Replay

FOUR

Jeff slapped the cards down one at a time, face-up, on the dark green Holiday Inn bedspread. He flicked them off the diminishing deck as fast as his fingers could move, and as he did so, Frank droned a now-familiar hypnotic chant: "Plus four, plus four, plus five, plus four, plus three, plus three, plus three, plus four, plus three, plus four, plus five—stop! Hole card’s an ace."

Jeff turned the ace of diamonds over slowly, and they both grinned.

"Hot damn!" Frank chortled, slapping the bedspread and sending the cards flying. "We are a team, my man, the team to beat!"

"Want a beer?"

"Fuckin'-A told!"

Jeff uncrossed his legs, walked across the room to the cooler on the table. The curtains of the first-floor room were open, and as he pried the tops off two bottles of Coors Jeff looked with fond admiration at his new grey Studebaker Avanti by the curb, gleaming in the lights of the Tucumcari motel’s parking lot.

The car had drawn curious stares and comments all the way from Atlanta, and would probably continue to do so for the rest of the drive to Las Vegas. Jeff felt totally at ease with it, even found a certain comfort in its "futuristic" design and instrumentation. The long-nosed machine, with its bobbed rear deck, would have looked attractively state-of-the-art in 1988; indeed, he seemed to recall that an independent firm had still been manufacturing limited-edition Avantis during the eighties. To him, here in 1963, the car was like a fellow voyager in time, a plush cocoon spun in the image of his own era. Nostalgic as he’d felt about the old Chevy, this machine evoked an even stronger, reverse nostalgia.

"Hey, where’s that brew?"

"Comin' up."

He handed Frank the cold beer, took a long pull of his own. They’d taken off right after Maddock had graduated, at the end of May. Jeff had long since stopped going to classes, was flunking out, and no longer cared. Frank had wanted to drive the southern route, stop over in New Orleans for a few days of celebration, but Jeff had insisted they take a more direct path, skirting past Birmingham and Memphis and Little Rock. Outside the cities there were newly opened patches of interstate highway every couple of hundred miles, with speed limits of 70 or 75, and Jeff had used their smooth, broad-laned isolation to push the Avanti near its 160 mph peak.

The depression and confusion Jeff had felt after the abortive evening with Judy Gordon had been largely dissipated by the Derby win. He hadn’t seen her since that night, except in passing, on campus. And he’d stopped agonizing over possible explanations for his predicament, aside from the times when he’d awake at dawn, his brain demanding answers that could not be found. Whatever the truth might be, at least he now had proof that his awareness of the future was more than just a fantasy.

So far, Jeff had managed to deflect Frank’s questions about what had led him to such a spectacular win. Maddock now assumed Jeff to be a handicapping prodigy, with some secret method. That image had only been strengthened by Jeff s refusal to make a follow-up wager on the Preakness, two weeks after the Derby. He’d been sure that Chateaugay would win two out of three of that year’s Triple Crown, but he couldn’t remember which of the Derby sequels the horse had lost; so, despite Frank’s protests, Jeff had insisted they sit out the Preakness. Candy Spots had taken the race by three and a half lengths. Now not only was Jeff certain of victory in the upcoming Belmont Stakes, but the resurgence of Candy Spots had driven the odds back up on Chateaugay.

The betting had given Jeff a new sense of purpose, distracted him from the hopeless quagmire of metaphysics and philosophy in which the answers to his situation lay buried. If he weren’t insane already, another month or so of brooding over those imponderables surely would have driven him to that point. Gambling was so clear-cut, so soothingly straightforward: win or loss, debit or credit, right or wrong. Period. No ambiguities, no second guessing; especially not when you knew the outcome in advance. Frank had gathered up the scattered cards, was stacking and shuffling them. "Hey," he said, "let’s do a double deck!"

"Sure, why not?" Jeff straddled a chair next to the bed. He took the cards, reshuffled, began to dole them out.

"Plus one, plus one, zero, plus one, zero, minus one, minus two, minus two, minus three, minus two…"

Jeff listened contentedly to the familiar litany, the running count of aces and tens as they were dealt. Frank had been avidly memorizing charts and tables from a new book called Beat the Dealer, a computer study of betting strategies in blackjack. Jeff knew from his own reading how well the card-counting method actually worked. By the mid-seventies, casinos had begun barring anyone who played with those techniques. In this era, though, the dealers and pit bosses had welcomed any sort of system players, considered them easy marks. Frank should do all right, hold his own at the very least; and if he were absorbed in the thrill of his own triumphs at the 21 tables, it might divert his attention somewhat from the more spectacular win that Jeff expected to achieve in the Belmont.

