Money Trouble

by William J. Reynolds

  “Bring the lady another Scotch rocks,” I told the waitress the bartender sent over. “I’ll have another Mic Dark.” The girl went away, and I said, “I did.”

  “ ‘Did,’ ” Carolyn said. “Past tense?”

  I nodded. “For a while. But hate’s a pretty powerful emotion, and it takes a lot of effort to keep it going. Sooner or later you get tired. Or you get sent to a laughing academy. With any luck, you get smarter as you get older, and you gain a little perspective. When you’re a kid, you can see things from only your point of view. You get a little older, all of a sudden you can see where someone else is coming from. Or was.”

  Carolyn looked at me and I looked at her, and there were maybe ten-thousand things that could have been said about what had happened twenty years ago … about how a couple of teen-aged friends suddenly became more than friends … about how the summer passed in a gauzy blur of hot days and hot nights, and the whispers, real and imagined, of dreams, fears, hopes … about how one left and one stayed and, despite all the promises and letters and long, late phone calls, nothing was ever the same after that … about tears and accusations, recriminations, denials and hard words and, finally, silence.

  All that could have been said, and more. Things that had never been spoken back then, or in the years since. But somehow, in that instant, none of it needed to be said any longer.

  And couldn’t have been: The waitress brought our drinks and cleared away the moment with our empties.

  “Anyhow,” I said brilliantly. “Twenty years. You already know about me—journalism school, army intelligence, private investigations, and my current stint as the world’s greatest unknown writer. What about you? You went to college …”

  She stirred her drink and set aside the skinny cocktail straw. “I went, but I didn’t stay long. I just sort of, I don’t know, ran out of steam my sophomore year. The folks blamed it on drugs, but that wasn’t it. Sure, I did a little pot, everyone did, and some speed—remember speed, Ivan? We thought that was about the absolute limit, speed.” She sipped from the glass and shook her head. “Speed. Seems about as racy now as … M&Ms or something, compared to what kids are doing to themselves with smack and crack and God knows what other junk. And this.” She raised her glass and inspected it under the dim yellow light from overhead. “God, but we were innocent.”

  “Not so very innocent,” I said. “Remember LSD?”

  Carolyn smiled. “I was scared to death of it. Never touched it. Never got into anything heavy, you know? Speed scared me, the way it made me feel, and pot made my eyes itch. The grass, the speed, they didn’t have anything to do with anything. They were just a convenient excuse, you know, something to blame for the fact that the good little girl didn’t stick to the blueprint, didn’t graduate with honors, didn’t attend Harvard law, didn’t hook up with a blue-blood firm, and isn’t too likely to end up on the U.S. Supreme Court anytime soon.”

  “What did happen?”

  Carolyn set her drink down in front of her and circled it with her fingers, almost but not quite touching the dewy glass. “I lost interest, is all. Being a lawyer, that was someone else’s dream, not mine. All I ever heard was, ‘You’d be good at this’ or, ‘You should be that.’ No one ever said, ‘Hey, what do you want to do, kid?’ ”

  “What do you want to do, kid?”

  She giggled, and I realized she had a slight buzz on, and so did I.

  “Good thing no one ever asked me: I still don’t know.” She picked up her cigarette. The end glowed red. “Lord, though, I wish I was making a lawyer’s kind of money. Take all my bills and lay them end to end … and I don’t have enough money to pay them.”

  “That’s a familiar song. What happened after college?”

  “This and that. I bummed around, mostly on the East Coast. I went out to San Francisco—you know, Haight-Ashbury, all that crap—but drifted back east. I floated. Nothing jobs, nothing friends, nothing relationships. About ten years ago I realized I wasn’t a kid anymore. Revelation, right? So I went back to school. I was working as a legal secretary when Mom got sick. Now I’m a paralegal. With Miller Moore?”

  I knew the firm. “Sounds good,” I said, transferring beer from bottle to glass and from glass to me. “You never married?”

