Crooked Hearts (12 page)

“Hold it.” Reuben’s hand shot out and snagged her wrist. “I want to see those cards.”

“What? Let go of me. Let go!” She made a grab for her discarded hand, but he beat her to it, scooping up all seven and fanning them out, squinting at the backs, then the fronts.

“Ha! I knew it! Look at that queen—see that?”

“What?” “I don’t see nothing.” “What the hell!”

They didn’t want to believe it, but there it was, big as life: a pinhole right through the black ruff around the queen’s neck. Reuben had put it there himself two hands ago with his new ring.

“She did it with her brooch,” he accused, pointing at the silver pin by Grace’s elbow. “It’s been there on the table since she first bet it. She’s marking the damn cards with it.”

“That’s not true! I never cheated in my life!” She glanced around the table, desperate for support. If they’d had nothing to go on but her angel’s face, they’d have rendered a unanimous acquittal in three seconds flat. But there was the queen, stuck through the throat, and there was the brooch, six inches away; she’d even been fiddling with it off and on during the game.

“Look at this,” Reuben said, clinching it. “She did it to the heart, spade, and club queens too. She marked every damn queen in the deck.”

“I didn’t!” She pressed her hand over her heart. “I’m innocent, I swear. It must’ve been somebody else, or—or else they were already marked and you just noticed.”

Reuben snorted.

“Please—I wouldn’t do it, I couldn’t. Don’t you believe me?”

Burgess and Wyatt shifted in their chairs, intensely uncomfortable. Rusty’s ears turned red and his freckles popped out. Sharkey stared at her hard, petting his mustache and scrolling his lips. Nobody spoke.

“Well, gentlemen.” Her mouth trembled and her dainty hands shook, but her voice stayed steady and wonderfully sad. She pushed her winnings into the center of the table, brooch and all, and stood up. “Thank you for your company. And now … I’ll say good evening to you.”

It was the tears that did it. They glittered on her lashes, refusing to fall, turning her eyes into blue pools of poignant suffering. Between the tears and her heartbreaking dignity, they were all goners.

“Wait,” growled Sharkey. He grabbed her elbow and held her still. “Somebody else could’ve marked ’em.”

“Oh, sure,” Reuben scoffed. “Who’s been winning?”

Rusty cleared his throat. “Maybe they were already like that. How do we know? Nobody checked ’em, we just started playing. Somebody could’ve stamped ’em before—days ago, for all we know. It’s
possible.”

Burgess and Wyatt were nodding their heads, with more hope than conviction. They had the goods on her, but nobody wanted to admit it.

“Honest to God,” Grace breathed, while a touching, childlike hope began to bloom in her tragic face, “I wouldn’t know how to mark a deck of cards if my life depended on it.”

More thoughtful nodding. Reuben let some of his scorn go and concentrated on looking doubtful.

“I say we get a new deck and let her stay in,” Sharkey opined at last. “On a trial basis. We keep an eye on her—which won’t be no hardship,” he leered, giving her elbow a familiar squeeze. “We see anything fishy, we give her the bum’s rush.”

“Does she get to keep what she won?” wondered Rusty.

“Can’t have it both ways,” Reuben put in quickly. “Either she cheated or she didn’t. If you let her stay in, you’re saying she didn’t.”

They couldn’t argue with that. Nobody liked it, but they decided to let her keep her winnings.

“No,” Grace said, wrinkling her brow adorably. They looked at her in surprise. “I don’t want it if you think I stole it. Take it back and we’ll just start all over.” Now they laughed at her, affectionately, indulgently. They had to talk her out of giving them their money back. “Well, at least take some,” she argued, pouting a little. “Take a hundred each. No, I insist.” And so it was that Grace gave four hundred dollars away—five, counting Reuben’s—and got in return the trust and devotion of four very stupid gulls.

She took her seat again with murmured thanks to all, and a special smile of gratitude for Sharkey. He turned beet-red and fingered his collar. If he’d been about to suggest that they switch to a different game now, the smile brushed the idea out of his brain like a whisk broom.

Rusty got a new deck from the bartender, and play resumed. On schedule, Grace began to lose. The men were sorry to see it, since it tended to confirm their worst suspicions; but getting more of their losses back mitigated their disappointment. Sharkey was the biggest winner. The incident seemed to have untied a knot in him, dissolved a clot, and the quickness of the game in the aftermath had him playing just shy of reckless. But it wasn’t only him; the fever spread to everybody as the game progressed, and Reuben pretended it had infected him, too. He bet most of his chips on an inside straight draw, and lost to Sharkey’s six-high flush. The fever got hotter. All the money was on the table now, nobody was holding out. The time had arrived.

