Last Call Page 8

  “It was that Lady Issit, the one who’s been kicking everybody’s ass at the Poker tables,” another man added. “I heard tell a big fat guy shot her right in the face, two or three shots.”

  Ozzie had walked away, shaking the coins in the vanilla wafers box. Scott followed him.

  “She ditched the baby, or Venus would have been behind the moon,” Ozzie said. “And the moon’s still up and Venus is down, so the kid’s still around somewhere, alive.”

  For an hour, while Scott grew more and more impatient and embarrassed, the two of them walked up and down Las Vegas Boulevard as Ozzie kept shaking the box and looking into it.

  And to his own chagrin Scott was not surprised when they heard an infant’s sobbing from behind a row of bushes on the south side of the Sands.

  “Careful,” Ozzie said instantly. The old man’s hand was inside his jacket, and Scott knew he was holding the butt of the Smith & Wesson .38.

  “Here.” Ozzie turned to Scott and passed the gun to him. “Keep it out of sight unless you see somebody coming at me.”

  It was only a few steps to the bushes, and Ozzie came back with a baby, wrapped in a light-colored blanket, in his arms.

  “Back to the car,” Ozzie said tensely, “and don’t watch us, look around.”

  The baby had stopped crying and was sucking on one of the old man’s fingers. Scott walked behind Ozzie, swinging his head from side to side and occasionally walking backward to monitor all 360 degrees. He wasn’t doubting his foster father now.

  It took only five minutes to get back to the car. Ozzie opened the passenger-side door and took the gun, and then Scott got in and Ozzie handed him the baby—

  —and for a moment Scott not only could feel the baby in his arms but could also feel the pale blanket surrounding him, and could feel protective arms sheltering him. Something in his mind or his soul had for years been unconnected, flapping loose in the psychic breezes, and was now finally connected, and Scott was sharing the baby’s sensations—and he knew she was sharing his.

  In his mind he could feel a personality that consisted of nothing but fright and bewilderment. You’re all right now, he thought. We’ll take care of you now; we’re taking you home.

  The link he shared with the infant was fading, but he did catch a faint surge of relief and hope and gratitude.

  Ozzie was behind the wheel, starting the car. “You okay?” he asked, glancing at Scott.

  “Uh,” Scott said dizzily. The link was gone now, or had receded below the level at which he could sense it, but he was still so shaken by it that he wasn’t sure he would not start crying, or laughing, or trembling uncontrollably. “Sure,” he managed to say. “I just…never held a newborn baby before.”

  The old man stared at him for another moment before clanking the car into gear and steering out onto the street. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said, alternately looking ahead and peering at the rearview mirror. “That’s…something I hadn’t…considered.” He gave Scott a brief, worried glance. “You going to be okay?”

  Ask her, Scott thought. “Sure,” he said.

  On the long drive home Ozzie had alternately driven very fast and very slow, all the while asking Scott what headlights he could see behind them. When they got back to the familiar streets of Santa Ana, the old man wasted a full hour driving around in circles, lights off and lights on, before at last pulling up to the curb in front of the house.

  Diana had been passed off as another illegitimate child of Ozzie’s cousin’s. The nonexistent cousin was getting quite a reputation.

  Now Scott Crane parked the Torino in front of Chick Hurzer’s bungalow on Washington Street, and after he turned off the engine and lights, he just sat in the dark car for a few minutes. For the first time in thirteen weeks he was thinking about a different loss than the loss of his wife.

  Ozzie and Diana and Scott.

  They’d been a family, his family, in that old house. Scott had fed Diana, had helped teach her to read, had admired the crayon drawings she had brought home from first and second grades. She had done a drawing of him as a Christmas present in 1968. Once she had broken her arm falling off the jungle gym on the playground, and once some neighborhood kid had thrown a rock at her forehead, and she’d got a concussion; both times he had been miles away but had known about it, and had gone looking for her.

  I never should have gone to the game on the lake, he thought as he impatiently blinked back tears—and Ozzie never should have left me.

