The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  I pulled Little to his feet and he reached down to get his now-mashed fedora. We sprinted the last few yards to my car and we were soon on our way out of the parking lot. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and tossed it to the old man. He wiped the blood from his hand and knife, and then looked at his hat sadly. “That damn hat was brand-new,” he said in disgust. “And I think I got blood on the sleeve of my coat, too. Well, I guess I asked for it. I was hacking at his shins by the time I hit the ground. Maybe I ought to have pulled my gun and shot him, but I didn’t.”

  “They were with Robillard earlier tonight,” I said.

  “I saw them.”

  “The other fellow was a friend of his named Simon Van Horn.”

  “Well, if they were with your buddy Robillard, then he set ’em on us for sure. The question is why.”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “I won a heavy bet off him tonight by backing your Tulsa Grays.”

  “Really? How heavy?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “God Almighty, boy … I think you are crazy!”

  “Me crazy? And you won what tonight?” I asked. “A dollar? All this trouble for a dollar? And you call me crazy?”

  As I swung the car out into the highway, I heard his high, reedy laughter ringing out against the darkness of the Oklahoma night.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I was packed and ready for the road early the next morning. I kissed Annie good-bye at the breakfast table, and Little and I shook hands on his front porch.

  “Well, when do you want to do it?” he asked.

  “It’s got to be late November. There are some other considerations that make that the prime time.”

  “That’s good enough. Being able to wear an overcoat is always an advantage on a deal like this. And I’ll set up a meeting with Tobe Perkins and call you in a few days.”

  “Little, is Perkins really solid?” I asked. “I mean will he stool?”

  “I’d bet my life that he won’t. He never has, and he’s sure had the opportunity. I’ve known him for forty years.”

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “Tobe’s in his late fifties, but he’s in real good shape. You see, he’s been clean as a whistle for better than ten years. Except for a little moonshining, that is. And hell, that ain’t even hardly a crime. I know he’d like to make one more good heist to get his hands on a little something to put aside for his old age.”

  “Okay. Here’s what you do. Tell him about me and my background—”

  “Except the things I ain’t supposed to know,” he said with a grin.

  “Right,” I said, grinning right back at him. “Convince him that I’ll do what I say I’ll do, and tell him that if this deal blows up in our faces I’ll see to it that he has the best lawyers money can buy, and that I might even be able to pull some strings with the government.”

  He appeared puzzled. “Okay, but there really ain’t no need for all that.…”

  “Yes, there is,” I said with a fiendish smile. “I’ve had another idea.”

  He reached up and pushed his fedora to one side to scratch his head above his left ear. “I sure wish you’d quit having them ideas, boy. I just want to sit on my front porch from here on out and watch the sun go down.”

  “Bull,” I said with a laugh. “You’re having fun and you know it. And if that two thousand doesn’t hold Willie until time to move, you just let me know. Or go ahead and give him another thousand and I’ll pay you back later.”

  “Okay. I hate that all this business with Willie has happened. He’s gone downhill here lately. Did you notice how grimy he was when we first came down to see the hotel? He didn’t used to go around that way. He’s never been the sharpest dresser on earth, but at least he stayed clean.” He shook his head and sighed. “Willie’s the only thing about this whole deal that frets me, and if he keeps on aggravating me I may just pull his plug and find somebody else.”

  “It’s your call, Little,” I said. “Do what you think is best.”

  As I drove off I looked back in the mirror and saw the old man standing on the porch, a worried frown on his face.

  * * *

  I got tangled up in a long, southward-bound military convoy about a hundred miles out of Tulsa, and it took me better than eight hours to get to Dallas. Listening to Tommy Dorsey on the car’s radio as I drove made me realize that Della and I had been existing rather than living. We didn’t even own a radio for our home. As soon as I hit town I drove to an appliance store I knew on East Main and bought the biggest table model Philco radio/phonograph combination I could fit into the backseat of the Lincoln. By that time I was exhausted, and a good part of it was a delayed reaction to the previous evening at the cockfight. I decided to spend the night in Dallas and drive the rest of the way home in the morning. I registered at the Adolphus and had a steak dinner in the dining room. Afterward I bought a bottle of White Horse at a liquor store a couple of doors down from the hotel, and then called room service for soda and ice. I had a couple of drinks and then phoned Della and told her to expect me home sometime the next day.

  The next morning I rose early and ate breakfast in the coffee shop. As soon as the stores opened I went to Neiman Marcus and bought Della a three-quarter-length cinnamon mink like one I’d seen her admiring in a Memphis furrier’s shop earlier in the year. A few minutes later I was on the road once again.

