Money Trouble

by William J. Reynolds

  When the waitress ambled over, I told her I’d changed my mind and just needed a coffee to go. Then I sat in my car and slurped burned brown water from a plastic container and shuttled across the AM band before giving up with a disgusted switch-off of the radio and the silent promise to invest in a tape deck.

  Forty minutes later, Eloise Slater and her friend appeared. They stood on the walk in front of the motel for a few minutes, then she climbed into her car, and he got behind the wheel of a gray Chevy Celebrity Eurosport. The only outward distinction between a Eurosport and a plain old ordinary garden-variety Celebrity seems to be the red pinstripe on the black vinyl bumperstrip around the car. I wondered how much extra the pinstripe cost. Wondered idly, as I jotted the car’s license number on the side of my coffee container.

  The Grain Bin had been aptly named. The bar-and-steak house was tucked into an old grain-elevator operation west of Ralston. The elevator itself, long disused, towered over the flat beige cement-block building that housed the bar and restaurant. The old elevator was a tall stainless-steel rectangle. Resting as it did on the perfectly flat plain, it could be seen for miles in any direction and looked like nothing so much as a defiant finger thrust against the hazy Midwestern sky. “The Grain Bin” was stenciled in red, at about a forty-degree angle, across the front of the elevator.

  I had followed Eloise Slater far enough to feel reasonably confident she was heading home, then peeled off onto the county highway that brought me to the steak house. Oddly, Eloise’s going home struck me as intriguing, not innocuous. She is held at gunpoint while two lunatics tear her home apart. A private investigator questions her about her involvement with a married man who very possibly was a bank robber. Then she hops in her car and drives off to have coffee with a friend. Then she goes home. Strange sequence. You’d think she’d either stay home and try to put the place back together, or clear out and stay the hell away until she got her head screwed on again.

  As I said, intriguing.

  I pulled off the highway into the Grain Bin’s unpaved lot.

  Once upon a time this had probably been a hotbed of agricultural activity, but the expansion of the city and its bedroom towns had pushed the farming frontier ever farther back. When I was a kid, my uncle used to take us for drives in the country—country that is now practically central Omaha. The Grain Bin, in its original incarnation, had once been isolated out here on the prairie, connected to the rest of the world only by a couple of narrow roads and a railroad siding. Now it sat at the intersection of a state highway and a main county road, territory it shared with a truck stop, a petroleum depot, and the Cloud 9 Motel (“Phone In Every Room”).

  The long beige building was fronted by a rustic boardwalk-and-eaves arrangement—you know, the kind you used to see on Gunsmoke. The Wild-West effect was spoiled by neon signs indicating Lounge and Restaurant over the appropriate rough-hewn doors.

  I yanked open the door under the buzzing Lounge sign and entered.

  And was struck blind.

  So, at least, it seemed, although after a few moments my eyes adjusted to the extreme blackness of the bar. I’ve always thought it strange that bars, where people are liable to consume alcohol, which is apt to interfere with people’s navigational abilities, are always darker than hell on a moonless night. But they are, and the Grain Bin Lounge was no slouch in that department. When my eyes came back on duty, I could see that the place was one large room dominated by a large horseshoe-shaped bar. The rest of the floor space was given over to tables and booths. Against the far wall, behind the bar, four or five pinball and video machines stood blinking and glowing mutely. Directly above them was a loft, or mezzanine, constructed of the same rough wood as the building’s façade.

  The bar was quiet. There were maybe half a dozen customers in the joint, two at the bar, sitting apart, the rest scattered here and there, intent on their own business. Faint country music and the fainter aroma of barbecue sauce drifted from the direction of the restaurant, getting ready for the lunch trade.

  I stepped over to the bar and sat near the cash register. The stools were high with low backs. The bar was ringed with a roll of black padded vinyl. I climbed onto a stool and rested my elbows on the vinyl and waited for the bartender.

