Drawing Dead (12 page)

Camaraderie is a wonderful thing.

So, I returned to the topic, what about this Bruno thing?

Ah. That. Yes. I can see how you might be concerned.

But I told you, said Brendan, it’s okay.

That’s the problem with you, Brendan. Everything’s always okay. Well, this one isn’t okay.

Yes it is, he said.

Oh?

Yeah. I was trying to tell you. They said they’d take care of it.

Who said they’d take care of what?

The Russians. The Bruno thing.

Ah, yes. The trusty Russkies. Take care of it. They didn’t happen to tell you exactly what they were going to do to take care of it, by any chance, did they?

No.

Did it involve kneecaps?

C’mon, Rick.

Dismemberment?

Stop it.

A long stretch in a dark place with concrete floors? Brawny meatballs serving knuckle food for lunch?

All right, all right.

Then I don’t know it’s okay, do I?

Once in a while you could maybe take my word for something.

Don’t take offense, Brendan. But we’re dealing with my life here. Or at least a limb or two. Three, four fingers at a minimum. I’ll take your word for something else, how about that? Tell me where there’s a good M club.

M club?

Yeah, M, without the S. I need somewhere to go get myself a good flogging. Punish myself. For being such a fucking douchebag.

I’m telling you, Rick, it’s going to be okay.

Butch, I said. Can you tell this guy to shut up?

Shut up, Brendan.

There’s a meet in Vegas, said Brendan. Thursday. You guys come. You’ll see.

Okay, Brendan, I said, that sounds great. We’ll go to a meet. That’s what I need. We can purge our anxieties. Reach a higher plane of consciousness. Cross the cultural divide.

Where’s the beer? said Butch.

It’s ten in the morning, Butch, I said. We finished the Jack. Have some Cutty. And anyway, only I start drinking at ten in the morning.

Rick, said Butch.

Yes, Butch?

It’s four in the afternoon.

I
SPENT SOME MORE TIME IN BED
. I wiped the pus from over my eye. I considered my situation. It didn’t take long. I summed it up in one sentence.

Life sucked.

I slept. I woke up. Things hadn’t gotten any better. I watched some football on TV. I watched a movie. Something with an aging Paul Newman and an awful lot of shadows. It depressed me. I slept some more.

When I woke again, it was the next afternoon. My eyes wouldn’t focus. My mouth felt like well-chewed newspapers. My heart was pounding. The pounding obsessed me. Was it real pounding? Or was it my hyperactive hypochondriacal imagination, zoning in on natural
phenomena, inventing life-threatening conditions from woodpeckers hammering on trees in neighboring yards? Or was I really going to have a heart attack? Maybe that was good. It might be a lot less painful than other things that were likely about to happen. Get the fucking thing over with. Get into a hospital bed. Soft nurses with powdery skin, administering to my every need. I got lucky, the insurance would pay for long-term care in a plush facility.

It didn’t make the fear go away. If it wasn’t the heart, it was the other stuff. Either way, I was fucked. I had to do something. Distract myself from the heart thing. Didn’t a heart attack involve pains down the left arm? I felt my arm. The arm was okay. Shortness of breath? Well, come to think about it, I definitely had that. I breathed deeply in and out. That gave me a little relief. But not enough.

Damn it, I was dying.

Well, if I’m dying, I thought, I might as well dress for it. I pulled out my best poker hat, the one with
Dead Money
on it. My blackest pair of wraparound shades. A black t-shirt. The holster. The bomber jacket. I looked for the Mauser. Fuck. Where was it? I scrambled through the junk on my bed. Found the Mauser box under four pizza boxes and a well-thumbed copy of
Gambling Theory and Other Topics
by Mason Malmuth. Somehow I’d managed to put the Mauser in its box. I admired the eagle chiseled on the lid. Took out the pistol. Hefted it. Nice heft. I stuffed it into the holster. A pleasing weight against the chest. Pressing against my heart. Slowing it down. Relaxing it.

I hoped I wasn’t going to have to go through any metal detectors. It’s okay, I told myself. I’m not getting on a plane, and I’m not in high school anymore. I should be all right.

I looked in the mirror.

Damn, I looked dangerous.

Maybe I could fool somebody.

