NO GOOD DEED SHOULD GO UNPUNISHED

by Barry Baldwin

Jack Zip, Calgary's most unsuccessful private investigator, was picking his way towards the Star Hotel, one of a row of crudely repainted beer parlours that stood out like cheap fillings in the mouthful of decay that made up this strip of the city's East end. Not the most promising place to be summoned to by an unknown voice on the phone, but beggars can't be choosers. Zip had taken to PI work like a duck to treacle; if things didn't look up soon, he could be joining the human flotsam around him.

It wasn't only the knots of panhandlers and hangers-about and occasional flat-out staggering drunks, not all of whom were Indians despite what the local racists said, that he had to negotiate. The Chinook had been blowing for a couple of days, that warm West wind which roars in every now and then to lift the hats and spirits of winter-weary Calgarians in brief respite from the long weeks and months of bone-chilling minus twenty degree cold that makes an average Alberta winter. He remembered, as he always did when it came, some schoolbook yarn that said the Chinook was the warm breath exhaled by a Cherokee princess lying dead of a broken heart in a hidden cave somewhere in the Rockies. Zip didn't care whether the wind came out of her mouth or wherever, as long as it was warm. The trouble is, the snow melts by day and refreezes overnight, turning every street and sidewalk into a
foothold-defying rink of black ice and slush.

The next minute, he was inspecting this winter wonderland from a vantage point flat on his back. Jack Zip was no ninety pound weakling, but the sudden impact left him sprawling and winded. His discomfort wasn't helped by the proximity to his face of a well-defined if slightly squishy turd, canine or human - you never knew around these
parts. Zip was realist enough not to expect anyone would come rushing or even sauntering over to his rescue. On streets like this, a man on his back - a woman too for that matter - was situation normal, hardly worth a first glance, let alone a second, unless he was out cold and there was a chance of lifting his wallet. So he was doubly surprised to find himself being hauled to his feet and getting at least the gesture of a brush-down from not just any sidewalk Samaritan but the damn young fool who had come charging out of the Star without so much as a glance at where he was going.

“Jeez, Mr Zip, I'm sorry. You all right? Look, I know I came out of there like a bat from hell, but if you knew why...”

Jack Zip, who already knew he was Jack Zip, gave the kid a sincerely sour look while he completed the process of getting his breath back. He'd been damp and dirty before, now he was all over muddy and wet, even if he was in better shape than the tattooed urban cowboy in singlet and early period Little Richard elephant trousers with
twenty-five inch bottoms who was vomiting sluggishly into a Canada Post mailbox to the contrapuntal whooping of an unsteady circle of buddies. He knew who the young man still pawing hopelessly at him was. The recognition brought him no glow of warming pleasure; instead, a compound of anger, embarrassment, and guilt. He was wearing a black Oakland Raiders windcheater over an open-necked plaid shirt, pre-ruined jeans and a pair of genuine Western boots from Taiwan .

Slim, dark and pouty, a James Dean clone, good -looking if you liked that sort of thing - despite his addiction to old movies Jack Zip didn't, but he knew plenty of women who did, which was one of many reasons he himself never
got to know any of them better - though the parade of pimples snaking its way across his cheeks and forehead made a strong plea for the complete course of zit control as advertised on TV available from fine pharmacies everywhere.

He'd said his name was Johnny Zomba, and he had a social insurance card that seemed to prove it. A year or so ago, when Jack Zip was just setting up his shingle and briefly felt he should impress his hypothetical clients with a brace of assistants (the motherly secretary soon quit, bored to death by having nothing to do and complaining she
could make more in one afternoon at Bingo Heaven than Zip was shelling out in a week), Johnny Zomba had been on tap as his legman.

There was nothing for him to do either, so Zip, who was no better at firing than he was at hiring, kept Johnny on the payroll just long enough for him to qualify for unemployment benefit, then since it's not easy to find fault with the work of somebody who's never had the chance to do any, picked a fight with him over some missing money (later found by Zip at the bottom of a liningless jacket pocket) and got rid of him, though he'd felt bad about this almost at once and had tried to make some amends by confirming to the unemployment insurance clerk when she called the truth of Johnny's completely different account of why he'd been let go. Since then, the memory of the kid's teary-eyed mixture of denials of theft and beggings for another chance had come back to haunt him every once in a while.

To Zip's alarm, the boy abandoned his manual dry-cleaning efforts and started to rub a sleeve across his own visibly reddening eyes.

“Hey, I'm the one who got flattened, it should be me doing the crying. What was that you started to say about if I knew why? Why don't we go and let you buy me a beer and tell me all about it?”

