Dead Man's Hand

by Otto Penzler

  "Let me take a stab at a guess here," Joe said. "She dialed your private line right about the start of the second period of the Rangers game. Right or not?"

  "If that's about eight or so, then yes, you win the stuffed bear," Tony said. "She was very upset, needed to talk, and couldn't make it wait. I offered to do a free phone consult, but she wanted a face-to-face. An hour later we were down a half bottle of red and doing a wild roll on the water bed."

  "I didn't think anybody still had a water bed," Steve said. "Or that they even made them. You don't have a lava lamp, too, do you?"

  I brushed Steve's question aside with one of my own: "This woman, was she married or single?"

  Tony stared at me for several seconds before he answered. "Would it make a difference either way?" he asked.

  "It might," I said, "to her husband."

  "She is married," Tony said with more a sneer than a smile. "Truth be told, most of the women who come to me for help are bound to the ring. If they weren't, then maybe they wouldn't be so damn unhappy and I wouldn't be pulling down seven figures to dole out my pearls of acquired wisdom."

  "Does any of that cause you concern?" I asked. "I mean, forget about the doctor-patient mumbo-jumbo crap. I'm talking here as a man. Does it bother you one inch to be taking another man's wife into your bed?"

  "It never has." Tony stared right at me as if his measured words were meant for my ears alone. "And it never will."

  "Is there any more pie?" Jeffrey asked. "I don't know what it is lately, but I can't seem ever to get enough to eat."

  "That may well be because you're celibate," Tony said. "You need something to replace what the body most needs. If you took my advice, which I rarely offer for free, you would switch gears and reach for a warm body instead of a warm plate."

  Jeffrey hated to talk about sex or at least that's the impression he wanted to convey. He was a Jesuit priest when I first met him, waiting in line to see Nathan Lane go for laughs in a Neil Simon play—an original, not a revival. It was a cold and rainy Wednesday and the matinee crowd was crammed as it usually was with the bused in and the walk-ins. We both should have been somewhere else, doing what I was paid to do and, in Jeffrey's case, what he was called to do. We made a valiant attempt at small talk as we snaked our way up toward a half-price ticket window and were surprised when we scored adjoining orchestra seats. "Now if the show is only half as funny as the critics claim," Jeffrey said, "we will have gotten our money's worth."

  We stopped by Joe Allen's for drinks after the show and I had just ordered my second shaken-not-stirred martini of the afternoon when I invited Father Jeffrey to join the poker game, eager to fill the void left by Sal Gregorio's spur-of-the-moment move to Chicago to tend to his father's meatpacking plant. Even back then, Jeffrey seemed to me a troubled man, grappling with the type of demons I would never be able to visualize in the worst of my black-dog moments. I came away with the sense that he had reached the top of the well when it came to his chosen vocation, not sure whether it was the pedophile scandal rocking the church that did it or just the very fact that he was a modern man forced to live a sixteenth-century life. "Do you miss it?" I had asked him that day.

  "What, the women?"

  "We can start with that," I said, trying my best to make light of what would have to be considered a serious deal-breaker in any contract talks that brought into play a lifetime commitment.

  "There are moments," Jeffrey said, "when I don't think about it. It is, by a wide margin, the biggest obstacle a priest must overcome. At least it has been for me. But hidden beneath the cover of misery, a silver cloud often lies."

  "What's yours?" I asked, maybe crossing deeper into the holy water than I should.

  "That it's young women who draw my eye and not innocent boys," Jeffrey said, the words tinged with anger and not regret.

  "Are you one of those rebels in a collar who think Christ and Mary Magdalene were more than just pen pals?" I asked, doing what I could to steer the conversation away from the uncomfortable.

  "I am one of those rebels in a collar who think Christ was too much of a man not to be in love with a woman as beautiful and as loyal as Mary was to him," Jeffrey said.

