The Only Girl in the Game (14 page)

“You remember pretty good. I must be the kind of customer you like to remember.”

“Always glad to welcome you back, sir. What kind of a limit were you thinking about?”

“I didn’t have any special idea in mind. I think maybe … twenty-five thousand. How does that sound?”

“High.”

Homer put his empty glass down. “Then thanks for the drink, and I better get back to my dollar bets.…”

“But not too high, Mr. Gallowell.”

“Then you’ll give me a twenty-five-thousand-dollar limit on a single bet?”

“And one bet of that size on the table at one time.”

“Now that sounds neighborly of you. Another thing, the last time I was here, that damn big crowd gathered round and watched me make a dang fool of myself, and if they could have found out who I was, it would have been all over the papers. So I want to bet inconspicuous like. I want you should fix me up with some chips worth twenty-five thousand apiece. You could maybe use hundred-dollar ones and put a little bitty piece of tape acrosst them, with your signature. Could you do that?”

“Yes, but.…”

“Now I got right here a check for two hundred thousand, which is the same as I lost last time. I want you to fix me up with eight of those special chips, and you better fix up another fifteen or twenty more of them in case I have to buy more or I should start winning some. Put them at that same table where I lost last time, tell those boys working that table all about it.”

“But.…”

“I don’t want to be conspicuous, Hanes. If you want any more of my money, you do it just like I want it done. I guess there’s places in this town that will do it my way if I ask polite.”

“Don’t you want to make … any smaller bets?”

“I sure do. Dollar bets, like I was doing when you come along. And every once in a while, when I happen to feel like it, I’ll throw one of those special chips into the game.”

“It’s unusual, Mr. Gallowell, but … we can do it.”

“I’ll go get my supper now, and I guess you can have it all set up the way I want it when I get back.”

“It’ll be just the way you want it, Mr. Gallowell.”

“I’ll just hold onto this check until you get my special chips fixed up.” Homer Gallowell walked out of Max Hanes’ office, concealing his feeling of triumph. Had he been unable to set it up exactly as he wanted it, he would have given up the idea and gone back home. His experiments had proved that any other approach would very probably result in a loss. Hanes, believing he was going to use a doubling system, had approved the big limit, knowing that any doubling system would collapse when any long run brought it up against the house limit. Even if he started with a one-dollar bet, doubling each time, betting against the shooter, sixteen consecutive losses would bring him to the point of a twenty-five thousand-dollar bet and, winning that one, he would make a one-dollar profit.

Sixteen straight passes was an event of utmost rarity. But it could happen. Following such a system, he did not have enough years left to get his previous losses back, even if he never ran into such a string of passes. His previous fiasco had been the result of using a bastardized doubling system on eights and sixes, betting one thousand, then two, four, eight and, because of the limit they had imposed on him, sixteen thousand. He had done reasonably well at first, had been, in fact, thirty-five thousand ahead after three hours of play, waiting for each shooter to roll the point he had to make before making his bets on eight and six.

But the dice at that table suddenly turned exceedingly cold for all shooters. Time after time they would make points and seven out. He was pushed up to sixteen apiece on both six and eight. As he kept covering for five straight rolls, the shooters would roll a point and then seven out. He dropped a hundred and fifty thousand during those five rolls, as people crowded thick around him and the table men kept the
play slow so as to give him time to get the bets down. He came back a little bit, and then limited himself to the big eight, and ran into the same sort of run again, and that was the end of two hundred thousand.

Max Hanes, he realized, had missed the one essential factor in the personality of Homer Gallowell. He always prepared himself for any venture. His methods were never the result of hunch, superstition or blind stubbornness. His was that optimum flexibility which permits quick adjustments to new problems, based on the acquisition of facts by hired experts. He looked rigid, inflexible, opinionated and stubborn. Yet this was the practised deception of the poker player. In his lifetime he had found the inflexible men easiest to devour.

He knew that what he accomplished or failed to accomplish at the crap table was a matter of great moment to Max Hanes, and he felt an easy contempt for the man. A great military leader, between campaigns, can amuse and refresh himself by playing a game of war on a board, using counters, and despite his desire to win he can feel comfortably superior to his professional opponent who has spent his life at the game rather than the reality.

