“All right,” Abel finally announced, as if we’d been having a discussion. “All right.” A glance, only that, at Patavena. “Don’t just stand there. Go finish the bedroom.”
“We ain’t done talkin’.”
“We sure the fuck are. Finish the goddamn bedroom.”
Patavena threw the decoy into a cushionless chair, from which it bounced onto the carpet. The tall man’s Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times before he spoke: “Yeah, I’ll go finish the goddamn bedroom. But you and me, we ain’t done yet. We still gotta talk about how you fucked me over.”
“I never fucked you over, stupid.”
“Yeah, well, you were gonna.”
“Bullshit.” Abel was trying to keep the gun and his attention on me while carrying on a conversation with Patavena, far to his left. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t sympathize.
“Bullshit,” Patavena replied hotly. “Then what’choo do, you borrow old man Steinhauer’s car and come down here without me. I s’pose, you find the money, you’re gonna come get me so we can split it.”
“That’s right, pinhead.” Again he glanced at Patavena; again it was for only a second.
The reply seemed to suck the wind out of Patavena’s jets. His mouth opened, closed, opened again, and said, “Oh. Uh.”
“Now will you go finish the goddamn bedroom!” Sweat beaded Abel’s forehead, even though he was standing right in front of the air conditioner. He dragged his left paw across his sort-of mustache and sniffed loudly.
Patavena hesitated, then went. The trailer layout was linear. The door opened to the living room, the living room segued into a minuscule kitchen, the bedroom was just past the refrigerator. It was from the bedroom that bumping, scraping, clunking noises now emerged.
“Jesus,” the young woman at my right muttered under her breath.
“Saves,” I said. She looked at me. “These guys friends of yours?” I said.
She snorted derisively.
“You two shut up,” Abel said.
“I never said anything, asshole” the woman said.
“Well, shut up anyway.”
“Fuck you. You think that gun makes you a big man.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but the gun does make him a big man.”
A loud crash came from the back room.
“Christ, he’s trashing the place!” The woman took two steps forward. Abel’s arcing the gun a few degrees toward her put a stop to that.
“You give us what we want, he’ll quit.”
“I told you, creep—I don’t have any money.”
The short, square man looked at me. I shrugged.
The bedroom door came open, and Patavena stepped out.
“Find anything?” Abel growled.
“Nah. ’Cept lookit this weird shit she got.” He raised both arms. From one hand dangled a pair of manacles, black leather cuffs linked by six or eight inches of nickel chain. In the other hand he held a short but businesslike riding crop, also black. “Weird, huh?” Patavena said with an idiotic grin.
I glanced at the woman. Her face was impassive. I said, “It’s bad manners to go prowling around in peoples’ closets, especially lady peoples’. You didn’t find what you’re looking for; why not blow—go home and cry in each other’s arms, or whatever you two like to do.”
Abel brought back his right hand, meaning to caress the side of my head with the gun. It was a mistake. In that interval the gun was aimed at the ceiling, not me, and I didn’t care so much about the ceiling getting ventilated. I spun a quarter turn on my right foot and brought my left knee up, hard, between his legs. He wilted and I took the noisemaker away from him with no trouble.
Patavena hadn’t moved. He still stood in the semihallway formed by the outside wall and the fridge. He still held the woman’s little playthings like trophies. He still wore an idiotic expression. But he was no longer grinning.
I said, “At risk of repeating myself, Laverne, take Shirley here and blow.”
“Uh,” he said. “We got two cars.”
“Typical American family. For cryin’ out loud, I didn’t kill him. He’ll be all right in two or three minutes. In three or four minutes you had both better be well on your way to far away from here.” I waggled the gun. Patavena stepped forward, remembered he had the toys, and pressed them on me. I took them both in my left hand, making a big deal of keeping Abel’s gun aimed at Patavena’s belly. Not that I needed the piece anymore. The fight had gone out of them.
Abel, groaning, gagging, was almost upright again, thanks in part to a nearby armchair. Patavena, when he had deposited his burden on me, moved to help him. They staggered out of the metal house. Neither looked back.
