Death Plays Poker

by Robin Spano

  “It’s a brutal game,” Clare said.

  “That one of your lessons from Mickey?”

  “It actually is.” Clare leaned in close. She liked Nate’s aftershave: not musky, but manly. Probably Axe. “You know people are dying on this scene, right?”

  “I’ve heard that.” Nate frowned. “But I didn’t join the tour until Niagara. No one died there, right?”

  “Right. Or here. Yet.”

  They arrived at the cash register and they both ordered black coffee. Nate paid and Clare thanked him.

  “No problem,” Nate said, as they made their way back toward the poker room. “Maybe now you’ll put out.”

  Clare laughed. “You’re closer than you know. I like beer, but I can live without it. But cut off my coffee supply, and I’ll happily whore myself out until my chemical balance is restored.”

  “Good to know. You were so insistent on splitting the bill last night, I was afraid I couldn’t buy you at any price.”

  “Splitting? I wanted to pay the whole thing.” Amanda had advised Clare to take every opportunity to grab the cheque, to create the impression that a hundred bucks was small change to her.

  “I know,” Nate said. “But if I’d let you pay, I would have felt compelled to put out. There’s nothing less sexy than being a kept man.”

  “There’s lots that’s less sexy. Like men who cheat on their wives.”

  “You don’t think cheating’s hot, in a clandestine kind of way?” Nate lowered his voice even deeper to say this.

  “I’d rather a man told me he liked to fuck sheep.”

  “Really?” Nate’s eyebrows arched.

  “I’d walk away regardless, but animals are a preference. Cheating’s immoral.”

  “No kidding,” Nate said. “Because I find moralistic people a turn-off. I’m going to make an exception for you, though.”

  “Appreciate it,” Clare said, realizing that maybe fucking sheep had its own morality questions — like, for the sheep. “Hey, I heard a rumor that those murders might be connected to some cheating ring. Have you heard that, too?”

  Nate’s brow lowered. He took Clare’s arm — carefully, so as not to spill the coffees — and led her to a wall where no one could overhear.

  “Wow,” Clare said. “Why the serious face?”

  “You should be careful what you say out loud around here.”

  “Why?” Clare smiled blandly, trying her best to look innocent.

  “I don’t know where you come from or how sheltered your world was growing up. My suspicion is that a lot of your innocence is a fucking act. But you must understand that the killer could be anyone on this scene. You can’t go around speculating out loud what these deaths do and don’t relate to. If the wrong person overhears you, they could think you know something and you could become the next victim.”

  “Okay,” Clare said. “I’ve never been around this world, around criminals, really. Well, my father had a friend who went to jail for fraud. But he wasn’t a close friend — more of an acquaintance —”

  “Shut up.” Nate leaned in and kissed her, and Clare was glad she was leaning into the wall, because the feeling nearly melted her. She hoped her Juicy Couture perfume really did mask that she hadn’t showered.

  Was it cheating if Clare wanted Tiffany to fuck this guy?

  THIRTY-NINE

  ELIZABETH

  Elizabeth watched Nate kiss Tiffany, up against the wall like they were in some romance movie. What a little fucking drama queen.

  At least it looked like Nate had won the prop bet. Which was good, because Elizabeth didn’t know how long she could pretend to be buddy-buddy with Tiffany without vomiting on her own words.

  She sipped her green tea. There were ten minutes left on the break and Elizabeth was alone at the poker table.

  She saw Joe near the coffee bar. Joe caught Elizabeth looking and waved. He had that stupid grin on his face, the one he plastered on in the morning and left on all day in case the cameras caught him in one of their candid shots. At least he’d taken off his Paris Hilton wig during the break. Still, the poison started a dull throb through Elizabeth’s body.

  Shit. She did a double take, but it was true. Her brother Peter was standing there talking to Joe. He was animated, grinning — Peter looked like he thought Joe was the greatest guy on Earth.

  The polite thing would be to go talk to them. Elizabeth used to care a lot about what the polite thing was, but that was one value the poker world had cured her of. Her veins wanted to explode, and now her head was beginning to go. She didn’t trust herself to get up; she was afraid she’d say something horrible to Peter.

  Oh, who was she kidding? Of course Elizabeth was getting up, walking over to the men, smiling broadly as she gave her brother a hug.

  “Liz!” Peter squeezed Elizabeth like she was a teddy bear he’d found buried at the bottom of a moving box after several years in storage. It actually felt kind of good. “Great to see you. Did I miss the email where you said you’d be in town?”

  Elizabeth gave a small laugh. “It’s not you I’m avoiding.”

  “Good,” Peter said. “Because I came to watch you play.”

  Joe wandered off, which Elizabeth appreciated. She looked her brother in the eye. “Please don’t watch me play. You know it throws my game off.”

  “I watch all your games on TV. What’s the difference?”

  “I’ve already played them by the time you’re watching.”

  Peter nodded at the indoor bleachers. “The spectators don’t bother you?”

  “They’re just background noise; I don’t see them as real people.”

  “How about a deal?” Peter said. “I won’t watch you play if you come out for dim sum on the weekend.”

