Drawing Dead (39 page)

I was angry as hell. I knew it wasn’t right to be angry at the dead. It wasn’t their fault they were dead. Though in Brendan’s case, I wasn’t so sure. But it isn’t good karma. It’s not like they could fight back. Make their argument. But I was sick of everybody dying on me. Melissa. FitzGibbon. FitzGibbon’s kid. Brendan. How dare they all? Make me go through all the fucking emotions? I feel bad. Do I feel bad enough? If I don’t feel bad enough, should I feel guilty about it? Do I feel guilty enough about it? Was there anything I could have done? Or did I actually help it along? Damn, I’d been mean to Brendan more than once. Did that make me responsible? For whatever he’d done to himself? Or whatever he’d let someone else do to him? There didn’t seem to be a third possibility …

Ah, fuck it. I shoved it aside. Dragged on some clothes. Put on the cowboy hat and my darkest shades. Got to the Rio. Found my table. There were a bunch of initials there. Johnnie G. Frankie Z. DJ Donnie.
Vinnie V. I thought of getting one. Ricky R. didn’t do it. Had to be Ricky P. or something. Wait a minute. Something wrong with that. Smelled of urination. Ah, forget about it.

I tried to watch the table, between naps. A couple, three tight guys. Maybe good. Maybe just tight. Hadn’t seen enough to tell. Johnnie G. was an Asian guy in shades, raising and re-raising. Never smiling. Just raking in the pots. Had to be careful with him. An older woman. Big hat, big shades, stack of chips in front of her. Friendly. Too friendly. Watch out. DJ Donnie was a loud-mouthed guy in a brown suede jacket, guessing everyone’s cards. Nice Jacks, he’d say, folding another hand he’d called to the end. We were supposed to be impressed. Frankie Z. was a pro I knew from New York. Solid guy till his fifth Budweiser. Then he could get dangerous.

About an hour in, I’m in a pot with DJ Donnie, Mr. Suede. I’m not unhappy about that. The guy is clearly full of himself, not nearly as good as he thinks he is. He has no idea that by telling everybody what he thinks their cards are—on top of the fact that he’s usually wrong—he’s doing nothing more than giving the better players information about how he thinks. And information, as we all know, is power. And power, as many of us are aware, is money.

I look at my hole cards. Ace, Ten suited. Pretty good starting hand, in late position anyway. If you play it carefully. Can’t get carried away with it. I put in a healthy raise. Everyone behind me folds to Mr. Suede. He calls. The flop comes all rags, Eight, Five, Three. Mixed blessing. Didn’t hit me, but not likely to have hit him either. I put in a big bet. Try to push him off the pot. He calls. He’s wearing shades. He stares me down. I think he’s staring me down. But actually, I can’t tell. Because of the shades. His shades. My shades. It’s a shady sort of deal.

The turn card is the diamond Jack. It does nothing for me. Apart from vague Bob Dylan associations. Or maybe that was the Jack of hearts. The Dylan song. I check. Not the Dylan song. I’ll check that later. I check my hand to Mr. Suede. He bets. Three-quarters of the pot. A healthy raise. I glance at him. He’s looking contemptuous. He’s too good for this crowd, the Look is telling me.

If he’s any good, I figure, the Look means he’s got something. Somebody with nothing, somebody looking for a fold, would want to be inconspicuous. Shrink to nothingness. Not raise suspicion. Instead, he’s staring me down. I think.

Of course, he could be thinking that I’d be thinking that if he had a hand he’d be doing exactly that, but that he was a good player, which he certainly thought he was, and I, therefore, would think he was, of course, that good a player, and that therefore I’d be thinking that he might be doing it on purpose, doing a reverse tell, and …

Well, you see how it goes.

But really, I decide, the guy’s a fish. So.

I call.

The river card’s a Ten.

I see a tiny flinch. He doesn’t like that card.

But he bets three thousand anyway.

I know I have him. I absolutely know it.

I shove all my chips in the middle.

Good river card, he says, shaking his head and raising his cards as if to fold.

I push my cards towards the muck.

I’ll pay you off, he continues,

just as my cards reach the discard pile,

and throws in the rest of his chips

to call my bet,

turning over an Eight

to match the one on board,

and as I reach to pull my cards from the muck

with my right hand

to flip over my Ten

and with my left reach for the mammoth pot

Frankie Z. says, Hey, wait a minute,

that hand is dead.

