Money Trouble

by William J. Reynolds

  “I’m sorry—but, believe me, if you saw them you’d know what a ridiculous thing you just suggested.” I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye. “Besides, when I suggested to them that Gregg may have entrusted his loot to someone else, someone the cops wouldn’t know about, the boys immediately scampered off to Ralston to see.”

  “Who? See who?” Her dark eyes were alive, electric.

  I ignored her and drank. The beer tasted like water. “The important discovery, the one the cops would credit, is that Gregg was up to his incisors in debt—”

  “We were.” Haughty. “But I’m working and there’s a little insurance and I’m making the paym—”

  “—to a private party. A loan shark, they’d call him in the crime novels. Gregg died owing the guy twenty thousand dollars. Which he could have paid off easily if he had seventy-eight grand stuffed into the mattress.”

  Carolyn looked like I had slapped her. Small wonder: In a way, I had. “I can’t believe it,” she said hollowly.

  “The guy Gregg borrowed the lettuce from isn’t a leg-breaker. But he wouldn’t have let Gregg go on forever without paying up. Sooner or later you’d have started to notice little things missing from around the house. Like furniture. It behooves you to pay off a guy like that, and Gregg undoubtedly would have if he could have. The fact that he didn’t might cut some ice with the proper authorities, as they say in the movies. There’s a cop or two I know I can convince: They’ll help me with the feds if I need it.”

  Carolyn’s face had been replaced by a pale blank mask of mute shock. Her mouth opened, her lips trembled. She chewed at her bottom lip, wet it with her tongue. Then, hoarsely: “Twenty thousand. What did he do with twenty thousand dollars?”

  “Well, the loan really was only ten thousand,” I explained. “The rest is interest.”

  “Dear God.” She clasped her hands, forefingers extended, and brought them to her lips. “But what—Where did the money go, the ten thousand …”

  I pushed the beer can away from me. Suddenly I didn’t want any more. “Gambling.”

  Carolyn seemed to stiffen, slightly, almost imperceptibly. Her voice was cold and the words sounded stilted and rehearsed when she said, “Gregg used to gamble. When we were first married. It was an illness, and he got it treated.”

  “Well, he should’ve gone in for a booster shot, because it didn’t take. You yourself speculated that the fifty he had on him when he died could have been the product of a pool-hall bet.”

  “That’s not the same thing,” she said woodenly.

  “No? Just like you’re not an alcoholic if all you drink is beer? Or you’re not a junkie if your drugs are prescription? Come on, Carolyn. It’s not the same thing because you don’t want it to be the same thing.”

  She said nothing.

  “The man he owed the money to, the loan shark, tells me that Gregg would bet on anything. But even with all that practice he never got any good at it.”

  Carolyn took a long pull from her glass. Then she sat silently and watched the ice melt in the Cool Whip tub.

  I said, “I suppose it’s like alcoholism, nicotine addiction, all that stuff. You can be clean for years, then along comes enough stress to shove you off the wagon. Gregg probably had quit. But when things got tough …” I shrugged. “He probably started with nickel-and-dime stuff, pocket money that he could lose without your noticing. Recreational gambling. Only to a compulsive gambler, ‘recreational gambling’ is like ‘social drinking’ to an alcoholic: there’s no such animal. Then he must have decided he could win big if he bet big. Another bet would get back his losses … another one to recoup those …”

  “Please,” she said sourly. “I know the story. I lived through it.”

  “It’s a blessing in disguise, if you want to take the Pollyanna position. If Gregg hadn’t been a betting man, he wouldn’t have owed the shark twenty grand. If he didn’t owe the shark twenty grand, there’d be absolutely nothing, instead of just practically nothing, pointing to Gregg’s innocence.” I fanned my palms in a kind of shrug.

  Carolyn raked a hand through the hair covering her left ear, pulling it back, letting it fall, mussed, behind the ear. Time passed, undisturbed by us. Finally she said, “You really think Gregg was innocent?”

  “I don’t think he knocked over those banks,” I said, which didn’t exactly address her question. “Innocence” is for theologians and philosophers. “Not guilty” is for cops and lawyers. And private detectives.

  “But I can’t prove it,” I repeated.

