Dean squeezed a chip so hard it cracked loud as a pistol shot. Startied, Alex banged a knee against a table leg and all the neatly stacked chips crashed to the felt.
“Damn!”
“Watch it!”
“It's about fucking time,” Dean growled. Digging furiously into his bag, he yanked out a month-old edition of the Marysville Register, the river town's weekly newspaper, and slapped it on the table.
“If you need a reason to care, you can start with this,” he hissed, veins bulging in his forehead.
Page one featured a story entitled “The Queen of Hearts” and a haunting photograph of a skull with a levee and river in the background. Clucking and nodding, Bobby read the brief article and said quietly, “Tell me about the card.”
“That was a shock to all of us,” Charlie said.
“I'm afraid I tossed the card into the grave, but I never mentioned it,” Alex confessed. “That alone could send me to prison.”
“That wasn't very smart for a genius,” Bobby sneered, flashing a glance of disdain at Alex who smiled in return. Bobby asked Dean, “What else did they find?”
More agitated than the others, Dean was steaming, ready to burst like an overheated boiler. He hunched his chair closer to the table, leaned over on his elbows, thick fists knotted under bushy chin, and turned deliberately from Bobby to Nelson. “You tell him, Lieutenant. What did they find?”
Lighting a cigarette, Bobby caught a glimpse of the photographs of their old heroes and quickly looked away. The images only served to remind him that fear and ghosts were closing in.
“They found nothing,” Nelson answered calmly. “The Yuba County Sheriff has a playing card with no fingerprints and a skeleton with a cracked skull that was in the right place, that's been in the ground the right amount of time, and is a female of the appropriate age.”
“Have they identified her?” Bobby asked.
“No. They're mystified.”
“Will they?”
“Probably not,” Nelson replied, shaking his head.
“Why not?”
Nelson hesitated. The answer to Bobby's question was in his briefcase, but he wasn't ready to reveal the documents until he had some indication of how Bobby would react to that information. He looked to Alex for confirmation, not to dissemble but to delay, and Alex nodded.
“Because the evidence will fall through the bureaucratic cracks,” Nelson explained. “The Yuba County people are competent, but they don't have the resources to push an investigation very far even with help from the state. They know she wasn't a local girl because they have no unsolved missing person reports from that era in the surrounding counties. It's just not going to happen.”
“So what's the problem?”
“We have to do the right thing, Bobby.”
“The right thing? The right thing? What the hell is the right thing?”
“That's what we have to decide.”
“If they can't identify her, you don't have to do diddly squat. And even if they do, so what? What's to connect her to you?”
Dean spoke up. “If doing nothing is the right thing, then that's what we'll do. In any case, we ran away from it then, but we can't now.”
“Why not?”
“It's hard to say, really. Do you believe in redemption?”
“Ha!” Bobby scoffed. “I don't believe in anything. Belief is for suckers. What a load of crap.”
“Listen,” Dean said, suddenly stern. “We haven't seen you since the night she died. You took off and never came back. Ever since, the rest of us have met every year to play cards, yes, but the real reason we get together is to assure each other that another year of silence has gone by. None of us has ever talked about Shanghai Bend, not one word to anyone, but there was always a joker in this deck, a wild card, an unknown, and that was you. We never knewâand still don't knowâif you talked. I'll tell you about belief, and you tell me if I'm a sucker. I believe you've never given away the secret. I believe it because if you had, there would've been serious repercussions, and that hasn't happened. But Bobby, right now, I want to hear it from you.”
“That's it? That's all you want from me? To know if I shot off my mouth?”
“That's a start.”
“I didn't come here to be interrogated.”
“And we're not here to question you,” Alex said. “It's the other way around.”
A glint of understanding crept into Bobby's mind. “You're thinking about turning yourselves in,” he said quietly.
“That's right. That's one option.”
“That's letting you off easy.”
Charlie looked at Alex who shrugged as if to say, we thought it would be like this. Dean's nostrils flared with impatience, and Nelson sighed.
“Bobby,” the policeman said. “We think you've always believed that we killed her.”
“You're God damned right. I know you did.”
