Two for the Money

by Max Allan Collins

  This side of the hill was just as steep, but there was no row of pines blocking the view. The house was two stories of yellow stucco, like the boathouse, but was much bigger and of that pseudo-Spanish architecture so common in the twenties. With its turrets and archways, it was a genuine relic, the castle of latter-day robber barons, built during the blood-and-booze era by the father of Charlie’s late wife. Someday people would pay fifty cents to hear a tour guide tell about it. Maybe today would provide a sock finish for the guide’s line of patter.

  “Somewhere down in those bushes,” Jon said, “is an underground elevator or something. Or maybe a hidden stairway. Over to the right of those cobblestone steps, see? I watched Walt last time he came back from the house and he came out of those bushes.”

  Nolan scratched his chin with the hand the .38 was in. “Kind of figured there was some other, easy way up there, besides steps. There’s steps in front and back both, but with Charlie wounded . . . he is wounded, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Jon nodded, “his thigh. I saw him back in Ainsworth’s office, his thigh was all bandaged. That’s the last time I saw Charlie, was back there in Iowa City. Christ, that reminds me, how’s Karen? How the hell is she? Did you see her?”

  “Yes. She’s fine. How about you? You all right?”

  “I am now that you’re here. How’d you find me, anyway?”

  “We can shoot the bull later, kid. Right now we got things to do.”

  “Listen, why don’t we just . . . no. Forget it.”

  “Something on your mind?”

  “No, nothing, forget it.”

  “You were going to say, why don’t we just take off while we got our asses in one piece?”

  “Well, yes. Being alive sounds pretty damn good to me at the moment.”

  “Do what you want. I’m staying.”

  “Yeah, well, me too, of course. And I understand how you feel about this guy Charlie, it’s a real thing between you two, been going on a lot of years and . . .”

  “Fuck that. The money’s what I care about. That son of a bitch has three quarters of a million dollars, our three quarters of a million dollars, Jon. And all that money sounds pretty damn good to me. That’s what I call being alive.”

  “I’d . . . almost forgotten about the money . . . how could I forget that much money. Seems so long since yesterday . . . yesterday Planner was alive, Nolan, do you realize that?” Jon’s hand whitened around the nine-millimeter automatic. “I’m glad we’re going to do something about . . . about what they did to Planner.”

  “Look. One thing we don’t need to be is emotional. We got no time for revenge. That’s for the crazy assholes, like Charlie. I want that bastard breathing, for the time being anyway. I got to shake our money out of him. God knows what he’s done with it.”

  “The money,” Jon said, nodding, loosening up. “That’s what’s important.”

  Nolan pointed at Walter, whose close-set eyes were big from listening intently to the conversation. “What about him? Have you gotten anything out of him?”

  “We hadn’t got very far in our conversation when you got here. I was asking him yes and no questions so he could shake his head and answer, and he claimed he wouldn’t scream or anything if I ungagged him, but I wasn’t convinced yet.”

  “It’s just the two of them, then, right? Charlie and the kid?”

  “Far as I know. Why not ask Walt, here?”

  “Take the sock out of his mouth.”

  Jon did.

  Walter tried to spit the taste out of his mouth, didn’t quite get the job done.

  “This is Nolan,” Jon said. “The guy I told you about.”

  Walter said nothing. He had a blank expression, as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be outraged or scared shitless.

  “How about it, Walt?” Nolan asked. “Just you and your dad?”

  Walter said nothing.

  Jon said, “I don’t think he’s going to say anything.”

  Nolan said, “Well. I’m going up the hill.”

  “Wait,” Walter said. “Don’t hurt him! He’s just a poor old man!”

  Nolan said nothing.

  Jon said, “What do I do?”

  Nolan stuffed the sock back into Walter’s mouth and said, “Stay here and guard Junior. If Charlie comes out on top, you’ll have good bargaining power.”

  “Don’t talk that way! How could that old bastard come out on top over you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe shoot me, like the other two times.”

  “Jesus, Nolan.”

  “Come on, I’ll help you take him downstairs. Ground floor’ll be better for you and if you set up behind the bar you’ll have a decent vantage point, and you’ll be right by the garage. He didn’t have car keys on him, by any chance?”