  “But you think the police will accept your … your theory? That Gregg’s owing this man so much money—and not paying it—proves he didn’t do it?”

  I rubbed an eye, watching her through the other one. “Cops are like everybody else; sometimes they surprise you by their reactions. Sometimes they’re off the wall, you can’t figure where they’re coming from. Mostly, though, cops are mainly reasonable people trying to do a mainly unreasonable job. I can probably convince them. In any event, I think it’s worth a try.”

  Carolyn shrugged and spread her hands on the table, palms down. “Nothing ventured …”

  “Then that’s what I’ll do, first thing in the a.m. Which is fast approaching.” I stood. “I’d better shove off and let you get some sleep.”

  “Wait,” Carolyn said. She paused, and when she spoke her words were slow, deliberate, controlled. “You said something about how Gregg might have given the money—if there had been any money—to someone else. Who?”

  I had hoped she’d forgotten.

  I sat again and fiddled with the beer can while I tried to phrase my reply. There are some things that are simply impossible to couch in polite, discreet euphemisms, some things that are simply impossible to break gently. Every cop, public or private, knows this. None of them ever gets any good at telling people that their husband or wife or kid is dead. Any cop you ask will concur.

  Telling a woman that her dead husband had been cheating on her up until the end isn’t in the same category, but that doesn’t mean it came any easier for me.

  Carolyn waited.

  I made a last-ditch search for the words. They were nowhere to be found. “All right,” I said. “That first time you called me, the time you hung up on the answering machine … You told me later you had been thinking of asking me to find out if Gregg was seeing another woman.”

  “Oh, God,” Carolyn said. Emotionlessly. All the emotions had been scoured out of her.

  “You were right.” I said it as gently as possible, which wasn’t gently enough. “For the past few months. Gregg’s pal Abel let it slip when I was questioning him. Then I sort of sicced him and Patavena on her so I could follow them.”

  Carolyn absorbed the news for a minute, maybe more. “What’s her name?” she finally said.

  “I don’t think that’s important.”

  “I do,” Carolyn snapped. “And I’m the one picking up the tab.”

  “Then keep your goddamn money.” My turn to snap. It was late and I was tired, if that’s an excuse. “Use it to hire someone who’ll do anything for a buck. Me, I won’t. I don’t think it’ll do you any good to know. Her either. Gregg’s gone and the affair is over and I’m not talking. Like it or lump it.” Who says I don’t have a way with words?

  Carolyn glared at me through narrowed eyes, her face flushed, her breathing hard. She was trying to come up with some good ammunition and wasn’t having any luck.

  Then she was saved by the bell. The doorbell.

  Carolyn looked at me, looked at the clock on the stove. “It’s a little late for company …” she said crossly.

  She left the room. I stayed put, trying out sentences in my head. It was hard work, so I got up and went to the sink, took a glass from the shelf above it, and filled it with water from the tap.

  At which point I heard Carolyn say, very loudly, “Why can’t you people just leave me alone!”

  The kitchen had two doors. The door in the south wall led t
o the dining room; the door in the east wall led past the stairs and into the entryway at the front of the house. I pushed through the second door—it was on a double hinge, like the door Rob and Laura always had so much fun with on The Dick Van Dyke Show—and into the entryway.

  Standing in the doorway, speaking to Carolyn in low tones, was Bill Jurgenson, junior G-man; his sidekick, Robinson; and three others I didn’t recognize. Jurgenson was holding a trifolded paper. I didn’t have to read it to know it was a search warrant. Carolyn avoided the paper as if she thought it might be infested.

  Jurgenson spotted me and did a neat little double take. I said, “You guys work long hours.”

  “I was about to say the same about you. Or—” He cocked his head to his left, toward Carolyn.

  “Business,” I said. I looked at Carolyn. “What’s the problem?”

  She was agitated. The irritation she’d felt toward me a few minutes ago had now exploded into full-blown, venom-dripping anger. Her eyes were wide, her nostrils flared. Her lips were pulled back away from her teeth and her breath shooshed between them in quick little gulps. The way she glared at Jurgenson, he might have been something that just climbed up from hell. “He wants to search my house again. He’s already done it once, why does he have to bother me again?” She turned her face to me. “Don’t let him.”

