By Robert Arabella Digo, paciencia y barajar
What I say is, patience and shuffle up the cards.
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote Part 2- The Dead Man's Tell "El Rey del Póker" Paco Vargas, a "fist-full-of-chips no fold'em hold'em" player from South America has just punched out Joey Rosenberg, the Majestic Casino's Poker Room Manager, after his pair of Kings, which made him quads on the river, have been declared mucked.
Talbot, the Poker Room's Chief of Security, "The Poker Cop," has broken up the fist fight.
Joey Rosenberg takes his bloodstained hands from his battered face and says to the man who has just knocked him down, "I'm going to kill you." Paco Vargas, still in a rage over his mucked nut hand, spits on the ground, and yells, "Aquí! Ahora! Right here! Right now! Or do you not have the cojones?" Joey, whose left eye is already swollen half shut, stands up and they lunge at each other.
The Floorman restrains Joey.
I keep hold of Paco.
"Enough!" I yell in my old "cop breaking up a drunken street fight" voice, "The two of you can take this outside later.
Right now you're both out of here!" Joey yells "This is not over!" as the Floorman drags him away.
I hold onto Paco.
Lucy gathers up his remaining chips which she then hands to him just before I hustle "El Rey del Póker out of the poker room.
Paco suddenly remembers his underage mistress and yells, "Wait! Wait!" He twists in my grasp, looking frantically left and right, asking "Juanita? Donde está mi Juanita?" I push him to the poker room door and shove him out into the Casino.
"I don't know where your teenage girlfriend is.
Find her and get out.
You are banned for life," I try out my high school Spanish, "Prohibito para la vida, from this Poker Room.
Come back and I'll have you arrested." Paco either does not understand or just totally ignores my warning.
Visibly agitated, he looks back and forth, yells, "Juanita! Juanita!" and disappears into the crowd.
Joey Rosenberg sits fuming in the poker room office.
He presses a towel full of ice against the left side of his blood-smeared face.
"Lookawad he did ta me," says Joey, taking the towel away to show me his purpled swollen-shut left eye.
I tell him I've blacklisted El Rey from the poker room.
Joey is still on tilt over being punched out by Paco's left-right-left.
"I've neva wauked away froma fight in my life!" he mumbles through his swollen upper lip, "Ya shoudn'ta inter-fered, Tally.
I coudda taken him." Joey then tells me all the things he'll do to Paco if he ever gets the chance.
Lucy Mah, the dealer who correctly mucked Paco's Kings after he abandoned his hand, walks in to tell Joey that the $5,000/$10,000 no-limit hold'em game that caused the Paco v.
Joey fight, has broken up.
"That last pot was almost $800,000.
It was won by a Full House, aces over kings.
The winner tipped me $1." Lucy asks Joey if he's all right.
When he begins telling her what he'll do to Paco in the re-match I leave.
Hoping the just-ended middle-aged championship fight, won by Paco on a first round TKO, will be the last excitement for the night, I buy into a $3-$6 hold'em limit game.
On my third hand I'm dealt a pair of Queens.
I raise.
A tourist calls.
My cellphone rings.
"Talbot? It's Penelope Fallon.
I need you.
.
.
.
" Let me tell you a little about Penelope Fallon.
"Red Penny" is an absolutely beautiful, wild-red hair, pale green eyes, and milk-white skin, woman who looks like a fantasy Vegas call girl.
Looks can be deceiving.
She is, in fact, a young smart ex-FBI Special Agent who runs the Casino Security.
Her jurisdiction, the House Games, occupies over 99.9% of the casino's floor.
My jurisdiction, the Poker Room, occupies the remaining less than .01%.
Penelope Fallon does not share well with others.
Having to deal with me, an ex-LVPD Homicide cop, drives Red Penny, a Type A+ obsessive/compulsive control freak, crazy.
In the Casino, people think Red Penny is already crazy.
In the Craps Pits, they call her Snake-eyes.
