“You’re in luck. One of our regulars can’t make it.”
Two hours into the game, I was ahead about three hundred dollars. After three hours I was ahead by almost eleven hundred dollars. It wasn’t that I was a particularly good player. They, including Corkle, were all incredibly bad, but I was learning that in a five-handed game, the odds of one of the bad players getting lucky was fairly high. Besides, I had to remember that I wasn’t there to win, just to keep the players busy.
From time to time, when they were out of a hand, the others at the table either ambled to the snack table in the corner for a plate of nuts and a beer or to the toilet just off the room toward the front door.
I didn’t meet the first raise on the next hand and moved toward the small restroom. It was a minute or two after one. Law Wainwright was sitting in a hotel room at Disney World with one hundred thousand dollars or a pistol with a silencer in his lap. I didn’t care which.
I looked back. The players were bantering, betting, acting like their favorite television poker pros. I moved past the restroom, turned a corner and went to the hall beyond to the front. I opened it quietly. Ames, flashlight in hand, stepped in. I closed the door and pointed to a door across the hallway. He nodded to show that he understood and showed me the Perfect Pocket Pager, one of the gifts Corkle had given us. I had an identical one in my pocket. Both Ames’s and my pager were set on vibrate. Each pager had originally been offered not for $29.95 or even $19.95, but for $9.95 with free shipping if you ordered now, but the “now” had been a dozen years ago and, until we had tested them, we didn’t know that they would work.
On the way back to the poker table, I reached in and flushed the toilet. The same hand was still being played, but only Corkle, who never sat out a hand, was still in it against Waysock from out of town. The pot, a small mountain of crisp green, looked big.
Corkle won the hand with a pair of fours. Both men had been bluffing.
I was worried about Ames. He wasn’t carrying a gun. I didn’t want a shoot-out and Ames was not the kind of man to give up without a fight. Ames and I were partners now. I was, I guess, senior partner. I know he felt responsible for me and to me. I felt the same.
Ames was going through Corkle’s office in search of the evidence Corkle had mentioned-evidence that might tell us who had killed Blue Berrigan and Philip Horvecki. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it was just another invention proceeding from Corkle’s heat-oppressed brain.
I was having trouble concentrating on the game.
“Two hundred more,” Keith the Kid said.
He hadn’t been doing badly. At least not in the game. He was a little over even. He winced in periodic pain or regret and gulped down diet ginger ale.
We were down to three players in the hand. I saw the bet and, for one of the few times during the game, Corkle folded. When the next cards were dealt to Keith and me by Kaufmann, Corkle got up and headed for the restroom. I watched him walk past it. I pressed the durable and easy-to-clean replaceable white glow-in-the-dark button on the pager in my pocket.
“Your bet, Lewie,” said Kaufmann.
“What’s the bet?” I asked.
“Three hundred,” said Kaufmann. “Keep your eyes on the prize.”
Period Waysock from Out of Town had waddled to the snack table.
I was holding two fours down and a third four showing on the table with one card to go, a set of three in a five-card-nothing wild game. The Kid could have had three sevens, eights, or jacks or just a pair of each. He wasn’t betting like a player with a set. I reluctantly folded, got up from the table and hurried after Corkle.
I caught up with Corkle in the foyer where he was pacing and talking on a cordless phone in front of the front door.
“No, D. Elliot Corkle is not sorry that he woke you. There are more important things than sleep. I did not make my money by sleeping. I made it by staying awake. You can sleep later.”
He looked around at the three closed doors and the elevator and kept pacing as he listened.
“Not everyone who goes to jail gets raped,” he said. “D. Elliot Corkle will put up the bail in the morning. Watch him all the time. Do not let him run away… All right. Let me know.”
Corkle pushed a button on his phone and I ducked into the bathroom and closed the door. I heard him walk past, come out, pushed the button on the pager twice and watched while Ames stepped out of Corkle’s office. He headed for the front door holding up an eight-by-eleven brown envelope for me to see. Then he went through the front door and closed it as I turned to return to the game.
Keith the Kid was standing across the foyer looking at me. He didn’t say anything, but he did give me a look of slight perplexity.
“Stretching my legs,” I said. “Bad knee.”
“What’d you have?” he asked. “That last hand.”
“Queen high,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not the way you bet.”
“I figured from the way you were betting that you had a set. The odds were against me.”
“You gave me the hand,” he said. “I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I didn’t.”
He touched his cheek nervously.
“I thought I could make back some of the money I lost here last time,” he said. “My father was a regular in this stupid game. He’s not well enough to play again. Heart. I took his place. I don’t want to lose, but I don’t want any gifts either. Besides the ones Corkle gives out in boxes as we leave.”
“Kaufmann won’t play a hand unless he’s holding an initial pair,” I said. “Period bluffs half the time, no pattern. Corkle never folds unless he’s beaten on the table.”
“And me?”
“You shouldn’t be playing poker.”
“You?”
“I don’t like to gamble,” I said.
“Then…”
“Hey, you two,” Corkle called. “Clock is moving and a quorum and your money are needed.”
I moved past Keith and took my place at the table. Keith came behind me and sat.
“Question,” Period Waysock From Out of Town said. “You wearing that Cubs cap for luck or because you’re going bald.”
“Yes, in that order,” I said.
“Let’s play some poker,” Corkle said, and we did.
At two in the morning, the last hand was played, the cash was pocketed and the lies about winning and losing were told. I estimated that Ames and I had come out about five hundred dollars ahead.
On the way out, Corkle handed each of us a small box about the length of a pen.
“See Forever Pocket Telescope with built-in sky map,” he said. “Specially designed lenses. You can clearly see the mountains of the moon or the party your neighbors are having a mile away, providing trees or buildings aren’t in the way.”
We thanked him. I was the last one at the door. Corkle stopped me with a hand on my arm and said in a low voice, “D. Elliot Corkle knows what you did here.”
I didn’t answer.
“You did some losing on purpose,” he said. “You’re a good player. You’re setting us up for next time.”
I didn’t tell him that I was sure I had come out ahead and not behind.
“Well,” he went on. “I don’t think that opportunity will be afforded to you. You’re a decent enough guy, but not a good fit here.”
I agreed with him.
“One more thing,” he said. “My daughter has bailed out Ronnie Gerall.”
He looked for a reaction from me. I gave him none.
“She stands to lose a quarter of a million if he skips,” said Corkle. “I’ll be grateful with a cash bonus of four thousand dollars if he doesn’t skip.”
He didn’t tell me why Alana Legerman would bail Ronnie out, but I could see from his face that we were both thinking the same thing.