  Jurgenson looked at me impassively. To his credit, he didn’t fuss or holler or wave his warrant around.

  I said, “I don’t think there’s much that can be done about it, Carolyn.” To Jurgenson: “Can’t this wait until morning?”

  He pursed his lips and gave me a long look. “I’d rather not.” He half-turned and faced Carolyn. “This won’t take long, Mrs. Longo.”

  Carolyn glowered at him, saying nothing. After a few seconds Jurgenson turned to Robinson. The white man nodded almost imperceptibly, and the black man and the others moved to prowl the premises.

  “Ironically, I was just telling Carolyn why I thought I could convince you guys to lay off her.”

  Jurgenson’s eyebrows went up. “I’d be interested in hearing that.”

  “I’ve come across one or two things that don’t prove anything per se, but tend to indicate Gregg Longo must have been innocent.”

  “I’m still interested.” The eyebrows stayed put.

  “The most significant of them is Irish Tim.”

  “Callinan? What’s he got to do with this?”

  I told him how Gregg Longo was into Callinan for twenty grand.

  Jurgenson whistled. “That’s a lot of bottle caps. But I don’t get your point. A guy owes a lot of money to a leg-breaker, seems to me that just makes him a candidate for doing something stupid.”

  “Stupid would be not paying Irish twenty Gs when you have fifty-eight more just like them collecting dust. Longo owed, he did not pay, therefore he did not have the dough, therefore he did not rob the banks. Q.E.D., as they say in the movies.”

  “Very imaginative.” He grinned.

  I shrugged. “Talk to Callinan.”

  Jurgenson’s grin widened. “Right. I’m sure he’d be very forthcoming with information.”

  “Seems to me it’d be more productive than this.” I gestured to indicate the house, which Jurgenson’s team had begun searching quietly, efficiently. “A little late for fishing, William.”

  “Some bite at night,” Jurgenson murmured. “But this isn’t a fishing trip. When I told you the investigation had been back-burnered, I told you the truth. Things have changed since then.”

  “Things. What sort of things?”

  Carolyn said, “I don’t want him here. I don’t want these men in this house.”

  “Carolyn …”

  “What are you doing?” She ran to the black man, Robinson, who had rolled back several feet of rug in the living room and now was tapping at the floorboards with a small rubber mallet. “Stop that!” Her voice was harsh and shrill.

  Robinson looked at Jurgenson. It seemed like a good idea, so I did too.

  Jurgenson moved behind Carolyn and gripped her upper arms in what was meant as a consoling gesture. She pulled away angrily. Jurgenson took a deep breath. “We have to do this, Mrs. Longo,” he said to her back. “I’m sorry. We’ll be as quick as possible. And as careful.”

  Without a word she stormed out of the room—through the dining room and into the kitchen.

  “Damn it, what’s going on, Jurgenson? I thought you said you’d take it easy on her.”

  He slid his glasses back onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes. They were red and watery with fatigue. “Believe it or not, Nebraska, I am going easy on her. Have you ever seen a full-scale search? Men all over the place like flies on garbage. This isn’t a search. This is nothing. This is—what?—research. Reconnaisance. Inspection …”

  “Maybe Santa will bring you a nice thesaurus for Christmas,” I said irritably. “Meanwhile, what the hell are you doing here?”

  He repositioned his eyeglasses. “The local banks have been running spot checks for us, comparing serial numbers of the bills they take in against the ones on the bills that were stolen. The ones that we know, at any rate …”

  “You told me that this afternoon.”

  “Yeah. What I didn’t tell you, I lied when I said none of the money had turned up. We had one the other day. A fifty. We’ve been working on its trail, tracing it back.”

  I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

  “We traced the note back to a guy named Lou Boyer. He tells us he got the fifty from Gregg Longo.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Tell the truth, now,” I said. “Isn’t this kind of a big waste of everybody’s time?”

  We were in the basement, Jurgenson and I, watching one of his minions work. Ordinarily I can stand around all day watching other people work, but tonight I was in no mood for it, giving scant attention to the big-nosed, balding fellow who went quietly about his business.

