PARK RIDGE
A Senior Center Murder

PARK RIDGE

Chapter One

Within every senior center in the country, from Seattle to Miami, from Charleston to Santa Fe, tucked away in some corner of the building, whether rented, leased or owned, you will find senior citizens playing cards. Whether crowded into church basements or luxuriating in the card room aboard cruise ships, they will spend hour after hour playing bridge or hearts or rummy or euchre. But wherever they play, you'll find at least one table distinct in its wealth of bright, multi-colored face cards, because the game of choice is pinochle.

The game of Bezique traveled as easily as a deck of cards stowed in a pocket of a salesman from Germany to France where it was promptly renamed Binocle. Perhaps the peculiar alliance or unnatural marriage of the Queen of Spades to the Jack of Diamonds, the ultimate meld, breaking rank and violating suit, provided the name. A "pinochle" built with a French deck of cards portrays a young knight who looks to his left at Her Highness who wistfully returns his gaze. Whether Binocle (as in binoculars) refers to their refusal to meet the eyes of those who hold their fate, revealing only one eye each, who knows?

For years the United States Playing Card Company produced special Pinochle decks with an eye on the German immigrants who brought the game to America. In 2006 in order to play, two decks of regular playing cards must be gutted, relieved of base cards (2-8), to achieve the panoply of power cards pinochle requires. Destroy the integrity of four commonplace decks and you can play double-deck pinochle.

On a day in late February in a small, northwestern suburb of Chicago, four card players began the complex process of bidding for the privilege of calling trump. The winner, Jack Buchtel, impulsively named murder trump.