Chapter 15: Chancer

For a change, my desk was being used as something other than a foot-rest. The surface wasn’t strewn for effect, you understand. It was supporting genuine work. To my left – because I’m sinistral – was a sheet of paper bearing an array of diagrams. Under my nose was one of the few books I owned – most of my reading material came from the local library. This work, Business Mathematics, was written by L.W.T. Stafford, and I would like to express my indebtedness to the author for what I consider an outstanding effort.

My cranial frenzy had been induced that morning, when I’d exchanged a few words with young Bobbie, who ran a newspaper stand near the office. Though I seldom bought his wares, he always seemed happy to pass the time of day with me. I think he considered my occupation glamorous. As I approached him, he was repeatedly tossing a coin, slapping it onto his left wrist, looking at it and grunting to himself. “Morning, Bobbie,” I said. “You look like an understudy for George Raft.”

“Mornin’, Mr Potts. I just don’t figure it.”

“Figure what?”

“This coin thing. I mean, if you toss one, you’d expect a fifty-fifty chance of a head, wouldn’t you?”

“Correct. So?”

“Well, if you tossed it twice, you’d still reckon the same way for two heads, wouldn’t you?”

I knew there was a catch in that, but couldn’t recall exactly what it was. However, I did remember – with commendable speed, I maintain – that my friend Stafford had something to say on the subject. Strange how these disparate things get together at the same time. “You’re wrong, Bobbie,” I said, “but I have to get to the phone right now. I’ll come back to you.”

I was stalling of course, but Bobbie seemed to regard me as an intellectual and I didn’t intend to disappoint him. Having nothing else to do, I dug out my vade mecum and got to work, knowing that I would be dealing with Pascal and his famous triangle, or something closely allied thereto.

After two hours of immersion, I was boned up. If you toss a coin once, the chance of getting a head is obviously fifty per cent. But if you toss twice, you might get head-head, head-tail, tail-head, or tail-tail, so your chance of two heads is only twenty-five per cent. Ever the experimenter, I tried this out with two series, each of a hundred double-tosses. It works. I got two heads twenty-three times with the first effort and twenty-four times with the second. That seemed reasonable to me, since the chances are three-to-one against, so any deviation from the expected outcome will be likewise. I was satisfied – and by the way, if you want to get three heads with three tosses, you have one chance in eight. With four tosses, it’s one in sixteen, and so on. One day, I’ll go into this matter of probabilities in the detail it deserves.

I was about to step out and reveal all to Bobbie when I got a visitor. Like too many other callers, he didn’t bother to knock – I might as well have swapped my PI licence for a hawker’s permit and worked on the street corner. Not that an alfresco arrangement would have been appropriate for my man, who didn’t seem like the outdoors type. He was, I guessed, in his thirties, about five-ten, heavily built, with a square, clean-shaven, fleshy face and plenty of straight mid-brown hair, slicked back. He wore a dark-blue, faintly reddish-striped suit, which I suspected hadn’t come off any peg, a blindingly white shirt, maroon tie with tiny gold somethings on it and gleaming black lace-up shoes. But for the bulging in his middle reaches, he could have been a tailor’s dummy. There was something about him that put me on my guard. It might have been the grey eyes – they seemed to lack the ingenuousness I’d have liked to see – or maybe the overall turn-out which, immaculate though it was, somehow verged on the flashy. Was he a low-life who’d got lucky? What the Irish call a chancer? One shouldn’t indulge in such speculation.

“Cyril Potts?” he asked.

“Yes. Have a seat.”

He thudded down like a meteorite impacting the Earth. “I need help,” he said, breathing heavily.

“And you are?”

“Clyde Osborne.”

“What’s your trouble, Mr Osborne?”

“I work for Victor Marks,” he said – and now that he’d strung more than two words together and begun to settle down, I was trying to get something from his speech. Nothing doing. It was a neutral, come-from-almost-anywhere voice.

“Oh.” My flat, downbeat tone said it all. I hadn’t thought it possible for me to get a world of meaning into one syllable, but I must have done it.

Osborne gave me a tight smile. “That seems to get through to you.”.

It did. I hadn’t met, or even seen, Victor Marks, but had heard a lot about him, all of which suggested that I would be as well off without personal acquaintanceship. Superficially, Marks was a land and property developer, though I didn’t know of anything he’d developed. According to scuttlebutt, his main activities were gambling and offering unsecured loans. I wasn’t sure how the first stood with the authorities, but I didn’t see anything wrong with it. If some people wanted to place bets and he was prepared to accommodate them, where was the problem? I assumed that he kept everything above board, taxwise.