It was a little after seven o’clock when Homer Gallowell picked up his eight special chips from Max Hanes. He found room at the rail of the crap table, and he was immediately aware of the special attention he was given by the three men operating the table. The other players didn’t notice this. Homer began to play, using silver dollars, betting with no particular plan or pattern. Max Hanes and two of his floor men hovered in the background for a time. Homer’s tough old plainsman face was expressionless. He waited and he watched and he counted, with the tireless patience of a lizard awaiting the random beetle, inconspicuous against sun-brown rock.

At twenty minutes after eight the special circumstances he had been awaiting occurred. There was a new shift working the table, but he knew they were completely aware of him. A woman at the far end made eight straight passes. She lost the dice. The next shooter was a man at her left, half drunk, noisy, aggressive, ready to be belligerent. Homer slipped two fingers into his vest pocket and took out one of his certified chips. The man rolled a nine, a three, a ten, a three, a nine. The noisy man let his come bet ride.

Homer reached over and put his special chip on the Do-Not Come line.

“Hold the dice!” the stick man said sharply.

“What the hell for?” the shooter demanded.

“Your bet is down, sir?” the stick man asked Homer.

“It’s just about exactly where I want it,” Homer said.

“That old man need help placing his lousy bet?” the shooter said. “Dad, you should know better than to bet into me. When do you guys break down and let me roll myself a seven?”

“Roll, sir,” the stick man said.

The shooter rolled another nine, and then eleven, trey, ten, six, seven. The bank man went to the bottom of one of the stacks in front of him, took out a special chip and placed it neatly on Homer’s. He picked them up and put them in his vest pocket.

“You put the hex on me, Dad,” the noisy one said. “You ride with me next time. Hey, are you hearing me, Dad?”

Homer Gallowell slowly lifted his head, unhooded the odd yellow-gray reptilian eyes and gave the man the same long look that had quelled men of considerably more stature than the drunk. “Keep it shut, son,” he said gently.

“No offense,” the man said in an entirely different voice.

Between that moment and midnight, Homer had three more chances to follow the same procedure, to put his bet down against the second roll of the shooter who followed anyone making at least eight passes. He lost once. He won twice. He left the table fifty thousand dollars ahead.

The method he had used violated the mathematical theory of the young mathematician in one respect. “But, Mr. Gallowell,” he had pleaded, looking close to tears, “Dice have no
memory
! If, with honest dice, a man rolled forty sevens in a row, on the forty-first roll his mathematical chance of making a seven is exactly the same as it was on the first roll.”

“Son, you’ve been a big help. We know the optimum size of the bets I got to make. We know I’m putting them on the best percentage bet on the table. I got this table you made up for me, telling me I can only bet nineteen or twenty times before it starts to run too sour against me. I got that part from you. I got the other part from the professional gamblers I had my people contact. Every damn one of them says that after a long hot roll, the next shooter is lucky to make one pass, and sometimes he makes two and he hardly ever makes three. Understand, son, this is what
generally
happens. Sometimes dice will stay hot all the way around the table, shooter after shooter. But those professionals, they see the shape of something you can’t measure with your
little tubes and transistors, and I think, for a patient man, it’s maybe enough to give me that little extra edge I need. Now if I was a
gambling
man it wouldn’t work, because I’d get all fired up over winning and I’d try to win so damned much I’d just naturally give it all the hell back to them. But I’m no gambling man. I just like to plan things out and see how they work. And if this don’t work, son, then I’ve settled once and for all there’s no way under God’s sun a man can beat those tables.”

Mr. Homer Gallowell of Texas walked from the table to the Afrique Bar, took a corner table and ordered a ham sandwich and some bourbon and water. He was near the door where the entertainers entered the bar. When she came through the door he stood up with grave courtesy and said, “Evenin’, Miz Dawson.”

“Well, hi, Mr. Gallowell!” she said with evident pleasure. “I heard you were back.”

“Can you set for a spell?”

“I have to go on right now, but I’ll be glad to after my act, if you’re still here. I know you don’t approve of my line of work.”