  “No.”

  “Can you hotwire a car, kid?”

  “My J.D. days pay off at last. Sure I can hotwire a car, can’t everybody?”

  “Good man. Come on.”

  They dragged Walter down the stairs into the gameroom.

  “See you kid,” Nolan said.

  “See you, Nolan,” Jon said. But he didn’t quite sound sure.

  7

  The elevator hadn’t seen regular use for years, having only recently been brought back into service for Charlie’s homecoming to Eagle’s Roost. Nolan stood inside the cramped, steel-frame cage, finger poised over a button that said UP. Should he press the damn thing?

  He didn’t know.

  All he knew was the elevator would deliver him somewhere inside that yellow stucco dinosaur up there. But somewhere covered a lot of unchartered territory. Still, it would be an easy, quick way inside the place; he would avoid that steep, out-in-the-open climb, wouldn’t have to worry about approaching the many-windowed house on all that flat surrounding ground. And there was surprise in it, too: no way in hell Charlie would figure Nolan for coming up the damn elevator.

  But the cage was doorless, and gave him absolutely no place to hide, nowhere to shoot from behind, nothing to help him work out a defense in case he was dropped into a waiting Charlie’s lap. And as basic as this elevator system was, Nolan expected no sliding door to await him at the end of his upward ride.

  Chances were good, however, that the elevator would open onto an entryway of some kind, with coatracks and such, a vestibule type of thing. Or perhaps somewhere in or near the kitchen, since anyone coming to a summer place like this for a stay would surely come bearing groceries. Neither kitchen or vestibule seemed highly likely places for Charlie to be hanging around.

  He pressed the button.

  The motor wheezed and coughed, the cable groaned as it lifted the cage. That was okay. He had known there’d be noise, especially with an elevator as old as this. Charlie would be expecting his son to be coming back and the sound of the elevator wouldn’t surprise him. And if Charlie was waiting for Walter by where the elevator came up, no problem either, as long as the old man was expecting the kid and not Nolan, he’d be easy to overcome.

  To get to the underground elevator, Nolan had had to shove his way through the brush and weeds that had overtaken what had once been a well-worn pathway, and sure enough, just in that area Jon had pointed out from the boathouse window, Nolan found an entrance. A heavy wrought-iron gate, which was being choked to death by ugly, clinging weeds, had been swung open to one side and a rock shoved against it to keep it open. He had then entered a narrow, low-ceilinged passageway, with plywood walls and a gravel floor; the air was dank and stale, the atmosphere falling somewhere between dungeon and cattle shed.

  The passageway, and the elevator itself, said something about the mobster mentality, or at least first-generation mobster mentality, and this, as much as the obvious age of everything, dated it all back to Capone days, in Nolan’s mind. After going to the fantastic expense of tunneling a hundred feet down through a hill, and then out thirty or forty feet more through the side of the hill to make the passageway, the first owner of Eagle’s
Roost had then spared all expense, getting the most fundamental, bare-ass elevator system he could, and putting in a passageway that could’ve been the gateway to Shanty Town. Those old mobsters betrayed their beginnings every time; they reverted to the penny-squeezing of poverty-stricken upbringings, whenever given half a chance. Those bastards knew how to suck up the money, Nolan thought, but they never learned how to spend it.

  And that none of it had ever been extensively revamped said something about Charlie, a first-generation mobster himself, who hadn’t been born into the Family, he’d married into it. Like his wife’s father, Charlie had known hard times, and like Nolan, he was a product of Depression years. While the elevator had apparently been kept in good working order and minor renovations made (electric motor replacing hydraulic, perhaps), Charlie had never put a new elevator in, or modernized the rustic passageway. Nolan could understand the psychology of it, because he shared Charlie’s inability to enjoy money, had never really been good at spending it, afraid somehow to get accustomed to luxury, as if getting ready for the next Depression. With it came a tendency to hoard your money for a rosy retirement, which wasn’t the best policy for men in high-risk fields, like Nolan and Charlie.