The lending was a different matter, especially the way Marks allegedly went about it. I’d heard that those who owed him money had two ways of dealing with their predicament. The less disagreeable route was to pay up at hair-raising interest rates. The other involved a quartet of psychopaths in Victor’s employ. It was said they enjoyed rearranging the physiques of defaulting debtors. I wasn’t au fait with the details, but knitting together what I knew and what I’d heard, I reckoned that as a boneman, Marks probably ranked somewhere between Vlad the Impaler and Tamerlane.

“I’ve heard of him,” I said. “Go on.”

Osborne’s face had taken on what, if I were a literary type, I’d call a sickly hue. “I manage the Amethyst Lounge for Marks,” he said. “In case you don’t know, it’s a gaming house.”

I knew where the place was and what happened there, which didn’t include much lounging, but was not aware of Marks’ involvement. I nodded Osborne on and he shifted uneasily. “Well, to cut a long story short, I’ve made a mistake. There’s this woman.”

I avoided saying ‘cherchez la femme’. “And?”

“She came into the place two months ago. Twenty-six years old and a dazzler. She played for high stakes from the beginning, lost a pile and was brought into my office. I’m a professional and I should have known better, but she knocked me right out of my shoes. God help me, I okayed her, in exchange for ... well...”

“Certain favours?” I suggested.

“You’re a man of the world.”

I didn’t recall being accused of that before, but produced a sage nod. “It comes with the job.”

He wriggled. “Before I knew what I was doing, she was into the club for twelve thousand. She paid me in kind all right, but if I had to work out the rate, I’d have been better off with a top-class hooker. I mean, it must have worked out at fifty dollars –”

“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine. And the result is...”

“It’s an old story,” he said. “She disappeared and the shortfall was discovered. Victor fired me and gave me a week to come up with the money. My time’s up now.”

“And you haven’t obliged?”

“No.”

“So what happens next?”

“You want me to spell it out?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary, but I’m not clear as to how I come in, especially at this late stage.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know that any better than you do. I’m not even sure you do come in, but I’m desperate. Look, since I came to this town two years ago, I’ve been tied up with my work and too busy to have a social life.”

“I’d have thought your life was social by definition.”

That brought another constipated grin. “Not really. In my world a man has associates, not friends. Oh, they give you the palsy-walsy look and slap you on the back, but believe me, if they see you fall, they’re onto the carcass like hyenas. You might find it hard to accept, but as of right now, you may be nearer to a friend than anyone else I know.”

I was surprised, but only for a moment, after which it occurred to me that people in Osborne’s business tend to work all night and sleep during the day. Without quite thinking it through, I surmised that he was telling the truth. “I understand,” I said, “but I don’t see what I can do?”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. You’re highly regarded in certain circles. I’ve even heard Victor mention you. Maybe if you step in and ask him to give me a little time, he’ll listen. I don’t know why I think that, but I do.”

Now it was my turn for shoulder-jerking. “Well, if that’s all you want, I’ll try, but I think you have too high an estimate of any influence I might have. Also, there’s the possibility that Marks will object to my intercession, which could be bad news for both of us. Have you thought of just getting lost?”

He shook his head. “There’s no escaping Victor Marks. First, he’s having me watched. Most likely he knows I’m here. Second, even if he wasn’t keeping tabs, he’d have no trouble finding me. I’ve heard of people who tried to get away from him. Not one of them made it. It’s a sport with him, like with big-game hunters. One fellow got to Scotland and another to Australia. It didn’t do either of them any good. Running isn’t an option.”

“All right,” I said. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do what I can. How do I contact you?”

He gave me an address in an out-of-town hotel where he’d registered under a false name, plus a phone number for Marks. As he rose to leave he forced out another pained smile. “Don’t mind my saying so, Mr Potts, but you don’t have that tough-guy look I’d expected of a man in your business.”

I chuckled. “I was off duty when you arrived. Now that the clock’s ticking I can do ‘mean’ as well as the next man. So long, Mr Osborne.”

After he left, it occurred to me that we hadn’t talked about my fees. Still, with all that money sloshing around they seemed trivial and anyway, I didn’t intend to exert myself unduly. Maybe a phone call and a short drive would do the trick, if it could be done at all. Being – at times – a man of action, I phoned Marks immediately. I got a secretary and told her who I was and what I wanted. She put me on hold for over a minute, then came back and without apologising for the delay said that Marks would see me in an hour, if I could make it, which I guessed meant that I’d better do so.