"… minus one, zero, plus one—stop! Hole card’s a ten." Jeff showed him the jack of clubs, and they slapped five. Frank drained his beer, set the bottle on the nightstand next to half a dozen other empties. "Hey," he said. "One of those drive-ins we passed on the way into town was showing Dr. No; want to check it out?"

"Jesus, Frank, how many times have you seen that movie already?"

"Three or four. It gets better every time."

"Enough already; I’ve OD’d on James Bond."

Frank looked at him quizzically. "You what?"

"Never mind. I just don’t feel like going; you take the car, the keys are on top of the TV."

"What’s the matter, you in mourning for the Pope? I didn’t even know you were Catholic."

Jeff laughed, reached for his shoes. "Oh, what the hell, all right. At least it’s not Roger Moore."

"Who the hell is Roger Moore?"

"He’ll be a saint someday."

Frank shook his head and frowned. "Are we talking about the Pope dying, or James Bond, or what? You know, buddy, sometimes I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about."

"Neither do I, Frank; neither do I. Come on, let’s go to the movies. A little escape from reality, that’s what we need."

They drove straight through to Las Vegas the next day, spelling each other at the wheel of the Avanti. Jeff had never been to Nevada, and the neon-lit Strip seemed emptier, less thoroughly gaudy than he recalled from movies and television shows of the eighties. This was pre-Howard Hughes Las Vegas, he realized, before the influx of Hilton and MGM money had built the massive, "respectable" casino hotels. Those that now dominated this surreal little segment of Nevada State Road 604 were low-slung, racy legacies of the postwar gangster era: the Dunes, the Tropicana, the Sands. "Rat Pack" Vegas, straight out of old caper movies with jivey, finger-snapping soundtracks. There was still a provocative hint of evil in the hot, dry air.

They checked in at the Flamingo, put sixteen thousand dollars in cash on deposit with the hotel casino. The assistant manager, all teeth and swagger, comped them to a three-room suite and all the food and drink they wanted for the duration of their stay.

Frank spent the evening checking out the blackjack tables: number of decks used, rules on splitting and doubling down, speed and personality of the various dealers. Jeff watched along with him for a while, then grew bored and went off to wander around the casino, absorbing the bizarre ambience of the place. Everything seemed illusory here: the brightly colored chips representing enormous sums of money, the flashily dressed men and women … desperate facades of sexual bravado and the pretense of limitless, uncaring affluence.

Jeff went back to his room early, fell asleep watching "The Jack Paar Show." When he got up the next morning he found Frank pacing around the living room of the suite, grumbling to himself and periodically referring to a set of makeshift flash cards.

"Join me for breakfast?"

Frank shook his head. "I want to go over these one last time, and hit the tables before noon. Catch the dealers at the end of the morning shift, when they’re starting to fade."

"Makes sense. Good luck; I’ll probably be out by the pool. Let me know how it goes."

Jeff ate alone at a table for six in the hotel restaurant, reading the Racing Form. The odds were still climbing on Chateaugay for the Belmont, he noted happily; but none of the dozens of other races mentioned in the paper meant anything to him. He wolfed down a double order of scrambled eggs with a thick slice of country ham, then had a large stack of pancakes and a third glass of milk. For the last few years he’d gotten in the habit of skipping breakfast entirely, maybe grabbing a Danish and the first of many cups of coffee on his way to work; but this new, young body of his had its own appetites.

Frank had gone down to the casino by the time Jeff went back to the room to change into his bathing suit. He grabbed an oversized towel and a copy of V, stopped by the hotel gift shop for a bottle of Coppertone (with no PABA rating, he noted), and found himself a lounge chair by the pool.

He saw her right away: wet black hair, sculpted cheekbones. Breasts ample but firm, belly trim, legs elegant and shapely. She raised herself from the pool, smiling and shining in the desert sun, and walked toward Jeff.

"Hi," she said. "Anybody using that chair?"

Jeff shook his head, motioned an invitation for her to sit beside him. She stretched out on her back, flicked her dripping hair over the back of the canvas chaise lounge to dry.

"Can I get you something to drink?" he asked, willing his eyes not to linger too long or too obviously on her droplet-beaded body.

