End of Story

by Peter Abrahams

  Ferdie was nothing to me back in football days and less than nothing now. I’m happily going after dust balls under the tray table and the next thing I feel is his hard muzzle at the back of my head. Am I expecting company? No. That explains my overreaction and I don’t even recognize Ferdie till he’s down. Course he has backup—procedure is how they get control of the wild boys—and they work me over for a bit, completely understandable, no problem. Then Ferdie’s back in the picture, a little different with missing teeth. One of them’s in my hand; I’ve been clinging to it during the working-me-over part for some reason. Ferdie asks the big question, the one about where the money is. I can only laugh.

  Ivy looked up. Harrow was watching her.

  “Where did you learn?” she said.

  “Learn what?”

  “To write like this.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you go to college?”

  “Have to graduate from high school first,” Harrow said.

  “You didn’t?”

  “Came close,” Harrow said.

  Ivy read the story again. “What made you decide to change tenses?”

  “How do you mean?” said Harrow.

  “Paragraph one’s in the past, two’s in the present.”

  “Yeah?” said Harrow. He got up, came around the table, read over Ivy’s shoulder. His leg pressed a bit against the back of her chair. “Hey, you’re right,” he said, and returned to his seat, simple, everyday movements that should have made no impression on Ivy, but because of their economy and ease, did.

  “You must have read a lot, growing up,” she said.

  Harrow shook his head. “But now I do.”

  “What do you read?”

  “Right now I’m going through a Louis L’Amour phase.”

  Ivy had heard the name, couldn’t quite place it. Harrow went to the shelves, brought over a worn paperback with a hard-eyed gunslinger on the cover.

  “Never read him,” Ivy said.

  Still standing behind her, Harrow said, “I like the wide-open spaces.”

  Ivy felt a funny feeling down her spine, as though someone had blown in her ear. She lowered her voice. “How did you get my number?” she said.

  “Information,” he said, lowering his voice, too; and now she actually felt his breath in her hair. “Is there a problem?”

  Ivy rose and faced him. “In terms of the preapproved lists and calling collect there is,” she said. “Not to mention cell phones.”

  “Yes,” said Harrow. “Better left unmentioned.” He smiled. “But in terms of being the writing teacher—any problems there?”

  Ivy thought about that. She was still thinking when Harrow backed quickly away. Taneesha stuck her head in the room.

  “Time,” she said.

  Harrow put Louis L’Amour back on the shelf, started for the door. He stopped, turned to her. “Any chance I could see something you’ve written?”

  Ivy checked her folder. She had El-Hassam’s poem about the knife, Harrow’s jacket, Tony B’s article on the Gold Dust verdict, Whit’s rejection letter—and a copy of “Caveman.” She handed it to Harrow.

  “Cool title,” he said on his way out.

  Ivy walked up the hill to her car, the prison wall on her right, the long view toward Lake Champlain scrolling up on her left. The intense fall colors were long gone, and now the dull ones were gone, too. The red Saab was the brightest thing around, by far. Ivy was unlocking it when she noticed a business card stuck under one of the windshield wipers.

  Sergeant Tocco’s card, with his name, position, and phone number printed on the front. She turned it over and found a single handwritten word.

  Thanks.

  Ivy ripped it up, tossed the pieces away. Getting in the car, she saw a guard watching from a tower high above.

  Ivy drove out of town, came to the highway, pulled over. Bruce had left an old road atlas in the glove box. Ivy opened it to upstate New York, found Raquette, a little dot on the south side of the St. Lawrence. She totaled up the miles from Dannemora: 67.

  Ivy got out her cell phone, called Verlaine’s. Dragan answered.

  “Ivy? This is you?”

  “Is Bruce there?”

  “Thanks God, no,” Dragan said.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Big dusting up with Chen-Li.”

  Chen-Li was the cook. “Don’t tell me he fired him.”

  “Oh, no,” Dragan said. “Chen-Li is quitting first. I am just now finished mopping up the damages.”

  “God.”

  “Any messages?” Dragan said.

  “Tell him—” Ivy paused; she’d never done this to Bruce, not once. “Tell him I can’t make it tonight.”

