Dead Man's Hand

by Otto Penzler

  "I'm listening now, Mrs. Mobley. Do you know who was selling him his dope? Do you have any names?"

  Stubbing out her cigarette, she hesitated, sipped from her drink, and shook her head. "No. He wouldn't ever talk about that, except to say that they were scary guys. You didn't want to cross them."

  "I'm sure that's true. Do you think he might have done that?"

  "Well, that's just the thing. I know he wouldn't. He was trying to get out and just kind of slip away from it all. I mean, getting the real job, making new friends, all of that."

  "So it really doesn't make sense to you that he would have double-crossed his dope partners, does it?"

  "I know he wouldn't have done that. It was the one thing he was really scared of."

  "But didn't the police investigate those connections back then?"

  "They said they did. But you know how that goes. Chet wasn't nobody important. He had some weed on him, big deal. Somebody paid off the cops to go away."

  "I don't think so, ma'am. Not in a murder case. That's not how it happens."

  "Well, sure, that's what you'd say. You're one of them."

  "I am one of them. But I'm also interested in finding out who killed your son. Maybe the police couldn't find anybody among his dope connections because they didn't do it. Have you thought of that?"

  "Well, who else, then? He wasn't real, like, involved in nothing else."

  "How about poker? Didn't he play poker?"

  In the middle of lighting up, she stopped the match inches before it reached the cigarette, then finally moved it to the tobacco and inhaled deeply. "What makes you say that?"

  "Because I'm pretty sure that poker is what killed my own father. Was Chet a poker player? Did he have a regular game?"

  "It was the one thing he had a real passion for, but how could you know that?"

  "Never mind that. Do you know if Chet got in a game in the last couple of days before he died?"

  Sinking back into her chair, Mrs. Mobley seemed to shrink before my eyes, the enormity of this new theory settling over her, weighing her down. Silently, she began to cry. Tears broke over the rim of her eyes and began to course down her cheeks. "I knew he wouldn't leave me," she said. "He would never have left me like that."

  I leaned forward and spoke softly. "Do you remember the names of anyone he used to play with, Mrs. Mobley? If I knew who was in that last game, I believe it could get us to the bottom of all of this at last."

  Staring into the middle distance between us, tears continued to fall off her chin and onto her housecoat. "I'm afraid there's only one I remember," she said. "One of the boys from Chet's new job. I know they played together a few times. A sweet kid, which was a nice change from the usual stoners, you know. I remember he came to the funeral."

  "And who was that, Mrs. Mobley? Do you remember his name?"

  She told me.

  "What's so important, Aaron? You sounded so upset on the phone." My mother, well turned out as always, stood in the doorway, concern etched in her fine features. It was 8:30 in the evening on the day after I'd spoken to Laraine Mobley. "Are the kids all right? Jen?"

  "The kids are fine, Mom. Come on in. Jen's in the kitchen." Leading her back into the house, I asked, "What did you tell Neal?"

  "Just what you said. That you and Jen were having a fight and you needed me to come and reason with her about something."

  "Right. Good."

  "Aaron. What's this about?" Then, seeing my wife—pale, drawn, red-eyed at the table. "Jen, dear. What's the matter?" Back to me. "What's going on?"

  "Sit down, Mom," I said. "We've got to talk."

  Pulling out a chair, carefully lowering herself into it, she looked at me expectantly. I sat down opposite her and pulled out the photograph of her and Pop that I'd been carrying around for the past couple of weeks. "Do you remember this picture, Mom?" I asked.

  "Of course I do."

  "It's the day Pop gave you the earrings, right?"

  Her hand went to her ears, where her favorite earrings still glittered. "Yes."

  "But those earrings got stolen along with your other jewelry during the burglary, didn't they?"

  "Yes, of course. What are you getting at?"

  "I'm getting at the earrings you're wearing right now, Mom. Where did you get those?"

