The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2002». Краткое содержание книги:
Because Lewis was an obsessive gambler, his mind, without conscious direction from him, invariably broke everything he did in life down to odds for or against. So when he stepped onto one of the elevators and reached past two Hispanic orderlies to press the button for five, he started trying to decide how it would be today: Would he be first, second, or third? The rule he applied was that he had to make up his mind before the elevator door opened on five. That was the only fair way to do it. Otherwise, he might see one of the other two in the hall upstairs. Then there could be no bet. Just like if he encountered one of them in the lobby. No bet.
The elevator stopped on three and the orderlies got off. The door closed and the car started again. Since he was now alone, Lewis said aloud, “Okay, one, two, or three? What’s it gonna be?”
This was important to him. This, in his mind, might tell him whether he was going to have a winning day or a losing day. To a confirmed gambler, every day was a new beginning, a fresh start, another chance to hit it big. Yesterday never mattered. A gambler that looked back on what he lost yesterday was a fool. The same as a gambler who planned what to gamble on tomorrow. Yesterday was over, tomorrow wasn’t here. There was only today.
The elevator stopped on five. A split instant before the door opened, Lewis decided. Second. He would be second today.
On five, he walked down a long corridor to a door with a sign above it that read: OUTPATIENT RADIOLOGY. Taking a deep breath, as if he had a fortune bet on the moment, Lewis opened the door and entered the waiting room. In a glance he saw that Potts, the skinny white guy, was already there, slouched down in a corner chair, leafing through one of a dozen outdated magazines spread about the room. Hoxie, the sullen black man, sat in an opposite corner, looking straight ahead, not moving, as if he were in a trance.
Lewis cursed under his breath. He had lost. Disgruntled, he signed in at the reception window and found a place to sit that was well away from either of the other two. Controlling his annoyance at this unlucky turn of events, he took off his heavy coat, pulled a racing form from one of its pockets, and began to reevaluate bets he had made earlier that morning in the day’s lineup at Calexico Downs.
An hour before catching a bus to the hospital that morning, Lewis had been knocking impatiently on the door of a basement apartment on the near Northwest Side, in the neighborhood where he had grown up, once all Irish and Italian, now mostly mixed black, Hispanic, and Asian. He had to pound on the door three times, the cold wind whipping at his ankles, before his friend Ralph opened the door.
“What the hell, you going deaf?” Lewis complained peevishly. “I’m freezing out here.”
“You’re lucky I’m letting you in at all,” Ralph replied without rancor. He closed and triple-locked the door behind Lewis. “This ain’t no Vegas casino, y’know. It’s a business. We got reg’lar hours. Especially on Thursdays and Fridays, which is count days.”
The two men retreated into what had once been a basement apartment but had been converted into a neighborhood betting parlor, where bets were taken not only on daily lineups from seasonal racetracks around the country, but also on baseball, football, basketball, and hockey games, as well as major boxing matches. The parlor was owned by Cicero Charley Waxman, who was nicknamed after the Chicago suburb where Al Capone had once had his headquarters. Waxman had two dozen similar locations, all of which were illegal but much more popular than the state-owned off-track betting sites, because the former accepted wagers on all sports, the latter only horse racing.
The parlor where Lewis gambled was managed by his friend Ralph, one of the gang he had grown up with, and the only one other than Lewis who was still around. Ralph had started as an errand boy for Cicero Charley while still in elementary school, and over the years had grown into gambling-parlor middle management. Even though his net income depended on the earnings of the parlor, he constantly nagged Lewis about his gambling problem.
“Why the hell don’t you give it a rest for a few days, Lew?” he griped now. “Go out and buy yourself a decent overcoat instead of laying bets every day.”
Lewis threw him a derisive look and did not even bother to respond to such an absurd suggestion. The day Lewis did not lay a bet would be the day when all racehorses, boxers, and football, baseball, basketball, and hockey players were dead. At a counter next to the betting cages, Lewis spread out a Green Sheet racing form and began filling out a wagering slip.
“So how’s the gallbladder treatment going?” Ralph finally asked, seeing that Lewis was ignoring his advice.
“Slow.” said Lewis. “The stones are shrinking, but slow.”
Lewis had not told anyone what was really the matter with him; the thought of someone feeling pity for him was nauseating. Ralph thought he was going to the hospital every Thursday morning for some kind of treatment that shrank and dissolved gallstones. That was the reason he let Lewis in early to bet on Thursdays. The parlor normally opened at ten.
Standing across the counter from each other, the two men were acutely but not uncomfortably aware of the marked differences between them. Both forty-six, Ralph now had a wife, two teenage daughters bound for finishing school, a two-story colonial home in an upscale suburb, two sedans, and a recreational utility vehicle. Lewis lived alone in a shabby little kitchenette in a tenement building in the same neighborhood in which they had grown up. He had no family, no regular job, and wore secondhand clothes from St. Malachy’s Thrift Shop.
Over the years, Ralph had tried to interest Lewis in bettering himself. Just a month earlier he had talked to Cicero Charley Wax-man about giving Lewis a janitorial contract for all of Waxman’s gambling parlors. “It’ll put you on easy street, Lew,” his friend had promised. “You hire a dozen welfare mothers to do the work, see, and you pay them in cash so they don’t have to declare the income. All you gotta do is supervise them. I know guys that would cut off a toe for a setup like that.”
But not Lewis. He shied away from steady employment like a two-year-old resisted discipline. When he had to work — emphasize had to, as in riding out a losing streak — he took a temporary job as a dishwasher or a trucker’s helper, or delivered advertising fliers door-to-door, whatever — as long as it was not permanent. Lewis wanted nothing in his life that was permanent. Especially now.
“Did I tell you Debbie finally got her braces off?” Ralph asked now, as Lewis continued to fill out his wagering slip. From his wallet, Ralph extracted a wallet-size photo of his eldest daughter. Lewis looked at it, seeing a girl who resembled Ralph too much to ever be pretty, but who did have, after thousands of dollars of orthodontics, a near-perfect smile.
“She’s a looker,” Lewis lied. “You’re a lucky man, Ralph.” Inside, he shuddered at the mere thought of such responsibility.
As they were standing there, another knock sounded on the outside door and Ralph went over to answer it. He admitted two men, both very large, wearing hats and overcoats, each carrying two large suitcases. As they walked past Ralph, one of them asked, “Count room unlocked?”
“Yeah, go on in,” Ralph said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Returning to the counter, Ralph took the wager sheet, tallied it up, validated it in an automatic stamping machine, and shook his head in sad resignation as Lewis counted out sixty-five dollars and gave it to him.
As Lewis made the bets, an old, familiar thought surfaced in his mind: Maybe today will be the beginning of a winning streak that will give me enough money to get the hell out of cold, dirty Chicago and go live where it is warm and sunny for the rest of my life.