The Only Girl in the Game (13 page)

“It isn’t that.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m just doing a favor for an old friend. That’s all.”

Al studied him with quiet amusement. “Sure, kid. We understand each other. Tomorrow your pal gets the chance to make his pitch. Some time tomorrow afternoon. I know some guys who’d like to listen to it. They got to have time to get here. I’ll let you know when to set it up. You want to sit in?”

“Not particularly.”

“Tell your buddy the wheels are starting to turn. Okay? Now why don’t you go out and have some fun and drinks with the kids while I make a couple calls?”

“Some other time, Al. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“You’re way ahead of the game already, so why don’t you relax a little?”

When he got back downstairs he called Temp’s suite, but there was no answer. He put a note in a sealed envelope and left it in Temp’s box at the desk. He had a very late lunch after a long and bitter conference with a food wholesaler who had been trying to squeeze George Ladori for special kickbacks. He was able to take a break at four o’clock and make a quick change to swim trunks and go out to the pool.

When he located Betty he walked over to her and said, “Why don’t you pick the same place every day?”

“I love having you hunt for me, darling. It keeps you off balance. I finished breakfast not ten minutes ago. I am truly a slob.”

“A lovely slob, with little telltale shadows under her eyes.”

“You don’t exactly look as if you were bristling with energy yourself, friend.”

“Hell, something woke me up at dawn, and it was quite a
little while before I could get back to sleep. You know how it is.”

“No I don’t, really. How was it?”

“Keep that up, and we could get thrown off the premises for bad behavior.”

“Braggard!”

He noticed the towel spread on the grass by her chair. “You found a friend?” he asked, with an edge of annoyance in his voice.

“Your friends are my friends. It’s Temp. He’s swimming at the moment. Vicky has gone shopping. He’s much nicer sober. But, then, aren’t we all? Did you talk to Al?”

“It’s all set up for tomorrow afternoon.”

Temp joined them, grinning, thumping the side of his head to get the water out of his ear. “You showed up too soon, Hugh. I was just about to start the sweet talk.”

“She’s listened to experts. She doesn’t need beat-up types from Nassau.”

“I’ll
decide what I need, gentlemen.”

“Get the note?” Hugh asked.

“Yes, and thanks. Today I’ve got my confidence back.”

Hugh looked at him. Nothing bad would happen to this brown man who sat in the expensive poolside sunshine, droplets of water shining against the brown of his shoulders. Temple Shannard would not be defeated.

Homer G. Gallowell of Fort Worth, Texas, arrived in Las Vegas in his own Piper Apache at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, piloted by a prematurely bald young man called Scotty. Homer had dozed most of the way. Scotty felt more at ease when the old man was asleep. It seemed a little better, somehow, than having him sitting there beside you not saying a word, just sitting and staring straight ahead, never looking down or to the side.

In his four years of employment by the Gallowell Company, this was only the second time he had ever piloted the old man himself, and the first time he had ever been alone with him in so small a ship. Parker, the chief pilot, had given Scotty his instructions.

“You fly by the book, boy. You run that check list like you had an inspector with you. And in your landing patterns, you make those turns loud and clear. You pretend like you’re wheeling seventy people commercial, and you’ll have no trouble. Don’t you say a word to him you don’t have to say. And for God’s sake, don’t try to help him in or out of the airplane.
When he says something to you, you give him the shortest damn answer you can come up with, and give it fast. When he gives orders, you listen so good you hear everything.”

“You make him sound rough, Joe.”

“Man, I mean he
is
rough. He’s got twice as many million dollars as you have years on you, and he didn’t get ’em by being a nice guy, that’s for sure. He’s an old lizard, baking hisself in the sun, dreaming about foxy tricks, and he doesn’t miss a thing goes on around him. He’s tough and spry as an old lizard too.”

“Why’s he want to go to Vegas?”

“How do I know? Maybe he owns it. He could have owned the whole place for years and nobody would ever know about it. He pays smart men four times what he pays us just to keep his name
out
of the papers, Scotty. You just bear down on the flying, and let
him
think about why he has to go to Vegas.”