“We need to know what you intend to do now that they've dug her up.”
Stunned, with decades of rage rising in his throat like bile, Bobby thought he was going to be sick.
“I don't like the sound of this,” he said vehemently, pointing an agitated finger at Nelson. “I used to know you, Chinaman, but I don't anymore. You're a cop. Somebody in the boonies dug a body
out of the ground, and if I were to say, âYeah, these guys killed this girl,' that's it. Case solved, and we all go to jail. To hell with that. I don't have anything to say to you. I came here for a card game.”
“What about the Yuba County Sheriff?”
Bobby moved as though he were going to get up and leave.
“Wait a minute, please,” Alex said. “There's no reason to be in a hurry. You may have nothing to say, but we do. We're in this together, pal. We're a royal flush, remember? If we hang, we hang together.”
“That's right,” Nelson said. “I'm not a cop at this table. I'm just the ten of diamonds. My job is on the line here.”
“We all have a lot to lose,” Charlie said. “Careers, reputations, families, fortunes, the works.”
Bobby shook his head. “Why risk it then? You can't bring her back. I can't believe you got me here to tell me you're going to confess. That's really crazy.”
“Before you decide we're out of our minds, you need to know what we know,” Dean said, the big man's tone quiet, intense, and considerably more sober than earlier in the evening. His fierce eyes scanned the table, looking first at Charlie who nodded and rattled the ice in his drink, at Nelson who raised his eyebrows, and Alex who touched the brim of his hat in salute. Then Dean leaned deep into the table and stared at Bobby who for the briefest instant looked like a deer caught in headlights.
“When you first came in you called me a billboard, and you were right,” Dean said, eyes locked on Bobby's every twitch. “I look like I belong in a freak show, but it's a disguise. We're all in disguise, because everything we've done since that night has been an attempt to hide what we did. I live with that every day. Every morning I wake up crazy, split in two. Half of me wants to be so fucking righteous just living is an act of repentance, and the other half wants to be so crazy it doesn't matter what I do. I don't know how to put it into words, but I think you can understand what I mean. You see, Bobby, I live right on the Feather River only a few miles from Shanghai Bend, and I've been waiting all these years for her bones to see the light of day.”
Bobby stammered, “Jesus Christ. Why?”
“Isn't it obvious? Guilt. Horrible, convoluted, twisted guilt,” Dean said with a shrug that was more like a full body convulsion. “Maybe it isn't obvious because it wasn't so obvious to me at first. I can understand how you, and Alex as well, live far away from where it happened and never want to go there, but I couldn't stay away. When I came home from Vietnam, I couldn't stop thinking about what we did at Shanghai Bend, and I started visiting the riverâto fish, at least that's what I told myself. Steelhead, salmon, shad, catfishâdidn't matter, I was compelled to be there. I got to know a few people, made some friends around Marysville, and, anyway, about twenty years ago there was a major flood that washed out an old mining camp. All of a sudden there were all these exposed skeletons and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was only a matter of time before that old river coughed up its most desperate secret, and when that happened, I had to be there. So I found a place, started a business, married a local girl, and waited.”
Dean sighed heavily and took a long pull of rum before going on. “We buried her, man, and that was wrong, but I never had the guts to dig her up. I've been waiting for someone else to do it, or the river to do it, like it was fate or destiny, and if it did happen, I wanted to know right away. I had a plan. I was going to kill myself. That's right. I was going to blow my head off with a shogun, but when it
did
happen, and they pulled her out of the ground six weeks ago, I lost my nerve. Maybe that was wrong, too. I suppose so, but there you are. This thing has eaten me alive, and I want to put an end to that.”
“Guilt,” Bobby said, drawing out the word. “Maybe you should blow your fucking head off, Dean.”
Dean's linebacker's eyes with flaming whites and bristling pupils bore in on Bobby like laser beams. “After what I just told you, you want to be a smart-ass?”
A tremor swept through the room. Bobby was rocketed back to the instant before detonation, and he took a deep breath to keep from exploding again.
