“Did you find out anything at the wake?”
“Nothing important. I’ll tell you later.”
“Okay,” I said, and led her into the living room to introduce her to the boys, all of whom acted very natural and nonchalant, except that Doug began puffing so much cigar smoke he looked like a low-pressure system, Leo knocked over all his little stacks of chips, Fred managed to kick over his chair when he blurted to his feet, Jerry began to giggle with the kind of unhappy laugh he makes when he loses, and Sid started to blink very rapidly as though he was trying a bluff.
Finally, though, everybody settled down. Abbie sat between Sid and me and got ten dollars’ worth of chips from Jerry; we filled her in on the house rules; Leo dealt a hand of guts draw; and Abbie took a nice pot with Queens over treys. Welcome to the club.
Two hands later it was her deal. “My favorite game is stud,” she said.
Doug, who wanted to make time with this beautiful girl but hadn’t yet figured out how to go about it in the middle of a poker game, said, “Five-card or seven?”
“Five,” she said. “Naturally.” In the silence following that put-down she shuffled like a pro, slid Sid the deck to be cut, and fired the cards out like John Scarne. My ace up looked good, but it was the ten in the hole that paired with the fourth card that did the trick, and I raked in a small but pleasant pot. It was then my deal, and it just wasn’t possible for me to deal anything but five-card stud.
Nor could anybody else switch, not after that announcement of Abbie’s, so for the next hour or so we played nothing but five-card stud. Abbie did well, playing a fairly conservative game and winning small amounts. My streak slowed a bit, but didn’t entirely turn off. Leo seemed to be holding his own, and Jerry just grew wilder and wilder, like a centrifuge going too fast and spinning all its money away. But the big surprises were Fred and Sid. Fred suddenly settled down and became a tight, sharp, wary, brilliant player, reading bluffs incredibly, betting his hands with the cunning of a tax lawyer, and all in all coming on like a graduate of Gardena. Sid, on the other hand, broke down totally. All math seemed to have left his head, and he played so erratically it was as though he was out of phase with the rest of us and was actually playing his hands five deals too late. Abbie was sitting at his left elbow, and the proximity was obviously more than he could handle. It was a great encouragement to know a gangster could also be human. If he’d been handy enough, I might even have whispered the magic name to him now, though come to think of it erratic people are more dangerous than any other kind, aren’t they? Hmm.
Anyway, along about eleven o’clock, at a time when Abbie was just about to deal, Doug asked her what she did for a living in Las Vegas, was she a dancer or what, and she said, “I deal blackjack.” And began to deal out the cards for stud.
Talk about a bombshell. Nobody looked at their cards at all, everybody just stared at Abbie.
It was Doug who asked the question in all our minds. Taking the cigar out of his face for once, he said, “Are you by any chance a mechanic?”
“We run strictly legitimate in Vegas,” she said. “The house makes its money on the percentages.”
“Yeah,” Doug said, and pointed his cigar at the deck in her hand. “But can you do crooked dealing?”
She looked around at all of us, and reluctantly she nodded. “I know how to do some things,” she said. “I wouldn’t do them, I promise, but I do know how.”
“Like what?” Doug asked her.
She shrugged. “I can deal seconds,” she said. “Or bottoms. I can mark a deck at the table, all that sort of thing.”
“Show us some stunts,” Doug said. He pushed the cards he’d been dealt over toward her. “Show us how it’s done.”
“But what about the hand?” she asked.
“The hell with the hand,” he said, and the rest of us said yes, the hell with the hand. We all pushed our cards toward Abbie, and she shrugged and picked them up and began to show us things.
Fascinating. She spent half an hour going through her bag of tricks, and it was lovely to watch. She had long slender fingers with pale red polish on the nails, and it was really great to see those fingers do things with the cards. Ace of spades on top of the deck, the fingers would flick flick flick, cards would be dealt out to all of us, and there on top of the deck would still be the ace of spades. She palmed cards, she did fake cuts, she did one-handed cuts, she dealt out hands and then stacked the deck while pulling in the discards and then made the stack survive shuffling and cutting and everything else we could think of. She took an old deck Jerry had around and showed us how to mark it with thumbnail indentations on the edges of the cards while the deck was in play. She showed us how to crimp the deck to get it cut where you wanted.
That was the end of poker for that night. Jerry broke out beer and Scotch and we all sat around and talked about gambling and cheating and one thing and another, cutting up old jackpots as they say, and we had a great time. Even Sid relaxed after a while. Fred’s wife Cora didn’t call, amazingly enough, and that simply rounded out the perfection of the night.
We split up about twelve-thirty, everybody agreeing Abbie should come back Sunday if she was still in town, and then we all went our separate ways. It had been one of my finest moments. Not only was I the guy who knew this girl and had introduced her to the game, she and I were leaving together. Besides that, I’d won fifty-three bucks tonight, which was very healthy for that game. The losing streak was over, I could feel it.
12
Sid had gone downstairs ahead of us, and was waiting for us on the sidewalk. He said to me, “You going home, Chet? I’ll give you a lift.”