I went to the bank. I took out twenty grand in cash from the Richard R. Redman Client Trust Account. The balance remaining was seven dollars and forty-three cents.

I guess it was an interest-bearing account.

Shit, I thought. I don’t just look like a criminal now, I am one. Well, maybe simply withdrawing the money wasn’t a crime. Though withdrawing it with intent to … aw, hell. It didn’t matter. I’d crossed a line. Not a line I’d ever thought I’d cross. Speeding, sure. Even the odd
DWI—never caught at it, though. But embezzlement of client funds? Jesus. This was a whole new me.

Sure, I intended to pay it back.

But that’s what they all say.

Like any criminal, though, I figured I’d get away with it. Double my money. Re-deposit. Even if the Bar Association audited the account, the fact that the money was missing for a couple of days, I’d get a slap on the wrist. It was the guys who took it and lost it that got creamed. Right? Sure, I said to myself. Not a problem.

To be honest, I wasn’t really that stupid. Unless you measure stupidity by actions. In which case, I was exactly that stupid.

I went outside. I looked up and down the street. It was a quiet, sunny day. Kids were playing stickball in the street. There wasn’t an assassin in sight.

I sighed. I went back to the house. Took off the getup. Lay down in bed.

We were off to Vegas soon. I could win the World Series. All this could be history.

There was still hope.

A
JOLLY BAND OF SELF-DELUDED POKER ASPIRANTS
, we were, heading for Vegas. Indiscretions, misdemeanors, felonies left behind in the vapor trail. The plane ride was giddy. I’d splurged. Used up the last of my frequent flier miles on upgrades. First class. There was something about getting off the ground, all together in that tiny sumptuous world of free cocktails and unrelenting snacks. Something liberating.

Along with the ground, we left the ugliness behind.

Until we got to Vegas, of course. Then another kind of ugliness hit. Like a sack of wet shit. A sack of wet shit with many, many flashing lights. And sequins. Cubic zirconium. And noise. The relentless chime and jangle of the slot machines—the dark matter of Las Vegas. The Eiffel Tower, shrunk and comic-booked. A black, mysterious pyramid that anywhere else might provoke curiosity. Here, it promised … more slot machines. Fat people. More fat people. Badly dressed fat people. Badly dressed fat people dragging annoying children. Badly
dressed fat people hypnotically playing jangling slots. And old people. Many, many old people. The sad and dying desperation of the fingers feeding slots.

The worst thing about it was, they all seemed to be having a good time.

The whole thing gave me a headache.

That was only my opinion, mind you. Brendan thought it was cool. Better than Times Square, even. He really was a kid, still. In so many ways.

Until later. Later, he was just dead.

Are you still a kid, a wife, when you’re dead? Or are you an ex-wife, an ex-kid?

We decided to save some money on the accommodations. We’d rather be off the beaten track anyway. Find some seedy little joint. Just close enough to smell the money. Not so close we’d get swallowed up by the kitsch.

We stopped at a greasy joint along the way. Got some Buffalo wings. Extra hot. With the bleu cheese sauce.

What, I asked, makes blue cheese better if you call it bleu? And shouldn’t it be either blue cheese, or fromage bleu? What’s with these people? Why not call white bread blanc bread? Red peppers rouge?

Shut up, Rick, said Butch.

We had a couple scotches. Doubles. I loved Las Vegas. You could get a double scotch in a greasy spoon. Almost felt like home. Especially when I heard something that sounded like Russians ranting, two booths down. They were loud and drunk. I turned an ear their way.

Yup, Russian all right.

Jesus, they were everywhere.

On the way out, I glanced at them. See if I recognized anybody.

I didn’t.

My heart slowed down.

But I knew it was inevitable. They’d be all over the World Series. A few years ago there were maybe four or five Russians around. Serious players, mostly. Guys you had to be careful of only at the poker table. Now it seemed like there were hundreds.

The Brighton Beach guys would be there. I’d wager on it.

If I had any money to wager.

We found a passable motel off the beaten track, but easy cab distance to the Rio. Where the World Series of Poker would be played.

