class="typestyle"> The Expert at the Card Table , a disarmingly literary illustrated manual of card-cheating methods by someone calling himself S. W. Erdnase, which was widely considered an anagram; Erdnase’s real name has never been conclusively identified. The book’s impact on Vernon was fundamental, and it became his lifelong fountainhead. Not only did he master the techniques detailed in the book, including the difficult and dangerous second and bottom deals, but he actually memorized it and spread its gospel. Magicians could learn a lot about naturalness and misdirection, Vernon believed, from cardsharps. If The Expert was his core curriculum, then his postdoctoral work consisted of tracking down mechanics. Magicians had always coveted the secrets of card cheats, but nobody had worked as hard as Vernon, who had spent 20 years diligently seeking out these guarded men.

So, Vernon knew what to watch for when he and Ross sat down over a deck with the jailed gambler, and he was not disappointed. The Mexican made a thoroughly professional showing, running through several slick moves and false deals. But it was when the men began to talk shop that Vernon became riveted. While reporting on the local gambling scene, the Mexican told the magicians that he had seen a man in Kansas City who could actually deal cards flawlessly out of the center of the deck. Do you know his name? Vernon asked. No, no name. Vernon pressed him now: How was the deal? Did it look natural? he asked repeatedly. The Mexican gave the same answer over and over: “perfect.” Vernon, Ross reported to a friend, “got wildly excited.”

While Vernon and Ross were jawing with a gambler in a Wichita jail, Allen Kennedy was 200 miles to the northeast in the small farming town of Pleasant Hill, Missouri, preparing for another night of card playing. The soft-spoken Kennedy, 34, who was born just outside Pleasant Hill and had lived in the area his whole life, was considered something of a mystery man in town. Though he picked up the occasional odd job—he drove a taxi for a while—many knew that he made his living mainly as a gambler.

Despite the Depression’s hobbling of other professions, Kennedy could still find steady work. He ran a regular poker game on Randolph Street with a partner named Midnight Underwood. And because Pleasant Hill was a division point for the regional train lines, there were always plenty of salesmen and others staying the night, eager to get into a game at the Tucker Hotel on Cedar Street or above the pool hall on First. If the poker action was thin, Kennedy could always join one of the floating craps games, which were plentiful in back alleys, in rail-depot sheds, even at farm sales. In those days, gambling was as much a part of Cass County as the fertile, rolling land that gave Pleasant Hill its name.

Kennedy also regularly made the short

trip up to Kansas City, climbing into his Ford Model A coupe and driving the 25 miles to a city that by 1932, in the grip of the legendary political boss and horseracing addict Tom Pendergast, was a nationally known center of gambling action. There he could easily find all-night games, mingle with local and out-of-town card hustlers, and stop in at the K.C. Card Company, one of the country’s leading purveyors of gambling equipment both fair and foul.

Despite his unorthodox profession, and his apparent ability to make a steady living at it, Kennedy clearly wasn’t rich. And unlike many gamblers, he never dressed in a flashy manner, preferring to wear what amounted to a kind of uniform for him: a light-colored button-down shirt, dark work pants, and a plain felt hat. These were clothes that could serve him in both the city and the country. With family all over the area, and an easy, genial manner, Bill, as most in Pleasant Hill called him, fitted in and was accepted by townsfolk. But they wouldn’t go near him at a card table. Earl Mitchell, who died last year at the age of 85, had gotten to know Kennedy when he would stop to gas up his Ford at Earl’s father’s filling station. Mitchell summed up the prevailing wisdom of the time: “He was a gambler. He knew when to and when not to.”

