Money Trouble

by William J. Reynolds

  “Why are you cross-examining me?”

  “Come on, Carolyn, you’ve hung around lawyers enough to know this isn’t cross-ex. I’m just asking a question.”

  “Why? What’s Monroe James got to do with anything?”

  Good question, I thought.

  “Good question,” I said. “I’m trying to figure that one out myself. I keep tripping over James, peripherally, sort of.”

  “What, did he have something to do with Gregg?” Her dark eyes were very wide, inquisitive.

  “No, I don’t think so. This is another case entirely.” Now it was my turn to dodge the question. “But I figured, since James used to work here, maybe you could tell me a thing or two about him. Do you know what he’s doing now?”

  “Haven’t the slightest idea. I could maybe find out …”

  “That’s okay, I’m sure I can, too, if it’s important.”

  “You’re sure? Someone here’s bound to know …”

  “No, it’s all right.” Someone there was bound to know, probably, but I didn’t need that someone alerting James to the fact that a private investigator had been in asking about him. It would spoil the surprise. Whatever the surprise was going to be. “Thanks anyhow.”

  I slid off the end of the table. Carolyn got to her feet. “Will I see you later?”

  I looked at the books on the shelves behind her. “I’ve sort of been seeing someone else, Carolyn.”

  “Oh. Is it serious?”

  “You make it sound like an illness. Yes, it’s serious. Serious enough. I don’t want to do anything to damage it. I don’t want to hurt her. And I think maybe I did both of those things already.”

  She turned her back to me, as if scanning the same dry, ponderous volumes that my eyes had gone to when I couldn’t face her. “Oh,” she repeated. “Then last night …”

  So we were back to that again. “Last night was last night. You said you don’t know what happened. Well, neither do I. You needed something and I needed something, and we found it. You needed to feel cherished, possessed, whatever. I needed to conclude something that had begun twenty years ago.”

  “That ended twenty years ago.” She turned and faced me and her eyes were red and moist and shiny. “Ended. Last night was the beginning of something new.”

  “Carolyn.” I took her by the shoulders. “Carolyn, I’m sorry, I don’t think so.”

  She pushed away. “You were whistling a different tune last night in the sack.”

  There was no point arguing with her. She had an unfair advantage: the truth. I moved toward the door.

  “Wait.”

  I did, and felt her hand on my shoulder, cool through my thin cotton shirt.

  “Ivan, I’m sorry. That was cruel. I … well, you’re right. I needed something last night, and you provided it. I had hoped maybe you and I would get back on track again. But I think I knew all along we never would. We’ve been off-track too many years, maybe. I don’t know.”

  I had turned. Now I took her into my arms, smelled the warm, fresh perfume of her hair, felt her generous body against me. “Damn it,” I said. “If things had been different … twenty years ago … today …”

  Carolyn ended the embrace and stepped back, wiping her eyes with her fingertips. “Things aren’t different. It’s no good wishing they were.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  There was what the novelists call an awkward silence. Suddenly we both found the carpet extraordinarily fascinating.

  Finally Carolyn spoke, with a self-deprecating half-laugh. “You were my first love, Ivan, did you know that? Oh, it sounds silly now, but back then … I used to think of us as Romeo and Juliet, you know, star-crossed lovers. Very tragic, very romantic.” She touched my cheek, very delicately. “I guess I still think of us that way.” Then she took her hand away and turned, this time toward the shaded windows. “Well, at least we’re friends again, right?”

  “Right,” I said lamely.

  “Okay.” She snuffled wetly. I may have snuffled a little myself. She turned toward me again. “Um, say, did you happen to talk to the police? About Gregg …”

  “Oh. Yeah. This morning. I told them all about Gregg and the money he owed, the money he could have paid back if he’d knocked over those banks.”

  “Uh-huh. And?”

  “And now we do what is commonly known as waiting and seeing. The cop I spilled it to promised to pass it along to them what should have it passed along to them. The feds already know: I told Jurgenson all about it last night. Now the various interested parties have to mull it over and decide what is and is not worthwhile. Personally, from what I’ve seen, they have so little to tie Gregg into the thing that I think they’ll probably be glad of any excuse to drop him entirely.”

  “God, I hope so.” She sniffed again and rubbed her nose. “I need to get on with my life.”

  “Well,” I said after a while, “I think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

  She barked a harsh, humorless laugh. “You know the joke—that light at the end of the tunnel is a train coming at you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The afternoon, uncomfortably warm, uncomfortably stuffy, stretched out before me. I drove around awhile in a futile effort to cool off and sort things out. I cased Monroe James’s neighborhood, trying to figure out what to do about him, how to handle him. It was a nice day for a little breaking and entering, but the environs were a little too busy for my tastes. Too many kids. Kids’ll do you in every time. Whenever events call for sneakiness, you can count on attracting a kid like a picnic attracting ants.

