Short Money

by Pete Hautman

  Crow decided to drop by at Nate Bellweather’s on the way out of town, though he didn’t expect to find Dr. Bellweather there. It was worth a try; he didn’t know where else to look. The address he’d found in the phone book turned out to be a modest bungalow in Northeast Minneapolis, only a few miles from where Crow had grown up. The house was barely distinguishable from the other bungalows on the block, all of them cheaply built dining the housing boom after World War II, now aging gracelessly. Nate’s station wagon filled the short driveway. Crow pressed the doorbell, banged on the door with the side of his fist.

  A few seconds later, the curtain over the door window moved an inch, fell back into place. Nate Bellweather opened the door about a foot.

  “He’s not here.”

  A fiftyish woman with artificially brown hair and a permanent-looking frown appeared at Nate’s shoulder.

  Crow asked, “Do you know where he is?”

  “He’s gone,” the woman said.

  “It’s cold out here. Do you mind if I come in for a minute?”

  The woman pushed Nate aside. “We don’t know where he is. Go away.”

  “I’m concerned about him,” Crow said, directing his words at Nate. “I think he’s in trouble with the Murphys. Do you know how I can get in touch with him?”

  “He’s gone,” the woman repeated.

  “Shut up, Ginny.”

  “Don’t you tell me to shut up.”

  Nate said, “He’s not here, Crow. Your job is over.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He didn’t tell me.”

  “You mind if I come in?” Crow pressed against the door. Nate resisted for a moment, then stepped back. Crow closed the door, looked around the neat, ordinary room. It looked a lot like the house in which he’d spent his childhood. Knick-knacks, plates on the wall, a cheap throw over the shapeless couch, popular magazines—Reader’s Digest, People, Sports Afield—fanned out on an oak-veneer coffee table.

  Nate Bellweather crossed his arms and took a position in front of the couch. Ginny made a sour face and left the room.

  “Nice place,” Crow said.

  Nate looked around the room, shook his head. “What do you want, Crow?”

  “I’ll be straight with you. Your brother never paid me for the time I put in. I’m just trying to collect my wages.”

  “One day’s wages? You’re kidding me.”

  “It’s a matter of principle.”

  “Yeah, well, the principle here is that you’re at the end of a long line of people that’re going to be looking for their money.” He sat on the couch, crossed his hands on his lap. “In any case, my brother’s not here. He left about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Alone?”

  Nate shrugged. “What my brother does is none of my business.”

  Ginny reentered the room, holding a shotgun, pointing it at Crow.

  Nate said, “Aww, for crying out loud, Ginny. Would you put that thing away.”

  “I’m telling you what I told Nelson,” she said to Crow, her voice shaking. “You get out of my house. You get out of here and don’t you come back.”

  Crow held his hands out and backed toward the door. “Okay, I’m leaving,” he said.

  Nate sighed and sank deeper into the couch.

  Crow opened the door, stepped outside. Ginny followed him to the doorway, keeping the shotgun trained on him, watched him walk to his car.

  Crow hadn’t been gone two minutes when somebody banged on the door again.

  Ginny Bellweather said, “It’s probably him again. Don’t open it.”

  Nate glared at his wife. He was sick of it. He was sick of running interference for his brother, of getting involved in his crazy schemes. And he was sick of Ginny bitching, complaining, and ordering him around. Bringing out the shotgun was really too much. If it was Crow at the door, come back to ask about something he forgot the first time, he had half a mind to apologize to the guy.

  “You hear me?” Ginny said.

  Nate pushed his jaw out so far it hurt. Screw you, he thought but did not quite say. He pushed up off the couch, walked straight to the front door, and yanked it open.

  It wasn’t Crow. It was a skinny guy in a gray Stetson.

  Nate opened his mouth. He didn’t know what he was going to say but was saved from having to come up with something when the man on his doorstep planted the heel of his boot in Nate’s belly, sending him stumbling back into the living room, crashing into the coffee table. Nate heard a shout from Ginny, then a thud and a squeal. He forced his eyes open, looked up, saw the cowboy holding the shotgun, saw Ginny slumped against the doorframe, holding her face. The cowboy turned his attention from Ginny hack to Nate.