  Carolyn looked at me, her glass parked midway between the table and her mouth. “Ivan, I thought you knew … I’m—I was married to Gregg Longo.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “It was like a bad dream,” Carolyn said. “A nightmare.” She drained a little Scotch from her glass, then fixed her dark eyes on nothing in particular. “The policemen at the door, telling me Gregg was dead. Then the questions. What did Gregg do during the day? Where did he go? How long had he been out of work? How much did I earn at the firm? How much did we owe? Then more questions from the government men. Then the reporters … I wouldn’t see them, wouldn’t talk to them, couldn’t … but even the neighbors, even our friends and relatives … all those questions—all those looks …” Her eyes came back to mine. “A nightmare. Ivan … it isn’t ending, the nightmare isn’t ending, sometimes I think it’ll never—”

  She broke off and cupped her palms over her eyes.

  “Three weeks,” she said from behind her mask. “Three weeks ago Wednesday. They came and they told me that they had killed my husband. They came and they told me that my husband was a bank robber. A bank robber! It’s so … so weird, so weird. A bank robber—it’s like Bonnie and Clyde, or John Dillinger, or something. It’s like someone telling you your husband was a horse thief, or a train robber—your first impulse is to laugh.” She took her hands away from her face. Her eyes were red, but her cheeks were dry. “Can you believe it? Gregg a bank robber?”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her I couldn’t for the life of me come up with a face or anything else to put with the name Gregg Longo.

  “They say he stole seventy-eight thousand dollars this summer—seventy-eight thousand dollars in those bank holdups?—and they want me to tell them where it is!”

  “Do you know?”

  “Of course I don’t know. I don’t know because Gregg never had any seventy-eight thousand dollars. When they killed him, he didn’t have seventy-eight cents on him.” She grabbed at her cigarette, snatching it out of the Olympia ashtray, and sucked on it nervously, angrily. “No, that’s not true. He had a fifty and a few ones.” She tapped gray powder from the end of the cigarette. It sailed dead center into its black target like a mortar shell. “The fifty came from one of the robberies. They traced the serial number or something.” She released a lungful of smoke.

  I said, “Fifty seems like a lot of cash to be carrying. If a guy’s supposed to be hard up, I mean.”

  “That’s what the cops said, too. I told them, he could’ve won it shooting pool. He could’ve gotten it anywhere, he didn’t have to have stolen it. That’s my whole point. That fifty could’ve come from anywhere … couldn’t it?”

  “Cash does have a habit of getting around,” I said noncommittally.

  “Well, if you don’t want to believe it, feel free; no one else does.” There was an inch left on the coffin nail, but she smashed it out in the ashtray. “Not the police. They’ve searched the house twice already. They searched my sister’s house. They questioned all my neighbors, my friends, the people I work with. They’ve gone through bank records, tax records, credit records … they’ve got documentation on every stinking pack of gum we bought in the past six months. I think they’ve tapped my phone; there’s a funny buzz on it sometimes. I think they’ve followed me a couple of times. I think they’ve rented the house across the street so they can keep an eye on me.” She fumbled with the cigarette pack, her eyes locked on mine. “Ivan, I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. That’s why I called you.”

  I ignited a match and held it out for her. Her hands were slender, long fingered, the nails slightly rounded and painted with clear polish. The hands shook as she fiddled with the cigarette and held it into the fl
ame I extended.

  As the dead match joined its brothers in the black ashtray, I remembered Gregg Longo.

  The memory was twenty years old and set in the wide, long halls of Central High School. Longo was in our class, Carolyn’s and mine. Longo was a sullen, skinny little pinched-face sort of guy. Weasely, but unmenacing. In those days of Beatlemania and the Mersey Sound and shaggy mop-tops, Longo was one of the last of the greasers. A borderline hood, he was in trouble a lot—not because he was bad news but because he hung around with guys who were bad news. While some of our classmates were studying to be leg-breakers, loan sharks, and con artists, Gregg Longo was the guy you’d vote Most Likely to End Up Behind Bars for Swiping Hubcaps.

  Now that I remembered who he was, I didn’t have a lot of trouble picturing him as a bank robber. A successful bank robber, well, that was something else again. I had trouble wrapping my head around that one. That, and the fact that Carolyn had been married to him for the past five years.

