At the curb outside his office, though, Corner Pocket seemed to have trouble leaving the car.
I waited him out.
“One other thing,” he said.
I thought I knew what it was, and I didn’t want to hear it, but it was his play and would have to be by his rules.
“Found the phony nurse’s uniform,” he said finally. “Funny little pillbox cap and all. It was in the wardrobe room out at Holy Joe’s place.”
He waited to see if I had anything to say. I didn’t.
“What we think,” he said, “is that Sue Harriet Gillespie was the nurse who killed Sam Goines—or rather McDuff, the actor who was pretending to be him—there at the hospital.”
I nodded. “That’s how it looks,” I agreed.
“Yeah...”
He toyed with the door handle and I wanted him to push down on it and get the hell out of there, but he wasn’t done talking yet.
“Autopsy didn’t turn up much,” he went on. “Doc says whoever did McDuff probably used insulin. Leaves no trace, you know? So we figure we’re looking for someone who would know about that stuff. A diabetic, maybe...or a nurse.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of figured it that way, too.”
He sighed and finally managed to open the door. “You’ll tend to it, then?”
“Yes.”
He got out and stood up and closed the door behind him.
“My heart’s in my mouth doing this,” he said, bending down to look back in at me. “The law enforcement in this town is something fierce.”
I tried to think of something to say to that, but there wasn’t anything, and after a moment or two he stood up again and I drove away.
My floor of the VIP garage was deserted again when I pulled into my slot and shut the engine off.
The door that would take me inside the hotel was directly opposite, and my mind was already up on Maxey’s suite. But it came back to where I was before I had locked the car door. Easing back into the seat for a moment, I fished the key out of my pocket and put it back in the ignition and turned the car’s electrical system on, and then pulled the key back out of the slot and got out again and closed the door and locked it.
And wished I were someone else.
Anyone.
Maxey was waiting with smiles and champagne.
I recognized the clothes. They were the ones she had been wearing in the Polaroid picture the colonel had shown me before we started playing poker. But I didn’t say anything about that as she poured champagne into two fluted glasses and handed one to me and proposed the first toast of the day.
“To us, lover,” she said. “And to all the good things of the world.”
I held the glass but didn’t drink.
“Come on, come on!” she said. “It’s celebration time. Ten years late, maybe. But we’ll make up for that.”
My face must have told her she was wrong, and I could feel the chill that touched her center as she read what was there. She froze, with the champagne forgotten in her hand.
“What about Sam?” I said when the silence went on too long.
“What about him?” she said. “He’s dead—or you wouldn’t be here.”
“And Colonel Connor?”
A little hesitation this time.
“Same answer,” she said.
“And Harry...?”
This time the pause was a long one, and the wa scurried up the thermometer from cold to hot and back down to cold again and she took a long, deep breath and put the champagne glass down on the table.
“Harry?” she said.
“Harry,” I said. “You remember Harry—the lover you told me about? The one you found after Sam got too busy. Harry’s dead, too. And we both know how she got that way.”
For a moment, she was going to deny everything and I could see it building up behind her eyes. Those damn violet eyes. But the pronoun I’d used in the last sentence told her it was no use, and her face emptied and she took a long, cold look at reality and accepted it for what it was.
“How long?” she said quietly.
“How long have I known who Harry was? Not long. I should have twigged back at the Gillespie compound, when Sue Harriet told me to call her Harry. The name rang a bell. But the explosion came right afterward, and I didn’t think about it again until this morning.”
She nodded slowly, seeing how it had been, and then gave me her very best shot.
“You could forget it,” she said. “I could make you forget.”
And she could.
It would be easy, because I would be helping, and I could probably even have found a way to straighten things out with Corner Pocket—or at least keep him quiet until we could be somewhere else. Sitting there and looking at her and remembering how it had been for us and how it still was, I wanted her in a way I’d thought was over for me, ended long before we met, and the knowledge came as a shock of recognition. A realization of what I was about to lose, and the certainty that it didn’t have to be that way. That all I had to do to change the future was nod my head. And overlook a couple of murders.
