The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  I shook my head in time with his and we both sat shaking our heads wisely. We’d had a deep and profound meeting of the minds right then and there on that particular subject, and we were in firm and lasting agreement that Ollie Marne never wanted try to screw me on anything.

  “I tell you what, Ollie,” I said, breaking the silence. “You keep up your end and you’re going to find out that Santa Claus really has come to town.”

  “You know, I can’t figure you out,” he said as he rose to his feet. “First it was poker, now it’s oil. I wish to hell I knew what you really came to town for. You ain’t here to kill nobody, are you?”

  “That’s it!” I said with a goofy grin. “You guessed it! You’re on to me, Ollie. I’m here to shoot a pillar of the community.”

  “Huh?”

  “Why sure! Killing upstanding citizens is a hobby of mine. I thought everybody knew that.”

  His face broke into a big smile and he gave me one of his braying laughs. “Move over, Jack Benny,” he said. “You beat anything I ever heard.”

  It seemed like he always left laughing, so I laughed too and gave him the brotherly slap on the back that was getting to be like a lodge ritual. As I stood on the porch and watched him drive away, I reflected that sometimes the best way to lie to a man is to tell him the truth so unconvincingly that he just can’t believe it.

  * * *

  Later that evening I sat reading a newspaper in the armchair in our bedroom. Della came out of the bathroom wearing the silk robe I’d given her, her hair wrapped in a towel. She stood at the foot of the bed with her back to me for a moment, then gave a little wriggle and let the robe fall to the ground, leaving herself naked. She treated me to the rear view of a long, luxurious stretch, then hopped onto the bed to lie facedown, her legs spread so that her ankles were a couple of feet apart. She raised herself on her elbows and looked back over her shoulder at me with an expression that was as old as Satan and as deadly as sin itself. “I thought the sight of my lovely bare carcass might give you some ideas,” she said. “But it looks like you’re going to read that paper all night, so I guess I’ll just go to sleep.”

  I threw the newspaper aside and walked over to the bed. Shucking off my bathrobe, I stepped out of my pajama bottoms and reached down and grabbed her feet. I flipped her over on her back and crawled up on the bed to loom over her. “Oh, I’ve got all sorts of ideas,” I said. “I just don’t know if a little girl like you is up to them.”

  “Try me.…”

  We did not go gentle into that good night.

  TWELVE

  Problems. The next morning I got a call from Icepick Willie. He was in town and wanted to see me at the hotel. I refused, but agreed to meet him at a truck stop café I knew a couple of miles north of the city limits. I found him there in the rear booth. He was dressed much the same as he had been at our first meeting, with cuffs that were still dirty and frayed and a tie that was a road map of stains from past meals. A large platter of sausage and eggs sat before him, and he was shoveling it down like there would be no tomorrow.

  “I need some dough,” he looked up and said before I had a chance to speak.

  “Then go earn some,” I said as I eased into the booth opposite him. “I’m not your fairy godmother.”

  He shook his head and forked a big piece of sausage into his mouth. “Can’t do it. Things are tough up in Little Rock right now. We need to get rolling on this job here.”

  “No,” I said emphatically. “I told you you’re not going to hurry me.”

  “How about an advance, then? Call it a loan against future proceeds. Chicken Little will tell you I’m good for it.”

  I regarded him coldly for a few moments, then asked, “Do you really need money or are you just playing games?”

  “Hell yes, I need the money. What do you think? That I got time to come down here just to fool around?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go for it.” I pulled my roll from my pocket and peeled off a thousand under the table. I slipped the money beneath the edge of his plate and then got to my feet.

  “Thanks,” he said, putting the bills into his pocket.

  “Just one thing,” I told him. “Don’t show up in this town again until we’re ready. Not for any reason. And don’t you ever contact me again. If you need something, then you get in touch with Little.”

  He stared up at me with his flat, unreadable eyes. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he whispered.

  I put my hands on either side of his plate and leaned down so that our faces were only a few inches apart. “Understand me, Willie. This isn’t some childish face-off between the two of us like we were kids on a school playground. This is for real, and there are forces involved here that you can’t even begin to imagine. Forces that could sweep both of us away like a pair of tumbleweeds. Now you cut out the foolishness and stick with the plan or something’s going to happen that you won’t like. And don’t ever call me again. Understand?”

  We stared eyeball to eyeball for a long time until finally he gave me an almost imperceptible nod.

  “Good,” I said, and turned and walked away.

  * * *

  On Tuesday I saw Chicken Little in the hotel lobby. He looked as grim as an undertaker in his dark suit and gray fedora, and we passed one another with barely a nod. I wanted to tell him about Willie and his recent trip to town, but I knew it was a bad idea for us to be seen together at the hotel. Soon, I realized, I’d need to take a trip up to Tulsa to visit the old man.

  I went out lease hunting the next day and returned in midmorning with the paperwork on a small twenty-five-acre tract that lay five and a half miles west of the second well. I didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out to be one of our best investments, lying close to the center of the field where the pool was only thirty-three hundred feet below the surface.