  The bartender was a woman, twenty-five or thirty—the older I get, the harder it is for me to judge—with sad eyes that didn’t go with the round, freckled, little-girl face. She was ten, fifteen pounds overweight, but she had the kind of build that can take it and make good use of it. She wore a new T-shirt, green with a white sea gull stenciled over the left breast, khaki pants, three gold earrings, two in the left lobe, one in the right, and a serpentine gold chain at her throat.

  “What’ll it be?” Making the effort to be pleasant.

  “I’m looking for a girl.”

  She laughed and looked dubiously at me.

  “Let’s rephrase that: I’m looking for a specific girl. Eloise Slater. I was told she worked here.” That was true; I had been told by Eloise.

  “Well …”

  I went for the wallet and showed her the permit. “I’m a private investigator, working for a lawyer.” All true. “There’s a possibility that Ms. Slater might have some money coming to her …” Also true—I mean, for all I knew, she did have money coming to her, a tax refund or something. It’s usually a good idea to cleave to these Chinese-fortune-cookie sorts of statements in situations such as this. Outright lies have a nasty tendency to come back and bite you in the backside later on.

  “Really?” the freckle-faced kid said, and now her eyes went with the face. “How much money?”

  “I don’t know that. They just give me names.”

  “Hang on.” Freckles went and pulled a battered tin recipe box from a shelf beneath the register. She opened it, flipped through some index cards, and came over with one. The Slater woman’s name, address, phone number, and Social Security number were neatly inked in green ballpoint on the lined card. I made a big deal of copying the info into my spiral notepad, although I already knew where she lived.

  “You know Eloise, then, do you?” I said casually as I wrote.

  “We work together sometimes. She usually works nights, and I’ve been working days lately on account of my boyfriend’s on the day shift now, too, down at the—”

  “It’s nice you can arrange your hours to spend time with your boyfriend.” Freckles smiled, a little shyly. “What about Eloise. She okay to work with?”

  Freckles shrugged. “Yeah, sure, she’s okay, you know.”

  “Shows up when she’s supposed to, does her job, doesn’t make trouble …”

  “I guess so. Why d’you want to know?”

  “It’s important,” I said. I tapped the notepad with my pen. “For the record.” I winked conspiratorily.

  “Oh. Sure. Well, I have no complaint with Eloise.”

  “That’s good.” I pretended to write it down. “You talked about your boyfriend … I wonder, is Eloise seeing anyone regularly?”

  “Hang on.” Freckles left to take care of one of the other men at the bar. I waited. Two fellows in pale-blue work shirts drifted in. The shirts bore the insignia of the oil company down the road. They found a booth across the room, took menus from the clip behind the salt and pepper rack, and studied the subject. Apparently lunch was served in the bar as well as the restaurant.

  “Now what were you saying?” Freckles said, as she leaned against her side of the bar.

  “Eloise Slater,” I said. “Boyfriends?”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. Well, I don’t know. I mean, I know she goes out with guys, but I don’t know if she has anyone steady, you might say. Every so often she’ll come in a little late—five, ten minutes, no big deal, everybody does that sometimes—and say it was ’cause she was with a guy, but I don’t know who or whether it’s the same guy every time.” She lifted the recipe card and tapped the edge of it against the bar a couple of times. “You got her address and phone number—why’n’ch
a ask her all this stuff?”

  I smiled and folded my notepad and slid off the stool. Freckles turned to replace the card. “By the way,” I said. “When does Eloise Slater work next?”

  “Tonight,” Freckles said without turning. “Six to two.”

  My eyes were knocked out again when I got outside, but I shoved them back into place and went to where I’d parked the Impala, in the shade of the grain elevator. At least, it had been shade. The sky had taken on a kind of purple-gray overcast since I’d seen it last, and the hard lines between sun and shadow were blurred.

  I slid behind the wheel and glanced at my sketchy notes before flipping the notepad up onto the dash. Freckles had told me little I didn’t already know and nothing that didn’t jibe with what the Slater woman had told me herself—which was not necessarily a bad thing. I had no idea how, or whether, Eloise Slater fit into the equation. I had no idea yet what the equation was. Certainly Gregg Longo’s friends and loved ones didn’t completely dismiss the possibility that he could have knocked over those banks. But seventy-eight thousand dead presidents had yet to make their whereabouts known.