It would be easy.
So easy.
“No,” I said, forcing myself to look directly at her as I said the words. “No, Maxey. I would if I could. God knows I would...
“God.”
The single word said it all, a paragraph passing between old friends and lovers who knew each other far too well to need more.
And then she took a long, deep breath and whatever had been between us—communication, rapport, sharing, whatever it had been—was gone. She stood in silence, face empty of emotion, and there was a wall of frosted steel around the core that I had seen and touched, and the woman in the room with me was someone I had never met before and never would know. I wondered how long she had been impersonating Maxey, how deeply she had buried the original. But it didn’t really matter.
“I have bank accounts in the Caribbean and in Switzerland,” she said. “And Sam’s plane is at the airport, with the crew on half-hour call. By this time tomorrow I could be anywhere on earth.”
True.
“Twenty-four hours,” she said. “One full day. For old times’ sake?”
Not much to ask for.
“All right,” I said. “Twenty-four hours.”
She didn’t thank me, and I didn’t say anything as she moved around the suite—into the bedroom and bath, and finally into the kitchen—picking up various things and stuffing them into the oversized tote she’d been carrying at Holy Joe Gillespie’s compound the day before. It didn’t take much time, and finally she was standing beside the door.
“No luggage?” I said.
She shook her head. “Nothing I’ll need,” she said. “Traveling light from now on.” There was something else, and she started to say it but didn’t, and turned to the door and opened it and stepped out into the hallway.
“Preacher...” she said.
I looked at her and waited.
“I love you,” she said.
Maybe it was true.
“Good-bye, Maxey,” I said.
The moments after the door closed were too long.
She would be going down the corridor to the elevators, and I could be out there in time to stop her and tell her to come back and we could work it out, we could work anything out, because this is not a world of absolutes and people can grow and change and no one can live a life that is totally logical. It’s too cold. And too alone.
I stood up, but instead of going to the door I opened the top drawer of the buffet. The Scheherazade thinks of everything; cards and chips were there in neat array. I took one of the decks with the hotel crest on the back and broke the seal and started back to the table, but it was no use. I couldn’t help going into the mini-kitchen. And opening the freezer door. And looking inside. And finding what I had expected:
Nothing.
Maxey hadn’t packed because she had decided not to leave today. She would send me instead. The dynamite and blasting cap were gone.<
br />
Once I was back at the table, with the balcony door open, my hands went on automatic pilot and took over the work of shuffling the cards and cutting them and shuffling again. Beginning to deal...
My wristwatch was still missing, and the amenities provided by the hotel did not of course include any form of clock. But seconds and minutes counted themselves off in my head regardless of distractions.
The game was five card stud, two–handed. Just me and the presence across the table. Hole cards landed and were covered at once by the first exposed cards.
Both of them aces.
By now the elevator would have arrived and she would be on her way down...
Rote actions, the repetition of familiar patterns even when unproductive, are known as a relatively ineffective way of trying to control compulsive behavior. Alcoholics and cigarette smokers concentrate on crossword puzzles and take part in athletics to fight their addictions. It seldom works. I dealt the second exposed cards: queen of diamonds for the other hand, eight of clubs for me. Possible straight bets.
Across the mezzanine and down the escalator...
The urge to get out of there, to run after Maxey and stop her and tell her to come back, was a fire in the blood. There could still be time. It didn’t have to be this way. We would think of something. But I sat still and moved my hands and gave the other side of the table the jack of spades and myself the eight of hearts. Low pair bets.
Out into the VIP garage now, feeling above the grille and finding the catch and releasing it and raising the hood...
I’d heard the story from Manny Temple years ago: Ignition bombs had been a kind of occupational hazard in his line of work, but a friend of his had figured out a way to cope with them. These devices are usually wired to the induction coil and then grounded, to explode as soon as the car’s ignition system is engaged. No danger in planting a bomb as long as the system is off. But if it’s left on, the dynamite goes off the moment the bomber tries to wire up that second contact. The final card I dealt across the table was a ten. I caught a third eight.
