Dead Man's Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table

Dead Man's Hand

Crime Fiction at the Poker Table

Edited by Otto Penzler

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD LEDERER

An Otto Penzler Book • Harcourt, Inc.

Orlando • Austin • New york • San Diego • London

Copyright © 2007 by Otto Penzler

Introduction copyright © 2007 by Howard Lederer

Missing the Morning Bus copyright © 2007 by Lorenzo Carcaterra

Pitch Black copyright © 2007 by Christopher Coake

One-Dollar Jackpot copyright © 2007 by Michael Connelly

Bump copyright © 2007 by Jeffery W. Deaver

Poker and Shooter copyright © 2007 by Sue DeNymme

Deal Me In copyright © 2007 by Parnell Hall

The Stake copyright © 2007 by Sam Hill

The Monks of the Abbey Victoria copyright © 2007 by Rupert Holmes

A Friendly Little Game copyright © 2007 by Lescroart Corporation

Hardly Knew Her copyright © 2007 by Laura Lippman

The Uncertainty Principle copyright © 2007 by Eric Van Lustbader

In the Eyes of Children copyright © 2007 by Alexander McCall Smith

Mr. In-Between copyright © 2007 by Walter Mosley

Strip Poker copyright © 2007 by The Ontario Review, Inc.

The Eastvale Ladies' Poker Circle copyright © 2007 by Peter Robinson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dead man's hand: crime fiction at the poker table/edited by Otto Penzler.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Detective and mystery stories, American. 2. Poker—Fiction. 3. Gamblers—Fiction.

4. Gambling and crime—Fiction. I. Penzler, Otto.

PS648.D4D385 2007

813'.54—dc22 2007009583

ISBN 9780-15-101277-0

Text set in Century Old Style

Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Printed in the United States of America

First edition

A C E G I K J H F D B

This is for my fellow Gamesmen:

Joe DeBlasio

Rupert Holmes

Douglas Madeley

Todd Parsons

Robert Passikoff

Jerry Schmetterer

Monte Wasch

and, in loving memory,

John Burgoyne

Contents

Foreword Otto Penzler [>]

Introduction Howard Lederer [>]

Mr. In-Between Walter Mosley [>]

Bump Jeffery Deaver [>]

In the Eyes of Children Alexander McCall Smith [>]

One-Dollar Jackpot Michael Connelly [>]

Strip Poker Joyce Carol Oates [>]

The Stake Sam Hill [>]

Pitch Black Christopher Coake [>]

Deal Me In Parnell Hall [>]

Poker and Shooter Sue DeNymme [>]

The Monks of the Abbey Victoria Rupert Holmes [>]

The Eastvale Ladies' Poker Circle Peter Robinson [>]

The Uncertainty Principle Eric Van Lustbader [>]

Hardly Knew Her Laura Lippman [>]

A Friendly Little Game John Lescroart [>]

Missing the Morning Bus Lorenzo Carcaterra [>]

Foreword

The biggest surprise about putting together a collection of stories combining poker and crime is that it has not been done before now. If ever a subject begged to be associated with crime it is gambling, and if you think poker doesn't involve gambling, you are seven years old and think it's fun to play for matchsticks.

For most of my long life, I have played a little poker and always considered it a participatory form of entertainment and pleasure, unlike, say, horse racing, which is best enjoyed as a spectator sport. I don't know about you, but I'd be reluctant to climb aboard one of those seven-foot-high, half-ton beasts as it careers along at a thousand miles an hour—at least.

Poker is a game that seems at its best when played with friends who laugh at your witty repartee, as you laugh at theirs. There has to be some money involved, of course—enough to hurt a little if you lose, enough to add some spring to your step if you win, but not enough to change your life forever in either direction.

I have played in a monthly game for about twenty years, making me one of the newcomers among a group that started nearly fifty years ago. Players have come and gone, of course. Of the originals, two have died, one moved to Florida (which is the same thing), one to California, and a few have merely drifted away. Some Mends of the core players joined for a while and dropped out, to be replaced by newcomers like me. It's a friendly game with most of the guys (and it's all guys, whether by design or happenstance or custom) taking turns as host, the biggest change being that, somehow, beer has been abandoned in favor of Diet Coke and ice water.

