FIFTEEN

That Friday when Della paid her staff we suddenly found ourselves in a position familiar to many Texas oil people: we were rich and broke at the same time. The abstract company had brought in over a quarter of a million dollars since we’d acquired it, and except for a small fund set aside to cover overhead we’d used every dime of the money to buy leases. It hadn’t occurred to us to pay ourselves any kind of salary, and now both our personal checking account and the pantry at home were empty and the electric bill was overdue. I gave Della $200 out of the now-replenished poker account so she could eat while I played, and she dropped me off in front of the Weilbach at a few minutes before six that evening.

The complexion of the game upstairs was changing. Pots were getting bigger and more money was flowing across the table each weekend. A couple of the regular players had found that it was becoming too rich for their blood and dropped out, only to be replaced by oilmen who had come to town with the boom. The tension was also greater, and the talk around the table was becoming more barbed, a violation of another of the game’s unspoken conventions. While card-playing buddies may needle one another in a friendly fashion at their regular Friday night game, this type of behavior has always been frowned upon at serious poker matches. The excuse is that poker is a gentleman’s pastime, and that gentlemen don’t act in such a fashion. The truth is that dedicated players really don’t like to say any more than they have to for fear of revealing patterns about their play.

Zip Zimmerman was there that Friday, losing as always, and Wilbur Rasco was present and playing his usual cool, deadly game. One of the newcomers to the table was Simon Van Horn, the man Rasco had identified as Clifton Robillard’s partner in the oil business. He was a tall, slim man in his early fifties, and in the past week I’d learned from my contacts that he was probably the wealthiest of all the new arrivals in town, a man with a national reputation who had served on President Roosevelt’s Petroleum Allocation Board back during the war. At the poker table he was a competent player whose game was weakened by his habit of putting his ego on the table along with his money, a quirk that was to prove very profitable to me in the weeks to come.

The other oilman present that evening was Howard Northcutt, an enormous, shambling hulk of a man who was given to backslapping and loud laughter. He was also one of the boldest and most aggressive poker players I’d ever seen. Then there was Clifton Robillard. A man of medium height, he had a trim, compact body, long arms, and long tapering fingers. His face was long too, with a finely sculptured nose over a neatly trimmed silver mustache and a wide, full mouth. Something of a dandy, he always dressed carefully in sparkling white dress shirts and custom-tailored suits of the most recent style and fashionable cut. That evening it was an elegant slate gray with a fine gold pinstripe.

I knew that he’d inherited some money from his father, who’d been a land speculator and cattle trader back in the nineteenth century. Right before the First World War the family had founded the Mercantile State Bank, which was Manlow Rhodes’s only competitor in town. Robillard himself had prospered through some unspecified involvement with the local munitions factory during the first war, but he’d lost heavily in the Crash of 1929, and for a time it looked as though he would go under. He made a comeback in the late ’30s, and since then his fortune had multiplied several-fold. He was politically connected as well. During the second war he’d served in the state senate, where he was noted for his loyal support of Governor Coke Stevenson’s conservative policies. Over the years he’d earned such a reputation for ruthlessness in business that his name was even feared in some quarters. Now in his midsixties and basking in his own mystique, he was rich, licentious, and doomed. He was the reason I had come to town.

*   *   *

“Oh yes,” Robillard said ten minutes later as we were taking our places at the table. “I’ve heard about you. I thought somebody said that you went to Yale University.”

“Harvard,” I replied.

“Harvard, no less.” He gave me a firm handshake and an affable pat on the back, but his eyes were cold and unfriendly and his voice was a soft, throaty purr that reminded me of a diesel truck idling; it gave the hint of power rarely used but always there in reserve.

The game heated up quickly that evening. I’d only been at the table about an hour when Zip Zimmerman’s oddball luck hit and he took a pot with more than $4,000 in it, several hundred of it mine. About nine o’clock I won a $2,700 pot, then just before midnight I went head-to-head against Clifton Robillard for the first time in a hand of five-card stud. On the first deal I had a king showing against his eight. I bet a $100 and he called it and dropped a $500 bill on the table. I matched him and everybody but Zimmerman folded. On the next round I drew an ace and Robillard paired his eights. The ace did me no good at all, but I had a second king in the hole to go with the one showing. Zimmerman wisely dropped out when the trey he drew didn’t improve the nothing he already had.

I have one fixed policy. I never look twice at a hole card no matter what. If you can’t look at your card one time and remember it for the few minutes it takes to play a hand of poker, then you have no business at the table. Still, many people, and even some fairly good gamblers, will take a second and sometimes a third look. Often a player will remember the denomination of the card, but not the suit and will have to look again if, for example, he winds up with three diamonds showing and only remembers that the hole card was red.

On the next card I drew a third king while Robillard drew a jack and immediately took another quick peek at his hole card. I knew at that point I was about to get some indication of how good a gambler he was. Twice before he had looked quickly at his hole card in the same quick, furtive fashion, and both times it was when he had paired. I knew it because I’d paid to find out, staying in with losing hands just to see his hole card. His peeking could be a tell, which is any physical mannerism or habit that, when repeated in the same circumstances, gives away a person’s game. And if his peeking was a tell, it was a blatant and obvious one and it meant that he was a mediocre gambler. If not, he’d been intentionally running a false tell on me earlier, and now I had no idea what his hole card was. If the latter was true, it meant that he was a more sophisticated player, and I wanted to know which.

“Pair of kings bets,” the dealer called.

I checked to him just as I would if I was a timid player who held a pair of kings and nothing else, and was concerned that the jack had given him two pair. He bet $200 with $2,300 on the table, bringing the pot up to a total of $2,500. It was a bet designed to keep me in the game.