  In fact, this wasn’t the first time Nolan had lost all his money in one fell swoop, wasn’t even the first time Charlie had been responsible. Not long ago Charlie had exposed Nolan’s well-established cover name and cost him his hoarder’s life savings. And Nolan had done the same for Charlie, hadn’t he? Exposing him to the Family and ending a lifelong career?

  And so now they were down to this. Two men who hadn’t been young for a long time, who for reasons obscured by the years had done their best to wreck one another’s lives (and with considerable success), two men alone in a house, with guns.

  Going up in that elevator, impressions of the long conflict with Charlie flashing through his mind, Nolan might have felt a sense of destiny, a feeling that here at last would be an end to the struggle, an answer to a question long ago forgotten, an end to the senseless waste of each other’s lives. But he didn’t. His mind was full of one thing: the money. He had squeezed the need for revenge out of his perception. Charlie was just a man who had taken Nolan’s money, and Nolan had to get that money back.

  The elevator chugged to a halt.

  Nolan had been right, on two counts: no door, sliding or otherwise, greeted him, just a metal safety gate that creaked unmercifully when he folded it back, and yes, he was in a vestibule, to the right of which he could see the shelves of a pantry, to the left the white walls of a kitchen.

  But he was wrong, too, on just about everything else.

  Charlie was in the kitchen.

  Charlie was sitting on one of four plastic-covered chairs at a gray-speckled-formica-top table in the surprisingly small kitchen, its walls crowded with appliances, sink, cabinets, with one small counter strewn with Schlitz beer cans and empty TV dinner cartons.

  In front of Charlie, on the table, was a silenced nine-millimeter automatic. Also in front of him were six more Schlitz cans. Charlie was wearing his underwear, a sleeveless tee-shirt and gray boxer shorts. The flesh of his limbs looked as gray as the shorts, a tan that had sickened, and flaccid; his right thigh was bandaged; on his upper left arm was a tattoo of a rose, nicely done. Charlie had a new nose; it was pink, unlike the gray-tan skin surrounding it. He was sleeping.

  He was, in fact, snoring, quite loudly, contentedly, even drunkenly. His head was resting on folded arms and he looked both very young and very old.

  Nolan took a chair next to him at the Formica-top table. He picked up the gun and stuffed it in his belt. Charlie didn’t stir. Nolan sat and studied his old enemy, the adversary who’d given him so much hell for so many years, tried to see the maniac he’d come looking for, and saw only a frail old sleeping drunken man.

  It was all disappointing somehow. An anticlimax that turned years of running, hating, fighting into an absurd, unfunny joke. He felt foolish, a little. And vaguely sad.

  But this wasn’t a time for reflection; there was money to find, and Nolan grabbed the tattooed gray arm and shook the sleeping man and said, “Come on, Charlie, wake up.”

  Like the curtain of a play, the lids on the close-set eyes raised slowly, and Charlie lifted head from folded arms and gradually got himself into a sitting position. He yawned. He smiled. He said, “Hello, Nolan.”

  “Well, hello Charlie.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yeah. We got to quit meeting like this.”

  “I see you took my gun, Nolan.”

  Charlie’s speech was thick but clear, each word let out after careful consideration.

  Nolan shook his head. “Why’d you have to get drunk on your ass like this, Charlie?”

  He shrugged, looked almost embarrassed. “A hell of a thing, I know. I guess I wanted to be numb for the goddamn bullets.”

  “I won’t kill you, Charlie, not if you give my money back.”

  The laughter came rumbling out of Charlie’s gut and he touched his forehead to the Formica top and cackled. When he looked up at Nolan he had tears in his eyes from laughing. “You stupid goddamn asshole, you think I’m afraid of you, afraid you’re going to kill me? Get away, get away, you silly bastard.”

  “Charlie.”

  “You can’t kill me, Nolan. Not you or the whole goddamn fucking Family. Nobody can kill me, I died a long time ago; don’t you read the goddamn papers? How can you kill a goddamn dead man? You tell me! I’m getting another beer.”

  Charlie got up and weaved toward the refrigerator and Nolan was up and on him, latched onto his arm and dragged him out into the adjacent room.