“No, I don't want to be a smart-ass. I want to be smart,” he said
hoarsely, almost hoping the big man would attack. With the knife concealed in his right sleeve, the fight would be quick and deadly. “I came here to play cards, and now I feel like I should have brought a lawyer. You killed her and buried her so you could have a normal life, and now you feel guilty. Fuck you. See a shrink.”
Dean rose half out of his chair, shaking an impassioned fist.
Bobby smiled. “Come on,” he said.
“Take it easy, Dean,” Charlie said. “Easy, big guy.”
Dean sank back into his chair, grabbed one of Alex's cigarettes and lit it. “Shrinks, lawyers, fuck that,” he said, voice trembling with contempt. “It's up to us and no one else.”
“Look, Bobby,” Charlie said, “the only reason for you to trust us is that we trust you. We were all drunk that night, and we're all equally guilty, and we all have everything to lose.”
“We've waited thirty-two years for you,” Dean said. “Some years we felt betrayed because you never showed, and other years we've just been sad. What we did fucked us all up, not just you. This isn't about you; it's about all of us. If you want to walk away again, so be it, but you already tried running to the other side of the planet, just like I did, and I doubt that worked any better for you than it did for me. What we did, and what it did to us, is in our hearts and we carry it wherever we go. We have a chance tonight to be clean and honest, not with anyone else, not with shrinks or lawyers or any of that, just us here at this table. Hey man, you're the ace of diamonds. When we were eighteen, you were my hero, big, bad Bobby McCorkle. You taught me how to be. That's worth something, isn't it? What do you say?”
One way or the other, they were offering him release. “Heroes are accidents,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “I'm a gambler. The only thing I ever did was risk my neck and get away with it, but I guess you can only get away with so much for so long. So what you're really telling me is that if we hang, we hang together.”
There were silent nods all around the table. Alex picked up the blue deck, shuffled, and flipped over the top card, the four of clubs, then quickly turned over the following three cards, all fours. The next card was a joker.
“A wild card,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Fancy that.”
He picked the joker off the felt and methodically tore it to bits.
“Are you leaving or are you gonna stay?” he asked.
Emotions rioted inside Bobby's head, but in the midst of the chaos one thought stood out: He wasn't going to allow himself to be charged with murder, tried, convicted, and sent to prison, perhaps to be executed for a crime he didn't commit. No doubt lethal injection would end the torture he'd inflicted on himself for the last three decades, but he'd go down fighting. He'd hear them out, and if they truly wanted to turn themselves and him in, no one would leave the Enrico Caruso Suite alive. It would end right there in the Palace Hotel.
“I think it's Charlie's deal,” he said. “What's the game?”
“Where'd that joker come from?” Bobby asked, annoyed at himself for missing Alex's sleight of hand.
Alex made a clown face, snatched off his hat, peered inside and replaced it on his head. “What joker? I didn't see any joker. Did you fellas see a joker? There's no wild cards in this game. Deal 'em, Charlie. Let's play.”
He winked at Bobby who leaned back in his chair, pensive, wondering where the next blast would come from in this minefield masquerading as a poker table.
Charlie picked up the red deck and promptly mis-shuffled, sending cards flying in all directions. Dean couldn't resist the urge to needle. “Nervous, are we?”
Charlie twisted in his chair and let fly a vicious backhand in the direction of Dean's head. Reacting swiftly, Dean tilted his chair and Charlie's fingers whizzed by his nose, missing by an inch.
“I know you can't help yourself, Studley,” Charlie snarled, “but you don't have to be a jerk all the time.”
Dean grinned and let it pass. Bobby saw it was just like the old days, back and forth, teasing and testing. Nothing had changed.
“I don't know if it's nerves or the cards are slick or what,” Charlie said, gathering up the deck and shuffling again. He stopped manipulating the cards to fan himself with the deck, saying, “Christ, it's hot in here. The damned air-conditioning must have broken down. I think next year we should play at the Saint Francis, you know what I mean?”
He stood, ripped off his jacket and shirt and, naked to the waist, passed the deck to Bobby. “Jacks or better,” he announced. “Cut the cards, if you please.”
“You're right. It is hot,” Nelson agreed and yanked off his shirt.