  He opened the door and got out. Clear your mind for the cards, he told himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  Just Back from the Dead

  Two hundred and seventy-two miles to the northeast, Vaughan Trumbill and Ricky Leroy sat panting on a couch in the houseboat lounge. The two men stared at the scrawny, wet, naked body of Doctor Leaky, which they’d just dragged out of the bathroom.

  Trumbill, whose bulk took up more than a third of the couch, wiped his huge bald head with a silk handkerchief. He had taken off his shirt, and his gross, pear-shaped torso was a coiled rainbow of tattoos. “The bathroom light and the fan and the water pump,” he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the roar of the generator. “I think he died about the same time the battery did.”

  “Be glad he didn’t drown,” said Leroy. “You’d have to empty his lungs again, like out at Temple Basin two years ago.” He stood up and stretched. “He’ll probably be up at around the same time the battery is. I’m already in a cab from the airport. Half hour, say.”

  The body on the carpet twitched.

  “See?” said Leroy, getting to his feet. “He senses me already.” He fetched a towel from the bathroom and tossed it over the old man’s scarred, featureless pelvis; then he crouched and prodded Doctor Leaky’s cheek and brow. “I hope he didn’t fall on the same side of his face as last time. They rebuilt his skull with coral.”

  Trumbill’s eyebrows were raised. “Coral? Like—like sea-shells, coral reefs, sort of coral?”

  “Right. I hear they’ve got some kind of porous ceramic they use now. Nah, the old jug doesn’t seem to have any chips floating loose.” He stood up.

  “I wish you’d stay away long enough sometime for him to die for good.”

  “It’d take a while; there’re some good protections on that body. And—”

  “I know, cryogenics and cloning.”

  “They’re getting closer every day…and this…jug of my own personal DNA is still unbroken.”

  The naked old body yawned, rubbed its eyes, and sat up. The towel fell away.

  “Looking like shit, though,” observed Trumbill.

  “Welcome back, Doctor,” said Leroy wearily.

  “They get in all right?” asked Doctor Leaky.

  “Everybody’s fine, Doctor.”

  “Good kid,” said the naked old man. He peered at the two men on the couch and scratched the white hair on his sunken chest. “One time on the lake—this must have been, oh, ’forty-seven, I hadn’t got the Buick yet—or—no, right, ’forty-seven—he got a hook in his finger, and—” He gave each of them a piercing stare. “Do you think he cried?” He waved off any replies they might have had. “Not a bit! Even when I had to push the—the part that, the barb, the barb, not even when I pushed it through so I could clip it off. Clip it off.” He squeezed imaginary clippers in the air, and then he stared from Trumbill to Leroy. “Didn’t…even…cry.”

  Leroy was frowning in embarrassment. “Go to your room, you old fool. And put your towel back on. I don’t need to be reminded.”

  Crane got out of the car and carried his plastic 7-Eleven bag across the sidewalk and up the stepping-stones to Chick Hurzer’s front door. The lawn and shrubbery looked cared for. That was good; Chick’s car dealership must at least be making enough money for him to hire gardeners.

  There was garrulous shouting from inside when he rang the doorbell, and then Chick opened the door.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Chick said, “Scarecrow Smith! Good to hav
e you back; this game needs a good loser.”

  Crane grinned. He had always avoided being any evening’s conspicuous winner. “Got room in your fridge for some beer?”

  “Sure, come on in.”

  In the bright hallway he could see that Chick had had a prosperous decade. He was heavier, his face puffy and threaded with broken veins, and his trademark gold jewelry was bigger and chunkier.

  In the living room five men sat around a card table on which a game of Seven-Stud was already in progress.

  “Got us a live one here, Chick?” one of them asked.

  “Deal me in next hand,” Crane said cheerfully.

  He leaned against the wall and watched as they finished out the hand. They were playing with cash now—Crane had always insisted on chips, which tended to make the betting more liberal—and they were apparently playing straight Seven-Stud, no High-Low or twists or wild cards, and the betting seemed to be limited and three raises only.