  They were in the big main room of the lodge now, a high-ceilinged hall with open beams and much dark wood and lots of doors and windows. The bulk of Eagle’s Roost was right here in this one big room, the ceiling coming down on the back third, indicating the partial second floor; everything but sleeping and cooking had been done in this hall, or so the covered furniture all around would indicate; a few pieces were uncovered, the sofas, the long dining table that was over to the left, as you faced the black-brick fireplace with its elk’s head above. In spite of the coolness of the day, it was rather warm in the hall, almost as if the fireplace had been going or the heat’d been on. Nolan dragged Charlie over to the semicircle of sofas facing the fireplace. Nolan tossed the little man onto one of the sofas, sat opposite him. Between them was a large round marble coffee table with a radio on it. Charlie had started to laugh again and was rocking side to side, holding his stomach, buckling with laughter.

  Charlie’s laughter subsided and he looked at Nolan and grinned. “I won, Nolan. I beat you. For years I’ve hated your fucking guts, for months all I’ve done is think about seeing you die. And now I don’t even hate you anymore. I forgive you, Nolan. I forgive you for shooting my brother eighteen years ago and stealing my money and making a fool out of me in the Family. Yeah, that’s right, I told you before, remember? How you wrecked my goddamn life, how I never moved an inch with the Family after you killed my brother Gordon and made me look stupid. But, Nolan, I forgive you. No shit, I forgive you. I even forgive you for passing me those marked bills, and look what that did to me. I don’t hate you, anymore, Nolan, now that I’ve won. Now that I’ve won I can look at you and just not give a goddamn.”

  “Where’s my money, Charlie? I’ll knock it out of you if I have to.”

  Charlie waved his hands at Nolan, gave him a Bronx cheer. “No way, I’m too far gone to feel it, you’d have to knock me out before you hurt me and then what would I tell you?”

  Nolan closed his eyes. Well, Nolan thought, he wants to talk, so humor him, sneak up on him that way.

  “Did you kill Harry, Charlie? Did you kill Tillis?”

  “Hell, no. Did you?” Charlie’s grin disappeared and he got suddenly somber. He rubbed his cheek. “I shouldn’t talk lightly of that. Harry was . . . he was my friend and he was my wife’s brother, you know. I lik
ed him and he helped me. He did a lot. He’s the one who helped me get the bead on you, for one thing, he was bankrolling jobs for people like you, ripoff guys, and had the connections it took to run down your friends and the people you work with. We even knew you stayed with that guy Planner for a while, but we weren’t sure that was where you left the money, not until I heard you were going to go to Iowa to move it.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “One of Felix’s boys was working for me. Right under that goddamn pimp lawyer’s nose. We knew all about you planning to switch the money to a Family bank, but you were pretty goddamn careful about telling where you were hiding it, weren’t you? Waited until the last minute to tell Felix where it was, and even then all you said was ‘Iowa,’ though it wasn’t any goddamn trick figuring out where in Iowa.”

  Charlie glanced slowly around the high-ceilinged hall. “Walter and me were just waiting at the lodge here to get the word where the money was, to know where to go to get it. It was good staying here with my boy, Nolan. I wish now he wasn’t involved in this, but just the same it was good being with him, in this place. This place has a lot of memories for me, a lot of my good hours were spent at the Roost, and I don’t mind ending it here, even though I always wanted to keep that part of my life outside. But you can’t do that, can you, Nolan, you can’t get away from what you are and you might as well come face to goddamn face with it.”

  He slammed his fist down on the marble of the coffee table in front of him. “Jesus! It was so fucking perfect, had it all worked out, just come back here with that money and hop on that goddamn plane to Mexico and fly down to Argentina like we had set up and Walter and me, we could’ve built a new life together . . . Walter’s so goddamn smart, I can’t believe it, you know he’s a college man . . . but then I got hit in the leg, that old bastard Planner hit me in the goddamn leg and made me kill him, and we got stuck in goddamn Iowa City and lost time there and messed up the flight and had to put it off till today and then Jesus, you were onto me and the Family was onto me, and then I hear on the radio they’re killing off everybody who helped me . . . Harry . . . Tillis . . . Jesus.”