The Wheel is Fixed

by James M. Fox

  “This one’s no customer.”

  He shook his fat gray head and scratched behind one ear. “Ye’d best see Mr. Norman,” he advised. “Him that’s the pit boss in there, he’ll be after knowing what ’tis all about.”

  In there was quite a situation. The air-conditioned room ran half the building’s size under a dome-shaped ceiling painted apple-green, from which at least two dozen banks of fluorescent lights bathed everything in a hard, impersonal green glare. Something like sixty poker tables ran wide open, with a waiting line of eager candidates for seats straining against the velvet rope. Surprisingly the place would have seemed very quiet indeed except for the dry ruffle of the chips like locust wings in flight.

  A spare, benign old gentleman neatly attired in double-breasted serge was nonchalantly leaning on the wall, under a life-size mural of an English fox-hunt scene, the one that shows the master of the hounds raising his whip to hold the pack in check before the kill. I had to introduce myself and stand careful inspection before he would admit to being Mr. Norman; his manner had that peculiar grave courtesy of the village parson welcoming a stranger to his flock.

  “I’m looking for some friends of mine,” I said. “They told me I could find them here. Bald little shrimp of a guy and his wife, a big, lively blonde. Mean anything to you?”

  “Do these friends of yours have names, Mr. Bailey?” No sarcasm intended, merely a polite correction of my oversight.

  I stared at him and said, “Yeah, but if you can’t make them for me without names I’m just wasting my time.”

  He nodded solemnly, as if acknowledging a compliment. “Maybe you are.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “Maybe they need me worse than I need them.”

  That gave him pause. He took his shoulder off the wall, and his unctuous tone became thoughtful. “I’ll have to ask,” he said. “Might take a little while.”

  I told him I would stick around, and drifted over with the crowd to watch the game. At the nearest table they were playing jack pots draw, two sailors from the submarine base at Long Beach, two potbellied small-shop-keeper types, two grim-faced, bespectacled, middle-aged housewives, and a stocky young Chinese girl in sweater and bobby sox, who seemed to be winning. Action was fast enough, and betting vigorous. I wondered why it didn’t do a thing to me. No kick, no chills, no clenching fists, no stinging in my veins. I didn’t even care who took the pot. Yet it was poker that had been the first to get me by the throat, nine years ago.

  “This way, please, sir.”

  The chip girl twittered at me like a frightened sparrow with a tomcat on its tail. Her thin, anemic little body looked as if it barely managed to support the weight of the heavy green-canvas change apron. I smiled for her, she needed so much to be shown I was a good guy after all, and walked behind her through the crowd and to a door between the snack bar and the armored cashier’s cage, way back in the rear.

  She knocked, and when the buzzer catch went off she quickly stood aside and shot another of those birdlike apprehensive glances at me. “Mr. Hunter will see you now,” she told me breathlessly, and almost ran away behind the clink and jingle of her stock in trade.

  There were two adding machines, a typewriter, and an old-fashioned mast-high cardboard filing-cabinet. There was a battered old office desk, cleared of everything but a half-empty highball glass. There were three more doors, one in every wall, and no windows, and another bank of fluorescent lights, and a slick, shiny floor of polished green linoleum that showed the crisscross rubber track prints of a wheel chair now drawn up behind the desk. The wheel chair’s occupant came pretty near to fooling me, for a second or two. He looked more like Burt Jones than Burt himself. He was older, smaller, skinnier, balder, more insignificant, his skull more perfectly egg-shaped and tinted a more violent pink, his features even sulkier, worse-tempered. Only the narrow, mouse-gray eyes he laid on me were different, like small-gauge shotgun barrels, hard and hollow, and offensively suspicious.

  “Don’t know you,” he informed me, testily, right off the bat. “You from the Riverside D.A.?” He saw my head shake. “Federal?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A private boy scout, huh? We got no use here for your kind.”

  “Can’t blame you, Mr. Hunter,” I said pleasantly. “It happens I’m not any kind of a dick. I just dropped in for a chat with Burt and Rita. Your manager out there may not have understood.”

  “A friend!” he scoffed at me. “They don’t make ’em, I’ll tell you that much. Who you think you’re kidding, boy? Go on, what’s the gimmick?”

