Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  In the case at hand, I had the feeling of being able to see some of the wheels go around despite the flawless surface poise. The wa was changed; I could not touch it directly—contact was too tenuous—but its temperature could be measured and it had gone from cold authority to warmth to heat and back to frozen tundra in the few minutes since Corner Pocket and I came through the door.

  It was chilled steel again now as we waited for the doctor to go on, and I found myself speculating again about the rumors concerning strained relations between her and the man who had been her husband for more than a decade. And gave myself a sneer of pure contempt. Sam had been my friend.

  The sudden discovery that I had been nursing a sick and secret little letch for his wife for all these years was appalling enough without the added complication of knowing that his death might not have been a total emotional disaster for her.

  Not that my own reaction had been much stronger. Somehow I couldn’t seem to associate the man who had just died in the intensive care unit of Mount Etna Hospital with the Sam Goines I had known.

  Perhaps it would have been different if Sam and I had had more than a few hours to become reacquainted after the hiatus of a decade. But I had a peculiar feeling that maybe it wouldn’t. Thinking back to the game that had occupied most of the night and morning hours, I realized that I had spent a good part of the time wondering about him, noticing a kind of emptiness, a lassitude that amounted almost to boredom. Sam had never been that way. I remembered him as vital and interested, bluffing far too often, sometimes just to liven up the action, and determined to win all the time. At everything. Something about him had been different last night, and it was more than could be charged to the lapse of ten years.

  In a month or two, when I’d had time to remember the man who had been my friend and the things we had laughed at and the times we had backed each other and the reasons we had had to trust each other, maybe then I would be able to make the loss real and begin my own mourning. But for now my emotional reaction was no more powerful than Maxey’s.

  And she was handling it nicely.

  I think the doctor had expected more, and his pause for effect stretched farther than he had intended before he was convinced that he’d seen all there was to see. Even then, he seemed oddly reluctant to continue with whatever it was he had to say.

  “You understand,” he said, clearing his throat unnecessarily, “that there are some formalities to be gone through, here...”

  Maxey nodded, never taking her eyes from his face, and he cleared his throat another time.

  “I was...ah...not Mr. Goines’s regular physician,” he said.

  Maxey nodded. “Dr. LeBatt,” she said. “In Monaco.”

  “Yes.”

  I think he was going to clear his throat yet again, but stopped himself before it happened.

  “Yes. Well...ah...with no regular physician in attendance, I’m afraid the law in Nevada—”

  “And just about everywhere else,” Corner Pocket broke in brusquely. “The doctor is trying to say that there will have to be an autopsy.”

  Maxey turned the eyes on Corner Pocket, and I was vaguely amused to note that he was no more proof against them than I—or any other man I had ever seen. They make you blink and shuffle. Find a way to bottle that and you could conquer the earth.

  “Just so,” Dr. Morse took back the initiative Corner Pocket had suddenly lost and seemed to carry it with more assurance than before. “Just so. An autopsy. And even if I had been the regular attending physician, I would have wanted full postmortem pathology. Because there are two big things about Mr. Goines’s death that puzzle me.”

  He stopped again to let us react, but this time he was ready to move again when we didn’t.

  “Firstly,” he said, “I believe I told you, Mrs. Goines, that your husband was improving and could have been expected to recover. I also told the police. And I said that because to the best of my knowledge and experience I believed it to be true.

  “Mr. Goines had been shot twice: once in the lower abdomen and once in the chest. But only the chest wound was immediately life-threatening, and I am absolutely certain that we were able to reduce it and repair the worst of the damage shortly after he arrived here. He had lost a lot of blood, and there was still some work to be done to contain the damage and make sure of preventing infection from the wound in the stomach cavity. But his crit showed that he had responded well to the multiple transfusions, and his vital signs were improving.

  “He was going to make it...”

  He paused again, but this time there was no sense of hesitancy or embarrassment. The emotion coming off him in waves was a pungent amalgam of indignation, frustration, and rage.

  “Samuel Goines should be alive,” the doctor said. “He should be awake and talking to us right now. But he’s not. He is dead and I don’t know why he died, and until I do know, I’m afraid I am going to be very damned difficult to be around. But that’s only part of the problem. The other part is, I think, more in your line.”

  He had turned to face Corner Pocket, and the last words had been addressed directly to him as he reached into the side pocket of his laboratory coat and rummaged around in the recesses for a moment.

  “I told you the monitor nurse reacted quickly to the change in Mr. Goines’s vital signs,” the doctor went on. “But in the time it took her to move from her station to his room, Mr. Goines’s breathing and heart action had stopped entirely. So of course her first thought was to begin immediate cardiopulmonary resuscitation. And that is what she did.

  “But she is an orderly person and an intelligent one, and even in her haste to get the patient’s heart and lungs back in action she was careful to preserve something most peculiar that she found laid out on the sheet covering his chest.”

  The doctor’s hand emerged from his coat pocket with five playing cards clamped between a thumb and forefinger, which moved with the unconscious ease of long practice to fan and display them for us.

