Desotel was in his mid-forties, a trim, good-looking fellow with wavy dark hair just going gray and a mustache trimmed to Wayne Newton specifications. He paused for a moment at the granite steps leading up to the club entrance, evidently deep in thought. Then he shook it off, grabbed the brass handrail, and hauled himself up the steps two at a time.
I waited a few minutes to make sure—reasonably sure—that Loverboy wasn’t doing a double-back on me. When his blue blazer didn’t come through the club’s revolving doors again after fifteen minutes, I figured it was safe to head out to the mall.
Now, my hot dog nothing but a fond memory, I wandered downstairs to the basement level.
Westroads is basically a two-story mall, constructed around an open courtyard or lobby at the center. But there is a basement level that houses a few public establishments—a tailor, a dinner theatre, a couple of little offbeat shops that seem to change bimonthly—as well as mall offices, storage space, and other similarly scintillating attractions. Including the maintenance department.
I stopped in, asked for Lou Boyer, and was told he was supervising renovations being made to a space on the top level.
Back upstairs.
Lou Boyer had been a friend of Gregg Longo’s. He had worked in Longo’s contract maintenance business until it went out of business. Now he was an assistant-something-engineer for the outfit that owned the mall.
Down from J. C. Penney on the second level, in one of the few unoccupied retail spaces in the place, one of the workmen directed me to Boyer, an overweight, applecheeked fellow, with thin sandy hair on his head and a thick sandy walrus mustache under his nose. Lou Boyer stood under a tall wooden ladder, hollering instructions up to two men who were threading electrical conduit above the suspended ceiling. I picked my way over plastic drop cloths, around paint buckets, and between makeshift sawhorses to where he stood. I introduced myself, told him what I was doing. “Looks like they’re keeping you busy,” I said. The conversational approach.
“Never any problem with that.” Boyer had a hoarse, Andy Devine kind of voice that suited him perfectly. “Old tenant moves out, new one moves in, and everything’s got to be done yesterday. Hey, lookit, you’re not supposed to be in here. The insurance …”
“Can we talk outside, then?”
Boyer ran a thumbnail over his mustache. “I s’pose … Hey, Steve! I’m gonna take a break for a minute.”
We slid out from behind the opaque plastic curtains that pretended to keep the dust from drifting out into the mall, found an unoccupied bench near the Christian Science Reading Room, and sat.
“You workin’ for Carolyn, then?” Boyer said. “Poor kid. Helluva way to lose a husband. Gotta be real tough on her.”
“Real tough on Gregg, too.”
Boyer grinned mirthlessly under the seaweed and pulled a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint from his shirt pocket. The Plen-T-Pack. He offered me a stick. I declined and watched him peel the foil paper from one and shove the gum into his mouth. “Well,” he said around a chew. “I guess everything’s a whole lot better for Gregg now, anyway.”
That was open to discussion, but I didn’t feel like discussing it. I said, “Carolyn’s hired me because she wants to know one way or the other whether Gregg was guilty of what he’s been accused of.”
“No,” Boyer said, chewing.
“No?”
He balled up the foil paper and shot it toward a trash bin eight feet away. Swish. “Not a chance Gregg knocked over those banks. Told the police the same thing, I did. Lookit—you know Gregg, did you?”
“Not really. By sight. We were in school together a long time ago.”
“Uh-huh.” He shifted the spearmint to the other side of his mouth. “Lookit, me and Gregg were in the service together. Navy. Now, the navy, it’ll do one of two things for a guy who’s maybe not a hunnert percent on the up-and-up. It’ll either straighten him out good. Or it’ll make him mean, mean like a snake.”
“You’re saying Longo cleaned up his act in the service.”
“Yessir. Saw it with my own eyes. He came in a punk, a smart-mouthed little bastard who was too big for his britches. Not a bad sort, you understand, just a wise-ass. Could’a gone either way. The way he went, he came out a sailor. Not a saint; a sailor, someone who’s learned some skills, picked up a little self-confidence, a little self-esteem, and maybe has something to look forward to now.”
