The Best of Lucius Shepard (97 page)

Mike
pretended to shudder and that brought another laugh. “Let’s see what you got,
pal,” he said. “Then we can talk about my game.”

Geneva,
a good-looking woman even if she is mostly silicon and botox, washed a fresh
deck, spreading the cards across the table, and shuffled them up.

The
game was cash only, no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em. It was held in a side room of
Harrah’s New Orleans with a table ringed by nine barrel-backed chairs
upholstered in red velvet and fake French Colonial stuff—fancy swords,
paintings with gilt frames, and such—hanging on walls the color of cocktail
sauce. Geneva, who was a friend, let me sit in once in a while to help me
maintain the widely held view that I was someone important, whereas I was, in
actuality, a typical figment of the Quarter, a man with a few meaningful
connections and three really good suits.

It
wasn’t unusual to have a couple of pros in the game, but the following week
Harrah’s was sponsoring a tournament with a million dollar first prize and a
few big hitters had already filtered into town. Aside from Mad Mike, Avery Holt
was at the table, Sammy Jawanda, Deng Ky (aka Denghis Khan), and Annie Marcus.
The amateurs in the game were Pellerin, Jeremy LeGros, an investment banker
with deep pockets, and myself, Jack Lamb.

Texas
Hold ‘Em is easy to learn, but it will cost you to catch on to the finer
points. To begin with, you’re dealt two down cards, then you bet; then comes
the flop, three up cards in the center of the table that belong to everyone.
You bet some more. Then an up card that’s called the turn and another round of
betting. Then a final up card, the river, and more betting ... unless everyone
has folded to the winner. I expected Pellerin to play tight, but five minutes
hadn’t passed before he came out firing and pushed in three thousand in chips.
Le Gros and Mike went with him to the flop. King of hearts, trey of clubs,
heart jack. Pellerin bet six thousand. LeGros folded and Mike peeked at his
down cards.

“They
didn’t change on you, did they?” asked Pellerin.

Mike
raised him four thousand. That told me Pellerin had gotten into his head. The
smart play would have been either to call or to get super aggressive. A
middling raise like four thousand suggested a lack of confidence. Of course
with Mad Mike, you never knew when he was setting a trap. Pellerin pushed it
again, raising ten K, not enough to make Mike bag the hand automatically. Mike
called. The card on the turn was a three of hearts, pairing the board. Pellerin
checked and Mike bet twenty.

“You
must have yourself a hand,” said Pellerin. “But your two pair’s not going to
cut it. I’m all in.”

He
had about sixty thousand stacked in front of him and Mike could have covered
the bet, but it wasn’t a percentage play—losing would have left him with the
short chip stack and it was too early in the evening to take the risk. He tried
staring a hole through Pellerin, fussed with his chips, and eventually mucked
his hand.

“You’re
not the dumbest son-of-a-bitch who ever stole a pot from me,” he said.

“Don’t
suppose I am,” said Pellerin.

As
I watched—and that is what I mainly did, push in antes and watch—it occurred to
me that once he sat down, Pellerin had stopped acting like dead money, as if
all his anxiety had been cured by the touch of green felt and plastic aces. He
was one hell of a hold ‘em player. He never lost much and it seemed that he
took down almost every big pot. Whenever he went head-to-head against somebody,
he did about average ... except when he went up against Mad Mike. Him, he
gutted. It was evident that he had gotten a good read on Mike. In less than two
hours he had 90 percent of the man’s money. He had also developed a palsy in
his left hand and was paler than he had been when he’d entered.

The
door opened, the babble of the casino flowed in and a security man ushered a
doe-eyed, long-legged brunette wearing a black cocktail dress into the room.
She had some age on her—in her mid-thirties, I estimated—and her smile was low
wattage, a depressive’s smile. Nonetheless, she was an exceptionally beautiful
woman with a pale olive complexion and a classically sculpted face, her hair
arranged so that it fell all to one side. A shade too much make-up was her only
flaw. She came up behind Pellerin, bent down, absently caressing the nape of
his neck, and whispered something. He said, “You’re going to have to excuse me,
gentlemen. My nurse here’s a real hardass. But I’ll be glad to take your money
again tomorrow night.”

He
scooted back his chair; the brunette caught his arm and helped him to stand.

Mike,
who had taken worse beats in his career, overcame his bad mood and asked,
“Where you been keeping yourself, man?”

“Around,”
said Pellerin. “But I’ve been inactive ‘til recently.”

* * * *

I
smelled something wrong about Pellerin. Wrong rose off him like stink off the
Ninth Ward. World class poker players don’t just show up, they don’t
materialize out of nowhere and take a hundred large off Mad Mike Morrissey,
without acquiring some reputation in card rooms and small casinos. And his
success wasn’t due to luck. What Pellerin had done to Mike was as clean a
gutting as I had ever witnessed. The next two nights, I stayed out of the game
and observed. Pellerin won close to half a million, though the longest he
played at a single sitting was four hours. The casino offered him a spot in the
tournament, but he declined on the grounds of poor health—he was recovering
from an injury, he said, and was unable to endure the long hours and stress of
tournament play. My sources informed me that, according to the county records,
nobody named Josey Pellerin lived in or near Lafayette. That didn’t surprise
me. I knew a great number of people who had found it useful to adopt another
name and place of residence. I did, however, manage to dredge up some
interesting background on the brunette.