  The basements of old houses are unbeautiful sights. They weren’t designed to be potential living space, to someday be turned into rec rooms, bedrooms, or dens, to have saunas or whirlpool baths or pool tables installed at a later date. They were designed to be big holes that you stuck big furnaces in, furnaces that probably burned big quantities of coal that also were stored in, you guessed it, the basement. In that regard, the Longo basement was perfect, a huge, cold hole with uneven concrete floor and rough-hewn cement-block walls. The room was dominated by a colossal thirty-year-old furnace—gas—whose enormous metal tentacles, some round, some square, branched in every direction up toward the house. Other basementy artifacts completed the picture: washer and dryer; water heater; dust-coated cardboard boxes, trunks, and suitcases; a rough-hewn, paint-splattered workbench covered with cans of paint and lacquer and thinner and a thousand other handyman supplies in no discernible order or pattern.

  “If it was, I wouldn’t be doing it,” Jurgenson said evenly. “You think this is my idea of a good time? I have a family, you know, a wife and three kids. At least, I think it’s three. It’s been a long time since I saw them.”

  It was cold in the basement, and clammy. The temperature had felt refreshing when we first came down, but now the hair on my arms was beginning to rise. “You searched this place before. If the money was here, wouldn’t you have found it?”

  “I would like to think so. It pays to be sure.”

  The guy with the nose plucked away the vinyl tape that held an insulating blanket around the water-heater tank, exposing a six-inch strip from top to bottom. He tapped along this strip with the end of his high-intensity flashlight.

  “The link to Longo is pretty tenuous. The link to this house, to Carolyn, even more so.”

  We were standing by the stairs, rough wooden steps in an open staircase, painted industrial gray. Now Jurgenson pushed off and went to breathe down his man’s neck. “The trail to Longo is solid,” he said. “The fifty-dollar bill was one of three fifties that were part of a regular daily deposit made by
one of the Westroads merchants. We talked to the clerks on duty that day; one of them remembered being given a fifty by a man she knew, a man who also worked at the mall. Lou Boyer. We talked to Boyer, who remembered having been given a fifty by Longo just before he died.”

  “Which is exactly what I would say if the feds were leaning on me. I’d tell you guys exactly what I know you want to hear. Especially if I had … neglected to mention the first time that Longo had paid me a fifty days before he died.”

  Jurgenson looked back at me, the glimmer of a knowing smile in the red-rimmed eyes behind their lenses. “So he told you about that, huh? Funny, I didn’t quite believe him when he told me he’d forgotten about the fifty when we interviewed him three weeks ago. A guy might almost think that Longo’s buddy was trying to shield him.”

  “Himself, more than likely.” I moved across the concrete floor. “Look, we both know how cash gets around. Just because a store deposits a particular note on a particular day doesn’t mean it took in the note on the same day. Maybe it did, maybe the note sat in the store’s cash reserve for days or weeks. Boyer’s fifty could have been one of the other two in that day’s deposit. Or it could be sitting in the store’s strongbox right this minute. What I’m getting at is anyone could have passed that fifty anytime since it was stolen. Boyer’s involvement, such as it is, may be coincidental.”

  “And maybe not. We have to check it out.” Evidently convinced that the tank contained nothing but water, Big Nose drew the ends of the wrap together. Jurgenson held them overlapped while Big Nose pulled the old tape tight across the seam. There was just enough sticky left to hold it together, at least temporarily.

  “There’s more to it than that, though,” I said.

  Jurgenson looked at me, wiping his palms together.

  “Isn’t there?” I pressed. “Your being here, I mean—even if the fifty came from Longo. You think that Carolyn knows something.”

  He made a dismissive gesture and turned away.

  I took his elbow, gave a second’s consideration to the look he shot me, and let go. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “But I’m right, aren’t I? Why else search the place? Again. You think she found the money. Maybe you think she knew where it was hidden all along and’s just retrieved it. By having a nice easy look-see here, you’re hoping you might notice something out of place, something that’s been disturbed since the last time you looked.” I pulled my hand across the topmost carton in a nearby stack of boxes and showed my grimy palm. “Like dust. Cobwebs. What do you think? Carolyn knew all along that Gregg was the robber? Hey, maybe she drove the getaway car! Or did she just come across the stash the other day?”