Drawing Dead (3 page)

“Check it out. Right off the end of my dock,” he said. “Caught it on a Dardevle.”

Crow looked at the photo. There was Ozzie, skinny white legs sticking out the bottom of his shorts, long blond hair under a Minnesota Twins baseball cap, standing in front of his cabin on Crook Lake, holding up a walleye that looked to be over six pounds. Crow was impressed. He imagined himself there, throwing out a line, reeling it in nice and steady. Right about then, Crow made his big mistake.

He said, “I wouldn't mind that. Get myself a cabin on a lake, walk out the door, throw out a line, catch a little breakfast. . .” He realized too late what he had done.

Ozzie laughed and put his wallet away. Zink was scooping in the pot, having won it with queens over sevens. Crow stared down at his chips, hoping without hope that his offhand comment had gone unnoticed.

“So what kind of place are you looking for, Joe?” asked Jimbo Bobick, the realtor from Brainerd, his wide smile shining across the table like the headlight of an approaching train. “I mean, are you set on having some shoreline, or just looking for something near a good fishing lake?”

“It's your deal, Jimbo,” said Zink. “You here to play cards or sell cabins?”

Jimbo laughed. “Both,” he said, riffling the deck. Jimbo Bobick was a big man with a big laugh. He loved to gamble, and he didn't mind losing. “Good hand,” he would say to the winner each time he watched his money migrate across the table. He was down two thousand, give or take a hundred, which was less than he'd dropped at the Minneapolis Golf Club that afternoon. Jimbo was wearing his lucky green blazer. It wasn't bringing him much in the way of cards, but it had delivered Joe Crow. He squared up the deck and offered the cut to Knox, who waved it away.

“You ever been up around the Brainerd area?” Jimbo asked Crow as he began to deal two cards to each player. “Beautiful country up there. Lakes full of fish, lots of nice folks. Ozzie loves it, don't ya, Oz?”

“Spend every weekend up there,” Ozzie said. “It's the only chance I get to relax.”

“What it is, it's the only chance you get to look at your porn collection,” said Zink. “You guys should see the skin mags this guy's got stashed away up there. A whole room full of the things. Invites me up there to catch a stringer of walleye, and the first thing he does is show me his porn collection.”

Ozzie shrugged. “Ginny made me get 'em out of our house,” he said, referring to his most recent live-in girlfriend.

Jimbo laughed. Ozzie's porn collection was legendary, his pride and joy. And it was true—Jimbo had seen it—it almost filled the back room of his three-room log cabin. “That's one of the advantages of having a second home,” Jimbo said. “Two separate life-styles. You never have to give anything up.” He watched Crow, looking at him closely. Nothing.

“Yeah, except now Ginny's into this do-everything-together thing,” Ozzie said. “Now she wants to go fishing with me. Next thing you know, she'll be here playing poker. Anyway, my porn collection has got to go. Any of you guys interested?”

“Just what I need,” Zink said. “A room full of used pornography.”

“You never know,” Frank Knox said. “It might come in handy.”

Jimbo noticed that Crow was riffling his chips, not participating in the banter. Joe Crow never had a lot to say. His sense of humor was too dry for most of the players—although Zink seemed to find him amusing—and he didn't know how to make small talk. Jimbo had noticed that before about Crow: the guy was there to play cards. Jimbo, being in the people business, was curious about Crow. He'd heard stories about him from the other players, but he had yet to separate the true from the untrue. Physically, Crow was on the small side—five feet eight inches and maybe a hundred fifty pounds—but he was usually perceived as being larger, especially when sitting at the card table. His stolid, expressionless face—dark-brown eyes and a wide, straight mouth—gave him a massive, dense look. At times he reminded Jimbo of a cigar store Indian, but his features were Irish—more petrified leprechaun than Native American. Poker face. The only part of him that didn't fit the picture was his hair—brown, black, sometimes with a hint of red, depending on the light—always sticking out, always in need of a trim. Jimbo didn't like or dislike him. He thought of Joe Crow as a force, like water in a river, or like the weather. The guy just didn't have a lot of personality.

