her Regret because they’d wanted a colt and had received a filly,” I yelled over the sticky breathing sounds around me. “That female had a passion for racing, though, and went on to win the 1915 Kentucky Derby, the first female to do that. And she was a clear favorite to win. No surprises there. Still, Feldman, and many other people like him, didn’t bet on her. He talked his friends out of betting on her, too. Too many people weren’t about to bet on the girl.”