"But I didn't do anything," Pullman whined.
The lawyer, a tanned forty-year-old with a fringe of curly hair, gave a chuckle, as if he'd heard that line ten thousand times. He continued, explaining that the prosecutor was out for blood. For one thing, a cop had been killed; the blond man, the apparent voyeur, had actually been an undercover LAPD officer pretending to work for the landscape maintenance company. His job was to report whenever Tammy left the apartment. Other officers or DEA agents would then take over surveillance and follow her in unmarked cars or vans. (When Pullman thought that he was reaching into his pants in preparation for a rape, the officer was in fact merely fishing his radio out of an inside pocket to tell the other surveillance team that she was leaving.)
"But--"
"Let me finish." The lawyer added that the cops were also outraged that, because of Pullman, Tammy had successfully escaped. She'd disappeared completely and the FBI and DEA believed she was probably out of the country by now.
"But they can't think I was working with her! Is that what they think?"
"In a word, yeah." He went on to say that Pullman's explanation for the past several days' events raised eyebrows. "To put it mildly." For instance, the police were curious why, if he'd noticed the supposed voyeur the day before, he hadn't told her then. If his concern, as he claimed, was for an innocent woman's safety, why didn't he tell her she was in danger when he'd first found out about it?
His red-faced explanation that he wanted to use the voyeur as an excuse to introduce himself to Tammy was greeted with an expression in the lawyer's eyes that could be read as either skepticism or embarrassment for a pathetic client. The man recorded this explanation in a few anemic notes.
And why would he lie to his employer about being sick today? To the police, that made sense only if he was serving as Tammy's lookout. Today's was to be a big drug transfer and they reasoned that Pullman had stayed home to make sure Tammy got away safely to deliver the goods. Their theory was that he had figured the maintenance worker for law and attacked him to give Tammy the chance to flee.
Physical evidence too: both his fingerprints and hers were on the portfolio, which happened to contain no headshot photos or audition tapes but rather a kilo of very pure cocaine. "She gave it to me," he'd said weakly. "To create a diversion, I'll bet. So she could escape."
The lawyer didn't even bother to write that one down.
But the most damning of all was the problem with his claim that he didn't know her. "See," his lawyer said, "if you really didn't know her or have any connection with her, we might get a jury to believe everything else you're claiming."
"But I don't know her. I swear."
The attorney gave a faint wince. "See, Rodney, there's a problem with that."
"I prefer 'Rod.' Like I've said."
"A problem."
"What?" Pullman scratched his head; the cuffs jingled like dull bells.
"They searched your apartment."
"Oh. They did? They can do that?"
A laugh. "You were arrested on felony murder, assault, aiding and abetting and drug charges. Yes, Rod, they can do that."
"Oh."
"And you know what they found?"
He knew perfectly well what they found. He sat back, stared at the floor and played absently with the handcuffs as the lawyer read from a sheet of paper.
"Some old Yoplait containers with Tammy's fingerprints on them, ditto, two wine bottles, a box of herbal tea and empty strawberry cartons. Magazines with her name on the address label. A charge card receipt of hers from a store in the Beverly Center. A Starbucks cup with her lipstick and DNA on the rim."
"DNA? They checked that, did they?"
"That's what cops do."
"I swear, she was never in my apartment. All that stuff . . . I just . . . I kind of . . . picked it up in her trash."
"Her trash?"
"I just saw some things out behind her apartment. I didn't think it was a big deal."
"You had two dozen snapshots of her on your dresser."
"I just took a few candids is all. She wasn't looking at the camera--you can tell the cops that. If I knew her, she'd be looking at the camera, wouldn't she?"
"Rod."
"No, listen! If we had been together somewhere she'd be looking at me, looking into the lens." Pullman's voice broke in desperation. "Like, 'Say, cheese,' you know? But she wasn't. That means we weren't together. It's just logic. Doesn't that make sense?" He fell silent. After a moment he added, "I just wanted to meet her. I didn't know how."