That’s right, Johnnie G. says, your cards touched the muck,

your hand is dead.

And of course, they’re right.

I watch my hard-earned stack disappear. Into the sneering pile of chips in front of Mr. Suede.

Well, I thought five minutes later, as I trudged empty-handed down the hallway in search of a scotch, I guess that was a fitting memorial. Somehow.

I
FOUND
B
UTCH IN THE PURPLE VELVET SANCTUARY
. A giant pineapple-shaped chandelier revolved slowly over my head. I hadn’t noticed it before. The thing covered half the ceiling. It had lumps and projections, orange and purple and green. It rotated. How could I have sat here night after night, scotch after scotch, and never noticed the thing?

I fought off the nausea.

Butch had crapped out, too. We traded bad beat stories. Correction. Butch told me a bad beat story. I told him how I’d beaten myself. I lamented an earlier hand, when I’d folded a pair of Nines to an oversized raise. It had felt like a bluff. But I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. Maybe, if I’d called, reraised, shoved, everything would have been different. But hell, the guy hadn’t shown his cards. For all I knew, it was a good fold.

I’d never know.

Stupid. To worry about it.

And anyway, there was some relief to it. There was no way I would have lasted anyway. Not now. Not the way things were. Better to have gotten it over with.

I’ll take another double, I said to the cleavage with a tray.

You really don’t know, I said to Butch, whether it’s real or constructed.

Some of it’s got to be real. You can see it.

Yeah. You can see those bits. But what’s under there? The substructure. Wires and twine? Toothpicks and cotton swabs? Stuffed bunnies?

That’s okay. I’m still looking.

We laughed. We watched the cleavage come and go.

Fuck, I said.

Yeah, he replied.

What’re we gonna do?

Nothing we can do.

I mean about Brendan.

Same answer. Until we get the autopsy results.

Can’t they get there a little quicker? I thought you had connections.

Butch laughed. It had a bitter edge. Just barely, he said. Anyway, it’s only been a day, Rick. This shit takes time. Toxicology and all that. I called once already today. I can’t be bugging them all the time. All they could tell me so far is, there were traces of blood on the knitting needle.

What the fuck?

Yeah. And it wasn’t Brendan’s.

I tried to think about what that might mean.

I didn’t have a clue.

Fuck, I said. There must be something more they can tell us.

Sure they can. They can tell us he didn’t die by shotgun to the head. He didn’t soak himself in gasoline and immolate himself in support of the brave freedom fighters of East Timor.

He wasn’t big on East Timor.

Not that I’m aware of.

Good point. Meanwhile, we can’t just sit here. I’m a little surprised at you, man.

Listen, Rick, I’m using what leverage I have. If they find anything worth telling us about, I’ll know it.

What about Andrei and Anatoly? I asked. They following up on them?

Yeah, yeah. I told them about that. No trace of the little fucks. They’re involved or not, you gotta expect they skipped town. The cops are better placed than us to track them down.

I guess, I said. Maybe. All right. Damn. What was he doing in a fucking tuxedo?

Uh, Rick, he was in a tux last time we saw him?

Oh, right.

And anyway, who cares? He’s gone, man. Whatever happened, we’ll find out. One way or another.

Yeah. We will. We owe it to him.

Well, said Butch, no, I don’t think we owe him anything. We owe ourselves. Because if we don’t.

You’re right. Because if we don’t. And what the fuck is with that fucking knitting needle?

Butch shrugged.

You know more than you’re telling me, don’t you?

Yeah. I know all sorts of shit.

Oh, shut up.

I thought about stuff. Random stuff. Random stuff that led to other stuff, that maybe wasn’t quite so random. Somebody else’s blood. On a knitting needle. Jesus. I had no idea. Must have been some kind of gay thing. Fuck, I didn’t know. Might as well have asked me where they buried Jimmy Hoffa.

I’d never gotten used to Brendan being gay. Not because he was gay, but because when I first knew him, a guy I met in a bar, a poker player, a carpenter, a guy unrelated to me by tragedy or marriage, he’d successfully masqueraded as a straight guy. Picked up girls in bars. Acted hurt if they paid more attention to me than him. Damn. It’d really been convincing. A shocker, when he told us.

And Melissa.

I wished she’d go away.

