Burgade's Crossing, page 4
The deal was Lady One-Eye's. Without speaking she picked up the deck. Again, Quincannon studied her dexterous fingers as they manipulated the deck, set it out to be cut, then dealt one card face down and one face up to the Rose and herself. If she was a skin-game artist, he reflected, she was in a class by herself.
The professionals she'd cleaned over the past eight weeks would have caught her out if she had been doing anything as obvious as dealing seconds, dealing off the bottom, switching hole cards, or using a mirror or other reflective surface to reveal the faces of the cards to her as she dealt them. She wasn't using advantage cards: the house provided sealed decks, which were opened in plain view at the table, and switching them for marked decks hidden in her clothing was next to impossible for a woman who wore a high-collared dress with long, tight-fitting sleeves. Nor could her gaff be table bags or any of the other fancy contraptions manufactured by the likes of Will & Fink, the notorious San Francisco firm that specialized in supplying gimmicks to crooked gamblers. Because of the raised platform, and the fact that a woman played upon it, the table wore its floor-length green skirt, but the skirt was drawn up until Lady One-Eye took her chair, thus allowing potential players to examine both it and the table if they chose to. Table tricks were the cheap grifter's ploy anyway. And Lady One-Eye was anything but a cheap grifter.
The Rose's up card was the jack of clubs, the Lady's the four of hearts. Both women checked their hole cards, then the Rose winked at her admirers, bet twenty dollars. Lady OneEye called and dealt a ten of diamonds to go with the jack, a deuce of spades for herself. This time the Rose bet fifty dollars. Again, silently, Lady One-Eye called.
The fourth round of cards brought the Rose a spade jack, the Lady a five of diamonds. The challenger grinned at her high pair and said-"Jacks have never let me down."-a remark that caused Lady One-Eye to cast an almost imperceptible sidelong glance at her husband. "One hundred dol Lars on the pair of 'em, dearie."
Quincannon wondered if the remark was deliberate-if the Rose, too, had noticed the intimacy between Jack O'Diamonds and Lily Dumont. Lady One-Eye was aware of it, of that he was fairly certain.
Without another glance at her hole card, the Lady called. Slowly she dealt the fifth and final cards. Jack of hearts. And for herself, the three of clubs.
The onlookers began to stir and murmur. Play at the few other open tables suspended for the moment. Everyone in the Palace stood or sat watching the two women. Even McFinn, leaning against one of the roulette lay-outs, was motionless for the time being.
"Well, dearie," the Rose said, "three pretty little jacks to your possible straight." She tapped her hole card. "Is this the fourth jack I have here? It may well be. What do you think, Lady, of my having the jack of diamonds?"
To Quincannon, the innuendo was plain. But whatever Lady One-Eye thought of it, she neither reacted nor responded.
"Or it may be another ten. A full house beats a straight all to hell, dearie. If you've even got a six or an ace to fill."
"Bet your jacks," Lady One-Eye said coldly.
The Rose's sly smile faded. She separated four blue chips from her small remaining stack, slid them into the pot. "Two hundred dollars says you don't have a six or an ace, and it doesn't matter if you do."
"Your two hundred and raise another two."
Voices created an excited buzzing, ebbed again to total silence. Neither of the women seemed to notice. Their gazes were now fixed on each other.
"A bluff, dearie?" the Rose said.
"Call or raise and you'll soon know."
"Four hundred is all I have left."
"Call or raise."
"Your two hundred, then, and raise my last two hundred."
"Call."
The pile of red and blue chips bulged between them. The crowd was expectantly still as the Rose shrugged and turned over her hole card.
The queen of hearts. No help.
"Three jacks," she said. "Beat 'em if you can."
Her one good eye as icy as any Quincannon had ever seen, Lady One-Eye flipped her hole card. And when it was revealed in the glistening mirrors, a triumphant shout went up from her admirers.
Ace of clubs to fill the straight.
The pot and all of the Rose's table stakes were hers.
For the next half hour Quincannon was busy attending to the reborn thirst of the customers. But not so busy that he was unable to maintain his observations.