  One year later, just about to the day, Father Jeffrey turned his back on his vows, handed in his collar, and walked out of the church life for good. Yet, in the time from that eventful day to this, he stayed celibate or, at least, so he claimed, though not from a lack of effort but more from a lack of experience. Now, of all the guys in the poker group, he was the only one Dottie liked, the one she didn't roll her eyes or mumble beneath her breath if we ran into on the street or in a local restaurant. She even mentioned once that she had gone to church to see him celebrate mass and listen to one of his sermons.

  "How was he?" I asked her that day.

  "He looked like he belonged up there," Dottie said about Jeffrey in the same awed tone I would have reserved for Frank Sinatra or Johnny Cash. "But then again, it's not like it was his first time."

  "Full house, kings high," Jerry said, resting his hand flat on the table and reaching over to drag a small mountain of different-colored chips his way.

  "Was that deck even shuffled?" Adam asked, shaking his head, thick hair covering one side of his thin face. "I mean, really, just look at all the face cards that are out. I don't think it was shuffled."

  "You only ask that when I win a hand," Jerry said. "There a reason for that?"

  "That's because the only hands you ever win usually come off a deck that hasn't been shuffled," Adam said.

  Adam and Jerry hated one another and I never understood why one, if not both, didn't just walk from the game. It wasn't as if the city was lacking weekly poker gatherings and God knows most of them served better food and had a nicer selection of wines to choose from than what I offered and set out. Adam was a doctor and a noted one, often cited in medical journals and in the Science section of the New York Times as the gold standard in regard to matters pertaining to women and their bodies. He was handsome, with an easy smile and a scalpel-sharp sense of humor, except of course when he found himself sitting across a table from Jerry, cards in hand and a stack of poker chips resting between them. And while I could never quite put a finger to the pulse that got the feud started in the first place, in many ways I felt myself to be the one responsible. After all, as with the rest of the group, I was the one who brought Adam into the game. And I would just as soon bring the weekly session to an end than to see it go on without Adam holding his usual place at the far end of my table.

  Dr. Adam Rothberg had saved Dottie's life.

  Three years ago, after a long bout with a flu that wouldn't quite surrender the fight, Dottie, fresh off a five-day siege of heavy-duty antibiotics mixed with cough syrup and aspirin, collapsed on the floor of our tiny barely walk-into-it-and-move-around kitchen. She was doubled up and clutching her stomach, foam thick as ocean spray flowed out of her mouth, and her body shook as if it were resting on top of a high-speed motorboat. I was about to jump for the phone and dial 911 when I remembered that the new face that had moved in down the hall during the last week belonged to a doctor. I rushed out of the apartment and ran out into the narrow hall, banging at a door two down from mine. I felt like a boy sitting under a tree crammed with packages on Christmas morning when I saw Adam's face as he swung open his apartment door.

  He saved Dottie's life that day, and we have been friends ever since.

  In that span of time, Adam's practice flourished and his stature rose, while mine pretty much hovered at the same level it had been for years. I don't hate the work I do really, it's just that I don't love it, either. I look around this table and don't see anyone happier at their chosen work than I am, except maybe for Adam, who truly loves putting on the white coat and playing God twelve hours a day. I am good at what I do, bringing a financial balance to the lives of my clients, despite the fact I can't seem to accomplish those same goals for myself. I could never get it to where I was a step ahead, with a
ll the bills paid and some money set aside. And I could never figure out where the hell it all went, especially since we didn't have the financial burden of kids and had lived in the same apartment for more or less the same rent since we were first married and, except for a two-week splurge in Italy during our first year together, seldom took long or expensive vacations.

  It bothered Dottie—I knew that. Not that I was an accountant, but that I was one without money and minus the drive or the talent to earn it. Women like Dottie go into a marriage and expect more out of it than they first let on, not wanting to be the kind of woman who lives her middle age in a financial and emotional rut. And the truth of that, the belief that I had let her down in some way, ate at me more than I would let on. I had failed her, and over time it chipped away at the love she felt for me. I could see it, sense it, her eyes vacant and drawn when she looked my way, her manner indifferent at best, her kisses directed more to the cheek than the lips, as if she were greeting a distant relative with whom she would prefer to have very little contact. It was so different from when we first met. Back then, I was sure we would love each other forever.

