Scratch Fever

by Collins, Max Allan

  Again, Jon said, “You’re nuts. She was running, and it all caught up with her.”

  “You mean God killed her?”

  “Well . . .”

  “He doesn’t have that good a sense of humor.”

  There was one thing Nolan could still do, and Jon drove him, after a good month had passed, to West Liberty. The weak-chinned deputy sheriff—whose name was Creel—lived in a little white frame house a few blocks from the outskirts of town—a few blocks from where he stopped Julie’s Mustang. So at two in the morning one night, with Jon at his side, Nolan knocked on Creel’s door.

  Creel answered in his pajamas. Nolan, wearing a ski mask, put a gun in Creel’s neck.

  Within the house, a female voice from upstairs called, “Honey? Is something wrong?”

  Nolan said softly, “Nothing’s wrong.”

  Creel looked at Nolan wide-eyed, slack-jawed; he looked at Jon standing just behind Nolan, also in a ski mask, also with a gun.

  “Nothing’s wrong, honey,” Creel called back. “Just some sheriffing!”

  And Nolan walked the deputy around back and had him sit in a swing on a swing set. Creel had kids, apparently.

  “Tell me about Julie,” Nolan said.

  “What?”

  “Tell me why you didn’t turn Julie and that money in last month.”

  And Creel did something amazing: he started to cry. He sat in the swing and cried.

  Then he talked.

  “I was nuts about that cunt. She had a beauty shop in town. For two years I tried to make her. I usually don’t cheat around, but that cunt was s-o-o-o-o-o-o beautiful. And she laughed at me when I came onto her. Two years I tried making her.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I saw this car driving wild. Flat tire. Pulled it over and it was this Julie. She had a shotgun, but it was empty. And she had a bag of money. All that fuckin’ money. She said, ‘You hear about the Port City bank job this afternoon?’ I said yeah. She said, ‘This is the money. Hundreds of thousands here. Nobody knows I got it but you.’ Jesus, I said. She says, ‘You want to be rich and fuck me whenever you want?’ I didn’t say nothin’. She says, ‘Rich,’ and reaches for my dick. ‘Nobody’s home at my place,’ I says. My wife and the kids was at her mom’s in Des Moines, for Christmas. She says, ‘Drive us there, then. Now.’ And I did.”

  Creel started laughing.

  “We parked the Mustang in back here, in the garage, and took the bag of money in and plopped it on the kitchen table. She and I sat and played with the money and laughed. Then we went upstairs to the bedroom and, sweet Jesus, I fucked her. Three times, and it was . . . nothing like it, ever. We was in bed together, and I drifted off to sleep, thinking it was a dream, a crazy dream. I woke up a couple hours later, handcuffed to the bed. Alone in the house.”

  Creel sat there, swinging.

  “You believe she’s dead?” Nolan asked.

  “If she isn’t, I’d like to kill her.” He laughed. “Or fuck her.” Then he just sat there blankly. Swinging.

  “We never had this conversation,” Nolan said.

  “Right,” Creel said.

  And Nolan and Jon went back to Iowa City and forgot about it.

  Now, a year later, Jon was in the back seat of a car, handcuffed like that dumb asshole Creel, while Julie and some dyke named Ron talked about whether or not to kill him.

  Right now Julie was still talking to that sandy-haired guy. If only they’d go into that warehouse for a while, maybe he could do something. . . .

  The car he was in was an old souped-up Ford, with tuck ’n’ roll upholstery, four-on-the-floor, stereo speakers on the back ledge. He was locked in, of course, but maybe . . .

  On the other side of the car, the one facing away from Julie and Ron and the Hulk, Jon bit the tip of the locking knob on the door. He pulled up his with teeth. It clicked.

  He glanced over to see if the figures out in the parking lot had heard it. It had sounded incredibly loud to him. But they still stood there, Julie and the guy, talking, Ron doing her James Dean slouch.

  With his back to the door, he used this cuffed hands to grasp the door handle. He pulled. The latch gave, but he didn’t open the door. He was still watching the people in the lot. To see if they’d heard the sound—which seemed to him to echo across the world like a shout in the Grand Canyon. But they didn’t seem to. Ron glanced over, but just momentarily.