With minor variations, this is how I've always known the game of poker in my mind's eye. We're not that different from the players who sit around the table in The Odd Couple. One will bet on every hand, no matter what he's been dealt. Another is more interested in telling stories and listening to them than in playing. A member of the game for about thirty years still asks, at least once a night, if a full house beats a straight. One deals as if each card had a different and peculiar shape, inevitably dropping cards to the floor and dealing some faceup when they should be down, and vice versa. Still another bets each hand—no, each card, in seven-card stud—as if his son's college education depended on it. One plays so badly that, if he says he can't make it to the game, we offer to have a limousine pick him up.

Like so many other elements of life with which I was once familiar and comfortable, poker has changed. Twenty years ago, if someone had been invited, not to play poker but to watch it, he would have asked to be shot instead as a more humane method of execution than being tortured to death.

Today, of course, telecasts of big-money poker are ubiquitous, hugely popular, and, admittedly, addictive. The great players—those with mountain springwater instead of blood and a giant ball-bearing in the place where others have a heart—used to ply their skills clandestinely, slipping into a town, cleaning out the local hotshots, and skedaddling before they realized they had been taken by a professional cardsharp. Now they are like rock stars, though they wear clean clothes and take baths. Even occasional televised-poker viewers recognize Johnny Moneymaker, Annie Duke, Howard Lederer, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, and Amarillo Slim.

There is a lot of money involved in the World Series of Poker and other televised events, and there are high-stakes games in Las Vegas, various Indian casinos, and in the back rooms of bars across the country. And the total gambled in these venues is dwarfed by the staggering sums wagered on Internet poker, which is like crack for compulsive gamblers. Where a lot of money is involved, can crime ever be far behind? In the case of poker specifically and gambling in general, defining crime is as easy and sensible as drawing to an inside straight.

In what must be regarded as Orwellian doublespeak or the height of cynicism, there are laws on the books of every state that make it a crime to gamble for money. There are far more venues in which it is permitted to place a wager in Las Vegas than there are in New York, for example, where it's a lot easier than in Utah, where it's pretty much outlawed. Okay, you figure, while you may not agree with the law, or like it, you understand the concept, which is to protect those who can least afford to lose their hard-earned food and rent money. While those who see it as a form of moral depravity may be a trifle zealous, federal and state regulations against alcohol (at one time) and drugs (currently) and cigarettes (imminently) were also passed for what is perceived as the common good.

Ah, but there is a lot of money involved, so some clever politicians, in consort with those who stood to gain, made an occasional exception. It was horse racing in some states. Bingo and charity gambling nights received some exemptions. Certain cities in Nevada, then New Jersey (and can the rest of the country be far behind?) licensed gambling casinos. Perhaps the most pernicious exceptions are the state-run lotteries, which spend fortunes advertising. The odds against winning the big prize are astronomical, but it's not very expensive to buy a ticket, or two or three, every week, year after year, so the poor plunk down their precious dollars as TV, radio, and newspaper advertising exhorts them to play again and again. Hey, you never know.

Lotteries are a tax on the stupid. The greedy politicians who promote them, wanting always more and more tax revenue, smirk at how cleverly they got away with it. Off-track betting parlors fall into a similar sewer of moral cynicism. Many years ago, when I worked in the sports department of the New York Daily News, I bet (oh, the shame, the shame!) on sports and horse racing. I knew my bookie, who used his profits to send two kids to Notre Dame, and who talked me out of a couple of bets that were beyond my means. He was at risk of being arrested at any moment of any day. The OTB emporium two blocks away flourished as subway and television advertising pimped the glories of betting—just so long as it was with a state-run gambling enterprise.

How, then, are these state-run gambling establishments worse than the Mafia and other hoodlums who make gambling opportunities available to those who want it? Okay, I'll concede that the governor won't knock on your door in the middle of the night and break your arms and legs, but then the crooked noses don't broadcast commercials telling you what a great idea it is to put the rent money on your lucky number, either.