“Well, okay, but not in there. I'm never going in that place again. Leastways, not without a shotgun to blast those guys apart.”

Mentally writing off his date with the owner of the voice on the phone - probably wouldn't have amounted to anything, anyway - Zip did the easy thing, simply guiding Johnny into the beer parlour next door. Its decor was classic Early Western sawdust and urinal, with a clearly used floor vomitory runing the length of the bar and a mammoth communal brass spittoon occupying a place of honour. Both bar and tables were packed with men feeding their pogey - unemployment benefit - cheques back into the local economy and arguing over the chances of the Flames making the hockey play-offs this year.

Over in one corner, a mighty-armed woman, rightly ignored by all, was pounding out sagas of the lusts of long-dead cowpokes. An optimistic glass placed on the piano lid for patrons to show their appreciation was emphatically
empty. Jack Zip felt a pang of sympathy for a fellow unrecognised artist as he spotted the one available table (“over there where that guy's lying”), appropriated it, and sent a crook-fingered message across the room to a waiter who in no time at all was slopping a couple of beers and a tab in front of them.

“Okay, shoot.”

Johnny Zomba's story tumbled out, punctuated only by gulps of beer from a glass frequently replenished without being asked by the waiter. After having been shown the door by Zip, he'd had nothing but a few casual heavy duty labouring jobs, picked up by a truck at the corner of the Eleventh Avenue human meat market where the unemployed hopefuls gather each dawn and decanted back there twelve hours later with cash in hand. But the cold weather put an end to most of this seasonal stuff, and the thought of a winter hanging around the streets all at once seemed too much. |

So Johnny hitched his way down to California and ended up - where else, it's not just an American dream - waiting tables and pumping gas in Hollywood until he got his big break. But he never advanced further than the studio audience for Jeopardy, and the only offer he had was a way too personal one from a line cook at the Burger king where he'd worked. His hopes had dwindled along with his money, a proper work permit let alone a green card were beyond his reach, so it was only a matter of time before he was back in Calgary .

One day he ran into Kelly, a girl he'd known in high school. It wasn't long before they were living together in a fourplex out in the Northeast wastes of the city. Kelly had a part-time cashier's job at the local supermarket; she
also had a baby on the way. With no other regular money coming in, Johnny took a big decision one night after hearing Kenny Rogers on the subject on the Country and Western radio station.

He sold or hocked most of the furniture, cashed in a Canada Savings Bond given to him some years before by an oddball relative which he suddenly remembered was gathering dust in a bank, and went out looking for the big card game that would set them up good without Revenue Canada needing to know anything about it. After striking out in the first few places he tried - Calgary isn't Las Vegas - his quest for ‘action' had ended in the Star Hotel when the bartender nodded him into a classic back room poker party.

“Where they took you for all you had,” contributed Zip, since Johnny choked off at this point; it took a good half glass of beer to lube his vocal cords back into working order.

“Yeah, they did. I mean, they must have. Well, I recall as how you know all about poker, Mr Zip.”

“Jack. Enough.” Zip knew far more than enough about poker; he'd four years at university to thank for that. “Point is, how much do you?”

“Used to play for matches in the school cafeteria. I'm no Brett Maverick, that's for sure. But I know enough to know they took me to the cleaners, though I'm darned if I can figure out how.”

“What were you playing?”

“Draw poker, with the Joker Wild.”

“How many guys were there?”

“Four.”

“Did they seem to know each other?”

“I guess so.”

Zip shook his head. “And that didn't tell you anything? Never mind, keep going.”

“Well, we played a few hands. Quite a few, I reckon. Average kind of stakes, a quarter to get in and fifty cents maximum.”

“It all adds up. And you won most of these hands?”

“Yeah, I guess I did. And not always with very good cards. Never had better than two pairs. Tell you the truth, I was surprised how quickly the other guys kept folding. But they were being really great about me winning, slapping me on the back and pushing the drinks at me and all.”

“Until oneof them suggested upping the ante and raising the limits to give them a chance to get some of their dough back?”

“That's exactly what they did, Mr Zip, Jack. We doubled the limits and played a jackpot. And I won that as well. It went quite a ways until one of them saw me on a full house, but I edged him out with mine, aces to his queens. Well, you can guess I wanted to quit on that, but they said, don't walk away when your cards are hot, come on, let's all go for broke on one last big one.”

Zip lifted his glass, swilled the beer around in it, and let Johnny carry on; he knew pretty much what was coming.

