Hard Cash

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Sure.”

  “What’s in the other box?”

  “Another Santa Claus costume. That’s a total of two. One small, the other’s large.”

  “And that’s what Nolan wanted me to pick up for him?”

  “Shit, yes. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “I’m afraid he doesn’t tell me much of anything.”

  “Yeah, that’s Nolan, all right Listen . . . you need any help getting into that, honey, just give Connie a call, you hear?” She winked and chewed her gum seductively and left him there with a hard on and a Santa Claus suit.

  It fit fine. He looked at himself in the cubicle’s shadowy mirror, and damned if the world’s shortest, most clean-shaven Santa Claus wasn’t staring him in the face. He asked Connie about the lack of a beard, after getting back into his street clothes.

  “Oh, the beards are in the other box, with the large suit,” she said. “The caps are in there too.”

  “Caps?”

  “Caps. You better try yours on.” She opened the other suit box and got out a floppy red cap with white ball on the end. “The beards are adjustable, around the ears, but the caps could be trouble . . . there, see? You got too much hair for a small. I’ll go back and get a medium.”

  She did, and insisted that Jon try that one on too, and he did, and she tweaked his cheek and said, “Gonna bring me anything for Christmas, Santa?”

  He grinned, trying to keep the red from crawling up his neck. “We’ll see,” he said.

  “I wonder what the heck Nolan wants with Santa Claus suits,” she said, shaking her head. “Somehow he don’t seem the Santa type. Unless he’s gonna empty stockings instead of fill ’em.”

  Jon nodded his agreement and watched her put the cap back in the box and tie some string around it.

  “Don’t forget to tell Nolan I said hi,” she said. “And maybe I’ll see you when you bring the suits back after Christmas, huh, honey?”

  It took him almost an hour to get back to Iowa City. The overcast day had everybody cautious and using their headlights, and he got caught behind some old ladies going forty-five. So did a lot of other cars; the traffic was heavy, and passing was difficult—no, impossible—and he followed the old girls to the Interstate, after which he was back to Iowa City in short order. He parked the Chevy II behind the antique shop and went in the side door, which was unlocked.

  That wasn’t right; surely he’d locked the door when he left. Yes, he remembered locking it.

  Too early for Nolan to back from Indianapolis. Wasn’t it?

  He shut the door. Softly. Silently.

  Listened.

  Heard nothing.

  Quietly he moved behind the long, saloon-style counter behind which his uncle had sat day after day puffing his foul-smelling cigars. He set his packages on the counter. In a drawer, below the cash register, was one of his uncle’s .32 automatics. Jon got it out Softly. Silently.

  He explored the downstairs. Nothing in the main room, with its antiques and showcases and counter and all. Nothing in his own room, except half the comic books in the world.

  But what about the other back room? The one that had included Planner’s workshop area, as well as where many very valuable antiques were crated away for future sale, and where the big old safe was. . . .

  The safe’s door was open.

  Otherwise, the room was as empty as the rest of the downstairs.

  But someone had been in here, opened the safe and, of course, found nothing in it. There hadn’t been anything of value kept in the safe since Nolan and Jon’s money had been stolen from it months before, the time Planner himself was killed defending that money. Killed in this very room. Jon had, in fact, scrubbed his uncle’s blood from the floorboards of this room. . . .

  He felt a chill, and for a moment was very scared, and then it passed. Whoever it was had been here and gone. He walked out into the other room and put the gun back in its drawer.

  He was halfway up the stairs, his arms full of the packages with the hunting jackets and Santa Claus suits, when he heard the noise.

  Talking.

  Someone was talking up there on the second floor. And it sure as hell wasn’t Nolan.

  And the talking was coming this way. Toward the stairs. They were going to come down the stairs!

