Somebody Owes Me Money

“You’re going to have an unfair advantage, you know,” I said. “None of us are going to be able to look at our cards.”

She smiled. “What a nice thing to say.”

“Did you find out anything at the wake?”

“Nothing important. I’ll tell you later.”

“Okay,” I said, and led her into the living room to introduce her to the boys, all of whom acted very natural and nonchalant, except that Doug began puffing so much cigar smoke he looked like a low-pressure system, Leo knocked over all his little stacks of chips, Fred managed to kick over his chair when he blurted to his feet, Jerry began to giggle with the kind of unhappy laugh he makes when he loses, and Sid started to blink very rapidly as though he was trying a bluff.

Finally, though, everybody settled down. Abbie sat between Sid and me and got ten dollars’ worth of chips from Jerry; we filled her in on the house rules; Leo dealt a hand of guts draw; and Abbie took a nice pot with Queens over treys. Welcome to the club.

Two hands later it was her deal. “My favorite game is stud,” she said.

Doug, who wanted to make time with this beautiful girl but hadn’t yet figured out how to go about it in the middle of a poker game, said, “Five-card or seven?”

“Five,” she said. “Naturally.” In the silence following that put-down she shuffled like a pro, slid Sid the deck to be cut, and fired the cards out like John Scarne. My ace up looked good, but it was the ten in the hole that paired with the fourth card that did the trick, and I raked in a small but pleasant pot. It was then my deal, and it just wasn’t possible for me to deal anything but five-card stud.

Nor could anybody else switch, not after that announcement of Abbie’s, so for the next hour or so we played nothing but five-card stud. Abbie did well, playing a fairly conservative game and winning small amounts. My streak slowed a bit, but didn’t entirely turn off. Leo seemed to be holding his own, and Jerry just grew wilder and wilder, like a centrifuge going too fast and spinning all its money away. But the big surprises were Fred and Sid. Fred suddenly settled down and became a tight, sharp, wary, brilliant player, reading bluffs incredibly, betting his hands with the cunning of a tax lawyer, and all in all coming on like a graduate of Gardena. Sid, on the other hand, broke down totally. All math seemed to have left his head, and he played so erratically it was as though he was out of phase with the rest of us and was actually playing his hands five deals too late. Abbie was sitting at his left elbow, and the proximity was obviously more than he could handle. It was a great encouragement to know a gangster could also be human. If he’d been handy enough, I might even have whispered the magic name to him now, though come to think of it erratic people are more dangerous than any other kind, aren’t they? Hmm.

Anyway, along about eleven o’clock, at a time when Abbie was just about to deal, Doug asked her what she did for a living in Las Vegas, was she a dancer or what, and she said, “I deal blackjack.” And began to deal out the cards for stud.

Talk about a bombshell. Nobody looked at their cards at all, everybody just stared at Abbie.

It was Doug who asked the question in all our minds. Taking the cigar out of his face for once, he said, “Are you by any chance a mechanic?”

“We run strictly legitimate in Vegas,” she said. “The house makes its money on the percentages.”

“Yeah,” Doug said, and pointed his cigar at the deck in her hand. “But can you do crooked dealing?”

She looked around at all of us, and reluctantly she nodded. “I know how to do some things,” she said. “I wouldn’t do them, I promise, but I do know how.”

“Like what?” Doug asked her.

She shrugged. “I can deal seconds,” she said. “Or bottoms. I can mark a deck at the table, all that sort of thing.”

“Show us some stunts,” Doug said. He pushed the cards he’d been dealt over toward her. “Show us how it’s done.”

“But what about the hand?” she asked.

“The hell with the hand,” he said, and the rest of us said yes, the hell with the hand. We all pushed our cards toward Abbie, and she shrugged and picked them up and began to show us things.

Fascinating. She spent half an hour going through her bag of tricks, and it was lovely to watch. She had long slender fingers with pale red polish on the nails, and it was really great to see those fingers do things with the cards. Ace of spades on top of the deck, the fingers would flick flick flick, cards would be dealt out to all of us, and there on top of the deck would still be the ace of spades. She palmed cards, she did fake cuts, she did one-handed cuts, she dealt out hands and then stacked the deck while pulling in the discards and then made the stack survive shuffling and cutting and everything else we could think of. She took an old deck Jerry had around and showed us how to mark it with thumbnail indentations on the edges of the cards while the deck was in play. She showed us how to crimp the deck to get it cut where you wanted.