“I feel like I'm in sweaty old Manhattan,” Alex said and removed his glasses and hat and pulled his shirt over his head.
Dean wasn't wearing a shirt, only a sleeveless undershirt that exposed the queen of diamonds inked into his skin. “Four cards to the flush,” he said and they all looked at Bobby.
What the hell, Bobby thought, cutting the cards for Charlie. I don't know what they're really up to, but at least there's a chance for a decent game before the shit really hits the fan.
“You guys are fuckin' nuts, y'know,” he said. “If you're nuts, then so am I.”
He pulled off his jacket and shirt and the splendid ace of diamonds glistened on his shoulder. Without spoiling the occasion with words, they all remembered that this was how they'd played in Alex's garage during those few brilliant weeks when their tattoos were new, when they were indeed a royal flush of glorious young men.
Alex started to laugh and his mirth was contagious. First Dean, then right around the table they all started to laugh and sputter like teenagers. Sniggling, trying to avoid a misdeal, Charlie slowly passed out cards for a hand of five draw and counted them off with a bouncing lilt, “Ah one, ah two, ah three, ah four, ah five, ah one, ah two ⦔
“Jesus, space cadets,” Nelson said. “You all right, Deano? You calmed down?”
“How the hell do I know? All I can see is I'm sitting around a hotel room with a bunch of half-naked lunatics. You're up, copper. Can you open?”
Nelson picked up his cards and said, “I open for fifty.”
Still giggling, Alex tossed a blue chip into the pot and said, “I see your fifty and raise fifty.”
Dean scooped up a handful of blues and poured them indiscriminately into the pot. “I see the first fifty, the second fifty, and raise five hundred, more or less.”
“You can't raise âmore or less' in poker,” Nelson objected.
Dean laughed again. “Oh, yeah? You wanna throw another firecracker at me?”
“Haha. Not while you're lookin'.”
“I call,” Bobby said.
“How much is it to me?” Charlie asked.
“Six hundred.”
“Okay, I'm in, I'm in. Who wants how many cards?”
They played the hand the way they'd played as kids, reckless and crazy, laughing, as though the game were actually fun. After all, it was only poker, not life and death.
Nelson won the hand with a pair of queens, and they sat there, bare to the waist, feeling silly and a little better.
“What we need is some of that good old rock and roll,” Dean hollered. “Da da da da da, back in the U.S. of A. Yeah!”
In an instant the great Chuck Berry was rolling out of the stereo like a steamy night in Memphis. Dean danced around the room, throwing his arms into the air, shouting and singing, “Oh man, oh man! Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!”
“Gimme some of that weed,” Charlie demanded of Dean.
“Oh, ho ho ho. You ready for that?”
“Hell, yes.”
“You're a wild and crazy guy, Charlie.”
Chuck Berry broke into “Johnny B. Goode” causing heads to bop and fingers to drum. Dean sat down, rolled a joint, and passed it to Charlie who fired it.
“Rocket Fuel,” Charlie breathed.
“The one and only.”
“What's that? What's Rocket Fuel?” Bobby asked.
“You're gonna learn all the secrets tonight, dude,” Dean said. “I'm a grower and this is the product.”
“He's big time,” Charlie said. “Or he was.”
“This is the last crop,” Dean said. “Recent events require prudence in the production of controlled agricultural substances. Too bad, but that's the way it goes. That's just the beginning of what this little episode is going to cost.”
“You know about this?” Bobby asked Nelson. “Jeez. You guys are so tight, I guess you must.”
“I couldn't care less,” Nelson answered. “I didn't become a police officer to throw my friends in jail. Besides, it's just weed. It's not heroin.”
This last word caused Bobby to blink rapidly.
“We know about that, too,” Alex said.
“What do you mean?” Bobby asked.
“I think you know.”
Alex pulled out his wallet and flashed a Department of Defense ID. “Recognize this? I'm sure you do. It's coded class one priority so I can do my own security checks for people who might have access to my classified work. I can obtain a complete dossier on just about anyone, and it's especially easy if the individual in question is or was military.”
Alex waited until the meaning of his declaration sank in.
“You've seen my jacket,” Bobby said.
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“I think so. I could recite names and dates, but what's the point?”