  “Who’s going to be there?”

  “Mom and Dad and me.”

  Her veins started pulsing, like the poison wanted out. “Do they know you’re inviting me?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “I want to see you, Peter. It’s just — Mom and Dad — and when everyone’s together — I can’t help feeling like I’m a teenager again. Only when I was a teenager I never disappointed them.”

  “You should hear them brag about you behind your back.”

  “So they can save face in front of their friends.” Elizabeth wrung her hands together. Maybe she should go for dinner, if only to buy some time until the next obligatory visit. “They make sure to let me know how they really feel.”

  “How do they really feel?” Peter shifted his black vinyl briefcase from one hand to the other.

  “Like I let them down when I stopped working for Dad and I’ve been letting them down ever since.”

  Peter didn’t say anything.

  “What’s wrong?” Elizabeth worried that something she’d said might have offended him.

  “I miss you.”

  Elizabeth bit her lower lip. “I miss you, too.”

  “So come for dim sum. It’s one meal. It’s painless.”

  “It won’t be painless for me. How about we get together, you and me? You don’t have to tell them I’m in town.”

  Peter’s eyes moved around the casino. The warning bell sounded. Most players were already in their seats. “You can’t not talk to them forever.”

  “I’m not not talking to them. I’m just, you know, not talking to them.”

  “I’m sure that’s different somehow,” Peter said.

  “You don’t know what it’s like. They’ve never put the same pressure on you.”

  “Why do you think I became an accountant?” Peter gestured toward his briefcase.

  “Because you love to be bored.”

  “Wrong. So I wouldn’t have to deal with constant disapproval. I’m not strong like you are.”

  Elizabeth wondered why people seemed t
o think she was strong. “If I was strong, I’d go to dim sum and the shit they spewed would be in one ear and out the other.”

  “So make a shield.”

  “What?” Elizabeth pictured herself in the back of someone’s metal shop, soldering and hammering until she’d built herself a medieval-looking shield.

  “Build a little imaginary shield that you can put up to deflect their insults. Say ping in your head every time you use it. The insults will bounce right back to them.”

  “I don’t want to ping insults back at Mom and Dad,” Elizabeth said. “They’re not like this on purpose.”

  “So ping the insults into the atmosphere.” Peter held up his hand and used a finger from the other hand to demonstrate the insult reflecting off in the direction of the sky. “Or imagine the insults dissolving as soon as they’ve bounced off the shield.”

  “My brother the video game freak.”

  “Come on, Liz. Visualization works.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “I’ll give it a try.”

  “So you’ll come to dim sum.” Peter’s face lit up.

  “Let me work on my shield first.”

  “Fine.” Peter shrugged. “While you’re working on that, I’ll just take a seat in the spectator area.”

  “Peter!”

  “Doesn’t have to be dim sum. Dinner can work. Dad loves this place at Westminster and Three Road. Their soft-shell crab is dangerously good.”

  “I hate deep-fried food.”

  “You won’t hate this.”

  “I have to get back to my table. The game’s going to start in — shit, like five seconds.”

  “Okay. I’ll be cheering you on.” Peter gave Elizabeth a little wave and started walking toward the spectator stands.

  “Please?” Elizabeth pleaded with her eyes. “I really don’t want you watching me.”

  Peter stopped walking, but he didn’t reverse his direction.

  “Okay,” Liz said. “Dinner. Or dim sum. This weekend.”

  “Deal.”

  “Oh, and Peter? Do you have time to do me a favor?”

  “I love it when someone asks me that question before they tell me the favor.”

  “Can you dig around Dad’s office for me? I need to find out everything I can about a furniture importer whose last name is James.”

  FORTY

  GEORGE

  “You think this is a bit cloak-and-dagger, Mickey?” George shrugged off his leather jacket and hooked it onto the back of his chair. “The bar downtown . . . the separate cabs . . .”

  Mickey squinted as he glanced around the busy room. “You think I’m funny. But anyone overhears this, I’m toast, you’re toast, we can both kiss all our dreams goodbye.”

  “All right, I get it,” George said. “I say anything, we’re both dead.”

  Mickey shook his head. “Joke all you fucking want to. There’s already three people who ain’t breathing too well anymore.”

  A waiter in black arrived at their table. He wore a little black apron from which he pulled a notepad and pen. Mickey ordered a bottle of Bud. George had the waiter list the microbrews on tap before selecting a local pale ale.

  When the waiter had left, George leaned into the table and said, “You’re willing to risk both of our lives just so I write your biography?”

  Mickey nodded. “A deal’s a deal. I’ll share information about this hole card scam as I find it; you make this book as good as it can be.”

  “How can one book be worth so much to you?”

  Mickey’s face pulled a pained, almost pleading expression. “It just is.”

  The drinks arrived. The waiter set down two cocktail napkins and the beers, frowning the whole time. He gave an exaggerated wrist swirl before turning and prancing away.

  “What, we’re not gay enough for him?” Mickey said when the waiter had left.

  George shrugged. “I don’t think it’s a gay or straight thing. I think he draws his self-worth from making himself feel superior to his customers.”