  “Cannot work the shift?” Dragan said.

  “No.”

  “You are sick, or—”

  “No. Just tell him I can’t make it.”

  “I? I am telling him?”

  “Put Anya on,” Ivy said. “Maybe she’ll work a double.”

  “Anya?” said Dragan. “She is quitting with Chen-Li.”

  Ivy drove into Raquette. First came a sign saying she was now on tribal land, then ramshackle houses with rusted-out car shells in the yards and glimpses of the river in between, followed by a gas station advertising the cheapest gas east of the Mississippi, plus tax-free cigarettes; and after that the Gold Dust Casino. She pulled into a half-full parking lot.

  Ivy had been in a casino once before—spring break junior year, Paradise Island. She’d walked in, dropped a quarter in the first slot machine she saw, pulled the arm, and presto: $425, a silver torrent that spilled all over her lap. After that, she’d moved onto blackjack, losing every penny of her winnings plus a hundred dollars more, which meant skipping a few meals to make her money last the rest of vacation. The whole episode took twenty minutes. She’d walked out feeling punchy.

  The Paradise Island Casino was a kind of cartoon palazzo. What had Tony B called this one? A pit? Ivy didn’t see it that way, not from the outside. The Gold Dust Casino was built of logs, like a frontier cabin, but gigantic. She went inside.

  “Welcome,” said a middle-aged blonde in a buckskin miniskirt. “Here’s a coupon for a free drink excluding champagne.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Enjoy.”

  Ivy wandered past banks of slot machines, most of them in use, onto a raised floor with roulette and blackjack tables and a deserted bar at the back. She sat down. A bartender appeared. Ivy asked for orange juice, sliding over the coupon.

  “Juice is free,” said the bartender, sliding it back.

  Ivy gazed around the room, tried to picture the crime: three men in ski masks, smoke bombs, shotguns. Hard to imagine exactly how it was supposed to work in such a vast space. “Where’s the office?” she said.

  “The office?” said the bartender.

  “The business office,” she said. “Where they keep the safe, and all that.”

  “The safe?” said the bartender. “I wouldn’t know.”

  He filled a dish with mixed nuts, pushed it toward her, then went off down the bar and made a phone call. Ivy sipped her juice, tried the nuts. Lots of Brazil nuts in there, her favorite. She realized how hungry she was, had a few more. A man in a business suit sat on the stool to her left. Another man, in a security-guard outfit, took the stool on her right. Kind of annoying, considering all the empty places, but Ivy had seen similar things at Verlaine’s. When it came to single women, men could be—

  “Got some questions, miss?” said the man in the suit. “I’m the manager.”

  Ivy turned to him: a copper-skinned man with glossy black hair. “Questions? I don’t—” In the mirror she saw another security guard step up behind her. “Oh,” she said. “You mean about the safe?”

  “I do,” said the manager.

  The bartender watched from a safe distance. Ivy laughed. “For God’s sake,” she said, “you
don’t really think I’m—” What was the expression? She fished it up from her memory pool of bad movies. “Casing the joint?”

  This was pretty funny, although no one else was laughing.

  “Why else would you be asking?” said the manager.

  “I—” What the hell was she doing, anyway? Ivy offered an answer that had some truth in it. “I’m interested in the robbery you had seven years ago,” she told him. “I’m a writer.”

  “What paper?” said the manager. “You’re supposed to go through our PR department.”

  “No paper,” Ivy said. “I write fiction.”

  The manager was silent for a moment or two. “You want to write a fiction story about a robbery that really happened?”

  “To use it as a base,” Ivy said. “A taking-off point.”

  “Taking off to what?” said the manager.

  “Good question,” said Ivy. “I hope to find that out in the process.”

  The manager nodded, as though that made perfect sense. “What have you written?” he said.

  The hateful question. “I haven’t actually published anything yet.”

  “I’ll need some proof,” the manager said.

  “Proof?”

  “That you’re a writer.”

