Crooked Hearts (11 page)

Her laugh sounded shaky. “No, thanks, I’ll take your word for it.” She wanted to move back, away from his disturbing nearness, but the details of the game she had in mind required confidentiality.

Because it was complicated, it took a long time to explain it. When she finished, the awe in his face made her blush—something she never did. “Grace,” he breathed, shaking his head in wonder. “Grace, Grace, Grace.” Before she knew what he meant to do, he slid his arm around her and kissed her on the lips.

It didn’t last long. Just long enough for the truth to sink in that this was what she’d wanted him to do ever since that first night, when they’d stood outside her hotel-room door and he’d pitched that bunkum about her “distinctive bouquet.” His lips were firm, almost hard, but they were warm, too, and they fit next to hers exactly right. The malty taste of beer sweetened the kiss, personalized it somehow. It was just a brief, friendly buss—she didn’t even close her eyes—but when it was over she had to stop herself from following Reuben’s head back to keep the contact.

His dancing eyes made her smile. “Sweetheart,” he murmured, still holding her by the waist, “I think we were made for each other.”

She lifted skeptical eyebrows and didn’t answer. In the back of her mind lurked the disturbing possibility that he might have a point.

No houseman, no shills, no rake—the Evergreen Hotel Saloon had it all. It was the third place they’d tried, searching for a quiet, clean establishment, where the play was modest but not stodgy, and most important, where Reuben wasn’t known.

“You gentlemen need a fifth?” he’d inquired of the quartet at a back table, prosperous-looking types but not high rollers, maybe traveling salesmen, playing a desultory game of euchre and looking as if they’d welcome some fresh action. If professionals played here, he couldn’t see any, but it was still early; the big sharps’ garner started much later and might go on for days.

He took an empty chair with its back to the wall, in case railbirds showed up later, and gave everybody a friendly smile. Grace had made him take off his tie, his vest, his collar, and his gold watch, claiming they made him look too dangerous—“like a big black coyote drooling in a sheepfold.”

“What’s the game?” he asked, “euchre?” They admitted it. He looked bemused but agreeable; a moment later, as he’d hoped, one of them suggested they switch to draw poker.

The setup was simple at the Evergreen. There were no dealers, no house players, no floormen; just friendly games of chance among gentlemen, who bought their chips at the table from an invisible banker. The house provided the chips and the cards, and in return the drinks and cigars cost a little more than they would at a casino. Table stakes was the rule, but it was flexible, and for now there was a ten-dollar limit on first bets and raises.

He was Obman, he told them—a name he liked to use because in Russian it meant trickery and deceit. The tall, skinny, bald-headed fellow to his left was Burgess; next to him was Sharkey, hard and sullen, with thick lips and a thin cigar; then Wyatt, fat and jolly, sporting an old-fashioned Prince Albert coat and striped trousers; and finally red-haired Rusty, freckled and vacant, with an irritating habit of clearing his throat. Burgess and Wyatt were pals; they worked for the same photographic-equipment manufacturing company. Rusty knew them because his cousin’s wife married Wyatt’s brother’s something or other—Reuben stopped listening and didn’t catch it. The wild card was Sharkey; like Reuben, he’d invited himself into the game. Nobody knew him, nobody could vouch for him. He claimed he was staying at the hotel, though, and the bartender was letting him run a tab. Reuben guessed that was some kind of endorsement.

He had a bad moment when a new man, apparently an acquaintance of Rusty’s, wandered over to kibitz and bum cigarettes and—Reuben was mortally afraid—offer to sit in the game. Visions of having to start all over somewhere else filled him with gloom, for a seventh player would completely muck up the carefully arranged cooler hidden in his inside coat pocket. But his luck held; the man’s cronies at another table called him back over, and he drifted away with a wave and a wink in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

About that time, Grace made her entrance. Reuben kept his eyes on his cards, pretending not to see her. Everybody else saw her, though. Conversations halted; dice fell silent; cards lay forgotten. Rusty finally kicked Reuben in the calf to get his attention. “Will you look at that?” he demanded. Wyatt said, “Mmm-mmm-mmm,” as if he’d just bitten into a warm piece of pie. Burgess pretended to fan his face with his cards. Sharkey said something so explicitly vulgar even Reuben felt a jolt of revulsion. His antipathy to Sharkey, whom he’d disliked on sight, intensified, and he was glad. Sometimes he needed an edge, a personal motivation when he was about to shear a sheep. And if everything went right, Sharkey would be sheared the closest, because he was sitting in the sucker seat.