Grace knew it too; she darted a subtle glance at him over her hole cards, which she always played from her hand instead of the board. She had about three hundred dollars in chips left, plus her brooch. Rusty gathered the cards up and shoved them to his left. It was Reuben’s deal.

Between shuffles, he signaled the bartender for another beer. “Anybody else? Wanda, you need another lemonade?” She shrugged and said sure. Reuben passed the deck to Burgess to cut, then paused to light a cheroot. The bartender came over and set the drinks down from a tray. Grace picked up her old glass before he could, to finish off the last swallow in the bottom. She took a dainty swig, smiled at the bartender, and handed the empty glass up to him. He never touched it—she let the glass go a split second too soon and it slipped from her fingers. Reuben had the straight deck between his knees and the cooler on the table before all the glass shards quit rolling on the floor.

Exclamations, apologies, reassurances. He waited until the hubbub died down before he started to deal.

Two down, one up. They all liked what they saw. Sharkey had ace high and bet a hundred, the biggest lead in the game so far. An excellent beginning, thought Reuben. Rusty, who had the worst hand in the deal, surprised him by raising thirty bucks, and the bet went around again. On fourth street, Burgess’s pair of queens was high, and he led with another hundred. Nobody batted an eye.

On fifth street, Sharkey caught another ace. That made two, and one in the hole. His ugly face never changed; he checked his hole card with no visible excitement, like a mother checking a baby’s diaper. But something crackled in the air. Reuben would’ve felt it even if he hadn’t known the cards everybody had, and the cards they were all going to get. Burgess took a third queen, all up, and grinned from ear to ear. Before the betting was over, the pot had grown to eleven hundred dollars, and Wanda LaSalle was almost out of chips.

On sixth, Reuben mucked his hand in disgust. Rusty finally saw the light and followed suit. Reuben felt sorry to soak him so badly—he liked Rusty, and had wanted to leave him some change—but it was out of his hands now.

Fat, happy Wyatt, who already had a hidden pair of eights, caught his third jack. But he was looking across the table at his pal Burgess’s three queens, and the view dampened his euphoria. If Burgess got a fourth lady, Wyatt’s full house would crumble to dust. Reuben relished his indecision, which came out in compulsive stroking of his silk lapels.

Sharkey was still in, still gloating secretly about his ace in the hole, and still raising on every bet. Grace was the dark horse. She had the nine and ten of clubs showing, the rest junk. The bet was back to Burgess and his three queens. He checked his hole cards with cagey-looking pleasure—a fairly subtle bluff. “See that and raise you another hundred.” Sharkey complied without a murmur. Grace threw in her last chips; she was down to her angel pin now, with one more card to go. Wyatt’s stack wasn’t any higher. Reason came flooding back to him in a rush. He mucked his hand with an oath, stood up, and stalked over to the bar. In spite of himself, Reuben felt glad to know they’d left him walking-home money.

Burgess, Sharkey, and Wanda.

“River card down,” Reuben murmured, dealing the last. Everybody got his heart’s desire, and Reuben’s job was over.

Burgess still looked high with his three queens. Trying not to let his jubilation show, he made a great business of betting everything he had left with apparent reluctance. Reuben sympathized: there was nothing trickier than bluffing that you were bluffing.

Sharkey called the bet and raised it five hundred, which cleaned him out, too. Burgess turned purple, but didn’t move a muscle. He was betting on four queens, and they’d waived table stakes long ago.

Wyatt wandered back, a shot glass in his hand, and took up a place behind Rusty’s chair. Everybody looked at Grace. For the first time since they’d called her for cheating she touched her angel pin, nudging it with her fingernail, toying with it. She still only had her nine-ten puppyfeet showing, the rest garbage. Wyatt had shown three jacks before he’d quit, so a jack-high straight flush for Wanda was possible but incredibly unlikely. What were the odds of it? Reuben wondered idly. Sharkey, he knew, was wondering too, but not so idly. It didn’t matter; whatever the odds, Sharkey was going to deem them too high to beat his four beautiful aces.

“Mr. Sharkey,” Grace said, in a voice so low everybody leaned forward to hear her. “Do I understand the bet to me is now five hundred?”