I closed the door after them and shot the bolt.
“Shiiit,” the woman breathed when the door was shut. She picked her way across the ruined room and sat on a love seat whose cushions were … well, elsewhere. She rummaged around and through some junk on the floor, came up with cigarettes and a throwaway lighter, and fired up. Her hands trembled, but barely.
I got my first real look at her then. Slender, dark haired—as I’ve said. Well-built in that stripped-down, athletic sort of way. Built for speed. She looked familiar, and in a minute I knew why. Add ten years and the concomitant little wrinkles, sags, and bulges, and you’d have Carolyn Longo. I wondered if Gregg Longo had realized the resemblance between his new cookie and the old model. Had it been coincidental? Or had it been the point?
When she had taken a deep drag of smoke and released it in a shaky exhalation, I pronounced my name.
“Eloise Slater,” she said with a vague cigarette-hand gesture toward herself. “Thanks for getting rid of those two.”
“No charge.”
“By the way, don’t you think you’d better look and see if they really left?”
“They left.”
“They could be out there waiting for you. Or me.” She pulled again on the gasper.
“They’re not,” I said.
Eloise Slater narrowed her eyes to peer at me through the cigarette smoke. “Yeah? Well … I’m from Missouri.” With a movement so quick it was barely a movement at all, she angled herself off the love seat, dodged the debris on the floor between her and the door, and pulled back the little brass-plated bolt. She hesitated, stuck the cigarette between her lips, opened the door two inches, maybe less, and looked out. When that proved nonfatal, she opened the door wide enough to take her head and shoulders and gave the unpaved road outside a thorough going-over.
“What part of Missouri?” I said.
She closed the door and bolted it. “Wise-ass,” she breathed, a slight, rueful smile at her lips. The smile tightened as her eyes left my face and took in the little room. “Geez, they trashed the place.”
“No permanent damage,” I said. “These guys were strictly amateurs, and bad amateurs at that. Pros don’t content themselves with looking under furniture. They take the furniture apart, they pull the paneling off the walls, they rip up the carpets, they generally make like a plague of locusts. Incidentally …” I held out the crop and the manacles. “Yours, I believe.”
She took them. Her face was open and, except for that faint smile at her full lips, expressionless. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Eloise Slater said.
“What makes you think I haven’t?” Her left eyebrow rose slightly, speculatively. I said, “Is that what Gregg Longo came here for?”
She drew again on the cigarette. “You make me sound like a hooker. I’m not. Gregg and I were—well, I don’t know if you’d say we were in love, but we liked each other. A lot. I was sorry when he got killed, real sorry. I miss him. And if we … played our little games, what’s it to you or anybody? And what in hell’s going on around here, anyway? First those two comedians and now you.”
“The cops, local and federal, think Longo knocked over a bunch of banks earlier this summer.”
“I know. I watch the news.”
“Then you know that he�
�or whoever—made a tidy profit on the venture. When Longo was killed he didn’t have any loot in his back pocket or in the car.” Not true: He had that stolen fifty, but as Carolyn had said, it could have come from anywhere. Including Gregg Longo’s hidden stash, if he was the thief. “The authorities didn’t find any in his house,” I went on. “His wife doesn’t have it. Abel and Patavena, the two charmers you’ve been entertaining this morning, they don’t have it. As they proved by coming here in the belief that Longo might have parked the cash with you.”
“Boy, did someone steer them wrong. If I had seventy-eight thousand bucks would I be living in a coffin like this and spending six nights a week at the Grain Bin lounge working for pennies an hour plus tips plus all the ass-pinching I can stand?”
Depends how shrewd you are, I thought, but didn’t voice it. “The cops never talked to you after Longo was killed?”
“Hey, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful or anything, but what’s it to you?”
“I’m a private detective, hired to investigate Longo.” It was all she needed to know. “The cops. They never talked to you?”
“No, thank you. I guess they don’t know about me and Gregg. I didn’t think anybody did. On account of him being married, you know? Anyhow, I wasn’t too broken up that the cops didn’t come hassle me.”