She wasn’t really beautiful. That too came to Reuben with a jolt, for up to now he’d believed completely in the illusion of beauty she deliberately fostered. But it was a trick. She tossed her hair, looked deeply into your eyes, smiled her suicide smile—she
acted
beautiful, and by sheer nerve and sleight of hand she made you believe she was. You never saw the flaws because you were too caught up in the trick, the mystique; seduced by the patter, you were watching the wrong hand.

The degree of courage an act like that must require took his breath away.

She glided up to the bar, oblivious to the interest her entrance had aroused, and asked for a drink. Her wine-colored dress fit her like a tight, tasteful glove, and Reuben congratulated himself again on his generosity in springing for it. The bartender set a tall glass in front of her; from here it looked like more lemonade. Before she could get her money out, the longhaired cowboy standing next to her shoved a quarter at the bartender, leaned in close, and said something to her out of the side of his mouth.

Looking directly at him, she said something back. The cowboy grinned, shuffled his feet, and straightened his collar to please her.

Her style wasn’t to freeze a man out with an ice-cold stare and a cutting remark—although Reuben knew from experience she was capable of it. No, what she did was
warm
you to death with her huge blue eyes and the sincerity in her sly, sexy mouth, that tentative smile trembling at the corners so sweetly, so
kindly,
you wanted to take her home and spend the rest of your life trying to make her laugh. She was the most natural bunco runner he’d ever met.

She asked the bartender a question, and he pointed at a table of gamblers across the way, then at Reuben’s table. Taking her drink with her, she sauntered over to the first group. There were five of them—one too many, or Reuben might have joined their game, instead of this one because they looked a shade richer. They all wanted her to sit down. She demurred, with some excuse that made them bark with laughter. They resumed their game at her insistence, but they looked self-conscious, sitting straighter in their chairs, refraining from spitting, slicking their hair back when, she wasn’t looking.

“Are we playing poker or not?” Reuben queried, clacking a short stack of chips on the table impatiently. Everybody but Sharkey grinned and looked sheepish and went back to the cards. Sharkey scraped his chair back from the table and walked over to talk to Grace.

He was a big, ugly, lumbering son of a bitch, and Reuben didn’t like the way they looked together, her neat and fair and petite, him hulking and drooling like a gorilla. It was fine as long as he kept his hands in his back pockets and inflicted his oafish flirtation on her with nothing but his tongue. But when he wound one of his long ape’s arms around her waist, Reuben’s sense of humor went into a decline, and his interest in the scheme they’d set in motion started to thin.

He should’ve known she could take care of herself. With a little dance step that got Sharkey’s hand off her, timed perfectly with a dazzling smile that made sure he never even noticed, she moved him, without touching, toward his own table—and the look on his. blockish face said he thought it was his idea.

“This here’s Miss Wanda LaSalle, boys, and she’s gonna sit down with us and play some cards. Anybody object?”

Far from it. Into the chorus of hearty “Hell, no’s,” Reuben threw in a querulous, “Well, personally, I don’t cotton much to playing cards with women.”

Sharkey removed his cigar, spat a speck of tobacco on the floor, and told him he didn’t cotton much to playing cards with smart-ass needle dicks with bad attitudes, and that Reuben could shut the hell up and deal or get the hell out of the game. Feigning sullenness, Reuben tipped his hat over his eyes and slid lower in his seat.

Grace took the chair Sharkey had dragged over and wedged between his seat and Wyatt’s. It was the right position, the place she had to be or the trick wouldn’t work, but Reuben still didn’t like it. “What’s the game, gentlemen?” she asked sweetly. Rusty told her, and she said, “Oh,” with just the right note of disappointment. What would she rather play? they asked anxiously. Well, she allowed, hopeful smile flickering, her real favorite was seven-card stud. Seven-card stud it was, the men declared, over Reuben’s surly objection that stud was a sissy’s game; next they’d be calling one-eyed jacks wild, he complained, and betting hair pins. Nobody paid any attention to him.