What Mitchell and most others in Pleasant Hill did not know was that in addition to his long nights, Bill Kennedy was putting in a lot of grueling hours during the day. One who did occasionally see Kennedy work in the daytime in the early thirties was Ralph McDonald, who is now 84. As a teenager, he had dated Kennedy’s niece May, the daughter of Kennedy’s sister Ruby, and when McDonald went to fetch her, he often saw Bill sitting at a table with a deck of cards in his hand, facing a mirror. “He sat in front of the mirror and dealt cards hour after hour after hour,” McDonald recalls. The image remains vivid almost 70 years later. Kennedy was practicing, working at something. “He’d deal you any card you’d want,” McDonald remembers. “He was good.”

For Vernon, hearing a report of the center deal deal was like Ahab sighting the white whale. The center deal was the ultimate move, the one that lay beyond even his exquisite dexterity and ingenuity. None of the top card men of the day could do it, though one, the Chicago magician J. C. Sprong, had been writing Vernon for years (his sign-off was “for pure sleight of hand”) to report rumors of a center dealer somewhere in the Midwest. He once offered Vernon $100 if he could turn up anything, but Vernon had never come close and had

all but written off the deal as a fairy tale. Yet now, suddenly, here was a working sharp telling him of a man in the next city who had mastered the impossible.

To understand Vernon’s obsession, one has to return to The Expert at the Card Table . Erdnase made no mention of a center deal, but he devoted considerable space to the innocent cut. As any experienced cardplayer knows, rule and tradition require the dealer to offer the deck to the player on his right for a cut before dealing. This routine proffer is considered insurance against false dealing, and Erdnase made it plain that cheaters considered it a huge problem. Even if a sharp could deal the second or bottom card flawlessly, he would still have to beat the cut or his precious cards would be buried in the center. To get around the cut, a sharp requires either a confederate to his right or still more difficult and risky sleights—like the shift, which reverses the cut, or the palm. For the lone cheater, Erdnase concluded, the cut was “the bête noire of his existence.”

But a polished center dealer would conceivably have nothing to fear. He could offer the deck for a clean cut, gather it back up, and blithely fetch his desired cards from the center. He would, in the card cheats’ succinct phrase, “get the money.” Vernon knew the theory, but he also knew the logistical obstacles. Second and bottom dealing called for advanced technical proficiency and granite nerve. Professional common sense told him the center deal was probably out of the question. Still, the only logical course of action now was to ditch the silhouettes, get to Kansas City, find this sharp, and have a look.

But first Vernon told a new magician friend, Charles Miller, about the Mexican’s story. The heavyset, baby-faced Miller, only 22, had just come up from El Paso, Texas, to visit Ross and to see the great Dai Vernon of New York, whom he had impressed by sitting him down and performing Vernon’s own effects. The twist was that Miller had only read the descriptions of the effects in a magic magazine and had been forced to work out his own techniques. “He is a genius,” Vernon confided to a friend. When Miller heard Vernon’s plans, he announced to his new comrade-in-arms, “I’ll go with you.”

It would be difficult to picture a scenario in the history of the American arts to match the sight of these two superb magicians heading into a mob-dominated city in search of a mythic, primitive master of their discipline. Imagine Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman joining forces to locate a Kentucky mountain fiddler or Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner hitting the road together in search of a backwoods storyteller. Vernon and Miller’s trip to Kansas City was a unique blend of artistic obsession, romantic jaunt, anthropological fieldwork, and foolhardy, even dangerous errand.

The popular

perception of the city they sauntered into was of a wild town teeming with crooked gamblers and gangsters. But while it was indeed chock-full of both, Kansas City was actually tightly controlled by the Pendergast organization, which relied on the mob boss John Lazia and a wholly owned police department to keep the wards in line. Gambling was “the heart and soul of the Pendergast machine,” according to the Kansas City historian William Worley, and Lazia made sure the cash flow was heavy and unimpeded. (When he told the story in later years, Vernon gave Lazia the colorful alias Snakey Davis.) Lazia’s biggest worry was not law enforcement but outside mobsters looking to cut in on some of this fruitful local action. Anyone unfamiliar caught nosing around was likely to be subjected to what Worley delicately calls “an examination.”

