Lucky at Cards hcc-28 Read online

  I crossed Washington, waited for a light, crossed Plum. I stepped into the lunch counter and sat down on a plastic-covered stool and leaned on the Formica counter. I asked for black coffee and a ham sandwich. The coffee steamed in front of me about the same time Murray appeared.

  No jailbird he. He was wearing a suit some expensive tailor had made. There was a fresh white carnation in the buttonhole. His tie had the Countess Mara crest, his shoes had a mirror shine, and the smile on his face would have done justice to an upstate politician. Confident eyes, a firm stride, a quick and strong handshake.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said to me. “Just coffee, and black,” he told the counterman. He eased himself on to the stool next to me, took a cigar from his jacket pocket, cut the tip, put it in his mouth and lit it. He blew out a cloud of smoke. We both sat there. He watched the smoke and I tried to guess what this was all about.

  He said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you, Bill. But I’m worried.”

  “About what?”

  “About Joyce. Have you seen her at all?”

  Easy now. “Once or twice, since—”

  “Since I was arrested?” I nodded. “Then you probably know what I’m getting at,” Murray said. “How did she seem then?”

  Anxious to be laid, I thought. And worried that you, Murray, might wiggle off the hook.

  “She seemed all right,” I said. His eyes were studying my face. “A little—well, worried, of course. But she didn’t believe you were guilty and she was sure everything would work itself out.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.” He chewed on the cigar, puffed on it, blew out another cloud of smoke. We were riding two levels, I thought suddenly. There was something underneath everything he said, something I could only half hear. “She didn’t know I was guilty,” he said softly. “That’s it right there, in a nutshell. Now she knows.”

  I didn’t have anything to say.

  “She’s in a bad way, Bill. Maybe she’s worrying about what’s going to happen to me. Maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe she can’t accept the fact I killed Milani. Whatever it is, it’s changed her. And I don’t like it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She’s tense and nervous and depressed. The tension and the nervousness—that’s understandable, that’s not so dangerous. But the depression bothers me. I’m afraid of it.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Afraid. Afraid she might—might do something rash.”

  The counterman brought Murray’s coffee and my ham sandwich. I took a bite and sipped at my coffee. I put the sandwich down, turned, looked at him.

  “I’ve only been out of jail a few hours,” he said. “Maybe things will change. I’ve tried to perk her up, tried to reassure her that there’s nothing to worry about, that Nester figures we have a good chance to get clear on temporary insanity. If she were just worried about me, I could probably talk her out of the mood she’s in. But I think there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  He took a long sip of coffee. He didn’t look at me when he talked. “Joyce came from a less than ideal background,” he said. “I suppose you know that.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well,” he said. “At any rate, she’s extremely conscious of social position, has been ever since we were married. I’m no psychiatrist, Bill, but I’ve got enough sense to know she feels insecure in the position she’s gained through marriage to me. And now she sees that position as shaky. She thinks we can’t hold up our head in this town any longer. She sees her whole world crumbling around her, and the result is a pretty terrifying depression. I’m afraid of it, to tell you the truth. Afraid of what she might do.”

  I didn’t answer him. Everything had a funny ring to it, an odd feeling. I felt as though our roles had been reversed. I was supposed to be the one on the inside while he was swimming in dark waters. But everything was getting scrambled. I had the uncomfortable feeling he knew things I didn’t know, and that I was way off in a corner somewhere. Depressed? Anxious about her social position? It didn’t sound much like Joyce. Maybe she was putting on an act for his benefit, maybe he just had things ass-backwards. But I couldn’t help getting the impression he had somehow taken the ball away from me.

  “Bill, I shouldn’t have bothered you. I don’t know what you can do—”

  “That’s what I was wondering.”

  “Unless you could talk to her,” he said. “You might have some influence over her.”

  “Me?”

  He nodded. “She seems to think a lot of you. You must have made a good impression on her.”

  “I hardly know her,” I said.

  He let that go right on by. “She has a bottle of sleeping pills,” he said. “Or had. I—I took them out of the medicine chest, spilled them into the toilet and threw the bottle away. That’s how worried I am.”

  “You don’t think—”

  “That she’ll kill herself? I certainly hope not. But I don’t know what to think any more, Bill.”

  We batted it around for ten or fifteen minutes. The conversation ran out of gas and I made up something about another appointment and having to run. I caught the check, he argued, I paid, he left the tip, we left the restaurant. He crossed to his car and I to mine and that was that. I returned to my office long enough to cancel a couple of appointments and retrieve a few things I wanted from my desk. Perry Carver and I tossed some small talk at each other. Back at my place I broke the seal of a fresh bottle of Cutty Sark. Then I sat in a chair and tried to get some thinking done.

  One fact emerged. I was finished with this town and it was finished with me, for all practical purposes. My working for Perry Carver had been a kick at the beginning, more because the job was something new than because of anything else. Now the job wasn’t new any more. And jobbing Murray Rogers had been exciting enough in a sort of scummy way, but that too was finished with now. He had been neatly boxed, and whether or not he got off without a jail sentence, Joyce would have what she wanted. She could divorce him with no trouble at all and could pick up a healthy settlement in the process.

