When she wasn’t busy seating people, Lynn’s station was at the kitchen end of the bar, away from the dining area, where she could keep an eye on the waitresses. After eight the place got busy. I didn’t mind; it gave me less time to think. Around ten my thinking got a crack on the knuckles. Palladino — a swarthy bull of a man with snow-white hair — came in to answer the wall phone. He swung around to survey the bar. “Don’t see him,” he boomed into the receiver. “Joe Williams been in tonight, Pete?”
Fortunately my back was to him. A scattered chorus of “No’s” from along the bar covered my silence. Palladino relayed the message and bustled out. I breathed again. You didn’t think there’d be inquiries about him? I asked myself. With Charley Risko looking for him? I set my shaking hands to washing beer glasses.
At two o’clock I was just as ready to rack it up as Tip had been at six. Palladino moved in behind the bar to outwait the night owls. At the apartment Lynn and I had scrambled eggs. Getting ready for bed she surprised me. “I had a letter from Gussie today,” she said.
Gussie was her cousin Augusta, four years younger than Lynn, and the daughter of a drinkin’ uncle. It gave me a turn hearing Lynn was in contact with anyone in her family. Once she started that — well, I’d had a long run for an old stud. “What’s on her mind?” I asked.
“She left home three months ago and got a job. Now she’s lost the job and she’s broke and she won’t go home. She kids about it, but it’s a worrisome thing for an eighteen-year-old.”
“I could move down the street and you could invite her to visit with you for a while,” I said.
“You could stay right here and I could invite her to visit me for a while,” Lynn said sharply. I was sitting on the edge of the bed taking off my shoes. She walked over to me, leaned down, and kissed the back of my neck. It did something to my toes. “Although I don’t know that I will. Gussie can be a bit of a handful.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard you say. Well, don’t let your invitation hang fire too long if you’re going to give it. The best way to repair mistakes made at her age is in advance.”
“All right, grandfather,” Lynn smiled. She bounced into the bed beside me. Despite the previous chain reaction from the back of my neck to my toes, we were asleep in ten minutes without violating the center of the bed. I don’t know what Lynn had on her mind. I had too much on mine.
I was up at one in the foreign noonday sunshine. I eased out of bed without waking Lynn. In the kitchenette I had a glass of tomato juice, and then went downstairs to the superintendent’s apartment in the basement. “Swede around, Edna?” I asked his wife when she came to the door. She was a two-hundred-pound whale with a baby face. “I need a hammer and a screwdriver.”
“He’s gone out, Pete.” She hesitated. “Don’t tell him I told you, but his tool box is behind the furnace room door.”
“Thanks, Edna.”
When I opened the box, the first thing I saw was a hacksaw. That was more like it. Working in the briefcase out in the car was too public, anyway. I went upstairs with the hacksaw and ran the car around in back of the apartment. In the back seat I spit on my hand and went to work. A hacksaw expert I’m not, and in the afternoon’s sticky heat I was drenched with perspiration by the time I finished. I wrapped briefcase and arm in the raincoat that was stiff with dried blood and carried them down to the basement.
I buried the arm in a pile of trash until I could think of a permanent place for it, and fetched a hammer and the biggest screwdriver I could find in the tool box. The briefcase lock was worse than the handcuff chain. In five minutes the screwdriver was looking like a ragged letter S and I hadn’t much more than scratched the lock. I discarded the ruined screwdriver, found a cold chisel, wrapped it in the tail of my shirt to deaden the noise, picked up the hammer, and really went to work on the lock. It still took me another five minutes before I shattered it.
I opened the briefcase and looked at the neatly wrapped packages of money. It didn’t surprise me. I’d have been surprised if it hadn’t been there. What did surprise me was the amount of it. And the denominations on a couple of the packages I picked up. I tried half a dozen more. Business must never have been better for Charley Risko, I decided. I picked up the briefcase and hefted it, and felt the first moment of doubt. There was just too damn much money in it. Had Risko gone out of his mind and started dealing in counterfeit?
