Lucky at Cards (6 page)

But there was a magician on the bill. He was around fifty. I didn’t recognize him but his name rang some sort of distant bell; I’d probably heard it when I was in the business myself. His tailcoat was frayed and his face was a map of blue alcohol lines and I looked at him and saw what I might have been if a dark-eyed man in Miami hadn’t had a proposition for me.

A grim prospect. But my watching him made my fingers itch for a tall silk hat and a rabbit to yank out of it. And he wasn’t even very good. He had a lot of stage presence but his moves were fairly obvious and his bag of tricks was a skimpy one. There was only one bit he had that I wasn’t able to figure, a routine involving a batch of Christmas-tree ornaments that disappeared into each other, something like that. And I could tell he wasn’t really essential to the trick. It was just a cute piece of equipment I didn’t happen to be familiar with.

A man nudged me. I turned and looked at him. He would have been a good ad for Alcoholics Anonymous; he was drunk, and he looked unhappy about it. “Say,” he said, “now how do you figure he done that?”

“What?”

“The trick,” he said. “What he did with them balls, making ’em do that and all. Now how could a man go and do something like that?”

“It’s magic,” I said.

“Yeah, but how’s he do it?’

“It’s the wand,” I said.

“It’s something special, the wand?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s magic.”

7

On Wednesday morning the phone woke me. The voice was Murray’s.

“Hi, kid,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got something good for you. You have a free day today?”

“Sure.”

“Can you get over here around a quarter to twelve? I’m setting up a lunch appointment with Perry Carver for you. Perry’s running an outfit called Black Sand Syndications. They sell limited partnerships in real estate syndications. It’s been a big thing in New York City but it’s a fairly new form of investment around here. You can get around ten percent on an investment and most of it is tax-free. I was speaking to him yesterday. He needs a good salesman or two and there’s no previous experience necessary because the field is a fairly new one here. He’ll take you out to lunch and you can see how it looks to you.”

“It sounds good,” I said.

“It might not be bad at all. Wear a suit and brush your hair and smile like a good boy. You might wind up with a pretty good position.”

I wore a suit and brushed my hair and practiced smiling at myself in the mirror. I skipped breakfast and spent the rest of the morning in the library scanning everything I could find on the scintillating subject of real estate syndication. I dodged through a book or two on the subject and checked out what some back issues of the financial magazines had to say about it. After a quick cup of coffee on Main Street I presented myself to Murray Rogers for inspection.

“You look lovely,” he said in his office. “Come on, I’ll take you downstairs and introduce you to Perry. Then I’ll move out of your way and you two can see what develops.”

Black Sand Syndications had a large office on the seventeenth floor of the same building. We took an elevator downstairs and Murray introduced me to Carver. He was a hefty man, bald on top, with innocent blue eyes and a firm jaw. His handshake was strictly dead-fish but his eyes took me in quickly. Murray made some jokes that weren’t particularly funny, and I showed my capped teeth in a smile, and Carver wound up taking me to the Downtown Merchant’s Club for lunch.

We had martinis first. Then I ordered a ham steak and he ordered an open turkey sandwich. He told the ancient waiter to bring us another pair of martinis. The drinks came, then the food. We ate and drank and made small talk. We were working on coffee before he said the first word about business.

“Know anything about syndicates, Maynard?”

"A little.”

“Suppose you tell me what you know. That way I won’t feed you a lot of information you’ve already got under your belt.”

I played parrot for ten minutes. I regurgitated the library’s store of information and told him just what a syndication was and just why it was a good investment for certain people. I told him the potentials above and beyond the tax-sheltered return, mentioned a few syndicates that had converted into common-stock corporations, and generally ran off at the mouth. The blue eyes became progressively more interested as I steamed along. By the time I was finished, Carver was beaming.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You actually know the field, don’t you?”

“Not really.”

“Where did you learn all that? Murray mentioned you were in Chicago before you came here, said something about a plastics firm. You in investments before that?”

It seemed like a silly time to lie. Perry Carver was a man who had pushed into a new field and was doing nicely in it. I guessed he’d be more impressed by quick learning ability than experience. I told him I hadn’t known a thing about syndicating a few hours ago, but picked it all up by reading a few books. For a few seconds he just stared at me. Then he started to laugh.