  He waited a minute or so.

  Then he pushed the door open a bit, hoping the dome light wouldn’t go on. It didn’t. One small break. He edged it open and slipped down out of the car onto the gravel and eased the door shut.

  On his belly, he looked under the car, toward Julie and the Hulk and Ron. He saw their legs; they hadn’t moved.

  He looked off, in the opposite direction. Another twenty feet of parking lot, then trees. If he could make it to the trees, and perhaps hide, then eventually work the ropes off his ankles, and find a highway . . .

  He crawled on his belly. The gravel was rough; it scraped him. He was only in T-shirt and jeans. His mouth, already tasting like an old gym sock, took in dust.

  He could hear them talking. They hadn’t noticed him. Trees ahead, a few yards.

  Then a voice. Ron’s.

  “Hey!”

  Feet ran on gravel.

  He tried to get on his feet; maybe he could hop faster than he could crawl.

  He never found out.

  A foot was on his back, and then he heard Ron say, “You ain’t goin’ noplace,” and she grabbed him by his bound ankles and dragged him, face down, back to her car.

  10

  HAROLD TOOK off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was sitting behind the metal desk in the small paneled office at the rear of his and Julie’s club, the Paddlewheel. He was waiting for the phone to ring.

  The Paddlewheel was a big place, an old converted warehouse near the banks of the Mississippi, in Gulf Port, Illinois; it contained a restaurant, several bars, several dance floors with stages, and a casino. But Harold’s office was small.

  Harold, of course, was big, a big man who felt uncomfortable in his small office, physically uncomfortable, psychologically uncomfortable. This small office was just another unspoken insult in his life with Julie. But he loved her. He loved her. And if she didn’t love him back, well, she didn’t love anybody else, either. Except Julie, of course.

  Julie had a large office upstairs, with a huge wood-topped desk, bulky old-fashioned safe, file cabinets, chairs, bar, television, stereo, a couch where she slept sometimes. Almost an apartment, and she did use it as a place to go, to stay, even overnight—when she wanted to get away from him for a while, Harold knew.

  They lived together in a big white house with pillars, a near-mansion built ten years before by a wealthy farmer for a beloved wife who divorced him a year later. The place was several miles outside Gulf Port, in the midst of rich farmland that Julie now owned, one of several investments she’d made with the money they were earning from the Paddlewheel. It was a four-bedroom home that required a housekeeper to come in three times a week, filled with antiques Julie picked up (her only hobby); they slept in separate bedrooms, though he was allowed to join her in her bed for love-making a few times a week.

  As for his small office on the basement level, she claimed it was a ploy of sorts; it was obviously necessary to keep considerable cash on hand for the casino and, she said, she wanted a certain amount beyond that in case the day came that they should need to leave in a hurry. So the big old safe in her office, in which a few thousand was kept, was a decoy; the safe containing over $100,000 was in the floor of Harold’s small office, a little vault in the corner, under the carpet.

  It had been a long and disturbing evening. What it should have been was a pleasant night out—dinner at the Barn, followed by scouting the band there for possible fill-in at the Paddlewheel. But then this Jon kid turned up out of Julie’s past.

  Julie had taken the mone
y from that bank job and turned it into the Paddlewheel, from which had come land holdings and a sporting goods store in Burlington and . . . and Jon and Logan would want their share, now that they knew she was alive. Julie claimed they’d want even more—revenge, she said. But Harold didn’t really buy that. He knew Julie well enough to know that if there was one thing Julie loved besides Julie, it was money; that was the only fever in her, and she wouldn’t do the smart thing, the right thing, and call this Logan and the kid Jon in and admit her deceptions and cut them in for a share. No way in hell. She’d do anything but that. Harold knew that only too well. He knew only too well what Julie was capable of, for money.

  He sat rubbing his eyes, waiting for the phone to ring. It was almost two in the morning, and he was exhausted. He wanted to go to his room at the house and sleep. Just sleep.

  But he had to wait till the phone rang.

