24

Ella thought that watching Jack Morris play blackjack was like watching a boxer taking a beating in a prizefight. After a while you just wanted the fighter’s corner man to throw in the towel and stop the slaughter.

When Bill gambled, win or lose, he always had fun. He joked with the dealers and the players next to him. If he won, he’d buy the other players a drink, and win or lose, he always tipped the dealers. But then Bill wasn’t a gambling addict, didn’t have thirty grand in debt hanging over his head, wondering how he was going to pay next month’s rent—which is what Ella had learned from the Dallas data miners about Jack Morris, the McGill’s bartender.

Jack declared an income of approximately twenty-five thousand a year, although Ella was certain he declared only a portion of the tips he made. He also received social security and a $430-a-month disability check from the VA. He was sixty-seven years old and had served in the army from 1970 to 1972, so he might have been in Vietnam. Ella didn’t know—and it didn’t really matter—if the disability check was for a combat injury or something else, but Jack didn’t move like a man with a disability. Ella wouldn’t have been surprised if tip-stealing Jack Morris had one of those impossible-to-diagnose back problems that might not be real.

Based on his credit card statements, Ella saw that every Sunday and Monday—Jack’s days off—he took a bus to Atlantic City. On rare occasions he would stay in a cheap motel in AC on Sunday nights—those rare occasions almost certainly coinciding with some unexpected luck at the tables—but most often he came home Sunday night and then took the bus back to Atlantic City the following day. Jack had a serious, serious gambling jones—which was why, as soon as she’d seen his file, Ella knew that Jack would be a walk in the park.

Ella had been on Jack’s bus when he left New York on a warm Sunday morning, a bus filled mostly with badly dressed old folks who didn’t look as though they could afford the bus ticket, much less a place at a poker table. Jack got off the bus at the terminal in AC and walked—eagerly, it seemed to Ella—to the Resorts Casino, one of the oldest casinos on the Boardwalk. There was a spring in his step, as if he just knew that today was going to be different, that today he was going to be a winner.

He sat down at a blackjack table, pushed a hundred dollars toward the dealer, and collected his chips—and twenty minutes later, he’d lost a hundred bucks. And as he played, he was absolutely grim. Men probably had more fun visiting a proctologist than Jack had playing blackjack. And when he lost—and as near as Ella could tell, he lost every hand—he swore out loud, smacked his hand on the table, and the dealer would admonish him. After he lost the first hundred, he took out five more twenties, and this time the money lasted a bit longer, maybe forty minutes. Then it, too, was gone.

Jack walked away from the table and over to the bar. Ella wondered if he was through gambling for the day and planned to head back to New York. She suspected not. Most likely he’d wait a while for his luck to change—as if there was any connection between time and luck—and then go to an ATM and get more cash from one of his overloaded credit cards. Ella walked up to him, took a seat on the stool next to his, and said, “Jack, let me buy you a drink.”

“What?” Jack said. Even the offer of a drink from a pretty woman wasn’t enough to wipe the sour expression off his face.

Ella wore a red wig, the hair touching her shoulders, and bright green contact lenses. She was dressed in tight-fitting designer jeans and a tank top she’d bought at Neiman Marcus. She’d dressed casually to better fit in with the losers who’d been on the bus with Jack, but as soon as she’d dealt with him, she’d hire a car to take her back to New York. She hated Atlantic City. Other than the towering casinos on the Boardwalk, it was a shabby, depressing place, growing shabbier each year as state after state authorized casino-style gambling.

“Who are you?” Jack said. “And why would you want to buy me a drink?”

“Jack, I’m your salvation,” Ella said. “I’m going to give you five grand today so you can keep on playing. And next month, provided you behave, I’m going to give you another five grand. Today is indeed your lucky day.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?” Jack said, but the possibility of someone giving him five thousand dollars made him noticeably less belligerent.

“I’m talking about Toby Rosenthal, the man you mistakenly identified as the man who shot Dominic DiNunzio.”

“Mistakenly?”

At that moment, the bartender came over, a heavily made up woman about Jack’s age, and asked if Jack and Ella wanted a drink. Ella didn’t even want to think about what the bartender would look like without her makeup. “I’ll have a Black Jack on the rocks,” Jack said. “A double. And it’s on her.” Ella had a Coke.

In the next thirty minutes, Ella went over Jack’s original statement to the cops, what he’d said at Toby’s lineup, and what he would say at Toby’s trial. Jack may have been a lousy gambler, but he wasn’t stupid and understood what was expected of him. Jack had no problem with what Ella wanted him to do. She figured Jack could rationalize his actions, as he was only one of five witnesses, and it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t be sure that he saw Toby shoot DiNunzio.

Ella could tell that Jack, with this newfound money, was eager to get back to the blackjack table, so she concluded by saying, “I’m going to go over all this again before Toby’s trial. In fact, I’ll probably go over your testimony with you several times. And like I said, next month I’ll mail you another five grand. I have your address. So are we good here, Jack?”

“Yeah, we’re good. Now, can I have the money?”

He looked over at the blackjack table as if it was an oasis in a desert and he was dying of thirst. What a loser—but he was her loser.

Ella took an envelope from her purse—but didn’t hand it to Jack. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Now me, I’ve never hurt anyone in my life; I’m just not that kind of girl. But the people I work for … Jack, can you imagine what it would be like tending bar in a wheelchair? Because that’s what you’ll be doing if you take our money and don’t do what you’ve agreed to do.”

Ella handed Jack the envelope and started toward the exit of the noisy, depressing, smoke-filled casino. She noticed she had a quarter in her pocket and stuck it in a slot machine on her way to the door. She pulled the handle and three red 7s lined up across the face of the machine. The machine started making a god-awful racket as it spit out eighty quarters. She couldn’t believe it: She’d just won twenty bucks. She laughed and kept on walking, not bothering to take the quarters out of the tray.