Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  That night Crystal and Earle Grundy played high-stakes nine ball. Most of the regulars recognized Earle when he came in and sat down on a stool, ostensibly to watch Crystal and me play. Earle was hard to miss. He was a black man, very tall and slim. His graying hair was shoulder length and scraggly, and he always played with a pair of reading glasses perched on his crown. Crystal pretended not to see him. He went along with the pretense. I don’t always understand these ritual preliminaries to gambling sessions, often as elaborate as aboriginal rain dances. Crystal beat me and immediately unscrewed her cue. I followed her lead.

  “Oh, hello, Earle,” she said.

  “Hi, Crystal.” His voice seemed heavy with some personal sadness. “Looks like you’re in stroke.”

  “It comes and goes. Earle, this is my friend Artie Deemer.”

  We shook hands cordially, but he didn’t smile. He and Crystal were doing business.

  “Ready to go, Crystal?”

  “You’re too good for me, Earle.”

  “I’m way past my prime.” He was no older than me.

  I returned the tray of balls to Davey at the desk and paid the table time. When I returned, Crystal and Earle were sitting on adjacent stools, but they weren’t speaking. The regulars were watching, waiting for serious action to enrich the routine of their lives. For once they were silent.

  “One-pocket, Crystal?” Earle Grundy was one of the best one-pocket players in the country.

  “I don’t play that game, Earle.”

  Feedback tore through the room, and Davey said over the PA: “Phone call for, Thumper. Thumper, you gotta call.”

  “Well,” said Earle languidly, “I guess I’ll go say hello to Davey. I haven’t seen him in years…Unless you want to play some other game. Like nine ball.”

  “You mean a friendly game?”

  “Sure, just a friendly game.”

  “How friendly?”

  “A hundred a set?”

  Crystal didn’t say yes, and she didn’t say no. “I can’t play you head up,” she said finally.

  The regulars were edging closer to hear.

  “What do you need?” Earle wanted to know.

  “The six.”

  “The six? Naw. I’ll go say hello to Davey.” But he didn’t move.

  “Well, we have to leave, anyway. We’re late already, aren’t we, Artie?”

  I pretended to look at my watch. “Almost,” I said.

  “Maybe some other time,” said Earle.

  “Yeah.”

  “Better not wait too long. I won’t have any eyes too much longer. Teeth, neither. So I’ll give you the seven tonight.”

  “I’ll take the seven and the break.”

  “Naw, your break’s too good.” Crystal was known to have a savage break. “I’ll give you the seven, and winner breaks.”

  “Then I’ll need the seven wild.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “That’s okay, we have to go, anyway.”

  “The seven and the break. But I must be feeling generous. I don’t usually.”

  “Hundred a set?”

  “Want to make it an even two hundred, since you got the break?”

  Crystal nodded. The preliminaries had ended. Let the games begin.

  While Earle warmed up—by pounding in cross-side banks, never missing a one, then doing the same thing long-rail—the regulars descended on me to know the arrangements and the stakes. I told them. Spanish Jackie started making odds, waving bills folded between his fingers. The regulars placed their wagers, and Crystal pretended not to notice.

  “Look at that guy bank,” commented Outta-Town Brown.

  “All black guys can bank,” said Ted Bundy. “They’re born with banking in their bones.”

  Feedback: “Phone call for Ernie’s wife. Ernie’s wife, you gotta call.”

  A hush fell around the table. Crystal crushed the balls. Two dropped. She stood staring at the rest. She had a clear shot at the one ball, and the nine had stopped near the corner pocket. The nine was makable off the one ball, but it was a dangerous shot, what good players call low percentage. Each nine-ball game presents a problem, and there is a crux, a one-shot turning point, to each. Sometimes the crux comes immediately, sometimes not until near the end. We were at the crux right now.

  Play the one-nine combination or try for the run out? If she elected to run the balls, she’d have no trouble until she got to the six, which lay frozen against the eight on the foot rail. She’d have to figure out a way to break that cluster. She decided to run them. She leaned down to shoot the one, an easy cut in the side. She missed.