  “You must be Burt’s brother,” I said. “You don’t need to worry, Mr. Hunter, I’m clean. If they’re around, they’ll see me, all right. It’s just a question of a little information.”

  He took those shotgun-barrel eyes away from me and sneered into his highball, almost good-naturedly. “Sit down, boy,” he said. “Maybe I can help you. Drink?”

  “Plain Scotch, thank you. This isn’t anything that would be in your line, Mr. Hunter. If your brother and his wife are not here, I’d appreciate it if you’d put me in touch.”

  “They tell you about this place?” He swung the wheel chair closer to the desk and stabbed a button, twice. His tone wasn’t exactly skeptical any more, or even curious. He sounded like a man who had made up his mind about me. I was a bore, who would have to be humored, but not very much. It was an attitude that bothered me, because I had no real remedy for it. I was already pretty sure that he had no intention of passing the ball.

  “Just the address,” I said carelessly. “Let’s get it straight, Mr. Hunter. This is purely a social call. Nothing to sell, nothing to collect. All I’m asking is a minor favor.”

  The door behind me opened, not the one through which I had come in, and a man in a striped-jersey T-shirt stuck in his head. Hunter scowled up at him and snapped, “Plain Scotch,” and waved him off impatiently. The man grunted and left, slamming the door. Hunter showed me another of his sulky sneers.

  “Sounds different now,” he pointed out. “A minor favor. You told my manager you figured Burt would need you more than you’d need him.”

  “Why not let Burt decide?” I offered cheerfully.

  He shrugged. Not in contempt, but more as if he were resigned, and prepared to be reasonable with me. “Okay, boy. If that’s the way you want it. I guess he’ll know where he can find you.”

  “You mean tonight?”

  “Tonight, tomorrow, next week, what’s the difference? How do I know when he’s gonna turn up? You in a hurry?”

  “Here we go again,” I said. “Yes, I’m in a hurry, Mr. Hunter. I made a special trip down here to see your brother. I’d love to explain what this is all about, but it happens to be a strictly personal matter that doesn’t concern you a bit. It wouldn’t even interest you, believe me.”

  This time the look he gave me flickered uncertainly. He was still bored and out of sorts with me, but something had come up to puzzle him, and he wanted to count the pot before deciding to make another bet. The room was suddenly quiet enough so the ribbons attached to the air-conditioning vent sounded like bunting flapping in a gale. I started losing both my patience and my nerve. It was becoming more and more conspicuous to me that Hurt’s connection with my own affairs had to be thoroughly explored without delay.

  “Whatever gave you the idea the Riverside D.A. has anything to do with this?” I prodded Hunter, stupidly.

  His eyes lost the flicker and had buckshot behind them again. Palm Springs is in Riverside County. I realized then, about ten minutes too late, that he was mixed up in the deal himself. He had me labeled as a shakedown artist all along, the kind of wolf who preys on other wolves.

  It was a nasty break, but I was stuck with it. Not even showing him my real hand would do a bit of good, if I could have accepted the preposterous risk involved. Now there was nothing for it but to try and throw a scare at him, to play it tough the way he would expect.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him
. “Your brother a crook? Maybe the cops can find him for me quicker than you. If that’s the way you want it.”

  The man in the striped-jersey T-shirt came shuffling in with my jigger of Scotch and a water chaser on a tray. He put the tray on the desk before me, grunted, and shuffled out again. The door slammed, hard enough to rattle the glasses. Hunter was reaching in a drawer, came up with a box of cheap drugstore cigars. He tossed me one and stuck another in between his thin pink lips and twisted the wheel chair back into position where he could strike a match on the wall. “Cops,” he said reflectively. “We got cops in this town, boy. The best that money can buy.” Current from the air vent unraveled the long gray streamer of smoke he blew across the desk. He gazed after it dreamily, ignoring me.

  “Well, fine,” I said. “You haven’t anything to worry about, then.”

  “That’s right.”

  His complacency was worse than a deliberate insult. I climbed to my feet and broke out a snarl. “Let’s see about a phone some place around. This is a gambling-joint you’re running, mister. Maybe the big fellow up in Bel Air can talk you into giving me a little service.”

  He actually smiled at me, with his kind of face. This was exactly what he had been waiting for.