  He couldn’t be soft or silent about it now. He had no choice but to clomp down the stairs and head toward that drawer with the gun in it, but they were closer to him than he had imagined, on his damn heels before he was even out of the stairwell. And the packages were flying and he was face down on the floor, one of the men on his back and the other standing in front of him. Jon couldn’t see anything of whoever it was except shoes. Black shoes and white socks. The shoes were old-fashioned, lacing halfway up the ankle. Clodhoppers, shoes a farmer might work in; the socks were loose and dirty.

  That’s all Jon saw of the two men, as he later deduced the number of his assailants to be: the shoes and socks of one of them, and nothing of the other, because the other was on Jon’s back, holding him down.

  Nobody said a word; certainly not Jon, whose lips and teeth were mashed into the wooden floor.

  And then one of the black shoes flew at Jon’s temple, and Jon went away for a while.

  He woke up on the couch upstairs.

  There was coldness on the side of his head.

  “Oh . . . fuck . . .” he heard himself saying. He sat up. The coldness, an ice pack, slid off the side of his head.

  Nolan handed Jon a cold beer. Jon grabbed at it, guzzling at the can like the Frankenstein monster taking his first drink.

  “Aren’t you even going to ask me how my day in Indianapolis went?” Nolan said.

  Jon just looked at Nolan. Then laughed. “Hey. You got me an ice pack. For my kicked-in head. You’re some kind of nurse, Nolan. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “If you want a doctor, I can get Ainsworth over here. That’s a hell of a lump you got. Concussion maybe.”

  “No doctor. I’m okay.”

  “You mean you think you’re okay.”

  “I don’t think anything. I think all my think got kicked all over the floor downstairs.”

  “Somebody was into the safe.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I think they were looking around upstairs, too.”

  “Nothing valuable taken?”

  “Nothing valuable to take. Except some of the antiques, which they didn’t touch. And a couple thousand in the wall safe, which they didn’t find. So you got here before they left, and they kicked you in the head? See who it was?”

  “I know exactly who kicked me in the head. We can have the cops put out an APB, my description is so exact.”

  “Who, then?”

  “A black farmer shoe with a dirty white sock and a foot in it.”

  “Terrific. Another beer?”

  “No. This one’ll do me. I’ll just lay back down here. What the hell time is it?”

  “Oh, around eleven I guess.”

  “When did you get back?”

  “Not long ago. I hauled you upstairs and got you an ice pack and you woke up.”

  “I’m not sure about that last part. Jesus. Now I know what they mean when they say ain’t that a kick in the head.”

  “Listen. Breen was murdered.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why you went to Indianapolis.”

  “I mean Breen was murdered, and then you were kicked in the head and our place was gone through. Nothing’s gone, but it was gone through, all right.”

  “You think there’s a connection? Between Breen and today?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “Me? You’re asking me, Nolan? For an opinion? Christ, I’m not ready for that. You better just kick me in the head. That I can handle. That I’ve had experience with.”

  “This heist. Maybe we should scratch it.”

  “Yeah, sure, only we aren’t calling the shots. Rigley is. Or Rigley’s girl friend is.”
<
br />   “Maybe Rigley and company’ll change their mind when I explain something funny’s going on.”

  “Is something funny going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I think I better try to talk Rigley out of it. The back of my neck is starting to tingle on this thing, and I think we better get out, if we can.”

  “And if we can’t?”

  “Go ahead with it, I guess. I think we better forget about bringing in another man. That okay with you? Breen would’ve been perfect, but he’s dead, and with what I got in mind for the heist, there really isn’t the time to recruit anybody else. Or the need either. We can get by, just the two of us. Don’t you think?”

  Jon rubbed the lump over his temple. “Maybe I will have another beer.” He got up and went after the beer, then came back and said, “Santa Claus suits?”

  9

  SHE GOT BACK to the cottage at five-thirty. She was bushed. Fridays at the beauty shop were always busy, but today had really been a bitch; she’d worked all morning without a break and straight through lunch and fought hunger pangs throughout the long and hectic afternoon. And now, home finally, she was so tired, she wasn’t even hungry anymore. Take a bath and get rid of the smell of hair spray and customer (and her own) perspiration and just flop in bed. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and George was there.