  “How you doing?” He grinned. “You feel like telling me where that Nelly Bell’s got hisself to?”

  It was all Nate could do to breathe. He shook his head.

  The cowboy’s grin disappeared. He rested the barrel of the shotgun on Nate’s chin.

  “How ’bout now?” he asked.

  Nate said, “I don’t know. He left a little while ago with the kid. He didn’t say where he was going.”

  The cowboy nodded, moved the barrel of the gun off to the side, brought it back, hard, slapping its length against Nate’s temple.

  “How ’bout now?” he said again.

  Five minutes and several blows later, through the bright flashes obscuring his vision and the ringing in his ears, Nate heard the cowboy pick up the phone.

  “He ain’t here,” he heard him say. “That’s right. No, I talked to him and his wife both. They don’t know shit. Okay.”

  Nate heard the cowboy hang up the phone, walk across the carpet, slam the door. He heard an engine start, then it was gone. He opened his eyes to look at his wife. She lay on her back a few feet away, her head turned toward him, a cut on her cheek, her nose and bottom lip bleeding. She gave him a look, daring him to say something.

  He wasn’t going to fall for that one.

  After a few seconds she said it anyway. “I told you not to open the goddamn door.”

  The sun had set. Two inches of grainy snow covered the streets. Crow slipped and spun and skidded his way to Highway 12, turned west. The road crews had salted the highway. He brought the Rabbit up to sixty miles per hour. The fact that Melinda wasn’t answering her phone could mean many things. He tried not to think about the worst of them, but no matter what direction he forced his thoughts, they would end with the vision of Melinda out of her mind, or dead on the floor. Or—another possibility—she had had some kind of run-in with Orlan Johnson, had wound up in jail. Eyes on the road surface, Crow began to construct an elaborate fantasy. Suppose that George Murphy, driven to an insane rage, was systematically kidnapping everyone who had ever had any connection to Dr. Nelson Bellweather. Suppose the Murphys were holding Melinda hostage. Soon they would approach him and threaten to feed his wife to the tiger.

  On one level he knew such a scenario was absurd, but since no one was there to challenge it, he let it play, feeling his rage, imagining himself rescuing Melinda, shooting all the Murphys to get to her. He replayed the episode, trying a few variations, squeezing it for every last heady drop of adrenaline.

  By the time he passed through Howard Lake, the salt was losing its battle with the gathering snow. A barking headache had settled low in the back of his skull. Drifts were building up on the roadway, and the snowflakes flashing in his headlights became bright bursts of pain. Crow hunched over the wheel, his jaw clamped tight, and held the speedometer at fifty. Ten miles later, he was down to thirty miles per hour, dodging drifts on the highway, straining to separate the road surface from the flat, white, featureless countryside. Thoughts of Melinda had lost focus and blended with the pain in his head, and he continued on propelled only by a sense of mission.

  He arrived in Big River rolling slowly through four inches of blowing snow. Melinda’s driveway was covered by a drift three feet high. Crow pulled over in front of the house and shut down t
he engine. He felt no relief at reaching his destination, though the pounding in his head receded somewhat. The house was dark, no sign of life. He slogged up to the front door, his shoes filling with ice. Snow had drifted against the door. He leaned on the doorbell and could hear it ring inside the house. He released the button. The house grew darker and quieter.

  The mailbox was stuffed with three days’ mail; Crow emptied the box and held the assorted envelopes in his hands like a bouquet or a box of candy. He listened for the sound of quiet footsteps, Melinda walking in her slippers, but heard nothing. Shifting the stack of mail to the crook of his elbow, he flipped through his keys, finally selecting the one that fit the dead-bolt lock he had installed a year ago. He opened the door. This time it wasn’t chained. He stepped inside.