  Those two guys Julie had contacted, the ones her Chicago connection put her onto, should have called by now.

  He didn’t like being part of this. He didn’t like being any part of killing. It wasn’t the first time she’d got him into being part of something that was directly opposed to everything he’d ever been taught, that he’d ever believed in. He didn’t understand it, how he could have come to believe in one thing, live for one thing: Julie. The few nights a week in her bed, doled out like a child’s allowance; the occasional tender look; those few times a week she’d squeeze his arm and smile, or touch his face. He lived for those. He didn’t believe any of them, but he wanted to. And he took what he could get.

  And then there were those rare, real moments when she got blue and came to him for some emotional support. When she needed a man to lean on, and for a while, a short while, he’d be a man to her, and to himself.

  The phone rang.

  It was the long-distance operator with a collect call for anyone from Mr. Smith. Harold accepted the call.

  A young, out-of-breath voice said, “This is Infante.”

  “I was told I’d be speaking to a Sal,” Harold said.

  “Well, you’re speaking to Infante!”

  “I better speak to Sal.”

  “You can’t! You can’t . . . he’s dead. Sally’s dead.”

  Dead. So it was starting, Harold thought. It was starting again.

  On the other end of the phone, Infante seemed to be sobbing.

  “Are you all right, Infante?”

  “I’m fine!” the young voice said with defiance.

  “Where are you?”

  “Some restaurant I’m at a restaurant. Denny’s.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Port City? I’m using a pay phone.”

  “In a booth?”

  “It’s a kind of stall.”

  “Well, keep your voice down, then, Infante.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “What happened?”

  “We had the guy’s girlfriend. We were waiting for him. But he came in and surprised us. He killed Sally. With a knife! With a goddamn knife!”

  “Please. Why did you leave the Quad Cities?”

  “I couldn’t stay! He knows who I am, this Logan or Nolan or whatever. He’d come after me.”

  “Then you better go someplace where you have friends who can hide you.”

  “I’m not hiding from that son-of-a-bitch! I want him. He killed Sally! Don’t you get it?”

  “Look. Infante, is it? Go to your friends—”

  “Sally was my friend. He was all I had! That fucker Nolan, I’m going to kill him!”

  You better decide whether you’re going to kill him or run from him, Harold thought But he said, “What are your plans, then?”

  “I’m coming to you.”

  “Infante, I wouldn’t . . .”

  “I don’t care what you’d do. I’m coming. You owe me money.”

  “That’ll be taken care of . . .”

  “It sure will. And you can put me up somewhere. While we wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “For Nolan.”

  Harold rubbed his eyes again.

  “Yes,” he said into the phone, “I suppose you’re right He will be coming, won’t he?”

  Harold gave Infante some directions and hung up the phone.

  Harold rarely drank. It was a holdover from his football days; he’d taken training very seriously. And he still took vitamins, watched his diet, worked out at a spa. He was into his thirties, and most men of his physical type would have gone to fat by now. Not Harold.

  But right now he felt like a drink. He’d have to go out to that parking lot, where Julie was dealing with that crazy lez, and tell her about Infante. Thinking about her with Ron gave him a sick feeling; thinking about what Infante had told him, and how Julie would react to it, made him feel sicker. He went to the bar just outside his office and unlocked the booze and mixed himself a Manhattan.

  Despite his not drinking much, he could make a hell of a mixed drink. He’d been a bartender for three years, after all. That’s what he’d been doing when Julie came back into his life a century ago. Last year.

  Of course he and Julie went back a lot farther than a year ago. She had been the high school cheerleader, the homecoming queen candidate, the local beauty contest winner, who had caught the eye of the local football hero—Harold. His eye wasn’t all she’d caught: on the eve of his freshman year at State, she announced she was pregnant.

  No problem: he had scholarship money, and an extra job. And he loved her. Very, very much. So they married. They had a beautiful little girl, Lisa. They were happy. Or at least he was. Julie seemed moody, but it wasn’t a bad first year for a marriage. Then his grades got bad.

  He hadn’t been in Vietnam long when he got the “Dear Harold” letter.