He looked at me. “I know what that means, and I know exactly what Gregg went through, in here”—he prodded his ample gut—“in the service. ’Cause I was just exactly the same as him when I upped, too.”
“Okay. But cut to the present. Longo’s out of work, his business has gone down the tubes, bills are piling up, his wife’s killing herself working overtime to keep a roof overhead and bread on the table …”
He was shaking his head. “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Gregg Longo would no more’a robbed a bank or a store or anything than you or I would. Just wasn’t in him.”
“Others who knew him aren’t so sure.”
“Their problem. Lookit, I knew the guy twenty years, on and off. Served with him, worked with him, worked for him.” Again the gum migrated. “If he was a crook, wouldn’t he’a tried to rip off his employees when the business started to go bad? He didn’t. He didn’t even cut anyone’s pay or let anyone go until the very end. Maybe he should’a. But he didn’t, and he didn’t stiff his customers or his creditors or the tax man, none of that.”
A large black woman shuffled by in a shapeless dress, rolled-down stockings, and carpet slippers. Boyer and I watched her push into the ladies’ room just beyond the racks of pay phones.
Boyer said, “You ever notice how tough it is to tell a black lady’s age? They go from like twenty to fifty, you don’t know how old they are. The good-looking ones look real good and the not-so-good-looking ones look real bad, but you don’t know how old. They hit fifty, and bang! everything falls apart kinda. Weird.”
I said, “You were telling me how much Gregg Longo resembled Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.”
He laughed. “Gregg was no Eagle Scout, nothing like that. He wouldn’t go walkin’ four miles in a blizzard to return four cents or whatever, like they say Abe Lincoln did. Gregg had some problems. He was fond of the bottle. He didn’t mind an occasional bet. He had a roving eye—you don’t tell Carolyn I said that, now. And he never really got unused to thinking his ship would come in.”
“Oh?”
“Ah, you know, like somethin’d come up and he’d make a million bucks and retire forever. Kid stuff. But Gregg was an alright kind of guy and I’m sorry he’s gone, and I’ll bet a week’s pay he never robbed so much as a gum-ball machine, much less a bank.”
“Maybe he thought it was time to make his ship come in.”
Boyer fixed me with a long, hard look, interrupted only by the rhythmic action of his fleshy jaw. “Well, goddamn, mister, if you’re so all-fired sure Gregg’s guilty like everyone says, why’re you takin’ his widow’s money to try and prove he isn’t?”
“I’m not trying to prove anything one way or the other,” I said. “What I mean is, Carolyn didn’t ask me to clear him. She asked me to find out either way, so she can finally get on with her life.”
He looked at me some more. I had no idea I was so interesting. “Uh-huh,” he finally said. “Uh-huh. Well, you asked me what I think and I told you. Lookit.” He worked the chewing gum some more. “Coupl’a days before he died, Gregg paid me fifty bucks on a hunnert I borrowed him back when I got this job. I mean, there I was working and there he was with nothing, sort of. I told him it was a loan, but of course I never expected to see it again—I mean, I’d’a never asked him for it. But like I said, here he comes with the fifty, apologizing ’cause he can’t let me have the whole hunnert. Now, if Gregg robbed those banks, he could’ve afforded to let me have the whole hunnert. But he probably wouldn’t’a paid me at all, ’cause then he’d’a been a real crook, see? Giving me
just part of the money he owed me, well, in my book that means the poor guy was just another honest sucker down on his luck.”
The logic was unassailable so I didn’t assail it.
Boyer said, sidling up to it, “Way they were talking, a lot of money’s missing.”
I nodded. The authorities hadn’t released an exact figure. “Almost eighty thousand.”
“Well, there, then.”
“ ‘There’?”
“Where’s a guy like Gregg gonna stash eighty thousand bucks? In a Swiss bank?” He chuckled silently. “More like a paper carton in the basement.”