She had gone away, of course. I hadn’t told her to. I hadn’t wanted her to. And yet, it had been such a relief. And yet, I still wished she hadn’t. But the new Melissa. The one still on the couch. I wished she’d go away, for sure.

But she wouldn’t. She, the whole thing, was always in my head. My wife, dead on the couch. My daughter weeping. Compared to that, the shock of finding out that Brendan had been hiding in plain sight as a straight guy was nothing. On the other hand, that he turned out to be Melissa’s brother was a bit much.

Everything I’d ever thought was suspect.

Well.

More suspect than before.

It was a lesson, though. Taught me to look behind everything. Under every carpet and sheet. Behind every offhand comment. Beyond the obvious.

Who the hell was I fooling? It taught me to keep them double scotches coming.

Butch and I had a few more.

Listen, man, I said. What we can do is, try to figure out where he went. Trace his steps. See what we can find out.

They’re already doing that.

Oh, come on, Butch. You know how they’ll do it. Remember FitzGibbon? We can be more subtle. Weasel shit out.

Speak for yourself.

Well, I can be more subtle. You can provide the muscle.

Fuck you.

We staggered to another place. Some overstuffed joint. A bad crooner doing a sad imitation of the Sinatra thing. Nobody could do Sinatra. How dare the guy? Worse, how dare Sinatra? How dare Frank die on us?

We had a few more scotches. I saw a blonde, two tables over. The Mediterranean glow was promising. That and the cheekbones.

I sidled over, on my way to the men’s room.

Hi, I said eloquently.

Hi, she chirped.

Close up, she was wrinkled. Pumped up. Inflated. Braised, not bronzed.

I felt ill.

Excuse me, I said with exaggerated politesse.

I stumbled to the men’s. I heaved. I sat. I pondered on Doom.

Oh well, I thought. Doom comes in many guises. Maybe this year it’ll come in the form of busting out of the World Series of Poker in a stupid and humiliating fashion.

Shit, I’d already done that.

I stumbled back to the table.

Butch was passed out. Head on the table.

His cell phone was ringing.

I ignored it.

Put my head on the table.

Passed out.

I had a dream. I was being chased by an enormous guy in a Hawaiian shirt.

Plastered on the front of the shirt was a giant pineapple.

W
HILE WE WAITED FOR THE AUTOPSY RESULTS
, or the cops to figure out something else, I buried myself in the endless high-stakes cash games. It wasn’t the ideal escape. The relentless rhythm of casino life will pound you down. Sometimes you have to get away. I guess that’s why they construct the elaborate spas, at the better places. That, and to keep the trophy wives happy. So, eventually I had to find a way to get away from my way of getting away from thinking about Brendan, brooding about my part in it, getting pissed at the cops for moving so slow.

I went for a swim. Maybe it would tire me out. Let me sleep. Twenty laps of serious stroking. By the tenth, I’d gotten into the groove of it. By the fifteenth, my arms, my thighs were aching. On the final two, I
was drowning. Halfway through the final lap I gulped down a quart or two of chlorinated filth. How many geezers had pissed in here in the past couple hours? I thought, a bit incongruously given my imminent demise. I panicked. I flailed. I’m sure I even blanched. I saw my life, such as it was, pass before my eyes. It was a disappointing show.

Fortunately, the pool was only four feet deep. Sensibly, I stood up. I was alive. I coughed. I heaved. I wheezed. I made an effort not to vomit in the pool.

Heard that was frowned upon.

By the time I hit the locker room, the endorphins kicked in. A near-death experience will do that to you. I wrapped a towel around my waist. Strutted to the shower stalls. Admired my desiccated biceps on the way. Back at the locker, I occupied myself with my hair. My thick, prematurely white, sexy hair. The gals loved it. I exulted in blow-drying it to a handsome sheen. I noted peripherally the jealousy in the balding locker–room–majority’s eyes.

Showered and dressed, I was feeling good. All atingle. Recent events receding fast. To wherever repressed bad things go.

Ready for a nice double scotch.

I made my way to my favorite circular purple velvet bar.

All of which made the fact that Evgeny was there even more disturbing than it had to be.

He and his Russkie pals were taking up more than half the joint. Thoughts of quickly ducking out, hiding in the oyster bar down the way, were immediately skewered when Evgeny spied me.

Rick-ay, Rick-ay, he called out. Come on ofver. I buy you trink!