  “Don’t get excited, boy,” he told me peacefully. “Go on, sit down and drink your drink. So you’re working for the big fellow up in Bel Air.”

  “What about it?”

  “Makes a difference. You ought to know. New man, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t like that. His tone was more solicitous than sarcastic, but I didn’t like it, anyway. It made no sense for him to relax, while I was the one to come down with a case of the jitters. The whole interview had gone sour on me from the start; there was something peculiarly wrong with it, the same queer, off-key dissonance as when the wood-wind section happens to be lagging half a bar behind the brass. I could hear it and see it and feel it, but I couldn’t reason it out or get it back into the groove, no more than anyone can explain a nightmare or influence its course. The analogy struck me as a pretty close one, because on the instant I thought of it the room started playing tricks with me. The walls were growing longer, the ceiling bulged up like a balloon, and the floor acquired a sudden alarming tilt to windward. The wheel chair with Hunter in it seemed to be rapidly rolling away from me, while the desk came sliding into my ribs, almost knocking me over, and forcing me to hang on to it for support. As nightmares go, this one did not amount to very much, but it involved all the usual sensations of blurred vision, a distant sound of roaring, and a feeling of abject physical docility. It made me shake myself, like a dog in his bath, and then my lungs stopped breathing, and my stomach stopped writhing, and the roof of the Club Gaucho came down on me, quietly and slowly, all the way down into darkness.

  Chapter Eleven: FIGHTING WOMAN

  THE tunnel was long, narrow, and soggy-wet inside, and it whirled crazily around off-center, like a maniac’s idea of something new in the way of amusement-park attractions. There was light at the end, beamed straight down the tapering, spinning exit shaft: no more than a pin point at first, but swiftly growing in size and in cold white spherical brilliance. The light seemed to suck me in and force me down at the same time, exerting a concurrent drag and thrust of more than sufficient authority to leave me completely helpless.

  Whatever I was using for a head felt like a red-hot cannon ball, suitable for sinking the Flying Dutchman, not suitable for functional human employment. Yet, somehow, mysteriously, it was regaining certain human faculties. It registered an offensive smell and issued a groan; it tasted blood and vomit; it picked up the exhaust gurgle of an idling motor and the gruff, uninterested mumble of voices, the sharp, metallic squawk of a radio turned up loud.

  “… twenty-two, Roger,” the radio was saying in a stridently officious soprano. “Seventy-six, on your query—the license number is Illinois nine Baker one one dash one five. Approach with caution, code three. Eighteen, no make. Fifty-three, call your station…”

  I groaned some more and tried to raise myself on one elbow, tried wearily to crawl out from under the inexorably impaling spotlight. A foot appeared in the beam and prodded my kidneys, not roughly, just enough to persuade me to abandon the attempt. Now I got a rat’s eye view of two pair of legs in identical gray flannel slacks and a glimpse of two coarsely checked tweed sports coats, side by side.

  “Rise and shine, Mac. Whatsa big idea, messing up our nice clean gutter, hah?”

  The voice from the shadows had a thin, hard, big-city accent, neither friendly nor unfriendly but plain matter-of-fact, the kind of voice that had never learned to shout in excitement or to whisper in emotion, so that it would sound almost exactly the same in the bedroom, at a baseball game, or in court. I shivered and made another formidable effort and succeeded this time in pulling myself up into something of a hunchbacked crouch on the curb. My head was cooling down, but the sidewalk continued to reel under me, and every inch of my digestive tract was throbbing with a caustic pain. Just talking was almost as bad as swallowing a razor blade.

  “What time is it?”

  “You got the time on you, Clem? This guy wants to know? He don’t carry a watch.”

  I held up my wrist for them. The watch said 10:43, but its crystal had been smashed. They didn’t laugh, or give me any kind of a reaction. They just stood over me, out of the light, watching. The radio spoke up and said icily, “KGPD, 11 p.m. All cars, clear frequency two. Eighty-nine, go ahead.”

  “I think I can make it now, fellows,” I said. “Thanks very much for standing by.”

  “You hear that, Clem? Guy figures he can make it now.”

  “You’re not going to arrest me, Lieutenant, are you?” I demanded, feeling the sweat break out all over me again.

  “Dettlinger,” he said. “Detective sergeant. Yeah, it’s a pinch, sweetheart. Drunk and disorderly. Okay with you?”

