Texas Hold ‘Em is easy to learn, but it will cost you to catch on to the finer points. To begin with, you’re dealt two down cards, then you bet; then comes the flop, three up cards in the center of the table that belong to everyone. You bet some more. Then an up card that’s called the turn and another round of betting. Then a final up card, the river, and more betting… unless everyone has folded to the winner. I expected Pellerin to play tight, but five minutes hadn’t passed before he came out firing and pushed in three thousand in chips. Le Gros and Mike went with him to the flop. King of hearts, trey of clubs, heart jack. Pellerin bet six thousand. LeGros folded and Mike peeked at his down cards.
“They didn’t change on you, did they?” asked Pellerin.
Mike raised him four thousand. That told me Pellerin had gotten into his head. The smart play would have been either to call or to get super aggressive. A middling raise like four thousand suggested a lack of confidence. Of course with Mad Mike, you never knew when he was setting a trap. Pellerin pushed it again, raising ten K, not enough to make Mike bag the hand automatically. Mike called. The card on the turn was a three of hearts, pairing the board. Pellerin checked and Mike bet twenty.
“You must have yourself a hand,” said Pellerin. “But your two pair’s not going to cut it. I’m all in.”
He had about sixty thousand stacked in front of him and Mike could have covered the bet, but it wasn’t a percentage play—losing would have left him with the short chip stack and it was too early in the evening to take the risk. He tried staring a hole through Pellerin, fussed with his chips, and eventually mucked his hand.
“You’re not the dumbest son-of-a-bitch who ever stole a pot from me,” he said.
“Don’t suppose I am,” said Pellerin.
As I watched—and that is what I mainly did, push in antes and watch—it occurred to me that once he sat down, Pellerin had stopped acting like dead money, as if all his anxiety had been cured by the touch of green felt and plastic aces. He was one hell of a hold ’em player. He never lost much and it seemed that he took down almost every big pot. Whenever he went head-to-head against somebody, he did about average… except when he went up against Mad Mike. Him, he gutted. It was evident that he had gotten a good read on Mike. In less than two hours he had 90 percent of the man’s money. He had also developed a palsy in his left hand and was paler than he had been when he’d entered.
The door opened, the babble of the casino flowed in and a security man ushered a doe-eyed, long-legged brunette wearing a black cocktail dress into the room. She had some age on her—in her mid-thirties, I estimated—and her smile was low wattage, a depressive’s smile. Nonetheless, she was an exceptionally beautiful woman with a pale olive complexion and a classically sculpted face, her hair arranged so that it fell all to one side. A shade too much make-up was her only flaw. She came up behind Pellerin, bent down, absently caressing the nape of his neck, and whispered something. He said, “You’re going to have to excuse me, gentlemen. My nurse here’s a real hardass. But I’ll be glad to take your money again tomorrow night.”
He scooted back his chair; the brunette caught his arm and helped him to stand.
Mike, who had taken worse beats in his career, overcame his bad mood and asked, “Where you been keeping yourself, man?”
“Around,” said Pellerin. “But I’ve been inactive ’til recently.”
I smelled something wrong about Pellerin. Wrong rose off him like stink off the Ninth Ward. World class poker players don’t just show up, they don’t materialize out of nowhere and take a hundred large off Mad Mike Morrissey, without acquiring some reputation in card rooms and small casinos. And his success wasn’t due to luck. What Pellerin had done to Mike was as clean a gutting as I had ever witnessed. The next two nights, I stayed out of the game and observed. Pellerin won close to half a million, though the longest he played at a single sitting was four hours. The casino offered him a spot in the tournament, but he declined on the grounds of poor health—he was recovering from an injury, he said, and was unable to endure the long hours and stress of tournament play. My sources informed me that, according to the county records, nobody named Josey Pellerin lived in or near Lafayette. That didn’t surprise me. I knew a great number of people who had found it useful to adopt another name and place of residence. I did, however, manage to dredge up some interesting background on the brunette.
Jocundra Verret, age forty-two, single, had been employed by Tulane University nearly twenty years before, working for the late Dr. Hideki Ezawa, who had received funding during the 1980s to investigate the possible scientific basis of certain voodoo remedies. She had left the project, as they say, under a cloud. That was as much as I could gather from the redacted document that fell into my hands. After Tulane, she had worked as a private nurse until a year ago; since that time, her paychecks had been signed by the Darden Corporation, an outfit whose primary holdings were in the fields of bioengineering and medical technology. She, Pellerin, and another man, Dr. Samuel Crain, had booked a suite at Harrah’s on a corporate card, the same card that paid for an adjoining suite occupied by two other men, one of whom had signed the register as D. Vader. They were bulky, efficient sorts, obviously doing duty as bodyguards.
I had no pressing reason to look any deeper, but the mention of voodoo piqued my interest. While I was not myself a devotee, my parents had both been occasional practitioners and those childhood associations of white candles burning in storefront temples played a part in my motivation. That night, when Pellerin sat down at the table, I went searching for Ms. Verret and found her in a bar just off the casino floor, drinking a sparkling water. She had on gray slacks and a cream-colored blouse, and looked quite fetching. The bodyguards were nowhere in sight, but I knew they must be in the vicinity. I dropped onto the stool beside her and introduced myself.
“I’m not in the mood,” she said.
“Neither am I, cher. The doctor tells me it’s permanent, but when I saw you I felt a flicker of hope.”
She ducked her head, hiding a smile. “You really need to go. I’m expecting someone.”
“Under different circumstances, I’d be delighted to stick around and let you break my heart. But sad to say, this is a business call. I was wondering how come a bunch like the Darden Corporation is bankrolling a poker player.”
Startled, she darted her eyes toward me, but quickly recovered her poise. “The people I work for are going to ask why you were talking to me,” she said evenly. “I can tell them you were hitting on me, but if you don’t leave in short order, I won’t be able to get away with that explanation.”
“I assume you’re referring in the specific to the two large gentlemen who’ve got the suite next to yours. Don’t you worry. They won’t do anything to me.”
“It’s not what they might do to you that’s got me worried,” she said.
“I see. Okay.” I got to my feet. “That being the case, perhaps it’d be best if we talked at a more opportune time. Say tomorrow morning? Around ten in the coffee shop?”
“Please stay away from me,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you.”
As I left the bar, I saw the bodyguards playing the dollar slots near the entrance—one glanced at me incuriously, but kept on playing. I walked down the casino steps, exiting onto Canal Street, and had a smoke. It was muggy, the stars dim. High in the west, a sickle moon was encased in an envelope of mist. I looked at the neon signs, the traffic, listened to the chatter and laughter of by-passers with drinks in their hands. Post-Katrina New Orleans pretending that it was the Big Easy, teetering on the edge of boom or bust. Though Verret had smiled at me, I could think of no easy way to hustle her, and I decided to give Billy Pitch a call and see whether he thought the matter was worth pursuing.