  Crane wondered if he’d be able to do anything about all this tonight. He had set up this game a quarter of a century ago, out of the remains of a Tuesday night game that had begun to draw too many genuinely good players to be profitable, and he had fine-tuned it to seem loose and sociable to the good losers while actually producing a steady income for himself.

  The hand ended, and one of the men gathered in the pot.

  “Sit down, Scott,” said Chick. “Guys, this is Scott Smith, known as Scarecrow. This next hand is…Five-Draw.”

  Crane sat down and, after the deal, watched the other players around the table look at their cards. This would be his first hand of Poker in eleven years.

  At last, having noted some mannerisms that might, as he got to know the play of these men better, prove to be valuable tells, he curled up the corners of his five cards and looked at his hand.

  Doctor Leaky had managed to tie the towel around himself, but halfway to his room he halted and sniffed the night breeze wafting in off the lake through the open porthole.

  “There’s one,” he said.

  Trumbill had stood up and started toward the old man, but Leroy waved at him to stop. “Just back from the dead,” said Leroy, “he might sense something. What is it, Doctor?”

  “On the hook,” said Doctor Leaky.

  “Oh, hell, you already told us about the hook. Will you—”

  “One of ’em’s on the hook, just now bit it, cards in his hands, blood in the water. The jacks will smell him. But now he’s on the hook, you can smell him, too. You’ve got to find him before they do, and you’ve got to put him safe in the fishbowl.”

  Leroy stared at the old man, who was blinking and gaping around in imbecilic fright as if he expected enemies to swim up out of the depths of the lake. As a matter of fact, there was an enemy deep in the lake—the head of one, anyway.

  After several seconds Leroy turned to Trumbill. “Maybe you’d better do as he says.”

  One of the players had asked to be left out of the hand so that he could call his wife, and he stood now at the telephone in the open kitchen, holding the receiver tightly. He could clearly hear the voices of the players around the table behind him.

  After a dozen rings a man’s voice answered by repeating the number he’d dialed.

  “Hi, honey,” the player said nervously, “I’m gonna be late, I’m playing Poker.”

  “Hi, sweetie,” said the voice in a mock-gay tone. “Poker, eh?” There came the clicking of an electric keyboard. “Got a lot in that list. You got any cross-references? A name?”

  “Hey, come on, honey, I can’t get mushy; this is the only phone here; these guys can hear me.”

  “Got you. Give me a category or something then, unless you want to listen to about a hundred names.”

  “That’s your dad all over,” said the player with a forced laugh. “Goes fishing all the time but doesn’t catch anything.”

  “Fishing and poker,” said the voice. “To me that sounds like that poker champ in Gardena who goes sports fishing all the time in Acapulco; matter of fact, I’ve heard he can’t catch anything.” There were several measured clicks on the keyboard. “I’ll know it when I see it…here we go, the guy’s name is Obstadt, Neal.”

  “That’s it, dear, and it’s worth fifty thousand dollars.” He glanced toward the game room and added, “The equity in that place, you know, after I added on that guest room and all—”

  “And the aluminum siding and all the goddamn painted lawn squirrels, I know.” There was more clicking. “There’s only one under Obstadt for that kind of money—a poker player, last seen in ’80, name of Scott ‘Scarecrow’ Smith, son of Ozzie Smith, last seen in ’69. I see Obstadt has been distributing pictures throughout L.A. and San Diego and Berdoo and Vegas since January of ’87. That’s your basis?”

  “Not really, it’s an old picture. Mainly it was the name.”

  “He’s playing as Scarecrow Smith?”

  “Right.”

  “That looks like a score for you, honey. Build: tall…medium…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Medium build. Weight: fat…average…”

  “Okay.”

  “I hope the clothes are distinctive. Hair: black…brown…blond…gray…”

  “Yup.”

  “Jacket—”

  “No.”

  “Saves us time. Shirt: plaid…”

  “Right. For this weather.”

  “Gotcha, flannel. Jeans with that?”

  “Yeah. And what you’d figure.”

