Lawrence Block - Chip Harrison Scores Again

“Didn’t think so. A Yankee, your typical Yankee, the heat’ll get him and he won’t mind the cold. With folks down here it’s the other way around. The way some of us were complaining about the first week in February, and it wasn’t all that cold. Of course our heat isn’t the kind you’ll get in a big city, where the buildings hold it in. Makes somewhat of a difference.”

I nodded.

“Minnie was saying you really made a good impression on the Reverend. She’ll see him Sundays after the service and as like as not he’ll have a good word for you.”

“I hardly ever talk to him.”

“Well, I wouldn’t let on in front of Minnie, but I wouldn’t be all that surprised if that’s what the drunken old sonofabitch likes about you. Last thing he wanted was for those old hens to saddle him with a nursemaid. Imagine the kind of person they’d be apt to pick. Some Salvation Army jackass with a ramrod up his ass who’d either be watering the old sonofabitch’s whiskey or praying all over the place. Just for the sake of somebody leaving him alone, I don’t suppose the Reverend would even mind if you was screwing his daughter six times a week and twice on Sundays.”

I came within inches of cardiac arrest. But the Sheriff went sailing right on, and I’m sure to this day he just tried to pick the least likely example he could possibly think of. He gave me a bad moment, though.

“And Geraldine’s happy with you, too. Happier than she lets on. She don’t let on much, that one, but I got to know her pretty good over the years. Had a place here for the longest time. Set it up herself. There was this woman she was working for who was doing wrong by everyone — girls, customers, law enforcement people. Geraldine, she opened up on her own and got the right backing and the right girls working for her and sent the other old bitch clear out of the state. She knows what she’s doing, that one.”

“I can believe it.”

“In her day, wasn’t a better-looking woman in the county. You can believe that one, too.”

“I do.”

“Wasn’t that bad myself, in those days. Before Minnie’s cooking.” And he patted his paunch and let his eyes drift off to examine old memories. Before Minnie, too, I thought, and wondered if Geraldine and the Sheriff still got it together once in a while for Auld Lang Syne. On holidays and birthdays, say. I sort of hoped they did.

“She thinks a lot of you,” he was saying. “She thinks you’re a good man to have around the place. Me, I think you make a damn fine Deputy Sheriff.” He clucked again. “Well, I’m running off at the mouth again, and you better get on back if you want your supper. Just thought I’d give you a few things to think about.”

A couple of days later Geraldine said, “Mate in four, starting with Knight to King Five. See it?”

I studied it for a long time, then nodded and started picking up the pieces.

“Interesting thing happened in the next county over,” she said. “Used to be two regular gambling places there. About a year ago Ewell Rodgers had a second coronary, and you generally only get three of them, and he closed up and went and sat on his rocking chair. The other place was run by a man named Morgan from East Tennessee. He was getting all of Ewell’s crowd, and success must have gone to his head. He rubbed some people the wrong way that he shouldn’t have. He got raided and arrested, and while he was sitting in jail waiting for someone to put up bail money, his place somehow or other caught on fire, and the fire department just happened to take a wrong turn getting there. Not a stick left. Morgan took the insurance money and bought the fastest car he could find and drove all the way back to East Tennessee with the gas pedal on the floor.”

She got up and went behind the bar and came back with a Coke for me and her bottle of banana liqueur. I couldn’t remember her ever bringing the bottle to the table before. Usually she took her glass back each time and refilled it.

She said, “I used to have gambling in here, you know. I must have told you that.”

“I think you mentioned it.”

“Did very well with the gambling. Then there was an election and I was let know that there wouldn’t be any trouble if the tables and slots and all went, so they went. By the time it was all right to replace them, it just wasn’t worth it. Ewell and that Morgan were doing good business and everything was off around here, I was down from seven girls to two, and I couldn’t be bothered. When Ewell retired I don’t mind telling you it gave me ideas. There was that much business open, and I was sure to get a good portion of it. And then when Morgan’s place went up in smoke—”

She picked up her glass, looked at it, and drank it down. This was as surprising as the time I heard her swear. She always took the stuff in little sips, and a drink would last her so long that I doubt she actually drank more than half of it; the rest evaporated.

“I would have six tables for cards,” she said. “No more than that. Five tables of poker and one of blackjack. On the poker you let the deal pass and just charge so much an hour to sit in the game. No cutting the pot. Morgan was cutting pots there at the end.

“On the blackjack, you would have to have a dealer. I could deal it myself, as far as that goes. Any fool can. The only problem is if you have a dealer working for you and you can’t trust him, because a blackjack dealer can think of fifteen different ways to cheat the house and you’ll be forever trying to keep up with him.”

She poured herself another drink. And drank it right down.

“And one craps table,” she said. “That’s all you would need. You let the players run the game, same as the poker. Then what I would do is slap slot machines all over the place. You make a ton on slot machines and all you have to do is take out the money and put a drop of Three-In-One Oil in the works once a month. No one ever lost money on a slot machine. Except the damned fools who play them.”

“Where would you put all of this?”

“Right here in this room. It’s big enough so there’d be space left over, no one would be crowded.”

“What about the drinkers?”

She filled her glass but left it on the table. “Over on the right. Nobody ever goes in that room and you wouldn’t know it’s there, but it wouldn’t be anything to put a bar in there.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’d never fit our Saturday crowd in there unless you packed them like sardines.”

“Chip, you wouldn’t want that kind of crowd if you had gambling. I don’t even want them now, but there’s not enough money just in the girls and I have to have every drink sale I can get. Put in tables and the idea would be to cut that crowd to a third of what it is. Maybe less than that, maybe a fifth, say, on Saturdays.”

“Some of those drinkers wind up going upstairs.”

“And most of them don’t. Instead they make noise and start fights, and that’s the last thing you can tolerate when you have gambling tables.”

“How would you cut the drinking crowd?”

“Easiest thing in the world. Leave out the beer taps. Sell imported beer by the bottle at seventy or eighty cents. Push the hard liquor price up to a dollar a drink, nothing cheaper. The way it is now, we’re selling girls to men who come here to drink. The other way, we’d be selling whiskey to men who come here for girls and gambling. And when a man’s gambling he doesn’t mind paying high prices for whiskey, and when he wins he likes to celebrate with a girl.”

“You’ve got it all figured out,” I said.

She drained her glass. “It’s not something that just came to me in a flash. I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Without the drinking crowd, I guess you wouldn’t have much need for a bouncer.”