The Saint Louis Rose, after fending off a pair of drunken sports who considered her fair game, slipped quietly out of the hall. Lady One-Eye gathered her winnings and cashed them in, all the while keeping watch on her husband and Lily Dumont. Jack O'Diamonds didn't stay long at Lily's faro bank, nor did he approach his wife. Instead, he stepped up to the bar and called for forty-rod whiskey. The Nevada City saloonkeeper, Glen Bonnifield, took this opportunity to stalk to Lily's table, lean down with his face close to hers. Their conversation was brief and heated. Then Bonnifield slapped the table hard with his open hand-as a substitute for slapping Lily, Quincannon thought-and swung away, back past the bar. His gaze met Diamond's in the mirror, the two struck sparks, but neither man made a move toward the other, Bonnifield stalked to the front entrance and was gone.
Quincannon served Jack O'Diamonds his whiskey. "Your wife had a fine run of luck tonight, Mister Diamond."
"My wife's luck is always fine." The gambler didn't sound pleased about it. Jealousy? Compared to Lady One-Eye's skill with the pasteboards, honest or not, his own was mediocre.
"And your luck with Lily? Has that been fine, too?"
The comment produced a tight-lipped glower. "What do you mean by that?"
"No offense, sir," Quincannon said blandly. "Mister Bonnifield seemed to think it was, that's all."
"I don't give a damn what Bonnifield thinks," Jack O'Diamonds said. He fingered his flashy diamond stickpin, downed his whiskey at a gulp. Then he, too, left the Palace - alone, and still without speaking to his wife.
Lady One-Eye took her leave five minutes later, in the company of the two burly bouncers assigned by McFinn as escorts. But first she approached Lily Dumont and engaged her in a brief, heated discussion, just as Bonnifield had. Lily's reaction to whatever was said to her was to call the Lady an unlady-like name in a voice loud enough to turn heads. Lady One-Eye responded by making a warning gesture with her gold-knobbed cane.
Quincannon decided he'd had enough of bartending, for tonight if not for the rest of his life. He hung up his apron, donned his coat and derby hat, helped himself to half a dozen cheroots from a cigar vase on the bar, and went to pay Lily a visit himself.
She was shuffling and cutting a full deck of cards for placement in her tiger-decorated faro box; the cards made angry, snapping sounds in her slim fingers. She, too, was a complete opposite of Lady One-Eye. She had flaming red hair, a volatile temper to match, and the hot sparking eyes of a Gypsy. Fire to the Lady's ice.
"Trouble with Her Majesty?" Quincannon asked sympathetically.
"Her Majesty. Hah. I'll tell you what that female is." Which Lily proceeded to do in language that would have made a hard-rock miner blink.
"A cold and jealous one, all right," he agreed.
"Threaten me, will she? I'll fix her first. I'll rip out her other eye and turn her into Lady Blind."
"Why did she threaten you?"
"Never mind about that."
Quincannon shrugged. "What does Jack O'Diamonds see in her?"
"Money, of course. But maybe not for much longer."
"Oh? He wouldn't be planning to leave her, would he?"
"That's none of your business."
"Is it any of yours, Lily?"
"Miss Dumont to you. My business is mine, no one else's."
"Not even Glen Bonnifield's?"
"Damn Glen Bonnifield. Damn Lady One-Eye. And damn you."
As Quincannon made his way toward the front entrance, he spied Amos McFinn moving hurriedly through the crowd to intercept him. He pretended not to see the Palace's owner; he had no interest in answering the "Anything suspicious?" question yet again. He managed to make good his escape before McFinn got close enough to ask it.
It was some past midnight now, and the mountain air was chill. Even though June was not far off, snow still mantled the Sierras' higher elevations. Grass Valley's hilly streets were deserted; the only sounds were the faint throb of a piano in one of the nearby saloons, the continual beat of the stamps at the big Empire Mine southeast of town. A far cry from the boom years of Grass Valley and Nevada City, following the 1851 discovery of gold in quartz ledges buried beneath the earth, when thousands of gold-seekers, camp followers, and Cornish and Irish hard-rock miners had clogged the streets day and night. Even on Quincannon's first visit here, more than a dozen years ago, the town had still retained some of its Gold Rush flavor. Now nearly all the rough edges had been buffed down and rounded off. This was fine if you were a lawabiding, church-going citizen with children to raise. But tame places were not for John Quincannon. He would rather walk the streets of a hell-roaring gold camp, or even those of the Barbary Coast.
