Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Which was fine with me.

  This was his line of work, not mine, and I was more than content to leave him to it. I had come to Las Vegas to play some poker and make some money, and multiple murders were definitely not on the agenda. Yet I couldn’t seem to make myself tell him the one fact I was holding back—not until I was sure what it meant. And that might take some time.

  I needed to be alone for a while, have leisure to study the various components of the hand I had been dealt so far, see how they might fit together, and weigh the chances of improvement and decide whether it was time to raise, call, or fold.

  Meanwhile, there was Maxey. If Corner Pocket’s unvoiced questions were noisy, the silent dialogue between Maxey and me was louder. She, too, was wondering whether I knew anything about the aces and eights. But she had something more than question marks to contribute. Reaching out with the back part of my mind while continuing to answer questions with the front, I tried to reach her. But as before, the wa was shielded, hidden behind a wall that seemed to have grown higher and stronger with the passage of minutes.

  The only impressions I could get were of fear—a chill that seeped through the shield despite a degree of control that was far stronger than I remembered—and of determination.

  Something was frightening her, but not badly enough to keep her from going through with whatever errand had brought her to Las Vegas in the first place.

  I couldn’t help wondering what it was.

  “Mrs. Goines...”

  The face was unfamiliar, but the attitude and the summons were not, and I turned away from the detective whose questions I had been answering to see if Maxey needed help.

  She had stopped talking, too, and turned her head in the direction of the thin, bald man who was leaning out the doorway of Sam Goines’s room.

  “Mrs. Goines, I’m sorry, but there is something that has to be done for the official record. Could you step in here for a moment?”

  Maxey looked at me. “Preacher...?”

  She didn’t have to say it twice. I think the detective nearest me wanted to put a hand on my arm to keep me where I was, but he didn’t do it and that was just as well. I moved across the room to stand beside her and stayed close, with my hand touching her arm, as she went into the room where her husband had died.

  A sheet had been pulled over Sam’s face and the various tubes and wires of intensive care had been disconnected, but the place still showed signs of the frantic effort that had been made to draw him back from the shadows.

  Someone had pushed the nightstand away from the bed with a rough hand. It was angled against the outer wall of the room, and a tray that had been on it had fallen to the floor, spilling various items of hospital bric-a-brac. The crash cart stood forlorn in another corner, its mission a failure. And the sheet covering the body had come loose at its lower end.

  Alive, Sam Goines had been vital and determined and full of slightly cynical laughter. A successful man and a tough one. A winner. In all his years, few had ever pitied him—or had reason to.

  But death is the card of change.

  The loosened sheet had left Sam’s feet exposed and somehow their nude and flaccid immobility brought a run of compassion for the man that would have been unthinkable only a few hours earlier. Maxey saw it, too, and I sensed a rush of emotion from her that paralleled my own. And that was a surprise.

  I had been an old friend.

  She had been his wife.

  But there was more. Something besides sorrow or even regret. I stood still, trying to identify the feeling, while the man who had summoned her into the room drew back the top of the sheet to expose Sam’s face.

  It was relaxed, composed. Almost smiling. And it crossed my mind that he might have had reason to smile. Sam’s life had been a texture of money acquired and secrets kept, and he had died in possession of a secret that a lot of people would have paid a lot of money to possess.

  All the same, there was something else...

  Maxey looked for a long moment at the exposed face and then nodded. The coroner’s man replaced the sheet and thanked her and then seemed to notice the exposed feet for the first time. He moved at once to cover them—and then I knew what had been disturbing me. I had a final moment in which to check before they were out of sight, and then looked at Maxey to see if she had noticed the same thing.

  But her face was closed and quiet.

  If she knew what I knew, and I was almost certain that she did, she wasn’t about to tell anyone about it.

  Together we walked in silence from the room.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  We tell ourselves that ultimate weapons held not just by both sides but by all sides in a world of diverse aims and conflicting needs and values will never be put to use because they are too terrible. Too totally devastating. Too effective...

  ELEVEN

  The questioning resumed as soon as we were back in the corridor, but the edge was gone and it gradually petered out with the standard injunctions: Don’t discuss this among yourselves, keep us informed of your whereabouts, let us know if you think of anything else. Written statements will be ready in a day or so, and we will want you to come in and sign them.

  And Corner Pocket had a quiet word of his own to add. “You stay in town,” he said. “We are going to talk again. Soon.”

  I allowed as how it did seem likely.

  Maxey had come to the hospital in a police car, and Corner Pocket said he was going to be busy at the hospital for a while, so I offered her a ride back to the Scheherazade.

  She accepted without comment, and we rode the first few blocks in what amounted to silence, though we continued to exchange small talk that would probably have made sense on playback if any outsider had been listening. But it was tinfoil, sound in an empty room.

  There were things I wanted to say.

  And ask. And tell...

  Traffic was heavier now, even on the side streets, and I edged the rented car into a left-turn lane and waited for the light to let me swing onto Paradise Road, but before I could do that Maxey touched my arm and made the first sensible suggestion I’d heard all morning.