  The crowd gasped. You could tell how the side betting had broken down. Those that had bet against her smiled. The others glowered. Expressionlessly, she sat down. She’d have to forget it, not let the early mistake defeat her. Earle ran the game out. They were playing what in the parlance is called a race to six games for the two hundred dollars.

  Crystal broke, but nothing dropped. The table was open. Earle never got out of line. He left himself a straight, short shot on the nine. Crystal didn’t even make him shoot it in. It was a foregone conclusion. She put her stick on the table between the cue ball and the nine, the sign of concession. The sweaters who had bet on Crystal fell silent and morose. Crystal broke, and again nothing fell. She never got another shot in game three.

  She knew she was in big trouble, but nothing showed on her face. They seesawed back and forth in the next game. One safety was more devious than the next. Then Crystal made a mistake. Earle had a shot. That’s all he needed. He was out. What was her problem? Was her head not on the match? Was the crowd making her nervous, or was Earle just too good for her?

  I realized that Bruce was standing beside me.

  “Hey, counselor,” he said.

  “Hey, Bruce.”

  “What’s the action here?”

  “Race to six for two hundred.”

  “What’d she get from him?”

  “The seven ball and the break.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Suicide.” He went looking for Spanish Jackie. He didn’t have to go far, not even out of earshot.

  “No credit, no credit,” said Spanish Jackie when he saw Bruce coming.

  “Did I mention credit? Did you hear me say credit? Just tell me the line.”

  “Three to one on Earle, but you can’t bet this set. Too late this set.”

  “Obviously, Jackie. Here’s a hundred on Earle for the next set. No, make it a deuce.”

  Bruce counted two bills from a fat roll. Naturally, I figured he had all ones stuck beneath the thin skin of hundreds, a so-called Minnesota roll. But no. There were hundreds at the heart of the roll. He had several thousand dollars there. Bruce never had real money. Where’d Bruce get real money?

  Spanish Jackie was asking himself the same question. He looked suspiciously at the bills, crinkled them, looked at them again, snapped them beside his ear. He even sniff ed them before he accepted Bruce’s bet.

  “Could I have a word with you, Bruce?” I asked when he stood beside me again.

  “You don’t even need to say it, Arthur.” He peeled off three more hundreds and stuck them in my shirt pocket. “Does that bring me current? Here, have another.” He slid it into the pocket.

  “Looks like you came into some money.”

  “Playing cards.”

  “I see.”

  Crystal was in dreadful shape. With only three balls left in game five, Earle had dumped her on the rail behind two balls. The one she needed to hit, the seven, was frozen on the opposite rail. She made a good try, going three rails, but she failed to hit the seven, a foul. Earle had cue ball in hand. Crystal didn’t even make him shoot. She racked the balls. Earle’s lead was insurmountable.

  “Ever heard of Tiny Archibald, Bruce?”

  Bruce blinked, but he didn’t look at me. “The basketball player?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “W
hy do you ask?”

  “Just wondered.”

  “Tiny Archibald? Hmm. No, doesn’t ring any bells. Seems like I’d remember a guy named Tiny Archibald. Why do you ask?”

  “How about Chet Bream?”

  “Chet Bream?”

  “Yeah, a journalist. He’s been doing a story on the CIA and the banking business. I figured you’d know him.”

  “Why?”

  “He said he spoke to you about Trammell’s death, you being the only witness.”

  Bruce shot a glance at me. You could see the wheels turning. “Would you like to step away from this gambling element?”

  “Sure, Bruce.” I saw Crystal pay Earle two hundred dollars. They were getting set to go again. Bruce and I walked over to the drinking fountain.

  “This Bream, was he a twitchy fellow, did a lot of ChapStick?”

  “Yeah, that sounds like the fellow.” I told Bruce first about the cop’s visit, then about Chet Bream’s. I told him that both wanted to talk to him about Trammell’s death, that both suspected Bruce had lied about the circumstances surrounding it. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

  “Trammell drowned, Artie. No shit. I didn’t actually see him go down for the third time, but he wasn’t on the boat and he wasn’t swimming around it. He drowned.”

