Free Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block

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