  The irony of today’s events did not escape me. I had done what Carolyn Longo first contemplated hiring me to do: I had found out whether her husband had been seeing another woman.

  Now I had to think of a good way of telling her that the answer was yes. And there was no good way.

  I slid the key into the ignition, but before I could start the engine, something cool and very solid insinuated itself against the back of my neck, behind and just below my right ear. I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the top of Marlon Abel’s head.

  Three thoughts chased each other across the vacuum between my ears. The first was that I had taken Abel’s peashooter away from him back at Eloise Slater’s place and hadn’t given it back. The second was that it was not impossible for Abel to own two guns, or to have acquired a new one in the past couple of hours. The third was that I had underestimated him, or overestimated myself. I had taken him and Patavena for a couple of short-hitters. It was now obvious that I had been mistaken. Painfully obvious.

  “Shut the door,” Abel said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  I shut the door, all right, but not until after I’d pitched myself out of the car and hit the dirt. Literally. Abel made a noise like a surprised yak and went to get out of the backseat, but as soon as he popped open the door I popped it shut again with a well-aimed kick. I was lying on my back next to the car, where I hoped the odds of getting shot were lower, so my mule kick had a lot of leverage behind it.

  Abel’s right wrist was caught between the car body and the window frame when the door swung back on him. He let out a howl of pain and dropped the eight-inch piece of threaded pipe he’d been holding. I kicked it under the car.

  Twenty or thirty feet away, a door opened on Patavena’s pitted Studebaker, and the man came out from behind the wheel. He carried an aluminum baseball bat.

  I jumped up, dived back into the car, and hit the glove-compartment latch.

  I got my hand on the canvas bag just as Patavena got his hand on my left ankle.

  He yanked. I dropped the bag and made a grab for the steering wheel as it slid by me. Missed. My right side and then my right shoulder banged hard against the doorstep and then against the unpaved lot as Patavena dragged me out.

  He let go of me to get both hands around the bat, which he raised high overhead.

  I crabbed under the car, groping for the pipe Abel had dropped. Found it. Snaked out from under the car on the far side.

  Patavena was coming around the front end of the car, choking the metal bat in his right hand. The look on his face was funny—funny strange, I mean, not funny ha-ha. A wide-mouthed, wide-eyed, vacuous look. Empty. Emotionless. I’ve seen people look more animated going after a housefly.

  I rolled up onto my feet, ducked as Patavena swung wide and missed, and, two-handed, whacked him with the pipe as hard as I could on the outside of his left knee.

  He gurgled in pain and brought the bat down across my back.

  It was lucky we were so close and he was so tall. The angle was such that what collided with my back was mainly Patavena’s long, sinewy arms. The bat cracked my tailbone a good shot that soared up my spine like a bottle rocket, but the pain wasn’t crippling. I took another swipe at the same knee and this time he went down.

  I dived across the trunk of the car, went around Abel, who nursed his bent and bloody wrist, reached in for the canvas bag, and extracted the .38 I had so conscientiously put away before I left the trailer park. Better late than never.

  Abel was making groany, gurgly noises that got louder when I grabbed his right wrist and squeezed it.

  “Jesus Christ,” he yelped, trying to pull away. Tears flooded his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, disappearing into the sparse vegetation on his lip. “Wha’j’a do that for?”

  “To hurt you, stupid.”

  “Fuck, man, my wrist, I think it’s broke.”

  “Remind me to stop at 7-Eleven and pick up a get-well card.” I still held his wrist, but lightly. Now I gave it another squeeze, just a little one, just enough to make him wince and draw in a sharp breath. “Now, Marlon, why don’t you tell me what the bright idea is.”

  “Man, I don’t know wha—aaAAAHH! Stop it! All right, all right. Fuck …” He squeezed his eyes shut. Water dribbled out under the lids. I was touched. “We weren’t gonna hurt you none.”