  She had no proof—that was the whole goddamn point of her life right now. Ivy came close to saying: Or what? What happens if I can’t prove I’m a writer? But then she remembered Whit’s rejection letter. She reached inside her folder.

  “Slow and easy,” said the security guard behind her. A holster snapped open.

  Ivy took out Whit’s rejection letter slow and easy and gave it to the manager.

  He put on reading glasses and read it. “I love their cartoons,” he said, handing it back. “How can I help you?”

  Fourteen

  The manager held out his hand. “Leon Redfeather,” he said.

  “Ivy Seidel.” Redfeather: a name like that was hard to forget; Ivy’s hand wasn’t quite steady when they shook. The security guards drifted away.

  “Although I don’t always get the jokes,” Leon Redfeather said.

  “Me neither,” said Ivy. “I’ve been reading a little about the case, Mr. Redfeather.”

  “And you want to know if I was related to Jerry,” Leon said.

  “Yes.”

  “He was my dad,” said Leon, rising. “I’ll run you through the whole thing.”

  Somewhere nearby a woman said, “My lucky number’s screwing up.”

  Ivy followed Leon back across the casino floor. “We were smaller then,” he said, “but the layout was just about the same.” He stopped near the entrance, heavy, brass-studded wooden doors. “They came in at midnight, ski masks on, all of them from West Raquette across the tribal line. The fourth one—Frank Mandrell, supposedly the brains—was waiting at the old boat ramp. I can take you down later. They had a couple smoke bombs, handguns and a sawed-off twelve-gauge, but how much of what happened was planned and how much was improvised no one knows. First thing they did was grab a waitress who was walking by right where you are. Then they moved toward the counting room.” Leon pointed to a stretch of wall lined with slot machines. “The old counting room,” he added. “Two doors there back then, counting room and staff room. My dad, just finishing his break, came out of the staff room.”

  Ivy had an unhappy thought. “Were you here that night?”

  “Still in grad school,” said Leon. “Hotel management.” The front doors swung open and mobs of people hurried in; a bus was parked outside and more were driving up. “But I’ve seen the robbery,” Leon went on, “many times.”

  “It’s on tape?” Ivy said.

  “This is a casino,” Leon said.

  Ivy glanced up at the ceiling.

  “Smile,” Leon said.

  They sat in Leon Redfeather’s office, nothing grand or ornate about it, simple furniture, a view of the river—so wide the northern bank was just a low smudge on the horizon—and portraits of Indian chiefs on the walls. Ivy recognized Sitting Bull and Red Cloud. Leon slid a tape into the VCR.

  Black-and-white: three men in ski masks flickered onto the screen. The smallest one had his arm around the throat of a woman in one of those buckskin miniskirts and held a gun to her head, the muzzle actually in her ear. Her mouth was open wide, a huge black hole. Leon stopped the tape. “That’s Marv Lusk,” he said. “A month or so out of jail, where he’d met Mandrell. Lusk was a cousin, distant, if I remember, of the guy in the back—Vance Harrow. The big one with the shotgun is Simeon Carter.”

  Leon pressed play. They all moved toward the counting-room door, a heavy steel door that didn’t match the frontier-style decor. The door next to it—knotty pine with a wagon wheel on the front—opened and out came a security guard buttoning his jacket. His face reminded Ivy of the portraits on the wall. He took everything in right away, faced the big man with the shotgun.

  The tape froze. “Dad was a big football fan,” Leon said, “and Simeon Carter had come out of West Raquette High a few years before. Best lineman they ever had, twice the size of every other kid, or anyone else in the county, for that matter.”

  Leon rose, went to the TV. “This woman here?” An old woman with enormous glasses, umbrella drink in hand. “She heard the whole thing. My dad said, ‘Hey, Simeon, you big dummy, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Go on home before you land yourself in a heap of trouble.’” Leon paused, standing close to the image of his father. “A generation-gap kind of comment,” Leon said. “Could have been funny under other circumstances.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ivy said.

  “He didn’t need the job,” Leon said. “Even the way revenues were then when we were starting out, he could have lived off his share. But my dad…well, you had to know him.” He went silent.

