“Hell, Danny, I’m sorry,” Weiss said.

He had begun to sweat. It was ten degrees outside, and not much higher in the office, but his face shined with sweat like a pale wet moon. Just as it had done years ago on his big night.

Weiss had begun with ten dollars, let the pot ride, and after his fifteenth straight pass there was $163,840 in that pot. Two more passes, maybe one, would have broken the game. That is the crapshooter’s dream: to be the last man at a long table in an empty room, stacking his money.

I remember the stink of his sweat-soaked clothes as the gamblers waited. I can see his hands shaking as he reached to drag $160,000 from that pot, and hear him croaking, “Craps coming, I got the hunch. Crap this time for sure.”

Crap had not come. He made two more passes before he crapped out, and when he walked out on stiff legs he left the game badly bent but not broken. The hard-faces smiled. They knew. Weiss walked out rich, but not a winner. He had won a battle; other men were going to win the war.

Now I said, gently for a born loser, “What trouble is it?”

“I don’t know, Danny,” he said, his hat held in both hands like a suppliant before a priest. “Freedman’s after me.”

He shuddered as if in pain. For Weiss, Detective Second Grade Bert Freedman was pain.

“You know,” I said. “Tell it.”

He looked at the ceiling as if trying to find some way of not knowing. “I went up to this guy in the Sixties: Jonathan Radford III. He got a nephew: Walter Radford IV. Like kings they got numbers.” He tried to grin to make it all okay. “Anyway, Walter owes me $25,000 from a big poker game. I go to collect from the uncle, see? A girl opens the door and sends me to a kind of office. This Radford don’t even turn around. He’s by the open window, breathing! Silk robe! The big man. He lets me cool my heels a while. I say where’s my money? He turns around, fast-like. He says no payoff! He says I can go whistle. He curses me out. So I throws a bluff at him, see? I say there’ll be trouble, heads maybe get broken. He comes on me like he’s nuts! He grabs me. He musses me up. I swing on him, maybe once. He goes over and just lies there. I mean, he don’t get up. So I go to turn him over, when he starts groaning. I got scared. I beat it.”