She bought two hundred dollars’ worth of chips right off the bat, which had a slightly sobering effect on the boys’ playful mood. They offered her the first deal, though, without cutting for it. Her hands on the cards were dainty, a trifle clumsy—but not too much; she shuffled the way most women ran: like girls. She was a real piece of work.

Betting heavily, she lost every hand.

Rusty felt terrible; Burgess and Wyatt tried to cheer her up; even Sharkey offered to switch to high-low. But she took her losses like a man, and stayed in the game to the bitter end—or until it was Reuben’s turn to deal. He passed her two crimped jacks and another from the bottom of the deck, one up and two in the hole. She ran out of chips on sixth street, and only stayed in for seventh because everybody else checked. Except for the lone jack, she had garbage on the board, and Reuben couldn’t help her; with this deck, the last card could be anything. Sharkey raised Burgess’s twenty-dollar reraise, and the bet was to the lady. When her hand went hesitantly to the angel pin on her bosom, Reuben closed his eyes in relief. It meant she had something good, something better than three jacks. It meant she couldn’t lose.

“This brooch is solid silver, gentlemen,” she announced. “Lordy, my luck’s
got
to change sometime.” She fingered her river card hopefully. “My brooch to see your raise, plus another forty?” she offered, lacy lashes fluttering. She’d stuck the brooch close to the tip of her breast; she ran two soft fingertips back and forth across the angel’s flowing hair, absently brushing her nipple with each pass. Sharkey swallowed and gaped, hypnotized. Rusty couldn’t stop clearing his throat.

“Yeah.” “Sure.” “Forty, okay.” “Fine with me.”

The pot burgeoned. It took her a long time to unpin the brooch and add it to the kitty, but nobody complained.

In the showdown, her pocket card turned out to be a matching nine. “Jacks full,” she announced happily. Reuben swore and threw his hand in without showing. Burgess, Wyatt, and Rusty did the same, although with better grace.

“Well, I’m damned,” muttered Sharkey, staring at the cards, trying to believe it. He had king trips showing, probably drawing to a full house of his own. He stumped his cigar out hard, hawked, and spat into the cuspidor.

It was wonderful how Wanda LaSalle’s luck changed after that. With her brooch on the table beside her, “for luck,” her stack of chips rose higher and higher and higher. The game heated up; pot limits and table stakes went by the board. Wyatt, the jolly fat man, turned out to have deep pockets and a penchant for chasing trips or two measly pairs all the way to seventh street and losing big. Burgess was a fish too, but not as reckless. Everybody enjoyed picking off Rusty, who bluffed like a kid with jelly on his mouth.

But Sharkey was the man Reuben longed to stuff. He was a lout, but he wasn’t stupid. Whether he was a sharp remained to be seen, but he hadn’t lost his caution yet. The game had gotten very loose and very fast, but Sharkey still played it close, calling and betting in monosyllables, eyes hooded like a lizard. And his regard for the lovely Wanda was entirely too warm for Reuben’s taste, manifesting itself in hot stares, crude lip-licking, and even a quick grope under the table once, the scope of which Reuben wasn’t able to assess from his vantage across the way. But it rankled.

If he’d had any doubts about Grace’s ability to win consistently in a relatively square game, she laid them to rest in minutes. She was shrewd, patient, unpredictable, and fearless—and lucky. She could read a bluff like a newspaper, and perpetrate one as convincingly as anybody he’d ever played with. Most important, she had a professional’s attitude toward money, which meant thinking of the chips as abstractions, worthless as pebbles or pinto beans until the game was over. If you had too much respect for money, you were done for.

In between hands, she asked the boys about their lives. They were shy at first, then amazingly forthcoming. The atmosphere started to resemble a fire-hall social more than a high-stakes poker game. She spun them a fascinating tale about learning to play cards from her father, the late Mr. LaSalle, who’d dropped dead at the faro table in a Virginia City saloon last year, leaving her with nothing but his favorite dice and the few simple gambling skills she possessed. It was a difficult life sometimes, and not very respectable, she knew, but a girl on her own had to get along somehow.

The bare bones of the story were completely incredible, but not a man among them doubted it. She was just so damn good.

She had sharp timing, too. At almost precisely the same moment Reuben decided it was time to move on to stage two, she sent him the signal. “Looks like I win again,” she chortled, gathering in another pot on her own deal. “I haven’t had so much fun since Aunt Aggie’s drawers fell down at the covered-dish supper.”