The doorman or concierge or whatever he was supposed to be cornered me in a foyer as big as my living room, pronounced my name into a gold-plated French-telephone receiver—no “uh” between “Mr.” and “Nebraska”: this was a class operation—pronounced me clean, and depressed a button on the space-age console of his desk. Double smoked-glass doors swung outward and admitted me to the holy of holies.
Okay, so it was just the lobby. It was an expensively done up lobby, replete with overstuffed, over-modern furniture, exuding all the warmth and charm of a dentist’s office. Someone who had an uncle in the mirror-tile business had handled the paneling: diagonal strips, two-inch-wide oak alternating with two-inch-wide strips of dark reflective glass. Oak-mirror-oak-mirror-oak-mirror—now I knew how a strobe light must feel. I entered the nearest of three elevators, the one the doorman had pointed out. It shot me to the fifteenth floor in about the same amount of time it took you to read those words.
And it opened on Irish Tim’s world.
The first thing I noticed was the carpet, wall-to-wall, very plush—and green. Real green. “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” green. It looked like the Old Sod itself. And it looked overdue for a mowing.
The second thing I noticed was the woman. She had bright red hair piled high on her head and cascading down the back of her neck. She wore a shimmery black floor-length number, gathered at the throat and exposing the silky, unblemished whiteness of her arms and back. Her eyes were wide and green—not the gaudy green of the carpet but the deep and lustrous green of emeralds. Her features were regular, her chin maybe just a shade too prominent.
“Mr. Nebraska? I’m Maureen. I’m the housekeeper. Mr. Callinan is in the den, if you’d care to walk this way …”
I’d have walked any way she said, but I have far too much class to have said so.
The living room gave way to a formal dining room, off of which was a short, wide hallway leading to the den and, presumably, the apartment’s bedrooms. The green carpet followed us the whole way.
Maureen tapped at the door of the den and opened it.
The room was dark, or nearly so. Illumination was in the form of a three-headed track-light rig that threw incandescent beams against the ceiling in a corner near the door. That, and the soft electronic glow from a twenty-five-inch color television monitor in the far corner of the room.
The den was a real den, not a spare bedroom pressed into service. It was a split-level affair. The door opened to the work space, where an ornate antique desk was positioned in the indirect light from the ceiling rig, and two straight chairs, also antique, or good reproductions, sat opposite the desk as if waiting for something. On the other side of the door was a round table, not antique, ringed with half a dozen comfortable-looking molded-plastic chairs. On the wall over the table was a write-on, wipe-off board. Over the desk was a framed antique map showing the counties of Ireland.
Eight feet from the door, the floor dropped a step to the playroom. A low leather couch sat against the long wall to the right; opposite, against the left wall, stood a wall unit loaded with stereo equipment, records, tapes, and compact discs, books, magazines, and general bric-a-brac. In the leftmost corner stood the television—stereo, of course—with a built-in VCR and a satellite-dish tuner resting atop it.
The back wall was glass, floor to ceiling. The city was growing gray beyond the panes, scarlet slashes tinging the sky, snaking away from the long sunset taking place on the other side of the building. Here and there across the city, lights glowed and blinked against the coming night.
In a leather recliner near the sofa sat Irish Tim.
“Thank you, Maureen,” he said in a brogue so thick you couldn’t cut it with a knife and fork. “We’ll be havin’ a drop in here, if y’d be so kind.”
Maureen affected a kind of curtsy and departed, closing the door. When she had, Callinan said, “So, then, you received me message.”
“Hello, Irish.”
He picked up a long, thin, rectangular box. A track-light unit over the couch came to life. The television went black. “Would you be wantin’ somethin’ to eat?” His voice was a rough, pleasantly raspy tenor. “Me, I finished up a while ago—a man of regular hours, I’m afeared—but Maureen’d be glad to put somethin’ together …”
I dismissed it with a gesture. “Although if the food is on a par with the surroundings, and especially the help …”
Tim chuckled modestly and made a self-deprecating movement of one meaty hand.
“By the way,” I said, seating myself on the couch he indicated with another gesture, “we’re all pals here, so how’s about we drop the Barry Fitzgerald impressions? You’re about as Irish as I am, Gabe, which isn’t very.”
