The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  He only had about $5,000 left in front of him and he pushed it into the pot. I tried to look surprised as though I had been expecting him to fold against a bluff.

  “I’d even like to go a little heavier than that if you were interested in taking my marker,” he said.

  “I would be more than willing to take your marker, sir,” I said, trying to put a worried frown on my face. “But I’ve always thought it unlucky to exceed table stakes. It’s a superstition of mine.”

  “Oh, I see,” he replied with a patronizing smile. “Well, then … Are you going to call the bet?”

  “Give me just a moment to think, please,” I said.

  “Take all the time you want.”

  He sat back comfortably in his chair, the very picture of confidence. I took at least a minute, time he would know had been spent for my own sadistic amusement the moment I turned over my hole card. I fingered my money dubiously, then finally nodded and met his raise. “Even call,” I said.

  This time around he didn’t have to be reminded that it was up to him to show his hole card first. He reached down with a carefully manicured hand and slowly turned over his third ace. “I guess that says it all, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  “Not quite,” I replied. With the most casual, offhand motion I could summon, a motion no more studied than turning the page of a dull novel, I flipped over that glorious, magic nine of hearts that gave me a straight flush. He froze for a moment in disbelief, then lunged to his feet, his breath coming in short gasps.

  “I don’t complain about getting beat,” he finally managed to say. “I don’t like it, but I can stand it. But what I want to know is why you took so damn long to call that last raise? What have I ever done to make you treat me like that?”

  It was my turn to have a self-satisfied smile on my face, one that I hoped he found truly hateful. “That’s just the way I like to play the game of poker, Mr. Robillard.”

  He quickly got control of himself once more. “I see,” he said, nodding solemnly. “Well, you did pretty good this time. But I once heard about a smart man who said that in the long run God’s with the big battalions.”

  “He had it wrong,” I said, my voice as cheerful as his was cold. “In the long run we’ll all be dead.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I went home and slept through most of that Sunday, then rose early Monday morning. Della had left early to go to the office. Just as I finished my morning coffee the phone rang. “Can you come to the office?” I heard Della ask.

  It only took me ten minutes to pull myself together and drive downtown. I found Della and Mona closeted in Della’s inner sanctum with one the stenographers we’d hired from Fort Worth. She was siting in a straight-backed chair in front of the desk crying her eyes out while Della and Mona loomed over her like a pair of angry hawks. I’d noticed the girl before. She was a short, curvy brunette with a wide red slash of a mouth and a provocative manner. The office chatterbox, at lunch she either had her nose in one of the collection of movie magazines she kept in the drawer of her desk or else she was regaling the other girls with vivid stories of her love life.

  “Meet Lisa the leak,” Della said.

  The girl wailed louder. “I didn’t do nothing,” she objected. “I swear.”

  “Hush,” Della told her. “Be quiet or I’ll call the police right now.”

  The girl managed to throttle it back to a tolerable level. “Go ahead and tell him, Mona,” Della instructed.

  “I should have seen it before I did,” Mona began. “Lisa ran the title on the Meese tract and on the Kraft lease too. None of the other girls had a hand in either, and none of them knew a thing about them. Then there have been at least three other tracts that have been grabbed out from under us that you never knew about.…”

  “Three?” I asked. “But why didn’t you tell me about them?” I asked.

  “I didn’t realize what had happened until this morning when I looked to see who had run the chain of title in each case. Lisa checked and passed on every title where the company failed to get the tract we were planning to lease. And who do you think got the leases in every case?”

  I nodded. “Van Horn and Robillard…”

  “Right,” Della said.

  “I want to leave,” Lisa sniveled. “You can’t keep me here. It’s kidnapping.”

  “Swell,” Della said. She grabbed the phone and slammed it down in front of the girl. “Just go ahead and call the cops,” she said. “They’ll be glad to come get you.”

  The wails began once again.

  “And you remember that partition deal with Ned Roberts that fell through a few weeks ago?” Mona asked above the din.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She pointed at Lisa. “There’s the reason right there. What tipped me off was seeing her with the two of them Friday night.”

  “Two of who?” I asked. “You mean Robillard and Van Horn?”

  She nodded. “Andy and I were both just too beat to drive up to Odessa for synagogue, and I didn’t even feel like cooking us any supper. About eight o’clock we decided to go to that little barbecue place down past the Row. That’s when we saw Miss Priss here coming out of the Roundup Club with Van Horn and that other guy. Then I realized what had to be happening.”

  “Now that I think about it,” I said, “both of them were late getting to the poker game at the Weilbach last Friday. They didn’t come in until around midnight.”

  “They were with her,” Mona said. “So the first thing I did when I got to work this morning was start checking the records.”

  “How do you know she was the one who ran the titles?” I asked.

  “Because I make each girl sign off on every bit of work she does,” she replied. “That way if any sloppy work starts showing up I know who’s doing it.”

  Della took a step closer to Lisa. “Which one of them are you sleeping with?” she asked her. “Van Horn or Robillard? Or are you servicing them both?”