I set the briefcase down and reopened it. In a separate compartment I found packets of papers. I fished out a few. They were wrapped in a kind of oilskinned paper and tightly sealed. On the wrapping was some printing, not much, and not in English. It looked something like Greek, but not exactly. I’d run a real estate office for a Greek once. The printing wasn’t in Greek.
I shoved the oilskinned packets back and returned to the money. One of the money packages felt odd in my hand. I separated it from the others for a better look. It was the wrong shape, and a second look told why. It was English pounds. Hundred-pound notes. The package next to it was francs. I looked at that one a couple of times before I noticed it was Swiss francs. U.S., English, and Swiss money, and if there wasn’t hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of it, I was a purple grackle.
If it was legitimate and not counterfeit, I reminded myself.
The foreign money and the sealed packets of papers bothered me. So did the denominations on the bills. It was outside the pattern, at least the pattern of the days I’d known. In three years I could be out of step, though, and anyway, if it wasn’t counterfeit I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. For three years and ten months the world had owed me something, and now, thanks to Joe Williams and a runaway car, it looked as though it had finally got around to paying off.
If it wasn’t counterfeit.
Heavy steps on the stairs startled me. I had the briefcase rewrapped in the raincoat, bloody side in, and under my arm when Swede came in. He was a massive Neanderthal whose year-round costume consisted of a T-shirt and dirty white ducks, even in zero weather. He looked sourly at the pretzeled screwdriver. I fished a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Put the change in an envelope and shove it under my door,” I told him as an afterthought. I didn’t want him thinking a ruined screwdriver was a five-dollar big deal.
I went out back again and put the briefcase in the trunk of the car. I wasn’t happy about putting it there, but I couldn’t think of a better place for it. I got in the car and drove off. I still had to get rid of the car door in my back seat, and the raincoat. I drove around looking for a weedy vacant lot. I couldn’t take the time to drive to a dump. Most dumps have watchmen, anyway. When I found a likely looking lot, I drove completely around it once, then came back to the side that backed up on a blank-walled factory building across the street. I parked the car, removed the torn-off door from the back seat, and walked out onto the lot. The weeds were bushy and waist-high. When I came abreast of a good thick clump, I pitched the door into it.
When it landed, I stood there petrified. Every time I’d seen the door before it had been upside down. This time it landed paint side out. Joe Williams’ car had been a maroon Pontiac. The door I was looking at was jet black. It hadn’t come from Joe Williams’ car. It had to have come from the car that hit him.
I jacked myself up and got back to the apartment basement in a hurry, taking time out only to drive up an alley and dump the raincoat out the window. Swede wasn’t around. From the trash pile I retrieved the arm and hand, now stiff and clawlike, the arm and hand that did not belong to Joe Williams. I picked out the cleanest sheet of paper I could find in the trash, handling it with my handkerchief to cover my own fingertips. From the coal-bin floor I scraped up some coal dust, wet it down with saliva, and took from the hand as careful a set of fingerprints as I could manage. I folded the paper and put it in my billfold, still careful to keep my own prints off it, and returned the hand to the trash pile.
I stood there at the foot of the basement stairs with a thousand things running
through my mind. Someone would be tearing the earth apart at the seams trying to find the briefcase. Charley Risko would be doing the same in an effort to recover whatever it was Joe Williams had been bringing him. Charley’s package must have been burned up in the fire. I was in the clear all the way around, though. For once I hadn’t been caught with a fork when it started raining soup.
If the money wasn’t counterfeit.
I went upstairs. Lynn was getting breakfast in the kitchenette. “Pete!” she exclaimed after one look at me. “Your face! What happened?”
“Face? Happened? Nothing. Nothing at all. Had to change a tire,” I said hurriedly. “I’m going to take a shower.”
I took it. I couldn’t hold the soap in my hand, and it wasn’t because it was any more slippery than usual. All I could think of was the briefcase full of money in the trunk of my car. I knew I had to get a better grip on myself than I had on the soap. Out from under the shower, I was still perspiring. I tested my pulse, and I didn’t go back into the kitchenette until it had slowed down.