Sharkey inclined his bulbous mug in assent.

She picked up the brooch. It looked pretty resting in the palm of her hand, the silver stream of hair shining in the glow of the gaslights. “What would you say …” Sharkey and Burgess bent closer to catch the words. “What would you say to letting the lady stand in for me?”

Sharkey blinked, not getting it. “Huh?”

“Just for tonight,” she clarified softly. “Five hundred plus what’s in the pot, against me, wherever you like. Whatever you like.”

A feather hitting the table would’ve made them all jump. Reuben wanted to laugh out loud at the identical expressions of dumb wonder on every face. To break the stunned silence, he kicked back in his chair and marveled slowly, “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

Rusty giggled and cleared his throat. Wyatt closed his mouth and ran his thumbs up and down behind his suspenders, watching his friend Burgess for a reaction. Burgess had gone even purpler, but otherwise kept his composure.

Sharkey’s thick lips tried to settle in a cynical, unruffled smile, but he kept rubbing his chest as if his heart hurt, or it had stopped and he was trying to restart it. “Get this straight,” he mumbled, and had to clear his own throat. “You’ll see my raise with … with …”

“Myself.”

She crippled him then with a white, blinding smile; he blinked in its radiance and rolled over, a dead man. “Okay with me,” he said on a weak puff of cigar smoke. He didn’t even check his cards first.

Burgess sat erect in his chair, not moving. He’d shuffled the seventh card in with his hole cards, but he didn’t look at them. Instead his eyes were glued to Sharkey’s two exposed aces, and then to Sharkey’s face. Red blotches on his cheeks gave away the ugly man’s excitement; but Burgess’s dilemma was figuring out if he was excited because he was bluffing, because he was stupid, or because he couldn’t lose. Seconds passed. Minutes. Burgess sat on, motionless as a bald sphynx, weighing and measuring. Just when Reuben knew he’d have to strangle Rusty if he cleared his throat once more, Burgess flipped his board cards belly down. “Not me,” he said softly, dignified in retreat.

Smart move,
Reuben congratulated him. Burgess looked like a family man, but he’d never once protested Grace’s unorthodox offer. So either he was a randier old goat than he looked, or Wanda LaSalle had paragon-toppling powers of a magnitude not yet known. Reuben suspected the latter.

Sharkey’s delight enhanced his ugliness. It was just him and Wanda now, and he could hardly wait for the big moment. He coasted the wet, disgusting mouth-end of his cigar around his fat lips, sucking in smoke and blowing it out through his nostrils.

Irrationally, stupidly, Reuben felt a snaky slither of jealousy in his gut. “A little brace game I once had occasion to observe,” Grace had called it at the Golden Nugget. The skill with which she played it was all the proof he needed that she hadn’t just observed it, she’d been the second lead in it. With her husband, Henri, no doubt. The retired entrepreneur with the bum ticker. Why should knowing that make Reuben jealous? He couldn’t say. All he knew was that the smoky pall hanging over the table was so thick with the smell and the taste and the feel of sex, he could hardly breathe it anymore. He wanted it for himself. He wanted to be in Sharkey’s shoes, and beat her cold with his four sweet aces.

It wouldn’t happen, of course. Wanda raised her dark-winged eyebrows at Sharkey to ask what he had. He waited another twenty seconds, wallowing in the suspense, and then turned over his cards. “Four bullets,” he said in a low, purring gloat that made Reuben’s lip curl.

“Oh, dear.” She faked a truly enchanting mix of sympathy and girlish excitement. “I guess I win. Look, I’ve got seven, eight, nine, ten, and jack of clubs.”

Sharkey couldn’t move. He’d frozen with his mouth open, holding his cigar in the air at a rakish, celebratory angle. Grace’s straight flush wouldn’t register; he kept batting his eyelids at it, but it still wouldn’t focus.

Go,
Reuben commanded her in his brain—but it wasn’t necessary. With the dexterity of a fan-tan raker, Grace was already scraping back her chair and scooping money, so much money, into her new pocketbook. “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for everything, and good night.” Her smile bedazzled them one last time, and then she was gone.

But not quite fast enough. Sharkey came out of his trance, leapt up, and grabbed for her arm. She had to stop—otherwise he’d have wrenched it out of the socket. Reuben was on his feet, moving toward them. Sharkey made a grotesque effort to smile, although anyone could see that what he really wanted to do was kill her.