  She read my thoughts. “Gregg had changed a lot since you knew him, Ivan. He had built a very successful business, a maintenance company that took care of a lot of businesses, a lot of offices around town. He was very good to me when Mom died. He was no saint, he had a lot of problems—things had been real bad the last six or eight months, ever since the business failed—but he was all right, you know?”

  The bartender, a sawed-off white-haired man with a crew-cut, was engaged in a mock argument with the waitress, who I suspected was a daughter or a niece or something. The TV over the bar was on, volume down, the jukebox was playing “Money for Nothing.” It was the summer you heard that song every time you turned around. On TV, Hawkeye started to say something to Trapper John, but I couldn’t lip-read it because I looked at Carolyn and said, “Why do I get the feeling that this was not The Greatest Love of All?”

  She gave me a long, hard look from the other side of the cigarette in her mouth. Then she took it away from her lips and said, “What were you expecting, Antony and Cleopatra? From what I hear, you and Jen aren’t exactly Héloïse and whatsisname.”

  “Abélard. And this isn’t a contest. I have a crappy marriage, if that makes you feel any better. It’s been a joke for years, and I have a feeling the punch line’s coming up. I apologize for being a wise-ass. At least you guys stayed together.”

  “For what it’s worth now.” Her eyes, unfocused, fixed on the television screen. Trapper John was saying something to Hawkeye. I didn’t know what. I didn’t recognize the episode. But it was an old, old one, from the days when Hawkeye and Trapper John and the rest of them were actually funny. “I called you,” Carolyn said. “About a month ago.”

  “I remember. You didn’t leave much of a message. I tried to find you in the book, but of course I was looking under your old name. I called a couple of the old crowd, but …” I let it drift.

  “I, um, I wanted to hire you. You used to be a private eye …”

  “Still am. That is, I’ve kept the license that says so. I just don’t go out of my way looking for that kind of work unless I have to. You can starve just as well on a free-lance writer’s income.”

  I waited while she wrestled with whatever she had to wrestle with in order to work things out in her own head. Finally she said, “Well, hell, it sounds crappy now, now that Gregg is gone … but I was going to hire you to, um, follow him.”

  I reached across the plastic tabletop, across the cigarette scars and the indelible rings, and covered her right hand. “Carolyn. Was it Gregg?”

  Carolyn shook her head and swallowed, hard. Her eyes were moist but, again, no tears. “Not that,” she said. “Not the banks. Gregg couldn’t …” She blinked rapidly several times, then made a halfhearted go at a laugh. “I mean, if he did rob them, I never saw a nickel of it.” She sniffed, and rummaged through her purse for a Kleenex. “No, I, um, I had another reason for calling you. I wanted you to find out if Gregg was seeing another woman.”

  “Ah.”

  She sniffed again. “This is really hard, you know? I—” Her voice cracked. We both waited a minute or so while she fought for control. “Gregg was out of work. He tried, he’d been looking everywhere, but there just wasn’t anything. I was putting in an awful lot of overtime, trying to make enough to cover all the bills. Gregg … well, you couldn’t expect him to sit around all day. He’d be out looking for work, or just … just out, you know?”

  I nodded. “What made you think he was seeing someone else?”

  “I didn’t say I thought he was. I wondered if he was. It’s stupid, I guess. I mean, before, Gregg was at work all day, I was at work all day … either one of us could’ve been fooling around with someone and the other’d never know. But it never even occurred to me until Gregg was out of work.” She took a drink, caught an ice cube, crushed it between her molars. “He was very distant. It was only getting worse. At first I figured he was just really down on himself, his situation. I told myself, ‘He’ll find something soon and everything will be okay.’ But he didn’t, and it wasn’t. I wondered if it was me. Then I wondered if it was someone else.”

  “Did you ever ask him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Since Gregg died … has there been anything … ?”

  She shook her head some more. “You mean pictures, letters, mysterious canceled checks?” She made another attempt at laughing. This one didn’t work too well either. “No, nothing. I haven’t even found a picture of an old girlfriend.”

