That was the end of poker for that night. Jerry broke out beer and Scotch and we all sat around and talked about gambling and cheating and one thing and another, cutting up old jackpots as they say, and we had a great time. Even Sid relaxed after a while. Fred’s wife Cora didn’t call, amazingly enough, and that simply rounded out the perfection of the night.
We split up about twelve-thirty, everybody agreeing Abbie should come back Sunday if she was still in town, and then we all went our separate ways. It had been one of my finest moments. Not only was I the guy who knew this girl and had introduced her to the game, she and I were leaving together. Besides that, I’d won fifty-three bucks tonight, which was very healthy for that game. The losing streak was over, I could feel it.
12
Sid had gone downstairs ahead of us, and was waiting for us on the sidewalk. He said to me, “You going home, Chet? I’ll give you a lift.”
Before I could say anything, Abbie said, “I have a car.”
“Oh,” Sid said, and shrugged. “I’ll see you, then,” he said, and turned and walked away.
I looked after him. “That’s funny,” I said. “He never offered me a ride before. He knows I’ve got my own car.”
“Is yours here, too?”
“No, not tonight. I came over straight from work.”
“Then let’s take mine,” she said. “I just rented it today.”
“I live out in Queens,” I said.
“That’s okay. We have to talk, anyway. Come on.”
So I went on. Her car was a green Dodge Polara, the seats freezing cold. We got in and she started the engine and said she needed gas. Did I know of any place open now?
“There’s a Sunoco station over on the West Side, but it’s kind of out of the way.”
“Is that the only place you know?”
Reluctantly I said, “Well, it’s the only Sunoco station I know that’s open now.”
“Does it make a difference? Gas is gas.”
“Well,” I said, even more reluctantly, “the fact is, I’m playing Sunny Dollars.”
She looked at me, and for a long time she didn’t say anything, and then she grinned and said, “You’re a nut, Chet.”
“I suppose I am.”
“Then it’s Sunoco,” she said.
“If it’s okay with you.”
“Why not? If you make out tonight I’ll take twenty-five percent.”
I grinned back at her. “You want to be in the action yourself.”
“Always,” she said, and pulled the car away from the curb. “Where to?”
“Through the park on 84th.”
We went around the block and headed west, and she said, “There’s other gasoline games, you know. Why not spread your play around a little?”
“You just worsen the odds against yourself that way,” I said. “There’s only a certain number of times you’re going to stop in at a gas station. You split that number into two games, you cut your odds back fantastically.”
“You double them,” she said.
“No, it’s a lot worse than that. I’m no mathematician, but I think you get multiples in there that kill you. My father could probably work it out.”
So then naturally she had to know about my father. I told her about him and the insurance thing, and then she told me something about her childhood, hers and Tommy’s. Their father had been in real estate in Florida, a real boom-or-bust business, and they had plenty of both extremes throughout their childhood. The booms were made shorter and the busts longer by the fact that the father was a real bangtail chaser, a horseplayer with an abiding faith in hunch bets and horses with funny names. Purple Pecunia would have been a natural for him, but he was dead now, having expired during the sixth race at Hialeah one afternoon seven years before when his thirty-seven-to-one shot, a horse called Mickey Moose, while five lengths ahead of the field had stumbled and fallen two strides from the finish line. The mother thereafter became a religious fanatic, moved to Nutley, New Jersey, and didn’t miss a church bingo game for the next four years, until the night the hit-and-run driver got her.
“They never did get him,” she finished. “There was nothing I could do about Dad’s death, and I didn’t do anything about Mom’s, but I’m going to do something about Tommy if it’s the last thing I do on earth!”
I looked at her, and she was glaring grimly through the windshield, and for just a moment my own grail — nine hundred thirty bucks — seemed trivial in comparison. I found myself tempted to offer my services, like a knight protecting some helpless damsel in distress, but fortunately the realities of the situation forced themselves back into my mind and I kept my mouth shut. In the first place, in the world in which Tommy McKay’s probable murderer moved I would be much more of a hindrance than a help, getting underfoot at all the wrong times, and so on. And in the second place, Abbie McKay was no helpless damsel in distress. She could take care of herself, that girl, I was sure of it.
So instead of volunteering, I switched the subject of conversation altogether, and we discussed the poker game for a while. She had some interesting things to say about the personalities and playing styles of the other players, and also suggested to me one of my own flaws in the game, being a too-great respect for aces. An ace visible in somebody else’s hand would tend to chase me at times that I had a perfectly respectable stay, and an ace in my own hand would keep me in at times when I had nothing but a clear-cut fold. I had to agree with that, and filed everything she said away in the back of my mind, to be used next week.
At the gas station we got two Sunny fives and a Dollars ten. “Anything good?” Abbie asked.
“No. These are the easy halves.”
After the gas station we went back across town and through the Midtown Tunnel and up onto the Expressway, and Abbie said, “We’re being followed, Chet.”
I turned around and looked and there were four pairs of headlights spaced out behind us. I couldn’t see any of the cars behind the lights at all. “Which one?” I said.
“Second car back in the left lane.”
“How do you know he’s following us?”
“He was behind us when we stopped for the light at Fifth Avenue on the way to the gas station. Then I saw him behind us again in the tunnel.”
“You sure it’s the same car?”
“I noticed the hood ornament,” she said. “It’s very sexy.”
I looked at her, abruptly more aware of the man-woman thing than of any car following us around the nighttime city, and she glanced at me, grinned, and said, “I’m putting you on, Chet.” She looked front again. “But it is the same car, I know it.”
I looked back again. The car was maintaining its distance back there. I said, “There’s something I didn’t tell you about. Maybe this would be a good time to.” And I told her about the hoods grabbing me last night.
She was very interested but didn’t interrupt at all, and when I was done, she nodded and said, “I didn’t think the mob had done it. It just didn’t look like their kind of thing. If they’re going around trying to solve it, too, that proves it.”