According to Ozzie, Crow was an ex-cokehead. Ozzie claimed that Crow had recently graduated from the cocaine program at Saint Mary's. Jimbo chose not to believe this. Crow was not his idea of a drug addict. Ozzie—one of the world's great bullshitters—also claimed that Crow was an ex-cop. Jimbo found it easier to believe the cop story than the cocaine story. In any case, it wasn't important. Whatever Crow was now, or had once been, he was starting to look a lot like a guy who was in the market for some lakeshore.

Jimbo pointed a forefinger at Zink. “Bet 'em, Zinker.”

Zink checked. Crow looked at his cards and bet twenty dollars. Ozzie folded. Al Levin twitched as if he had received a mild electric shock, then called. Frank Knox considered his cards, frowned, shrugged, and called. Jimbo laughed and added his forty dollars to the pot. He was holding a pair of deuces.
Deuces never looses
, he said to himself. “A lot of really nice properties have come on the market this year. The recession, you know.” He flopped three cards faceup on the table. Ace, jack, eight. “Your bet, Crow.”

What Jimbo needed was a toehold. “They've been pulling fifteen- pound northerns out of Gull all summer,” he said.

Crow bet forty dollars but gave no sign he cared about the size of the northern pike in Gull Lake. Al Levin and Frank Knox immediately folded. Jimbo laughed, called Crow's bet, and turned a fourth card. Another jack.

In an average year, Jimbo Bobick lost about twenty thousand dollars playing poker, blackjack, and golf. Fortunately, he earned ten times that selling lake properties in the Brainerd area, where a quarter of Minnesota's ten thousand lakes were located. Some of his fattest commissions had come from guys he had met while gambling. He got down to the Twin Cities every couple of weeks, usually got into at least one card game at Zink's, and in the past two years had sold properties to both Frank Knox and Ozzie LaRose. The Minnesota dream of a cabin on a lake was alive in every man. Jimbo Bobick believed this the way he believed in heaven and hell. His job was to find the dream and to nurture it.

“I had this one place, a beautiful three-room cabin.” Jimbo watched Crow's eyes carefully as he said, “On an island.” He saw Crow's pupils enlarge slightly. Jimbo smiled. He should have known—Crow was an island guy. He sat back in his chair. “You don't see those island properties come on the market very often. I sold it to a guy who uses it about one week out of the year. Beautiful view. I'll go forty.”

Crow raised. Jimbo called and turned the final card over. A deuce.

Crow bet eighty dollars. Jimbo looked at his hand—a full house, deuces over jacks—and considered his next move. “You ever think about owning your own island, Crow?”

“It's your bet,” Crow said.

“I know. I'm thinking. You know, there is a guy I know, has an island on Tenmile. I think his business is in trouble. I'll talk to him.”

Crow shrugged. “You going to raise, call, or fold?”

Jimbo threw his hand into the discards. “It's all yours, my friend.” He watched Crow rake in the pot. “Listen, how about if I show you a few of these places, Crow? You could drive on up, and we'll go check out some properties. What do you say?”

“Sure,” said Crow, stacking his chips. “Maybe we could do that sometime.”

Jimbo smiled. There was no better time to push a sale than when the other guy thought he had you by the nuts. Joe Crow had just won himself one hell of an expensive pot.

Richard
Wicky drove around the block twice, finally squeezed his Mercedes into a spot between a black Jaguar and a beat-up Toyota. He had to give the Jag a little shove to get in, but what the hell. He'd paid a premium for those big German bumpers; might as well use them. He fumbled in the glove box with his right hand, came out with a sterling-silver coke vial, and treated each nostril to a little toot. He looked at his new watch—a Rolex President—sniffed, screwed the top back onto the coke vial, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, got out of the car, and inspected his parking job. The back end of the Mercedes was sticking out a couple of feet, but not too bad. He locked the doors and headed back up the sidewalk toward Club 34. The sky was beginning to lighten; the streets were deserted.

The outside door leading to the upstairs apartment was unlocked. Wicky climbed the wooden staircase, telling himself he was feeling lucky. Wicky believed in luck, especially at the card table. He believed that winning at poker came half from being able to read opponents and half from luck. He considered himself a lucky person, and he could read faces as if they were Teleprompters. He tried not to think about the fact that he almost always lost. When he did think about it, he attributed the loss to a fluke, or a single expensive mistake, or a hole in his luck.