“I don’t suppose. But didn’t it occur to you that you might be able to clear Longo?”
“How?” She sucked on the cigarette. “He didn’t hide any money here, but that wouldn’t prove he didn’t hide it somewhere else.”
“You work nights. That means you saw Longo during the day.” She nodded. “These were daylight robberies. If Longo was with you on any or all of those occasions—”
“What, you think I wrote it down in my diary every time he shot his load? If he was over here every day, sure, I’d go tell the cops that. But he wasn’t … and dates, I don’t know any dates. I’d end up getting hauled through the grinder by the cops, and it wouldn’t do Gregg any good. Wouldn’t do him any good anyway, ’cause he’s dead.”
Unassailable logic. I said, “How long were you and Longo …”
“About four, five months, up until he got killed. I met him at the bar. He was there with those other two lowlifes, whatever you said their names were, which I guess is how they knew about me. They didn’t ever come around more than once, twice. Never after me and Gregg took up.”
I righted a chrome-and-vinyl kitchen chair and sat on it backward. “What do you think, was your boyfriend the bank-robbing type?”
She had wandered back across the room and resumed her place on the love seat. “I don’t know what ‘type’ that is,” she said. “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. But I don’t think he did.”
“Did he ever say anything, do anything that made you wonder?”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know. Maybe something that didn’t register at the time. But then he got killed, and they were saying he robbed those banks, and you sort of said to yourself, ‘Holy cow, that’s what he meant.’ Anything?”
“Well …”
I waited.
“This is so stupid … I mean …” She made a disgusted sound, put on a face to go with it, and said, “Look, once he said how he ought to go rob a bank or knock over a liquor store or something. You know, because he was so strapped for money. But it was just something you say, you know?”
I knew. People say things all the time. “If X did Y I’ll kill him.” “If things go on like this I’ll jump off a building.” “If I don’t get a job pretty soon I’m gonna have to start robbing banks.” Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s just talk. Contrary to the TV mystery shows, cops are usually hip enough to know that. They also know, and so did I, that there’s always that one time in a hundred.
I said, “Well, how did he say it. I mean, did he just say it—‘They want six hundred bucks to fix the car, and I don’t have it unless I go rob a bank’—or did he have a plan?”
She looked at me through the gauze of smoke that rose from her mouth. “Get serious.”
“I am serious.”
“Well, hell no, he didn’t have a plan. For cryin’ out loud.”
“Money was a problem for him the whole time you knew him?”
“Problem? Nah, how could it be? He didn’t have any.” She pulled on the cigarette. “I mean, yeah, sure he had money, a couple of bucks maybe. But nothing to spread around. Enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, not enough to make the rent. You know what I mean?”
“Believe me, I do. There was never a time when all of a sudden he seemed pretty flush, maybe had a couple extra bucks to spend?”
“If he did, he was cagey. Real cagey. When he died he still owed me a hundred bucks.”
“Let’s say he was cagey. Let’s say he took care of those banks and he kept it from his wife and his pals and you—everybody. What would he do with the money? Where would he stash it?”
“How the hell would I know? I wasn’t married to the guy. But I guess that wouldn’t make any difference, since you say his wife doesn’t know either. I liked Gregg a lot but I didn’t know everything there was to know about him. I guess maybe we never had that kind of time to spend together, you know what I mean?”
This time I didn’t know and said so.
Eloise Slater’s eyes turned reminiscent. They were dark eyes, dark like Carolyn’s, but where Carolyn’s were almost black, Eloise’s were gray, a dark gray, a gray-flannel gray. “When you spend a lot of time with someone, you talk, you know, about all kinds of things. When you don’t have a lot of time, you don’t want to waste it.”
“You get down to business.”
“There you go again, like I’m some kind of whore.” There was neither anger nor resentment in her tone. There was, literally, nothing. “Well, think what you like. Gregg and me, we just had some nice times together. He wasn’t perfect, but he was a really nice guy.”
“Whips and chains notwithstanding.”
She eyed me coolly. “You got it backward, mister.”
“Really? I didn’t know Longo very well, but I’d’ve never figured him for the type.”
