Somebody Owes Me Money

Everybody else at the table tonight was a regular. Fred Stehl, the guy currently head to head with Leo, was a gambling fool, and next to Jerry Allen, was the closest thing to a fish among the regulars. He was a fairly consistent loser, maybe four times out of five, but as he would begin to lose he would also begin to get more cautious, so he rarely lost heavily. The big joke with Fred was his wife, Cora, who was death on gambling and was always trying to track Fred down. Almost every time she’d call during the game, wanting to know if Fred was there, and Jerry always covered for him. A couple of times she’d actually showed up at the apartment, but Jerry hadn’t let her in, and the last time, over a year ago, she punched him in the nose. It was really very funny, though Jerry, with a nosebleed, hadn’t seen the humor in it very much. Fred ran a laundromat on Flatbush Avenue over in Brooklyn, and I guess he had to make a pretty good living at it because on the average he had to drop ten or twenty bucks a week at our two games. Also, he plays the horses a lot. In fact, it was through him I started placing my own bets with Tommy McKay.

Doug Hallman, currently dealing, was a huge hairy fat man who ran a gas station on Second Avenue not far from the Midtown Tunnel. He was a blustery sort of player, the kind who tries to look mean and menacing when he bluffs. Otherwise he was a pretty good poker player and won more often than he lost, and my only objection to him was the twelve-for-a-quarter cigars he smoked all the time.

And finally there was Sid Falco, thin, serious, narrow-headed, probably the youngest guy at the table. A deadly serious poker player, he was full of the math of the game, the only one at the table who could reel off the odds for making any hand given any situation and lie of the cards. He played strictly by the book, which meant very conservative, no imagination, and he was a small but consistent winner. Two or three times a night he’d try a bluff, because the book says you should bluff every once in a while to keep the other players guessing, but his bluffs were always as transparent as wax paper. A bluff being so unnatural to him, he would start acting weird, like a robot going crazy in a science-fiction story. He’d light a cigarette with funny jerky movements, or start telling a joke in a high-pitched voice, or start comparing the time on his watch with the time on everybody else’s watch. His bluffs tended to get called.

The current hand finally finished itself out, and when Fred Stehl bumped Leo Morgentauser’s bet on the last card, everybody knew he’d bought the straight after all. Which was too bad, because everybody but Fred had known for a long time that Leo already had the flush.

Leo, naturally, went into his Actors’ Studio number, frowning at his down cards, at Fred’s up cards, at the chips in front of himself, at the pot, at the opposite wall, and then finally sighing and shaking his head and raising Fred back.

And Fred gave him another raise. Because he’s a gambling fool, because his straight had come in and he couldn’t believe it was a loser, and because it was early in the evening and he hadn’t lost much yet.

And Leo cried, “Hah!” and with a great flourish and an evil grin of triumph he raised Fred back.

Fred’s face was pitiful to see. He understood now he’d been suckered, but Leo’s overacting had to keep him in because there was always that faint remote chance Leo was trying a double reverse bluff, which of course he wasn’t. But Fred had to call.

Leo showed him the flush and pulled in the pot.

Fred didn’t even bother to show the straight. He just folded his up cards and pushed them away.

Leo dealt next, seven-card stud again, the game he’d won at. I got a four and nine down and a Jack up, three different suits, and folded. I spent the rest of the hand watching Sid Falco, who was nursing a pair of showing Queens through a careful methodical hand in which his only competition was Jerry Allen, who looked to have Kings up with no pair showing.

So Sid Falco was a mobster. Or worked for a mobster. Or worked for somebody connected with mobsters. Or something. The point was, did he look any different now that I knew whatever it was I knew about him?

No. He looked like the exact same guy who’d always said he was a salesman for a wholesale liquor company.

Well, maybe that was true. There were still a lot of legitimate outfits that tended to have mob connections. Like bars, for instance, and soft-drink bottlers, and jukebox and vending-machine operators, and liquor wholesalers, and linen services, and real estate management companies, and God alone knows what all. So Sid Falco could have an apparently honest job and he could still be a mobster.

But why didn’t he look different to me? Tougher, maybe, or more dangerous, or dirtier, or more mysterious. Something. But he didn’t.