  She hesitated, cocking her head questioningly. "From Neal. He knew the originals were one of my favorite things I'd ever got from your father, and on our second anniversary—mine and Neal's, that is—he bought me a pair that matched them. It's why I never take them off, because the first time I did, I lost them."

  While I stood up and crossed over to the phone, Jen reached across the table and put her hand over my mother's. "Abby," she said, "that's not a matching pair, those are the same earrings."

  "What? Don't be ridiculous. We looked at that picture, and Neal matched them as well as he could. What are you both saying? How could Neal have the original...?"

  I missed the rest of it. I was telling my colleagues in San Mateo homicide that I had my last piece of the puzzle, and that they should move in and take Neal into custody.

  Among the insurance papers that had settled my pop's estate and that Mom and I had stored in the safety-deposit box we still rented at our local Bayshore Savings, the earrings had been appraised and described in minute detail, down to the distinctive flaws that made each of the diamonds unique.

  It's always preferable in a murder case to have foundational hard evidence linking the suspect to the crime. And it doesn't get much harder than diamonds. Without them, Charles Baden's testimony that he'd played poker regularly with Neal wouldn't have been enough to convict, or to force Neal to confess. And neither would Laraine Mobley's information that Neal worked at the same construction site at the same time as her son. He might have even stood up against the evidence of the diamonds themselves, but he finally could not withstand the look of loss, despair, and hatred in my mother's eyes. You want my opinion, that's what finally broke him.

  So this was the way it had gone down:

  There had only been four players at that last game—Pop, Brady, Chet, and the man who was to kill all of the others over the next three days. These were my pop, because Neal needed the money back, and he had to take the jewels to make it look like a burglary. Brady and Chet had to go because they very well might have figured it out. Chet, Neal said, was even a likely blackmail threat—he was feeling out the possibility when Neal put a quick stop to it with a nail upside his head.

  They'd played table stakes, with a several-hundred-dollar buy-in per player, and Pop had been the big winner, cleaning out the other three. It was a big enough financial hit for all of them, but for Neal, the money loss was world-shattering. He'd almost saved the down payment and had made an offer for his first house, which was just a bit more money than he had in hand. He thought he was close enough to win the difference with one good game.

  Instead, he'd been wiped out.

  By a good Mend—

  Whose beautiful wife had fed him dinner several times over the past couple of years, and whom he coveted deeply.

  And whose son, the future cop, had buried as an impossible secret, a repressed memory, the significance and identity of the man he'd seen all those years ago, and every year since—sitting in as the fourth player at his father's table at a Mendly little game of poker.

  Missing the Morning Bus

  Lorenzo Carcaterra

  I lifted the lid on my hold cards and smiled. I leaned back against three shaky slats of an old worn chair, wood legs mangled by the gnawing of a tired collie now asleep in a corner of the stuffy room, and stared over at the six faces huddled around the long dining-room table, thick mahogany wood shining under the glare of an overhead chandelier, each player studying his hand, deciding on his play, mentally considering his odds of success, in what was now the fifth year of a weekly Thursday-night ritual. I stared at the face of each of the men I had known for the better part of a decade and paused to wonder which of t
hese friends would be the one. I was curious as to which of the six I would be forced to confront before this night, unlike any other, would come to its end.

  I wanted so desperately to know who it was sitting around that table responsible for the death of the woman I loved. And I would want that answer before the last draw of the evening was called.

  I tried to read their faces much the same as they would the cards in their hand. There was Jerry McReynolds, wide smile as always plastered across his face, a forty-year-old straight and single man free of the weight of day-to-day-worries, a millionaire many times over due to a $5,000 investment in a small computer start-up outfit working out of a city he had never heard of, let alone visited. Jerry never missed a Thursday-night game, boasting of his streak as if he were a ballplayer about to make a move on Cal Ripken, Jr.'s long-standing record of consecutive games played. He came outfitted in the same casual manner in which he approached the cards dealt his way, catalog-ordered shirts and jeans, nothing fancy, nothing wild. I could count on him to come in with two high-end bottles of Italian reds and quickly ease into the steady flow of cards and chatter that filled our weekly five-hour sessions. Jerry was the guardian of the chips and kept a small pad and a pen by his side, starting off the game with a $50 feed and dispensing out whites and blues to any player running low or chasing empty. Jerry kept his cards close, doing a quick fold if he felt his hand weak, playing the table as he did his life, on the up-and-up and without a hint of bluff. In five years of play, I could never recall a time when Jerry left the room with less in his pockets than he had at the start.