“They said, how's about a dollar ante and betting pot limit. I tried to say that was too rich for my blood and that I wanted out, but hell, I was on a roll, and that's why I was there in the first place, so I went along with it. And when I saw my hand, I was over the moon. A straight flush, ten high. Never had one before in my life. I mean, what are the
odds of a deal like that?”

“Approximately one in thirteen thousand two hundred and eighty-five point five, with the Joker. One in seventy-two thousand one hundred and ninety-three point three three without.”

Johnny Zomba blinked, setting off a little dance of the zits across his brow.

“How in tarnation could you reel that off? You turned into Mr Spock or something?”

“Nope. It's all in Scarne.”

It was obvious from some more blinking that he was about to be asked what the hell this Scarne was, so Zip hastily footnoted, “JohnScarne wrote the best book of all time about cards and how to cheat. Ought to be required reading for tenderfeet like you, save you a lot of grief.”

“But how do you remember the numbers like that?”

“Photographic memory, I guess; comes in handy.” Zip didn't add that he'd not long ago read an article which said this was a sign of a low IQ. “Anyway...?”

“So, one of them opens the pot. Everybody stayed in. Then the guy on my left took a couple of cards, and the others drew as well. One of them bet the limit and raised. The next guy called and raised. The other two folded. The three of us went round a few times. Table stakes were long gone. We were on to cheque books and IOUs and betting our cars and anything you could think of. I started to panic, but I knew I had this straight flush. Not the top hand, but what were the odds of anyone having a better one?”

“One in one hundred and nineteen thousand five hundred and seventy point two for a Royal Flush, and...”

“Yeah, okay. Anyways, I saw them. Killed me to do it, but I'd had enough. I spread my straight flush on the table. One of the others had nothing, but the guy to my left gave a kind of grin, first one he'd cracked all night, and put down a royal.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“I couldn't believe my eyes. But when I saw him raking in the money and my IOUs and watch and car keys and all, I jumped up and called them all the names under the sun. All the time I was thinking, what'm I going to tell Kelly? What could I do? It was four against one. So I crashed out of that room and on to the street and right into you.”
Johnny paused for the inevitable amber irrigation.

“I was taken, wasn't I, Jack?”

“What do you think?”

“But how? That's what I don't figure. How?”

“Try to think. Were there any cigarette lighters or coins or other metal objects lying around on the table? Did any of them smoke a pipe?”

“Not that I recall. For sure, no pipes. Why?”

“ No shiners then. Did you notice any of them hold the cards in any particular way when they were shuffling or dealing?”

“What? I don't know. Maybe. One guy, he had real big hands, did seem to keep his fingers curled around the long edges and now I think of it his index finger...”

“The Mechanic's Grip.”

“Look, what is all this stuff? I'm not with you.”

“I told you earlier, Johnny, you should read Scarne. It's all in there. Get Kelly to buy you a copy for Christmas. A shiner is any reflecting surface that can show you what cards are being dealt. Sometimes you get them built in to the metal rings round a pipe bowl. If you spot a guy with the Mechanic's Grip, it means he's palming cards or dealing
seconds or off the bottom. If they could handle that, they were probably up to crimping and false cutting and the whole shebang. What kind of pack were they using?”

“Just ordinary blue ones. They broke out a new one for the pot limit round. Said it might bring them luck.”

“I bet. Now, who dealt you your straight flush?”

“I did. They insisted. Courtesy to the new boy or something. How in hell could they cheat me when I was doing the dealing?”

“You could be about to find out. Now think hard and think good . Did anything happen when you were dealing?”

Johnny's forehead crinkled. “Not that I...Wait, there was one thing. I was offering the pack to the player on my right to be cut when the guy on my left tapped my arm and tried to bum a cigarette. I told him to hold his horses for a minute and he said okay. So what?”

Zip allowed himself a slow smile, the kind that invites congratulations.

“And that, my young friend, is when they cold-decked you.”

“Cold-decked?”

“Yep. It's the simplest form of cheating there is, and an absolute killer for the sucker who's dealing. While you were distracted by the cigarette-bummer, the guy on your right switched in a new pack, one that was rigged to give you your straight and them their royal. Then they just sat back and sandbagged you with their pot raises.”

Johnny Zomba digested this in silence for a moment, then burst out,“Those cunning so-and-sos! Wait till I...” Then reality snuck back in.

“Wait till I what? What can I do, Jack?”

“Not a lot.”

Johnny looked at Zip in a way Zip wished he wouldn't. “I don't suppose you could think of something?”

“Can you pay?”

“ No , no way. Leastways, not with money. Hey, maybe I could do some free legwork for you?”