  When I pulled into the drive about one o’clock that afternoon, I was surprised to see Della’s car in the garage. I managed to get the Philco hauled into the living room by myself. She was in our bedroom, sitting Indian fashion in the middle of the bed wearing a loose pair of white shorts and a yellow blouse. In her lap she held the shoe box in which she kept snapshots of her daughter. Her eyes were full of tears when she looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t expect you home this early.”

  “Sorry for what?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. Instead she held up a small framed oval picture taken just a few weeks before the accident. The little girl was as blond as her mother, with big eyes and a pug nose. Her name had been Suzanne and she’d been killed by a drunk driver not long after her fourth birthday. Della pointed silently to the picture like a child showing off a crayon drawing to her father.

  “I know you probably think I shouldn’t do this,” she said, and started to put the pictures back in the box. “But these snapshots and my memories are all that’s left of her, and if my memories fade she’ll be all gone.”

  I leaned over and took her hands. “I think nothing of the sort. You do this as often as you need to.” I bent down to give her a kiss on the forehead and smoothed her hair for a moment. I knew that at least part of her anguish was that her baby had been a cesarean birth and there could be no more children for her.

  Slipping quietly from the room, I closed the door behind me. I managed to get the radio hooked up without electrocuting myself, then tuned it to soft music from a station in Fort Worth. A few minutes later I had a pot of coffee brewing in the kitchen. I had just finished my second cup and lain down out on the sofa when Della came into the room.

  “Want me to get you some coffee?” I asked.

  She shook her head and came over to the sofa. It was long and heavy and almost deep enough for two people to lie side by side. Stretching out, she draped herself half on the cushions and half on me with her head on my chest. “You’re not getting much of a homecoming,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine, and stop saying you’re sorry,” I told her gently.

  “I like the radio,” she said. “It sounds wonderful.”

  I snuggled her up against me and petted her hair. She buried her head in my chest and began to cry softly. “I may not be such a bargain,” she said through muted sobs.

  “Hush,” I said, and squeezed her tight. I let her cry herself out and we both dozed off and slept for almost an hour.

  Later that night
, after she’d gone to bed, I was puttering around the kitchen making myself some bacon and eggs when the phone rang. I heard Simon Van Horn’s voice as soon as I lifted the receiver. “I just want you to know that I didn’t have anything to do with what happened in the parking lot up there at Tulsa,” he said.

  “Why, nothing happened to me in the parking lot,” I replied casually. “Mr. Little and I just drove home, but I did hear that a couple of Mr. Robillard’s friends got roughed up out there.”

  There was a long pause before the voice spoke again. “I see. Well, I hope you understand that I have enough problems of my own without buying in to somebody else’s.”

  “That’s a fine attitude, Mr. Van Horn. I try to live that way myself.”

  There was a second pause before I heard the gentle click as the connection was broken. I ate my supper and read the paper for a while. Before I went to bed I sneaked Della’s mink coat into the hall closet with the intention of giving it to her in a happier moment. But she found it before I had the chance.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The attack at the cockfight had given me a new respect for the lengths Robillard was willing to go to when riled. And since I intended to rile him even more than I already had, I decided a little protection was in order. There were two pawnshops in town. At the smaller I found a Colt Pocket Auto much like Little’s. I also bought a kidskin shoulder holster at a local saddle shop. A phone call to Colonel Garrison resulted in his contacting the local district judge, a thin, acerbic, sixtyish man named Colin Striker who was part of the Manlow Rhodes faction in town. The next day Judge Striker quietly issued me a permit to carry a pistol.

  When the next Friday rolled around, Della and I were once again reduced to one car. A bad head gasket put the new Ford wagon into the shop for a few days. It was under warranty, but we were left with only the Lincoln for the weekend. That evening Della dropped me off as usual at the Weilbach, and went on her merry way back home with a stack of books from the library. The first hand had just been dealt with four players sitting in when I came in the room. I stood and watched for a few moments amid the low murmur of voices and the occasional soft rustle of money at the table.

  Poker is the stuff of legends, though its real history is as alluring as any of the folklore that surrounds it. A primitive version of the game was first known in Italy during the Renaissance, and some form of it was brought to this continent by Italian immigrants who came to New Orleans not long after the War of 1812. From there it spread via the Mississippi River, which became the mother vein of American poker. The first modern version played on this continent was the game of draw, and the earliest record of it dates back to 1829. That mention is a notation in a traveling Englishman’s diary that recounts the popularity of the game on Mississippi River boats a full three decades before the Civil War. Draw retained its ascendancy throughout the nineteenth century, and it was the game of choice in the days of the old West. It was two pair in a hand of draw poker—aces and eights, the famous Dead Man’s Hand—that Wild Bill Hickock was holding when the fatal shot was fired into his back. Around 1900 five-card stud became popular, and there is no doubt in my mind that it was invented by professional card players. Draw is still the best game for novices because it reveals very little about a player’s holdings. The advantage of stud to a professional is that ultimately he knows four of your cards and sees your hand as it unfolds. He also sees your reaction to those cards. While you have the same information about his hand, his superior card skill and his experience at reading people put him in a far better position to make use of the knowledge. All the other card games popular today, games like Omaha hi-lo, Texas hold ’em and Mexican sweat, were concocted by skilled card men with an eye to their own advantage.

