Tell

by Norah McClintock

  I took a quick break and went into the house to get a soda from the fridge. Phil and Jack and a bunch of Phil’s friends were sitting around the dining room table, playing poker. When Phil heard me come into the kitchen, he called for me to bring him a cold beer. He asked around the table and said, “Make that five cold ones, Davy.”

  I brought in the beers just in time to see Jack put down his cards. Phil groaned and threw his cards into the middle of the table. Jack grinned and raked in all the chips. He took a long drink from the cold beer I handed him.

  “What do you say we take a break?” one of the other guys said. He was a smoker and my mother didn’t allow smoking in the house. Phil went along with it even though I bet he used to smoke his cigars in the house before we moved in. The three guys who did smoke went outside. Phil pulled out a cigar and went with them. I went back through the kitchen and into the garage. Jack followed me.

  “How’s the job going, David?” he said. Then he stepped into the garage. “Wow!”he said. “I didn’t know this place even had a floor. You must have worked your butt off all day.”

  He had that right.

  “Who’s winning?” I said.

  “The night’s still young,” Jack said. “Things could change.”

  “Yeah, but right now, who’s ahead?”

  “I am.”

  “And Phil?” I asked.

  “I guess you could say he’s not doing so well.”

  Just like always. I’d hung around more than a few of their games over the years, a lot of times running beers for them and refilling bowls of chips and pretzels. Sometimes I ordered pizza for them and brought it in with paper plates and napkins.

  “I guess that’s because you’ve been playing serious poker for a long time,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Jack said.

  “I mean, you have way more experience with cards than me. When Phil plays me,he wins more than he loses.” I’d been thinking about that all afternoon. If it was something really big that had to get done in order to stop my mother from having a meltdown, I always lost. If it was something small that Phil could just decide not to do, I sometimes won. “But when he plays you, he usually loses more than he wins, and when he wins, he doesn’t win big. Or maybe he’s just lucky with me and not so lucky with you.”

  Jack glanced back over his shoulder into the kitchen. He closed the door. He said, “If I tell you something, you have to promise to keep it to yourself, okay, David?”

  I nodded.

  “I guess you could say in a way that I win more because I have more experience,” he said. “But not in the way you mean. Phil has a tough time playing against me because I have a tell on him.”

  “A tell?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “In poker, a tell is any kind of gesture or mannerism that gives you some idea of how good or bad a person’s hand is,” Jack said. “For example, if you see a player constantly looking at his hole cards, that’s often a tell of a poor hand. Of course, some players know that, so they check their hole cards a lot even when they have a great hand, just to throw you off. Another example is that some people play with their chips every time they bluff without even realizing it. Some blink a lot more than usual when they have a strong hand. If you pay attention, you can pick up tells on people. It can give you an edge.”

  “And you have a tell on Phil?”

  Jack nodded.

  “What is it?”

  Jack shook his head. “I can’t tell you that. But if you watch him, maybe you can figure it out.” He studied me for a few minutes. “Phil is pretty consistent,” he sa id. “It do esn’t mat t er i f he’s playing poker or he’s doing something else, you can always tell when he’s not on the level.”

  “You mean, when he’s bluffing?” I said.

  Jack nodded. “Or when he’s doing something that maybe he shouldn’t. Or being untruthful.” I noticed he didn’t come right out and say cheating or lying. “But if you want to figure out what his tell is, you have to watch him closely.”

  “And that’s why he beats me so much?”

  Jack looked around the garage, like maybe he was hoping to find something. Finally he shook his head.

  “Next time you watch him play poker with me and the other guys, watch what he does with his cards at the end of a hand,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just watch. And then watch what he does with his cards when he plays hands with you.”

  Detective Antonelli shifted in his chair.

  “David,” he said. “I already asked you once to stick to the point.”

  “I am sticking to the point,” I said.

  “Okay. So now I’m going to ask you to get to the point.”

  I told him, “Wait.”

  Chapter Nine

  I didn’t finish cleaning the garage that night after all. Instead I went inside and fetched beers for Phil and his friends. Besides Jack there was Ted, Mike and Arnie. Except for Jack, they were all truckers. I kept the chip bowl and the pretzel bowl filled to the brim. I ordered the pizza when they got hungry for something bigger and greasier. And I watched Phil play poker.

  At first it was confusing. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t think I’d ever figure it out. I watched Phil win hands and lose hands. I watched him fold sometimes before a hand was played out. He did a lot of things when he played. They all did. They munched handfuls of pretzels. They fiddled with their poker chips. They swigged beer. They ran their fingers through their hair. They scratched themselves all kinds of places. Maybe some of it meant something. Maybe it didn’t.

  Then came a hand where Phil bet big. Ted laughed.

  “Phil’s bluffing again,” he said. He raised Phil’s bet.

  I glanced at Jack. He was looking at Phil as if he was the only person in the room. He was staring at him, hard. So I looked at Phil too. When I did, I saw him do something that made me almost fall over, as if someone had just kicked me hard in the gut and all the wind had come out of me. After that I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  Mike studied Phil for a minute.

