Jackie was trying very hard not to laugh. I wanted to smack him.

“Do you want to know what this private investigator is doing for me tonight?”

Again, no takers.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. He took another hit off his glass of J.D. “He’s watching my wife. He’s been following her, in fact, for two weeks straight.”

“Why are you telling us this?” Bennett said. “If there’s something going on between you and your wife…”

“No, no,” Vargas said. “Not between me and my wife. Between my wife and somebody else.”

“Well okay,” Bennett said. “But come on, you don’t have to-”

“Oh, but I do,” he said. “I most certainly do. I’ll tell you why. I would like somebody at this table…” He gave Kenny a quick glance. “Kenny, you are excused from this question. I would like somebody else at this table aside from Kenny who has no fucking involvement in this matter whatsoever to tell me why our friend Mr. Swanson is not playing cards with us tonight.”

“He said he couldn’t play,” Bennett said.

“Yeah, we got that part,” Vargas said. “Tell me why he couldn’t play.”

“We don’t know,” Bennett said.

“You don’t know. Okay. And last week, when he couldn’t play, you didn’t know why then either.”

“That’s right.”

“Okay. So we play with five last week over at Bennett’s bar and the game sucks and we would have played with five this week, but fortunately, Jackie just so happens to have this friend Alex handy who can fill in for Swanson.”

“Leave Alex out of this,” Jackie said. “I asked him to play. So we’d have six. That’s all there is to it. We don’t know anything about Swanson.”

“What about next week?” Vargas said. “Is Swanson going to play next week? Or will Alex be sitting in again? Because we certainly wouldn’t want to cancel the game, now would we? Because then my wife wouldn’t have an excuse to go have a night out with the girls.”