Eloise Slater crushed her cigarette into a lime-green plastic ashtray she found under the loveseat. “You and your ‘types.’ There aren’t any ‘types.’ Some people like some things and some people don’t, and those are the only ‘types’ there are. You can’t tell by looking. And a lot of people don’t know what they like until they try. Gregg didn’t know. Maybe you don’t know either.” Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe you’d like to try some things.” She had placed the toys next to her on the love seat. Now she raised the cuffs. The nickel chain caught the light and threw it back at me. “Maybe you’d like to try these on for size. Maybe you’d like for me to tie you spread-eagle with a gag in your mouth and a leather hood over your head.” She grinned. “Would you like that?”
“Thanks for the offer, but never before lunch.”
She shrugged with studied nonchalance. Most people shrug with their shoulders. “You may not know what you’re missing.”
“And then again I may.” The tank top and cutoffs she wore did little to mask the pleasures her lithe body might hold. Might, hell.
Again she shrugged, and dropped the cuffs. “Maybe you do. Anyhow, I don’t know what else I can tell you. About Gregg, I mean. If he was a crook he sure kept it hidden from me. If he had seventy-eight thousand he sure didn’t leave it with me. He didn’t leave anything. Except a toothbrush.” She looked around at the disarray. “You’re welcome to search the place, if you can find the place.”
“I’ll pass on that offer too. I don’t think Abel and Patavena will bother you anymore. But if they do, or if you think of anything that may be helpful—something Longo said, maybe, or did—give me a call.” I handed her one of my business cards. She studied it as if she expected it to reveal more than my name, rank, and telephone number.
“Maybe I’ll call sometime,” she said after a long while.
CHAPTER SIX
I’m a suspicious kind of guy. Goes with the territory, maybe, although it’s a chicken-egg situation: Am I a suspicious kind of guy because of the trade I’ve plied, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, for so many years? Or have I been drawn to my various investigation-oriented jobs because I was a suspicious kind of guy to start with?
In any event, there I was, being suspicious, in my car, just down the road from where the mobile-home court’s entrance emptied into the street. I was parked on a side street half a block away, in the shade of a two-story sand-colored medical-arts building, listening to the radio and keeping an eye on the gravel drive leading into the trailer park.
Half an hour later, give or take, a once-red Le Car appeared at the end of the drive in a cloud of dust, made a right turn without signaling and, a few blocks down, another right onto the high road. I didn’t get a good look at the driver—too much white dust from the trailer park’s gravel lot—but the car was Eloise Slater’s.
There were any number of reasons for her to head out into the wide world. A varied selection of them went through my head as I followed her down that ribbon of highway, as the bard has it. Most of them were perfectly innocent. I followed her anyway.
I followed her over to Seventy-second Street, followed her north and into the city. She turned left at the light at Grover Street. For an instant I thought she was heading for the construction site on Hascall and wondered what the heck for. But she turned left again immediately, into the Howard Johnson lot. I drove on by, turned right at the next opportunity, got onto the access road that runs parallel to Seventy-second, and doubled back down to the light. By the time I pulled into the HoJo, the Le Car was parked and empty, its occupant just entering the glass doors to the coffee shop.
The coffee shop was the squeaky-clean vinyl-and-plastic palace these places always are. I grabbed a two-top booth near the front windows, which afforded me a good view of the back of Eloise Slater’s head and the front of her companion’s. He was a light-skinned black man in a sharp black pin-striped suit, red silk tie, and blindingly white shirt. His hair was medium-long and shiny, worn in the wet-looking “curl” that is Michael Jackson’s major contribution to Western civilization. I couldn’t hear much of their exchange—the rest of the clientele lacked the courtesy to shut up while I was trying to eavesdrop—just a few snatches, meaningless out of their context: Eloise thanking him for meeting her, him saying it was no problem, Eloise saying he was looking good, him returning the compliment. You get the idea. When she sat down and they began discussing whatever it was they were discussing, I could hear nothing. And my lip-reading isn’t good enough to have deciphered the black fellow’s side of the conversation.
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