Dr Slope added mustard to the tray.
Now they were three.
Two weeks had passed since the funeral. Tonight, by some connectedness of spirit, the three of them had gathered together in this place where the fourth player, Louis Markowitz, had been loved by a close circle of men.
He clutched a Tupperware container to his chest and made the contorted face of a man who would rather not cry. He set the plastic container on the tray. What was missing? he wondered as he picked up the tray. When the bell rang again, announcing a fourth person, the tray fell from his hands.
He sank to the floor and slowly reached out for the heavy mustard jar, sturdy thing, unbroken. He crawled about the tiles, blindly groping for each dropped item, finding the butter and the knife with his eyes screwed shut, watertight.
When he was again in full possession of everything he had lost, he carried the tray down the narrow hall and into the rabbi's den which was lined with four walls of books and two old friends, and one very large stranger, the fourth man, who was unfolding the last leg of the card table. He was six-four but non-threatening in his size, perhaps because his face was so wonderfully appealing. What a nose. And those eyes. Even with the heavy eyelids, the irises were so small they left a generous margin of white on all sides, giving him a look of wide-eyed astonishment at just everything in the world.
Slope liked this man immediately. He looked at the faces of his friends, and, like himself, they were unconsciously, accidentally smiling.
"Pull up a chair, Mr Butler."
"Charles."
"Edward."
"Let me give you the ground rules, Charles," said Robin Duffy, a small and compact bulldog of a man introduced as Louis's lawyer and neighbor of twenty years.
"Louis explained the rules to him," said Rabbi Kaplan, pulling his own chair up to the table. "Charles came with twelve pounds of nickel and dime rolls."
The strained silence was broken by Robin Duffy. "I like a man who comes prepared to lose big."
"So Louis invited you to join the game?" Slope dealt out the cards, and immediately went to work on building a pastrami sandwich.
"I inherited his chair." Charles eyed the tray of sandwich makings with the discrimination of a connoisseur, and passed over the Cheddar cheese for the Swiss, so as not to overpower the more delicate slices of cold chicken. He pulled the letter out of his jacket pocket and exchanged it for the jar of mayonnaise in Slope's hand.
The doctor stared down at the handwriting which had become so familiar to him over his years with the medical examiner's office. Louis's friend was pointing to the third paragraph which indeed spelled out a legacy. The letter was silently passed from man to man as the dealt cards lay where they landed. It seemed Louis's friend had been left more than the chair.
"Well, that fits," said Duffy when he folded the letter and handed it back across the table. "I always figured the poker game was just a front for raising Kathy." He popped the cap from a bottle of beer and picked up his cards. "Did Lou ever tell you where he found her?"
"No. No, he didn't."
"She was maybe eleven. He caught the little brat breaking into a Jag. Well, he's holding her out by the collar of her jacket, and she's swinging away, little fists pounding the crap out of air. So it was take the kid home with him, or spend what's left of the wife's birthday hassling with Juvenile Hall."
"But Helen didn't understand," said Slope, picking up his cards. "She thought Kathy was a present. She wouldn't let go of the kid for twelve years."
Charles smiled down at a clear space on the table where his photographic memory projected the pages of Hoyle which dealt with the rules of poker, a game he had never played. Nowhere in the rules did it list Doomsday Stud with deuces wild. "Louis must have been pleased that she turned out so well, becoming a policewoman and all."
The other three men looked up from their cards, their faces all asking the same silent question: Are you nuts?
"Helen Markowitz did teach Kathy table manners." Duffy examined the card which had been laid down faceup. "I'll bet a nickel. But the kid never really changed. She likes being a cop 'cause she can steal more interesting stuff with her computer. And she gets clean away with it."
"Yeah," said Slope, lighting a cigar and pushing his own coins to the center of the table. "I'll see that nickel and raise you a dime. Whatever Louis needed, Kathy could get for him. I guess he had a few occasions to worry about his pension. After she broke into the FBI computer, I saw him make the sign of the cross – sorry, Rabbi."
"The things she's done," said Duffy, picking at his cards and trying to give the appearance that this was not a potential world-class poker hand. His dime grudgingly pushed into the small pile of coins.
"Remember when she was a little kid," said Slope, "and Helen enrolled her in the NYU computer courses for children?"
"Yeah," said the lawyer. "Helen was so happy that day. Kathy had finally taken an interest in something legal. Do you remember the way Helen cried when the kid gave her that present? You know, the one she made at computer school?"
"That transfer from the savings and loan?" Slope pushed another nickel into the pot as the next card hit the table, faceup.
"Yeah." Robin Duffy smiled and then his mouth wobbled as he tried to take the expression back before it tipped his hand, which was somewhat improved by the card dealt him. "Kathy just couldn't understand why Helen was crying. She figured anybody'd be thrilled to have an extra twenty thou in the checking account three weeks before Christmas."
"Then", said Rabbi Kaplan, "Kathy figured, well Helen is Jewish. Maybe different customs."
In the next four hours, Charles discovered that the game of poker could not be learned from a book, and that Helen had worked miracles with Kathy's behavior. Within six months of foster-care, the Markowitzs had been able to take the child into a store with them, and even turn their backs on her for whole minutes at a time – all because theft, petty or grand, made Helen cry. Helen had done so good a job that Kathy could now pass for a young lady in any company but this one. These men knew what she was: a born thief, a hardcase with no intrinsic sense of right and wrong. Yet, of all the five billion on the planet, Louis Markowitz had loved her best.
After the fiasco with Helen's present, Louis had taken Kathy out of the computer course. The NYU instructor had been sorry to lose such a dazzling student. The bank transfer had been fixed, said the pale little man with the thick glasses. The bank didn't even know the money was ever missing. So why pull the child out? he had asked, genuinely puzzled. It seemed to be upsetting the little girl, he said. Look, she's going to cry.
How could Louis have explained to that kind, soft-spoken, endlessly patient little man that this was not a real kid he had by the hand. You could stick pins in Kathy all damn day long and she'd never, never cry. She had no soft spots.
Later, she would cry for Helen and not stop crying for days, but that was still years and years away. These were the early days of life with the baby felon.
Determined never to stick Kathy on civilians again, Louis brought her into work with him in the after-school hours and pointed at a row of computer terminals in the Special Crimes office. This is crap, he explained to the skinny kid who didn't even come up to his lapel pin in those days. We don't have genius programmers, he told her then, no decent equipment. What we got won't work half the time. And now I've got a PC that won't work at all. You're so smart? Fix it, he told her, and you can play with that one.
One night, when she was only an inch taller, she crept into his office with a strange little smile. She dumped a load of printouts on his desk and crept silently away. Long after Helen had come to take the little angel home, Louis was still at his desk reading all the department dirt he ever imagined possible. The thief had cracked every high-echelon code in existence and raided Internal Affairs.