At the Blackjack Tables, The Red Queen.
In the Roulette Pit, she's The Green-Eyed Monster.
In the Pai Gow Pits she's The Dragon Lady.
I call her Red Penny.
But never to her face.
"Penelope, I know you need me but I'm in the middle of a friendly little card game so I can't give you phone sex right now.
Why don't you call "1-800-I'm A Desperate Lonely Woman" while I play this game?" The rainbow flop comes 3 4 8.
I bet.
The tourist calls.
"I need you to come to the Security Office." A Queen falls on the turn.
I bet and am called.
"Why?" A 5 falls on the river.
I bet and am raised.
I call.
"I have a lost girl here who speaks only two words of English." "And what two words in English does the lost girl know?" "'Poker' and 'Cop'." I show the tourist wired Queens.
"Trips," says the dealer.
The tourist show me an off suit A2.
"Bicycle," says the Dealer.
I tell Red Penny, "Here name is Juanita" and walk away from the table.
Penelope Fallon found the half-hysterical Juanita, wandering through the Casino.
The girl now sits quietly licking a ice cream cone, watched by Red Penny's grandmotherly looking secretary, who has cleaned off Juanita's mask of adult make-up.
I tell Red Penny the strange story of Paco and Juanita, leaving out the Paco-Joey fist-fight.
She calls Paco's Suite but there's no answer.
With her heavy make-up off, Juanita looks much much younger.
I ask, "Just how old do you think she is? "She could be twelve, she could be.
.
.
." I never get to hear the upper age of the range.
From the loudspeaker above Red Penny's desk come the words, "Shots fired! Pool area.
Repeat shots fired! Pool area." Red Penny shakes the cigarette box and, finding it empty, crushes it in her fist and flings it away.
"Wonderful!" she mutters to herself before asking the dead man, "I don't suppose you have a smoke." The semi-submerged man floating face down in the deep end of the Majestic's swimming pool does not answer.
Thinking of the hours of mind-numbing paperwork to come - death is a file all forms in triplicate event - she curses the dead man while frantically tearing open an-other pack of cigarettes.
"Penelope," I say to her, "if you're trying to tear off the Surgeon General's Warning you're doing a really poor job.
Red Penny, an unlit cigarette in her mouth, now fights with her throwaway lighter, trying to fire up her three hundredth cigarette for the day.
I walk over and blow out the flame.
"Do that again and I'll kill you," she says and begins again to flip the lighter's ignition switch frantically.
It sputters to life and she gets her smoke fix.
"The Surgeon General doesn't have my job.
Besides, only 50% of smokers die from smoking.
Why should 100% of us quit?"
The security people fish the floater out of the pool.
We turn our attention to the waterlogged body now lying at pool side.
Red Penny takes a deep drag from her cigarette.
"Point-blank gunshot to the face.
Not that there's much face to look at." This is an understatement.
The victim's face, or what's left of it, has been torn to pieces, large chunks of flesh and bone have been gorged away, both eye sockets are empty, destroyed.
"His mother wouldn't know him on his birthday," says Red Penny, breathing out smoke, "Let's search him." She goes through his shirt pocket and pulls out a Majestic Hotel KeyCard.
"One of my hotel guests." I check his pants pockets.
Purple poker chips spill out.
"One of my players." Suddenly I have a sick feeling about this.
I ask Red Penny to show me his right hand.
She holds up the limp arm.
I look.
Below the wristline on the inside of his right hand is a tattooed A.
"Tengo un as encima de mi manga!" Paco told one and all, " I have an ace up my sleeve!" It's the Dead Man's Tell.
"Paco Vargas! Juanita's keeper," I tell Red Penny, "the guy who called himself 'El Rey del Póker'." "And do you have any idea who killed "The King of Poker?" I do not answer.
I don't know who killed him.
All I know for sure is who threatened to kill him.
Copyright © 2003 by Robert Arabella Please post them in our Poker.
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