He paused on the boardwalk to light one of the cheroots he had appropriated. He preferred a pipe to cigars, but free tobacco had a greater satisfaction than the paid-for kind. Then, instead of turning upstreet to the Holbrooke Hotel, where he had engaged a room, he walked downhill to the town's main thoroughfare, Mill Street. The only lighted building along there was the Empire Livery Stable. He saw the night hostler working inside as he passed-and no one else before or after he turned uphill on Neal Street.
The bouncer at McFinn's had told him that Lily Dumont's cottage was on Pleasant Street, just off Neal. He found it with no difficulty-a tiny frame building, of no more than three rooms, tucked well back from the street in the shade of a pair of live oaks. The neighborhood was a good one, and by the starlight he could tell that the cottage and its gardens were well set up. Much too well set up, he thought, for a woman who operated a faro bank to afford on her own. He wondered if Glen Bonnifield had an investment in the property.
The cottage's curtained windows were dark; so were those in the two nearest houses. He shed the remains of his cheroot and walked softly around to the rear. The back door was not locked. He entered, struck a lucifer to orient himself and to show him the way into the front parlor.
An oil lamp with a red silk shade sat atop a writing desk. He lit the wick, turning the flame low, and by this light he searched the desk. There was one bottle of ink, but it was blue, not green. Nothing else in the desk held any interest for him. He carried the lamp into Lily's bedroom, where he found further evidence of financial aid: satin dresses, a white fox capote, an expensive ostrich-feather hat. But that was all he found. If Lily had written the threatening note, she had either done it elsewhere or gotten rid of the bottle of ink she'd used.
Quincannon returned the lamp to the writing desk, snuffed the wick, then followed the flicker of another match to the rear door. He let himself out, shut the door quietly behind him.
He was just turning onto the path toward the front when the first bullet sang close past his right ear.
He went down instantly, a reflex action that saved his life: the second bullet slashed air where his head had been. The booming echo of the shots filled his ears. He reached under his coat for his Navy Colt, then remembered that he hadn't worn it because of his bartending duties; instead, he'd armed himself with a double-barreled Remington Derringer, an effective weapon at close quarters in a crowded room but with a range of no more than twenty feet. He rolled sideways, clawing the Derringer free of his pocket, half expecting to feel the shock of another bullet. But there were no more shots. The thorny wood of a rose bush ended his roll; grimacing, he shoved away, and then lay flat and still, the Derringer up in front of him. He peered through the darkness, listening.
Running footsteps. Fading, then gone.
He pushed onto his knees. Lamplight suddenly brightened one of the windows in the house next door; its out-spill showed him that the yard and the street in front were now deserted. He got quickly to his feet, careful to keep his head turned aside from the light. A face peered out through the lamp-lit window and a voice hollered: "What in tarnation's going on out there?" Quincannon didn't answer. Staying in the shadows, he ran ahead and looked both ways along Pleasant Street.
His assailant had vanished.
"Hell and damn!" he muttered angrily under his breath. He slid the Derringer back into his pocket, and hurried to Neal and around the corner before any of Lily's neighbors came out to investigate.
Grass Valley a tame place now, its streets safe at night? Bah! There was still plenty of hell left in this camp. The question was, was it hell directed at him or someone else?
The Holbrooke, a two-story brick edifice on East Main, was Grass Valley's oldest and finest hostelry. Presidents Grant, Harrison, Cleveland, and Garfield had stayed there during visits to California. So had Gentleman Jim Corbett. And so had the notorious gold country highwayman, Black Bart-a fact the management chose not to advertise. If any of the hotel's distinguished guests had ever wandered uphill to Texas Tommy's Golden Gate Brothel, a nearby attraction in the old days, this fact was also held in discreet confidence.
