Death Plays Poker (15 page)

CLARE

The sun hit Clare’s eyes, waking her up and telling her she had a headache.

At least she hadn’t slept with Nate. Clare might have, but she’d kept enough of her senses to remember that Tiffany was not such an indiscriminate slut.

Her phone was ringing. Had it been ringing for a while? She had vague memories of the phone ringing in one of her dreams. She checked call display: Amanda.

“What?” Clare’s voice was hoarser than she’d thought it would be.

“Clare. You okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I’m at the Elbow Room. We were supposed to meet for breakfast.”

Clare looked at the clock beside her bed. “Shit. Sorry. You want me to meet you there now?”

“No time. Your tournament starts in less than an hour. Are you just waking up?”

“Yeah. I thought I set my alarm, but I must have messed it up.” Did that sound believable in anyone’s world?

“Were you up late? When I didn’t see you this morning, I called in. Reports have you leaving the casino around ten.”

Well, kudos to whoever was spying on her. “Reports are right. And then I had drinks with one of the suspects.”

“How many drinks?”

“Your people didn’t follow me to the bar? I was sure I saw a goon sitting inside.”

“How many?”

“Just one. He was sitting at a table inside where he could see the door to the patio, pretending to read a newspaper.”

“A goon is a thug, Clare. These men are officers. If you weren’t here on loan, they would almost all be senior to you. And how many drinks, was my question.”

“Two or three.” Which was half true if shots didn’t count.

“Okay. Well, don’t worry about breakfast. We can catch up tomorrow. Good luck today.”

Clare was off the hook this easily? Cloutier would have been screaming for her badge.

“Oh, and Clare?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll leave your sunglasses with the concierge at your hotel. Pick them up on your way out. They’re blingy.”

“Awesome.” Had Clare really just said “awesome” about a pair of sunglasses? “Sorry I messed up your morning.”

Clare showered quickly, smoked half a cigarette on the curb while she waited for a cab, and slid into her tournament seat with four and a half minutes to spare.

“Forget to blow-dry your hair today?” T-Bone sneered at Clare on his way past her table.

Clare looked up. “I didn’t want to stand out in this crowd by appearing too well groomed.” She made a note to spend some quality time with a comb and a mirror during the break.

“Touché.” T-Bone fingered the gray ponytail poking out from his black cowboy hat. “Good luck with the cards, kid. Don’t want you busting out before I can humiliate you at my table.”

“Ditto,” Clare said. “Which means, good luck with the cards, T-Bone. Make sure you accumulate lots of chips so I can take them all at once.”

Elizabeth, from her seat at Clare’s table, said, “You two should get a room.”

Clare made a gagging motion.

T-Bone said, “You think I want to see her bony ass naked?”

“You think I want to smell what’s under that cowboy hat?”

Elizabeth eyed Clare as T-Bone sauntered away. “You have a lot of confidence for someone who can’t play this game. Is Mickey still coaching you?”

Clare nodded.

“You’re lucky. For all his annoying personality traits, Mickey plays a seriously good game.”

“He’s a professional poker player,” Clare said. “Don’t you all play a good game?”

Elizabeth nodded slowly. “But some people — like Joe and T-Bone — rely on people-reading and gut-related factors for their edge. Others — like me — suck at people-reading, so we grind away using numbers and odds.”

“Which one is Mickey?”

“He’s both. He acts like he’s such a crazy man, shooting from the hip. Makes everyone think he’s a gut player. Well, his gut is good — it’s on a par with Joe’s and T-Bone’s. But he’s got science down better than I do. He’s probably the only player on the scene that scares me.”

Clare wondered why Elizabeth was still pretending to be nice to her. She should use this in while she had it. “Is Loni Mills bipolar?”

“What?” Elizabeth looked at Clare oddly. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“When I met her she was super nice. Chatty, talked to me about the waiting list at that Niagara Falls game. Now I think she hates me.”

“She does,” Elizabeth said. “But don’t worry. It’s not personal. Loni hates anyone who steals Mickey’s attention away from remembering her.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to. But you can trust Loni. Who she says she is is exactly who she is. If she has something against you — as I guess you can tell — she’ll show it or she’ll say it to your face.”

This seemed like a strange thing for Elizabeth to say. Clare was tempted to come right out and ask why Elizabeth was pretending to like Tiffany. Instead, she said, “What about Fiona?”

Elizabeth frowned as she pushed her long black hair behind her ears. She had an expression like she was swatting away a mosquito. “What about her?”

“Can I trust Fiona? She’s been friendly. And I like her.”

“Up to you,” Elizabeth said. “My rule with Fiona is I trust her as long as she’s in my line of sight.”

Clare found that answer unhelpful. “What’s her angle, though?”

“Her angle is herself. If you make Fiona look good, she’ll want you around. If she senses competition, not so much.”

“Competition for men?” Clare wondered if Fiona was interested in Nate.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Competition for the spotlight.”

NOAH

Noah toyed absently with his chip stack, letting the heavy clay disks slip through his fingers and clack against each other as they fell back into their pile. It was soothing, like running his toes through pebbles at the beach and listening to them shift. Not that he ran his feet through pebbles a lot in Manhattan.

He stared at the black table felt with the red maple leaf — the Canadian Classic logo — in the center. The scratchy British voice came through his earbud: “T-sixteen. P-six, seven-deuce clubs.”

Noah peeled back the corners of his cards to see the seven and two of clubs. Perfect: he’d just learned that he was at Table Sixteen in Position Six.

He watched Fiona standing at the entrance to the poker room floor. Two cameras were on her and her hands were gesturing passionately.