  “Face it, Phil,” he said. “It’s not your night, and the bluffing isn’t going to help.”

  Phil matched Ted’s bet. Then he said, “Hell, might as well make it interesting.” He raised and then he looked at Arnie, who did the same thing.

  Then it was Jack’s turn. He said, “Fold,” and threw down his cards.

  Phil laughed and raised again.

  Ted looked at Jack and folded.

  “Wuss,” said Mike. He called. So did Arnie.

  Phil won with a straight flush, king high.

  “Damn,” Mike said. “I could have sworn you were bluffing again.”

  I glanced at Jack. He had known that Phil had a strong hand this time. I was positive he had. And I was pretty sure I knew how he knew.

  I hung around for the rest of the game. For a while I wasn’t really paying attention. I was too stunned by what I had seen. I was remembering so much that I started to feel like Phil’s garage before I’d cleaned it. There were so many memories and they were all about to cascade down around me and bury me.

  When the game finally broke up, everyone was talking and fooling around and I couldn’t get Jack alone. Finally everyone left. I hurried to catch up with Jack, who was on his way to his pickup.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Phil said when I bolted out the door. “You’re supposed to be helping me tidy up.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I called to him, even though I had already decided that I wasn’t going to help him with anything ever again.

  I caught up with Jack just as he was slipping the key into the ignition. He opened his window.

  “You knew he wasn’t bluffing,” I said. “You knew it.”

  Jack didn’t say anything.

  “It was his face, wasn’t it? Before, he was watching everything that was happening. He was really paying attention.But when he pulled some good cards, all of a su
dden he had a blank look on his face, like he didn’t care anymore, like whatever. And his lips.” I had noticed that right away. “He licked his lips a couple of times, right?”

  “With Phil, mostly it’s the lips,” Jack said. He grinned at me. “You should take up poker. You’re pretty observant.”

  There was also the other thing Jack had told me to watch for. He said I should look at what Phil did with his cards at the end of a hand when he was playing with Jack and when he was playing with me. I had done exactly what Jack had said.

  “At the end of a hand with you, Phil throws his cards onto the pile where all the other cards are,” I said. “With me, he puts his hands over the cards and he slides them in to where my cards are and then he sort of blends them in with the rest of the deck.”

  Jack didn’t say anything.

  “What does it mean, Jack?”

  “What does what mean?” Jack said.

  “He puts his hands over the cards when he plays with me.”

  “Covers them up, you mean,” Jack said.

  I nodded.

  “Like maybe he’s hiding something,” Jack said. He turned the key in the ignition. “I know he’s your dad, David—”

  “He’s my stepfather.”

  Jack shrugged. “It’s not my family. It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t get involved.”

  I waited.

  “But some things are wrong,” he said. “And I can’t just stand back and watch them happen. That’s why I told you what to look for.”

  Maybe that’s where Jack was different from me, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I went back inside. I looked at the mess in the living room. There were empty beer bottles everywhere. And ground-up potato chips and pretzels all over the carpet. Plus dirty paper plates and napkins, dirty glasses, and some pizza grease stains on the table that my mother would freak over if she ever saw them, because this was her table—or so she always said. She had picked it out. Phil had probably paid for it. She always made a big deal over using coasters and place mats so that the table wouldn’t get marked up.

  “Come on,” Phil said. “Help me tidy up.”

  “I just spent all night cleaning the garage,” I said. “You tidy up.”

  I knew that Phil was angry because his face got all red.

  “I’ll play you for it,” he said. “If you lose, you do the cleanup by yourself.”

  “Two out of three,” I said so I’d have a good chance to watch.

  I won the first hand. I didn’t see Phil do anything out of the ordinary. At the end of the hand, he threw his cards in.

  On the second hand, Phil licked his lips when he fanned out his cards and again after picking up three cards. He won that hand. He slid his cards in.

  The same thing happened on the third hand. Phil licked his lips. I don’t think he even noticed he was doing it. He won again.

  “I guess that settles it,” he said.

  He started to slide his cards into the middle. I reached out and pushed his hand away from the cards. I guess he didn’t expect that because he looked startled. I grabbed his cards before he could react. He tried to snatch them back, but I got up from the table and ran into the kitchen.

  I had started with five cards. I’d discarded three and drawn three more. When the hand was over, I threw my cards onto the discard pile. Phil had also started with five cards. He had also discarded three and thrown them onto the discard pile. So there should only have been five cards under his hand as he slid them across the table. But instead there were eight—the five that made up his winning hand and that he had showed me, and three more. Where had the extra three cards come from? There was only one explanation.

  Phil came into the kitchen. He glanced at the cards in my hand. I stared at him.

  “You cheated,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “All this time you’ve been playing hands with me, you’ve been cheating.”

  He tried to laugh it off. “It’s not like I was stealing from you, Davy,” he said. “It’s not like we were playing for money.”