As they came over the mountains Scotty was thinking how little the old man looked like the traditional image of the rich Texan. He was spare, fairly tall, and he had the look of one who had been powerful in his youth, but the years had shrunken the slabs of muscle to hard gristle and string. He wore a rusty black suit and a vest with a gold watchchain looped across it, and steel-rimmed glasses that rested in a slightly crooked way on the sharp old beak of a nose. He wore high black shoes, bulbous at the toes, a cheap bright necktie soiled in the area of the knot from many tyings, and a black ranch hat, old and worn and dusty. He had the hard, lean, grooved, wind-bitten face of a man who has spent the front half of his life sleeping on the ground. His hands, thickened by the toil of years ago, rested on his thighs, scarred, red-knuckled, looking too big for the rest of him.

See him in a bus station, Scotty thought, and you’d figure him for an old ranch hand on his day off. You’d never guess about all that damn oil and more land than he’s ever had a chance to ride across, and the other stuff they say he owns—newspapers, radio and television stations, chemical companies down on the Gulf, oil-well-supply outfits. You could never guess it from the way the old son of a bitch looks.

They say he married once and she took sick a year later and lived twelve years in pain before she died, and that was the end of it for him. They say if you cross him, he’ll wait until he’s got you set up just the way he wants you, and then he’ll grind you down into rubble. Power is what he lives off,
they say. He eats it and drinks it and rolls in it. Most times he travels with all those serfs around him, bowing down, yessiring, doing the paper work for his big deals. They say he used to have a U.S. Senator he tamed and treated Like a dog. But sometimes, like now, he moves alone.

Scotty made his tower contact, waited his turn, brought the plane around and set it down, and taxied to where they told him.

The old man dropped down lightly and Scotty handed his old square-cornered suitcase down to him.

“You get the aryplane checked over good and gassed to go and put in a place that suits you, Scott. I’m going to be at the Cameroon. You locate you a place and phone the name of it and phone number to the Cameroon for them to put in my box so I can get you when I need you. You stick close by that number up to five in the evenin’ every day, and from then on do like you please because we wouldn’t be leavin’ later. Don’t get yourself too drunk to fly the aryplane, and beyond that I don’t give me a damn what you do.” He took a long black old bill case out of the inside pocket of his jacket and gave Scott a hundred-dollar bill. “You’ll charge gas to the company, and you’ll get expenses back from the company, and this here hondred dollars is to amuse yourself with on account of you kept your gawddamn mouth shut and flew good and steady.”

By the time Scotty could open his mouth to thank him, the old man was fifteen feet away, lugging the heavy bag without apparent effort, heading toward the cab rank at the terminal.

As Homer Gallowell rode toward the Cameroon in the cab, he felt a cold and savage excitement in his belly, strong enough to outweigh his own dry amusement at himself. It had been too many years since he had felt this way. He was walking right back into the polished machine that had taken one fifth of a million dollars away from him the last time he was here. He had come to Vegas the previous time because it had been selected as neutral ground, and there had been some dickering to do. He had not been interested in the gambling. He had found himself with unexpected time on his hands, and he became interested in the mechanics of the crap table as he watched, with contempt, the sweaty fools being parted from their money. In time he thought he saw a way the odds could be beaten, and so he had tried it and suffered a humiliating defeat. The damage to his cold pride had hurt much worse than the loss of the money.

And now he had come back, prepared for a laboratory experiment in the methods that had made him an enormously powerful man. And what was sweeter to him was the knowledge that he was bucking somebody else’s system. It had been too many years since he’d had a chance to do that. Men challenged him from time to time, but he knew all the uses of power in the areas where he was challenged. They had to play his game, and their defeat was so inevitable it often bored him. Long long ago he had whipped other men at their own games, and the memories of those times were still sweet. This was a rather childish opportunity to try it again.

The men at the Cameroon would be delighted to see such a valuable sheep come back for a second shearing, he knew. And they had no reason to suspect it would not go exactly as it had gone the previous time. Possibly they thought him senile. And, he thought, possibly I am. And this return visit is a sign of it.

