Money Trouble

by William J. Reynolds

  I said, “Either Longo robbed those banks or he didn’t.”

  Tim said, “Those would appear to be the only possibilities.”

  “Let’s say he did.”

  A crooked smile made its way across Irish Tim’s oversized face. “All right, let’s.”

  “And let’s say that through diligence, superior intellect, and good luck, I trip over the loot.”

  “Which a smart young lad like your ownself is liable to do.”

  “And then let’s say I decide to keep the money for myself.”

  Irish Tim Callinan’s smile didn’t budge. “You wouldn’t do that. Not all of it. You’re too honest, like most people.”

  “Okay, I’m honest. So let’s say I find the money and I turn it all—all—over to Uncle.”

  He made a noise with his mouth, kind of like, Tchah, and said, “I said honest, not stupid.”

  “Sometimes they’re the same thing.”

  The smile stayed put, but now it didn’t reach as far as his eyes. “Then I would be very disappointed in you, lad,” Tim said quietly in his gravelly tenor. “I’m thinkin’ you’re smarter than that.”

  Which I could take any way I liked.

  Maureen waited at the end of the short corridor outside the den. Irish Tim must have somehow signaled her that I was leaving. I followed her through the dining room and on into the living room, admiring the ebb and flow of her hips under the shiny dress, the shock of red, red hair against her ivory back. She did not have the pink, slightly mottled skin of some redheads … yet I didn’t doubt for an instant that the color of her hair was the work of Mother Nature, not Lady Clairol.

  At the door, Maureen stopped, turned, and put a slim hand on my arm. It was warm—her hand; my arm felt like ice beneath it.

  Her eyes were impossibly green, her lips impossibly pink. They parted. “Mr. Nebraska … would you do something for me?”

  She was probably accustomed to men answering that question with, “Anything.” I managed, “If I can.”

  She left me, left the room, and was gone a full minute, perhaps longer.

  If my life were a detective novel, she’d’ve returned as naked as the day she was born, her flaming hair down around her milky shoulders.

  In the event, when she returned she was fully dressed as before. But now she carried something, a small object, in both hands. She crossed the room, smiling, and held it out to me.

  It was a book. It was my book. It was The Book.

  She said, “Will you autograph your novel for me?”

  I sat behind the wheel of the car, listened to the radio, looked at Emerald Tower, and thought.

  Shadows had lengthened and blackened while I was in the Enchanted Kingdom. The sun was making its last stand off behind the tower, and as the light died, so did the heat, a little. But the air lost none of its moisture. The evening was still, the air was stale with a kind of vague fishy smell to it.

  The woman on the radio said the temperature had dropped from eighty-four to eighty-two in just an hour and made it sound like a big deal. Then she played “Runaway,” by Del Shannon. The singer, not the mystery writer. Good song, but I like Elvis’s “live” version better. It’s got guts. Shannon whines; Presley growls.

  By the way, there’s no arty significance to that song. It’s just what the station I happened to be tuned to happened to be playing when I happened to be listening.

  I thought about Irish Tim Callinan. Actually, I thought about Maureen, although “thought” isn’t the most accurate verb, and then after a while I made myself think about Irish Tim.

  Callinan lied when he said he was a gambler. Maybe he had been, once upon a time, but no more. You don’t reach Irish Tim’s plateau—you don’t get Emerald Towers and two or three legitimate front corporations and hot-and-cold-running Maureens—by being a gambler. You take risks, certainly. The very nature of Irish Tim’s “business” was risk. But risk can be managed; out-and-out gambling never can, not from the gambler’s side, which is how the Las Vegases and the Atlantic Citys pay for the lights.

  All of which meant Callinan didn’t just stick a pin in the phone book and hit my number.

  He called me for a reason, and that reason was—what? He knew Longo was guilty and he wanted the money? Why bother with me? Tim had access to any of a dozen guys who could track down the loot, unencumbered by such excess baggage as the law, ethics, or even common courtesy.