"No, thanks," she said, but smiled and looked straight at him, taking the edge off the refusal. "I just had a Bloody Mary, and the heat’s making me a little dizzy."

"It’ll do that if you’re not used to it," he agreed. "Where are you from?"

"Illinois, just outside Chicago. But I’ve been here for a couple of months, think I might stay awhile. How about you?"

"Atlanta right now," he told her, "but I grew up in Florida."

"Oh, so I guess you’ve always been used to the sun, hmm?"

"Pretty much." He shrugged.

"I went to Miami a couple times. It’s nice, but I wish you could gamble there."

"I grew up in Orlando."

"Where’s that?" she asked.

"It’s near—" He almost said "Disney World," stopped himself in time, then started to say "Cape Kennedy," though he knew that wasn’t the real name of the place, even in 1988. " … near Cape Canaveral," he finally finished. His hesitation seemed to puzzle her, but the awkward moment passed.

"Did you ever see any of those rockets go up?" she asked.

"Sure," he said, thinking of the drive he and Linda had made to the Cape in 1969 for the launch of Apollo 11.

"Do you think they’ll ever really get to the moon, like they say?"

"Probably." He smiled. "Oh, my name’s Jeff, Jeff Winston."

She extended a slender, ringless hand, and he grasped her fingers for an instant.

"I’m Sharla Baker." She took her hand back, ran it through her straight, wet hair and down her neck. "What kind of work do you do in Atlanta?"

"Well … I’m still in college, actually. I’m thinking about going into journalism."

She grinned good-naturedly. "A college boy, hmm? Your momma and daddy must have plenty of money, sending you to college and to Las Vegas."

"No," he said, amused; she couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three herself, and he’d been automatically considering the age difference from the opposite perspective. "I paid my own way here. Won the money on the Kentucky Derby."

She raised her delicate eyebrows, impressed. "Is that so? Hey, have you got a car here?"

"Yeah, why?"

Her long, tanned arms arched lazily above her head, swelling her breasts against the nylon of the demurely styled, old-fashioned bathing suit. The effect, to Jeff, was as erotic as if she’d been wearing one of those outrageous French-cut designs of the eighties, or nothing at all.

"I just thought we might get out of the sun for a little while," she said. "Maybe take a drive over to Lake Mead. You interested?"

Sharla lived in a tidy little duplex near Paradise and Tropicana. She shared the place with a girl named Becky, who worked the 4:00 P.M.-to-midnight shift at the information booth in the airport. Sharla didn’t seem to do much of anything, except hang out in the casinos at night and by the hotel pools in the afternoon. She wasn’t really a hooker, just one of those Vegas girls who liked to have a good time and weren’t insulted by a little gift or a handful of chips now and then. Jeff spent most of the next four days with her, and he bought her several small presents—a silver ankle bracelet, a leather purse dyed to match her favorite dress—but she never mentioned money. They went sailing on the lake, drove up to Boulder Dam, saw Sinatra’s show at the Desert Inn.

Mostly, they fucked. Frequently and memorably, at her apartment or in Jeff’s suite at the Flamingo. Sharla was the first woman he’d been to bed with since this whole thing had begun, the first other than Linda since he’d gotten married. Sharla’s eagerness for sex more than matched his own. She was as wanton as Judy had been coy, and Jeff reveled in the heat of her unrestrained eroticism.

Frank Maddock took occasional advantage of the outright play-for-pay girls who were a feature of every lounge and casino, but he spent most of his time at the blackjack tables. Winning. By the day of the Belmont, he’d run his own stake up another nine thousand dollars, of which he generously offered Jeff a third for having bankrolled this venture in the first place. Between them, they now had almost twenty-five thousand dollars on deposit with the hotel; and Frank was, with some reservations, willing to go along with Jeff’s insistent notion that they bet it all on the one race.

When post time came that Saturday, Jeff was at the Flamingo’s pool with Sharla.

"Aren’t you even gonna watch it on TV?" she asked as he showed no sign of budging from his rattan mat.

"Don’t have to. I know how it comes out."

"Oh, you!" She laughed, slapping his rear. "Rich college boy, think you know it all."

"I won’t be rich if I’m wrong."

"That’ll be the day," she said, reaching for the bottle of Coppertone.

"What? That I’m wrong, or poor?"

"Oh, silly, I don’t know. Here, do the backs of my legs."