  “How can you say that?” Lisa shrieked. “That’s so awful!!”

  “Which one is it?” Della demanded. She and Mona began to close in on the hapless girl like two young lionesses after an exhausted gazelle. “Was it Clifton Robillard? Don’t you know that man’s old enough to be your grandfather?” Della asked.

  “That’s disgusting!” Mona spat.

  “I never did it with him! I swear.”

  “Then it was Van Horn,” Della said.

  “Just a few times,” Lisa said, her tears running like Niagara. “I mean, he’s young … Sorta.”

  “He’s in his late forties, and you’re not but twenty-two,” Della said. “Besides, he’s married.”

  “Yeah, but he’s got a real bad marriage—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Della said in exasperation. “Don’t tell me.… His wife doesn’t understand him. Right?”

  “Yeahhh?…”

  “What did he do?” Mona asked. “Promise to introduce you to somebody out in Hollywood?”

  “How did you know that?” the girl gasped.

  Della and Mona both rolled their eyes. “And your father’s a minister,” Mona said. “I’ve heard you mention that. What would he think about you sleeping with a married man?”

  “Your dad’s a preacher?” I asked. “What kind?”

  “B-B-Baptist…”

  “Then you ought to know you could go to hell for what you’ve been doing,” Della said coldly.

  At that the girl’s wails rose to an unearthly crescendo.

  Della looked at me, and asked, “What do you want to do?”

  I considered. I could strong-arm the girl into feeding false information from me to Robillard and Van Horn. But to what purpose? The Meese affair hadn’t really been directed at me financially; it was intended simply as an annoyance because that was the kind of man Robillard was. It would be nice if I could get him and Van Horn to waste a pile of money leasing useless land. But they had access to the same geology reports I had, and there was little chance the
y would fall for a completely bogus tract. Van Horn especially; he was far more knowledgeable as an oilman than I was. Then there was the fact that Lisa was probably too stupid to play a double role with any conviction. We would simply be better off without her. “Get her out of here,” I finally replied.

  Mona opened the door. Lisa gazed up at me uncertainly. “Go,” I said. “And don’t ever come back.”

  Mona stood back from the doorway. After casting her eyes wildly around for a few seconds, the girl lunged to her feet and bolted from the room like an unbroke filly. Mona pushed the door shut behind her.

  “That poor fool has no more brains than a gnat,” Della said, and dropped wearily into the chair behind her desk.

  “She has enough sense to know she ought to be loyal to people who’re paying her a generous salary,” Mona countered.

  “You’re right,” Della admitted.

  Mona heaved a deep sigh and looked at us with a stricken expression on her pretty face. “It was all my fault,” she said. “I’m the office manager and I should have caught it before I did. I’ll be happy to resign if you want me to.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Mona…” Della began.

  “No, really … I feel so responsible.…”

  “Just hush,” Della said.

  “The losses were minimal, Mona,” I said. “But what gets me is the idea that they would do something like that.”

  “But isn’t there any legal recourse?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “There are some federal laws that cover industrial espionage, but I don’t know if they apply to oil production. I don’t think they do, and the charges would be next to impossible to prove anyway. That fool girl would be useless as a witness. A good defense attorney would shred her to rags.”

  * * *

  “I guess we’ve put a stop to that business,” Della said that night as we climbed into bed. “Are you going to mention it to them?”

  “You mean Robillard and Van Horn? I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I’ve been boring in pretty heavily on Robillard ever since I started playing poker at the hotel. It was reasonable to expect a man like him to retaliate.”

  “Do you think it really was retaliation? Or just normal business skulduggery?”

  “Maybe some of both. But Mona needs to keep a close eye on those other girls up there.”

  “Oh, she already is. She called the whole staff together today and read them the riot act. I don’t think there will be any more problems.”

  “Just please promise me one thing, Della,” I said with a grin.

  “What?”

  “If you and Mona ever get it in for me, just go ahead and shoot me. I’d prefer it to the way you two skinned that poor girl alive today.”

  “Nope. No promises. If you’ve got it coming, then…” She fell silent and raised her eyebrows.

  “Ahhh … Cruel, wanton woman…”

  “If you’ll shut up, I’ll show you how wanton I can be.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The next morning I arose at four and got an early start to Tulsa. The previous Friday a small box that bore a Virginia postmark had come in the mail. Inside the box were three keys and a stiff note card that contained a carefully typed address and nothing else. I knew then that it was time for another talk with Chicken Little.

  The week before we’d decided that sharing one car was becoming too much of a burden. Della frequently drove out to the basin to check leases on her own, and I often found myself desperately needing transportation when she was gone in the Lincoln. We went shopping for her for a vehicle, and a few hours later she drove away from the local Ford agency with a new woody wagon whose metal was painted a deep maroon.

  “It goes good with your convertible,” she said.