"They found some binoculars too. They figured you used those to keep an eye on her door to warn her if anybody was going to raid her place."
"That was just so I could . . . so I could look at her. She's really pretty." Pullman shrugged. His eyes returned to the floor.
"I think the only thing we can do is talk to the DA about a plea bargain. We don't want to go to trial on this one, believe me. I may be able to get you a deal for fifteen, twenty years . . ."
"Twenty years?"
"I'll talk to them. See what they say."
The lawyer stepped to the door of the interview room and rapped on it to summon the guard. A moment later it opened.
"One thing," Pullman said.
His attorney turned and lifted an eyebrow.
"Sally Vaughn."
"Who?"
"A runner-up for Miss Iowa. Few years ago."
"What about her?"
"I sold her a car and we went out once but she wasn't interested in seeing me anymore. The same thing sort of happened with her."
"Same thing?"
"Like with Tammy. I was kind of watching her more than I should have."
"Peeping?"
He started to object to the word but then nodded. "I got arrested. That's why I moved here. I wanted to start over. Meet somebody for real."
"What was your sentence in Iowa?"
"Six months suspended, counseling for a year."
"It didn't take, the counseling."
"Didn't take, no."
"I'll get the records. The DA might buy it. But he lost a prime perp because of you, so he's going to want something. Probably stalking and privacy charges. You'd have to do a year, eighteen months, I'd guess."
"Better than twenty."
"I'll see what I can do." The lawyer stepped through the door.
"One other question?" Pullman asked, looking up.
"What?"
The prisoner said, "Will the police use all of those things they found? For evidence?"
"From your apartment?"
"Right."
"Probably not. They usually pick the best ones."
"Then you think I could have a couple of the pictures of Tammy to put up on my wall here? There's no window. There's nothing to look at."
The lawyer hesitated, as if Pullman were joking. When he concluded that apparently the prisoner wasn't, he said, "You know, Rodney, that's probably not the best idea in the world."
"Just a thought."
The attorney left and a large guard stepped inside. He took Rodney Pullman by the arm and led him to the corridor that would take him back to his cell.
THE POKER LESSON
Poker is a game in which each man plays his own hand as he elects. No consideration should be expected by one player from another.
--JOHN SCARNE
I want into one of your games," the boy said.
Sitting hunched over a hamburger in Angela's Diner, Keller looked up at the blond kid, who stood with his hip cocked and arms crossed, trying to be cool but looking like an animal awkwardly trying to stand on its hind legs. Handsome enough even though he wore black-rimmed nerd glasses and was pale and skinny.
Keller decided not to ask the kid to sit down. "What games?" He ate more of his burger and glanced at his watch.
The kid noticed the move and said, "Well, the one that's starting at eight tonight, for instance."
Keller grunted a laugh.
He heard the
rumble of one of the freight trains that bisected this neighborhood on the north side of town. He had a fond memory of a diesel rattling bar glasses six months ago just as he laid down a flush to take a $56,320 pot away from three businessmen who were from the south of France. He'd won that pot twenty minutes after the first ante. The men had scowled French scowls but continued to lose another seventy thousand over the course of the rainy night.
"What's your name?"
"Tony Stigler."
"How old're you?"
"Eighteen."
"Even if there was a game, which there isn't, you couldn't play. You're a kid. You couldn't get into a bar."
"It's in Sal's back room. It's not in the bar."
"How do you know that?" Keller muttered. In his late forties, the dark-complected man was as strong and solid as he'd been twenty years ago. When he asked questions in this tone you stopped being cute and answered straight.
"My buddy works at Marconi Pizza. He hears things."
"Well, your buddy oughta watch out what he hears. And he really oughta watch who he tells what he hears." He returned to his lunch.
"Look." The kid dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. Hundreds mostly. Keller'd been gambling since he was younger than this boy and he knew how to size up a roll. The kid was holding close to five thousand. Tony said, "I'm serious, man. I want to play with you."
"Where'd you get that?"