  “Why should he care who’s superior? Anyway, it’s you he hates. ‘What kind of fucking microbrew?’ Who asks that shit?”

  George rolled his eyes. “I like beer that has flavor. And I understand why the waiter’s sensitive. It takes brains to do his job well, but there’s zero prestige associated.”

  “Who cares about prestige?” Mickey asked. “Is he living for himself or other people?”

  “Who’s your biography for, if not for other people?”

  Mickey muttered something into his beer bottle.

  “Pardon?” George said.

  “I said it’s for my fucking father.”

  George looked at Mickey for a moment and said, “Families are fucked. We can leave them, go out on our own and never talk to them, but we can’t escape their criticism.”

  Mickey looked at George oddly. “Why you gotta philosophize about everything today? My old man don’t criticize me. He’s prouder than punch that I made it so far. Watches me on TV with his buddies all the time.”

  “So I don’t get it.”

  “Obviously. I mean, I’m sorry about your family and all. They sound like pompous windbags, so I guess it’s not your fault you’re like you are. But at some point, George, you gotta claim your life.”

  George fingered the stubby base of his glass. It wasn’t the smoothest beer he’d ever tasted, but it had body, and he liked that. “This isn’t about me.”

  “Sure it is. You don’t want to write my biography because you think it’s not prestigious. You’re as bad as that fucking gay waiter.”

  “You think he’s judging you for preferring big blonds with silicon implants?” Yet another problem George had with the poker scene; it insulated the rednecks from ever having to change their bigoted ways.

  Mickey snorted. “Don’t make this about me being a queer-o-phobe. I had friends who used to beat queers up; I never joined them.”

  “Nice friends.”

  “Nicer than your fucking friends,” Mickey said. “Making you feel like less than a man if you don’t get all the perfect credentials from Snob School.”

  “Can we dispense with the abusive preamble and cut to the reason you called me here?”

  “Yeah, all right.” Mickey glanced around again. “So I’m talking to Loni after I bust out of the tourney in Niagara — it’s her favorite time to talk, when she thinks I’m down — and she tells me she’s thinking of playing in the Vancouver game.”

  “I was at Loni’s table today,” George said. “She’s doing well in the game. I’m surprised.”

  “You should be fucking surprised. Not to malign her intelligence, because Loni is one of the most skilled manipulators I know. But neither math nor cards are her forte.”

  George hoped this wasn’t the whole reason Mickey had wanted to meet. Sure, with cheaters in the game, it was natural to suspect everything unusual. But — “A monkey could win one of these tournaments if the cards chose to fall that way. Is this why we’re here incognito?”

  “We’re not incognito. We’re not wearing disguises.”

  “Sorry,” George said. “Wrong word, but you get my meaning.”

  “As a writer, you should choose your words more carefully. Maybe I shouldn’t have picked you to write my biography.”

  “Would you come off it, Mickey, and tell me what there is to tell.”

  “Fine. Anyway, Loni had had some drinks — it was the middle of the afternoon, but life with T-Bone drives her to the bottle at all hours — and she starts saying shit like what if there was a way for her to know everyone’s hole cards.”

  “Really,” George said. “Just out in the open. The most skilled manipulator suddenly forgets how to keep a secret.”

  “Shit,” Mickey said. “You think she’s playing me?”

  “Either that o
r you’re playing me.”

  “Why would I play you? I want to get to the bottom of this scam as much as you do. I would have bailed on this Canadian Classic bullshit tournament if I didn’t think I could help fix it.”

  George wasn’t sure what Mickey meant by “fix.” “How many players do you think are cheating?”

  Mickey shrugged. “There’s two or three I’d lay money on. I don’t want to say any names until I’m more sure.”

  “You’d lay money on them, but you can’t say their names out loud?”

  “To lay cash I need odds. To accuse someone of cheating, I need close to a hundred percent.”

  George half-smiled. “How did you get these names?”

  “Other than Loni — who I’m going to call as a sure thing — I watch them play poker.”

  “And if they play a hand they should have folded, they go on your radar?” George asked.

  “No. If their eyes say they can see my fucking hole cards, they go on my radar.”

  “How do their eyes say that?” George wondered what his own eyes were saying.

  “Same way they say if they’re bluffing or holding the nuts. I could always see behind people’s eyes, since I was a kid watching my uncles play.”

  “What about the guys who wear sunglasses?”

  “Well, they’re the smart ones, aren’t they? But there’s other ways you can tell. How they handle their chips, are their hands shaking or even, are their shoulders tight or relaxed —”

  George cut in, “So why would Loni bait you? What did her eyes et cetera say?”

  “You know what interferes with my reading skills?” Mickey slammed back the rest of his beer. He held the bottle up and pointed at it to show the snotty waiter he was ready for a new one. “Loni. Because even though I know she’s an opportunistic bitch who would throw me to the curb without glancing back to see if I was bleeding, she’s still my ex-fucking-wife, and I still go crazy when we’re in the same room together. She’s the only thing on this whole scene that makes my radar go kaboom.”

  George wrinkled his forehead. “What Loni told you — whatever it means — does that put T-Bone on the radar as a cheater?”