Jeff was half dozing in the sun, his hand resting on Sharla’s naked thigh, when Frank came out of the hotel with a look of shock on his face. Jeff bolted to his feet when he saw his friend’s expression; Christ, maybe they shouldn’t have bet it all.

"What’s the matter, Frank?" he asked tightly.

"All that money," Frank rasped out. "All that fucking money." Jeff grabbed him by the shoulders. "What happened? Just tell me what happened!"

Frank’s lips pulled back in a crazy half-smile. "We won," he whispered.

"How much?"

"A hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars." Jeff relaxed, let go his grip on Frank’s arms. "How do you do it?" Maddock asked, staring hard into Jeff’s eyes. "How the hell do you do it? Three times in a row now you’ve called 'em right." "Just lucky."

"Luck, my ass. You did everything but hock the family jewels to bet on Chateaugay in the Derby. You know something you’re not telling, or what?"

Sharla bit her lower lip and looked up at Jeff thoughtfully. "You did say you knew how it was gonna come out."

Jeff didn’t like the turn this conversation was taking. "Hey," he said with a laugh, "next time out we’ll probably lose it all."

Frank grinned again, his curiosity apparently gone. "With this kind of track record, I’ll follow you anywhere, kid. When do we take the plunge again? You got any good hunches coming up?"

"Yeah," Jeff said. "I’ve got a hunch Sharla’s roommate will call in sick from work tonight, and the four of us are gonna have one hell of a celebration. That’s all I’d bet on right now."

Frank laughed and headed for the poolside bar to get a bottle of champagne, while Sharla ran to phone her girlfriend. Jeff sank back down on the mat, angry at himself for having said as much as he had and wondering how he was going to tell Frank their gambling partnership was over, at least for the summer.

He damn sure wasn’t about to admit that they couldn’t bet any more races this year because he couldn’t remember who’d won them.

Jeff spread a thin layer of marmalade on the hot croissant, bit off one flaky corner. From the balcony above the avenue Foch he could see both the Arc de Triomphe and the green expanse of the Bois de Boulogne, each an easy walk from the apartment.

Sharla smiled at him from across the linen-covered breakfast table. She took a large red strawberry from her plate, dipped it first in a bowl of cream and then in powdered sugar, and slowly began to suck the ripe berry, her eyes still locked with Jeff’s as her lips encircled the fruit.

He set aside his copy of the International Herald-Tribune and watched her impromptu performance with the strawberry. The news was depressingly familiar, anyway; Kennedy had delivered his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in the divided city east of here, and in Vietnam, Buddhist monks had begun immolating themselves on street corners to protest the Diem regime.

Sharla dipped the berry back into the thick cream, held it suspended above her open mouth as she licked off the white droplets with the tip of her tongue. Her silk gown was translucent in the morning sunlight, and Jeff could see her nipples as they stiffened against the thin fabric.

He’d rented the two-bedroom apartment in the Neuilly district of Paris for the entire summer, and they had left the city only for an occasional day’s excursion to Versailles or Fontainebleau. It was Sharla’s first trip to Europe, and Jeff wanted to experience Paris in a different manner than he had on the whirlwind package tour he’d taken with Linda. He had certainly succeeded: Sharla’s lush sensualism meshed perfectly with the romantic aura of the city. On clear days they would stroll the side streets and boulevards, stopping for lunch at whatever bistro or café might capture their interest; and when it rained, as it did often that summer, they would curl up in the comfortable apartment for long, languid days of fire and flesh, with the unseasonable hazy chill of Paris outside the windows a perfect backdrop to their passion. Jeff wrapped his fears in Sharla’s sleek black hair, hid his un-diminished confusion in the folds of her sweet-scented, supple body.

She looked across the table at him with an impish gleam in her eye, and devoured the plump strawberry in one carnal bite. A thin trickle of the bright red juice colored her lower lip, and she wiped it slowly away with one slender, long-nailed finger.

"I want to go dancing tonight," she announced. "I want to wear that new black dress, with nothing underneath, and go dancing with you." Jeff let his gaze wander down her body, outlined in the white silk robe. "Nothing underneath?"

"I might wear a pair of stockings," she said in a low voice. "And we’ll dance the way you taught me to."