  “You cheated,” I said again. I couldn’t believe it. Well, maybe that wasn’t exactly true. Maybe it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that Phil would do something like that. But I felt like an idiot for being cheated by him all this time and never knowing it. “I’m going to tell Mom,” I said. I probably sounded like a baby saying that, but I wanted her to know what kind of jerk she had married.

  “She won’t believe you,” Phil said. “Not after I talk to her. That’s the trouble with being a pain in the ass, Davy. She knows you don’t like me. She knows you never listen to me. Now, as far as she’s concerned, you’re just going to kick it up a notch and start telling lies about me. Keep it up and nobody’s going to be sorry when you’re finally old enough to move out.”

  I looked at Detective Antonelli.

  “Is that why you did it, David?” he said. “Because you found out that your stepfather was cheating you at cards?”

  “I didn’t do it,” I told him. “I didn’t do anything.” And, boy, that was the truth.

  Chapter Ten

  Detective Antonelli stared at me. He said, “Where did you get the gun?”

  “What gun?”

  “Come on, David,” he said. “Your stepfather was shot dead. Your mother found the missing picture of your brother in the clothes dryer. Your clothes were the only ones in the dryer. We know for a fact that you were in the immediate area right before your stepfather was shot.And you lied to us about it. Where did you get the gun? What did you do with it afterward?”

  “I never had a gun. I didn’t do it,” I told him again.

  Detective Antonelli looked impatient.

  “I just told you about Phil cheating so you’d get an idea what kind of person he was,” I said. “The important part has to do with that hand he played with Jack. The one where he kept raising and he won, and where Jack folded.”

  “What about it, David?” Detective Antonelli said. He sounded worse than impatient. He sounded annoyed.

  “I saw what Jack was talking about,” I said. “I figured out what Phil’s tell was. After he looked at his cards, just before he bet, when Jack was looking at him, studying him”—I wanted him to get that part—“Phil’s face changed. One minute he was right in there, watching everything. Then, just like that, he licked his lips and his eyes went kind of blank, like he was trying hard not to show what he was really feeling, like he didn’t want everyone to know he had a great hand for a change.”

  “David, we need to get back on topic here.”

  “Do you remember what my mother told you about my brother Jamie?” I said.

  “David—”

  “Do you?”

  “She said he drowned.”

  “We were at this cottage that Phil had borrowed from a friend of his,” I said. “We were supposed to spend two weeks there. My mom was nervous about it. She never learned to swim. She didn’t like the water. Jamie didn’t know how to swim either. Mom tried to make him go to swimming lessons, but he horsed around so much all the time that they kicked him out. She made him wear a life jacket just to go on the beach, and she made sure that either she or Phil was watching him all the time. Phil, he could swim. He always boasted how he was on the swim team in high school. He has a bunch of medals and ribbons in a display case on the wall of his study.” They were probably the only things he had ever won. He was probably one of those guys whose best years were in high school.

  “And you?” Detective Antonelli said.

  “I took swimming lessons in school. My swimming instructor said I was a better swimmer than any ten-year-old he had ever seen.”

  Detective Antonelli said, “This is going somewhere, right, David?”

  I said it was. I told him how broken up my mother had been when Jamie drowned.

  “If he was wearing a life jacket, how did he drown?” Detective Antonelli said.

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “Jamie never listened.
Or if he did, he listened to what you told him to do and then he did the opposite. He was going out in the boat with Phil. The boat belonged to the same guy who let Phil have the cottage. It had a big outboard motor on it. They were out there together—Phil and Jamie. It was my mother’s idea. You know, let them have a little quality time together and maybe Phil would warm up to Jamie, and Jamie would listen to Phil for a change. I was on the shore. I could see them. They weren’t out all that far. Phil had paddled out to where the water was deep and he wanted to start the engine. I could see that Jamie didn’t have his life jacket on.”

  “David, I’m sorry about your brother,” Detective Antonelli said. “But unless this has something to do—”

  “I think my mother liked that Phil carried Jamie’s picture around with him all the time,” I said. “I think that made her believe that Phil really loved Jamie. It sure made everyone else believe it. People were always telling Phil what a good guy he was, but how maybe he made it hard on himself, having that picture with him all the time. He got a lot of sympathy from it. One time he told me he got a lot of free drinks too, you know, from people who would see the picture on his key chain and say, Is that your son? And then he’d tell them the whole story.” Well, he didn’t tell the whole story. He told his version of it. “And people would feel sorry for him and buy him a beer.”

  Someone knocked on the door to the interview room. It was a cop. He said, “The mother wants to be in here with her son. She’s making a big fuss about it. She says she’s going to call a lawyer.”

  Detective Antonelli sighed and looked at me.

  “She can come in if she wants,” I said. “But first I want to tell you about my brother Jamie.”

  “After that you’ll tell about your stepfather?”

  I said I would. Then I told him about Jamie. I told him a few other things too. After he listened, he sent another cop to check on some of what I said. When the other cop finally came back into the room, he said something to Detective Antonelli in a quiet voice that I couldn’t hear. Detective Antonelli said, “Show Mrs. Benson in.”