His big face darkened for an instant, and anger flashed in his eyes like heat lightning. But it only lasted an instant. The darkness passed and a hissing sort of laugh exploded from him. “Well, then,” he said, and with only the barest trace of anything that could be called a brogue. “I’ve been talkin’—talking—that way so long, it’s like second nature to me.” He laughed again, and it was calmer, less sputtery. “Nothing worse than a convert, eh? Religion, politics, nationality, temperance—doesn’t matter: He always takes it too far.”
I knew what he meant. A nonsmoker who shook the habit is ten times more opposed to the weed than someone who never smoked. Fifty years ago, or more, Gabriel Solomon Rabinovitz had adopted the stereotypical Irish caricature as protective armor. He didn’t need it anymore, but it was by now, as he himself said, second nature. Maybe even first: How long do you have to affect something before it’s no longer an affectation?
Tim inspected me a moment, a grin on his pleasantly ugly face. “I’d been thinkin’—” He paused, closed his eyes briefly in a heaven-help-us way, and started again, broguelessly: “I thought you were out of the private-eye game, Nebraska.”
“A game, is it? I thought games were supposed to be fun.” Another tap on the door, and Maureen entered bearing a teak tray. The tray held Waterford glasses, cocktail napkins, an ice bucket, an open bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a new bottle of Jameson’s. She placed the tray on a coffee table in front of the couch and knelt near me on the green carpet.
She lifted a glass, looked up at me, and said, “Ice?”
I was aware of a warm, vaguely spicy scent from her. “No.”
Maureen broke the seal on the bottle and neatly filled a glass to the halfway point. She handed it and a small blue napkin to me, then put cubes in the second glass, poured the Daniel’s over them, and took it to Irish Tim. Repeating the curtsy, a quick bent-knee thing, she left.
“I don’t believe it,” I said when the door had closed. “All this Old-Sod nonsense and you’re drinking”—I lifted the square bottle—“ ‘Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Quality Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey’? I’m very disappointed, Tim.”
He smiled at me over the rim of his glass, and the brogue was comically thick when he said, “Aye, well, there’s no raison t’be tellin’ anyone”—the brogue vanished—“that I never could stand that crap. To your health.”
I’ll drink to that, and did.
The whiskey was hot going down. Then it hit my stomach and started a low, soothing glow that seemed to spread out from my belly in smooth, warm fingers. I held the crystal to the light and inspected the contents. “The oldest of whiskies,” I said.
“That’s one thing it has going for it,” Callinan agreed. “The Irish had whiskey eight hundred years ago. At least.”
“Uisge beatha, or however you pronounce it. From uisge comes ‘whiskey.’ ” I caught Irish Tim’s glance. “One of the dubious side benefits of the writing life is you learn all sorts of wonderfully useless stuff. I did an article on spirits, oh, almost a year ago. Picked up all kinds of junk. Uisge beatha, for instance, or the fact that the Americans and Irish spell ‘whiskey’ with an e-y while everyone else—the Scots, the Welsh, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Aussies—drop the e. I’m murder at Trivial Pursuit.”
Tim chuckled, a rich, full-bodied chuckle that seemed to begin somewhere down in the middle of his ample self, bubble up his windpipe, and escape through the small gap between his lips. He held his glass, nestled against his belly, between both of his large, blunt hands.
“Then you are still writing. I was confused—I’d been thinkin’ somehow that you were out the detective game for good.” If he realized he had slipped back into an Irish cadence, if not exactly a brogue, he gave no sign of it. “I been hearin’ about this book of yours …”
“Unfortunately, more people have been hearing about it than have been buying it.” I dragged out and put on the old wide-eyed innocent face. “Have you got yours yet?”
Irish Tim smoothed the red hair over his left ear. He looked like he was afraid I might have a copy in my back pocket and expect him to hand over ten ninety-five for it if he admitted he hadn’t bought it. You get used to that look in a hurry.
“Eh … no,” he admitted. “Is it out already? Where’d a fella get a copy?”
You get used to that question, too. “Gee, I dunno,” I said blandly. “Let’s see … it’s a book … how ’bout—a bookstore!”