“I’m a son of a bitch,” he said. “You know what I have to go through to find a salesman who knows his rear end from third base? I’ll tell you, Maynard, I look at about twenty applications a week. None of them know the first thing. They just want to make money, that’s all. And the damned fools don’t know anything and can’t learn anything. I tried to set up a training program to drum a few facts into their heads. Didn’t work at all. I’ve got three decent salesmen working out of an office that could support ten of them but I can’t find seven more worth putting behind a desk. You already put together more than any of those lardheads got out of the program. Can you sell?”

“I think so.”

“Suppose you had a young fellow who told you he was more interested in growth than income. What would you tell him?”

He gave me a cigarette and a light. I took a drag, blew out smoke. “I’d tell him ten percent was more growth than he could expect to make in the market, and with a lot less risk. And I’d tell him that Glickman went from seven-and-a-half to thirteen or fourteen over-the-counter after conversion to a stock issue, and I’d name a few other syndicates that showed comparable performance.”

“Right,” he said. “Suppose your prospect was a widow with twenty thousand dollars in a savings bank. She’s afraid of risk. What do you tell her?”

“That the risk is low because she’ll be owning a piece of real property, not just a bag of dreams. And that the difference between four percent and ten percent is the difference between eight hundred dollars and two thousand dollars annually.”

“You’ve got a job,” Perry Carver said.

I had a job. He took me back to the Rand Building and gave me a desk next to the water cooler. He wrote out a check to me for five hundred dollars as an advance against commissions to be earned in the future. He handed me twenty cards from the prospect file, gave me a stack of letterheads and told me where to have business cards printed up.

“Make as many calls as you can,” he said. “You rarely sell anybody on the first trip—that’s one of the reasons I wanted to feed you an advance. I won’t expect results right off the bat. If you run out of dough, just holler. And feel free to hit any side prospects you want. Don’t be reluctant to sell your friends. The package we’re handling now is an attractive one. New York office building, Madison Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street. It’s a hundred percent rented and the distributions are personally guaranteed by the general partners for the first five years. It yields eleven percent. See what you can do, Bill.”

I stayed at my desk all afternoon. I called prospects, mailed prospectuses at them, told them to look them over and that I would call in a day or two for an appointment. I made notations in an appointment calendar, jotted down trivia on each of the prospect cards. I mailed propaganda to the men in the poker game—Sy Daniels, Harold Barnes, all of them. Maybe I got carried away. That night I dodged a dinner invitation and took myself to a steak house. It was a small club with wood paneling on the walls and big leather chairs around polished oak tables. There was a crowd at the bar. I took a table in back and polished off a thick sirloin with a baked potato. I drank scotch first and brandy afterward and smoked a few cigarettes.

After dinner I sat there and thought about Murray Rogers. I’d been dodging the issue all afternoon. It was easy to become wrapped up in the new job and forget all about the real purpose, especially easy because I liked myself better as William Maynard, bright young salesman with Black Sand Syndications. I liked that man better than Bill “Wizard” Maynard, a slick sharper who was sleeping with another man’s wife and planning to send that man to jail.

I went back to the Panmore and picked up some sleep. In the morning I made a few calls and set up two afternoon appointments. I had a bite sent up from the coffee shop down the street and ate at my desk. Then I stopped to see Murray.

“I wanted to get in touch with you earlier,” I said, “but I’ve been busy as hell.”

“I spoke to Carver. Congratulations, Bill.”

“Thanks.”

“You really swept Perry off his feet. He was impressed, and he doesn’t impress that easily. Think you’ll like the work?”

“I think so.”

He drummed the desk top with his fingers. “Time for a hand or three?”

“Just barely.”

He took out the cards and we played a few hands of gin. I let him win a few dollars and I paid him. He boxed the cards and put them away. I took my cigarettes from my jacket pocket. There was a key on the top of his desk about midway between us. The key to his office, I guessed. I shook the cigarette pack clumsily and three or four of the cigarettes jarred loose and bounced across his desk. The two of us reached for them and scooped them up, and by the time they were back in the pack his key was in my pocket. The hand is quicker than the eye, gentlemen. A little misdirection is a dangerous thing.

There was a little booth in a parking lot on Washington Street where they made duplicate keys while-u-waited. I had the locksmith knock out a copy of Murray’s key and put it on my key ring. Then I was ready for my appointments.