We went to work in my car. I was afraid to leave it parked near the apartment with the briefcase in the trunk. Beforehand I took a hundred-dollar bill from a package in the briefcase and slipped it into my pocket. I’d turn the bill in with my bank for the night’s business. If it was a phony, Palladino’s bank would be on the phone to him in the morning.
At work during a quiet spell I called Palladino in to the bar. “There’s a bunch of wiseacre kids fooling around the cars out at our place,” I said to him. “Hubcaps missing, air out of the tires, that kind of crap. I can’t catch the punks at it, but I think I’ve got the fingerprints of one of them. What’s the best way to go about seeing if he’s got a record and finding out his name and address so I can put the fear of God in him?”
Palladino held out a hand like a sixteen-pound ham. “Give,” he grunted. “I got a boy downtown still owes me a few favors.” He winked heavily.
I fingernailed the paper out of my wallet and handed it to him, and he waddled away. I couldn’t make the inquiry myself, but it was something I should know. If anything should slip somewhere along the line, it could help a hell of a lot to know from what direction they’d be coming at me.
Because one thing I knew: come high water or dry riverbed, I wasn’t giving up that briefcase.
Around eleven o’clock Happy Jack Markham walked into the bar and slapped a paper down in front of me that I recognized at once as a garage estimate. His broken-nosed features were wearing their usual cheerful grin. “Man, you really use a car,” he said amiably. “Next time I rent — ”
“Shut up, Jack!”
He shut up. He looked surprised. In the six months I’d been there, I think it was the first time I’d raised my voice. Heads turned along the bar. I kicked myself mentally for letting Jack approach me publicly like this. I should have gone to him. In silence I counted out enough money to cover the estimate and added a bonus before pushing it across the bar to him. I liked Happy Jack; he was one of the world’s originals, a tough-fibered, nail-hard man who had earned his passage for years in the exercise of those activities calling for a maximum of brazen gall and physical courage. It hurt to see a man like him sidelined by a heart murmur. It was only too clear a reminder of the mortal status of us all.
“At least lemme know what happened,” he protested, pocketing the money. “You sure scuffed — ”
“Later, Jack,” I said. My voice may have been lowered but its intensity was not. Happy Jack regarded me speculatively. His glance took in Lynn standing at her station at the end of the bar, and his expression cleared. So I was keeping something from her? His responsive grimace was intended to indicate that I could count on him.
“Listen, Pete,” he began again after draining the drink I set out on the bar for him. “Somethin’ funny happened you ‘n I ought to talk — ”
“Later,” I cut him off, and walked away from him. He shrugged, looked at Lynn again, then at me, and rolled his eyes ceilingward. If he had written it on a blackboard his opinion couldn’t have been expressed more clearly that to cheat on Lynn a man had to be out of his mind. Happy Jack shrugged again, topped off the first drink with another, and departed. For once I was glad to see him go.
There was no call from Palladino in the morning. The hundred-dollar bill had passed muster at the bank. The money in the briefcase was legitimate. It made me wild to know how much there was, but I had no place to count it. I couldn’t even think of a safe hiding place where it would still be easily accessible.
That afternoon I made sure Swede was out of the building, then went down to the basement and retrieved the arm and hand from the trash pile. It was time; it was beginning to get ripe. I wrapped it in the most inflammable things I could find and stuffed it down the apartment incinerator. It was a big incinerator, and for thirty minutes I stood there and shoved down everything I could find that would burn, including a couple of pieces of rubber. If there was a smell, no one would be able to identify it.
Two days later I was still riding the briefcase around in the trunk of the car. I was so jittery it showed. Twice Lynn asked me if I was in trouble. When I denied it, and just about took her head off in the process, she retreated into an injured silence. Pressure was building up inside me like in a leaky boiler; I had to talk to someone, but I couldn’t talk to anyone.
Friday night at work Palladino shambled up to me at the bar, gravity in every line of his moon face. I braced myself, I didn’t know for what. “You hear about Markham?” he asked me.
“Markham? H-Happy Jack?”