  “Okay. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, but I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Okay, pal, thanks a lot.”

  “So where’d you get the money? You didn’t get the money for bullshitting the cops about Trammell’s death, did you?”

  “I told you. I got the money playing gin with a fish at the Salmagundi Club. Nobody believes me. Why doesn’t anybody believe me?”

  “Because you’re a liar.”

  “Listen, guy, you got to loosen up. Smoke some of this when the going gets tough.”

  “Okay, see you around.” I had a drink of water, then went back to the game.

  “What’s the score?” I asked Thumper.

  “Two to nothing in the second set. Crystal’s down. Say, Artie, you wouldn’t be interested in a Wagner Power Painter, would you?”

  “When I came in here tonight, I hoped desperately someone would offer me a good deal on a Wagner Power Painter.”

  Bruce came out of the rest room. Head down, he strode to the front door, then out into the night. My heart sank. That was a very bad sign. If Bruce won the bet, Spanish Jackie would still pay off; it wasn’t that. But betting on pool isn’t like betting on a horse at OTB. You stay to watch. That’s part of the point. Bruce wasn’t staying. He was walking out on a two-hundred-dollar bet.

  Earle sank the nine in a long combination off the five. Devastating. Three to zero…Maybe Bruce just went out for coffee…They had excellent coffee right here. I kept looking over my shoulder at the door. He never returned.

  The rest of the set lasted a mere forty minutes. Crystal never had a chance. On the rare occasions she got an opening, she failed to capitalize on it. She unscrewed her cue, paid Earle another two hundred dollars, and shook his hand. I let her sit by herself on a bench in the corner for a while, then I joined her.

  “I was terrible,” she muttered, staring out. “I was terrible in Philadelphia, and I was terrible here.”

  “Do you want to play him again?” I said after a while.

  “I don’t have any more money. I just dropped four hundred bucks.”

  “I do.”

  “Artie, I want you as a lover, not as a stake horse.”

  “I know. We don’t need to make a habit of it. But if you think you can beat him…”

  “You think I can?”

  “He’s tough. But the spot is fair. You never really recovered from missing that one ball in the first game. Maybe starting from scratch—but I get fifty percent if you win, plus I get to perform certain twisted sexual acts on your person.”

  “That’s a hard offer to pass up.”

  I slid two of Bruce’s hundreds out of my pocket and put them on her knee. She took a deep breath for courage and went after Earle Grundy.

  It took all night, literally. The sun was well up when they finally quit. Crystal won that first set and paid me off right away. Then she won the next set. She was playing flawless, intelligent pool. She safetied Earle to death in those sets. She dumped him into one untenable position after another. It blew his patience. But no one ever said Earle Grundy lacked heart. He came back to win the next two. Side betting was very heavy. There must have been fifty people sweating the match. Even the bangers got in on the action. About four a.m. a quartet in evening clothes wandered in. Twenty minutes later they were calling for Spanish Jackie. It was an orgy of side wagering.

  Most of the people in New York were shouldering their way to work when Earle called it quits by unscrewing his cue. His eyes were red and sunken. So were Crystal’s, but the big difference in their eyes was that hers had won. Some players contend that in pool nothing else matters.

  Earle paid off, congratulated her like a gentleman, and walked out the door, alone, into the raw daylight. By then the sweaters had diminished in number, but not by much. Some had taken a cold bath. The odds at one point went to four to one against Crystal. The losers sat silently, bleary-eyed, smoking cigarettes.

  I could tell Crystal’s adrenaline was still pumping even before she said, “I’ll take you back to your place, where I’ll let you perform—what was it?—twisted sexual acts on my person.”

  I was walking on my ankles by then. I didn’t think I could come up with anything twisted, except my spine.

  Driving up Amsterdam, she said, “I’ll never be really good at this game, because I always feel sorry for the person I beat.” We stopped at the light at Seventy-second Street. “And poor Earle didn’t have anybody to go home with.”