  “Say if it ain’t sneakers. Okay. Is that enough?”

  The player turned toward the table and looked at the other men. “It’s enough. Listen, hon, you don’t have to worry about that. We’re at Chick Hurzer’s house, on Washington in Venice.”

  “Was gonna be my next question.” Clickety-clickety click. “Okay, he’s in the book; I don’t need the house address. What’s your code number?”

  “Four-six-double-three-two-oh.”

  The voice repeated it slowly, saying “zero” instead of “oh.” “That’s correct?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  The player could hear rapid clicking now. “I got you in,” the voice said. “Call the payment number a week from now. If it checks out to be the right guy, you got forty-five thousand bucks coming.”

  The game went well for Crane. The extra dozen decks of cards encouraged players to call for a new deck after a loss, a good start toward getting some superstition back into the game, and the sandwiches, when he brought them out at midnight, were a good enough diversion to produce a couple of instances of positively idiotic play. And there were a couple of doctors at the table, and doctors always had a lot of money and played loose, staying in with just about every hand; and nobody was completely sober, and Scott was apparently the only one who had any concerns about money, and by the time the game broke up at two in the morning he had won more than two thousand dollars. That was two payments on the mortgage right there, and he could certainly find another game somewhere within the next couple of days.

  Chick Hurzer had been a bigger winner and was now drinking scotch. “So where have you been, Scarecrow?” he asked jovially as people were standing up and stretching and one man turned on the television. “You’ve got time for a drink, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Scott, taking a shot glass. “Oh, here and there. Honest work for a few years.”

  Everybody laughed—one of the players a little tensely.

  Obstadt’s man had been apologetic on the telephone about its being short notice, but Al Funo had laughed and assured him that it was no inconvenience; and when the man had started to discuss payment, Funo had protested that old friends didn’t argue about money.

  Sitting in his white Porsche 924 now, waiting for Scott Smith to emerge from this Chick Hurzer person’s house, Funo tilted down his rearview mirror and ran a comb through his hair. He liked to make a good impression on everyone he met.

  He had removed the Porsche’s back window, but
with the heater on the car was warm enough, and it idled so quietly and smokelessly that a pedestrian walking past it might not even know the engine was running.

  He was looking forward to meeting this Smith character. Funo was a “people person,” proud of the number of people he could call his friends.

  He watched alertly as half a dozen men ambled out through the front door of Hurzer’s house now into the glare of the streetlight, and he was quick to pick out the gray-haired figure in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Other people were shaking Smith’s hand, and Funo wished he could have joined in the camaraderie of the game.

  He got out of his car and began sauntering along the sidewalk, smiling, not minding the waterfront chill in the salty air. Ahead of him the men had separated, heading for their cars.

  Smith seemed to be aware of Funo when he was still some yards off along the sidewalk; he had his hand by his belt buckle, as if about to tuck in his loose shirttail. A gun? Funo smiled more broadly.

  “Hey, pal,” Funo said when he was close enough for an easy, conversational tone to be heard, “have you got a cigarette?”

  Smith stared at him for a moment, then said, “Sure,” and hooked a pack of Marlboros out of his pocket. “There’s only three or four in there,” Smith said. “Go ahead and keep the pack.”

  Funo was touched. Look at the car this guy’s driving, he thought, a beat old Torino covered with dust, and he gives me his last cigarettes!

  “Hey, thanks, man,” he said. “These days it’s damn rare to meet someone who’s possessed of genuine generosity.” He blushed, wondering if the two gen’s in his last phrase had made him seem careless in his choice of words. “Here,” he said hastily, digging in the pocket of his Nordstrom slacks, “I want you to have my lighter.”

  “No, I don’t need a—”

  “Please,” Funo said, “I have a hundred of them, and you’re the first gen—the first, uh, considerate person I’ve met in twenty years in this damn town.” Actually Funo was only twenty-eight and had moved to Los Angeles five years ago, but he had found that it sometimes helped to lie a little bit when making new friends. He realized he was sweating. “Please.”