Poker is quite a different kettle of fish from playing a number or putting down twenty bucks on some horse running in a $6,000 claiming race at a distant racetrack, of course. A poker player relies on getting some good cards, without doubt, but also on knowing what to do with them. Understanding a little about the odds, trying to keep track of which cards have been played, reading your opponents' faces and body language, makes it a test of skill, as well as nerve. Those smart dudes (and dudesses) on ESPN (and virtually every other channel, it seems) winning hundreds of thousands, or even millions, at Texas Hold 'Em don't become legends because they're lucky, although that is an element of poker, as it is in life, that should never be discounted.

There are some smart dudes (and, yes, dudesses) on the following pages and, as in real life, some excruciatingly stupid ones. There are some you wish could be in your regular poker game, and some you pray will never ask to be dealt in. The writers who brought them to life are among the most distinguished of their era—the Moneymaker, Duke, Lederer, Chan, Hellmuth, and Amarillo Slim of the mystery-writing world.

You've already tossed in your ante, so enjoy the game.

—Otto Penzler

Introduction

For well over 150 years, poker has been America's table game of choice. The mere mention of the game would conjure images of Mississippi riverboat gamblers, cowboys willing to shoot a man if he thought his opponent had an ace up his sleeve, and brazen Vegas hustlers drinking whiskey and smoking cigars while using marked cards to take the unsuspecting.

While there may be a little truth to these bygone notions, over the last 150 years poker has become inextricably woven into the fabric of the American experience. The game has been played by American presidents and Supreme Court justices. Grandmothers teach their grandchildren how to play on the kitchen table. (I'm betting on Grandma.) Friends use it as an excuse to get together each week to drink a few beers, curse their bad luck, and, most important, strengthen the bonds of friendship that can be so fragile. Ten years ago, the New York Times reported that 50 million Americans played the game at least on a monthly basis.

With all this in mind, one shouldn't be amazed that the game has become such a popular form of television programming. In 2003 the World Poker Tour brought hole-card cameras and high production values to televised poker. Later in that year, the aptly named Chris Moneymaker, a Tennessee accountant, turned a $40 online entry into a seat at the $10,000 buy-in main event of the World Series of Poker, where he beat 839 of the best poker players in the world to become world champion while pocketing $2.5 million. These two events combined to make poker an overnight media sensation.

Of course, within a few months, those same media were already predicting that the poker fad was bound to fizzle in, at most, a year. They failed to realize that poker never gets old. Playing and watching the game always will fascinate because it is more about the people you are playing with than the cards you are dealt. Poker is simply a vehicle that facilitates human connection. Two office mates might learn more about each other in a single evening of spirited poker play than they would in a year of shared meetings and tepid hellos at work. Long before 2003, poker had already worked its way into our language. Colorful, often-used phrases such as blue chip, bottom dollar, pass the buck, aboveboard, and square deal can trace their origins to poker. A game that has so firmly entrenched itself in a culture's psyche is not likely to burn out anytime soon.

Poker has even spawned a rich tradition of nonfiction. Al Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town is a classic, and more recent books like Jim McManus's Positively Fifth Street and Michael Craig's The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King point toward a bright future in the poker nonfiction category. Until now, however, poker fiction has been nearly nonexistent.

With this in mind, Otto Penzler assembled a staggering array of crime novelists and asked each of them to weave the great game of poker into an original short story. John Lescroart writes a story about how the memories of a father's home poker game still haunt the son many years after his death. Rupert Holmes tells a tale of a poker game that is more than it appears. Eric Van Lustbader shows how the game can form the basis for a unique father/daughter relationship. Walter Mosley examines how the game of poker can provide a unique platform for nonverbal communication. And Sam Hill examines a poker pro coming to grips with his own mortality, both physically and professionally. These are just a small sampling of the stories you will find inside the collection.