“I guess I can stand waiting for you, if I don’t listen too hard.”

“My public!” she said mockingly. “I’ll be back.”

He sat down and watched her thread her way between the tables toward the small stage. He looked at her strong flanks, the good shoulders, the long straight line of her back, the grace and balance of the way she moved, and he wondered why there were so few of them left nowadays, so few honest-to-God women on the earth, all strength and pride and warmth. It was a new breed nowadays—the whimpering ones, the squeaky little neurotic ones, all petulance and boredom. This one was so like Angela, long ago, before a sickness of the blood brought her down. It took thirteen years to kill her, but it never once made her whine. It seemed such a damnable waste to him, both Angela and this Betty Dawson. Betty was letting too many years go by. She’d lost seven good years of childbearing, of belonging to a good man and working with him, and that was what God had intended for her—not this singing dirty songs to drunks.

He remembered the odd way he had met her. A year ago March. Thirteen months ago. After losing all that money he’d been up at five the next morning, annoyed with himself, anxious to get hold of his pilot a little later on and be off the ground by eight at least. The gambling had been
evidence of a kind of boredom that had been growing within him for several years. He had so consolidated his power position that it had become, he realized, a little too easy to achieve his goals. Yet such was his respect for the smooth functioning of the intricately structured Gallowell Company that he could not bring himself to set up the artificial challenge of making a consciously faulty decision in order to handicap himself.

On that year-ago morning, irritable with his own unarticulated discontent, he had heard a woman singing. There were a few clots of people at the gaming tables in the casino, but most of the tables were idle. A few slot machines made isolated sounds, as opposed to the continuous roaring of the earlier hours of the night. He walked slowly across the casino floor and into the Afrique Bar.

The woman sang to eight customers in the big shadowy glossy room. Half of them were listening. One bartender wiped the bar top. The other one polished glassware.

The woman at the piano wore dark red, indecently tight, and she sat at a small white piano. A baby spot shown down on her. The husky timbre of her voice had stirred an ancient painful memory, but as he stood just inside the doorway, listening, he heard the words of a ballad overly clever, cutely dirty, and he turned to leave. But just as he turned, she ad libbed a line right along with the song, saying to him, “It isn’t polite to walk out on me, sir. It hurts my morale no end.”

He hesitated, shrugged, sat alone at a table for four nearest the doorway. He had a waiter bring him a pot of coffee. He learned that it was possible to listen to the cadence of her voice without following the words.

When she finished, and was applauded heartily by one drunk, she gave an ironic bow, switched off her own spot, and came directly to Homer Gallowell’s table.

“I hear you used to have half the money in the world,” she said. “I hear they taught you a little humility out there, sir.”

He stood up. “That’s your right name on that little sign yonder?”

“Betty Dawson, yes.”

“Homer Gallowell, Miz Dawson. Would you … set for a spell?”

“Thank you kindly,” she said. And sat with him.

He wondered why he had asked her. He was wary of all impulsive acts. And he had good cause to be particularly wary of all attractive young women. Angela had been the only love
in his life. As his personal power increased, women had pursued him with a fervor and shamelessness and relentlessness that bemused and alarmed him. But he had evaded all the degrees of relationship they wanted to achieve. Angela had died when he was thirty-five, half his life ago. He had felt a strong and purely physical need for a woman, but Angela had left no room in his heart for any emotional relationship, and he had been far too busy building an empire to devote any time to social involvements. And so, with a cruel logic that suited him, with a characteristic, ruthless efficiency, he had solved his own problem in his own way.

One of his agents in Mexico selected the girls from small villages, picking them for health, cleanliness, poverty, good manners, industry and their sturdy, dusky comeliness. The girls were in no way deceived. Each one, in her turn, was told that she would be taken legally to the States on a work permit. She would work in the hacienda of a rich and powerful Norte Americano, and she would be expected to share his bed for a period of a year or two. She would be instructed in ways to prevent issue from this relationship. She would receive generous pay for her services, and when it was over she would be returned to her home village with a gift so generous that it would be easy for her to marry well in the village. Refusals were rare. And all those who had accepted over the years seemed well-content with the bargain they had made.