In business, Wicky's combined luck and perceptive abilities had served him well. His clients were still buying everything he recommended, and this new thing he had gotten into—the Galactic Guardians Fund—was bringing in some sweet commissions. He was even thinking about buying some of it for himself. Business was good. But in other areas, specifically those surrounding his marriage, his luck was hurting. His wife, he was sure, was fucking some other guy. Married two years, and already she's going out on him. Two o'clock in the morning, he gets home and she's gone. He'd sat around the condo for three hours thinking about it, drinking beer, watching cable, chipping away at a quarter-ounce chunk of coke, and finally had to get out of there, hoping to find the game at Zink's still going strong.

He knocked on the upstairs door. A moment later, Zink opened it. He looked tired, which was normal for him at any time but especially at dawn, after a night spent playing cards. “Hey, Dickie, come on in.”

Wicky always introduced himself as Rich, but few people called him that for long. Just about all of them, including his wife, called him Dickie. Once, when he complained, she told him, “You just don't look like a Rich, Dickie. You look like a Dickie. My little Dickie-poo.” He was a lumpy man, shorter and wider than average, with coarse yellow hair and pale-blue eyes that never stopped moving.

Wicky looked past Zink at the other players. Frank, Al, Ozzie, Jimbo the realtor, and Joe Crow. “So who's got all the money?” He walked up to the table and scanned the stacks.

Zink inclined his head toward Crow, who was in the process of showing Frank Knox a winning hand, all hearts.

Wicky wrinkled his brow. “Don't you ever lose, Joe?”

Crow shrugged.

Wicky took a chair and pushed it between Crow and Zink. “You're looking good, buddy,” he said, looking at Crow's pile of chips and cash. “What does a guy have to do to get a stack like that?”

Crow shifted his chair to put more space between them. “Live right,” he muttered, the standard poker player's response to Wicky's question.

Ozzie said, “Nice clock, Dickie.”

Wicky shot his cuff and held the Rolex out for all to admire. “You like it?”

Everybody liked it.

Al Levin was shuffling the cards. Al claimed that seven good shuffles guarantees a random mix of cards. He had read it in
Scientific American
. “You in, Dickie?”

“I'm in.” He pulled out a sheaf of mixed bills and laid them on the table. “Reel 'em, Alan.”

Al Levin offered the cut to Ozzie, then dealt in his characteristically twitchy manner. Levin had a nervous tic that showed up in every part of his thin, dry body. He was a numbers guy, and a good one, but it made Wicky itchy just to sit at the same table. Wicky looked at his cards—the jack and ten of clubs. Not bad. Knox bet, Jimbo and Zink folded, Wicky called.

Crow raised fifty dollars. Wicky examined Crow's dark Gaelic features. Of all the guys he played cards with, Crow was the most difficult to read. Something about him made you see what you wanted, or expected, or feared. He couldn't read the man's cards for shit, but he was working on it. People were his specialty.

Ozzie folded. Wicky paid to see the flop—king, four, four. He checked, then folded when Crow bet another fifty. Frank Knox raised a hundred. Wicky was sure that Frank Knox's raise was a bluff. Crow looked again at his cards, then re-raised another hundred. Did Crow have a hand? Wicky had no idea. He watched Crow's still, calm face and let himself imagine Crow as angry, frightened, sad, confident, proud, nervous…. All of those things were there; he had only to think it, and the emotion would fit itself to Crow's features. The man was like a mirror. He had the perfect poker face—not a face that displayed nothing, but a face that reflected the hopes and fears of the other players.

Wicky, who considered himself a master of practical psychology, felt as though he had finally created a working theory to wrap around the enigma of Joe Crow. Not that it would help his game.

Frank Knox said, “Shitsky.” He picked up his two cards, looked at them, looked at Crow's raise, shrugged, and threw them away. Crow pushed his own hand into the discards and scooped in the pot.

Wicky frowned—now he would never know. Crow rarely had to show his cards, and when he did they were usually winners. In his quiet way, he dominated the action. Wicky put his hand on Crow's shoulder. “You're one hell of a cardplayer, Joe.”

Crow turned his head toward Wicky, who saw, or thought he could see, that if he didn't move his hand quickly he might lose it. Wicky lifted his hand and shook his head, smiling. “Joe, if I didn't know you so good, I'd think you didn't like me.”