  Sitting at the table with glass of booze and accompanying bottle in front of him.

  Terrific.

  “Hi, baby,” he said. A little sheepishly. A little drunkenly. Sitting in his shirtsleeves, his coat and vest and tie tossed on the couch the way a kid tosses off his jacket after coming in from school. George was a handsome man, in that slick executive way of his, but when he got the least bit drunk, his eyes started drooping, and he began getting a rather stupid look to him. She hated him when he looked stupid like that, which was, unfortunately, a way he’d been looking more and more lately.

  She closed the door, slipped out of her cloth coat, hung it on the rack. She was still wearing her white beautician’s uniform. After nine solid hours of doing her best to make other women’s hair look presentable, her own was matted from sweat and generally a mess. She didn’t smell good. Or feel good. And George was here.

  Terrific.

  She walked over to the table and stood over him as he sat fiddling with his half-drained glass of bourbon. She looked down scoldingly and said, “I thought we agreed not to get together. Until tomorrow, when we meet with your robber friends.”

  “Well, baby, I . . .”

  “I thought we agreed you’d spend some time with your wife.”

  “Baby, you know I can’t stand being around her when she’s drinking. You don’t know what it’s like being around somebody who’s drinking all the time.”

  “Don’t I?”

  He looked down into his bourbon, then hung his head. “I . . . guess I deserve that, don’t I? I have been drinking a lot myself lately, haven’t I?”

  She thought, why don’t you shape the hell up, you self-pitying son of a bitch?

  She said, “It’s okay, honey. You’ve been under terrible pressure. I understand.”

  And as she said that, she patted his head, twisting some of his slightly curly dark brown hair in her fingers playfully, affectionately.

  He touched her arm. “Sit down, baby. I’ll get you a glass, if you’ll just sit down and have a drink with me, and we can talk.”

  She didn’t sit down. Instead she plucked the bottle off the table and put it behind the bar on a shelf with all the rest of the bottles and came back and kissed his neck, nuzzlingly, and then took him by the elbow, saying, “Now, come on. Be a good boy and shoo. Go home. I want you out of here.”

  And he looked at her with tearful eyes, still slightly stupid eyes, but compelling, too, in their way. “Julie. I need you. Let me be with you.”

  Goddammit, he was almost whimpering. Seeing him act like this made her want to slap him silly, in a way, and in another, want to hold him.

  She did neither.

  She went and got his coat, vest, tie, and topcoat and put them on the table in front of him and said, “Go home, George. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I need you tonight.”

  “Tonight I need for myself, George. I need some time to rest, some time to get myself together for what’s coming up. Please.”

  “Julie . . . surely you understand how I feel, how I’m . . . I’m shaking inside, Julie. How I’m scared out of my mind thinking about . . . about what we’re going to do and . . . how I need you. To hold me.”

  Shaking inside, he said. And outside, too. He was a wreck, a nervous damn wreck, and she had to do something.

  She sighed.

  “All right,” she said. “Go on into the bedroom.”

  “Baby . . . it’s not that . . . We can just talk. . . . I just need to be with you right now, I don’t. . .”

  “Go on in the bedroom and wait for me. I have to take a bath. I have to relax a minute. I’ll be in in a while. Now scoot.”

  She drew a hot bath. So hot her skin turned lobster red as soon as she dipped into it. She liked a hot bath. She liked to burn away the dirt, burn away the thoughts. Just settle into a steaming-hot tub. Hot bubble bath—millions of bubbles; she liked the smell of the soap, the bubble bath smell, the slickness and smell of the perfumy bath oil. It was a peaceful experience, the way sleep was supposed to be.

  She luxuriated in the tub, sliding her hands over her oil-sleek body, the globes of her full breasts bobbing above the surface of the bubbly water, nipples erect. And she stroked them, soaped them, her breasts, nipples, pussy, thick soapy-silky triangle of hair, sliding hands over firm, muscular oil-slippery thighs. She leaned back and enjoyed herself.

