Lucky at Cards

After a few more minutes I took our glasses to the bartender and he filled them up again. I brought them back and we drank. She asked me if I’d managed to work up any ideas. I told her that Murray could go insane or skip the country or get himself conned for a fortune.

“We’d go insane before he did,” she said.

“Probably.”

“I was thinking,” she said. “We could kidnap me. I could disappear and you could call him on the phone and tell him to get a hundred grand in small bills and leave it somewhere. He would pay, Bill. And then we could go like the wind.”

“A fake kidnapping?”

“Why not? I would whimper into the phone and say how they were going to rape me and kill me and everything. What’s wrong with it?”

“A lot of things. The money would be marked, it’s always marked in kidnap deals. There are people who buy marked money for something like thirty or forty cents on the dollar, more or less depending how hot it is. And it would be hotter than hell on this deal because when you didn’t turn up they’d figure you were dead. Even if he didn’t go to the cops right away, he’d go to them afterward. With the FBI in the picture we wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“I could go back to him after the payoff. Then I could leave him later.”

“I still don’t like it,” I said. “Too many things can go wrong. With all those variables to play with, one thing’s sure to turn sour and ruin the whole game. Picking up the money is hard enough with a whole mob in the show. It’s tougher than hell to work two-handed.”

“It was an idea.”

“A cute one. But it won’t play.”

She worked on her drink. I stared down at the table and told myself it was time to skip. There was no way to have the girl and the money, and the girl wouldn’t come along unless the money came too. This wasn’t my type of scene. In the morning I could be on my way, headed for New York and a world I knew.

Then I lifted my eyes and threw the thought away. I looked at her and wanted her so bad I could taste the desire rising in my throat. My hotel room, and her hair on my pillow. A muscle worked in my jaw.

“There has to be a way, Bill.”

“I can’t find it.”

Her eyes dropped. “So we can go to hell then. Go to hell, go directly to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“You mean go to jail, don’t you?”

“This is the adult version. Monopoly for hippies.”

The idea was there all at once. Small talk had triggered it, and then the whole scheme was there, fully developed, perfect. Would I have thought of it sooner or later anyway? A good question.

“Bill? What’s the matter?”

“Go to jail,” I said.

“I don’t get it.”

“I do,” I said. “And it’s pretty.”

6

She dropped me at the avenue. I picked up the rental and headed for the hotel, then changed my mind and took a left turn. I drove through the Negro neighborhood and into the old Polish neighborhood, and I sat on a stool in a tavern and drank boilermakers for a few hours. The tavern was painted a bright yellow on the outside, and the interior was done in equally bright red and blue. It was enough to blind you. I drank slowly and steadily, tossed a handful of nickels into an illegal pinball machine, tossed a handful of dimes into a legal bowling machine, and had a sandwich of Polish sausage on black bread.

It was a cool and windless evening. I didn’t want to think about Murray Rogers or Joyce Rogers, and if I had gone back to the hotel I would have thought of little else. The Polish tavern was a handy escape. I bought the first two drinks myself, and then I taught a pair of steelworkers how to play the old match game, and after that they did most of the buying. In the end I was drunk enough to have trouble fitting the key into the car’s ignition, but still sober enough to drive it once I had the key business mastered. I reached the hotel and fell asleep when I touched the bed.

In the morning I showered and shaved and put on a clean suit and a sincere tie. I had breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs. I was a little bit hungover but the food and the coffee took away the bite. I winked at the waitress, left a good tip, and found a phone booth.

It was around ten. Main Street was heavy with traffic and the buses were rolling along and smelling up the air. A batch of teenage girls, lipsticked and jean clad, were oohing over a department store’s window display. I turned into the phone booth, sat down, dropped a dime in the slot and called Murray Rogers at his office.

“Bill Maynard,” I told the girl. I dangled on the line while she told Rogers who was calling, and then he was giving me a large hello.

“I’d like to see you this afternoon,” I said. “If I could.”

“Trouble?”

“No trouble. I still haven’t made that trip to New York. I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d like to hang around here, find a niche for myself and get settled.”

He was enthusiastic, told me he hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d like to see me stay in town. “I’ve got a luncheon appointment,” he said. “It will tie me up from one until about two-thirty. But any time after that is fine.”

“I’ll be up around two-thirty, then.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll see you, Bill.”

The main library was on Panmore Square near the hotel. I felt a little out of place there. The card sharp doesn’t lead a life that keeps him in the literary swim; I knew a blackjack dealer in Vegas who thought Mechanix Illustrated was a card sharp’s manual with photographs, for example. But I made myself at home and took a run through the card catalogue, jotting down a few titles on a yellow slip of paper. I gave the slip to an auburn-haired librarian named Lenore Something-Or-Other, and she handed it to a beady-eyed page, and he brought me half of my requested books a few minutes later and explained that the other half were out somewhere. I carried the books to a table and skimmed through them. I picked up an idea here, a notion there. Ideas and notions with a purpose. Because we had managed to hit on the right way to have our cake and eat it, too, the perfect ploy for moving Murray out of the picture without our letting go of his money. It was simple, really.

We would send him to jail.

At a quarter to two I gave the books back to stack and left. I grabbed a hamburger and coffee and didn’t even try to cheat the cashier. Murray Rogers had an office in the Rand Building, which was as close as the city came to a skyscraper. The building was some twenty-eight stories tall and his office was on the twenty-fourth floor. I rode up in an express elevator and walked in through a frosted-glass door with his name on it. A pair of green leather chairs framed a table piled high with old copies of Fortune and Esquire.

There was a receptionist sitting behind a heavy oak desk. She was neatly starched and crisply antiseptic. I gave her my name and she put it on the intercom. I heard Rogers’ voice tell her to send me in. She pointed me at another frosted-glass door with his name on it and the word Private as subtitle. I stepped inside and he stood up and we shook hands. I passed up a cigar, accepted a drink. I sat down and we smiled earnestly at each other.

“So you like it here,” he said. “I’m glad to hear that, Bill. Have you been looking for work?”

“Not exactly, Murray. I’ve been feeling my way around.”

He nodded. “Sy said something about you—uh, sort of checking out the classifieds. What are you looking for? Plastics?”

It was time to drop the plastic front before somebody realized that I couldn’t tell my acetate from a hole in the ground. “I’m not exactly sold on plastics,” I said. “That was my last job, but I haven’t really spent that much time in the field. And I don’t see any real future in it myself. You need a strong engineering background or some