There were few rules for each writer. How they used the game to further the narrative was entirely up to them. And the results prove that poker fiction can consist of much more than the typical tale full of poker cheats and con men. Clearly, each author has had a different experience with the game, and that experience shines through in unique ways in each story. Poker's varied forms and attributes are all utilized differently by each author. Dead Man's Hand ultimately ends up creating a mosaic of the game that will, hopefully, change how fiction writers use the game in the future. It's a fresh approach that was a long time coming.

Whether you are a poker enthusiast, a crime-novel aficionado, or both, curl up with this collection of exciting single-sitting stories, and you will be rewarded with an array of bluffs, gut shots, and surprise river cards. Enjoy!

—Howard Lederer

Mr. In-Between

Walter Mosley

You can call me Master, I said to the white man behind the broad ivory-colored desk. The stretch of 59th Street known as Central Park South lay far beneath his windows. The street was filled with toy-sized yellow cabs and tiny noonday strollers.

Come again? Clive Ford bristled in his oversized chair.

That's my name—Master Vincent. My mother christened me so that no man could insult me without lowering his own head.

Is there something else they call you? Ford asked.

I eased into the wide-bottomed, walnut client's chair and crossed my legs. I didn't like Ford. He had watery eyes and was short and fat with stubble on his chin. I felt that a man, despite his liabilities, should make the most of himself. And appearance was the easiest blemish to cover.

When I looked in the bathroom mirror I didn't see a handsome or even a good-looking man. Tall and gawky, more gray than brown-skinned, I had big ears and an overbroad nose. But at least I wore nice suits that made me look filled out and hats that partly hid the insult of my Dumbo Lobes.

Call me Mr. In-Between, I said. It fits my nature and my vocation.

Your what?

Job.

Oh. Yes. That's why you're here, isn't it? I wondered how a man like Clive Ford got to be the vice president of some big corporation when he looked like a warthog and didn't even know simple, everyday words.

I have a friend who needs a favor, Ford said.

What friend?

That's not important.

To whom?

Say what? Ford asked.

To whom is the identity of your friend unimportant?

You don't need to know his name. Ford showed irritation at my continued impertinence.

I shrugged.

My friend is owed a great deal of money by a man who wants to pay but who also needs his anonymity.

Now, that's a big word. I gazed out of the high window down across Central Park. It was a beautiful sunny office and a lovely summer's day.

All we need is for you to attend a private poker game in Brooklyn Heights—and win.

I can play, but I can't promise to win. I put my hands on the arms of the chair, indicating that it was time to go.

Game is fixed. You use this—he threw down two tight bundles of what looked to me to be one hundred $100 bills each—and when the night is over, you take either $10,000 or ten percent of the winnings, whatever's more. You don't have to worry about the game being fixed; my client will repay any losses by the other players.

I settled back into the chair. I'd promised Felicia a trip in October and my funds were low. There was my emergency cash, but that was inviolate. Then again, I'd have to look long and hard to find another woman like Felicia. She didn't mind my odd hours or sporadic, sometimes days-long, absences.

I trust you, baby, she'd say in her high voice, but you got to treat me right.

How's the game fixed? I asked Clive Ford.

By an expert, Ford said. All you have to do is play and bet heavy if you have more than two of a kind.

Deuces?

If it's three twos in your hand, you're gonna win—probably.

How much?

No less than a hundred grand.

I didn't like it. But the ugly man was referred by Crow, and Crow was as good an agent as you could have. Still, Clive Ford was ugly and didn't care who knew it. If that was what he was like on the surface, what might there be hidden underneath?

Why don't you exercise? I asked him, unable to keep the disgust out of my tone.

What?

Why don't you go to a gym? You got something wrong with your legs?

What the hell does that have to do with the game tonight? Bernardi told me that you were professional.

I carry things from one set of hands to another. I deliver, but I don't work for just anybody.

My references are good. Play the game, take your winnings, and bring them back to me tomorrow.

What if I lose?

You won't.

I hesitated a moment past the comfort zone of a normal conversation.

Besides, Ford said, you're covered by Bernardi. He's the one I go to if anything goes wrong.

I had never met Bobo Bernardi. He was an ex-professional wrestler who had gone into the private delivery business. He only contacted me through Crow. Crow had a one-room office on 146th Street near Malcolm X. That office was the highway on-ramp that led from Harlem to the rest of the world.