  She honestly got more pleasure, more sexual, sensual pleasure out of a good hot bath than the act of sex. Fucking had never been much more to her than a way of pleasing and controlling a man. And she’d gotten even less pleasure from her experimental couple of flings with other women.

  But this was pleasurable. Soaking and soaping herself. Indulging that fine body of hers. And it was a fine body; she knew it was. She didn’t really blame men (or anyone) for wanting her.

  Conceit? No, not really—at least she didn’t think so. She had an ability, she felt, to assess herself in a detached, realistic manner. She saw her body, for example, as a tool, even a weapon. Nice tits, nice ass, but like all tools (weapons), meaningless without the brains to put them to use.

  Take her high school years, for instance. She’d blossomed rather late, well into her teens, and consequently had that muted contempt for her admirers that all former wallflowers feel. She used her good looks to be popular, to date the cutest guys from the wealthiest families, to be a cheerleader and homecoming queen candidate and generally overcome a somewhat poverty-stricken background. (Her father had worked for the railroad and earned a decent wage, but not decent enough to properly feed, house and clothe six kids, a wife, and mother-in-law. As the oldest, Julie had all but raised her two sisters and three brothers, as her mother had had enough to do just to cook, keep house, and look after her own ailing mother.) The highlight of her climb out of the lower middle class muck came shortly after graduation, when she won the home-town beauty pageant that could have led to Atlantic City and beyond, if it hadn’t come out about her and the one judge.

  They let her keep her scholarship money (held in trust for use in educational pursuits only), and she eventually used it, to go to beauty school, but first she got knocked up by one of the few nonwealthy guys she’d ever gone out with, a sandy-haired football hero who she figured would probably go on to make a fortune playing pro ball someday. She began to think she’d figured wrong when he flunked out of school the first year, trying to study, play football, hold a job, and be a husband/father simultaneously. He got drafted. Sent to Vietnam.

  She divorced him while he was still overseas. It was a gamble, because he still mig
ht come back and be a pro ball player and get rich, but then again he might also get his leg blown off over there, so she’d dumped him, left her kid (a girl) with her mother, who had the time to look after a kid now that most of her own were grown and gone and with Grandma dead and gone, and enrolled in beauty school.

  That was where she had latched onto Claire. Claire was a rich man’s daughter and hadn’t been smart enough to make it in a real college or university and had ended up at the beauty school in Iowa City. Nobody at the school liked Claire because she was stupid and spoiled and a closet lez. But Julie liked Claire. Or anyway Julie liked Claire’s money, and soon they were roommates; she even gave Claire a free feel now and then. And when they got their diplomas and passed their state boards (the fix had to be in for Claire to pass, the stupid bitch) Claire’s rich old man had given her the beauty shop in West Liberty (which was a small town midway between Iowa City and Port City) as a graduation present And Claire had invited Julie along.

  And Julie had gone, figuring it would do till something better came her way.

  Like a George Rigley.

  She’d known it would only be a matter of time before a George Rigley entered her life. A wealthy, my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me type who wanted some nice, young, sympathetic snatch. And she was eager to fill that role . . . until the time came when she could take over the wife’s role, and step into the plush, easy life hard cash could bring.

  But it had taken her longer than she’d thought: her small-town location limited her prospects, and the two men who preceded Rigley as her benefactors (an attorney from Iowa City and a doctor in West Liberty) had not proven the long-term meal ticket she’d hoped.

  Then, finally, three years ago last summer, she met him. She’d been on the prowl, sitting at the bar in that new place in Iowa City, the Pier, wearing as little as possible—baby-blue flimsy halter and short shorts. George Rigley, sitting a stool or two away, asked her if he could buy her a drink; she’d said he could, and it went on from there. He was at first as smooth and superficial as he no doubt was when he was sitting behind his desk at his bank. But later, after they’d taken a table off in a properly dark and secluded corner, he’d blurted out, “Listen, I’m nervous as hell. I mean, I’m new at this, and you’ll have to forgive me if it shows.”