Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  An almost-straight arrow.

  Which always made me wonder what the hell he was doing in Las Vegas.

  Once inside the room, Corner Pocket wasted no time. The remains of the late Danny DiMarco, the general wreckage of the room, and the two police interrogators each rated a single appraising glance en route to the balcony, where he stepped gingerly through and around mounds of shattered glass to the railing and spent a moment or two looking first downward to the spot where the dead machine gunner’s body had fallen, and then upward to the overhang.

  “One of them was picked up from the roof?”

  The question was asked in an almost casual way and hadn’t seemed to be directed toward anyone in particular, but he was talking to me and I took care to make my answer as careful and accurate as possible.

  “Seems likely,” I said. “But I didn’t see it happen, and later I was too busy staying alive to take much interest.”

  He nodded. “Can’t say I blame you.”

  He moved back into the room and came to a stop beside the divan. A floor lamp that had taken more than its share of damage lay on its side near the wall, and he bent absently to put it back on its base, but stopped just before his fingers would have made contact. “Forensics lab’s been in here already, I suppose?” he said, looking over his shoulder at the detectives.

  Momentary hesitation.

  “They’re on their way,” one of them said finally.

  Corner Pocket’s hand moved away from the fallen lamp and he eased back to his full height. “You’ve checked out the bedrooms? The rest of the suite?”

  The taller and beefier of the detectives, an affable sort who had introduced himself as Bill Bowers, stirred uncomfortably, trying to keep his eyes on the notebook that was still open in his hand but not having much luck. “Gotta be empty,” he said in a voice that seemed almost strangled.

  Corner Pocket nodded. “Well,” he said evenly, “since you’re sure of that, don’t you think one of them might have been a better place to ask your questions—just to keep the crime scene intact until it can be examined and photographed in situ?”

  Even uttered in the mildest of tones, the words were a skin-peeling criticism and professional challenge. But neither of the detectives seemed to want to argue the point, and I couldn’t help thinking their silence showed better judgment than I’d have expected. They compromised by sitting still and hating his guts in silence.

  “Okay, then,” he said when the moment had passed, “I’m going to borrow the preacher, here, for a while.”

  He turned a cool eye on them, waiting for objections.

  There were several. But neither of the homicide detectives seemed to want to put them into words, and after a moment or two he nodded curtly and I stood up to follow him to the door.

  That finally got an audible reaction.

  “Wait a minute...”

  Bowers put his notebook down and shifted his bulk into what might or might not have been an attitude of truculence, prepared at last to regurgitate all the words he had swallowed in the past few minutes. But he never got the chance.

  Corner Pocket turned his head to look, as though seeing him for the first time. “Why, hello there, Bowers,” he said in a friendly tone. “Stolen any good neckties lately?”

  The big man froze, lips already formed around the next syllable but unable to force it out of his throat.

  His face drained of color, blushed a bright red, and then faded to white again. I was surprised to feel the white-hot intensity of rage and hatred that he concentrated momentarily on Corner Pocket...and then turned on himself. I wondered how he was able to live inside there, and found myself cringing from a sudden close-up view of pounding lungs and tortured digestive organs. As answers go, it was detailed and explicit.

  If Bowers couldn’t learn to like himself a little better, he was not long for this world.

  “Okay, then,” Corner Pocket said.

  Nobody seemed to have any objections to offer this time as he headed for the door with me in his wake, and he left the room without a backward glance. But I couldn’t resist looking back for just a moment.

  The two detectives were still frozen like flies in amber, gazing in the direction of the door, hating the world and themselves and Corner Pocket with their eyes and every line of their bodies. But Judge Apodaca was having a fine time.

  Visibly diverted, he sat relaxed against the cushions of the mined divan, savoring the greenish cigar he had just set fire to and tapping the ashes onto the blood-spattered carpet with the cavalier unconcern of a man who knows himself to be on the side of the angels.

  And he was right. No doubt of it.

  But I couldn’t help wondering what the forensics people would make of it all...

  Corner Pocket—the name came from the time a few years earlier when he had almost become chief of police, but found himself relegated to second place in a typical Las Vegas political squeeze—didn’t seem to have much to say until we were in the service elevator watching the floor numbers slip by en route to the basement, and then he seemed to decide that his exchange with Bowers needed some kind of explanation.

  “I can be such a son of a bitch,” he said.

  I favored him with my very blankest country-boy gaze and waited for more. “They speak well of you down at the Elks Club,” I said.

  That earned me a sour grin and a shake of the head.

  “Bill Bowers,” he said, “is a total pain in the ass. It isn’t that he’s dumber than an ox. He’s not. But he isn’t any smarter than an ox, either, and along with it he’s a snotty, opinionated loud-mouth bastard and a bully, and five minutes of his conversation would be enough to put Albert Schweitzer in a mood to punch his lights out.”

  “I kind of got the idea that he admires you, too.”

  “All the same,” Corner Pocket went on, not hearing me or not giving a damn, “he’s a fairly competent thief-catcher when you leave him alone to do the job. Not that he gets a hell of a lot of practice, because no one ever lets cops alone in this town. All part of the Las Vegas mystique, so I hear tell...”