Connecting the wire to the coil...
Maxey’s suite was directly above the VIP garage, and the force of the explosion down below rattled the sliding door to the balcony and the dishes in the kitchen. But my hand was steady. I had already said my good-byes and held the wake, and the funeral had been years ago and I had missed it. I turned my hole card and looked, but it was no surprise because I had been dealing, and I had started with the one I would need to complete a full house.
Two aces. And three eights.
That’s another thing about cheating at poker: If you’re good at it—really good—sometimes you can even cheat yourself.
A BENEDICTION
(CONCLUDED)
Amen.
THIRTY-THREE
Winding up details and touching bases took a while—even poor tame Bill Bowers didn’t buy my story about Maxey getting a bomb intended for me because I’d loaned her the key to my car—but Corner Pocket ran a little high-level interference and finally it was done.
We didn’t talk again.
Nothing to say.
Two days later I was back in Best Licks, showing Margery the $87,540 Happy Apodaca had saved for me from the first game—and finding out that we didn’t need it after all.
“Guy from the IRS phoned,” she said. “Told me to forget it. All a mistake. Computer foul-up or something.”
Megalomaniac or no, Francis Carrington Shaw was a man of his word.
Wonderful.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
But I had to explain. So I did, all of it, starting with Shaw and not forgetting Danny DiMarco or Manny or Terry McDuff or Happy Apodaca or Sam or the colonel or Holy Joe or Hairy or Big Trouble or Little Trouble or the bomb. Or Maxey.
And when I was done Margery just looked at me.
Her mother was Hopi and her father was Mandingo and the beautiful, imperious face that was their legacy to her never tells anyone anything she doesn’t want to tell. In all the time we’ve known each other, I have never been able to read it.
But I didn’t have to.
“You killed her,” she said.
“She killed herself, Margery. Trying to wire an ignition bomb to my car.”
“She loved you.”
“She worked with Goines all the way—until the first time he came off a loser. Killed at least two people, and it didn’t mean a thing. She used her knowledge as a nurse to load the needle Sue Harriet Gillespie used on Terry McDuff, then rigged a bomb in Sue Harriet’s car to make sure her mouth stayed shut. There may have been others...”
“You loved her.”
I didn’t reply to that, because I couldn’t. I didn’t know the answer then and I still don’t and I don’t suppose I ever will. I’d wanted her and needed her and our times together had been good and maybe that was love or maybe it could have been love. Or maybe not.
“Margery...”
But she was already headed for the door.
“Not now, Preacher,” she said, without looking back at me. “Later. Tomorrow, maybe. But I don’t want to talk to you right now.”
She went out and closed the door behind her.
I sat there for a while, wishing she would come back and wondering if she did what I could say and whether things would ever be the same between us again. I depended on her. In more ways than one.
Nariyuki no matsu.
I went into the kitchen and brought out the jug of triple-run blockader the sheriff of our county had delivered the last time he came for a visit, and poured three fingers into a glass and thought about adding an ice cube and sneered at myself and put the jug back and carried the drink out to the balcony.
The sun was gone, and clouds were drifting through the trees of the pass into the valley, their tops white and dreamlike below me.
I took a sip of the blockader. But it tasted like the horse had kidney trouble, so I poured it out over the railing and stood there for a long time with the empty glass in my hand watching the sky and the trees and the clouds below and thinking some of the darkest, coldest, loneliest thoughts that I own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ted Thackrey Jr. was a Korean War vet, an author, and newspaper reporter who, after stints at several newspapers, ended up in 1968 at the Los Angeles Times, where he became known over the next two decades for his colorful news stories, columns, and obituaries. His novel The Preacher was an Edgar Award finalist that led to two sequels, Aces & Eights and King of Diamonds, and the movie Wild Card starring Powers Boothe. He also wrote the nonfiction books The Gambling Secrets of Nick the Greek and The Thief: The Autobiography of Wayne Burke, and ghostwrote more than forty books and several screenplays. Thackrey Jr. died in 2001.
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