“Lissen,” Charlie yelled, “you inherit that kinda money and you naturally feel like you know alla answers and also it puts me in a position where I can’t exactly kick him inna ankle, you know what I mean? So, wit’ the new pernna view, I say tuh him, very patient, ‘Why don’t you pass the time by playing a liddul solitaire?’ ”
Raymond was on a bar stool twelve feet away from Charlie and had in no way been eavesdropping on the conversation, as that could have been judged suicidal. He rapped on the bar peremptorily with a half dollar. Charlie looked up, irritated. One lousy customer in the whole lousy joint and he had to be a point killer.
“What, arreddy?” Charlie inquired.
“Give me a deck of cards,” Raymond said. Charlie looked at the bookmaker, then rolled his eyes heavenward. He shrugged his shoulders like the tenor in Tosca, opened a drawer behind him, took out a blue bicycle deck, and slid it along the polished surface to Raymond.
Raymond took the deck from its box and began to shuffle smoothly and absent-mindedly, and Charlie went back to barbering the bookmaker and the young, dumpy blonde. Raymond was laying down the second solitaire spread when Marco came in, ten minutes later. He greeted Charlie as he passed him, ordering a beer, then stood at the bar at Raymond’s elbow. “I got held up in traffic,” he said ritualistically. “And so forth.” Raymond didn’t answer.
“Are you clear for dinner, Raymond?” Marco wasn’t aware that Raymond was ignoring him. “My girl insists that the time has come to meet you, and no matter how I try to get out of it, that’s the way it’s got to be. Besides, I am about to marry the little thing, ringside one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, and we would like you to be the best man.”
The queen of diamonds showed at the twenty-third card turn. Raymond scooped the cards together, ignoring Marco. Becoming aware of the silence, Marco was studying Raymond. Raymond squared the deck, put it facedown on top of the bar, placed the queen of diamonds faceup on top of the stack, and stared at it in a detached and preoccupied manner, unaware that Marco was there. Charlie put the glass of beer in front of Marco at the rate of one hundred and thirty-seven words a minute, decibel count well above the middle register, then turned, walking back to the bookmaker and the broad to punctuate his narrative by recalling the height of the repartee with his brother-in-law: “Why don’t you take a cab quick to Central Park and jump inna lake, I says,” and his voice belted out loud and strong as though a sound engineer were riding gain on it. Raymond brushed past Marco, walked rapidly past the bookmaker and the girl, and out of the saloon.
“Hey! Hey, Raymond!” Marco yelled. “Where you going?” Raymond was gone. By the time Marco got to the street he saw Raymond slamming the door of a cab. The taxi took off fast, disappearing around the corner, going uptown.
Marco returned to the saloon. He sipped at his beer with growing anxiety. The action of the game of solitaire nagged at him until he placed it in the dreams. It was one of the factors in the dreams that he had placed no meaning upon because he had come to regard the game as an aberration that had wriggled into the fantasy. He had discussed it because it had been there, but after one particularly bright young doctor said that Raymond had undoubtedly been doing something with his hands which had looked as though he were playing solitaire, Marco had gradually allowed the presence of the game in the dream to dim and fade. He now felt the conviction that something momentous had just happened before his eyes but he did not know what it was.
“Hey, Charlie.”
Business of rolling eyes heavenward, business of slow turn, exaggerating the forbearance of an extremely patient man.
“Yeah, arreddy.”
“Does Mr. Shaw play solitaire in here much?”
“Whatta you mean—much?”
“Did he ever play solitaire in here before?”
“No.”
“Give me another beer.” Marco went to the telephone booth, digging for change. He called Lou Amjac.
Amjac sounded sourer than ever. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Come on, save time. What happened?”
“Raymond is at the Twenty-second Precinct in the middle of the park on the Eighty-sixth Street transverse.”
“What did he do? What the hell is the matter with you?”
“He rented a rowboat and he jumped in the lake.”
“If you’re kidding me, Lou—”
“I’m not kidding you!”
“I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”
“Colonel Marco!”
“What?”
“Did it finally break?”
“I think so. I—yeah, I think so.”
At first, Raymond flatly denied he had done such a thing but when the shock and embarrassment had worn off and he was forced to agree that his clothes were sopping wet, he was more nearly ready to admit that something which tended toward the unusual had happened. He, Amjac, and Marco sat in a squad room, at Marco’s request. When Raymond seemed to have done with sputtering and expostulating, Marco spoke to him in a low, earnest voice, like a dog trainer, in a manner too direct to be evaded.
“We’ve been kidding each other for a long time, Raymond, and I put up with it because I had no other choice. You didn’t believe me. You decided I was sick and that you had to go along with the gag to help me. Didn’t you, Raymond?” Raymond stared at his sodden shoes. “Raymond! Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Now hear this. You stood beside me at Hungarian Charlie’s and you didn’t know I was there. You played a game of solitaire. Do you remember that?”
Raymond shook his head. Marco and Amjac exchanged glances.
“You took a cab to Central Park. You rented a rowboat. You rowed to the middle of the lake, then you jumped overboard. You have always been as stubborn as a dachshund, Raymond, but we can produce maybe thirty eyewitnesses who saw you go over the side, then walk to shore, so don’t tell me again that you never did such a thing—and stop kidding yourself that they are not inside your head. We can’t help you if you won’t help us.”
“But I don’t remember,” Raymond said. Something had happened to permit him to feel fear. Jocie was coming home. He might have something to lose. The creeping paralysis of fright was so new to him that his joints seemed to have rusted.
The capacious house in the Turtle Bay district jumped with activity that evening and it went on all through the night. A board review agreed to accept the game of solitaire as Raymond’s trigger; and once they had made the connection they were filled with admiration for the technician who had conceived of it. Three separate teams worked with Hungarian Charlie, the talker’s talker, the bookmaker, and the young, dumpy blonde.
At first, the blonde refused to talk, as she had every reason to believe that she had been picked up on an utterly nonpolitical charge. She said, “I refuse to answer on the grounds. It might intend to incriminate.” They had to bring Marco in to bail her attitude out of that stubborn durance. She knew Marco from around Charlie’s place and she liked the way he smelled so much that she was dizzy with the hope of cooperating with him. He held her hand for a short time and explained in a feeling voice that she had not been arrested, and that she was cooperating mainly as a big favor to him, and who knew? the whole thing could turn out to be pretty exciting. “I dig,” she said, and everything was straightened out although she seemed purposely to misunderstand his solicitude by trying to climb into his lap as they discussed the various areas, but everybody was too busy to notice, and he was gone about two seconds after she had said, listen, she’d love to cooperate but why did they have to cooperate in different rooms?
The bookmaker was even more wary. He was a veritable model of shiftiness, which was heightened by the fact that he was carrying over twenty-nine thousand dollars’ worth of action on the sixth race at Jamaica, so he couldn’t possibly keep his mind on what these young men were talking to him about. They persuaded him to take a mild sedative, then a particularly sympathetic young fellow walked with him along the main corridor and, in a highly confidential manner, asked him to feel free to discuss what had him so disturbed. The bookmaker knew (1) that these were not the type of police which booked gamblers, and (2) he had always responded to highly confidential, whispering treatment. He explained about his business worries, stating, for insurance, that a friend of his—not he himself—was carrying all that action. Amjac made a call and got the race result. It was Pepper Dog, Wendy’s Own, and Italian Mae, in that order. Not one client had run in the money. The bookmaker was opened up like a hydrant.