The Dusty Angel was a joint that once had tried too hard and then, some time ago, had given up trying at all. There was a large circular fountain in the middle of the lobby, empty of water. The pennies had all been stolen. Plastic vines dripped from the ceiling around the fountain. Their leaves were covered with dust. Plastic plants really didn’t require less maintenance than real ones, I mused. I mean, you didn’t have to water them, but you did have to dust them. Well, they weren’t dying, anyway. Though they did have a deceased kind of look about them.

Would you like a non-smoking Queen? asked the innocent young lady behind the counter.

Well, I said, perhaps my friends would. But I’d prefer a room.

The girl seemed a nice young thing, timid, freckled and bucktoothed.

She looked at me like I’d grown a dick out of my forehead.

I put my hand to my brow. No dick there.

Ah, then the dick must be me, I concluded.

She wasn’t angry. She just hadn’t gotten the joke. She patiently explained to me what she’d meant. Non-smoking meant the room. Queen described the bed.

Thank you, I said. That would be fine.

Actually, said Butch, we’d prefer a suite. Three bedrooms. One for each of us. Do you have suites?

She eyed us suspiciously.

Butch smiled his big smile. Brendan smiled his nervous one.

Well, she said, there is the Executive Suite. But it’s very expensive.

We asked how much. She told us. It was less than a single room at the Rio.

Expensive is a relative concept.

And you get what you pay for. The grandly named Executive Suite was done up in that motel beige that does its best to cause no offense. Everything had a distinct air of Scotchgard. Brendan’s room faced the front parking lot. Butch’s faced the rear parking lot. Mine faced … the parking lot next door.

Something to be said for symmetry, I guess. Equality. Fraternity.

But there was a big central living room. A wraparound couch. A wide balcony. And a mini-kitchen. It would do.

We unpacked the four boxes of booze we’d picked up at a package store on the way. We were going to need a lot. After a hard day of poker, you needed to celebrate. Or tranquilize. Depending.

And anyway, only a fool, or Gavin Smith, drinks during the game. We’d need to catch up.

I slouched into the beige wraparound. Butch, cop that he was, took the matching armchair, sat up straight. Brendan joined me on the couch, near horizontal.

Brendan was a bit of a duckling that way. I feared this imprinting thing was going to get out of hand.

But, we had a home. We could stay awhile.

Adventure, I said.

Fame, said Butch.

A million bucks, said Brendan.

Let’s make a plan, I said.

Let’s plan to get drunk, said Butch.

Excellent plan, I said.

I grabbed the glasses. Made us another set of doubles.

Someone had left a yellow and green striped, miniature rubber football between the cushions of the wraparound. I tossed it to Butch. He made a one-handed grab.

Brendan lit up one of his Gitanes. I was going to protest. Gitanes, besides being pretentious as hell anywhere outside of Paris or Amsterdam, stunk up the joint like the house burned down and you’re sitting in the water-soaked rubble. But what the hell. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I was sure the world was full of people who found my ultralight menthols offensive. Several of them had, in fact, identified themselves to me.

I got to tell you, Butch said, I’m not into this chicken-shit preliminary tournament stuff. For me it’s the Main Event or it’s nothing.

I tried to think of a clever response, but the second double scotch had just done a flanking maneuver on my left frontal lobe, and that’s where the wit resides.

I hear you, I said.

It was the best I could do.

I flung the ball out the window into the parking lot below. A gift, I thought, to the local schoolchildren.

A little mitzvah never hurts.

Did they have schoolchildren in Vegas?

Have you caught the cleavage in this town? I said. There’s so much around, it kind of stops meaning anything anymore.

I know what you mean, said Butch.

Another hazard I’m spared, said Brendan.

I don’t know, said Butch, there’s those guys on the trapeze at the Rio, on the way to the elevator. Spandex. Glutes.

To die for, I said.

I wouldn’t know, said Brendan.

You’re not fooling anyone, I said. But you know, now that I think of it, there’s something kind of weird.

What?

Well, you don’t really see any openly gay guys in Vegas. At least, not in the mainstream places. It’s another of those fifties hangover things, I think. Like drinks with little hats in them. Must be still underground. I mean, all those trapeze guys have to have somewhere to go to unwind, don’t they?

There’s more than you might think, said Brendan.

I see, I said. You know more than you’re letting on.

You’ll have to show us, said Butch.

Sure, said Brendan. But I don’t know if it’s really anything you want to see.