He pursed his lips and gave me a look that was half-amused, half-relieved at not being put on the spot. “I’m takin’ it, then, that you’re not completely out of the business.”
“It’s sort of like a bad marriage: You’re never really out of it. Why?”
“Well, because I hear around town, that you’re lookin’ into Mr. Gregg Longo’s, ah, unexpected demise.”
“News travels fast.” The cops, the bartenders, the guy at Job Service, the construction foreman, Lou Boyer, any of half a dozen big-eared workers on Hascall Street or at Westroads—Irish Tim could’ve learned of my interest in Longo’s death from any of them. I knew better than to ask his source, or knock myself out trying to guess.
“That it does,” Callinan agreed. “Are you?”
It was a rhetorical question. Irish Tim was plugged in well enough to find out what color underwear I had on if he really wanted to know. I nodded.
“I wonder why.”
“That’s an easy one: I’m being paid to. You knew Longo?”
“We had some business. I suppose the grievin’ widow wants you to clear her poor dead husband’s good name.”
“Do you?” I took a sip of my drink—a small one. I’d had no dinner, and I didn’t want the liquor sneaking up on me. “It’s funny, I can’t help wondering what your interest is, Irish.”
He paused for a sip of his drink. Light touched a walnut-sized stone set in a gold ring on his right hand and scattered in ten different directions. “As I mentioned, poor Mr. Longo and I had a business arrangement. A financial arrangement.”
I sighed. “How much was he into you for, Tim?”
“Ten.”
“And the vig?”
His pale eyes scanned the room lazily. “Oh … about the same.”
“Good Jesus,” I said softly. “Ten grand out at one hundred percent interest. Nice work if you can get it. Ponies?”
“Ponies, ball games, prizefights, state lotteries. Mr. Longo was the sort who’d be willin’ to put money on whether a rabbit could get across a highway without bein’ flattened by a truck.”
I wagged my head in disbelief—mild disbelief. Lou Boyer had said that Longo enjoyed an occasional bet, as I think he put had it. Ten grand’s worth indicated a hell of a lot of occasions, but Boyer may not have known. Compulsive gamblers are like alcoholics in a lot of ways, and one of the ways is they get very good at hiding their illness. Boyer had also said that Longo never got past thinking that the riches of Croesus were about to land in his lap. It looked like he had taken some steps, some big steps, to try to make it happen. Had he then had to take even bigger steps to bail himself out of trouble with his banker?
I said, “What’s the due date?”
“Oh, well, it had already come and gone by the time Mr. Longo died.”
“Tch,” I said, or something much like it. “And you can’t exactly make a claim for recovery on his estate.”
“No, not exactly … but after a fashion, perhaps. Y’see, if people are right in thinkin’ Mr. Longo was responsible for those banks bein’ robbed, well, then, there’s—what do they say—seventy-five or eighty thousand dollars unaccounted for somewhere.”
“Seventy-eight seems to be the working figure.” Although the cops had not released the exact number, Irish Tim would know it. And Tim forgetting a dollar amount was only slightly more likely than you forgetting your middle name.
“Do tell. It seems to me that with a bright, talented lad like yourself makin’ inquiries, well, that seventy-eight thousand might just get itself found. You see what it is I’m gettin’ at?”
“Yes, believe it or not, I do.”
He looked across the room at the stereo gear and frowned at it. “Now, let’s understand each other. I only want my due. Twenty thousand. Twenty, and not a penny more. And I’ll pay you a finder’s fee—say, ten percent? Fifteen?—out of that twenty.”
“What about the remainder?”
The big man shrugged. “No concern of mine, surely. I’m only interested in my due.”
“But why should I give any of it to you? Assuming there’s any to be found, I mean, and that I find it. If I’m honest, I turn it all in. If I’m not, I pocket the whole bundle of joy and not merely, what, two thousand?”