  “Listen, Sergeant, I’m not drunk. That was a Mickey they slipped me. Chloral hydrate. I’ve had it once before.”

  Clem snickered. Dettlinger said politely, “My, what a shame. They shouldn’t of done a thing like that. Maybe you wanna tell us how come.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think of that. You don’t know, hah, sweetheart? Okay, lemme tell you. Any time one of you syndicate mobsters gonna show his face on our territory, bingo, down comes the ax. We ain’t fooling around, and we don’t owe your boss any favors. Not in this town, we don’t. We got a judge here, he’ll toss you sixty days in the morning, on the road gang, no bail. Come on, let’s get going.”

  The radio coughed sharply and said, “Eighty-nine, clear. Sixteen, to Fountain and Ardmore, a woman screaming. Check disturbance, keep the peace.”

  I said, “For God’s sake, Sergeant, this is all a big mistake! They got the wrong impression at the poker club. I’m not a mobster for the syndicate, or do you think I’d have been enough of a square to drink their Scotch?”

  “So far as I’m concerned,” said Dettlinger, “you god damn hoods are just a bunch of jerks. Doc Hunter claims you tried to put the bite on him. He ought to know.”

  “All I asked him was to let me talk to his brother.”

  “Yeah? He don’t have any. You kidding me, sweetheart, or are you just plain dumb?”

  Doc Hunter! You remember what Doc said. If they’d catch us muscling in—I was squirming with confusion and bewilderment, helplessly trying to match up the pieces of this crazy jigsaw pattern. Some of it made sense, dangerous, paradoxical sense. The knockout drops, for one example, had been ordered for me long before I’d made a nuisance of myself. They’d been expecting me at the Club Gaucho—they knew my name and they had been warned about me in advance, warned that I was Walter Hitchcock’s errand boy. Burt Jones himself must have tipped them off; whatever he’d been up to at Palm Springs, I was the party who’d unwittingly scared him away. They had concluded that I knew too much and that I meant to squeeze a payoff out of them. New man, aren’t you?


  “So all right, I’m dumb,” I said. “But if Doc has no brother, who’s this character that looks like him, the way one rotten egg looks like another? The one who drags a girdle full of blonde around with him. Tell me that much, Sergeant, will you please?”

  The two of them stiffened, a little, as if they were mildly surprised. It was quiet again, for several seconds; even the radio released no more than a drone and a sputter of static. From the ocean a low bank of cool, salty fog came leisurely rolling down the narrow side street. At last Dettlinger demanded roughly, “If you’re no hood, then what’s your grift here, Mac?”

  “No grift. This fellow and his wife, they asked me to come down and look them up.”

  It was Clem who obliged with another snicker. Dettlinger snapped his fingers, loud enough to sound like a .22 going off. “Let’s see your driver’s license.”

  He studied it for quite a while. This time I got a profile view of him, straw hat brim pulled way down into deep-socket eyes, the cynical prow of a nose, the mustache bristle camouflaging full, almost weakly sensual lips, the rock-hard chin jutting out belligerently into the light. My license was three years old, and it still showed the Normandie Apartments, which is a pretty fair Los Feliz District address.

  “You work for a living?”

  “Musician.”

  “Got a union ticket on you that says so?”

  I pretended to search my wallet. The spotlight beam caught a flash of my old Army ID card. He snatched it out of my hands, glanced at it, and pushed it back at me.

  “Burt Jorgenson,” he said, half to himself. “Him and the floozie been roping for Doc’s private back-room game again. Some kind of cousins, I hear. You better get wise to yaself, soldier.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You hear him, Clem? This guy don’t know the score.” His tone acquired the contemptuous benevolence he would have put into it while supplying directions to a kid on an unfamiliar newspaper route. “Look, soldier, poker’s legal here in California, but only where the city council says it is. The law kinda passes the buck to the people, see, they should figure it out for themselves do they wanna call it a game of skill or what. In Formosa we’ve opened her up six months ago, and that makes us and maybe two-three other towns up north the only places where a cop can’t make much of a living any more. Doc’s club’s all square, on account of we keep it that way, but I don’t advise nobody to get mixed up in none of them private parties like he organizes on the side. You got a car?”