  I first saw Dorothy Blakemore at a counter on the second floor of a department store on the Upper East Side. It was a week before Christmas and the place was mad crazy with shoppers with a hunger for gifts, credit cards clutched in their hands. She was staring down at a counter filled with men's gloves and kept shaking her head each time a tall, thin, and harried salesclerk made the slightest attempt at a suggestion. "I don't even know his size" were the first words I heard her say, her voice a sultry mix of Southern warmth mixed with a Northeast education.

  "If I had an idea as to his height and weight, then perhaps I can narrow down your choices," he said to her, his tone more condescending than consoling.

  Dottie paused for a brief second and then glanced in my direction. When she turned and our eyes met, I knew that I was in the middle of a movie moment, standing a mere distance from a woman as beautiful and striking as any I would ever be lucky enough to see in my lifetime. "He's about the size of this man," she said to the salesclerk as she walked toward me.

  I helped her pick out a pair of black leather gloves for her brother, who lived in some town in Maine whose name I could never remember. I wasn't the type to move fast when it came to women, but I knew in my heart if I didn't connect with Dottie on that day, then I would for sure never see her again. There have been few moments in my life when I've been able to manage to put the pieces together and not muck up the works, and that early afternoon was top-of-the-list one of them. I offered to buy her a cup of coffee at a nearby luncheonette that, if it were anywhere else other than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan would be called a diner, and she smiled and nodded. I fell in love that day and have been ever since.

  "Cards don't look to be falling your way tonight, Ike," Steve said, dropping a three of hearts next to my six of spades. "But then, why should tonight be different from any other game?"

  "I used up my run of luck looking for love; there wasn't any left over for cards," I said with a slight shrug, my words sounding much meeker than I intended.

  "So things between you and Dottie are good now?" Tony asked.

  "Did I ever give you a hint that they weren't?" I didn't bother to disguise my annoyance at the question.

  "How about we just play the hand?" Joe advised. "You want to talk about unhappy marriages, let's talk about Isiah Thomas and Stephon Marbury. Not only are they mucking it up with each other, they're destroying any remote chance the Knicks have at ever sneaking into the playoffs."

  "Dottie and I are not unhappy," I said with as much vigor as I could muster. "And if I did or said anything to give you that impression, it was wrong and unintentional."

  "And there it shall end," Jeffrey said with a nod and a smile. "To be quite honest, I never realized how much men loved to gossip until I started playing poker. Unless it's just this particular group that happens to be so chatty."

  "I can only imagine what you and your crew talked about back in your rectory days," Steve said. "I would bet a full load it covered nastier terrain than who was swigging too much of the communion wine."

  I sat back, smiled, and listened as the kidding and ribbing continued around me, holding my anger in check, knowing that the moment was at hand, the killer soon to be revealed. It was all very easy in some way to piece it together, deciding who in the group sitting around my table would bear the responsibility that had led to my Dottie's sudden and unexpected death.

  It was his fingers that were wrapped around the thick black handle of the carving knife as much as mine. It was his hand along with mine that plunged that blade into Dottie's frail and tender body again and again and again until she fell to the floor of the back bedroom, her head slumped to one side, blood oozing out of the deep, severe wounds and staining the thick Persian rug she had brought with the proceeds from my first-and-only Christmas bonus back during that first year of wedded bliss.

  I was a forty-four-year-old man, alone and in debt, out of shape and mentally drained, my hair thinner than it had any right to be and my stomach rounder than anyone my age would prefer. I had a past that was filled mostly with dark and gloomy days and empty nights, touched only on rare occasions by the light and tender glare of happiness. I had a future that promised to be even bleaker, doomed to live out what was left of my time alone and in a constant struggle to survive.

