“At first,” she said, “it was just something that happened. We met in Nice, at one of the world’s most boring cocktail parties. Harry had corralled a waiter and asked me if I wanted a refill and I said I did and we started talking and after a while we decided to get out of there and go somewhere else.”
She took another sip of the scented tea and then poured for both of us.
“The somewhere else turned out to be Harry’s apartment,” she said. “And I have to tell you that it was no surprise. I’m not really like that, lover—believe it or don’t believe it, suit yourself—I hadn’t strayed in all the time I’d been married to Sam, and that was quite a record. Especially for the crowd we were in. By the kind of yardsticks they use, I was practically a nun.”
“But Harry changed all that?”
She smiled at me and there was the trace of a glitter in her eyes. But if she was offended, she didn’t say so.
“But Harry changed all that,” she said. “Or I changed. That first time started something I found out I couldn’t stop. And didn’t want to. We were careful in public and careful when we saw each other in private, but there was no chance at all that Sam wouldn’t find out, and anyway I told him in the first week or so, as soon as I was sure it wasn’t something that was going to just fade away.”
“He accepted it?”
She started to say yes; you could see the word completely formed, just below the threshold of sound. But it evaporated before it could be said and after a moment of hesitation she shook her head. Not emphatically, but with sure knowledge.
“He told me he did,” she said. “And we never mentioned it again. But thinking about it now, I can see that he never really intended to let it pass.”
Maxey leaned back in the booth and let her eyes focus on the cup in her hands.
“Sam Goines,” she said, “was going to be a king. An emperor. And kings and emperors have harems—wives and mistresses and concubines and whatever else you want to call them—the more the merrier. That’s all right. Fits the picture. Adds to the image.
“But let one of the wives or concubines start playing snatch-grab-and-tickle with the majordomo or the master of revels and all bets are off. It’s royal executioner time...and I should have known it.”
“You think he’s that jealous?”
“I think he’s that much attached to the image of himself as Henry the Eighth or the king of Siam.”
She let it sink in, and then voiced my next thought for me.
“I think,” she said, “that this town, Las Vegas, is a place where a man with the right amount of money and the right kind of connections and the right kind of muscle can do just about anything he wants, and I think that’s why Sam Goines got us here.
“This is his killing ground.
“I think everyone in that penthouse at the Scheherazade was supposed to die—that’s why I was so sure they meant you when they said they found three people down on the floor and one of them was a preacher—and I think Harry and I are supposed to die, too.”
“Harry’s here?”
“This is Harry’s home. Here in Las Vegas. Which might be just one more good reason for Sam to decide to do it all, clear the books, right here in town.”
Thinking it over, I had to admit it made pretty good sense. Except for one detail.
“If that’s what you think,” I said, “why did you go along with the gag—identify the man in the hospital as Sam?”
She blinked, and the tears were near the surface again. But the voice was steady. “I never claimed to be a hero, lover,” she said. “I want to stay alive and I’ll do anything, say anything, that I think might help. That nurse you saw me talking to in the hospital, the one you think maybe killed Terry McDuff? Well, she was giving me a message from my loving husband. She told me he wasn’t in that room—up until then, I’d thought he was—and she said he wanted me to identify the man in there as him, and if I didn’t I wasn’t going to walk out of that hospital, or even off that floor, alive.”
The tears were gone, but even through the defensive curtain that masked the wa from me I could feel the fear-chill that lived inside her.
“I’m shook, old buddy,” she said. “Terrified out of my mind. And if you’re anything like as smart as the man I remember, you’ll have sense enough to be scared, too.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
King David, in his time, had spread himself “like the green bay tree” over the whole land of Israel, smiting his enemies and dancing for joy at the capture of a major city...
FOURTEEN
Terrified or not, Maxey didn’t seem to have lost her appetite, and we passed the next few minutes in silence, doing a fair execution on the corn soup, duck, pork, and snow peas.
They were worth the effort.
But our minds wandered, and by the time we were down to the black cherries, peaches, and kumquats, I had come up with the only suggestion that seemed logical in the circumstances.
“You could run,” I said.
Maxey seemed to think it over.
“Where?” she said.
“Anywhere you like. You say Las Vegas is Sam’s killing ground. All right. So if you’re really sure he’s in that kind of a mood, make him come after you somewhere else. Someplace where screaming matters and murder gets investigated. Or dig a hole and pull it in after you.”
She smiled at me.
“Sure,” she said. “It makes sense, and don’t think I haven’t considered it. But I’m not going to do it.”
Maxey put back the last cherry she’d chopsticked off the platter and set the bamboo sticks down in the middle of the table.
“I’m tired, lover,” she said. “I want to go on living, but not if it means running and looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”
Her face was quiet and the words were sure, and I could find no reason at all to doubt that she meant every one of them.