Jeff smiled, ran his fingertips lightly across her naked thigh where the robe had fallen open. One night three weeks ago they’d been dancing at one of the new "discothèques" that had recently originated here, and Jeff had spontaneously begun to lead Sharla in the sort of sinuous, free-form dance movements that would evolve over the next decade. She’d taken to the style right away, adding several erotic flourishes of her own. The other couples, all of them doing either the Twist or the Watusi, had stepped back, one by one, to watch the ways that Jeff and Sharla moved. Then, at first tentatively but with growing enthusiasm, they’d begun to dance in a similarly unstructured, openly sexy manner. Now he and Sharla went to New Jimmy’s or Le Slow Club almost every other night, and she had started to select her dresses on the basis of how enticingly they would move across her body on a dance floor. Jeff enjoyed watching her, got a kick out of seeing the other dancers mimic her moves and, more and more, her clothing. It amused him to think that in one night out with Sharla, he might unintentionally have altered the history of popular dance forms and speeded the libidinous revolution in women’s fashions that would mark the mid- and late sixties.

She took his hand, moved it between her thighs beneath the robe. His croissant and café au lait sat cooling on the breakfast table, forgotten along with the mysteries of time that had so concerned him in the spring.

"When we get home," she whispered, "I’ll leave the stockings on.

"So," Frank asked, "how was Paris?"

"Very nice indeed," Jeff told him, settling into one of the commodious armchairs in the Plaza’s Oak Room. "Just what I needed. What do you think of Columbia?"

His former partner shrugged, signaled for a waiter. "Looks to be as much of a grind as I’d expected. You still drink Jack Daniel’s?"

"When I can find it. The French never heard of sour mash."

Frank ordered the bourbon, and another Glenlivet for himself. Faint strains of violin music drifted through the open door of the bar from the Palm Court, off the lobby of the elegant old New York hotel. Above that serene backdrop could be heard the occasional quiet clink of glass against glass and the muted ambient hum of conversation, the words themselves muffled by the room’s thick drapes and plush leather.

"Not exactly the kind of joint I expected to be hanging out in, my first year of law school." Frank beamed.

"It’s a step up from Moe’s and Joe’s," Jeff agreed.

"Is Sharla here with you?"

"She’s seeing Beyond the Fringe tonight. I told her this would be a business talk."

"You two getting along well, I take it?"

"She’s easy to be with. Fun."

Frank nodded, stirred the fresh drink the waiter had set before him. "I guess you haven’t seen much more of that little girl from Emory you told me about, then."

"Judy? No, that was finished before you and I ever went to Las Vegas. She’s a nice girl, sweet, but … naive. Very young."

"Same age as you, isn’t she?"

Jeff looked at him sharply. "You playing big brother again, Frank? Trying to tell me I’m out of my league with Sharla or something?"

"No, no, it’s just—You never cease to amaze me, that’s all. First time I met you, I thought you were some wet-behind-the-ears kid who had a lot to learn about horse racing, among other things; but you’ve shown me a thing or two, yourself. I mean, Christ, winning all that money, and tooling around in that Avanti, and taking off for Europe with a woman like Sharla … Sometimes you seem a lot older than you really are."

"I think now would be a real good time to change the subject," Jeff said curtly.

"Hey, look, I didn’t mean to insult anyone. Sharla’s quite a find; I envy you. I just feel like you’ve … I don’t know, grown up faster than anybody I ever knew. No value judgment intended. Shit, I suppose you could take it as a compliment. It’s just kind of strange, that’s all."

Jeff willed the tension out of his shoulders, sat back with his drink. "I suppose I’ve got a large appetite for life," he said. "I want to do a lot of things, and I want to do them fast."

"Well, you’ve got a hell of a head start on the flunkies of the world. More power to you. I hope it all works out as well as it has so far."

"Thanks. I’ll drink to that." They raised their glasses, silently agreed to ignore the strained moment that had passed between them.

"You mentioned that you told Sharla this would be a business meeting," Frank said.

"That’s right."

Frank sipped his Scotch. "So, is it?"

"That depends." Jeff shrugged.

"On what?"

"Whether you’re interested in what I have to suggest."

"After what you pulled off this summer? You think I’m not gonna listen to any other wild notions you might have?"

"This one is going to sound wilder than you imagine."

"Try me."

"The World Series. Two weeks from now."

Frank cocked one eyebrow. "Knowing you, you probably want to bet on the Dodgers."

Jeff paused. "That’s right."

"Hey, let’s get serious; I mean, you did one bang-up job calling the Derby and the Belmont, but come on! With Mantle and Maris back in, and the first two games here in New York? No way, man. No fucking way."