  The air smelled stale. He dropped the mail on a chair and toned on a lamp. He let his breath out, realizing only as he exhaled that he had been holding it for some time. The living room was perfectly ordered, the furniture meticulously placed, the pictures hanging on the walls, the books aligned on their shelves, the magazines carefully arranged on the coffee table, every surface perpendicular or parallel to the walls of the room. The mirror hung in place, recently cleaned. The sense of Melinda’s absence hit him low in the belly, and he sank down onto the sofa. Where had she gone?

  On a trip? Crow experienced an image of Melinda on a beach in Cancun, drinking rum punch. I’m hallucinating, he thought.

  Shadow creatures played at the periphery of his vision.

  Another image: Melinda on her bed, her heart stopped, lying there dead for three days. Would the power of her copper pyramid preserve her body? More likely, it would be grotesquely swollen. He stood and walked slowly up the stairs, fighting the pictures in his mind. He had seen a few bodies during his years with the Big River police; the detail his mind retained was excruciating. Halfway up the stairs he struck an invisible, internal barrier and stopped, then was able to continue only by pretending that he was still a cop, that this was just another house, on another street, in another city. The bedroom door was closed. He pushed it open. The bed was made, there were no wrinkles on the bedspread, no organic reek of decaying flesh. The pyramid was intact. There was no bloated body in the bathroom, or in the spare bedroom, or in any of the other rooms. He turned himself back into Joe Crow.

  He called Felix, but Felix wasn’t home either. His cat bowl sat empty on the kitchen floor.

  She had made her bed and straightened the magazines, which meant that she was planning on leaving, planning on coming home. It wasn’t like she had been raptured, or taken against her will. Crow looked at the sofa, remembering the times he had slept there, too loaded to climb the stairs to the bedroom. He took a step toward it, caught himself, then turned to the front door. He did not want to awaken in this silent, abandoned home.

  Before he left, he shoveled the sidewalk and the driveway. Melinda hated the snow. As he shoveled, he began once again to wonder about Orlan Johnson. Although all the signs were that Melinda had left deliberately and with some forethought, Orlan Johnson’s grinning, cigar-impaled face continued to assault him. Was he responsible for Melinda’s disappearance? Had his visit frightened her into leaving? Why was he driving all over the state, looking for Joe Crow? It had to be something to do with the Murphy kid. Did they still think he was involved in that?

  Crow jammed the end of the shovel into the snowbank. Two facts stood out in his mind: The last person who had actually seen Melinda, so far as he knew, was Orlan Johnson. And Melinda was gone.

  It would drive him crazy not to know.

  Mary Getter mixed another Manhattan and brought it to her husband, who was slumped morosely in his leather club chair. This was number four, three more than he usually drank before dinner. He took the drink without looking up at her and tossed half of it down his throat. Mary sat across from him in her coordinating bone-colored leather armchair. She was getting these jangly vibes from David, and when she looked directly at him, then closed her eyes, she discovered the afterimage of an alarmingly blue aura—not David’s color at all.

  The eggless Caesar salad had been sitting on the dining room table for half an hour. The lamb roast with mustard sauce, prepared according to a recipe featured in the latest Minnesota Monthly, was slowly cooling, the fat congealing. David usually had a good appetite, but something was bothering him and tonight he had shown no interest in food. “Are you getting hungry?” she asked.

  Getter shook his head.

  Mary smiled and nodded, her brow knitted. A difficult case, she imagined. She considered eating her own dinner and leaving him to himself. But that wouldn’t be right. Perhaps she could help him rechannel his thoughts. She thought back over her day, searching for a topic of conversation that might interest him.

  “Joe stopped by today,” she ventured.

  A tremor shot up Getter’s body, sending a globule of Manhattan arcing out of his glass onto his shirt. Uncharacteristically, he didn’t seem to notice the spill. He kept his eyes locked on some distant landscape.

  After a second, he said, “What did he want?”

  Mary shrugged, looking at the spot on his shirtfront. “Nothing. He was asking about Melinda.” She decided not to mention that Joe had also been asking about Dr. Bellweather. Whatever was bothering David, she didn’t want to add to it.

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. He said he’d been fishing with that horrible old man.”