  “Turn right,” she said.

  “I thought you were staying at the Scheherazade.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, it’s to the left.”

  “But I’m hungry.” She turned her head to give me another dose of the armor-piercing eyes. “I thought you might know where we could find some Chinese food...?”

  I looked back at her and found myself marveling once again at how few changes ten years had made. A touch more self-assurance, perhaps, though Maxey had never been exactly shy. And the kind of clothes that are so expensive they don’t need a maker’s name stamped on them. But the face hadn’t changed. Flawless, if you discounted the nose she’d always said was just a little bit off-center. And the woman who owned it seemed to be someone I remembered, too.

  “I think I might know a place,” I said.

  She grinned at me. “So turn right, dammit, and let’s get out of this desert sun.”

  My hands moved the steering wheel and my feet made the car go and my eyes kept us from running into solid objects. But they were on autopilot, doing their own thing while the rest of me sat still and reacted to Maxey—as always—with as much cool restraint and poise as one of Pavlov’s dogs.

  All things considered, I didn’t seem to have changed much, either.

  One of Las Vegas’s worst kept secrets is the Chinese food at the coffee shop just off the casino in the Golden Nugget, downtown.

  Been that way for a long time.

  Menus on the counter and at the booths are all carefully calculated to proclaim café-American, solid sandwich-and-blue-plate fare, perhaps a cut or two above average for the genre but certainly nothing to paste in the memory book.

  The knowledgeable, however, are aware that a quiet request to the waitress for the Chinese menu is the passport to the best oriental cookery east of Sa
n Francisco.

  The Golden Nugget is located in that part of Las Vegas known to visitors as Casino Center and to regulars as Glitter Gulch, world capital of neon-and-plastic kitsch, where the only way to be sure whether it is midnight or noon is to walk into the middle of the street and look up.

  The intersection it shares with Binion’s Horseshoe, the Fremont, and the Four Queens is the ground-zero center of town, the place where gaming operations finally came into their own after the early years of trail-town stagnation, and from that crossroads to the Union Plaza a couple of blocks away, the area is zoned, planned, and deliberately decorated to offer a kind of all-casino ambience calculated to attract wonderment and dollars.

  And in this milieu the Golden Nugget has flourished.

  Even before the hotel was built, it was known as the biggest and most successful of the downtown casinos, occupying a full frontage block along casino row.

  It was during those non-hotel years that the tradition of elegant Chinese cuisine in the coffee shop began, and all subsequent managements have been wise enough to keep this intact no matter what other innovations might be under consideration. The Golden Nugget could probably survive without the Chinese food—we live in a world of wonders where human beings are able to live for long periods without lungs or kidneys or even flesh-and-blood hearts, and some few cities have achieved a certain weird zombie-life after the destruction of their downtown commercial centers—but it would have no soul.

  On arrival, we turned the car over to a valet parking service outside the early-whorehouse facade, walked through the lobby to the casino, and turned left toward the food.

  Maxey was a stranger to the place by now, but I spend enough time in Las Vegas—and like Chinese food well enough—to be considered a regular, and the waitress turned away to fetch the special menu without having to be asked. A pretty meager perk, to be sure. But pleasant, and I settled myself to study the slick-finished trifold with a sense of comfort and familiarity... which turned to pure déjà vu when I glanced at my dinner-breakfast companion.

  This was the place where it had started.

  I had been on terminal leave from the army hospital for three weeks and in Las Vegas for two—long enough to find out that I didn’t know as much about the game of poker as I had imagined, but not long enough to be sure whether I would ever be able to learn.

  There was a little money. Uncle Sugar is not precisely bountiful when it comes to ex-corporals who have managed to lose an eye in combat, but various politicians over the decades have finally gotten him out of the old-time habit of telling them thanks a lot, now go root hog or die. So for the time being I was receiving regular checks from the Veterans Administration, pending final disposition of any claim I might have for disability.

  I had discovered the Golden Nugget’s Chinese menu on my fifth day in town and had been a regular ever since. Even in those days, I was savvy enough to keep my eating and drinking to an irreducible minimum while playing poker, so of course I ended every game ravenous and sleepy, a mind-bending combination for a man whose dreams were already less than comfortable. Chinese food, particularly Cantonese cooked by people who knew what they were doing, turned out to be a palatable—if somewhat addictive—answer.

  I could eat it with relish and digest it without nightmares, and I was about to do both the night someone seated in the booth opposite my own leaned across the aisle to demand immediate information on the source of my goodies.

  The person who had spoken was on my right side, which is to say my blind side. I turned my head to see her before answering... and temporarily forgot how to speak the English language.

  Maxey always had that effect on me.

  Fortunately it was a reaction she had seen before and was used to. She gave me a moment to recover scrambled wits and then repeated the question.

  I explained about the menu, but there seemed to be another problem: She had lost one contact lens at work and taken the other one out, and the regular glasses, which she hated anyway, were at home. Could I possibly...?