But once Vernon and Miller proved they were gamblers and not gangsters, they would have been generally free to roam in search of action. Vernon posed as a natty sharp who played the transatlantic ships. Miller, the greenhorn, was under strict orders to keep quiet. Vernon told him that if asked, he was to say only that he was a dice man and not go into details. Above all, he was not to mention that he was a magician; if the cheaters knew, they would never talk.

The two doggedly made the rounds, hitting gambling joints, bars, and pool halls. But when they asked about a center dealer, they came up with little except shakes of the head. It began to look as though the Mexican had merely passed along another version of Sprong’s fairy tale. When they visited the K.C. Card Company, they were directed to still another gambling den, a tough, rundown joint guarded by a man who kept a .45 revolver openly displayed on his wheelchair. Vernon gave the name of K.C.’s manager, Elbert (“Red”) Langworthy, as a reference and got past the guard to face the stern men who ran this backroom dive. What do you want here? they demanded of Vernon, as Miller hung back. Vernon casually stuck to his cover, explaining that he was a mechanic and had heard there was a cheater in town who could deal from the center of the deck. He told them he was eager to get in contact with the man. The men stared at him, and then one of the toughs spoke up. “What mail-order catalog’ve you been reading? What do you mean, dealing from the center of the deck? It’s tough enough to get the second card! That’s a lot of hooey. Nobody does that.”

There was little Vernon could say in response. He and Miller were shielded from both information and harm by the sheer preposterousness of their goal. Then one of the men pointed

at Miller, asking, “What’s the fat boy do?” Before Vernon could respond, Miller piped up, answering in a nervous, boyish quaver, almost a squeal, “I’m a dice man!” That froze the room. Vernon made a motion to the men to indicate that Miller was a bit off, and then the two undercover magicians beat their retreat.

Coming as it did in his very first foray into the world of cheaters, the dice-man episode was something of a humiliation for the young Miller. Deflated, he dropped out of the hunt and returned to El Paso, but Vernon was back in Kansas City almost immediately. This time he concentrated his efforts on the K.C. Card Company, figuring this center of gambling gossip just a block from city hall would hold the key. There he ingratiated himself with the staff by showing off his rigged faro box, a beautiful antique designed for cheating at the popular turn-of-the-century card game, and he pressed them again about a center dealer. Eventually they sent him to an old man. He proved extremely reluctant to talk, but Vernon worked on him, and finally he admitted knowing “the only man in the world who can do this.”

“He’ll let you cut and replace or even triple-cut’em,” the man told Vernon. “Yet any time he wants them, out they come.” The old-timer said that although he didn’t have a definite address, he did have a town and a name. The town was Pleasant Hill. The name was Allen Kennedy.

When Vernon got to Pleasant Hill the next day, as he reported to Miller soon after, his “troubles had only started.” While they weren’t under the thumb of Pendergast and Eazia, the residents of Pleasant Hill were not quick to give information to some well-dressed city slicker snooping around. “Everyone told me something different,” Vernon recalled. First he was stymied by asking for “Allen,” when most knew Kennedy as Bill. One person told Vernon that Kennedy lived above a grocery store, but when he found the place, it was deserted. Next, he was told that Kennedy lived behind a printshop. That, too, was a false lead.

Then Vernon stopped a “wise-looking fellow” on the street. “If you did find him, it wouldn’t do you any good,” the man said. “He never talks to anyone.” The man told Vernon that Kennedy sometimes worked as a taxi driver, sometimes as a printer, sometimes as an automobile mechanic. So Vernon tried the garages, where many knew Kennedy but no one knew, or would say, where he lived. Finally, in frustration, Vernon asked a little girl on the street. She pointed to a small white house. “They say in the Scriptures, ‘and a little child shall lead them,’” Vernon recalled. “So it came to pass.” He knocked on the door, and a man in overalls answered. He looked a little like the movie star Richard Dix. “Yes, I’m Allen Kennedy,” he said. “What can I do for you?”