  TEN

  THE TELEPHONE WOKE me about noon. A woman with a squeaky voice: “This is Lydia Segal. Remember me? With Bruce? From the pool hall?”

  “Sure, Lydia.” I always felt sorry for Lydia, an anorexic woman barely out of her teens who Bruce used to drag into the Upscale Poolroom after a weekend of debauchery. They’d stagger around the table, dribble coffee down their chins. On those rare occasions when she showed up straight, she was an intelligent person with psychological insight and a sense of humor. Now she didn’t sound particularly straight.

  “I was supposed to see him last night. I went over to his place. I saw light coming under the door, but he didn’t answer. I went away. I came back today and there was still the light, but he still didn’t answer.”

  If Bruce had been a normal citizen who pays taxes, I would have suggested that Lydia call the police. “I saw Bruce last night,” I said. “He had a wad of money.”

  “Money?…Bruce?”

  “He said he won it in a card game.”

  “I thought maybe since you live right around the corner, you’d be with me when I open the door. I got a key. I’m scared something happened. Cops have been around.”

  “Cops?”

  “Well, one cop. And other weird people.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Up on Broadway.”

  “I’ll meet you at his place in twenty minutes.”

  “What could I say?” I asked Crystal after I had related Lydia’s call. “I couldn’t just say no…Could I?”

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “No, there’s no need for you—”

  “Yeah, but there might be.”

  Bruce lived in a shitty brownstone on Ninety-eighth Street near Amsterdam Avenue. The usual members of the community were standing around. A wasted old man on a walker sang, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” A group of kids played tackle football in the street. Crystal and I looked around for some kind of trap, but we knew that if there were one, we’d never see it. That caused the commonplace to assume an air of menace. I hate it when the commonplace assumes an air of menace.

  Lydia was sitting on the stoop. Her knees looked l
ike oranges in bags too narrow. She stood up when she saw us. Her eyes were black holes. Why was I involved with such people? Why didn’t I move to Scarsdale or Greenwich, play golf and barbecue shrimp with those who hold traditional values and pay income tax?

  “Lydia,” I said, “this is Crystal.”

  “Hi, Crystal. We’ve met.”

  Crystal said she remembered. Crystal was tense and stiff.

  Lydia unlocked the street door and led us down a dark hallway to a T at the end. We went left. Lydia knocked on the second door on our right. “Bruce! Hey, Bruce!”

  “I hate you!” shrieked a woman to someone on an upper floor.

  Bruce didn’t answer. Lydia looked up at me. I motioned for her to try the key. She did, then pushed the door open. We hesitated there in the hallway, wondering what we’d find inside. Wait a minute, I suggested to myself, we didn’t have any real evidence to assume there was something terrible waiting inside, just the fears of a largely unreliable burnout. I led the way inside.

  I had never been to Bruce’s place before, and it was worse than I imagined. The only furniture in the living room was a grimy beanbag chair. I’m not one to fault a person for the absence of furniture, but this was a different matter. Here there was no room for furniture because of all the stolen goods packed into the room. There were about fifteen television sets, most still in unopened boxes. There were stacks of car radios and boom boxes. A little path snaked through the hot stuff to the kitchen. I heard a sound, a sort of muffled mewing, coming from the bedroom.

  “Bruce?”

  “Mmmmff f!”

  I picked my way cautiously around air conditioners, over cameras, moving bicycles from my way. I paused a moment at the bedroom doorway. I glanced back at Crystal and Lydia. Crystal, her mouth agape, peered at the hot stuff. Lydia’s eyes were wide. I peeked around the threshold.

  Bruce was totally naked. He lay on his stomach on the bare mattress with his arms and legs spread out and tied to the corners of the bed frame. Bruce had been whipped with something. Savage red welts, some oozing blood, latticed his back from the tops of his thighs over his buttocks to the tops of his shoulders. He whined and mewed. Then I saw that his mouth was sealed with flesh-colored tape. I felt Crystal and Lydia behind me. Both gasped at once. Lydia began to weep. The bedroom stank of urine.