  I could. And since it was awkward for me to twist my head so far around to see her—I wasn’t about to look away—it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to move over into her booth. Which, in turn, led to introductions. And a few minutes later we were splitting a double order of wonton, curried chicken with peppers, Peking braised lamb, and spicy eggplant with more steamed rice than any six people could eat. But we made a valiant attempt.

  Maxey affected my speech centers, not my appetite.

  And later I found myself talking easily, too. Concealed behind that high-impact exterior and the imposing professional-dancer name of Moira Fonteyn, I discovered, was a twenty-four-year-old registered nurse named Dorothy Maxine Mankowski, whose imposing upper and lower measurements had ruled out all hope of a ballet career by the time she was seventeen.

  “Even then,” she sighed, “I was five feet eleven, a hundred and plenty. Pivot hard enough and the top of me could knock one of those poor little male dancers into the middle of next week. So I went to work on the line at GM to get enough money for nursing school.”

  One graduation, one marriage, one divorce, and one elderly private patient later, she was in Las Vegas. And back to being a dancer.

  “Well...sort of,” she amended. “Most of the show I just stand there wearing about thirty pounds of stuff on my head and six ounces everywhere else. But we all do a kind of time-step for the finale. So I say I’m a dancer, because that’s easier and nicer than saying I’m scenery, even though that’s what I’m really hired to be.”

  The words held no bitterness, only calm acceptance of an existing situation, and she snorted at the idea of returning to the nursing profession.

  “Not till I’m old and gray and too bent to get into that damn headdress,” she vowed. “The hours are long, the work’s hard, and even though being an RN takes a couple years of college and you’re supposed to be a kind of administrator, the doctors treat any nurse like rented furniture—or an off-hours sex toy if they think they can get away with it—and I have sort of got out of the habit of being either one.”

  I said I could see how that might be.

  Las Vegas, she said, wasn’t a half-bad place to stop and rest and figure out what to do with the rest of a lifetime.

  Which jarred me a bit.

  Because I was in town on the same errand.

  Even with the garnish of easy conversation, a breakfast of Chinese food isn’t much foundation for any kind of lasting relationship, and I was only half-hopeful when I suggested that there were more things to do in town than hang around the casinos and eat curried chicken.

  But the gallon or so of spiced tea I had consumed had left me both alert and optimistic, and it turned out to be her day off, too—I hadn’t yet told her that it was always my day off if I wanted it that way—and we started with a game of tennis that must have amused anyone who was watching even more than it did us. Which was a lot.

  Moira/Maxey, I discovered on the first serve, was by no means as blind as a bat without her glasses, but all the same suffered from a myopia that gave her less than a split second to react to the ball. Her reflexes were good. Excellent, in fact. But seldom good enough to connect.

  I, on the other hand, was playing tennis for the first time since becoming monocular, and I hadn’t yet had time to achieve the mental compensation that eventually simulates normal three-dimensional sight.

  The result, so far as tennis was concerned, was a comedic turn that finally and mercifully ended in mutual hilarity after the second set.

  Maxey—she had asked me, as a favor, to call her that after the second time I addressed her by the mouth-filling professional name—said she hadn’t noticed the prosthetic eye that I wore, and though I put that down to nearsightedness, her only reaction on closer contact was curiosity. Wearing her glasses, she wanted to see me take the glass eye out and put it back in. Perhaps it was the background in nursing, perhaps simply an open and accepting quality
that seemed basic to her nature, but it was the only attitude I could have lived with at the time. I was still a little squeamish about the damn thing myself.

  And of course she had to hear how I had come to need it.

  But all that happened later.

  That first day, we rented a car after leaving the tennis center, stopped by her apartment long enough for her to retrieve the spectacles, and then moved on to the golf course at the hotel where she worked—where she proceeded to beat the living hell out of me hole by hole until the seventeenth green where I demanded that she accept at least the handicap of putting without her glasses and she said she would do that if I would tee off with my left eye closed and I agreed and we actually tried to do it...with results roughly comparable to those we had achieved on the tennis court.

  The game never really got finished.

  We were laughing too hard and the foursome behind us was too impatient and besides, the sun was going down and it was time for the nineteenth hole.

  Nowadays I drink only occasionally, when the potation is worth it (the triple-run blockader that enlivens an occasional evening at Best Licks, or a really celebratory dinner wine) or when the occasion seems to demand it. But in those days I was having a sick little love affair with the bottle, feeling sorry for myself and using that as justification on hangover mornings. So the evening got a lot wetter than I had intended and I sort of lost track of events between the golf course and the moment, quite a few hours later, when I woke up in a bed I didn’t recognize, staring blearily at the ceiling of a room I had never seen before.

  I was alone, but there was ample evidence that the other half of the double bed had been occupied at some recent time, and I lay still for a while trying to remember who it might have been. But it was no good.

  A blank.

  I did the only thing I could think of to do, which was sit up and look around for my undershorts. And regretted it immediately. Bells were ringing in the far distance, and the room seemed to want to remain on its side.

  Maxey walked in a minute or two later and gave me what might or might not have been a smile. A glass of something dark and violent-looking was in her hand. Her I remembered.