Zip just managed to repress a shudder at this prospect. “Don't even think about that. Well, I'm sure not going to barge in there right now and beat the living crap out of them; I'm not the Saint. But listen, I'll work something out to make those guys foot the bill. You can't be the first sucker they've had the pleasure of entertaining. And I expect
that bartender gets his cut for steering the action-seekers into the back. So...”

The wheels were already spinning in his head, but Jack Zip thought it would look better if he waited a while, give the impression of some concentrated brainwork. Anyhow, Johnny needed to be taught a lesson as well as be helped.
“I'll work it out, no sweat. But I'll need you to help.”

“Just name it, Jack, just name it.”

The following night, Jack Zip rang Johnny Zomba and named it. A sly glance at his fake Rolex - there was no clock - told Zip that he had been playing and mostly winning for nearly three hours. There was a tidy pile in front of him. His four opponents were routine B-feature characters; Zip felt so much at home that he was almost ashamed. They
had grunted their first names, but he had them privately classified as the Marx Brothers: Groucho, Chico , Harpo, Zeppo. As he had expected, the bartender had been only too eager to point him into the small smoky back room.

The game was unfolding pretty much as Johnny Zomba had described. Draw poker with the Joker Wild. No sign of any shiners; Zip kept his own counsel over the frequently distinctive hand jobs with the cut, deal, and shuffle. The Marx brothers mostly kept their heads down and just played, rationing any conversation beyond what the cards
required to a few minimalist noises when attending to the beer a waiter fetched in at notably short intervals. Zip was reminded of the first and last time he had politely asked for cards at Nevada Slim's, a low-limit casino in Las Vegas - raising two fingers in a combination of instruction and rebuke, the world-weary dealer had said, “in this town,
guy, we don't talk.”

There was a brief burst of animation, though, when the jackpot round was proposed, played, and lost to Zip on an ace-high flush.

“Boy, do you ever lose?” asked Chico.

“Not my night, that's for sure,” lamented Harpo. The notion of a pot limit finale was floated right on cue. Zip
likewise followed suit: he demurred, considered, agreed, on condition that it was all cash upfront, no cheques or IOUs. A new deck was produced and handed to him to be stripped out of its cellophane like a girlie magazine, shuffled, and dealt.

"Where's that waiter?” grumbled Groucho.

Zip gave the cards a thorough work-out. As far as he could tell, they were the genuine article: no edge work, no block-outs, no bevelling or trims.

When this performance was over, he pushed the deck across for Chico on his right to cut. At that exact moment, Groucho on his left nudged him in the ribs and said, “I'm fresh out of smokes, can you oblige?”

Zip gave him some kind of smile, “sure, there's a new pack in my jacket pocket there, help yourself.”

Groucho did so, no hint of a Thank You. It would have been lost, anyway, in the noise of a big crash that made them all spin round. The waiter, a nervous-looking type, not very old, with a mop of fair hair marginally complemented by a struggling pencil moustache, had dropped the latest tray of drinks while attempting to hold it high with one hand as he pushed the door to with the other.

“Clumsy son of a bitch,” Harpo snarled.

" Forget it,” said Zip, “maybe he's fresh on the job.”

“That's right, come to think of it, I've never seen him in here before.”

The waiter went down on his knees, implying a touch of prayer as he clawed up the debris, after which he scuttled out and was back with a new round in record time.

“Get out and stay out,” ordered Chico when he'd set down the glasses. When everyone had ante-ed up their dollar, Zip dealt the cards. He squinted at his own hand. Groucho opened the pot with a five. Harpo, Zeppo, Chico , and Zip matched him.

In response to Groucho's sign language, Zip fed him two new cards. The other three stayed and also drew. Zip indicated he was standing pat. Groucho bet the pot limit. Harpo called him, adding a five dollar raise. Zeppo and Chico promptly folded. Zip threw in three tens and a five. Groucho and Harpo followed suit. Zip called their two raises. After another raise and call by Groucho and Harpo, Zip calculated that the pot stood at ten thousand
five hundred and thirty dollars; it would cost him seven thousand and twenty to call the last two raises. Shaking his head, Zip announced that he had no choice but to see their hands.

A smirking Groucho fanned out his cards on the table, showing a Royal Flush. Harpo had nothing.

All four looked at Zip. He milked the moment, then one by one revealed his lethal quintet: four twos and the Joker.
Zeppo, the scrawniest of the four, leapt up and started hollering about cheating bastards, but two of the others pulled him down and told him to quit his noise.

“That's good advice,” Zip said, lifting his right hand, “I know at least five ways of disabling any one of you with
this.” He'd always wanted to use this line which he had lifted from one of the private eye stories he read to while away his plentiful dead time in the office.