  There are two things the novice needs to remember about professional poker players. In the first place the professional is in the game to win money. This seems like a truism, but beginners often overlook the fact that winning the most money is not the same thing as winning the most pots or the biggest pots. Good poker players know that the player who steadily wins more than his share of the small and medium-sized hands will come out ahead of the player who wins only a couple of big, dramatic hands during the course of a game. Good players must also learn to bet by the odds and control their own urges to plunge and gamble against the percentages. The second thing the novice needs to understand is that the true pro has learned to assess the game with his head rather than with his hormones, and that he can usually resist the normal human urge to see a hand of poker as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. While he may have pride in his ability (or her ability; some women are very fine players), he is not humiliated by temporary setbacks and sees no disgrace in folding when the odds are against him. One other thing I have noticed about professionals is that eventually most of them will lose their edge and start to get sloppy. While three hours of poker played each Friday night can be thrilling for anyone, sitting at the table hour after hour, several days a week for years on end can become fully as boring as running a punch press in a factory or practicing tax law. When a card player reaches that point, he either finds it difficult to maintain his level of concentration or he begins to knowingly make risky bets in order to add spice to his life. The latter had happened to me in the last few years before I sat down at the game at the Weilbach.

  In my best days I was in the upper echelon of the second rank of good poker players in this country. What kept me out of the top ranks wasn’t any lack of skill or knowledge but the fact that I’ve always been more of a gambler than a professional card player. A true gambler, no matter what his level of skill at the table, loves risk and seeks it out for its accompanying thrills. In contrast, the professional card player hopes to minimize risk at all times, and prefers to live a life no more exciting than that of the CPA who does your taxes. Since coming to the Weilbach I had done consistently well, but this was more a testimony to my skill than to my temperament. Other than a couple of exceptions like Wilburn Rasco, I was simply a far better card player than the other men in the game. But my tendency to plunge was a positive advantage to me in confronting Clifton Robillard. All I had to do was keep my head above water financially and go head-to-head with him as often as possible in order to unnerve and rattle him.

  Robillard was already at the table when I arrived that Friday night, and his eyes were wary and guarded as I walked in the room. I had decided to maintain my pretense that the attack in the parking lot had never happened. Once he saw that I wasn’t going to bite him, he relaxed and even preened a little. News of the bet at the cockfight had spread quickly, and he quickly made a good-natured show of paying me. The man had swallowed his initial humiliation and was now basking in the renown of losing the town’s biggest wager in recent memory.

  After I’d taken my money and shaken hands all around, I gave the porter a hundred dollars for my part of the rent. I also threw a second hundred into the jenny. Zip Zimmerman had the deal and he called a hand of seven-card stud. I pitched in the ante and we began. I was a few hundred down an hour and a half later when Robillard relaxed and became talkative once again. I’d just taken him for about $500 when he folded after the third card in a hand of five-card stud. Besides his statuesque brunette, there were two other young women present in the suite that night, both obvious call girls. They’d come up with Simon Van Horn, who was another consummate womanizer despite having a wife and a couple of children back home in Fillmore. One of the other players had already taken the younger of these girls into a bedroom for an hour’s interlude.

  “You don’t ever seem to sample the talents of any of these fine-looking girls,” Robillard said to me.

  “No sir, I don’t. I don’t believe in mixing my pleasures, and I come up here to play cards.”

  “Speaking of women, that little blonde you are keeping certainly is fine looking.”

  I gave Robillard an easy smile, and said, “Della’s not a kept woman. If anybody’s kept in the arrangement, it’s me. She was the one who g
ot us into the oil business.”

  “Is that a fact?” he asked.

  “It is indeed, and even though Deltex Petroleum is half mine on paper, she’s the brains behind the whole thing.”

  “Brains or no, I bet she’s a hot little number in the bedroom,” he said. “A fine-looking girl like that…”

  I gave him another smile, this one more patronizing than amused. “Mr. Robillard, do you know what separates human beings from the lower animals?”

  “Why, I never gave it much thought, to tell you the truth. I leave that kind of thing to you college boys.”