I SLIPPED MY MAZDA into a spot on the side street that fronted the brick-faced complex. I snapped on the Club, which was ludicrous, actually, since my car was over ten years old and as desirable to a chop shop as an East German Trabant, but still it was that type of neighborhood. At thirty minutes per quarter I figured three in the meter would be more than enough. I pulled my briefcase out and locked the car and headed up the steps to the Albert Einstein Medical Center.

In the lobby I walked guiltily past the rows of portraits, dead physicians and rich guys staring sternly down from the walls, and without stopping at the front desk, took my briefcase into the elevator and up to the fifth floor, cardiac care. The hospital smelled of overcooked lima beans and spilled apple juice and I could tell from just one whiff that Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky in Room 5036 was not a happy man.

“I’m nauseous all the time,” said Jimmy Vigs in a weak, kindly voice as I stepped into the room. He wasn’t talking to me. “I retched this morning already. Should that be happening?”

“I’ll tell the doctor,” said a nurse in a Hawaiian shirt, stooping down as she emptied his urine sack. “You’re on Atenolol, which sometimes causes nausea.”

“How am I peeing?”

“Like a horse.”

“At least something’s working right.” Jim was a huge round man, wildly heavy, with thick legs and a belly that danced when he laughed, only he wasn’t laughing. His face was shaped like a pear, with big cheeks, a large nose, a thin, fussy little mustache. He lay in bed with his sheet off and his stomach barely covered by his hospital gown. In his arm was an intravenous line and beside his bed was a post on which three plastic bags hung, filling him with fluids and medicines. The blips on the monitor were strangely uneven; his pulse was eighty-six, then eighty-three, then eighty-seven, then ninety. I wondered if Jimmy would book a bet on which pulse rate would show up next and then I figured he already had.

“Hello, Victor,” he said when he noticed me in the room. His voice had a light New York accent, but none of the New York edge, as if he had moved from Queens to Des Moines a long time ago. “It’s kind of you to visit.”

“How are you feeling, Jim?”

“Not so well. Nauseous.” He closed his eyes as if the strain of staying awake was too much for him. “Helen, this is Victor Carl, my lawyer. When a lawyer visits you in the hospital it’s bad news for someone. I guess we’re going to need some privacy.”

She smiled at me as she fiddled with his urine. “I’ll just be a minute.”

“With what he’s charging, this is going to be the most expensive pee in history.”

“Okay, okay,” she said as she finished emptying the catheter bag, but still smiling. “Just another moment.”

“She’s been terrific. They’ve all been terrific. They’re treating me like a prince.”

“When are they cleaning out your arteries?” I asked. For the past few years Jim had worn a nitro patch and kept the medicine by his side all the time, often popping pills like Tic-Tacs when things got tense. He had had a bypass about ten years back, before I met him, but I had never known him to be without pain and finally, when the angina had grown unbearable, he had consented to going under the knife, or under the wire at least, to clear his arteries by drilling through the calcium deposits that were starving his heart.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “By tomorrow evening I’ll be a new man.”

The nurse fiddled with the drips and took some notations and then left the room, closing the door behind her. As soon as it was closed, Jim said in a voice with the New York edge suddenly returned, “You bring it?”

“I don’t feel right about this,” I said. “I feel downright queasy.”

“Let me have it,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Let me have it,” he said.

I was reaching into my briefcase when an orderly came in with a tray. I snapped the case closed before he could see inside.

“Here’s your lunch, Mr. Dubinsky,” said the orderly, a big man in a blue jumpsuit. “Just what the dietitian prescribed.”

“I’m too nauseous to eat, Kelvin,” said Jimmy, weak and kindly again. “But thank you.”

“You’ll want to eat your lunch, Mr. Dubinsky. Your DCA’s tomorrow morning, so you won’t be getting dinner.”

“I’ll try. Maybe a carrot stick. Thank you, Kelvin.”

“That’s right, you try, Mr. Dubinsky. You try real hard.”

When the orderly left, Jimmy ordered me to close the door and then said, “Let me have it.”

I stepped over to the tray the orderly had just brought and lifted the cover. Carrot sticks and celery and sliced radishes. Two pieces of romaine lettuce. An apple. A plastic glass of grape juice. An orange slice for garnish. “Looks tasty.”

“Let me have it,” he said.

“I don’t feel right about this,” I said as I again opened my briefcase and pulled out the bag. White Castle. A grease mark shaped like a rabbit on the bottom and inside four cheese sliders and two boxes of fries.

He looked inside. “Only four? I usually buy a sack of ten.”

“You need a note from your cardiologist to get ten.”

He took one of the hamburgers and, while still lying flat on his back, popped it into his mouth as easy as a mint. He breathed deeply through his nose as he chewed and smiled the smile of the righteous.

“What about your nausea?”

“Too many damn carrots,” he said in between sliders. “Carotene poisoning. That’s why rabbits puke all the time.”

“I’ve never seen a rabbit puke.”

“You’ve never looked.”

While he was shoving the third hamburger into his mouth, keeping all the while a careful eye on the door, the phone rang. He nodded with his head to the phone and I answered it. “What’s Atlanta?” asked the whispery voice on the phone.

I relayed the question to Jimmy and he stopped swallowing long enough to say, “Six and eight over Houston.”

“Six and eight over Houston,” I said into the phone.

“This is Rocketman,” said the voice. “Thirty units on Houston.”

I told Jim and he nodded. “Tell him it’s down,” said Jimmy Vigs and I did.

“That’s the problem with this business,” said Jim. “It never stops. I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow and they’re still calling. I need a vacation. Want a fry?”

“No thank you.”

“Good,” he said as he stuck a fistful in his mouth. “They’re not crisp enough anyway, you need to get them right out of the fryer.” He stuck in another fistful.

“You know, Victor,” he said when he was finished with everything and the bag and empty boxes were safely back in my briefcase and the only remnant of his surreptitious meal was the stink of grease that hung over the room like a sallow cloud of ill health, “that was the first decent bite I’ve had since I was admitted. Starting tomorrow I’m going to change everything, I swear. I’m going to Slim-Fast my way to skinny, I swear. But I just needed a final taste before the drought. You’re a pal.”

“I felt like I was giving you poison.”

“Aw hell, they’re scraping everything out tomorrow anyway, what’s the harm? But you’re a real pal. I owe you.”

“So then do me a favor,” I said, “and tell me about one of your clients, a fellow named Edward Shaw.”

Jimmy sat still for a while, as if he hadn’t heard me, but then his wide cheeks widened and underneath his tiny mustache a smile grew. “What do you want to know from Eddie Shaw for?”

“I just want to know.”

“Lawyer-client?”

“Lawyer-client.”

“Well, buddy, you know what Eddie Shaw is? The worst gambler in God’s good earth.”

“Not very astute, I guess.”

“That’s not what I tell him. He’s the smartest, most informed, most knowledgeable I ever booked is what I tell him. And he’s such an uppity little son-of-a-bitch he believes every word of it. But between you and me, and only between you and me, he is the absolute biggest mark I’ve ever seen. It’s uncanny. He’s such a degenerate he couldn’t lose more money if he was trying. He’s the only guy in the world who when he bets a game, the line changes in his favor, he’s that bad. He bets a horse, it’s sure to come in so late the jockey’s wearing pajamas. I could retire on that guy, go to Brazil, lie on the beach all day and eat fried plantains, suck down coladas, never worry about a thing, just bake in the sun and book his losers.”