  The song had long since ended and the bar was silent except for a dull undercurrent of conversation supplied by the few other customers. Eleven o’clock on a weeknight, even a summer night, wasn’t the joint’s rush hour. Places like that, you’ll see more traffic along about seven or eight o’clock. Dinner’s over, the dishes are done, and mom and dad pop ’round the corner for a cold one. Not too many years ago, mom and dad would’ve brought the kids along for a Roy Rogers, but the law’s tightened up on that sort of thing these days.

  We sat with our thoughts for a little while; then I said, “Well, there probably wasn’t anything going on. It wouldn’t matter either way now, would it? I mean, Gregg’s gone …”

  She finished her drink, her third, and flagged the passing waitress. I let myself be talked into another beer. What the hell.

  “Yeah, Gregg’s gone,” Carolyn said. “Gregg’s gone. And I’m here.”

  Heavy stuff. I said, “Look, Carolyn, I know how rough this has got to be, but you’ll pull through okay. I think you’re doing real fine already. Just give it time …”

  She gave me the sort of look you ought to give someone who’s mouthing the sort of mindless platitudes I was.

  “Time,” she said. “That’s good. How shall I fill my time? Waiting for another surprise inspection by the police? Overhearing my coworkers talk about me when they think I can’t hear? Watching my neighbors watch me whenever I go out back to hang up the wash … as if they expect me to come out with a shovel and dig up the seventy-eight thousand dollars they’re certain I’ve got buried there.” Her voice broke—this time under the weight of anger, not sorrow. She reached for the pack of cigarettes. It was empty. She crushed it into a ball and flung it against the wall of the booth. “Smoke too much anyway,” she mumbled through her teeth.

  Once again, the girl came with our drinks. When she had left, Carolyn said, “Christ, Ivan, I just want to be left alone. You know?” She sighed deeply. “My husband is dead, and I can’t even grieve because no one will leave me alone to do it. Everyone’s convinced Gregg was guilty. Well, maybe he was. He was out of work, and Lord knows I don’t make much at the firm. Things were tight, real tight. Who knows? Like I said, Gregg was no Boy Scout. Lately he’d been hanging around with a couple of characters who looked like bad news to me. Maybe he thought his back was against the wall … maybe he thought he didn’t have any choices … The thing is, I never saw any of the money, if there was any. I sure as shoot don’t have it now. But no one believes that any more than they believ
e Gregg was innocent. So they’re making my life hell. And they’re going to go right on making my life hell until they either see that Gregg was innocent or they get back their goddamn seventy-eight thousand lousy dollars.”

  “And that’s why you called me. This time, I mean, tonight. You want me to clear Gregg.”

  She sighed again and impatiently smeared a tear from one eye. “It sounds crummy, but I don’t care about Gregg. People are gonna think what they want to think. If there’s any good come out of the last two, three weeks, that’s it—I’ve learned how really petty people can be. Well, Gregg’s past being hurt. He doesn’t care what people think. And me, I’m just too tired to care.”

  “Then …”

  “Then I guess what I’m saying is this: Either you clear him—” She raised her glass and held the rim against her lower lip. “—or you find out where he hid the money.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  We sat around the bar for about another hour and got about another hour’s worth drunk. We talked. We talked about Carolyn and Gregg. We talked about Jen and me. We talked about Carolyn’s life. We talked about my books, the one that had been loosed on an innocent world a few weeks earlier and the one that was, as I hedgingly put it before changing the subject, “in the works.” We talked about people we’d known in school, the ones we’d kept up with and the ones we hadn’t.

  And we talked about the way Gregg Longo died.

  “He pulled over and got out of the car.” Carolyn dinked with her glass, making the cubes chase each other around the inside perimeter. “Just like they told him. The cops. Then—I don’t know—it went wrong. They said Gregg got out, but then he reached back in and came out again holding something. In his hand, his right hand. The cops thought it might’ve been a gun—it was getting dark—and the bank guy was supposed to be armed and dangerous. So they shot him.”

  “Cops,” I said. “How many cops?”