  But if Callinan knew for a fact that Longo wasn’t guilty, he’d have even less reason to have me in for a drink.

  Which meant Callinan didn’t know for a fact either direction … but did know that Longo was smack in the middle of the picture no matter which way things fell.

  And so was I.

  No, Irish Tim wasn’t gambling. He was hedging. If Longo didn’t have the money, Tim was no worse off than before. But if Longo did, and I somehow managed to get my mitts on it, and Callinan had given me things to think long and hard about … .

  Tim had indeed given me some things to think about. But not about him, and not about me.

  About Gregg Longo.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The guy behind the bar put a napkin, a glass, and a bottle of Falstaff in front of me, in that order. I moved some of the beer into the glass and, while the head went down, casually swiveled on my stool and inspected the Grain Bin.

  Business was good. I don’t suppose the owners were in much danger of exceeding legal occupancy, but trade was brisk. Most of the tables and all of the booths on the main level were spoken for. I had plenty of company at the bar, too. By the sound of it, the mezzanine was given over to a private party. In the back of the room, the pinball and video machines pinged and beep-beeped and whoop-whoop-whooped under the skilled hands of kids who looked like high schoolers to me but were probably college kids on summer vacation. The combined effects of several dozen conversations conducted simultaneously put the noise level at a steady but tolerable decibel reading, disrupted only occasionally by an excited impromptu cheer from the back room or raucous laughter from upstairs.

  The clientele was a decidedly nontrendy mix—the college kids in their jeans and whatever kind of casual shoe was in that season; businessmen and salesmen who had stopped for a quick one after work and, accidentally or otherwise, lost track of the time; urban and not-so-urban cowboys and their paramours; and the less-easily classifiable—workers from the oil depot down the road, guys from the truck stop, passers-through who had wandered over from the Cloud 9 Motel with its Phone In Every Room.

  I added enough beer to top off the glass, sipped, and scanned the room again for Eloise Slater.

  The way hard-drinking, hardboiled detectives get to be so hard drinking, I figured, is by spending so much time hanging around bars. I seemed to be spending a fair amount of my free time in them myself these days. No way around it, though. When the people you’re spooking around after hang around in bars, so do you.

  Eventually I found Eloise Slater. More correctly, she found me. I had my eyes on the right side of the room when a voice in my left ear said, “I thought that was you.”

  I turned. She was wearing a grin and a hot-pink knit shirt tucked into tight black leather pants. Under the shirt, nothing. Under the pants, hard to say. The pointed toes of shiny, sapphire-blue high-heeled shoes showed under the pants’ tapered legs. Her belt was a length of gold chain, drawn through the loops and secured with a small golden padlock. I smiled. “You thought right,” I said.

  She set a round cork-lined tray on the rubber mat between two upright chrome rails on the bar. “Two Bud Lights, two Coors, tonic twist,” she told the bartender in a rapid monotone. He nodded at about the point where you or I would be saying Wha-at?, and went to work. Eloise Slater tucked a lock of dark hair behind her right ear, looked at me sidelong, and said, “I’m pissed off at you.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “You sicced the cops on me,” she said quietly but forcefully, on the tail of a quick glance around to make sure no one
was paying attention. No one was. “That was a crappy thing to do.”

  “Just doing my job. As they said at Nuremberg. Anyhow”—I examined her from the floor up—“you don’t look much the worse for wear. What’d they do? Ask you a few questions, look around the house? Hell, after this morning’s festivities, it must have been a cakewalk.”

  Despite herself, she laughed. “They didn’t have to look around much: Everything’s still piled up in the middle of the place. I had some errands to run today, and I really just didn’t feel like dealing with the mess.”

  “Uh-huh.” I drank some beer. “Well, I’m sorry I blew your cover, but so it goes. Look, I need to ask you a couple more questions.”

  “What about?”

  “Longo. And things.”

  “Things, huh?” One slender eyebrow inched upward speculatively. “I’ll bet.”