“I told you one of the reasons I married Sam was to make sure I never had to go back to Detroit or any place remotely like it, and I have to tell you I still feel that way. Even if I knew it was going to end like this, I wouldn’t go back and change anything. Does that seem crazy?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Not crazy.”
Sad, maybe. But I didn’t say that.
“All right, then,” she said. “So try this on: I am awfully damned glad to see you. I can’t run and I can’t hide and I can’t even fight—at least not in any way that would matter. But the best luck I’ve had in years was for you to live through that business at the Scheherazade. Not just because I like you, though that counts. But more than that, because I think with you around I might really stand a chance of living through the next week or, who knows, maybe even a year...”
She stopped talking, and she might have been waiting for a reply. But I couldn’t think of a thing, so I dropped enough money on the table to cover the price of the meal and a ridiculous over-tip and we got out of there and found the rented car and headed back toward the Scheherazade.
It was a nice speech, and all the nicer because it didn’t seem to have been rehearsed.
Nice to know someone had such perfect faith in me.
Nice to be trusted.
Especially by Maxey.
Now if I only had some idea of what was going on and what I was supposed to be doing...
It was still the shank of the morning, but I hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours, so it was only a minor letdown when Maxey left me at the door of her suite.
I offered no objection. But all the same I felt a sneaky little lift when she explained that—murder plots or no murder plots—she had a couple of duty calls to make around town, and she wanted to see me later.
“I have kind of an idea,” she said. “Maybe nothing, maybe something. But give me a call when you wake up. Okay?”
Okay.
I went back to the elevator, but punched the lobby button rather than the one for my own floor. As it happened, I had
a couple of errands of my own.
Superspy movies have always left me cold, and elaborate countermeasures make me feel like the central character in some such unlikely tale.
But this was Las Vegas.
I walked quietly through the casino, picked up a pocketful of change, chose a public telephone at random, and placed a long-distance call to Best Licks.
Margery answered on the first ring.
“Thank God!” she said when she heard my voice. “Don’t you ever check the messages at that damn hotel?”
She was flustered, and that in itself told me a lot. Margery does not fluster easily.
Part of the problem, it developed, was because of early news reports that I had been shot to death. The good people of Best Licks—Preacher’s faithful congregation, bless ’em all—had begun packing and arming with a general view to burning the city of Las Vegas to the ground. The plan had been abandoned—with some reluctance, she said—when a corrected report put me back in the land of the living, and I filed the information for future consideration. It’s nice to be liked. But I made a mental note to try to die in some nice neutral manner that would not seem to call for reprisal. My friends might not really have been able to wipe Las Vegas entirely off the face of southern Nevada. But considering some of their histories, I decided they could have dented things up quite a bit.
The narrowly averted massacre was not, however, the principal reason for Margery’s emotional upset.
“Some of the alarms went off,” she said. “Someone’s getting curious about us...and you.”
That made more sense.
The late Nicholas Dandolas, better known as Nick the Greek, was a man acquainted with the whole geography of gaming; one who had made all the stops from top to bottom and back again and then taken time to formulate a philosophy based upon the information so dearly bought.
He said that “fame, for a gambler, is usually followed by poverty. Or prison. Or death.”
It was a dictum that I had always taken seriously, and the alarms Margery was talking about were a part of the distant-early-warning system we had set up in places where information seekers would be sure to intrude—beer-can-on-the-barbed wire alarms passed on to her by people who would, for one reason or another, let us know when anyone started asking questions about me or the town or the other people who live there.
We value our privacy.
“We’ve had alarms go off before,” I said.
“Not like this. I got seven calls in one day—from people in Washington, Chicago, New York, Topeka, Houston, Sewanee, and, believe it or not, Ho Chi Minh City.”
I believed it. But I didn’t like it at all.
“Any of them know who the questions were coming from?”
“No. But two of them said it didn’t seem to be an individual. More like an organization. A group.”
“Official?”
“No way, José. But one of them used a kind of funny phrase.”
“Funny?”
“Funny odd. Not ha-ha. The one who called from Topeka didn’t seem in a very good mood. Kept growling about something called the Mormon Mafia. Mean anything to you?”
I told her it didn’t, but I was lying and I spent the time it took me to get back to my floor trying to fit the words into the rest of the picture.
Here was the fifty-third card in the deck.
Margery might not have heard of the Mormon Mafia. She almost never gets to Las Vegas. But I knew that it referred to the squeaky-clean-cut corps of Utah-bred musclemen surrounding Francis Carrington Shaw.
Like another billionaire recluse before him, Shaw was said to have a horror of germs and infection equaled only by his aversion to personal publicity. His bodyguard was, therefore, composed of nonsmoking, nondrinking youngsters recruited almost from the very steps of the temple at Salt Lake City and highly paid for a kind of straight-arrow loyalty and competence perhaps available from no other source.
They even had a kind of reserve corps of ex-bodyguards who had graduated to various security and investigative jobs in the Shaw empire, all of whom could be counted upon for immediate and totally reliable service.