  Getter drained the remains of his cocktail.

  “I hate to say it, Mary, but your brother is a sleazy little son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “Not only that—he’s a compulsive liar. Remember that, Mary. Nearly everything he says is untrue. I think he should be under the care of a psychiatrist. The guy’s—what?—thirty-something? Look at the mess he’s made of his life. Sticking his nose into other people’s business. He’s going to get himself killed. I can’t say I’ll be sorry.”

  Mary pressed her lips together but did not reply. She had never heard anything quite like this before. She knew that David didn’t like Joe, but he usually wasn’t so blunt about it. Besides, he was wrong in his assertions. Joe had had some troubles, and his mind was closed in many areas, but he had always been straight with her. In Mary’s opinion, that was part of his problem. His honesty made people uncomfortable.

  Getter stood up, weaving slightly.

  “Do you want to eat now?” Mary asked hopefully.

  Getter snapped his head back and forth. “I have to make a phone call,” he said.

  Amanda Murphy had no illusions about the quality of her cooking. Everything she made turned out dense, sticky, and powerful, like her sons. Her apple pie, for instance. The bottom crust was half an inch thick, charred on the bottom and slimy on top, covered with a loose layer of oversweet, mushy apples. The top crust was better, except for the lumps. Not the worst apple pie she had ever made and eaten, but darn near. Fortunately, George’s sense of taste was not acute, and he’d been eating her pies since he was a kid. He didn’t even complain about the raisins.

  “Great pie, Mandy,” he grunted through a gummy mouthful.

  Anyway, it was nutritious. A pie that weighed that much had to have some good in it. Amanda cut herself a small slice, helped it along with a glass of bourbon-spiked Pepsi.

  The late afternoon call from the lawyer had put George in one of his dangerous moods. Then when Ricky called to say that Nelly Bell wasn’t hiding out at his brother Nate’s, he got even worse. Threw his office phone right through the window, busted them both into smithereens. Amanda had been tiptoeing around him all evening. So far, the lawyer hadn’t called back like he said he would, and with every passing minute George seemed to be getting shorter, darker, and wider, looking as if he was about to explode. She wished Ricky would get home, so George would have somebody to yell at.

  When the phone on the kitchen wall rang, Amanda let George answer it.

  “Murphy here.”

  He listened, grunted, listened some more.

>   “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there.” Pause. “Yes, I’ll have your goddamn reward money. …Well, whosever it is, I’ll have it. And you’d best have the boy. …Well, somebody sure as hell better have him.” He hung up.

  Amanda thought, Here it comes. His head is going to explode.

  But George let out a long, whistling breath and returned to his seat at the kitchen table. “That was the lawyer,” he said. “He wants me to bring the money to Birdy’s tomorrow morning. He says Nelly Bell will be there with Shawn.”

  Amanda said, “How much money do they want you to bring?”

  “Three hundred thousand dollars.”

  Amanda coughed into her Pepsi. “For a child?”

  George shrugged. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “I don’t have it anyways.”

  “Where are we going?” Shawn asked.

  Doc Bellweather smiled. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

  Shawn thought about that. The adventure, hiding out with Doc and Nate and Ginny, had been getting old. He was glad to be going someplace instead of sitting around Nate’s house watching TV, with Ginny always looking at him weird, like he was a dog going to bite her or something.

  “The Mall of America,” Shawn said. “Camp Snoopy. You can take me on the rides.”

  “You don’t want to go there,” Doc said.

  “Yes I do.”

  “Well, we’re headed the other direction. Don’t you want to go home? See your dad?”

  Shawn looked out the window. They were on the highway. He saw a sign: HWY 12 WEST. Did he want to go home? He thought about his room and about the animals. He thought about the tiger chained up in the lodge, the smell of Grandy’s cooking. He thought about telling the kids at school about how he had run away.

  “My dad’s going to be mad,” he said. “But I’d kinda like to see the animals.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll talk to him.”

  “He might be mad at you too.”

  “I think you can count on that,” Doc said.

  XXI

  The man who has injured you will never forgive you.