Jocundra
Verret, age forty-two, single, had been employed by Tulane University nearly
twenty years before, working for the late Dr. Hideki Ezawa, who had received
funding during the 1980s to investigate the possible scientific basis of
certain voodoo remedies. She had left the project, as they say, under a cloud.
That was as much as I could gather from the redacted document that fell into my
hands. After Tulane, she had worked as a private nurse until a year ago; since
that time, her paychecks had been signed by the Darden Corporation, an outfit
whose primary holdings were in the fields of bioengineering and medical
technology. She, Pellerin, and another man, Dr. Samuel Crain, had booked a
suite at Harrah’s on a corporate card, the same card that paid for an adjoining
suite occupied by two other men, one of whom had signed the register as D.
Vader. They were bulky, efficient sorts, obviously doing duty as bodyguards.

I
had no pressing reason to look any deeper, but the mention of voodoo piqued my
interest. While I was not myself a devotee, my parents had both been occasional
practitioners and those childhood associations of white candles burning in
storefront temples played a part in my motivation. That night, when Pellerin
sat down at the table, I went searching for Ms. Verret and found her in a bar
just off the casino floor, drinking a sparkling water. She had on gray slacks
and a cream-colored blouse, and looked quite fetching. The bodyguards were nowhere
in sight, but I knew they must be in the vicinity. I dropped onto the stool
beside her and introduced myself.

“I’m
not in the mood,” she said.

“Neither
am I, cher. The doctor tells me it’s permanent, but when I saw you I felt a
flicker of hope.”

She
ducked her head, hiding a smile. “You really need to go. I’m expecting
someone.”

“Under
different circumstances, I’d be delighted to stick around and let you break my
heart. But sad to say, this is a business call. I was wondering how come a
bunch like the Darden Corporation is bankrolling a poker player.”

Startled,
she darted her eyes toward me, but quickly recovered her poise. “The people I
work for are going to ask why you were talking to me,” she said evenly. “I can
tell them you were hitting on me, but if you don’t leave in short order, I
won’t be able to get away with that explanation.”

“I
assume you’re referring in the specific to the two large gentlemen who’ve got
the suite next to yours. Don’t you worry. They won’t do anything to me.”

“It’s
not what they might do to
you
that’s got me worried,” she said.

“I
see. Okay.” I got to my feet. “That being the case, perhaps it’d be best if we
talked at a more opportune time. Say tomorrow morning? Around ten in the coffee
shop?”

“Please
stay away from me,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you.”

As
I left the bar, I saw the bodyguards playing the dollar slots near the
entrance—one glanced at me incuriously, but kept on playing. I walked down the
casino steps, exiting onto Canal Street, and had a smoke. It was muggy, the
stars dim. High in the west, a sickle moon was encased in an envelope of mist.
I looked at the neon signs, the traffic, listened to the chatter and laughter
of by-passers with drinks in their hands. Post-Katrina New Orleans pretending
that it was the Big Easy, teetering on the edge of boom or bust. Though Verret
had smiled at me, I could think of no easy way to hustle her, and I decided to
give Billy Pitch a call and see whether he thought the matter was worth
pursuing.

I
had to go through three flunkies before I got to Billy. “What you want?” he
said. “You know this is
Survivor
night.”

“I
forgot, Billy. Want me to call back? I can call back.”

“This
is the two-hour finale, then the reunion show. Won’t be over ‘til eleven and
I’m shutting it down after that. Now you got something for me or don’t you?”

I
could hear laughter in the background and I hesitated, picturing him hunched
over the phone in his den, a skinny, balding white man whom you might mistake
for an insurance salesman or a CPA, no doubt clad in one of his neon-colored
smoking jackets.

“Jack,
you better have something good,” Billy said. “Hair’s starting to sprout from my
palms.”

“I’m
not sure how good it is, but...”

“I’m
missing the immunity challenge. The penultimate moment of the entire season.
And I got people over, you hear?”

Billy
was the only person I knew who could pronounce vowels with a hiss. I gave him
the gist of it, trying not to omit any significant details, but speeding it
along as best I could.

“Interesting,”
he said. “Tell me again what she said when you spoke to her.”

I
repeated the conversation.

“It
would seem that Miz Verret’s agenda is somewhat different from that of the Darden
Corporation,” Billy said. “Otherwise, she’d have no compunction about reporting
your conversation.”

“That
was my take.”

“Voodoo
business,” he said musingly.

“I
can’t be sure it’s got anything to do with voodoo.”

“Naw,
this here is voodoo business. It has a certain taint.” Billy made a clicking
noise. “I’ll get back to you in the morning.”

“I
was just trying to do you a favor, Billy. I don’t need to be involved.”

“Honey,
I know how it’s supposed to work, but you’re involved. I got too many eggs in
my basket to be dealing with anything else right now. This pans out, I’m
putting you in charge.”

* * * *

The
last thing I had wanted was to be in business with Billy Pitch. It wasn’t that
you couldn’t make a ton of money with Billy, but he was a supremely dangerous
and unpleasant human being, and he tended to be hard on his associates. Often
he acted precipitately and there were more than a few widows who had received a
boatload of flowers and a card containing Billy’s apologies and a fat check
designed to compensate for their loss and his lamentable error in judgment. In
most cases, this unexpected death benefit served to expunge the ladies’ grief,
but Alice Delvecchio, the common-law wife of Danny “Little Man” Prideau,
accused Billy of killing her man and, shortly after the police investigation
hit a dead end, she and her children disappeared. It was rumored that Billy had
raised her two sons himself and that, with his guidance, hormone treatments,
and the appropriate surgery, they had blossomed into lovely teenage girls, both
of whom earned their keep in a brothel catering to oil workers.