  The tray was reloaded now, the tab smartly anchored to the cork with water or whatever. She hoisted it onto her hip with easy, practiced skill and gave me a long, narrow look with her slitted dark eyes.

  I watched her climb the wooden stairs to the mezzanine over the game machines.

  I waited. It was a longish wait. That was all right. I dumped the rest of my beer into the glass and watched minuscule bubbles drift upward. Some of them clung to the inside of the glass. I wondered what determined which ones would stick and which ones would roll on up the glass and disappear into the quarter-inch of head floating on top.

  Private detectives spend a lot of time alone, waiting, with nothing to do.

  A few minutes later, Eloise was back with a trayful of empties, glasses as well as bottles. The bartender scooped up the glasses and dumped them into sudsy water under the counter. Then he grabbed the tray and, from three feet away, shot the bottles into a plastic-lined cardboard drum.

  “Three Coors, three Falstaffs, Miller Lite, Coke,” she told the bartender. To me: “Well?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, you said you had some questions. Ask. Or are you sure you just came here to talk?”

  I watched the bartender work, quickly but not hurriedly, and said, “Aw, now you know.” I swallowed some beer. “I came here to drink, too.”

  “Right,” she said.

  Again the tray was full. Again she left. Again I waited.

  After an interval, she returned with another set of orders for the bartender and another sidelong glance for me.

  I said, “This conversation would take less time if we were doing it by mail. Is there a possibility you could spare five minutes, five consecutive minutes, to talk to me?”

  “I’m off tomorrow night,” she said. A strange half-smile snaked across her lips. “That’ll give us all night.”

  “I just need five minutes.”

  She looked at me under drooped eyelids. “What the hell. Hey, Denny.” The bartender looked up. “I gotta take five. Get Shelly to cover for me, will you.”

  “You don’t go on break till nine.”

  “Screw you.”

  We stepped out onto the boardwalk fronting the place. The world was that funny blue-gray you get only on long summer evenings, only in the Midwest.

  Between its own lamps and the illumination spilling back from the front of the old elevator, the parking lot was well lighted. Clouds of insects hung around the lights. A few kids hung around the cars. Two men and two women, the men in bowling shirts that had Kingpins across the backs, came up the walk. I waited until they passed us and entered the bar. Then I said, “This morning you said something about Longo once talking about ro—”

  “You got a car here?” She smiled again, the strange half-sleepy, half-smirky smile. “I need to get off my feet a minute.”

  I said yeah and we went along to the far end of the building where the Impala was parked. She slumped on the seat on the passenger’s side, propping her feet against the dash. She let out a long sigh, then, as an afterthought, asked if I minded.

  “Please,” I said magnanimously. “My dashboard is your dashboard. I’ve never been a cocktail waitress, but those don’t strike me as ideal footwear for the endeavor.”

  She stabbed a heel into the dash and waggled her foot. “Eight hours on these can be a killer, but they help you get bigger tips.”

  I looked at her shirt.

  “Tips,” she said, “ti-puhs.” She grinned. “But you’ve got the idea. I wear a shirt lets you get a little peek at my boobs, pants so tight I practically have to grease my legs to get into them, and heels that half the guys in the place would love to have me wear walking up and down their backs—you think they’re gonna be noticing how long it took me to make their change?”

  “Very scientific.”

  “Swinging your ass beats running it off.”

  “I think I came across that one in Bartlett’s the other day.”

  Eloise gave me a long look. Then she leaned across, took my head in her hands, and held her mouth very close to mine. I could smell her breath, toothpaste and lipstick, smell her perfume floating over the fainter but pungent smell of cigarette smoke. Her lips were sweet and smooth and cool with gloss. They drifted lightly over mine, then harder, harsher. She ended the kiss, moved her face away. Then she ducked back in and bit my lower lip, lightly but definitely.

  She pulled away. “You sure that isn’t what you came for?” The laugh was a bark.

  I said, “Maybe you could take a course at the YWCA or someplace, develop a little self-confidence.”