“Yeah. They took ‘im outa the trunk of his car this afternoon. He’d been through the wringer.” The unexpected import of Palladino’s words left me so high between wind and water I could feel the hinges of my knees loosening. The big man was shaking his head, frowning. “I didn’t know he was in wrong wit’ any of th’ boys. Funny thing: I hear nothin’ they done to him was enough to send him over. Must be his heart conked out on him.”
He left me. I retreated to the far corner of the bar, my temples pounding. How could I have been so stupid not to have foreseen that whoever had lost the briefcase would obtain the name and address of the first car at the scene of the accident? They had come to Markham, and Happy Jack, no man to be intimidated by threats or even outright violence, undoubtedly had sought to bargain with them before telling them what they wanted to know: who had been the driver of the car if he hadn’t. Happy Jack owed me no loyalty, but his well-developed inclination to turn a profit in any situation in which he found himself would have been as instinctive as breathing. He would have attempted to bargain, and found his tormentors uninterested in bargaining. His anger must have killed him, if his injuries hadn’t.
BUT — had it killed him before the injuries forced him to reveal my name?
I poured myself a pony of brandy and drained it in one gulp.
When I turned, I found Lynn’s gently disapproving gaze fixed on me from the other end of the bar. Disapproving or not, I moved in her direction. I had to talk to someone. I couldn’t stand my own thoughts.
Her innate good sense kept her from saying anything about the brandy. “I meant to show you your picture in the paper this morning,” she said to me when I came up to her station. She burst out laughing at what must have been the expression on my face. “Don’t look so startled, Pete; it wasn’t really you. Just a dark, smudged picture that looked something like you.”
“Picture?”
She nodded. “Of an accident down in Ohio the first of the week.”
I got away from her somehow. I unlocked the half door leading into the storeroom behind the bar and went in. Tip O’Neal always ate his lunch in there, and he always left the morning paper. I snatched it up from the upended case of Amontillado that served as Tip’s table and turned hurriedly from the folded-down racing page. When I saw it, I think my heart nearly stopped beating.
Dark, yes; smudged, yes; but my picture.
A black-boxed item
appeared alongside it, and the headline jumped up at me. TOLEDO JUDGE SEEKS BENEFACTOR. I strained in the poor light to see the smaller print. “Judge Owen Haines, whose life was saved on the turnpike recently by an unknown man, is still trying after one unsuccessful attempt — ”
I stopped reading, crushing the paper in my hands. Judge Haines had obtained the name and address, too. He’d looked up Markham to thank him, and found Markham wasn’t the man. Happy Jack had been trying to tell me that at the bar the night I shut him off. It was consistent with Happy Jack’s nature that he would have told the judge nothing without first checking with me. Consistent, and fortunate for me.
I uncrumpled the newspaper to look again at the picture. It was a poor picture, but it was a picture. The photographer hadn’t been aiming at me, but at the remains of the wreck beyond. Regardless, not only Judge Haines was looking for me now. The people who owned the briefcase were looking for me. Charley Risko — if he recognized the picture, and why shouldn’t he? — was looking for me. And if the damn newspaper wandered far enough afield, a prison warden and a couple of police departments would be looking for me.
The bare walls of the storeroom seemed to close in on me. For a second I felt I couldn’t breathe. There was a door in the rear wall of the storeroom that led to the parking lot out back. Only Palladino was supposed to have a key to it, but my first week on the job I’d had one made for myself. I hadn’t cared for the idea of a dead-end wall behind me as I worked. I took out my key and went over and tried the lock, quietly. I knew it worked, because I’d tried it before, but I just had to make sure again. Then I relocked the door and put the key back in my pocket.
Now that it was too late, I could see in technicolor what a star-spangled fool I’d been. After my outburst at Happy Jack at the bar, any inquiries there were sure to end up tying me to his car. Anyone talking to Swede Jonson, the apartment superintendent, was certain to learn about the ruined screwdriver, and make his own deductions. Judge Haines had only to set eyes on me to make positive identification. And there was the briefcase itself still riding around in the trunk of my car. Even with the key to the back door in my pocket, I’d never felt in a tighter box. I was tempted to cut and run right that second.
Strongarm (Prologue Crime) Page 2
