She blocked the doorway the way I had with Oliya.
“Hi,” I said.
“He’s been tired lately,” she replied. “Don’t take too long.”
“Okay.”
That should have been enough but she was stuck like glue to the doorjamb.
“The case is over, right?” she asked. “I mean A Free Man is gone, isn’t he?”
I’d met Mr. Lamont Charles when investigating a murder a few years before. He was in a nursing home at the time. Loretta had worked as a volunteer there.
“All over,” I assured her. “This is just a friendly visit. You know that man of yours is like a great Greek philosopher. He’s got answers to any question you could imagine and many more that you don’t have words for yet.”
Defeated by kindness, Loretta moved back from the door and I eased into the apartment.
“Come on out here, Officer,” came a musical tenor from the veranda.
“Here I come.”
“Honey,” the man’s voice added, “can you bring out some bourbon, a glass, and some ice?”
“You shouldn’t be drinking,” she said to the air.
“That’s why I only asked for one damn glass. You know the detective likes his whiskey.”
“Okay.”
The veranda was nine or ten feet wide and six deep. There were flowering plants along the lattice metal wall and an ornate table inlaid with blue and red Moroccan tiles.
Maybe sixty, he was leaning against the wrought-iron railing, wearing a deep red housecoat with a royal blue T-shirt underneath. The pose was pure 1930s. William Powell considering his next quip. Humphrey Bogart’s wry but comfortable stance in the face of insurmountable odds. Only, for Lamont Charles this was not an act. With skin black and lustrous as tar, his smile was a starry palate. He’d lived the lives of the characters that populated Depression-era films. Born in Acres, Mississippi, he’d chopped cotton until his father left and his mother died. Then he wandered down to New Orleans and played blackjack, stud poker, banco, and even the slot machines in back rooms, gin joints, and whorehouses, first in Louisiana and then around the world. He was banned from the main floor of every casino in Vegas, not for cheating, not even for counting cards, but because he was the luckiest man on earth — so dubbed by almost every gambler who had the bad luck of sitting across a gaming table from him.
He turned from the view of the Hudson to regard me. Letting one hand loose from the railing, he almost fell but then righted himself.
Grabbing hold of the back of a nearby cast-iron chair, Lamont worked his way around until he could fall back on the cushions.
When I’d met him, the professional gambler was triplegic, with only his right arm functional. He lived fairly comfortably in that convalescent home. Loretta was a nursing student doing an internship there. That’s where she got to know Lamont. Even after she took a paying job, Loretta dropped by every week or so. She’d fallen in something beyond love with him. She took him out of that nest of senility and got him so that he could stand upright and even take a step or two. His left arm was weak but he could use it to steady an object while his right hand did the work.
In the beginning Loretta took extra shifts as a nurse at New York Presbyterian to pay for Lamont’s doctor bills and their rent. But for the last year, on the first day of every month, Lamont and Loretta have gone down to Atlantic City for a game literally run by kings.
“How you doin’, Detective Oliver?” he greeted. “Have a seat.”
“You know I haven’t been a cop for nearly fifteen years,” I said as I settled.
“Once a cop...” he insinuated on an airy smile. Then: “What you got in the satchel?”
It was a slender blue briefcase I’d found in the blue bedroom. I laid the case on Moroccan tile, then opened it to reveal 250 shiny silver disks.
“Oh my God,” Lamont said, his eyes alight with the promise of treasure.
“You got the cards?” I asked him.
“Blackjack?”
“Just what I had in mind.”
“Loretta,” the luckster called out.
“Yeah, baby?”
“Bring me out a hundred ones.”
“Okay.”
“There’s more than twice that here,” I said.
“I see,” he assured me.
From somewhere in the folds of the housecoat, my friend brought out a blue deck of Bicycle Standard playing cards. Mr. Charles’s face glistened with the fever of gambling. Somehow he managed to shuffle the deck using the good hand and the infirm one.
Blackjack. It was the first word of an ancient incantation that sometimes allowed a poor man or woman to dream about deliverance. Lamont grinned at those cards.
We played for nearly three hours. I do believe that he could have beggared me in forty-five minutes, but Lamont was having a good time, wanting to savor the feeling of victory.
After letting me take a pot or two, the hustler asked, “You want another drink, Officer?”
“No, thanks.” I looked up to see him smiling.
“That’s right, son,” he said. “Alcohol is poison for the serious gambler.”
After that exchange he won fourteen out of the next sixteen hands.
Loretta had come to the sliding glass door of their terrace. She stayed inside, watching intently from shadow. Now and then Lamont would look up at her, his eyes expressionless.
I could feel the potency of their connection. There was a hunger between them. Somehow this want was satisfied by him playing and her looking on.
I didn’t know exactly why I was there. Lamont didn’t know anything about petroleum bootleggers or alt-right warriors. He didn’t have any contacts that would have helped me. But he was a prodigy of calculated risk and had spent his life in the hazard lane of a race to the death.
“You ever play two hands at once?” I asked when I’d lost half of Melquarth’s dollars.
“Sure,” Lamont said to his hand. “Sometimes I’ll buy two places at the table. It’s a good way to understand who you playin’ against by competing with yourself.”
That was an interesting idea, but I was after something else.
“I mean have you ever played at two different tables at the same time — against different opponents?”
“I don’t use the word opponent in cards. It’s not straightforward like chess is. What makes gambling fun is the element of luck. You could be your own worst enemy or the cards might just fall your way.”
“I get what you mean.”
“Hit me.”
I did.
He glanced at the card and then at me.
“You pat?”
I nodded.
“Twenty-one,” he murmured.
Showing me the cards, he then raked in a thirty-six-dollar pot.
It was his turn to shuffle.
“But what if you were playing at two different tables at once and you had to win at both to take the antes?”
“Whoa,” he crooned as he cut the deck with one hand. “That would be a great game. I don’t know how you’d do it. I mean, three people sitting at the same table is like that in a way, but... that extra hand would hurt you.”
He offered me the cut.
I waved it off.
He dealt.
I lost.
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “If I lose either hand, then I lose it all.”
“If you were in some crazy situation like that, you could go at it like most gamblers, I guess. I mean, you could just go for broke and hope for the best. Problem is if you go for broke that’s usually where you end up.” Lamont was looking into Loretta’s eyes as he spoke.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. “Is there another way?”