“Raise,” I said. I threw the $200 onto the table, then followed it with three $500 bills. “Fifteen hundred to you, Mr. Robillard.”

He appeared surprised, but it could easily have been false surprise. “Well, well,” he murmured. “The college boy thinks he has a good hand, it seems.”

I had decided earlier that I would be the very soul of courtesy in dealing with him regardless of how snide he became. “Yes sir, that’s what I think,” I replied. “And it will cost you fifteen hundred dollars to see it.”

“I don’t believe you’ve got that third king,” he said with a smile. “A man with that third king in the hole would have looked at it at least once, just to make sure it hadn’t changed spots since the first time he saw it.”

I said nothing, and he met the $1,500, and then threw another $1,500 in on top of it.

I called his raise and tapped the table for cards. He drew a six and my card came up a five. He was beaten, though he didn’t know it yet.

He looked over at my stake. “You’re in this hand pretty deep for a fellow who came in the door so light, aren’t you?” he asked. “What have you got left over there? About four thousand?”

“Pair of kings still bets,” the dealer said.

Robillard’s eyes were a pale, icy blue, and I looked right into them for perhaps ten seconds and said, “Pair of kings checks.”

He glanced over at my stake again, and said, “You know, college boy, I could buy this hand right now. I think that little stack of bills in front of you is about all you have.”

“But you don’t know how much I have in my pocket, Mr. Robillard,” I answered politely.

“I know how much I’ve got,” Wilburn Rasco said, and reached into his coat. He pulled out a long, thick wallet that bulged with currency and threw it over on top of my stake. “There’s about ten thousand dollars there, son. And you can owe me. You just use as much of that as you need to.”

Robillard turned his head to regard Rasco. “What do you think you’re doing, Wilburn?” he asked.

“It’s been done here before, and you know it.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Rasco replied. “But I’ll tell you what ain’t been done. Nobody buys pots at this table. This may be a no-limit game, but the understood rule has always been that you don’t go over a man’s table stake unless he’s agreeable to the bet. And then you take a marker for the difference if you win. That, by God, is the way we’ve always done it, and I’ve been playing in this game for twenty-five years.”

Rasco’s voice held a cold fury. Whether his anger came from some old insult he’d suffered at Robillard’s hands or whether it sprang from the bad manners the man currently concealed beneath his velvety demeanor I had no idea.

“Thank you, sir,” I told him, and looked across the table at my opponent. “Now, Mr. Robillard … one way or another, I’m going to get to see that jack you have in the hole,” I told him politely. “So you need to either bet or check. Unless, of course, you want to fold.”

“I wasn’t going to try to buy it,” Robillard said smoothly as he counted out $2,500 and carefully dropped it on the table. “I was just commenting on the possibilities.”

I thought about raising him by throwing Rasco’s whole wallet onto the table, but there was some chance he might fold. And at that point it was worth more to me to see his hole card. I handed Rasco’s wallet back and pushed my own money into the pot. “Even call,” I said.

The room was silent. Robillard made no move to touch his cards. “I believe I’m the one who called,” I reminded him.

His eyes never left my face as he reached down and slowly turned over the jack of hearts.

“Not quite good enough,” I said as I flipped over my third king.

He smiled when he saw the card, but his eyes said that the loss had pricked his ego badly. Excellent. That had been my intention.

The hand we’d just played told me that he was a mediocre gambler. Unless, of course, the whole thing was contrived with the eye to bigger takings down the road. And that could well be the case. I know because I’d done things equally complicated myself. Even when the table is straight and free of cheating, poker is a game of chicanery and deceit. The basic mechanics and rules can be learned by an intelligent child in an afternoon or less, but a lifetime is not enough to master it in the heart where it’s really played.

Several years earlier I’d been trapped on a long train trip with nothing to do, and I’d fallen into a card game with four older men. One of them was a sixty-year-old preacher who refused to play for money. We managed to round up about a thousand matches and divided them up four ways. And for the life of me I couldn’t beat that old preacher at five-card stud. I won a few hands, but after about four hours of steady playing he finally cleaned me and his two friends out. Besides being a superb player, he was as good a card mechanic as I ever met. He rightly concluded that even in a friendly game where no money was at risk, I wouldn’t let him get away with cheating me directly when he had the deal. So several times he stacked the cards to let one of the other players beat me, then siphoned the stakes away from them with his superior playing skill. It had been an amusing experience that cost me nothing and taught me something about human nature.

I’d paid no attention to his name when he first introduced himself, and following the lead of the other two I’d simply called him Reverend. As I rose from the table he reached over and clasped my shoulder in a fatherly grip. “Young man,” he asked, “did you ever hear of a fellow called Cornbread Broussard?”

“Sure,” I answered. “He was from south Louisiana, and he got that name because he didn’t like light bread and wouldn’t eat it. Back about thirty years ago he was considered the king of the stud poker players here in the South.”

He pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to me. It read “Reverend Victor Broussard, Thibodeaux, Louisiana.”

“That was me,” he said, “in the days before I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior.” He gave my shoulder another fatherly squeeze, and said, “You ought to quit this game boy. It’ll kill a man.”

Broussard might have gotten religion, but it hadn’t rid him of the killer instinct a good poker player needs. I doubt that he ever worked harder for any of the fortunes he’d won and lost in any of the plush New Orleans gaming rooms where he once played nightly than he did for those worthless matches that night on the train. He lusted after victory regardless of the stakes, and to him the matches were little more than a means of keeping score.