Hard Case Crime - 28 - Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780857683410
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2006-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

11

Friday I sold a unit and a half of our current syndication during the morning without leaving my desk.

I had a lazy lunch in the Panmore Men’s Grill with Jack Kimball, another of Perry’s salesmen. We ate Welsh rarebits and drank Dutch beer and talked shop for two hours. I spent the afternoon looking over some brochures on new syndicates Perry was thinking about handling. There was a bowling alley in Baltimore with a fifteen percent payout, a shopping center in New Rochelle, a St. Louis apartment house. I thought the shopping center offered the safest return and would be the easiest to push, and I typed up a memo to Perry with my recommendation. At five o’clock he handed me a check for my commissions on sales to date. Even with the five-hundred buck advance chopped off, the sum was a decent amount.

I won money at the poker game that night. We played at Ed Hart’s place in a downstairs game room similar to Murray’s. I wound up eighty bucks ahead, mostly by honest play with a few assists from sleight-of-hand. The cheating, such as it was, was almost automatic. Like the palmed-off five spot at the lunch counter a week or so earlier. That sort of habit is a hard one to break. I played fairly well and the cards ran my way, so even without a little of the best of it I would have cleared fifty bucks or so. The cheating was worth the extra thirty to me.

Saturday I slept late, soaked in a tub, cracked a fresh fifth of scotch, drove around town aimlessly, took Barb to dinner. We wound up going to a movie, finally. I held her hand through the show, and now and then she gave me a little squeeze.

Would I hold hands with Joyce? No, of course not. We might leave the movie in a hurry and find a hotel room. We might watch the movie all the way through without any contact at all. But we would never sit holding hands in a theater balcony.

We were too damned hip for that.

After the show I suggested going some place and drinking. Barb said she had scotch at her place. “The seats are comfortable and the privacy can’t be beat,” she said. “And the prices are eminently reasonable, Bill.”

So at her house we sat on her couch and drank her scotch out of coffee mugs because she couldn’t find appropriate glasses. We pretended it was Prohibition and we were in a subtle speakeasy. She did a terrible imitation of Walter Winchell announcing The Untouchables, and I poured fresh scotch into our cups, and we put Ella Fitzgerald records on the player.

I don’t remember who suggested dancing. We wound up giving it a whirl. I held her a little closer than necessary and clomped around ponderously and tried to remember how long it had been since I’d done any dancing. That had been a big thing with Carole before we had been married. After the marriage had ended I didn’t have anyone to dance with.

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