The bug he’d left in Fiona’s room hadn’t told him much. She hadn’t even been in the room for five minutes the previous night. There was a little shocked scream when she realized her suitcase had been broken into. Noah wondered if he should have made it less obvious — taken one note from the middle instead of the whole stack. But whatever. It was done. Then about half an hour later, two voices had been speaking. Fiona and a guy who sounded like George Bigelow. Noah’s interpretation from the clips he’d managed to hear was that they’d come by to grab some things, and Fiona had spent the night in the other man’s — George’s? — room. She sounded afraid. Scared of the cops or scared of the killer, Noah couldn’t tell.

It could screw up his plan if Fiona stayed in this other man’s room permanently. He would have to bug that room, too. His first step was to find out if the man was George. His second — hmm — well, one thing at a time.

GEORGE

George watched the dealer set up the new hand. He was like a magician, dropping cards so quickly you barely saw his fingers until they’d moved on. He was impressed with himself — George could see that in the smirk he gave no one in particular as he set down the deck after dealing. But he was invisible. No one — not even George, normally — watched him work.

Was it strange that a person who clearly wanted to feel empowered — the Dealer of Fiona’s notes — would choose such a background title for his name? Or was that part of the thrill — pulling the strings, dealing the cards, changing the outcome for everyone here while remaining effectively invisible?

A pudgy man across the poker table from George waved into the stands. George followed his gaze to see a woman waving back — equally pudgy, her eyes wide and her smile wider, clearly thrilled for her husband, who had probably won his seat to this tournament in a $5 satellite online. The couple didn’t care if he won — their suburban mortgage would be under control and their kids wouldn’t be in expensive schools. This trip was an adventure; maybe the wildest thing they’d ever done. The pudgy man looked at his hole cards, tried three or four different faces on before folding.

Watching this couple reminded George of what had drawn him to poker ten years earlier as a fresh grad school dropout. This scene was alive. It was the opposite of academia, with its meaningless theoretical conversations about events that had already happened or books that had already been written.

The skinny man who was next to play scowled and muttered and tossed his hand in the muck. “You’re giving me nothing,” he said in the direction of the dealer. “Can’t you just reach into that pile of cards and give me something I can work with? I’m gonna get blinded away before I ever get to play a hand.” His fingers were yellow; George guessed that he needed a cigarette.

George couldn’t stay here much longer. He had money saved. He could buy a modest writing space. Maybe not the spacious New England log cabin of his dreams, with its gourmet kitchen and picture windows overlooking an isolated lake, but something, somewhere, that would work.

“Hey, George, you know about the game tonight, right?” Joe Mangan said from behind a pair of oversized pink sunglasses. He had a blond wig with ponytails and he was wearing a pink plaid shirt; George wondered if he was supposed to be Paris Hilton from
The Simple Life
.

The rest of the table perked their ears to this conversation — George could see it; their bodies even shifted slightly toward Joe. Like when the cool kids would sit by their lockers talking about weekend plans before class began, everyone was interested when Joe Mangan talked about his social life. Maybe that’s what George liked about poker — for the first time, he was on the inside of the cool crowd. The dumb thing was, when you were in it, you didn’t notice. The only bonus was that you no longer suffered the angst of being an outsider.

“Elizabeth invited me,” George said. “I’m not sure if I’ll make it.”

“We’re leaving the dock at eight. If you’re coming, get there a bit early and text me when you get to the gate. I told Liz I’d take her for an early dinner. She gets all annoyed if our life becomes all about poker.”

“I don’t blame her,” George said. “She’s an amazing woman; she shouldn’t be wasting her whole self on this game.”

Joe, as Paris Hilton, shrugged. “I could play the game forever and not get bored.”

“You gotta have more in your life,” Mickey said, from down the table. “It’s no good playing games all day and night without some bigger purpose. You want to learn about one-track obsession, you should see
Black Swan.
Swap poker in for the ballet, it’s like your Ghost of Christmas Future.”

“What’s your bigger purpose?” Joe ignored the reference to a movie he was clearly never going to see. “A bigger jar of peanuts?”

“No way,” Mickey said. “George is writing a book about me.”

George’s heart sank. He had promised Mickey this biography. But in his image of himself in his writing cabin in the woods, he wasn’t writing poker books. It was fiction only — or this weird blend of fact and fiction he’d been working on lately.

“You’re lucky,” Joe said. “With George writing it, your book will be good. Mine’s a load of crap. It sells well, but my writers were a team of hacks and I’m pretty sure it shows.”

“You didn’t write your own book?” George had no idea why he was surprised. He mucked his ten-nine offsuit.

“Who has time for that?” Joe said. “I mean, you do, obviously. You’re a writer. I don’t mean it’s a waste of time. But it’s not what I’m good at.”

“What are you good at?” Mickey asked Joe.

“Playing games,” Joe said, making a giant overbet before the flop. “And reading people.”

“Yeah?” Mickey grinned. “Read this: all in.”

“I read that I should fold.” Joe flipped over two eights and tossed his hand in the muck.

“Good read.” Mickey showed a jack and a five. “If you’d called that, I would have been out of the game.”

George shook his head. “You guys are both cowboys. I’m sitting here trying to play textbook poker, wondering why I can’t win a hand. And this is why. The so-called heroes are making moves even a novice would know to avoid.”

“Except when we make the move, it’s for a reason.” Mickey seemed to be glaring at Joe. “Right, Pretty Boy?”

Joe laughed. “No one calls me that in real life, Crazy Mouse. And sure, I guess we always have a reason.”

George had forgotten Fiona’s old name for Mickey. He hadn’t known her when she’d done her podcast, but he’d listened to each episode, sometimes more than once.

George caught sight of Fiona, flitting around like the extrovert she wasn’t. He was glad to have her staying in his room again, even if it was fear that brought her there. It was how things should be. George wondered if she’d come with him to his writing cabin. Maybe if she was scared enough . . .