Before I could say anything, Abbie said, “I have a car.”
“Oh,” Sid said, and shrugged. “I’ll see you, then,” he said, and turned and walked away.
I looked after him. “That’s funny,” I said. “He never offered me a ride before. He knows I’ve got my own car.”
“Is yours here, too?”
“No, not tonight. I came over straight from work.”
“Then let’s take mine,” she said. “I just rented it today.”
“I live out in Queens,” I said.
“That’s okay. We have to talk, anyway. Come on.”
So I went on. Her car was a green Dodge Polara, the seats freezing cold. We got in and she started the engine and said she needed gas. Did I know of any place open now?
“There’s a Sunoco station over on the West Side, but it’s kind of out of the way.”
“Is that the only place you know?”
Reluctantly I said, “Well, it’s the only Sunoco station I know that’s open now.”
“Does it make a difference? Gas is gas.”
“Well,” I said, even more reluctantly, “the fact is, I’m playing Sunny Dollars.”
She looked at me, and for a long time she didn’t say anything, and then she grinned and said, “You’re a nut, Chet.”
“I suppose I am.”
“Then it’s Sunoco,” she said.
“If it’s okay with you.”
“Why not? If you make out tonight I’ll take twenty-five percent.”
I grinned back at her. “You want to be in the action yourself.”
“Always,” she said, and pulled the car away from the curb. “Where to?”
“Through the park on 84th.”
We went around the block and headed west, and she said, “There’s other gasoline games, you know. Why not spread your play around a little?”
“You just worsen the odds against yourself that way,” I said. “There’s only a certain number of times you’re going to stop in at a gas station. You split that number into two games, you cut your odds back fantastically.”
“You double them,” she said.
“No, it’s a lot worse than that. I’m no mathematician, but I think you get multiples in there that kill you. My father could probably work it out.”
So then naturally she had to know about my father. I told her about
him and the insurance thing, and then she told me something about her childhood, hers and Tommy’s. Their father had been in real estate in Florida, a real boom-or-bust business, and they had plenty of both extremes throughout their childhood. The booms were made shorter and the busts longer by the fact that the father was a real bangtail chaser, a horseplayer with an abiding faith in hunch bets and horses with funny names. Purple Pecunia would have been a natural for him, but he was dead now, having expired during the sixth race at Hialeah one afternoon seven years before when his thirty-seven-to-one shot, a horse called Mickey Moose, while five lengths ahead of the field had stumbled and fallen two strides from the finish line. The mother thereafter became a religious fanatic, moved to Nutley, New Jersey, and didn’t miss a church bingo game for the next four years, until the night the hit-and-run driver got her.
“They never did get him,” she finished. “There was nothing I could do about Dad’s death, and I didn’t do anything about Mom’s, but I’m going to do something about Tommy if it’s the last thing I do on earth!”
I looked at her, and she was glaring grimly through the windshield, and for just a moment my own grail—nine hundred thirty bucks—seemed trivial in comparison. I found myself tempted to offer my services, like a knight protecting some helpless damsel in distress, but fortunately the realities of the situation forced themselves back into my mind and I kept my mouth shut. In the first place, in the world in which Tommy McKay’s probable murderer moved I would be much more of a hindrance than a help, getting underfoot at all the wrong times, and so on. And in the second place, Abbie McKay was no helpless damsel in distress. She could take care of herself, that girl, I was sure of it.
So instead of volunteering, I switched the subject of conversation altogether, and we discussed the poker game for a while. She had some interesting things to say about the personalities and playing styles of the other players, and also suggested to me one of my own flaws in the game, being a too-great respect for aces. An ace visible in somebody else’s hand would tend to chase me at times that I had a perfectly respectable stay, and an ace in my own hand would keep me in at times when I had nothing but a clear-cut fold. I had to agree with that, and filed everything she said away in the back of my mind, to be used next week.
At the gas station we got two Sunny fives and a Dollars ten. “Anything good?” Abbie asked.
“No. These are the easy halves.”
After the gas station we went back across town and through the Midtown Tunnel and up onto the Expressway, and Abbie said, “We’re being followed, Chet.”
I turned around and looked and there were four pairs of headlights spaced out behind us. I couldn’t see any of the cars behind the lights at all. “Which one?” I said.
“Second car back in the left lane.”
“How do you know he’s following us?”
“He was behind us when we stopped for the light at Fifth Avenue on the way to the gas station. Then I saw him behind us again in the tunnel.”
“You sure it’s the same car?”
“I noticed the hood ornament,” she said. “It’s very sexy.”
I looked at her, abruptly more aware of the man-woman thing than of any car following us around the nighttime city, and she glanced at me, grinned, and said, “I’m putting you on, Chet.” She looked front again. “But it is the same car, I know it.”
I looked back again. The car was maintaining its distance back there. I said, “There’s something I didn’t tell you about. Maybe this would be a good time to.” And I told her about the hoods grabbing me last night.
She was very interested but didn’t interrupt at all, and when I was done, she nodded and said, “I didn’t think the mob had done it. It just didn’t look like their kind of thing. If they’re going around trying to solve it, too, that proves it.”