“Between the local cops and the feds, all those kinds of things have been thoroughly checked. And dismissed.”
“Well, there,” Boyer repeated. He pushed himself off the bench and looked down at me. “I don’t s’pose I helped you much. Or Carolyn, I oughta say.”
I stood also. “Well, as I say, either way …”
“I don’t s’pose you can really clear Gregg until they catch the guy who’s really responsible. I mean, if they never find the money, they’ll just assume Gregg hid it too good. That’s too bad, ’cause the real guy probably figured the going was good when Gregg turned up as everybody’s fall guy. He’s probably catching rays on some tropical island right now … . Well, I better get back on the job. Already got laid off once this year, don’t want to try for two. Nice talking with you.”
I watched Boyer amble, Winnie-the-Pooh fashion, back to the plastic curtain. Then I went and fed a quarter to one of the public phones and called police headquarters. They put me on ignore for a week, then Kim Banner came on the line.
“Hey there, Sam Spade, I was just talking about you.”
“Voice full of reverence, awe, and admiration, no doubt.”
“Like usual. Listen, you know someone named Jurgenson, a fed?”
“I don’t know any feds. I had a decent upbringing.”
“Oh, yeah? What happened? Anyhow, I just spent about an hour on the phone with this character, playing twenty questions. Subject: a private license belonging to someone whose last name begins with N and rhymes with ‘Nebraska.’ ”
“Huh. Bureau, or Treasury?”
“Treasury.”
“Huh.”
“ ‘Huh’ isn’t the word for it. Seems a little bird told this Jurgenson cat you’re poking around into the Longo business, and Jurgenson doesn’t like it.”
“Jurgenson shouldn’t listen to little birds.”
“Funny, almost. What he doesn’t like is you sticking your big fat nose into his investigation.”
“My nose is neither big nor fat, and I haven’t been sticking my big fat nose into anyone’s investigation but my own. For all the good it’s done. What’s Jurgenson’s beef? What’d he want to know?”
“Everything. Your history, your record, your reputation, your relations with the department …”
“He wants to know if I’m the type who’d disappear with seventy-eight thousand smackers if I happened to trip over them.”
“Something like that.”
“And you told him …”
“… That I’m not sure I wouldn’t disappear with seventy-eight thousand smackers if I tripped over them.”
“Thanks, I’m sure that eased his mind a lot.”
“Not as much as you might think. Listen, you getting anywhere on this thing?”
“Depends what you mean. What I’m getting is a lot of people who don’t know anything one way or the other but wouldn’t exactly be bowled over if they learned that Longo held up a bank or two in his spare time. Longo’s got one staunch supporter, but he’s outnumbered four to one by the people who won’t stick their necks out and say they think it’s impossible for Longo to have been a crook.”
“Just like doctors recommending painkillers for people stranded on desert islands.”
“Two of Longo’s cronies in particular act like they think he was guilty. I hoped they’d lead me to the loot, but no luck. However, they did lead me to a little girlfriend Longo had. Seems she slipped between the bed and the wall, so to speak, during the investigation. Longo did such a good job of keeping her under wraps that no one knows about her. No one official. You might want to pass that along to whoever it should be passed along to. She’s a member of the chorus—you know, ‘Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, I don’t know.’ She says she didn’t step forward because she can neither clear Longo nor implicate him. But maybe she knows more than she told me. Maybe she knows more than she knows.”
“I’m just an officer of the law, that heavy philosophical shit is way too much for me. Gimme her name.” I did. Over the wire I could hear the dull scratching of pencil on paper. “Right. Well, anything else you’d like me to do—pick up your laundry, feed the plants, water the cat …”
“This is what I get for being a good citizen and sharing what little I know with the local law-enforcement establishment—sarcasm. Well”—I worked a little quaver into my voice—“that’s all right. Doing good is my reward. I don’t need thanks.”
“That’s lucky,” Banner said, and hung up.