But there were some things they could not know. They could not know that he had installed a crap table at the old ranch south of Dallas and he had spent a few hundred hours estimating odds and methods of play before calling in one of the bright young mathematicians from the Gulfport outfit. Once the young man got it through his head he was to take this seriously or get fired, he settled down. He compiled figures, took them back and checked them against the electronic calculator at Gulfport, then came back to the ranch.

The problem was to find the most plausible way to win three hundred thousand dollars with the smallest chance of loss. All systems of doubling up except one were eliminated, and that one would only work if Homer Gallowell could achieve a very generous hike in the limit on any one bet. After intensive study, that system was also eliminated. The critical factor seemed to be the provable assumption that the more bets placed, the better the house percentage against the bettor. Patient and bewildered ranch hands, who wondered if the old man had begun to lose his mind, threw dice for hours. The opinions of professional gamblers were secretly sought. And the final plan was an apt combination of the sterility of higher mathematics and the superstitions of the accomplished gambler.

It had as good a chance of working as Gallowell had hoped for. It depended on his exercise of a rigid discipline. He knew he would not deviate from the program in any way. Yet, in spite of all the planning and all the caution, the casino might take his money just as easily as before. It was that
chance which kept him in a state of cold anticipation as the cab pulled up under the marquee of the Cameroon. He had grown weary of sure things in the last decade.

He was treated with a bored indifference right up until the moment he signed the registration card, and then the red carpet was unrolled with awkward haste. Yes sir, Mr. Gallowell, sir, your suite is all ready, sir, this way, sir.

The spacious beauty of the suite amused him. Had he been paying for accommodations, he would have picked the smallest, cheapest room in the house. This was not so much frugality as it was an indifference to his surroundings. He needed a roof, a bed, a toilet, a tub, a sink, a chair and a window. Anything else was superfluous.

The stacked silver dollars amused him too. The note of welcome was signed by Max Hanes. He remembered him. Looks like an old ape, that feller. Guess I was one of his favorite people last year. So he fattens me up for another crack at me.

Gallowell fed three silver dollars into the slot machine standing next to the bedroom door and got ten back. That was the end of his interest. The gain was not worth the effort of pulling the handle and the boredom of watching the colored wheels go around.

He unpacked with an old man’s fussy neatness, washed up and went down to the casino, the side pocket of his jacket sagging under the load of silver dollars he had taken off the bureau. He went directly to the crap table where he had dropped the two hundred thousand and began to play without any feeling of interest, wagering one dollar at a time, losing a little more often than he won. He was waiting for Max Hanes, and he knew it would not be a long wait.

“Welcome back, Mr. Gallowell,” Max said.

He turned and shook hands with the squat bald man. “How you, Hanes?”

“Fine, sir. Just fine. Going to try us again?”

“Haven’t decided. I guess maybe I’ll just stick to dollar bets this time. Then you fellers can’t get to me so bad.”

“Think your luck would run as bad as it did last time?”

“It might. It just might. I guess I couldn’t get much interested unless it was arranged a mite different, Hanes.”

“How do you mean?”

“Got a place where we can talk it over?”

Max Hanes took Gallowell back to his office, a rather small and shadowy room with a bright light that shone directly down on the dark top of his desk.

“Can I get you a drink, Mr. Gallowell?”

“Bourbon and branch water’d cut the dust some.” He waited until Hanes had hung up after ordering the drinks and then said, “On second thought, I’d do better sticking to one-dollar bets. I learned long ago you can’t get rich playing the other feller’s game.”

“Some do, Mr. Gallowell. Some do.”

“But do they stay rich? I got myself in that habit, sort of.”

“Here’s our drinks, sir.”

“Good fast service you get here, Hanes.”

“You talked about a different kind of arrangement.”

“Last time I was here … this is fine bourbon … I could maybe have made out better but I kept a-running head-on into that limit you set on me.”

“We made it sixteen thousand on any single bet, didn’t we?”