  The cards were good ones. Worth betting in anybody’s game. But I couldn’t help thinking about all the times they had been losers, beginning nearly a century ago in Dakota Territory and running full tilt through the years to this long morning in Las Vegas, where their myth and legend were reinforced and augmented. Someone, somehow, had managed to make Sam Goines’s final hand a full house:

  Two aces. And three eights...

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  But our age is unique, for we live in a world of make-believe.

  A false world, dedicated to propositions of fantasy, because reality—the real world—contains corners too dark for close scrutiny. We lie to ourselves because we think that we must lie. Or go mad...

  TEN

  For a long moment nobody spoke. But there was a lot of thinking going on, and I wasn’t at all surprised to see Corner Pocket looking at me with a combination of puzzlement and fury. He would be sure now that I was lying to him, and the hell of it was that he was right: I was lying. But not about the things he suspected.

  I was holding out on the identity of the dead gunman, and nothing that had happened in the past few minutes had changed my mind about that.

  Until I could explain it to myself, I sure wasn’t going to try explaining it to anyone else.

  But about the rest of the morning’s events—the killings and the helicopter and the atom bomb and now the dead man’s hand—he knew as much as I did. Still, I couldn’t fault him for thinking I had to be lying. Looking back on the morning, it seemed to me that I had been behaving like some kind of hockey puck. Yackety Doodle in Wonderland. Someone, somewhere, had set up a series of unlikely events and led me into the center frame on the obvious assumption that there wouldn’t be a thing I could do about it. And so far someone, somewhere, was damn well right.

  I could feel myself beginning to steam...and ran through a series of mental obscenities with the realization that this, too, was probably an expected and programmed reaction.

&n
bsp; Jesus on a bicycle...!

  “Who else went into that room?”

  Corner Pocket had been thinking, too, and not just about me.

  The doctor shook his head. “I asked the same question,” he said. “But the nurse says everything was normal. The only visitor on the floor was Mrs. Goines.”

  Maxey blinked and came back from whatever far land of consideration she had been visiting. “What?”

  “Sam’s room,” I said, trying to give her a little time. “You were here in the waiting area. Did you see anyone go in or out?” She blinked again. “No,” she said. “No one—but I hadn’t been here very long.” She turned her head to look at me. “I’d only been here a minute or two before you arrived. The nurse outside had to check with the police before I could get in, and then I didn’t know which room he was in or whether I could see him, so I had to ask a nurse—”

  And then my brain finally came to life. “The cap!” I said, cutting her off in midsentence. “The cap she was wearing—Maxey, where was that nurse the first time you saw her?”

  Maxey looked at me as though I’d suddenly started to drool. But she answered.

  “Right here,” she said. “In the corridor. Outside Sam’s room.”

  “Had she been in the room?”

  “I...don’t know. Maybe.”

  “And you asked her where Sam was.”

  “Yes. And she said he was in there. In J-one. But no one was allowed in there without the monitor nurse’s permission.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then you came in...”

  I closed my eyes and tried to bring the picture of the corridor back as it had been at that moment.

  “Medium height,” I said. “Late thirties, brown eyes, black eyebrows—rather heavy, artificially darkened, maybe—with a rather large, straight nose.”

  Corner Pocket still didn’t know what it was all about, but he had taken a small notebook from his pocket and I could see that he was inscribing hen tracks I recognized as shorthand.

  “All right,” he said when he was done. “That squares with what I saw. I don’t think either of us saw the mouth or chin.”

  “No. I didn’t, anyway.”

  “But so what? We’ll get the nurse back here and question her.”

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “You won’t.”

  Corner Pocket transferred the notebook to the hand holding the ballpoint and gave me his full attention. “Go on.”

  “You won’t question that nurse,” I said, “because she doesn’t exist. The cap she wore. It bothered me as soon as I saw it, but I didn’t know why until now.”

  “The cap?”

  “Nursing schools are tough,” I said. “Graduation is a big event, and it ends with something called the capping ceremony. Each school has its own distinctive headgear, and the graduate R.N. wears that cap and no other throughout her career. Which is why this nurse’s cap is so important. It’s the little round beribboned pillbox granted by the Sisters of Saint Anselm.”

  Corner Pocket didn’t understand, of course, and neither did Maxey or the doctor. But they hadn’t spent a year as student instructor for Sewanee’s course in contemporary church history. And I had.

  “The Sisters of Saint Anselm,” I said, “were a nursing order with just one school. At Limoges, in France. It was wiped out during the Second World War and never reestablished. The last graduating class was in 1940.

  “The youngest person legitimately qualified to wear the cap would now be in her midsixties.”

  Corner Pocket swore and took two quick strides in the direction of the visitors’ telephone. But we both knew it was only a gesture and a pretty useless one at that.

  Uniforms are anonymous in a hospital.

  To leave the building unobserved, the ersatz nurse had only to keep her eyes front and her mouth firmly shut. Stopping to talk to Maxey must have been an annoyance. An unexpected glitch in an otherwise perfect plan. But nothing serious. Nothing that the sudden arrival of two outsiders and Maxey’s reaction to seeing me alive couldn’t cover.