  So I needed to keep my focus on the present.

  In one room, staring up at a chipped and stained white ceiling, an overhead fan on low, circulating warm air in gusts, was the body of a woman who had shared twenty-two years of my life.

  And in this room, surrounded by poker chips, two decks of playing cards, near-empty bowls of nuts and salsa, drinks waiting to be finished, sat the man who had forced my hand and directed it toward murder.

  "Looks like it's your deal, Ike," Adam said. "And your call. What's it going to be?"

  "Let's make this the final hand," I said.

  "It's not even ten," Joe protested. "We usually go to eleven, sometimes an hour or two later. Why make it such an early call?"

  "If it's the last one, can we at least make it interesting?" Steve asked.

  "I intend to," I said. "Midnight baseball, no peak, threes and nines are wild. You draw a four and you can buy yourself an extra card."

  "How about we double the ante, then?" Joe asked. "And let's put no limits on the raises. That square with everybody?"

  "You go that route and the pot can start to get a little steep," Jerry said. "It's always been a friendly game. This will take it out of that ballpark, no doubt."

  "What, you afraid of losing something off the heavy pile of dough you got stashed?" Joe asked.

  "I'm afraid of sitting here and watching you lose money I know you don't have," Jerry said. "Nothing more."

  "You should all be afraid," I said. "This is the one hand none of you can hide from and not one of you can afford to lose."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" Adam asked. "Just deal the cards, and let's get this over with. These weekly games are starting to wear a bit thin. It might just be time for me to move on."

  I shuffled the deck one final time and pushed it over to my left, waiting for Tony to cut the cards and turned to Adam. "And if luck singles you out, then you may well get your wish, doctor," I said.

  I had their attention now, each staring at me not sure whether I was drunk or tired or had totally spun my wheels off the rails. Slowly and with great care, I doled out seven cards to each player, myself included. "This isn't at all like you, Ike," Jeffrey said, more than slightly annoyed. "Maybe Adam is on the right track. We may all need to call it for tonight. You look like you could do with a good night's rest."

  "You might be right on that score, Padre," I said. "I might just need a few solid hours of shut-eye. But before I push back and trot off to bed, I need to bring our little game to a fitting end. I think that's something we all would want. So how about you
sit back and sit tight? This won't take very long."

  I caught the glances racing across the table from one set of eyes to another, the looks a mixture of confusion, anger, concern, and indifference, and it made me smile. I had them now, these six friends of mine, men I had trusted and confided in, to some had even bared secrets I would never want spoken outside this room. For a long stretch of time in my troubled life, they were the raft that I could wrap my arms around and ward off, however briefly, the arching waves, dark clouds, and approaching storm of an existence that seemed destined to end with my drowning death. But they all carried with them the Judas coin, and the blood of a good woman was now smeared across it.

  We all turned our first card over. Steve was high with a jack and casually tossed a one-dollar chip onto the center of the table. I stared at him and waited for him to return my look. "She cared about you," I told him, "and took good care of you after your minor mishap a while back. It was her idea to put you in bed—our bed—and leave you there until you were well enough to walk out on your own. But even after all that, you seemed to act as if you didn't even notice when she was around. Or was that a charade meant only for my eyes?"

  Embarrassed that his suicidal secret was now open for discussion, Steve looked around at the others before he turned to me. "I don't know what you're getting at, Ike," he said. "You're a bit out of control and not just tonight, but for a while. We've all picked up on it and let it slide figuring you needed to work a few things out, is all. But now it's reached a tipping point, and maybe we should bring it all to a stop right here and right now."

  "It's only a game, Ike," Jeffrey said. "It would be madness to let friendships be cast aside over some silly game."

  "What's only a game, Padre?" I asked, turning my attention to Jeffrey. "The hand you've just been dealt, or the deal between you and Dottie?"

  "What are you implying?" Jeffrey asked. "I have never had an improper moment with Dottie. Not one, not ever. And for you to even think something like that borders on madness."