Jeff leaned forward, spoke softly but insistently. "That’s how it’s gonna go. A shutout, the Dodgers four straight."

Frank frowned at him strangely. "You really are crazy."

"No. It’ll happen. One-two-three-four. We could be set for life."

"We could be back drinking at Moe’s and Joe’s, is what you mean."

Jeff tossed down the last of his drink, sat back, and shook his head. Frank continued to stare at him, as if looking for the source of Jeff’s madness.

"Maybe a small bet," Frank allowed. "Say a couple of thousand, maybe five, if you’re really stuck on this hunch."

"All of it," Jeff stated.

Frank lit a Tareyton, never taking his eyes from Jeff’s face. "What is it with you, anyway? Are you determined to fail, or what? There’s a limit to luck, you know."

"I’m not wrong about this one, Frank. I’m betting everything I’ve got left, and I’ll offer you the same deal as before: my money, you place the bets, seventy-thirty split. You risk nothing if you don’t want to."

"Do you know the kind of odds you’d be bucking?"

"Not exactly. Do you?"

"Not off the top of my head, but—they’d be sucker odds, because only a sucker would make a bet like that."

"Why don’t you make a call, find out where we’d stand?"

"I might do that, out of curiosity."

"Go ahead. I’ll wait here, order us another drink. Remember, not just a win; a Dodger sweep."

Frank was away from the table less than ten minutes.

"My bookie laughed at me," he said as he sat down and reached for the fresh Scotch. "He actually laughed at me over the phone."

"What are the odds?" Jeff asked quietly.

Frank gulped down half his drink. "A hundred to one."

"Will you handle the bets for me?"

"You’re really gonna do this, aren’t you? You’re not just joking around."

"I’m dead serious," Jeff said.

"What makes you so goddamned sure of yourself on these things? What do you know that nobody else in the world knows?"

Jeff blinked, kept his voice steady. "I can’t tell you that. All I can say is, this is far more than a hunch. It’s a certainty."

"That sounds suspiciously like—"

"There’s nothing illegal involved, I swear. You know they couldn’t fix a Series these days, and even if they could, how the hell would I know anything about it?"

"You talk like you know plenty."

"I know this much: We can’t lose this bet. We absolutely cannot lose it."

Frank looked at him intently, tossed off the rest of his Scotch, and signaled for another. "Well, shit," he muttered. "Before I ' met you last April I figured I’d be living on a scholarship this year."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning I guess I’ll come in with you on this fool scheme. Don’t ask me why, and I’ll probably blow my brains out after the first game. But just one thing."

"Name it."

"No more of this seventy-thirty crap and you putting up all the money. We both take our chances, throw in whatever we’ve got left from Vegas—including what I raked in at the tables—and anything we win we split down the middle. Deal?"

"Deal. Partner."

It was the October of Koufax and Drysdale.

Jeff took Sharla to Yankee Stadium for the first two games, but Frank couldn’t even bring himself to watch them on television.

The Dodgers took the opener 5-2, with Koufax pitching. Johnny Podres was on the mound the next day, and with an assist from ace reliever Ron Perranoski he held the Yankees to one run, while the Dodgers punched in four on ten hits.

The third game, in L.A., was a Drysdale classic: a 1-0 shutout, with "Big Don" putting the Yankees down one right after the other. In six of the nine innings, Drysdale came up against only the minimum three batters.

Game number four was a tight one; even Jeff, watching it in color at the Pierre in New York, started to sweat. Whitey Ford, pitching for the Yankees, was up against Koufax again, and they were both out for blood. Mickey Mantle and L.A.s Frank Howard each slammed in homers, making it a 1-1 tie by the bottom of the seventh. Then Joe Pepitone made an error on a throw by Yankee third baseman Clete Boyer, and the Dodgers Jim Gilliam tore into third. Willie Davis was up next, and Gilliam scored the deciding run on Davis’s fly to deep center.

The Dodgers had shut out the Yankees in the World Series, the first time that had happened to the New York club since the Giants had pulled it off in 1922. It was one of the great upsets in baseball history, an event Jeff couldn’t have forgotten any more than he’d be likely not to remember his own name.

At Jeff s insistence, Frank had spread their $122,000 bet among twenty-three different bookies in six cities and eleven different casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, and San Juan.

Their total winnings came to more than twelve million dollars.