  I’d just handed the lease to Mona when I heard a commotion in the outer office. A few seconds later Sheriff Will Scoggins and one of his deputies pushed their way into Della’s private cubbyhole at the rear of the building.

  Scoggins was a tall wide-bodied man of about sixty, fat but with plenty of gristle under it. He wore a loose, floppy suit of dark brown summer-weight wool and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with a rattlesnake hatband. He had mousy gray hair and a mean, sagging, jowly face with two bright little eyes set closely together over a great looming beak of a nose. A long-barreled Smith & Wesson Triple Lock .44 in a western style holster rode near his right hand.

  I knew his record and it was a sorry one. As a young man he’d started his career as a city cop in El Paso, but was fired when caught forcing a burglar’s wife to sleep with him in return for not arresting her husband. After that he drifted around the oil boom towns of West and Central Texas for a few years, working variously as a constable and city marshal, taking his rake-off from the gambling and prostitution that always sprang up like mushroom growths in the wake of each new strike. Along the way he came up with the idea of returning home and running for sheriff. He won the election with the help of several well-heeled citizens who expected little in return from him beyond subservience and a willingness to look the other way. Now in his twenty-second year in office, he was overbearing and steeped in corruption.

  After he’d taken Mona’s arm and steered her from the room, he shut the door soundly behind her and then leaned against it. He ignored Della and gave me a long stare that was meant to be intimidating but wasn’t.

  “Can we help you?” I finally asked.

  “I’ve got something on my mind that we need to talk about,” he said in a thick, gravely voice.

  “So let’s talk,” I told him.

  “We’ve had some complaints about you two.”

  “What sort of complaints?” Della asked, casually pushing her work aside.

  “A lot of people don’t like the way you’re gouging folks with this fifty-dollars-an-hour business.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, her voice tart and self-assured. “Well, I
don’t care what people don’t like. I’m not running a charity here.”

  “You might not be running anything much longer if you take that attitude.”

  “We’re busy,” I told him. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “Then you can just damn well take time. Do you know who I am?”

  “No,” I said. “But whoever you are, you could certainly use a better tailor.”

  “Wha—” he began, reflexively glancing down at his pants. Then he stared up at me with a sour expression. “I’m the sheriff of this county.”

  “Congratulations.”

  He wanted to shoot me at that point. Men like him are always enormously impressed with themselves, and disappointed to no end when others don’t share their estimate.

  “Sheriff, the abstract business is an unregulated industry,” Della said. “I can charge a thousand dollars an hour if I want, and no one can do anything about it. You should know that.”

  “He hasn’t gotten any complaints,” I told her. “This is a shakedown, pure and simple.”

  “You need to watch your mouth, city boy,” Scoggins said. He pulled a plug of tobacco from his pocket and gnawed off a chew. “And I better not have to tell you again or I’ll haul you in for a little private session at the jail.”

  “What do you really want?” Della asked.

  “Like I told you, a lot of folks are upset over this. You’re violating the law, and it’s something we need to talk about.”

  “Violating the law?” Della asked. “You must be crazy.”

  “Show me which law you’re talking about,” I said. “Let’s go next door to my lawyer’s office and look it up in the state statute books.”

  “It’s a local ordinance,” he said. “It ain’t got nothing to do with the state.”

  “Ahh, I see,” I said. “But if you wanted to you could probably put in a good word and get it suspended by the city council or the county commissioners court or whatever. Right?”

  “I might,” he replied. “But what you need to understand is that this is a tight community. You people come in here and you suck up all that money. Then you’ll be gone when this oil deal is done, and the money will be gone with you. Folks resent that. That’s the kind of thing our little ordinance is designed to prevent.”

  “And when was it passed?” I asked. “Last week?”

  “It don’t make no difference when it was passed. It’s on the books.”

  “Then let me tell you something that’s been on the books longer than your ordinance. Freemantle Vs. Portland, Maine, 1847. Winning brief argued by Rufus Choate before the U.S. Supreme Court. Other than Sunday blue laws and liquor laws, counties and municipalities can act in restraint of retail trade only in times of declared emergency, insurrection, and martial law, and then only with the consent of the state.”

  “You talk like a lawyer,” he said.

  “I am a lawyer.”

  “Then why aren’t you practicing law?”

  “You’re a man. Why aren’t you acting like one?”

  His face turned red. “Are you trying to talk yourself into jail?” he growled.

  “No,” I answered. “If I wanted to land in jail I’d try to file a complaint against one of your pimp buddies like that boy did who got beaten to death in your lockup back during the war.”

  “All right, Mr. Big Mouth. Lawyer or not, you’re coming with us. Grab him, Joe.”

  The deputy took me roughly by the arm. Della rose to her feet and started to say something but I cut her off. “Don’t worry. He just wants to scare us into coming across.”

  * * *

  They cuffed me and hustled me out to a black four-door Ford patrol car and pushed me into the backseat. Neither of them said a word on the way to the county jail. I hadn’t expected them to. The silent treatment is intended to unnerve the subject and increase his anxiety about his fate. It didn’t bother me. I’m naturally quiet anyway.