  His voice trailed off, and I tried to think of a remark that would be snotty, loud-mouthed, and bullying enough to make him feel better but couldn’t come up with anything.

  “That bit about the neckties was below the belt, though,” he said a floor or two later. “Now I’m going to have to find some way to apologize to the stupid prick without really apologizing, and... Goddamn, will you tell me why I’m laying all this crap on you?”

  I thought it over. “My honest face and sensitive nature?”

  That actually got a smile. Junior grade. “Oh, the hell with you, Bible-thumper...”

  We descended a few more floors in companionable silence.

  “Neckties?” I prompted, when I thought he was ready to talk again.

  Corner Pocket snorted and shook his head.

  “The poor dumb bastard,” he said. “It happened more than ten years ago. Ten years! And no one’s ever let him forget it. Including me. Five weeks after he joined the force, fresh from the academy, there was a kick-in at a men’s store downtown one night and he caught the squeal along with his partner, a drunken, burned-out old hairbag who was supposed to be his field training officer.

  “Bowers played it strictly by the book: radioed for backup and then covered the front of the store while the supposedly more experienced and competent man went in through the back door to check out the premises and make sure the burglars weren’t still in there. Or, anyway, that’s what he told Bowers he was going to do. What he really did was walk in there and select two or three good-looking sports coats he thought would fit him, ditto a few pair of slacks, and some neckties—believe it—and stash them in the trunk of the prowl car.

  “Guys in the backup car never twigged and neither did the robbery team when they got there, so the hairbag waited until Bowers had to pee and took off in the prowl car, yelling some thing about an emergency call. Took him only a minute or two to d
ump the coats and slacks at his place, of course, and then he went back to pick up Bowers, saying the emergency was a dud. Which still might have been okay. Nothing new in the annals of police science. But the hell of it was the old fart had been nibbling all night long on a flat pint of vodka he had hidden in the car, and he took an extra moment or two to pour himself a big one while he was home, so damn if he didn’t forget to unload the neckties...and there they were, staring up at him, when Bowers went to unload the trunk at the end of the watch.”

  I sighed, seeing how the story had to end. “Naturally, Bowers blew the whistle,” I said.

  “Naturally.”

  “And naturally his friend and mentor, the hairbag training officer, never saw those neckties before in his life.”

  “And naturally, Internal Affairs found the coats and slacks at the old son of a bitch’s house, but still had no way to go except to kick Bowers’s ass all the way around the four hundred block of Stewart Avenue—more for industrial-grade stupidity than for any suspicion that he’d really tried to steal any neckties—and the hairbag went on three months’ vacation and then retired, and Bowers got a month’s suspension to go into his personnel file where no one would ever forget it or let him forget it, either.”

  “Including you.”

  “Including me,” Corner Pocket said. “Jesus, Preacher, sometimes I get so damn sick of being me...”

  The elevator stopped in the hotel’s subbasement, and we turned to face the metal door.

  “Well, then,” I said, “maybe you could go be someone else for a while.”

  “Yeah? Who’d you have in mind?”

  I considered the proposition while the elevator hummed and hitched, easing itself into alignment with the floor.

  “Francis Carrington Shaw?” I suggested.

  He seemed to think it over, but shook his head. “Too old,” he said. “Besides, they say he’s sick.”

  “But rich.”

  “Who wants to be rich?”

  “Both of us!”

  The doors rattled open and I followed him out of the cage along a metal catwalk to a door that I knew opened on the parking lot that was sandwiched between the rear of the hotel and the pool-cabana area.

  “I tell you what,” he said, fumbling with the security lock. “Suppose you be old, rich, sick Frank Shaw—and I’ll be a smart New Jersey hood named Manny Temple, and skim all the money away from you...”

  He went out the door without waiting for my reaction or even checking to see if there was one, but I had known Corner Pocket too many years to think he had picked Manny’s name out of the blue, and I had lived too long to believe in coincidence. He was trying to tell me something.

  And maybe he had.

  It had been a long night. Clocks are hard to find in Las Vegas—even gift stores rarely stock them—but darkness was fading, and the quiet suburban developments that stretch out across the east side of town were already reflecting morning light as we started around the side of the hotel to the spot where the gunman’s body had landed.

  Corner Pocket had used the service elevator and the side approach to avoid the news media, but apparently no one had bothered to tell the reporters and photographers about the body outside the building. Their cars and relay vans seemed to be queued up near the Scheherazade’s main lobby entrance, at the top of an embankment and nearly a block away from where we were. The cleanup squad had done its usual quiet and effective job, and we had the section of the parking lot nearest the tower pretty much to ourselves except for the technicians of the police forensic detail.

  “Meat wagon’s on its way,” Corner Pocket said. “But I noticed that the guy was wearing a stocking mask, and I wanted you to see him without it.”

  “Thanks a group,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  The trouble with violence is that it is so terribly violent.