  And my part of the proceeds? Gone and forgotten, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want Murray’s money now and I didn’t want Murray’s wife. I wanted to do what a grifter does when the setting turns sour. I wanted to take off.

  Hell, I could do it. Murray was nailed to his guilty plea, and to Joyce it didn’t much matter if I stuck around or not. A day, two days—time to clean out the bank account and pay off the money due on the Ford and straighten myself out with Perry Carver. And then I could leave. No hits, no runs, no errors—well, maybe a few errors, come to think of it. And a great many men left on base.

  So I’d drive out Main Street in a day or two, and this time I would take that right turn at the Thruway entrance, and pick up the ticket, and drive the four hundred miles to New York. And after two hours making the rounds of a few right places I would make the proper contacts and work the proper connections and get ready to spend the rest of my life doing what I was evidently born to do—plucking pigeons and shearing lambs with false shuffles and crimp cuts and hold-outs and second deals.

  But there was something I had to take care of first, a bridge that had to be burned correctly. I waited until it was about the right time. Then I picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  She answered right away.

  “Barbara,” I said. “This is Bill.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Are you busy tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Dinner? I’ll pick you up around six?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  I put down the phone and wondered just how I would tell her that she wouldn’t be seeing me again.

  15

  Barbara Lambert was such a very damned fine girl. If she had been aggressive or cheap or mercenary or a nymph or anything like that, then there would have been no need to tell her in the first place and telling her would have constituted no major
problem. But she was a very damned fine girl, and I would have no fun telling her we were quits.

  I told her at the end of the dinner. We went to the Evergreen and had rare steaks and baked potatoes, and I told her over coffee. I set my cigarette in the enameled ashtray and put my coffee cup in its saucer and spoke her name.

  “Go ahead,” Barb said.

  “Go ahead?”

  “Go ahead and tell me,” she said.

  She was especially attractive that night. The blond hair gleamed, the blue eyes struck sparks, the knit dress was tight around the soft curves of her body. But her lips were set now and her fingers gripped the cigarette she was smoking almost tightly enough to break it in half.

  I said, “I’m leaving town in a few days.”

  “For how long?”

  “Permanently.”

  She didn’t say anything. She nodded, digesting the information along with dinner.

  “Why, Bill?”

  “Reasons.”

  “Reasons you want to talk about?”

  “Well—”

  “You don’t have to, Bill.”

  This last said softly, quietly, with the head lowered and the sentence trailing off. “Oh, hell,” I said. “It’s no great secret. Things aren’t working out here, that’s all. I’m the old square peg in the round hole, that bit.”

  “I thought you were doing well.”

  “In some ways.”

  She didn’t say anything. I waved for the check and put a bill on the table to cover it.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We left the Evergreen. We drove for a couple of blocks without saying anything.

  Until I said, “I’m not the guy you think I am, Barb.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “No.”

  “Who are you, then?”

  So I shrugged and told her. Not all, of course. Not close to all. But a little, and enough.

  “I’m a sort of a criminal,” I said. “In a way. A con man, a hustler. I deal in high-priced card games. I’m good with my hands. Sometimes I cheat. Most of the time I cheat.”

  She didn’t say anything. She was staring straight ahead. I offered her a cigarette. She didn’t take it.

  “I wound up in this town by mistake,” I went on.

  “Things kept falling in my lap.”

  “Like me?”

  “Like you. Like a batch of friendships. Like the job with Black Sand. All of that. I—I hadn’t planned on any of that. I was going to stay in this place long enough for Sy to fix my teeth and then I was going to leave. I didn’t want to settle down here.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, not entirely dishonestly. “I’m not sure. I guess I thought maybe it could work out, living an honest life, staying in the same place forever.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “No,” I said. “It didn’t.”

  More silence. I drove on this street and that street and paid very little attention to where I was going. She held out one hand for a cigarette. I gave her one and she lit it herself.

  “Where are you going, Bill?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Why don’t you take me with you?”

  “Barb—”

  “I’m good company,” she said. “I can cook and sew and say bright things. I’m fun at parties. And I know when to shut up and get out of the way. Most of the time, at least.”

  I didn’t say anything. Barb smoked her cigarette.

  She said, “Why not?”

  “I can’t.”

  “He travels fastest who travels alone? I won’t try to slow you down or cramp your style. I’m not the reformer type. Remember the game we played? I’ll be the high-priced call girl type, Bill. I’ll live your life.” She turned away and I couldn’t see her eyes. “I remember playing that game, Bill. Only you weren’t playing, and maybe I knew that all along.”

  “Barb.”

  She got rid of her cigarette. “No?”

  “No.”

  “You wouldn’t even have to marry me or anything. See how shameless I am? You could just take me along. I’ll be your private whore, Bill. I’ll be William Maynard’s private whore. That’s quite a little title, isn’t it?”