  She smirked. “You liked what you saw this morning, at my place, you liked the things I told you, the things I said I’d do to you. For you. You know you did. But you’re like the guy who wants to buy a dirty magazine and’s embarrassed, so he gets Time and Newsweek and everything else to try and cover it up.”

  “Actually, I get dirty magazines because I’m embarrassed about buying Time and Newsweek. Listen. This morning you said Longo had once mentioned the idea of robbing a bank.”

  Her laugh was even harsher than before. “That’s the best you can do? Jesus …” She shook her head, grinning. Then she reached between her bent knees and opened the glove compartment. “You got any cigarettes in here?”

  “No.” I reached under her legs and closed the little door. “I quit six years ago.”

  “Yeah? I quit once for a whole week, but it didn’t last. How’d you do it?”

  “Easy. I ran out of money and cigarettes at the same time. And speaking of money …”

  Eloise sighed elaborately. “Like I told you, like I told the guys from the Treasury, it was just, like, talk, all right? It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t like Gregg was showing me an outline of exactly how he planned to rob banks.”

  “How’d he happen to make the remark? What led up to it?”

  She shook her dark head, frowning. “I don’t know. I don’t remember—that’s how unimportant it was. I suppose Gregg was talking about how tight things were, you know, and then he said, like, ‘What I ought to do is go rob a bank.’ Something just that stupid.” She looked at me, the frown still in place.

  “Did Longo talk a lot about money?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “I mean, was he preoccupied with it? Did he talk about being in hock to someone in a big way?”

  “He owed everybody. He owed on his house and his car and most of the junk they bought, him and his wife, since he went out of business …”

  “Not that kind of stuff. This would be something he owed to one person.”

  “He owed me a hundred bucks.”

  This was getting nowhere.

  I said, “Did he ever talk about needing to get hold of a lot of money, fast, in order to make a big payment?”

  Lips pursed in concentration, she shook her head.

  “Did he ever talk about leaving town?”

  “Not really.”

  “What does ‘not really’ mean?”

  She snorted in exasperation. “Jesus! It means he said it once or twice the same way he said he should rob a bank. He’
d be real down about nothing turning up, like a job, I mean, and then he’d say how maybe him and me should just up and leave town, you know, see if things were better someplace else.”

  “Was there a time …” I paused, thinking how to phrase it. “Did there come a time when Longo didn’t seem so concerned about money?”

  “Like after one of the banks was knocked over?” Again with the half-smirk. “You asked it before. Look, why’n’t you just tell me what you really want?”

  What I really wanted was a peek inside of Longo’s head, take a look at his attitudes, his feelings, and try to get a handle on whether or not the little weasel had actually robbed those banks. Was he consumed with worry about money and then, suddenly, not—as if his money trouble had simply evaporated? Lou Boyer told me that Longo had never grown out of thinking that his ship would come in sooner or later. Did Longo have reason to think it finally had? Had Longo planned to skip town with or without the money he owed Irish Tim Callinan? Or when his life bled out of him as he lay on the pavement that summer night, was his last thought that he had at least escaped the long arm of the loan shark?

  Ever since I had connected a face with the name Gregg Longo, the other night with Carolyn—ever since I had seen the pictures of Longo on Carolyn’s dresser and had compared the face in them to the face in the faded pictures I still carried in my head after twenty years—I had been mentally reviewing the only clear memory I had of him.

  High school. Junior year, I think, but it could just as easily have been senior year. There was a room, a glorified boiler room, really, in the basement of the school building. The room was a litter of junk and janitor’s supplies, a tangle of pipes and steel electrical conduit. Some of the teachers would sneak in there for a smoke between classes.

  At some point during the year, several of the less academically inclined members of the student body conspired to flush every toilet in every bathroom in the building at exactly the same instant.

  The escapade was planned with the exactitude of a surgical air strike. Sufficient numbers of troops, girls as well as boys, were drafted in order to ensure that every crapper in the joint was activated. Watches were synchronized—in some cases, no doubt, stolen and then synchronized—with fanatical precision. The operation went off on time. And the result was as you’d expect.