  I sat back, rubbed the stiffness from the nape of my neck, and tried to recall how I came to know Jerry in the first place and couldn't quite place it, my cloudy memory confining it to one of the holiday receptions my wife used to host on a semiregular basis back in the days when our marriage still had the scent of salvation. God, how I hated every one of those parties, forced to make small talk in a room packed mostly with her friends since the few I had were seldom invited or welcomed into her cloistered world. I took a long gulp from a glass of scotch and looked back on those long and tedious nights and did a quick flash of Jerry being dragged by the hand in my direction, a glass of white wine in one hand, my wife's in the other. "You two will be good friends in no time at all," she said as she made a quick U-turn back into party traffic, her short and tight black skirt giving strong hints of the curvy body that rested beneath, long red hair hanging just off the edge of her shoulders. She was about forty-two then, give or take, and looked at least ten years younger, the quick smile and easy laugh a sweet antidote to the onslaught of age. I wasn't quite sure how Dottie and Jerry came to know one another and I never did bother to ask, but there was always more to their friendship than they were willing to let on. There was that look between them. You know the kind I mean? As if someone was in front of them telling a joke and they were the only two in on the punch line.

  "Five-card draw, jacks or better to open," Steve said, giving the deck one more shuffle before the deal, waiting for us all to ante.

  "I need a refill." I tossed my one-dollar chip into the center of the table, pushing my chair back and walking over to a crowded countertop, filled with half-empty bottles of scotch, bourbon, gin, and wine. I spun open the top of a Dewar's bottle and stared over at Steve as he doled out the cards meticulously, eyebrows thick as awnings shading his eyes. I had known Steve since forever started, both of us only children raised in the same Bronx neighborhood and going to the same Catholic schools straight through till college. And even then, while he froze his ass off studying economics and law at Michigan and I was smoking and doping my way through four years of English, a language I already had a leg up on, at Williams, we never drifted very far apart. We saw each other during breaks and vacations, hustling over to the same parties and looking to score with the same girls. I guess if I had to pick one, I'd point to Little Stevie Giraldo as my best friend, the fast-talker with a good line of shit and an innate ability to talk the unwilling to tag along on any outing he thought was worth the time and money. As he got older and life started dealing him a tougher hand of cards, Steve's youthful edge took a sharp nosedive and by the time he hit his forties, he was a man adrift, moving from one mid-tier job to the next, in debt to credit cards and street lenders, a decade into a loser's marriage and with two kids who cost him ten for every five he earned. I was the only one in the room who knew he tried to do a final checkout about eighteen months back, but even there his bad luck stayed that way. He chugged enough pills and booze to knock off Walter Hudson—that guy who was so fat they had to bury his ass inside a piano—and all it got him was a long night at a crowded hospital, his stomach pumping out everything he had managed to shove in. I was the one who waited for him, rushing over from a nearby bar where I was nursing a few, soon as I got the word from Mackey, a mutual pal working the wood that night.

  Dottie came by at sunup, driving the old Nissan she would never let me sell, and took us both back to our place, where she made some coffee and let him sleep the rest of the OD off in the back bedroom. She didn't say all that much about it, and I said even less. But I couldn't help but catch the look of concern on her face, odd since she never much cared for Stevie one way or the other. Made me wonder what kind of look I would have earned if it was me instead of him lying in that bed, one pill removed from the long nap.

  "Are you in or not, Ike?" Joe asked. "I mean, you going to pony and play or you just looking to mix drinks all night?"