  “Oh dearie-dear, I must have overreacted again. Silly me. Too much caffeine, no doubt.” I shoved the gun in his belly. “Can the sales talk, Abel. I’m not buying. I don’t especially want your guts all over the backseat of my car, but I’m willing to live with it if need be. You get the idea?”

  He nodded, weakly. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “You feel better than you will if you don’t tell me what I want to know. Why’d you two losers follow me? Why’d you jump me?”

  On the other side of the car, Patavena was dragging himself upright. I ignored him. Abel was going into shock on me. His wrist probably was broken. It certainly was an attractive shade of blue.

  “M-money,” he said. His lips barely moved; they were rubbery looking, as if they were shot full of novocaine. “We thought … you and the girl …”

  Abel pitched forward, and I two-stepped backward just in time to miss getting my shoes thrown up on.

  Patavena was limping around the back of the car, still holding the bat. He stopped, looked at Abel sprawled on the ground, looked at me. “He dead?”

  “No. Would you like him to be? I can arrange it.” I lifted my right arm and let him see the gun. He dropped the bat. “What’s the deal, Patavena? You figure the girl has the money and she and I came to some kind of arrangement after I shooed you boneheads away?”

  “I guess …”

  “You guess. Swell.” Folks had started drifting over for lunch, and several of them wore that morbidly curious face you see on people driving past automobile wrecks. I said, “I ought to sic the cops on you two, just to get you out of my hair, but I can think of better ways to waste my time.” I waved the gun at Abel, who was struggling to his hands and knees—hand and knees, I should say, since his right wrist couldn’t have supported the weight of a hummingbird. “Take un-Abel here and get lost—again. This time I’m not kidding around. I don’t like you guys anymore, and I don’t want you hanging around me.”

  Patavena came and half-dragged, half-carried Abel to the Studebaker. I watched them leave. Then I did likewise.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A not-too-much-younger me could easily have polished off an entire afternoon in a shopping mall, wandering around Crossroads or Westroads, playing looky-lou, checking things out, and generally being a nuisance for people bent on serious shopping. No more. Malls, all of them, give me the heebie-jeebies in my old age. I avoid them as much as is humanly possible, and when avoidance isn’t humanly possible, I stick to my mission statement, in and out like a S.W.A.T. team.
The only significant browsing I do takes place in bookstores. And the amount of time I spend on them has been decreasing in recent years, in proportion to the increasing amount of shelf space bookstores are wasting on videotapes, audiotapes, computer software, and other high-profit nonbook junk.

  I mean, really—you go to a bookstore to look at books, right? You want video, audio, computer, you go to a video, audio, or computer store.

  Nevertheless, I made the obligatory pilgrimage to both B. Dalton and Waldenbooks when I hit Westroads. Dalton had The Book, my firstborn, in stock, two copies under Fiction and Literature, one under Mystery. Waldenbooks didn’t carry it at all. I contemplated getting the kid behind the counter to special-order it for me and then never coming in to pick it up, but what would that accomplish? They’d only send it back to their jobber.

  What I needed to do was special-order it for friends of mine who were too lazy or cheap to go do it themselves—leaving their names and telephone numbers with the clerk, of course.

  Having ascertained that Dalton’s inventory, at least, was up to standard, I stopped at Orange Julius and wolfed down a hot dog. I had missed lunch, having made a detour downtown after playing kiss-and-slap with Laurel and Hardy. Too late to tail Desotel to lunch, but I camped out across from the Olympic Club and picked him up as he came toddling back up the sidewalk shortly after one. Desotel had deviated from the routine in two respects: One, he was late. Usually he was back on duty by one at the latest. Two, he had company. Ordinarily he lunched alone and made the voyage to and from solo—except for me—but today he was accompanied by another man of Desotel’s approximate height and build. From a block-and-a-half’s distance, the view obstructed by the noontime crowd, that’s about all I could tell. Desotel and the stranger paused on the sidewalk and presumably exchanged words, then the stranger jaywalked across the street and disappeared into the traffic and the crowd. Desotel continued up the sidewalk.