  I could see her face again. There were tears in the corners of her eyes. The tears weren’t flowing down her cheeks. The tears just stayed there, like pearls, like beads of sweet sweat. She didn’t wipe them away. I wanted to stop the car and kiss them away.

  “Bill, why won’t you take me?”

  “Because you don’t belong. It’s not your life.”

  “What is?”

  “A house. Kids. A good man.”

  “Aren’t you a good man?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Can’t I have a bad man?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you wouldn’t like it,” I said. “Oh, it would be a storybook life for the first little stretch. Then it would turn sour for you. You would get sick of cheap hotel rooms and shabby men and sleeping days and hustling nights. You couldn’t take it.”

  “Because I’m weak?”

  “Because you’re human. Because you can only function in the gray world when a part of you is missing, Barb. The out-and-out crook is different. He’s some kind of a rebel or some kind of a nut or both, and all his lines are clearly drawn. The marginal criminal is in a different boat. He’s a human being with a certain part of his humanity surgically removed. He operates differently, functions differently, reacts to different stimuli.”

  “You talk well for a crook.”

  “I’m a bright crook. Intelligence doesn’t have much to do with it. The smartest man I ever met was a high-rolling crap shooter. He didn’t cheat. He knew every percentage on every bet, knew that all almost intuitively. He could beat casinos, and he murdered any money-craps game going. He doubled up and worked tricky combinations and did all this with the speed of an IBM calculator. And the dumbest man I ever met was a pool hustler. He acted better than the Method Kids, but he didn’t have a brain in his head. It isn’t a matter of brains. It’s something deeper, more basic.”

  “Hearing a different drummer?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And I don’t hear that drummer?”

  “Be damn glad you don’t.”

  “Why? Because I can live a good clean life?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A good clean life,” she said. “And when it’s all over I’ll be just as dead as everyone else.”

  Two tears spilled over, rolled slowly down either cheek. I moved to wipe them away. She twisted away from me, brushed savagely at the tears with the back of her hand.

  “When are you leaving, Bill?”

  “A day or two.”

  “That soon?”

  “Just about.”

  “Oh.” She took a breath. “I think you should take me home now, Bill. Please.”

  I headed the car in that direction. I didn’t say anything. Neither did Barb. I did some thinking, and I suppose she did the same, and nothing seemed to add up the way it would have in the movies. In the movies every sucker gets an even break, which is wrong.

  Runyon had the real story—all of life is six-to-five against.

  So I didn’t say anything and neither did she. At one point I leaned over and turned on the car radio. Some disc jockey was playing Two Different Worlds, proving that there is a God, and that He’s equipped with a deadly sense of humor. The record got halfway through the first chorus before Barb reached over to turn it off.

  Then we were pulling up in front of her house. She switched off the ignition and pulled up the handbrake. She took the keys out of the ignition and handed them to me.

  I looked at her. Calm, now. Cool.

  “Come inside with me,” she said.

  “Barb—”

  “Please,” she said.

  It was soft and warm and wordless. We
walked to the door without touching one another. She opened the door with her key. I kept thinking that I shouldn’t be here, that I had no right. But she was calling the tune. Inside, she closed the door, and in a moment we were in the bedroom, and she closed that door, too, and turned from me and began taking off all of her clothes.

  Nude, she smiled strangely at me. She raised her hands to her breasts, cupped them, felt of their weight. She let her hands trail lingeringly down the front of her body, touching, displaying. “Look what you’re giving up, Bill,” she said very softly. “It’s not all that bad, is it?”

  It wasn’t bad at all. I took a step toward her and she choked back a sob and rushed into my arms. I held her and she put her head against any chest and sobbed aloud. I stroked her back and reached down. She pressed herself against me. I reached over and scooped her up and tumbled on the bed with her.

  When my hands found her and touched her she was wild. Her feet kicked at the bedclothing and her breasts rose and fell with her furious breathing. I couldn’t keep my hands away. I petted her and stroked her until the fire was too much to be borne.

  Then we were together.

  In bed, she tried to pack a lifetime into a handful of moments. She clutched and held and sought and found. Her mouth was honey-sweet, her breasts cushion-soft, her body a rich vein of warm gold. A lot of sorrow faded and was lost, and a lot of distance melted down and evaporated. There was closeness, and give and take, and something that in a pinch could have passed for love.

  Afterward, more silence. She lay motionless on her side with an arm curved under the swell of a breast. Her eyes were closed. She did not move. I bent down and kissed her mouth. I straightened up and tried to think of something to say. Nothing fit. I turned, strode out of the bedroom and out of the house and out of her life.

  I drove off with the car radio blaring. I just wanted noise, and static would have served as well as the music. I was tuned to one of those stations that shouts at you. They’re supposed to be very big with the teenage set. These stations tell you their call letters every two or three minutes, and they hit you with spot news about pedestrians run down on local streets and kittens rescued from trees and other bits of excitement. I half-listened and half-drove and found a whole load of things I didn’t want to think about.