Take this job as a gift, Crow had whispered over the phone. It's the best-payin' gig you evah gonna get.

Ten thousand dollars was a good payday, and cash was the cleanest package to carry. It wasn't like prescription drugs or stolen property; it wasn't like counterfeiters' product or stock-market tips that couldn't be trusted to electronic media. Real money was clean; something the cops could question, but they could not, legally, confiscate.

We're not talkin' counterfeit here, are we, Mr. Ford?

Clean American currency ... Master.

I knew then that Ford was no fool. He saw my vain spot as soon as I told him my name.

We spent the next forty minutes going through the details of the pickup.

Pickup, drop-off. These were the two terms that bound my world, the bookends of my entire professional life. If an FBI agent wanted to speak to a prostitute he'd gotten fond of, I would deliver the valentine. If an informant deep within a criminal organization needed a line out, I was his connection.

With Crow as the router, Mr. In-Between was the express-mail system for a dozen and more shadow worlds. There was nothing that I wouldn't move except for slaves, the condemned, and terrorist communiqués.

I'm not an assassin or an assassin's helper, I told my intern, Mike Peron, a youngish New Yorker of Peruvian descent.

But what if it was a message to some CIA guy in Cuba to wipe out somebody down there? Mike asked.

No. Once you open that door, then anything—and everything—goes.

Mike nodded once and filed the information away. He would make a good bagman one day.

I had a loft apartment in Tribeca that didn't require rent. I'd once done a favor for the landlord, Joe Moorland, which had earned me a lifetime get-out-of-rent-free card.

The ceilings were eighteen feet high, looming over three thousand square feet of mostly empty space.

I like space. One of my favorite pastimes is to stare out over the empty bamboo floor of my home. At the front corner of the loft, I walled off four hundred square feet for an office. This was where Mike and I worked. We could gaze out of the fourth-floor window onto Greenwich Street and discuss the best ways to go about a problem; not that I had any difficulty forming strategies. It's just that sometimes I needed an extra pair of hands, and it was always good to see how someone else would go about getting from Point A to Point B.

And Mike had other qualities. He spoke Spanish and street, and he was small, with a New World Indian look about him. Nobody would ever suspect him on a sophisticated run.

Why you gonna take this job? Mike asked that afternoon as three fire engines blared past on the street below.

It's good money and Crow asked me to do it.

But you're like a shill.

Crow says it's not like that.

When I'm'a meet this Crow?

When you learn to speak proper English, I said.

I know how to talk.

Good. Now all you have to do is implement that knowledge, and the windows of the world will open for you.

Mike glared at me but he didn't argue. He knew that I was the doorway to his dreams of dignity, wealth, and respect. He didn't even have a high-school diploma when I found him hustling for nickels in East New York. Now he'd earned his GED, and no one had stabbed him in over two and half years.

You got that address? I asked him.

Yeah.

Check it out and follow procedure.

If there's trouble ahead?

Blue cell. I gave him the new number.

I had three pay-as-you-go cell phones, each one of a different primary color. I changed the number on one of these phones every month. When I made a change, I'd tell Mike which one to call.

After Mike left on his errand, I went into my apartment and lay down on the chaise lounge I'd bought from my psychoanalyst at the end of six years of deep therapy. I'd spent five days a week on that brown, backless sofa. I bought it for $18,000, telling my analyst, Dr. Myra Golden, that I'd use it when I felt the need to tap into my unconscious mind.

I lay down and closed my eyes thinking about Clive Ford and his mission.

The more I thought, the more I worried that the whole thing was a mistake. Pickup, drop-off—that was my mantra. This poker playing lay outside my area of expertise. But Crow had asked, and $10,000 was heavy cash for a day's work.

The red phone made the sound of Zen bells in the distance.

Hello.

Hey, baby, how you doin?

Felicia.

You know it make me dizzy when you say my name like that, Master, Felicia said.

I told you that you don't have to call me that, girl.

How can I help it, she said in a serious tone, when I know every time I say it, your dick gets hard?