Bobby's face grew solemn and he said, “I don't know whether to be pissed off or overawed.”
“I know, and I wouldn't blame you for being angry, but we had to protect ourselves.”
“Against what?”
“Against your giving us away, of course. Look, I have access to your government records, and Nelson has sheets from the Reno police and the Nevada highway patrol, from Louisiana, Arizona, North Carolina, West Germany, I could go on. We know about your addiction, about detox and the car wrecks and all of it. You're sitting here with your shirt off, and I can't see any fresh needle tracks. That's a good sign. Shit, man, we've followed your life all these years, and you scared us to death more times than I can count.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. You guys are bouncing me around like a basketball. You work for DoD? I thought you were a professor.”
Alex nodded. “I am, and neither Columbia University nor DoD
would be happy to learn I used my clearance and access for personal reasons. They'd be even unhappier if they knew about my involvement with a young girl whose bones were dug out of a riverbed. I'd be disgraced and tossed out on my ear in a New York minute.”
“You do classified work?”
“Yes.”
“On what?”
“Space-based laser communications for nuclear weapons platforms.”
“Wow.”
“No, shit, wow.”
“That's the price you'll pay for the queen of hearts?”
Alex smiled his most gracious smile, took off his glasses and let Bobby catch a glimpse of Dr. Goldman. He sat up straight, pulled his shoulders back and chin up, and the fact that he was naked to the waist with his white, round, bourgeois tummy exposed only increased the effect.
“Dr. Goldman summers in the Hamptons,” he said, deadpan. “Dr. Goldman reads the
Times and Journal
and the
New York Review of Books
. Dr. Goldman goes to conferences in Berlin and speaks German. Dr. Goldman knows how to comport himself in a safe room in the Pentagon. Dr. Goldman leads a sophisticated life on the Upper West Side and knows the first names of a dozen headwaiters as well as the names of their children and grandchildren. Dr. Goldman is successful, well-connected, intellectual, and rich.”
Alex sniffed, relaxed his haughty manner and became Alex again. “Yes, Bobby, I'd lose my lab and my security clearance. I'm sure my wife Joanna would divorce me, and I'd probably never see my children again, or at least not for a long time.”
What Alex didn't say was that the wizard of Alvarado Street didn't like Dr. Goldman very much. He'd rather play cards and think about nothing beyond the next hand.
“How many kids do you have?” Bobby asked.
“Four. Two with my first wife Naomi and two with Joanna. All girls.”
“That's a heavy price to pay.”
“No foolin'.”
“You never told either of your wives anything? Didn't they ask about the tattoo?”
“Sure they asked. Women always ask. Joanna has tried for years to get me to have it removed. I lie. We all lie, make up a story, spin some bullshit, and that's that.”
“So you know all about me. That's scary.”
“No, not everything, only what's in the paper trail, and we never had any intention of using the information except to keep ourselves informed. We needed to know whether you were alive or dead, where you were, and who you lived with. We're your friends, Bobby, and we're not sitting judgment on you any more than on ourselves. We know the Army sent you to shrinks, and we worried about them. We worried about your being a junkie, because sometimes a junkie will say or do anything to score dope. We know you have two kids. Nelson has one although he's never been married, and Dean may have a dozen, but if he does, he doesn't know about them. He does have the finest wife on the planet, so I hear, but I've never met her.”
“You will on Sunday,” Dean said. “Billie's coming down to pick me up.”
“Sunday's a long ways away. Whose deal? Nelson? What's the game?”
“Seven stud. Ante up.”
Each in turn threw a white chip in the pot. Dealing, Nelson called out the cards, “A seven to Alex, a five to Dean, an eight to Bobby, a nine to Charlie, and another eight to the dealer.”
“We know about you,” Charlie said, “and it's only fair that you should know anything you want about us.”
Bobby added it all up and the sum of his thoughts was that his old friends were scary and dangerous, methodically deceitful, and perhaps as crazy as he was. He peeked at his hole cards and said, “All I need to know about you, Charlie, is whether or not you learned to play this game. You're high, nine of clubs. Bet âem or forget 'em.”