  Human beings have survived thirty-two-story falls. Movie stuntmen jump from near-comparable heights to earn a few thousand dollars’ worth of talent and danger fees; ordinary people who inadvertently do the same thing because of awkwardness or drunken ineptitude—and live to celebrate the experience—are an infrequent but ever popular staple of television news broadcasting.

  Stuntmen, however, land on air bags, and nonprofessionals who survive unrehearsed seem always to have found convenient canopies or awnings or haystacks or even flat van roofs to soften the last few inches of descent.

  The gunman who had dropped from the penthouse balcony at the Scheherazade had enjoyed no such good fortune. True, he had probably been dead for several seconds before he began his descent, and I had somehow supposed that this might mitigate the more spectacular effects of the sudden stop 300 feet below; total relaxation of the body and noncirculation of blood should, I reasoned, minimize postmortem damage.

  But I was wrong.

  Trauma center physicians have long been aware that the human body is a complex of contradictions—tough and resilient and self-repairing under many trying circumstances, but infinitely delicate and frangible in others. And the insult that can be inflicted even on lifeless tissue by contact at near terminal velocity with concrete-based asphalt is more intricate and various than even the most clinically detailed report can convey.

  None of the bullets fired by the Huey’s door gunner seemed to have stayed with their target; the wounds were of the sort associated with armor-piercing ammunition rather than ordinary military ball—neat entry wounds stitched into the back and untidy exit blossoms on the chest. I could see both kinds without having to turn the body over because impact had twisted his torso through a full 180 degrees of arc, rearranging hips and legs in what might have been a running attitude had they not been turned at an angle so impossibly opposed to the rest of him...and had the legs not been so misshapen, so much shorter than the legs I remembered.

  Unusual position and misproportion were, however, mere details when compared to the color. Collision with the parking lot’s surface had turned the dark coverall a grayish pink, and radial streaks and even mounds of brightness were distributed over a radius of several feet surrounding the body. I found myself thinking of strawberry jam, and was immediately forced to beat back a full-scale rebellion in the digestive tract.

  “Hit feet first, seems as if,” Corner Pocket commented.

  The tone was casual, the words dipped in cynicism, and I rounded on him, ready to ease my own guilt and revulsion with a few well-chosen words about humanity and decent respect for all life, but stopped short at the sight of his face. The skin had gone bloodless white, tight, and transparent across the cheekbones; it was the face of a man far older and sadder than the one I knew, with all of the emotions, which were usually so well disguised by professional attitude and control, naked and helpless to the self that lives just behind the eyes. Here was simply another human being, shocked and humbled in the presence of the Great Death—and dealing with it in the best way he knew.

  “That’s why I wanted you to look,” he went on after a moment. “See, the face is about the only part of him that came through intact, and it seemed like a good idea for you to have a look, in case it was anyone you might know.”

  The forensic detail’s work was almost finished. A chalk line now detailed the final position of the body and I could see that some brave soul had gone through the dead man’s pockets, though there was nothing in their carefully labeled envelopes but arid Nevada climate and a few specks of dark-colored lint. The gunman had carried no identification, money, or other pocket stuffers, and I made a quiet note under “professional” while keeping my mouth firmly shut and adding the silent wager that the labels would also have been cut away from the clothing and any identifiable dental work removed.

  Corner Pocket looked a question at the head of the forensic team, got a nod of response, and bent—with visible reluctance—to remove the ripped and laddered remnant of the nylon stocking that had covered the gunman’s head.

  Poker is a learning experience. It prepares
the dedicated player for all manner of life situations, honing and refining such useful skills as freehand psychology, probability mathematics, and manual dexterity, and encouraging the cardinal virtue of patience. Also, it teaches physical control, particularly of the facial muscles.

  The term “poker face” is more than a cliché.

  My own exterior was, I think, composed in lines of total repose as I gazed for the first time upon the only-slightly-distorted features of the man who had seemed to try so hard to kill me in the moments just before his own death. He was about my age, dusky-skinned and black-browed, the nose and cheekbone and forehead slightly tilted and flattened on one side as though from a long-ago mishap imperfectly repaired. I looked and was startled to find myself suddenly in conscious control of the cadence of my own breathing, of my balance and stance and position on the face of the earth. The brightening air was electric with ozone and the tips of my fingers were sensitive to its ions as I concentrated on a single object—a pebble on the asphalt—and narrowed my vision until it filled the world.

  The state of nothingness consumed me and assumed automatic control of the periphery while I strained to be sure that nothing of my shock and incomprehension was permitted to disturb the surface.

  “Nope,” I said. “Don’t know him.”

  Corner Pocket sighed and shrugged, handing the rained stocking to one of the technicians and turning away.

  “Worth a try,” he said.

  I didn’t reply and offered no resistance as he headed back to the hotel, this time by way of a side door that I knew would lead us up a short stairway to the lower lobby level. I hung back a bit, an elementary maneuver intended to discourage conversation while I sorted through the chaos of memory and emotion evoked by the death mask that hung now in the center of enigma.

  The flattened cheek and bent nose were unmistakable, the face older than at our last meeting, but recognizable nonetheless beyond all possibility of coincidence or error.