A shrug. "I got it."
"Don't give any Sopranos crap. You gonna play poker, you play by the rules. And one of the rules is you play with your own money. If that's stolen you can hike your ass outta here right now."
"It's not stolen," the kid said, lowering his voice. "I won it."
"At cards," Keller asked wryly, "or the lottery?"
"Draw and stud."
Keller enjoyed a particularly good bite of hamburger and studied the boy again. "Why my game? You got dozens you could pick."
The fading city of Ellridge, population 200,000 or so, squatted in steel-mill territory on the flat, gray Indiana River. What it lacked in class, though, the city more than made up for in sin. Hookers and lap dance bars, of course. But the town's big business was underground gambling--for a very practical reason: Atlantic City and Nevada weren't within a day's drive and the few Indian casinos with licensed poker tables were filled with low-stakes amateurs.
"Why you?" Tony answered, "'Cause you're the best player in town and I want to play against the best."
"What's this, some John Wayne gunfighter bullshit?"
"Who's John Wayne?"
"Christ . . . you're way outta our league, kid."
"There's more where this came from." Hefting the wad. "A lot more."
Keller gestured at the cash and looked around. "Put that away."
The kid did.
Keller ate more burger, thinking of the times when, not much older than this boy, he'd blustered and lied his way into plenty of poker games. The only way to learn the game poker is to play--for money--against the best players you can find, day after day after day. Losing and winning.
"How long you played?"
"Since I was twelve."
"Whatta your parents think about what you're doing?"
"They're dead," he said unemotionally. "I live with my uncle. When he's around. Which he isn't much."
"Sorry."
Tony shrugged.
"Well, I don't let anybody into the game without somebody vouches for them. So--"
"I played in a couple games with Jimmy Logan. You know him, don't you?"
Logan lived up in Michigan and was a respected player. The stakes tended to be small but Keller'd played some damn good poker against the man.
Keller said, "Go get a soda or something. Come back in twenty minutes."
"Come on, man, I don't want--"
"Go get a soda," he snapped. "And you call me 'man' again I'll break your fingers."
"But--"
"Go," he muttered harshly.
So this's what'd be like to have kids, thought Keller, whose life as a professional gambler over the past thirty years had left no room for a wife and children.
"I'll be over there." Tony nodded across the street at the green awning of a Starbucks.
Keller pulled out his cell phone and called Logan. He had to be cautious about who he let into games. A few months ago some crusading reporters'd gotten tired of writing about all of Ellridge's local government corruption and CEO scandals so they'd done a series on gambling (THE CITY'S SHAME was the yawner of a headline). The police were under pressure from the mayor to close up the bigger games and Keller had to be careful. But Jimmy Logan confirmed that he'd checked the boy out carefully a month or so ago. He'd come into the game with serious money and had lost bad one day but'd had the balls to come back the next. He covered his loss and kept going; he walked away the big winner. Logan had also found out that Tony's parents'd left him close to $300,000 in cash when they'd died. The money had been in a trust fund but had been released on his eighteenth birthday, last month.
With this news Keller's interest perked up.
After the call he finished his lunch. Tony delayed a defiant half hour before returning. He and his attitude ambled back into the diner slowly.
Keller told him, "Okay. I'll let you sit in tonight for a couple hours. But you leave before the high-stakes game starts."
A scoff. "But--"
"That's the deal. Take it or leave it."
"I guess."
"Bring at least ten thousand . . . . And try not to lose it all in the first five minutes, okay?"
The moments before a game begins are magic.
Sure, everyone's looking forward to lighting up the sour-smooth Cuban cigars, arguing about the Steelers or the Pistons or the Knicks, telling the jokes that men can tell only among themselves.
But the anticipation of those small pleasures was nothing compared with the one overriding thought: Am I going to win?
Forget the talk about the loving of the game, the thrill of the chase . . . those were all true, yes. But the thing that set real gamblers apart from dilettantes was their consuming drive to walk away from the table with more money than they sat down with. Any gambler who says otherwise is a liar.