“Mister, why don't you take your dough and git?” muttered Groucho.

“That's also good advice,” said Zip, now on an epigrammatic roll, and he did whatever the past tense of ‘git' is.

The money sat in a proud pile between them in the front of the old blue 1974 Pontiac Ventura which Johnny Zomba said he'd borrowed from Kelly. Zip had to admit that Johnny looked much better in his natural state than he did with a yellow rug and fake hair on the upper lip. Now that his stress levels were down, even his zits seemed to have subsided.

“Jeez, that was really great, Jack, really something. Double cold-decking them when I dropped that tray the way you said to.”

“That was my worst moment. Not whether I could bring the move off, but wondering if they'd fall for it. They were pretty cool customers on the whole. Especially when I scooped the big one. I was surprised they let me go so easily. Still am, come to that. That's why I had you waiting in the back alley with the engine running. I was half expecting that big bartender out there to reclaim their wad.”

“Guess they realised you're the main man, Jack.”

Johnny's eyes slid from Zip's face to the money and back. “So, the deal is...?”

“Nice choice of words, Johnny, in the circumstances. The deal is what it always was. You get back what they took off you. The rest is my fee, courtesy of the boys in the back room; no pain, no gain for you. Don't look at me like that. I thought it all up. I took all the risks. I could have got creamed in there.”

“I know, I know, though I could have got creamed as well if they'd tumbled to me. Only what with Kelly expecting and having to give up her job soon and me with no prospects of one and the landlord's upping the rent so we could be out on the street and...well, we could really use some of that extra dough.”

Zip looked at Johnny. Johnny looked at Zip. Zip blinked first. The money he'd used to stake himself into the poker game had come from the ever-dwindling reserve of the Super Seven Lottery win with which he'd set himself up in the investigation business in the first place and on which he had been and was still living. Unless he got some half-decent incomings to match his outgoings, and pretty damn quick, he soon wouldn't have any more money in the bank than the boy, and he certainly didn't have any Kelly pregnant or otherwise to keep him warm at night.

But he figured Johnny Zomba was the sort of kid whose life had so far been measured out in coffee spoons of disappointment while he, Zip, had at least had his moments. If he thought long enough, he might even remember what they were. To hell with it, it was only money. He shoved the whole lot over to Johnny.

“Jack, Mr Zip, I don't know what to say. I'll never forget you for this, and you can be damn sure Kelly won't. Maybe you'll consider standing up as the baby's godfather when he's born. Anything I can ever do for you...”

“Just two things, Johnny. Don't start crying on me again, and don't ever spread word on this to anyone. Got my reputation to protect (Zip managed to conjure back his poker face as he said this - what reputation?), don't want people thinking Jack Zip's a soft touch for every sob story in town.”

Zip was opening the passenger door and out of the car before he'd finished this last bit. As he walked away in the direction of his own car, hanging on to his feel- good buzz, he shot just one glance over his shoulder. He was kind of hoping to catch Johnny gazing after him in wide-eyed adoration, but the kid already had the bills spread over the
seat and was counting them into piles.

The four men were slopping around in the trailer in which they lived on the permanent site out in the Southeast section. With all the chugging of their Molson's cans and the blue haze of Export A, it was more like the Red Green show than the Marx Brothers. Thanks to the heavy beat of a vintage Doug and the Slugs tape, it took a while for them to register that somebody was thumping at the door. Finally, one of them reached across with his foot and pushed it open for their visitor to clamber in.

“Hey, did he come across, I hope?”

“What do you think? All the way.”

“Way to go! Those guys in Hollywood sure missed a talent in you.”

“Sure did,” said Johnny Zomba who'd never been within a thousand miles of LA. Anyone could disguise their voice over the crackly old bakelite telephone from the Star Hotel or wait for his target to approach its door before barrelling out and cannoning into it by accident on purpose.

“That no - good Zip, calling me a thief the way he did before pink-slipping me. I swore then I'd get even and now even I am. I knew he'd fall for it, after the way he lied to the unemployment people for me. Bastard likes to feel good if it doesn't cost him too much. Great idea, wasn't it? I have to admit it wasn't mine, though. Kelly thought it all up, had the notion from some old movie, she said, must be the only one Zip's never seen. I got myself some smart chick there. Only letdown is, Zip'll never know how I paid him back. Maybe I can do something about that one day. Here's the loot. He hung on to a grand for his fee, I figured I couldn't push my luck too far.Up yours, Zip. I
never stole a red cent from anyone in my entire life.”