  The security men stationed in the lobby and elsewhere had no memory of seeing any specific nurse—with or without a peculiarly shaped pillbox cap—and even the nurse assigned to the ICU monitor shook her head in blank incomprehension when Corner Pocket got around to questioning her. She knew the kind of cap he was talking about, but her job was to concentrate on the patients’ condition as set forth in the gospel according to Medi-Date Systems, Inc., and not to clutter her head with questions about nursing schools and what business a seemingly legitimate nurse with a clipboard might have on the floor.

  She did her job and tried to let others do theirs.

  Her attitude was prim and self-righteous and superior and altogether irritating, but I didn’t find myself in any position to criticize and I don’t think Corner Pocket was feeling especially self-satisfied, either. His shoulders slumped a little as he turned away from the monitor desk and faced us with what might have been a diffident shrug that never quite came off.

  “Gone,” he said.

  Nobody seemed to have anything to say about that.

  “You got a closer look at her than anyone else,” he said, turning to Maxey. “Neither Preacher nor I can remember seeing the bottom half of her face. Anything you can help us with there?”

  Maxey blinked, and I knew she was either editing what she was about to say or really trying to remember, and I was surprised to discover that I really couldn’t be sure which it was.

  “Wide mouth,” she said. “One tooth a little crooked in front. I remember thinking she would be quite good-looking if it were fixed, and wondering why she hadn’t had it done. And a fairly strong chin. No dimple and not too big for the face, but not undersized, either. I could tell you the shade of lipstick, but I don’t think the name would mean anything to you—call it a darker red, keyed to the number three pancake she was wearing.”

  Maxey stopped talking for a moment, and I think Corner Pocket was going to ask another question, but she spoke before he could. “You’ll never find her with any description that any of us can give,” she said.

  Now it was Corner Pocket’s turn to blink. “Say what?”

  “The descriptions. The ones you got from Preacher and from me. They’re no good. Everything, starting with height and going on to the color of her hair and the skin tone and the color of her eyes, every single damn thing, even to the shape of the nose and mouth, is something that can be changed.”

  “But—”

  Maxey shook her head impatiently. “Talking to you just now,” she said, “it suddenly struck me: Lifts in the shoes or flat heels or high heels and the design of a woman’s clothes can make her seem inches taller or shorter. Take it from me—I’m tall enough to have to know about things like that.

  “And the makeup. Preacher noticed the nursing cap but didn’t know it was important at the time. I noticed the makeup. Hospital nurses rarely wear much, but she was loaded. A number three pan isn’t usually worth remembering and I didn’t think about it...then. Talking about it now, I realize that the amount she had on was unusual. More for television or for the kind of society bash where newspaper and magazine photographers will be popping bulbs and you don’t want to come off invisible inside your own clothes.

  “Even the eye color could have been tinted contacts. I wear contacts myself. Sometimes.”

  There was a pause, and I caught the tiniest hint of a side glance in my direction. Did I remember?

  Yes. I did.

  “Give that nurse, whoever she was, fifteen minutes outside the hospital, or inside it if she has a change of clothes with her and a private place to remove the makeup,” Maxey said, “and she could walk past any one of us without a chance of being recognized.”

  I think we all knew Maxey was right. But Corner Pocket had to go through the motions anyway, and I knew better than to do anything more original than relax.

  Another team of detectives and forensic tec
hnicians arrived to take over the investigation, and of course each of us had to go through the story again. And again. And yet again. Even Corner Pocket wasn’t exempt. And I noticed that the questioning was a lot less gentle and circumspect than had been the case with the detectives who came to the penthouse of the Scheherazade. Hotel killings—even when complicated by factors like a pair of masked hit men with submachine guns and a helicopter escape—are one thing; murders that happen in a hospital are quite another. This time the interrogators wanted the straight facts, never mind the polite omissions. And then they wanted the stories told over again, starting and working toward both ends with every detail cross-referenced and rechecked. Las Vegas police can be professional enough when they’re allowed. Not that it made any difference.

  Sam was still dead.

  And the person suspected of killing him was still at large without even a good description available.

  There was also the matter of the killer’s calling cards. Aces and eights. The dead man’s hand. The first time, at the hotel, it could have been coincidence. The cards had been together on the table, and they could have been on Danny DiMarco’s chest by chance.

  This time, however, there could be no doubt. No question of coincidence. The cards had to mean something, had to be someone’s idea of delivering a message. And because of the business I am in the chances were that it was addressed to me. So naturally I had to know what it meant.

  And I didn’t have a clue...

  And naturally Corner Pocket thought I did.

  All through the police interrogation I could feel his eyes on me, and the questions he was asking were louder than the ones that were spoken by the investigators. Old friends we might be—or at least respectful acquaintances. But three men were dead now, and there was reason to believe that one of them had been playing some kind of game with a stolen atom bomb. Personal emotions and individual concerns were going to run a bad second to professional duty for the duration.