He was good at finagling. He had the gift of gab, and a face like a Baptist preacher’s, and a winning smile. First he sat himself down at a table near their booth. Then he contrived to jostle a waitress and spill a fresh round of beers she was bringing to them. He offered to pay for the drinks, flashed his wallet so they could see that he was flush. Chatted them up a little, taking it slow, feeling his way.
One of the fiddlers bought him a beer, then he bought them all another round. That got him the invitation to join them. Right away he laid on the oil about being in town for a convention himself, the old birds of a feather routine. They shook hands all around. Dave from Cleveland, Mitch from Los Angeles, Verne from Cedar Rapids, Harry from Bayonne. And Johnny from Denver. He didn’t even have to maneuver the talk back to cards. They weren’t interested in his convention or their own, or San Francisco, or any other kind of small talk; they were interested in poker. He played some himself, he said. Nothing he liked better than five-stud or draw. No wild-card games, none of that crap; he was a purist. So were they.
“We’re thinking about getting up a game,” Harry from Bayonne said. “You feel like sitting in, Johnny?”
“I guess I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “Depending on the stakes. Nothing too rich for my blood.” He showed them his best smile. “Then again, nothing too small, either. Poker’s no good unless you make it interesting, right?”
If they’d insisted on penny-ante or buck-limit, he’d have backed out and gone looking elsewhere. But they were sports: table stakes, ten-buck limit per bet, no limit on raises. They looked like they could afford that kind of action. Fiddle-music jerks, maybe, but well-dressed and reasonably well-heeled. He caught a glimpse of a full wallet when Mitch from L.A. bought another round. Might be as much as four or five grand among the four of them.
Verne from Cedar Rapids said he had a deck of cards in his room; they could play there. Johnny said, “Sounds good. How about if we go buy a couple more decks in the gift shop. Nothing like the feel of a new deck after a while.”
They all thought that was a good idea. Everybody drank up and they went together to the gift shop. All Johnny had to do was make sure the cards they bought were Bicycle, one of the two most common brands; he had four shaded Bicycle decks in his pocket, two blue-backs and two red-backs. Then they all rode upstairs to Verne from Cedar Rapids’ room and shed their coats and jackets and got down to business.
Johnny played it straight for a while, card-counting, making conservative bets, getting a feel for the way the four marks played. Only one of them was reckless: Mitch from L.A., the one with the fattest wallet. He’d have liked two or three of that type, but one was better than none. One was all he needed.
After an hour and a half he was ahead about a hundred and Mitch from L.A. was the big winner, betting hard, bluffing at least part of the time. Better and better. Time to bring in one of his shaded decks. That was easy, too. They’d let him hold the decks they’d bought downstairs; simple for him to bring out one of his own instead.
He didn’t open it himself. You always let one of the marks do that, so the mark could look it over and see that it was still sealed in cellophane with the manufacturer’s stamp on top intact. The stamp was the main thing to the mark, the one thing you never touched when you were fixing a deck. What they didn’t figure on was what you’d done: You carefully opened the cellophane wrapper along the bottom and slid out the card box. Then you opened the box along one side, prying the glued flaps apart with a razor blade. Once you’d shaded the cards, you resealed the box with rubber cement, slipped it back into the cellophane sleeve, refolded the sleeve ends along the original creases, and resealed them with a drop of glue. When you did the job right — and Johnny Shade was a master — nobody could tell that the package had been tampered with. Sure as hell not a fiddler named Dave from Cleveland, the one who opened the gimmicked deck.
The light was pretty good in there; Johnny could read his shade work with no more than a casual glance at the hands as they were dealt out. He took a couple of medium-sized pots, worked his winnings up to around five hundred, biding his time until both he and Mitch from L.A. drew big hands on the same deal. It finally happened about 10:30, on a hand of jacks-or-better. Harry from Bayonne was dealing; Johnny was on his left. Mitch from L.A. drew a pat full house, aces over fives. Johnny scored trip deuces. When he glanced over at the rest of the deck, he saw that the top card — his card on the draw — was the fourth deuce. Beautiful. A set-up like this was always better when you weren’t the dealer, didn’t have to deal seconds or anything like that to win the pot. Just read the shade and it was yours.
Mitch from L.A. bet ten and Johnny raised him and Mitch raised back. Verne from Cedar Rapids stayed while the other two dropped, which made Johnny smile inside. Verne owned four high spades in sequence and was gambling on a one-card draw to fill a royal or a straight flush. But there was no way he was going to get it because Mitch had his spade ace and Johnny had his spade nine. The best he could do was a loser flush. Johnny raised again, and Mitch raised back, and Verne hung in stubborn. There was nearly a grand in the pot when Mitch finally called.
Johnny took just the one card on the draw, to make the others think he was betting two pair. Mitch would think that even if Johnny caught a full house, his would be higher because he had aces up; so Mitch would bet hot and heavy. Which he did. Verne from Cedar Rapids had caught his spade flush and hung in there for a while, driving the pot even higher, until he finally realized his flush wasn’t going to beat what Johnny and Mitch were betting; then he dropped. Mitch kept right on working his full boat, raising each time Johnny raised, until he was forced to call when his cash pile ran down to a lone tenspot. That last ten lifted the total in the pot to twenty-two hundred bucks.
Johnny grinned and said, “Read ’em and weep, gentlemen,” and fanned out his four deuces face up. Mitch from L.A. didn’t say a word; he just dropped his cards and looked around at the others. None of them had anything to say, either. Johnny grinned again and said, “My lucky night,” and reached for the pot.
Reaching for it was as far as he got.
Harry from Bayonne closed a big paw over his right wrist; Dave from Cleveland did the same with his left wrist. They held him like that, his hands imprisoned flat on the table.
“What the hell’s the idea?” Johnny said.
Nobody answered him. Mitch from L.A. swept the cards together and then began to examine them one at a time, holding each card up close to his eyes.
Harry from Bayonne said, “What is it, shade work?”
“Right. Real professional job.”
“Thought so. I’m pretty good at spotting blockout and cutout work. And I didn’t feel any blisters or edge or sand work.”
“At first I figured he might be one of the white-on-white boys,” Verne from Cedar Rapids said. “You know, used whiteout fluid on the white borders. Then I tumbled to the shading.”
“Nice resealing on that card box, Johnny,” Dave from Cleveland said. “If I hadn’t known it was a gimmicked deck, I wouldn’t have spotted it.”
Johnny gawped. “You knew?” he said. “You all knew?”
“Oh sure,” Mitch from L.A. said. “As soon as you moved in on us down in the bar.”
“But... but... why did you...?”
“We wanted to see what kind of hustler you were, how you worked your scam. You might call it professional curiosity.”