Keller felt this rush now, sitting in the pungent, dark back room of Sal's Tavern, amid cartons of napkins, straws and coffee, an ancient Pabst Blue Ribbon beer sign, a ton of empties growing mold, broken bar stools. Tonight's game would start small (Keller considered it penny ante, despite the ten-large admission price) but would move to high stakes later in the night, when two serious players from Chicago arrived. A lot more money would change hands then. But the electric anticipation he felt with big stakes wasn't a bit different from what he felt now or if they'd only been playing for pocket change. Looking over the bare wood table, seeing the unopened decks of the red and blue Bicycle cards stacked up, one question sizzled in his mind: Am I going to win?
The other players arrived. Keller nodded a greeting to Frank Wendall, head of bookkeeping at Great Lakes Metal Works. Round and nervous and perpetually sweating, Wendall acted as if they were about to be raided at any minute. Wendall was the smart boy in Keller's poker circle. He'd drop lines into the conversation like, "You know, there're a total of 5,108 possible flushes in a fifty-two-card deck but only seventy-eight possible pairs. Odd but it makes sense when you look at the numbers." And he'd then happily launch into a lecture on those numbers, which'd keep going until somebody told him to shut up.
Squat, loud, chain-smoking Quentin Lasky, the owner of a string of body shops, was the least educated but the richest man in the room. People in Ellridge must've been particularly bad drivers because his shops were always packed. Lasky played ruthlessly--and recklessly--and would win and lose big.
The last of the group was the opposite of Lasky. Somewhere in his late sixties, lean, gray Larry Stanton had grown up here, worked for another local manufacturer all his life and then retired. He was only in Ellridge part of the year;
winters he spent in Florida. A widower, he was on a fixed income and was a conservative, cautious player, who never won or lost large sums. Keller looked at the old guy as a sort of mascot of the game.
Finally the youngster arrived. Trying to be cool but obviously excited to be in a serious game, Tony stepped into the room. He wore baggy slacks, a T-shirt and a stocking cap and he toted a Starbucks coffee. Such a goddamn teenager, Keller laughed to himself.
Introductions were made. Keller noticed that Stanton seemed troubled. "It's okay. I checked him out."
"Well, it's just that, he's a little young, don't you think?"
"Maybe you're a little old," the kid came back. But he smiled good-naturedly and the frown that crossed Stanton's face slowly vanished.
Stanton was the banker and took cash from everybody and began handing out chips. Whites were one dollar, reds were five, blues ten and yellows twenty-five.
"Okay, Tony, listen up. I'll be telling you the rules as we go along. Now--"
"I know the rules," Tony interrupted. "Everything according to Hoyle."
"No, everything according to me," Keller said, laughing. "Forget Hoyle. He never even heard of poker."
"Whatta you mean? He wrote the rules for all the games," Lasky countered.
"No, he didn't," Keller said. "That's what people think. But Hoyle was just some Brit lawyer in the seventeen hundreds. He wrote this little book about three bullshit games: whist, quadrille and piquet. Nothing else, no Kankakee, pass the garbage, put-and-take stud or high-low roll 'em over. And try going into the MGM Grand and asking for a game of whist . . . . They'll laugh you out on your ass."
"But you see Hoyle books everywhere," Wendall said.
"Some publishers kept the idea going and they added poker and all the modern games."
"I didn't know that," Tony said distractedly. He shoved his geek glasses higher on his nose and tried to look interested.
Keller said sternly, "Sorry if we're boring you, kid, but I got news: It's knowing everything about the game--even the little shit--that separates the men from the boys in poker." He looked him over carefully. "You keep your ears open, you might just learn something."
"How the hell can he hear anything even if he keeps his ears open?" Lasky muttered and glanced at the boy's stocking cap. "What're you, some kind of fucking rapper? Lose the hat. Show some respect."
Tony took his time removing the hat and tossing it on the counter. He pulled the lid off his Starbucks cup and sipped the coffee.