  As I watched her swing out into the street in her new car that day I could only laugh inwardly. Not that long ago I’d been a lone eagle, answering to no one besides myself and responsible for nothing beyond my car and several suitcases of clothing. Now I’d not only acquired a woman eleven years my junior but a house and a station wagon as well. The previous fall I’d had a modest income from a trust, and now I was well on my way to becoming an oil baron. Things had certainly moved fast since I met that girl; I was on the verge of becoming domesticated, and much to my surprise I didn’t find the prospect all that unpleasant.

  It was a long drive. Around noon I made a quick stop for a light lunch at a little roadside café about fifty miles north of the Red River, and then pushed on until I finally pulled into Little’s yard not long before suppertime. I’d known the old man ever since I was a kid. My father was a bred-in-the-bone Cajun from a little town a few miles outside Lafayette, Louisiana. He’d come to East Texas not long after the turn of the century and gone into the timber business. Dad was a ruthless but likable man, and in a few years he had established a sizable fortune that included a controlling interest in a thriving bank in Lufkin. But like many Cajuns, he was addicted to gambling in general and cockfighting in particular. Though my devout Presbyterian mother finally succeeded in getting him weaned off gambling, he never gave up his love of cocking. In his later life he watched avidly even though he no longer bet. He and Chicken Little were lifelong friends, and some of my finest memories were of the many summer weekends I’d spent at Little’s place during my youth.

  The house was a sprawling structure of whitewashed clapboard with a tin roof that stood on a wooded bluff overlooking a wide bend in the Cimarron River a few miles out from town. The old man occupied one of a pair of deep hickory rocking chairs that sat on the front veranda. He wore khaki pants, a much-washed and much-darned white dress shirt and a weathered fedora. A stoneware demijohn with a cob stopper sat on a small table beside his chair, alongside a sugar bowl, a saucer of lemon halves, and a pair of heavy mugs.

  “Come on up here and set a spell,” he said as I climbed the steps. “I was just fixing to make a hot toddy. Have one with me.”

  I took the other chair and shook his thin, bony hand. “I’ll have a drink, but not a toddy. Haven’t you got any ice?”

  “Ice,” he grumbled, getting to his feet. “A grown man that don’t know how to drink whiskey.”

  He disappeared into the bowels of the house and returned in a couple of minutes with a steaming kettle and a mug of cracked ice. I pulled the cob from the demijohn and poured a good dram over the ice. The liquor was almost clear, with only the barest trace of amber coloring. Little put two spoonfuls of sugar into one of the other mugs, then squeezed in half a lemon. He partially filled the mug with hot water and gave it a stir with the spoon. When the sugar had dissolved, he topped it off from the whiskey jug. I took a pull of my own drink and gasped.

  Little grinned. “Pure corn. It’ll do the job, won’t it?”

  “Yes,” I answered once I’d gotten my breath. “But there are easier ways to get it done.”

  He laughed. “I’m running three stills right now near Waverly over in the Cookson Hills,” he said. “Big stills. Got men hired to tend ’em for me.”

  “What in the world do you do with that much corn whiskey?” I asked.

  “Take it over to Little Rock and sell it for five dollars a gallon. The man that buys it from me cuts it, doctors it up and flavors it, and then sells it to bars for two and a half a fifth. Then they sell it by the drink for bonded stuff. They say this fellow can make green corn whiskey taste like eight-year-old bourbon. It more than doubles a bar owner’s profit on a bottle.”

  “Why don’t you flavor the whiskey up yourself and get all the profit? Just run it straight from Cookson down to Hot Springs.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” he replied, nodding slowly and raising his head to gaze off at the horizon, a faraway look in his eyes. Chicken Little had numerous theories about life, some of them deeply theological, and I sensed that he was about to expound on one of them.

  “I could do that,” he said thoughtfully. “But it might take some ki
llin’ to get things set up right, and that kind of behavior is liable to lead to hurt feelings. Besides, I’ve always had this notion that the Good Lord wants each man to make his living in certain ways that he laid out for him in the days of his youth. I believe that if a man strays into other fields he’s asking for trouble from Above. That’s why I didn’t want to buy into none of that oil business when you mentioned it, even though I did appreciate the offer. The only time in my life I ever went to the pen was because I strayed from my appointed course and got into some activities the Lord had reserved for other folks.”

  “I saw you down at the Weilbach,” I said, changing the subject. “How do things look?”

  “Good. I don’t believe it’s going to be any problem at all. That stairway being so close to the door helps. And the deputies they got hired to guard the thing are awful careless.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, they’ve gotten even more so since the oil boom blew in. So are we on?”

  He laughed his ready laugh, his pale blue eyes dancing. “Why, hell yes, we’re on. I told you that when you first come up here last year.”

  “I know that’s what you said then, but you hadn’t had a chance to look the situation over at that time. I don’t mean to ask a friend to commit suicide for me.”

  “Ain’t no suicide to it, so you stop talking that way. That kind of talk’s bad luck. Don’t you worry. I know what I’m doing.”

  “How about the other crew?” I asked. “Are they in?”

  “I think so. The main man is a fellow named Tobe Perkins. I’ve known him forever, and I guarantee that he’s one of the best. But he wants to meet you.”