Irish Tim smiled. “Say three. I like you.” He shifted in his chair and leaned forward, narrowing the four-foot gap between us. “Nebraska, I’ve been around a long time and I’ve been a lot of things but mostly what I’ve been is a gambler. D’you see? Everything I’ve ever done’s been a gamble. Now I’m gamblin’ on you to be like most people—neither too honest nor too dishonest. I’m thinkin’ you wouldn’t mind turnin’ a dollar or two for yourself if the greater portion of the money would be gettin’ to where it’s supposed to go. That’s what honesty is, y’know, a matter of degrees. I mean, the man owed me twenty thousand and I’m only tryin’ to recover it. I could’ve told you he owed me fifty, sixty, seventy. I didn’t. Why?”
“You knew I wouldn’t buy it.”
He pretended to look offended. “Because I’m basically an honest man.”
“Lending money out at a hundred percent interest isn’t honest, Timmy. It’s usury, and it’s slightly illegal.”
He waved it aside as if it were an annoying insect. “You’re talkin’ law. I’m talkin’ honest. If a man’s willin’ to borrow from another man at a particular rate, what’s that to anybody but the borrower and the lender? … Anyhow, I didn’t want to see you so we could hold a debate. I wanted to discuss my little business proposition with you. What d’you say?”
He emptied his glass, reached for his bottle, and nodded at the other bottle with a question stitched across his face. I shook my head and said, “If I owed you twenty thousand and I didn’t feel like paying it, what would happen to me?”
Callinan pursed his lips and put an inch of liquor into the bottom of his glass. “If we didn’t both know how Mr. Longo … expired, I might think you’d be hintin’ that I had a hand in it.” He tested the whiskey, found it as satisfactory as the first glass had been, and risked a larger swallow. “That’s always been a problem, y’know, in the trade. What to do with a welsher. In the old days, you’d break an arm or a leg, or both, as a kind of warnin’. If the warnin’ didn’t happen to take …” He raised and lowered his shoulders.
“Well, they still go in for that, some of the boys. But the problem is, you still don’t have your money. Me, I’ll give a fella a good stern warnin’, maybe two. And then I’ll … repossess.”
“Repossess? Repossess what?”
“Whatever. Car, furniture, clothes. Things I can resell, so as to not only teach the offendin’ party a lesson but also recover at least some of my outlay.” He sipped silently. “Much more civilized and practical, wouldn’t you say?”
Maybe I would have, but
I didn’t. I said, “If Longo owed you twenty thou and had seventy-eight thou in a shoe box, a very large shoe box, why wouldn’t he just pay you?”
“I’ve asked myself the very same. Could it be the lad was plannin’ to disappear with my money as well as the banks’?”
I looked at him. “Now that would be pointless. You’re networked better than CBS. Longo could disappear anyplace he’d like and you or one of your friends would find him inside of six months. Longo knew that. He must have, or he’d’ve skipped long ago—skipped if he couldn’t pay, pay if he could.”
The red-haired man plucked at his lower lip. “You overestimate my influence,” he said. “I won’t tell you I don’t have friends here and there, but …” He shrugged.
“If Longo was going to skip, he’d’ve skipped. If he had almost eighty grand, he’d’ve had plenty of money to do it in style, too. He also would’ve been able to pay you off and still have almost sixty thou to eke by on for a while. He didn’t do either. Doesn’t that suggest to you that perhaps Longo didn’t have the money?”
Irish Tim spread his hands, his glass held lightly in his left hand, his right hand empty, large and meaty. “That bein’ the job y’ve cut out for yer ownself,” he said, the situation-comedy brogue fully back in place. “If the dearly departed was indeed innocent as the angels, then of course there’ll be no money to recover. But if there should be …”
I rested the glass against my lower lip. “Yes,” I said. “If there should be … What about his wife?”
“The grievin’ widow? Carolyn?” It bothered me that he knew her name, although of course he would. “What about her? … Ah, no, I see. You’re thinkin’ I might like to take some of my losses out of her own no doubt delectable hide.” He shook his big, homely head. “No, lad. You should know me better’n that. I’ve no quarrel with her.”
I downed some whiskey. Its flavor and aroma were at once distinct and subtle. Now that I was used to it, I found its effect on my mouth and tongue to be less burning, more prickling—teasing. And it had a nice way of sort of softening the edges of the world, rather than blotting them out like Old Fedora and the other industrial-grade brands of buck-fifty-a-gallon paint remover that I usually drink.
Money Trouble Page 10