The gas-lit lobby was deserted when Quincannon entered. Gaslight flickered even more dimly in the upstairs hallways; electricity had yet to be installed here. He made his way, first, to the door of Number 3, the room occupied by Lady OneEye and Jack O'Diamonds. No light showed around its edges, and, when he pressed his ear to the panel, he heard nothing from within. From there he went around past Number 8, his room, and stopped before Number 11 at the rear. It was no more than five seconds before the latch clicked and the door opened.
He said: "The Saint Louis Rose, I presume?"
"Hello, dearie." She caught hold of his coat sleeve, tugged him inside, and quickly shut the door. "You're late. I expected you an hour ago."
"I've been to Lily Dumont's cottage."
"Have you now. For what purpose?"
"Not the one you're thinking. She has too many admirers already."
"John Diamond, for one."
"So you noticed that, too. I thought you had."
"Lady One-Eye is also aware of it."
He nodded. "Trouble there, do you think?"
"Of one kind or another. Lily Dumont is a dish to tempt any man, especially one with a block of ice for a wife."
"I prefer loud and bawdy blondes myself." Quincannon gave her a broad wink. "Come over here, Rosie, and give me a kiss."
"I will not. Stand your distance."
"The Saint Louis Rose is no more likely than Lily Dumont to refuse a handsome man a kiss. Or anything else he might want."
"Perhaps not. But Sabina Carpenter is and you know it."
"To my great sorrow."
Quincannon sighed and went to sit on one of the room's plush chairs. He gazed wistfully at his partner in Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, and the object of his unrequited affection. She had removed all of the bawd's rouge and powder and false eyelashes, and shed the ridiculous ringlet wig. The transformation was amazing. In place of the hard, vulgar, blonde Rose was a mature, wellbred, dark-haired woman with more than a dozen years of experience as a detective, six of those with the Pinkerton Agency's Denver office.
"What did you mean by loud and bawdy?" she demanded. "Do you think I overplayed my role tonight?"
"Perhaps a touch," he said tactfully.
"I thought my performance was rather good."
"It's too bad Lotta Crabtree wasn't here to see it. She might have offered you a new career as a stage actress."
"Don't make fun of me, John. I didn't strike a false note with Lady One-Eye, I'm certain of that."
"She was too busy plucking you like a chicken," Quincannon said. "How much did you lose, by the way? The entire fifteen hundred McFinn gave you?"
"Yes. Mostly on that last hand."
"A straight to your three jacks. Luck of the cards, or did she manufacture her own luck?"
"Oh, she's a skin-game artist, all right," Sabina said. "One of the best I've seen."
"Were you able to spot her gaff?"
"I think so. But she's so good at it that it took me most of the night. I wouldn't have seen it at all if I hadn't spent those weeks with Jim Moon at the Oyster Ocean in Denver a few years ago, learning his bag of tricks. It boils down to manipulating the cards so she knows her opponent's hole card on every hand she deals."
In gathering the cards for her deal, Sabina explained, Lady One-Eye dropped her own last hand on top of the deck, the five cards having been arranged so that the lowest was on top and the highest was second in line. As she did this, she gave the five cards a quick squeeze, which produced a slight convex longitudinal bend. During the shuffle, she maneuvered the five-card slug to the top of the deck. Then, just before offering the deck for the cut, she buried the slug in the middle, at the point where her opponent tended to cut each time. The crimp in the cards ensured that the slug would be returned to the top. All she had to do then was to deal fairly, flexing the deck once or twice first to take out the slug's bend. The first card she dealt, which she knew from memory, was therefore the opponent's hole card. And her hole card, the second in line, was always higher.
"Clever," Quincannon said. "The advantage is small, but for a sharp it's enough to control almost any game."
Sabina nodded. "But I'd like to play her once more ...or rather, Rose would.. .to make absolutely sure I'm right about her gaff. An hour or so should do it. Will McFinn stake me to another five hundred, do you suppose?"
"Probably, but we needn't stretch his patience. I'll stake you, my dear. If you lose, we'll add the sum to McFinn's bill."
"He might refuse to pay the extra charge."
"No matter. I'll accept your favors as reimbursement."
His boldness, as always, exasperated her. "You never give up, do you, John?"
"Never. You may as well say yes now and enjoy the consequences. I'll wear down your resistance sooner or later."
