So I went straight over there from the garage.
Verna looked up when I said hello. Her round, plain face was red with prickly heat and her colorless hair hung limp and sweat-plastered to her skin. There was a funny look in her eyes and around her mouth, a look that made me feel uneasy.
“Frank,” she said. “Lord, it’s hot, isn’t it?”
“And no relief in sight. Where’s Jerry?”
“In the house.”
“Busy? I’d like to talk to him.”
“You can’t.”
“No? How come?”
“He’s dead.”
“What?”
“Dead,” she said. “I killed him.”
I wasn’t hot anymore; it was as if I’d been doused with ice water. “Killed him? Jesus, Verna—”
“We had a fight and I went and got his service pistol and shot him in the back of the head while he was watching TV.”
“When?” It was all I could think of to say.
“Little while ago.”
“The police... have you called the police?”
“No.”
“Then I’d better—”
The screen door popped open with a sudden creaking sound. I jerked my gaze that way, and Jerry was standing there big as life. “Hey, Frank,” he said.
I gaped at him with my mouth hanging open.
“Look like you could use a cold one. You too, Verna.”
Neither of us said anything.
Jerry said, “I’ll get one for each of us,” and the screen door banged shut.
I looked at Verna again. She was still sitting in the same posture, head down, staring at the steps with that funny look on her face.
“I know about him killing me all the time,” she said. “Did you think I didn’t know, didn’t hear him saying it?”
There were no words in my head. I closed my mouth.
“I wanted to see how it felt to kill him the same way,” Verna said. “And you know what? It felt good.”
I backed down the steps, started to turn away. But I was still looking at her and I saw her head come up, I saw the odd little smile that changed the shape of her mouth.
“Good,” she said, “but not good enough.”
I went home. Mary Ellen was upstairs, taking a shower. When she came out I told her what had just happened.
“My God, Frank. The heat’s made her as crazy as he is. They’re two of a kind.”
“No,” I said, “they’re not. They’re not the same at all.”
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t tell her what I meant. I didn’t have to, because just then in the hot, dead stillness we both heard the crack of the pistol shot from next door.
Shade Work
Johnny Shade blew into San Francisco on the first day of summer. He went there every year, when he had the finances; it was a good place to find action on account of the heavy convention business. Usually he went a little later in the summer, around mid-July, when there were fifteen or twenty thousand conventioneers wandering around, a high percentage of them with money in their pockets and a willingness to lay some of it down on a poker table. You could take your time then, weed out the deadheads and the short-money scratchers. Pick your vic.
But this year was different. This year he couldn’t afford to wait around or take his time. He had three thousand in his kick that he’d scored in Denver, and he needed to parlay that into ten grand — fast. Ten grand would buy him into a big con Elk Tracy and some other boys were setting up in Louisville. A classic big-store con, even more elaborate than the one Newman and Redford had pulled off in The Sting, Johnny’s favorite flick. Elk needed a string of twenty and a nut of two hundred thousand to set it up right; that was the reason for the ten-grand buy-in. The guaranteed net was two million. Ten grand buys you a hundred, minimum. Johnny Shade had been a card mechanic and cheat for nearly two decades and he’d never held that much cash in his hands at one time. Not even close to that much.
He was a small-time grifter and he knew it. A single-o, traveling around the country on his own because he preferred it that way, looking for action wherever he could find it. But it was never heavy action, never the big score. Stud and draw games in hotel rooms with marks who never seemed to want to lose more than a few hundred at a sitting. He wasn’t a good enough mechanic to play in even a medium-stakes game and hope to get away with crimps or hops or overhand run-ups or Greek-deals or hand-mucks or any of the other shuffling or dealing cheats. He just didn’t have the fingers for it. So mostly he relied on his specialty, shade work, which was how he’d come to be called Johnny Shade. He even signed hotel registers as Johnny Shade nowadays, instead of the name he’d been born with. A kind of private joke.
Shade work was fine in small games. Most amateurs never thought to examine or riffle-test a deck when he ran a fresh one in, because it was always in its cellophane wrapper with the manufacturer’s seal unbroken. The few who did check the cards didn’t spot the gaff on account of they were looking for blisters, shaved edges, blockout or cutout work — the most common methods of marking a deck. They didn’t know about the more sophisticated methods like flash or shade work. In Johnny’s case, they probably wouldn’t have spotted the shade gaff if they had known, not the way he did it.
He had it down to a science. He diluted blue and red aniline dye with alcohol until he had the lightest possible tint, then used a camel’s hair brush to wash over a small section of the back pattern of each card in a Bee or Bicycle deck. The dye wouldn’t show on the red or blue portion of the card back, but it tinted the white part just lightly enough so you could see it if you knew what to look for. And he had eyesight almost as good as Clark Kent’s. He could spot his shade work on a vic’s cards across the table in poor light without even squinting.
But the high-rollers knew about shade work, just as they knew about every other scam a professional hustler could come up with. You couldn’t fool them, so you couldn’t steal their money. If you were Johnny Shade, you had to content yourself with low-rollers and deadheads, with pocket and traveling cash instead of the big score.
He was tired of the game, that was the thing. He’d been at it too long, lived on the far edge of riches too long, been a single-o grifter too long. He wanted a slice of the good life. Ten grand buys a hundred. With a hundred thousand he could travel first-class, wine and dine and bed first-class women, take his time finding new action — maybe even set up a big con of his own. Or find a partner and work some of the fancier short cons. Lots of options, as long as a guy had real money in his kick.
First, though, he had to parlay his Denver three K into ten K. Then he could hop a plane for Louisville and look up Elk Tracy. Ten days... that was all the time he had before Elk closed out his string. Ten days to pick the right vics, set up two or three or however many games it took him to net the seven thousand.
He found his first set of marks his first night in Frisco. That was a good omen. His luck was going to change; he could feel it.
Most weeks in the summer there was a convention going on at the Hotel Nob Hill, off Union Square. He walked in there on this night, and the first thing he saw was a banner that said WELCOME FIDDLERS in great big letters. Hick musicians, or maybe some kind of organization for people who were into cornball music. Just his type of crowd. Just his type of mark.
He hung out in the bar, nursing a beer, circulating, keeping his ears open. There were certain words he listened for and “poker” was one of them. One of four guys in a booth used it, and when he sidled closer he saw that they were all wearing badges with FIDDLER on them and their names and the cities they were from written underneath. They were talking the right talk: stud poker, bragging about how good they were at it, getting ready for a game. Ripe meat. All he had to do was finagle his way among them, get himself invited to join the play if the set-up and the stakes were right.