It was the right kind of afternoon. I kept my two appointments and both prospects were perfect ones.

The first was a fellow about my age, a cautious type who functioned as a bookkeeper. His mother had died a month or two ago and he had come into twenty-five thousand dollars worth of insurance money. He was earning seventy-five bucks a week, he wanted a second income to make life a little fuller, and he was scared to death of the stock market. My pitch on the eleven percent return appealed to him. He might have been good for the whole twenty-five grand, but I told him not to throw all of his eggs in one omelet. I sold him a pair of five-thousand dollar units and told him I’d keep my eyes open for the next good package that came our way.

The second prospect didn’t have that kind of money to play with. He was a little older, and his capital was savings, not insurance windfall. He liked the idea of tax-free income and took a half-unit at twenty-five hundred dollars. He wrote me his check and I returned to the office to report to Carver.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “You’re terrific.”

“I didn’t have that much to do with it,” I said. “They were pretty much pre-sold.”

“Knock off for the rest of the day, Bill. Drop your hotel and find an apartment. And don’t try to dodge taking credit where it’s due. Don’t give me that pre-sold crap. You made the calls and you closed the sales. You’re a wizard, Bill.”

Wizard, I thought. Sure, I thought. That’s what I am—a wizard. Also a magician.

I thought I’d tell Murray about the sales and did. I accepted the congratulations and told him I’d see him at the game later that evening. When I left his office the key was right back on his desk where it belonged. He had never missed it. I had a copy and he had the original back and he didn’t know a thing about it.

The game was at Ken Jameson’s house. Ken was the one who headed an insurance agency. He was a few years younger than most of the other players, just about my age. He had a wife and three young kids and a house in the suburbs. We sat around the dining-room table and played poker. Ken’s wife was a pretty girl who had sprung full-blown from the forehead of some slick magazine editor. She took care of the kids, put them to bed, and parked herself upstairs in front of the television set for the evening. She didn’t venture into the dining room except to say hello. She wouldn’t have recognized a bottom deal in slow motion.

If we had played at Ken’s house that first night, I would have been in New York a day later. There would have been no electric contact with Joyce Rogers, no job with Carver’s outfit, no dark mystery of frames and set-ups. Life is a hellishly iffy proposition from beginning to end. There are always a million sneaky little variables, and any one of them can send you spinning in another direction entirely.

We played, and I didn’t cheat. My restraint was not easy to maintain at first. But I managed, and at nine-thirty I was about fifteen dollars in the hole. I pushed back my chair, straightened up. “You’ll have to excuse me for about an hour,” I explained. “I’ve got a call I have to make, a plant foreman over on the East Side. This was the only time I could arrange to see him.”

“That’s a hell of a note,” Murray said. “We were just starting to take a few dollars away from you.”

“I’ll be back before eleven. I’ll lose in a hurry to make up for it.”

“A real go-getter,” Sy Daniels said. “Don’t you know the rules? No business on Friday nights. Just poker.”

I laughed, left and boarded the Corvair. I started the car and pulled away and headed back into town. There was no foreman over on the East Side. Correction—there were probably a few hundred foremen over on the East Side, but none of them interested me at the moment. I had other plans.

I drove the car, smoked a cigarette. That was a nice thing about my new job—it gave me a free and easy sort of schedule. I could knock off work whenever I pleased if I had something else going, and at the same time I could invent a business appointment whenever I needed an excuse. I needed one now.

The car seemed to know the way. I finished my cigarette and pitched out the butt. In the morning I would have to see about finding an apartment—the Panmore could run into money if I stayed there any length of time. And pretty soon it would be time to turn the rental back to Hertz and make a down payment on a car of my own.

I made a final turn, drove part of the way down the block. I eased the car over to the curb, braked, killed the ignition. I walked fifty yards or so to stand in front of a big brick ranch on a large plot. There were a few lights on. The garage door was open and I could see a Caddy convertible parked there. She was home.

The night was cool, clear. At the front door I poked the bell.
My Dog Has Fleas
, the chimes played.

Joyce Rogers opened the door. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened and she started to say something, but I pushed her inside and drew the door shut and stopped whatever she was going to say with a kiss. I held her close, felt the sweet warmth of her fine body against mine. I unpinned her chestnut hair and it fell free. I ran my fingers through it.

“We’ve got about an hour,” I said. “Let’s not waste it.”