  It was a rambling trip that took about twenty minutes. We went out Roosevelt Boulevard to Buckshot Row, where the deputy went into two of the dives. He was back in a couple of minutes each time. Obviously they’d arrested me in the middle of a collection run. It surprised me that Scoggins would be running his own bag, especially with a witness present. I decided that he was even more foolish and arrogant than I’d been told. Finally my silence got the better of him. “You don’t say much,” he remarked.

  I only grunted in reply.

  The jail was a three-story sandstone dungeon that looked like it had been built in the Middle Ages. Scoggins’s office was a pine-paneled chamber on the first floor, its walls full of guns and wanted posters. The desk was a big oak affair with a deep, high-backed executive’s chair behind it. A pair of mounted steer horns hung behind the desk, and a framed blowup of John Wayne in Tall in the Saddle graced one end of the room.

  The deputy unlocked the cuffs and slammed me down into a chair facing the sheriff’s throne. Or at least he slammed me as hard as you can slam a man six inches taller than you who isn’t fully cooperating in the slamming. Scoggins motioned him out of the room and he left, closing the door behind him. The sheriff then took his place behind the desk and regarded me like an Oriental potentate surveying his domain.

  “You got that wrong,” I told him and pointed to the picture of John Wayne.

  “Huh?… What do you mean?”

  “Wayne always plays the honest lawman.”

  He was fast for a man his size. Like lightning he reached across the desk and slapped me on the left side of my head. I saw it coming and rolled with it, but his hand was thick and hard and the blow landed solidly enough to leave my ear ringing and my face numb. “You need to remember who you’re dealing with,” he said.

  “I always know who I’m dealing with. Are you sure you do?”

  He wrinkled his brow in thought and played around with a pencil for a few seconds, rolling it about on his desktop with his palm. “I was going to go about this by closing you down for a couple of days,” he said.

  “What would that have gained you?” I asked.

  “It would let you two steam a little and give you enough time to think things over. But Ollie Marne told me that might not be a good idea since old Colonel Garrison said you’re a straight guy. That made me think. Do you really know Garrison?”

  He was talking about Homer Garrison, head of the Highway Patrol and the Texas Rangers. He was a capable and honest man, and I knew that he despised Scoggins. The attorney general and the Rangers had investigated Scoggins twice, but they had come just short of enough evidence for an indictment both times.

  “Why don’t you call Austin and ask him?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “I met him a time or two back during the war,” I said without interest.

  I suppose he expected me to claim we were blood brothers. The fact that I wasn’t particularly impressed by my own credentials seemed to puzzle him. “I don’t get it. What in hell are you, anyway? An undercover Ranger?”

  “You better hope not,” I told him.

  “Huh? Why’s that?”

  “When’s the last time you heard about somebody slapping a Texas Ranger without finding himself in a world of misery afterward?”

  That troubled him. Another frown furrowed his brow. “Somebody told me you worked for some government outfit back during the war,” he said. “Is that the straight goods?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  He reddened. “What’s so damn funny, hotshot?”

  “You.”

  “Wha—?”

  “You take a man who for all appearances is perfectly respectable, and who’s been vouched for by the head of the state police, a man you think might have even been an agent of the U.S. government at one time. Then you try to shake him down in his place of business, and finally you wind up hauling him off to jail and slapping him around. Pardon me for asking, but don’t you think a lawman who behaves that way is pretty stupid?”

  He reddened even
more deeply and was about to slap me again when I stopped him with a word. “No,” I said calmly. “Don’t do that. Right now you have nothing to do with the reason I’m in town, but that could change, and you wouldn’t like it.”

  He stopped and thought for a minute. While he was thinking, I took a Montecristo from my coat pocket and stripped it of its wrapper. He watched me as I put it in my mouth and lighted up. My absence of fear had thrown him. He was a bully, a man accustomed to having all the advantages in situations on his own ground where people cowered before him. Back in those days in Texas a county sheriff could get away with slapping just about anybody by claiming that the person in question had attacked or insulted him, but we both knew his efforts to intimidate me couldn’t go far beyond that. Something told him that he was on thin ice in some way he didn’t understand, so we just sat and stared at each other while I smoked my cigar.

  Finally he spoke. “You know, a guy that talks the way you do could piss somebody off enough that you might have some real trouble.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “Sheriff, this is all pointless. We’re going to keep operating the abstract company the way we want to and you know it. And we’re not paying you any shakedown money, either. If you close us down, I’ll just go get an injunction against you. Why don’t you stick to leaning on your whores and your bartenders and leave legitimate people alone, and then we can all prosper and be happy.”

  “This is my town and I run it my way.”

  I laughed again. “You don’t run this town any more than I do, and we both know it. That’s not the way it works in this country. It’s never one man. It’s always a group, a power structure, and you’re not really part of it. You may haul water for them and keep the sewers clean, but you don’t run anything.”

  He leaned back in his chair and tried to understand it all. But before he could get it ciphered out, a deputy I hadn’t seen before opened the door, and said, “Boss, I hate to bother you, but some lawyer’s out here and he’s got Manlow—”