house weren’t going to tip to me. It would be a profitable evening all around.
I put the mirror on the dresser, stuck the deck of cards in a drawer. I went downstairs to the bar and told the bartender to pour some Cutty Sark over some ice cubes. I sat sipping the drink and thought about Chicago and a dislocated thumb and two chipped teeth.
Chicago had been a big mistake all across the board. There are a few ways for a good card mechanic to make a living, and if that’s how you make your living you have to know what those ways are. The friendly game is the easiest way—you play with solidly respectable people like Seymour Daniels and his poker buddies and you can let the deck stand up and salute without anybody tipping to the bit. The average player never looks for the gaff and never sees it when it’s used on him. You don’t even need to be talented—not a player in thirty can recognize a deck of marked cards if you give them to him and tell him to play solitaire with them. You can use readers all night long and nobody sees the light.
I just leveled with one approach. That’s how you do it when you’re on your own hook, freelancing on the poker circuit. Another is worked with a group called a card mob. There’s one mechanic, a helper who crimp-cuts for him, and a few shills who do what they’re supposed to do. Some amateur hookers do the steering for you, bringing the marks to the poker table as a prelude to some genital gymnastics. The marks drop their money and go home and the card mob splits the take.
In Chicago, I had tried the third way. I went into a real game against real gamblers, a table-stakes bit for heavy money. A mistake, of course, but I wanted to pick up a very fast couple of thou because there was a broad I was trying to impress and she impressed easily when you had the dough. She was a bottle-blonde with bedroom eyes and a Hollywood body. It’s easy to lose your sense of balance over something like that. I lost mine. I did everything wrong.
The game had been a steady thing in the back room of an all-night drugstore. You paid five dollars an hour for your chair, and for that you had sandwiches and coffee and immunity from cops and holdup men, the latter two vocations about the same thing in Chicago. I plunged into the game cold without managing to set up a friendship with any of the players, which was a mistake right there. I sat down at ten-thirty, and by two in the morning I was twenty-three hundred dollars to the good.
Look, there’s nothing easier. A fast game has a minimum of thirty hands to an hour and the game I’d been in was faster than that. The average pot held sixty or seventy bucks. The big ones held a few hundred. You don’t have to win every hand to take a game for a bundle. You just have to win a little more than your share. I made sure I won enough, and I made sure I didn’t always win on my deal. I palmed cards, holding out an ace or a pair until they would come in handy. I picked up the cards before my deal to leave a couple of kings sitting sixth and twelfth from the top and I made sure the shuffle didn’t change the arrangement. Then a crimped card let the man to my right cut the cards right back to where I wanted them and I had kings wired to play with.
Things like that.
The hell. At two in the morning a little man with hollow eyes had seen me dealing seconds. “A goddamn number two man,” he yelled. “A stinking mechanic!”
They hadn’t even asked for an explanation. They took back their twenty-three hundred plus the five hundred I started with. They hauled me out behind the store and propped me up against the wall. One of them put on a pair of black leather gloves. He worked me over, putting most of his punches into my gut. The one that broke my teeth was a mistake—I slipped and fell into it, and the guy belted me in the mouth by accident. The thumb was supposed to break but only dislocated. They dragged me out to the street and gave a shove and I wound up in the gutter.
“Card mechanics die young around here,” the hollow-eyed little man had said. “Maybe you shouldn’t stay in Chicago too long.”
And I hadn’t stayed long at all. I returned to my hotel and picked up the couple of hundred bucks I’d left there in reserve. I washed up and knocked myself out with cheap liquor. The next afternoon I woke up with a hangover, dressed, packed a suitcase, skipped my bill and got the hell out of Chicago. I didn’t even take time to say goodbye to my bottle-blonde—I just hopped on the first train out and left it when it hit this burg.
And for a week I didn’t do anything but sleep late and drink too much and have my teeth fixed. I had the same dream every night, and each time I woke up sweating just as the men in my dream caught me cheating and stuck a gun in my face and squeezed the trigger. Each night I woke up and touched myself to make sure I was alive.
During the first few days I tried dealing now and then, trying to figure out what had gone wrong for me. The thumb didn’t work at all. I hold a deck of cards in my left hand when I deal, and the left thumb is important. It has to lift the top card for peeks, and the thumb has to have just the right touch in slipping the top card out and drawing it back for second dealing. My left thumb couldn’t do a thing. I gave up and got my teeth fixed and drank and dreamed bad dreams and waited it out.
The thumb was fine now. I was good enough so that Daniels and his friends wouldn’t spot the cheating even if they were looking for it, and they wouldn’t be looking for it. I finished my drink and ordered another, trying to figure out just how much the game would be worth to me. The average pot in the buck-limit game will hold eight or nine dollars, of which the winner puts in about two-fifty or three. That’s in a five-card game; in seven-card stud the average pot runs closer to twelve, with four or five of the total coming from the winner. So you can figure the winner’s profit on a hand at around six or seven dollars. If you pick up three pots more than average per hour, you’ll take around a hundred dollars out of a five-hour game.
Even without giving myself the best of it, I figured to be a winner in Daniels’ game. I had played the game more and I knew more about it than the rest of them. But I couldn’t afford to win on talent alone.
Well, change that. On talent, yes. On legit talent, no. With a little cheating the game figured to be worth two or three hundred dollars, and I figured I could win that much without their becoming suspicious.
I signed a check for my drinks and put a buck on the bar for the bartender. I caught a movie, then grabbed a meal. After dinner I took a hack to the drugstore and waited for Dentist Daniels to come to me.
Like a lamb to slaughter.
2
The big gray Olds the dentist drove was so new he hadn’t got around to stripping the plastic film off the rear seats. The game was about half a mile from the drugstore he picked me up at and he chattered for the full distance, giving me a quick briefing on the game and the players. I didn’t figure to need it but I let the information soak in for future reference.
There were two doctors, an insurance man, a CPA, Murray Rogers and Sy Daniels and me. Rogers and the accountant—a guy named Ed Hart—were the strong players, according to Daniels. The insurance man played a good game but gave his hands away, tightening up when he held good stuff and relaxing on a bluff. One of the doctors—either the internist or the eye man, it was hard to keep them straight—played too many hands and chased straights and flushes all night long.
I asked Daniels about his own game.
“About average,” he said. “I win sometimes and I lose other times. Anything else you want to know?”
“Nothing I can think of.” I laughed. “It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference, Sy. I’ll forget everything you told me the minute I sit down at the table. That’s my trouble—I get too much kick out of the game to concentrate on it.”
“Well, it’s no fun if you have to work too hard at it.”
“That’s it,” I said. “When my luck runs good I win money. When it turns sour I lose. It’s more a question of luck than anything else.” And luck has about as much to do with poker as skill has with a crap game.
Daniels took a left turn, letting the power steering do all the work. He offered me a cigarette and I shook my head and lighted one of my own. Then he pulled the Olds over to the curb, leaned on the power brakes, parked the car. We walked a few doors down the street to an all-brick ranch set on a big lot. The grass had a fresh crew cut and the hedges were planted in toy evergreens. The doorbell played
“You boys are late,” he rumbled. “Let’s get rolling, team.”