“They think this guy Solomon Napoli did it,” I said. “The cop that came to see me mentioned the same name, too.”
“We’ll have to find out who he is,” she said. “But in the meantime let’s get away from those people back there.” And she stood on the accelerator.
Dodges have more pep than they used to. We took off like the roadrunner in the movie cartoons, shooting down the Expressway like a bullet down the barrel of a rifle.
“Hey!” I said. “We have cops in New York!”
“Are they staying with us?”
I looked back, and one pair of headlights was rushing along in our wake, farther back now but not losing any more ground. Fortunately, there was very little traffic on the road, and our two cars wriggled through what there was like a snake in a hurry.
I said, “They’re still there.”
“Hold on,” she said. I looked at her, and she was leaning over the wheel in tense concentration. I couldn’t believe she meant to take that exit rushing toward us on the right, but she did, at the last minute swerving the car to the right, slicing down the ramp without slackening speed.
There was a traffic light ahead, and it was red. There was no traffic anywhere in sight. Abbie got off the accelerator at last and stood on the brake instead. Bracing myself with both hands against the dashboard, I stared in helpless astonishment as we slewed into the intersection. I believe to this day that Abbie made a right turn then simply because that was the way the car happened to be pointing when she got it back under control.
Anyway, we leaped another long block down a street absolutely empty of traffic, which was lucky for them and lucky for us, and then we squealed through another right turn. We were on a block of scruffy-looking storefronts now, dark and silent and dismal. About mid-block there was a driveway between two buildings on the right side, and Abbie made an impossible turn, shoved the Dodge in there, screamed to a stop inches from a set of crumbling old garage doors, and cut the engine and the lights.
We both looked out back, and a minute later we saw a flash of light go by, white in front and red in back. “There,” Abbie said in satisfaction, and twisted around to sit normally again.
I sat sideways, facing her, my back against the door. “Abbie,” I said, “you have achieved a rare distinction. You have driven an automobile in such a way as to terrify a New York City cabdriver.”
It was very dark back there, but I could see her grinning at me. “We got away, didn’t we?” she said, and I could hear the smugness in her voice.
“We got away,” I agreed. “I’d almost rather I was caught.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” she said.
Something in her voice gave me pause. I said, “I wouldn’t? What do you mean?”
“Who could that have been,” she said, “but the same people who were after you last night? And if they want you again, it can only mean one thing.”
“What one thing?”
“They’ve decided you are guilty after all,” she said.
“The heck,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“I thought you were guilty for a while,” she said. “And why would they come back after you again? Why follow you around?”
“Maybe they want to ask me more questions. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about. The next thing you’ll say,” she said, “is that you want to go home, just as though nothing had happened.”
“Well, naturally,” I said. “Where else would I go?”
“They’ll be waiting for you,” she said. “If you go home, they’ll kill you.”
“Kill me? Abbie, at the very worst they’ve thought of something else they want to ask me. In fact, I’ve got questions I want to ask them, like where I go to get paid. Unless you found out tonight at the wake.”
“I didn’t find out anything at the wake,” she said. “Chet, if you show yourself to those people, they’ll shoot you dead.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Did Tommy’s wife show up at the wake?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not being silly. I’m trying to save you from being killed.”
“I’m not g
oing to be killed,” I said. “Will you stop talking about that? Wasn’t there anybody interesting at the wake at all?”
“Some of Louise’s relatives,” she said, “but none of them knew where she was. And some other people came, some of them looked pretty tough, but none of them would admit he worked for the same people as Tommy, so I couldn’t ask any questions. And you better not ask any questions, because you’ll get your head blown off for the answer.”
“This is the same kind of jumping to conclusions you did when you first got into my cab,” I said. “Then you were convinced I was a killer, and now you’re convinced I’m a killee.”
“A what?”
“Marked to be killed,” I said.
“Because you are,” she said. “Won’t you even consider it as a possibility?”
“No. Because it isn’t.”
“Chet, I don’t want to take you home. They’ll be watching your place.”
“Say,” I said. “There’s a flaw in your theory. Those people last night knew where I lived, they were waiting for me there, so they wouldn’t have to follow me anywhere. That had to be somebody else just now.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do they want with you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
“But you don’t think it’s possible, whoever they are, that they might want to kill you.”
“There’s no reason,” I said, “for anybody to want to kill me. Will you get off my back about that? You’re too goddam melodramatic by half.”
“Chet, don’t be nasty. I’m just trying to tell you—”
“You’re just trying to get me caught up in your paranoia,” I said, being maybe sharper than necessary because the idea she was suggesting was very nervous-making. “Now,” I said, “I’ve had enough of it. It’s late at night, I’ve got to work tomorrow. If you’ve got nothing else to tell me about the wake, let’s just get going.”
I could see her controlling her temper. “You don’t want to listen, is that it?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“That’s fine by me,” she said, and faced front. She started the car, backed us out the driveway to the street, and headed back for the Expressway.
Somebody Owes Me Money Page 8