  "I'm in for a dollar," I said, dropping two cubes into my tumbler and glaring over at Joe, decked out as he always was in a battered New York Yankees baseball cap, Detroit Red Wings sweatshirt, and San Diego Chargers workout pants. A walking billboard of sports franchises. Joe was a trash-talking, ballbuster of a work-from-home bond trader who left his Upper West Side apartment only for poker games or sporting events. Other than on those semiregular occasions, he shopped, ordered food, chatted with friends, and read for both leisure and business on his laptop. His two-bedroom condo, bought with the inheritance he scored off the daily-double death of his mother and a great-aunt three days apart in 1995, was a smooth blend of Ikea, sports and movie memorabilia, furniture, and utensils. Dottie disliked Joe with an intensity that bordered on the fanatical which, if he knew how she felt, he would ironically appreciate, able to compare it to his rabid feelings toward both the Boston Red Sox and the New York Islanders.

  I guess I liked him for the same reasons she didn't. Joe was filled with passion and was never shy to let anyone with ears know how he felt about his teams, his favorite movie or TV show. Hell, he would even get into a beef and a brawl over the athleticism of pro wrestling. Funny though, in all the years I've known Joe, and I've been doing his taxes now going on ten years this next April, he's never once asked me what my favorite sport was or which team I liked. For all he knows, I can't stand the sight of any sport, let alone follow one close enough to dip into my savings for season tickets and wear the team colors to my best friend's wedding or wake. But Joe did know that Dottie liked basketball and that she never missed a New York Knicks game on television during the season and, on rare occasions, the playoffs. I know that only because he mentioned it once during a poker game, after the Knicks by some miracle had beaten the Miami Heat the night before, how happy Dottie must have been to see that happen. How the hell could he have any idea that she was a fan or was even at home to watch the game?

  I was back at my seat looking down at a pair of tens and a queen high, the fresh drink by my side. I glanced to my left and caught Tony's eye and was given a warm smile as a reward. "Everything good with you?" he asked.

  "Good enough," I said, trying to keep the conversation light and not veer it toward the personal, which is the road Tony always seemed to prefer.

  It made sense that he would, of course, what with him being a shrink and all. Tony enjoyed doing hit-and-run probes into the lives of the men around the table, treating the entire night as if it were a ca
sual group session with cards, chips, and money added to the mix. He would keep it all very chatty, never giving the impression he was picking and pawing or even the least bit curious about any one of us but always leaving the table owning a lot more information than he had when he first walked in. When he wasn't busy jabbing at our collective scabs as casually as he would a platter of potato salad, Tony regaled us with tales of his sexual conquests, most of them arriving courtesy of his practically all-female practice. It was difficult not to envy any man who in a given week would bed as many as five different women, so you can imagine how well his tales traveled around a poker table filled with either those who had gone without for longer than they would dare to remember or the few who felt strangled by double-decades' worth of marital gloom.

  "This is one you won't believe," he said, dropping his cards on the table in a fold and sitting back, wide grin flashed across a face that looked far too young for a man one month shy of his fifty-second birthday. "I have this new patient, right? Drop-dead blonde with stallion legs and a killer smile. Only on her second visit, asks if it's okay for her to call me at home. You know, just to shoot it whenever the urge hits."

  "You ever see any ugly patients?" I asked. I really didn't want to believe that every woman who paid to tell Tony sad tales of an unfulfilled life was poster-girl material even though, deep in my heart, it figured probably to be indeed true.

  "Only on referrals," Tony said. "Anyway, I'm supposed to say no to such a request, I suppose. I mean if I'm going to do a line-by-line with the rulebook."

  "But you never have before," I said. "No sense finding religion now, especially when it's a different promised land you're looking to find."

  "So, I give her my home number and go about the rest of my day," Tony said. "I had no doubt she would make use of it down the road a bit, maybe get a few more sessions under her garters before she made the move."