I held the dead receiver until the dial tone came back. Then I hooked it and crossed over to the wall rack containing phone books in their metal covers. If someone dropped down from another planet tomorrow, he’d get the idea that telephone directories, banks’ ballpoint pens, and hotels’ coat hangers are the most valuable commodities on earth, the way we nail them down.
I swiveled the Omaha White and Yellow Pages into reading position and looked up United States Government. The local Treasury office was in the federal building downtown, on South Fifteenth Street.
Bill Jurgenson looked like your next-door neighbor. He had curly black hair salted with gray, pale green eyes, and a wide, nondescript face that was showing a blue five o’clock shadow about two hours early. He wore brown oxfords, tan slacks, white shirt, and a blue rep tie shot with tan and red. His shirt sleeves were turned back a couple of rolls and his horn-rimmed glasses lay on the desk blotter in front of him. I put him at fifty-five, give or take. He looked more like a high-school principal than a G-man.
The desk wasn’t Jurgenson’s; it belonged to someone named K. Schotten, who was high enough up the bureaucratic ladder to rate a private office and not be expected to be in it. So we were.
With us was a young black man in a gray summer-weight suit. He was very tall and fit looking—a former Creighton Bluejay basketballer, I imagined—with an attentive, studious air about him. He had a vinyl-covered legal pad open and propped on his crossed knees. Bill Jurgenson had introduced him only as “Agent Robinson.”
Jurgenson said, “I’m a little surprised to see you here, Mr., uh, Nebraska.”
I’m used to that little, uh, pause before my name, as if the speaker isn’t quite sure he’s got it, uh, right.
“Me too. But my spies tell me you’ve been asking around about me. I figured I could do a better job than anyone else of satisfying your curiosity.”
He considered that, and me, for a long moment. Then: “All right. The top question is, What are you doing fooling around in the Longo investigation?”
I told him. I wasn’t sure that “fooling around” would have been my choice of words, but I told him. The whole truth and nothing but, as they used to say on The Defenders. I know this kind of attitude won’t get me elected to the Private Eye Hall of Fame—whenever we’re dealing with Officialdom we’re supposed to haul out the big chip that comes in our membership kit, balance it on our shoulder, and talk extra tough—but if you’re more interested in doing your job than cracking wise, you fast discover that the boys and girls with the badges are a lot more helpful if you don’t antagonize them too much.
Jurgenson listened attentively, glancing occasionally at Robinson, who might have been a wood-carving for all the expression he displayed. When I finished, Jurgenson picked up his glasses from the desk blotter and swung them absently between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “I think you’ve been u
p-front with me,” he said. “I appreciate that, and I’m going to return the favor. We are dead-ended. The file remains open, of course. But just between us girls, we’ve moved on to other things. Us and the Bureau. We’ve had to.”
“What about the money? Has any more of it shown up?”
He swung the glasses some more. “Not dime one, except for the fifty-dollar note Longo was carrying. We’ve circulated the serial numbers, of course, and asked the banks to keep an eye open for us, but it’s a needle-and-haystack operation. We’re talking a lot of bills, in denominations from ones on up. Even a small bank can’t cross-check the serial number of every single note that comes through. Fifties and hundreds is about all we can hope for, and even then it’s spot-checking, is all. You can’t blame ’em. They’ve got other business to handle too.”
“If none of the money’s turned up, it means one of two things,” I said. “Either the robber is clever, laying low, not spending the loot, biding his time. Or he’s already vanished to parts unknown and the money just hasn’t shown up in the federal-reserve pipeline yet.”
“Three things.” This from Robinson. “He’s getting the money laundered. It would lower his profit margin: The going rate locally is ten or twelve percent, higher if you need to move a lot of hot money fast. But it would increase his safety margin.”
“Four,” Jurgenson corrected. Robinson and I looked at him. It was getting to be like a tennis match. “Longo stole the money, Longo hid the money, Longo can’t tell us where the money is on account of Longo got himself iced.”
Money Trouble Page 8