  Ivy stared at the frozen images: the terrified waitress, Leon’s stern father, and three hidden faces, although Marv Lusk’s gritted teeth showed through the mouth opening in his mask. Carter was looking down at Jerry Redfeather. Harrow was reaching inside his jacket; his posture seemed a little awkward.

  Leon went back to his chair, reached for the remote. Action. Simeon Carter swung the shotgun at Jerry Redfeather, cracking him on the side of the head. Jerry toppled over, but as he fell, he drew his gun. The muzzle flashed and suddenly there was a big rip across the top of Lusk’s mask and he was falling backward. The waitress ran away. Jerry, on the floor now, looked stunned, as though he’d had the breath knocked out of him. Carter stepped back, the shotgun in one hand now, pointing down at Jerry. Jerry started bringing his gun up. The shotgun went off, a big white blast on the tape, and Jerry got jolted a few feet across the floor; but Ivy also saw a smaller, simultaneous glare sprout from Jerry’s gun.

  Carter peered down at his own chest, as though in surprise. He took two steps backward, then slumped to the floor in a twisted heap. Harrow stepped over Carter’s body, stumbling a little, and tossed a canister to his right. He bent over Jerry, ripped a key chain off his belt. Smoke came curling into the picture. Harrow unlocked the counting-room door and went in, gun raised.

  The smoke grew thicker. Harrow came out in seconds, a duffel bag over his shoulder. He ran to the left, out of the frame.

  Another man appeared, slow and cautious, a handkerchief over his mouth. He knelt over Jerry, felt for a pulse in his neck, moved on to Carter, finally to Marv Lusk. Lusk raised his head an inch or two. His lips moved.

  “A doctor who happened to be there,” Leon said. “Lusk tells him that it’s all Frank Mandrell’s fault.”

  Blood came seeping out of Lusk’s mouth; then it poured. The smoke thickened. Leon switched off the machine.

  His gaze met Ivy’s.

  “That must be hard to watch,” Ivy said.

  “At first,” Leon said. But his eyes weren’t quite dry.

  “Your father was so brave,” Ivy said.

  “He wouldn’t have seen it that way,” said Leon. “Any of this helpful to you?”

&n
bsp; Ivy didn’t know. How hateful the tape was, in so many ways; the very worst, maybe, being how Harrow ripped the keys off Jerry’s belt.

  “Could I just see the very end part again,” Ivy said, “where he runs out?”

  Leon replayed the end. Harrow had one of those duck-footed runs, with a short, choppy stride, almost clumsy.

  Leon drove Ivy along a bumpy dirt road that ran by the river and dead-ended at a huge willow tree, branches trailing in the water. They got out of the car, walked down a boat ramp, the cement all cracked, the sides eroding. A cold wind blew from the Canadian side. The river made a sound like shhh.

  “Frank Mandrell was waiting for Harrow right here,” Leon said. “He had a little runabout tied to the tree. The Border Patrol launch was out that night and they spotted him—his name had already gone out over the air. Whether Harrow double-crossed him wasn’t clear, but Mandrell made a deal on the spot, giving up Harrow as the third robber. They grabbed Harrow over in West Raquette, where he was living with Betty Ann Price. Betty Ann was already gone and so was the money.” Leon watched a Styrofoam cup float quickly by. “Two hundred ninety-seven thousand five hundred and twenty dollars was the exact amount, no matter what you’ve read. And there was no skimming. They must think we’re stupid.”

  “Who?” said Ivy.

  “White people,” Leon said. “The counting-room jobs are all tribal. Why would we skim from ourselves?”

  They got in the car. Leon turned the key but they didn’t go anywhere; he watched the wind ruffling up the water in spiky little bumps. “What kind of story are you planning?” he said.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Ivy said. “I need to know more.”

  “Such as?”

  “What Betty Ann Price was like, for example.”

  Leon turned up the heat. “Can’t we start with an easier one?”

  “I figured you knew her,” Ivy said. “Didn’t she work at the casino?”

  “Dealt blackjack for a few months,” Leon said. “She quit five weeks before the robbery. But as for knowing her, I guess I really didn’t.”