Offhand, I couldn’t think of a single reason why he might have told one of his minions to compile a dossier on me and mine. But someone was certainly putting one together—in a hurry, too; seven calls from widely separated points in a single day couldn’t be read any other way—and Shaw, or someone working for him, was the only nonofficial possibility.
I was at my own door and the key was in the lock.
But I hesitated.
Just a day earlier, I would have entered the room without a qualm. Las Vegas has fewer hotel room holdups than most places. Even first-offense stickup men always seem to get badly hurt resisting arrest, and those who have the ill fortune to be identified as habituals are not infrequently shot to death by officers who explain that despite all warnings the suspect made a sudden movement as though attempting to draw a weapon.
On such rumors are low crime-rate statistics founded.
Events of the past few hours, however, had made me superstitious, and I let the door swing back all the way to the wall before sticking my nose through it and stopped on the other side of the threshold while I listened to the room with a kind of concentration I had learned with great difficulty from a man who had lost both his eyes instead of only one.
No.
Not this time.
The room was empty. I closed the door behind me, feeling childish...and changed my mind again in an instant when visual scanning of the premises stopped at the table arranged with two chairs beside the window.
I had arrived the day before to find it adorned by a bowl containing fruit tastefully arranged around a bottle of Tattinger blanc—a champagne I have been known to consume without protest—and it had still been there when I left to join Goines and the others in the tower suite.
Now it had been moved.
The bowl and the fruit were perched on a sideboard. And the bottle stood alone in the middle of the table, acting as a kind of paperweight for an envelope that didn’t seem to be addressed to anyone.
Neither was the note inside. But it was intended for me.
“The ticket is for the hotel safe,” it said. “You had $87,540 when the game stopped, and I talked the police out of holding it as evidence.
“Ice this champagne.
“And give me a chance to drink some of it when you wake up.”
The note was signed with a large and flourishing A, and I glanced briefly at the safe receipt before putting it and the note back in the envelope and carrying it, along with the bottle, to the pint-sized refrigerator located under the wet bar, where I stored the bottle at the bottom and the envelope at the top, under an ice tray.
Not an ingenious hiding place.
But proof against amateurs, and I found myself grinning a little as I closed the thermal door on the two items, wondering just what kind of leverage Apodaca had used to pry that money loose from the law. Whatever it was, I owed him. Until now, I had resigned myself to losing the loot that had brought me to town in the first place.
His suggestion of a meeting in the near future—with or without bubbly French wine—sounded like a good one, too.
But for the moment, I was still at the end of a day and standing in a hotel room that had already been entered at least once without my knowledge or permission, and I approached the closet with a wariness born more of habit than any real apprehension.
It was empty, but I got a minor shock when I opened the door. A full-length mirror fastened inside flashed back the image of a rather formal scarecrow.
Skinny, this one, and looking as though he had spent the past few hours rolling around in an alley.
I regarded him without sympathy.
The black three-piece suits I favor—coat cut a bit long and old-fashioned, vest tailored to accommodate certain items of personal security, color available nowadays only by maximum exercise of persuasion—are a necessary part of th
e professional poker image, like Slim Preston’s silver-mounted cowboy boots or Treetop Jack’s high-crowned hat and beard. But they serve other purposes as well.
The material is selected to resist the wrinkling and conceal the stains that might otherwise act as tattletales to my mental or emotional condition; the uniformity makes it possible for me to change clothes without having seemed to do so. And the fact that nobody expects to see me wearing anything else has, on occasion, enabled me to move about in effective disguise simply by switching to chinos and a T-shirt.
This time, however, the costume had failed in function.
And in tensile strength. Maxey might, I thought, have warned an old buddy that a seam in his coat collar was strained and that the flap over his left coat pocket was dangling by a thread.
All that could be repaired.
But the shirt was a total write-off. The top button was semi-detached, two other buttons were missing, and one of the cuffs had suffered some sort of mishap that had left its edge ripped, raveled, and dirty. The string tie was still knotted, but strenuous activity had twisted it to one side and frayed one of the ends beyond repair.
The suit went on a hanger, marked and noted and left to hand in for the hotel tailor shop. Shirt and tie went into the wastebasket.
And the body that had worn them went into the shower.
First cold.
Then hot.
I emerged relaxed and ready for a good day’s sleep.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
David knew the truth, and said it in his psalm: “He passed away, and, lo, he was not.” And yet the knowledge did not deter him for an instant...
FIFTEEN
But the eyes wouldn’t close.
And the mind wouldn’t stop.
I could have forced the issue, of course, left the transition in the care of a mantra that would take me to that upland alp where the sun shines on the upper side of passing clouds and blades of grass growing beneath the hand are the fingers of the Enlightened One, clasping earth and eternity in that unity which is the essence of all joy.
Aces and Eights Page 14