  He didn’t see any action in ’Nam. He’d had two things going for him: bad eyes and the ability to type.

  He was a clerk typist, in the rear area, and never heard a shell go off. It was an easy war for Harold.

  Peace had been another matter. He was divorced from a woman he still loved. He was a football hero without a college degree and had few qualifications for anything outside of clerical work or a factory job. He ended up a bartender, in an all-night joint in Gulf Port, across the river from Burlington, where he’d gone to work in a college buddy’s office as a clerk. He’d thought about bettering himself. He’d considered going back to college and trying again; he’d considered going to a business school, for a two-year degree at least, to bolster his clerical credentials.

  But he gave that up after one of the two-week summer visits he had yearly with his daughter. She was being raised by Julie’s younger sister and her husband, an executive with a public relations firm in Minneapolis; she was very happy with them. They were her parents, for all intents and purposes. And while Lisa—who was thirteen now—loved her father, enjoyed their visits together, she made it clear she was happy where she was. And one thing Harold wouldn’t do was make his daughter unhappy.

  There were only two things Harold wanted in life: his daughter, Lisa, who was lost to him, except in the “Uncle Daddy” sense, and his ex-wife, Julie, who had gone into business, with a beauty shop in a small Iowa town called West Liberty, and who wanted nothing to do with him—though she did call him on the phone now and then, when she was feeling low.

  So Harold had settled into life-as-existence. He worked at menial jobs. The bartending gig was about the longest-term employment he’d had since the service. He took an odd pride in his ability to mix a good drink, any drink, and talked sports with customers till all hours. Harold did still get some pleasure out of watching sports on TV. That, and listening to old Beach Boys and Beatles albums from his high school days, was about all Harold had.

  Till that afternoon last year when Julie showed up at the bar.

  She had looked strange. And beautiful, of course. She was wearing a clingy blood-red sweater and slacks. She had a wild look, her eyes aglitter, her hair slightly disarrayed. An animal
look. And there was good reason: she was on the run.

  “Do you want me back?” she whispered. Just like that. Leaning across the bar. There were only a few customers in the place. Jody’s, like most Gulf Port establishments, was a night spot primarily. But she whispered.

  “You know I do,” he said.

  “Can you get somebody to relieve you here?”

  “For a few minutes?”

  “For until I say different.”

  “I’ll make a call.” He did. “The relief guy will be here in twenty minutes. Can it wait till then?”

  “Yes,” she said, and took a table near the bar.

  The new girl, Doris, a blonde of about twenty-five with dark roots and a nice frame and a pleasant, pockmarked face, waited on Julie; Julie ordered coffee. While Doris was off getting it, Julie came to the bar.

  “Who is she?”

  “Just some transient gal.”

  “Transient?”

  “Divorcee. No kids. Got an ex-husband in Ohio she’s on the run from.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause he still loves her. Ever hear of that?”

  “What did he do, beat her?”

  “I guess.”

  Julie nodded and went back to the table. Doris brought the coffee.

  Julie said, “You’re new here, huh?”

  Doris smiled, said, “Just collecting a few paychecks, honey. I’m on my way to California.”

  “Oh. Relatives there?”

  “No. My folks are gone and I was the only one. I got a couple of old boyfriends out there, though. That’s better than relatives.”

  “Any time. How’s your paycheck collection coming along?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m on my way to Los Angeles. Just stopped here to look up my ex-husband. He’s that good-looking bartender over there.”

  “Harold’s your ex? No kiddin’!”

  She sat down.

  “Say, I was mostly saving for my bus fare and such. If you can use a rider, somebody who can help you drive, I’ll turn in my apron and hop in your car.”

  Julie smiled and extended a hand. “It’s a deal.”

  Shortly before three o’clock that morning, Harold was in the Mustang, and Doris was behind the wheel. Harold, in the passenger’s seat, was steering, because Doris was unconscious. Julie had put Seconal in some coffee Doris drank a few hours before. Harold was off on the shoulder, waiting for Julie. There was some snow on the ground, but no ice on the highway. It was cold. Harold was sweating.