  I decided to see what my subconscious could do with the problem, and put a few more miles on the odometer.

  Eventually my not-so-happy wandering brought me near the old Decatur Street homestead, and my potbelly reminded me that it hadn’t been stoked lately.

  The mail wasn’t anything to write home about: bills, two rejection slips, Newsweek, and a nasty letter from a book club. People like me shouldn’t belong to these “negative option” outfits. I never get the card returned by the deadline, so they send me books I don’t want, so I send them back, so they get ticked off and send me snippy “reminders” of how the racket operates. Pointless notices, I should say. I understand how they operate; it’s they who don’t understand how I operate.

  Three people had hung up on the answering machine. Or one person had hung up three times. Or one once and one twice, and what the hell difference did it make anyhow.

  I reset the machine, slapped together a peanut-butter-and-mashed-banana sandwich, and downed it and a glass of flat Coke while looking over the news of the week.

  That kind of high living can go on only so long, of course. Eventually I toddled back to my bedroom/office, where I stood looking at the desk, the typewriter as if they had only just materialized.

  I liberated the aborted Longo report from the typewriter and slipped it into the topmost of the three plastic baskets on my desk. The baskets are optimistically labeled In, Out, and Pending; in fact I distribute items based on which basket looks emptiest at the moment.

  Funny thing: The disparate pieces of The Next Book were waiting for me right where I had left them, partly sprawled across the desk, partly stacked on the floor next to it, mostly floating in the vacuum between my ears. Literary gnomes had not sneaked in and completed the manuscript while I was distracted by other things. Little bastards.

  I picked up a pencil and poked the blunt end at the most recent pages, as if leery of touching them. In all, there were probably two hundred, two hundred fifty sheets of paper lying around. That’s not as impressive as it may sound. Many of those sheets held only a few lines, once the cross-outs were deleted. Some of them were inserts, brief passages intended to fit between existing passages that I was too lazy to retype. Some were just rough outlines, notes to myself, thumbnail character sketches. Assembled, clean-typed with proper margins and no strike-overs, they probably would come to no more than a hundred and fifty page
s. Less than half a novel.

  Of course, length isn’t everything. In fact, it isn’t anything. Story is everything. You start at the beginning and you go till the end, and whatever length you end up with is the proper length. The problem was, I wasn’t going. I wasn’t writing down dead ends, which is frustrating but not really a waste of time, since even your mistakes and false starts teach you a thing or two. I wasn’t writing simply to get words on paper, which frequently can trigger a true creative flow. I wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t that the story wasn’t there, it wasn’t that the words wouldn’t come. The story was there, and I had been in the business long enough to know that if the story was there the words would come if I prodded and teased and cajoled them. I just hadn’t been. For a whole bunch of reasons that very neatly jelled together into one. Fear of failure.

  When The Book was accepted for publication, I thought the event had shoved me past that little gremlin. I thought it would be clear sailing through The Next Book, and all the Subsequent Books I knew would come.

  I was wrong. If anything, success, such as it was, only heightened my fear of failure.

  Because, with the first book, I had had nothing to lose; now, suddenly, I did. A tender, green, undeveloped reputation, very fragile, very delicate. I didn’t want it bruised.

  Now the pages, the sentences, the words that had come together so well before I had proven myself—the words that had fairly leaped from fingers to keys to paper, that had flashed through my brain so rapidly and so clearly that I barely had time to get them down—now those words stared at me lifelessly, mockingly.

  I dropped the pencil and picked up and skimmed the last few pages I had done. It was like reading someone else’s work.

  This was the crossroads, I realized. I had three choices. Forge ahead with The Next Book—close my eyes, hold my nose, and dive in. Or dump it and start over from square one. Or dump it and not start over from square one, come to grips with the fact that very, very few people derive any kind of living from the written word, and get on with some kind of adult pursuit.

  That didn’t sound like much fun.

  I rescued the page I had thrown away last night, gathered up the disordered sheets from the desk, and threw them facedown onto the stack on the floor. Then I grabbed my barely legible handwritten notes, a fresh legal pad, a new Bic Roller, lifted the ungodly mess from the floor into the crook of my left arm, and headed for the living room.

  Where I dropped my burden in the middle of the ugly rust-colored shag carpet, got down on the floor, and got down to work.

  The machine collected two more hanger-uppers: I resolutely ignored them. The third call, however, was accompanied by a message:

  “Goddammit, Nebraska, don’t you live there any more?”

  I reached up and grabbed the phone from the coffee table and asked Kim Banner if she thought that was any way to talk to people.

  “I wasn’t talking to a people, I was talking to a damn machine. I’ve been trying to get you all day.”

  “It is for people like you that I spent my hard-earned dough on the aforesaid damn machine. Just leave your dulcet tones on the painfully low-quality tape and I will—”

  “Jesus, who wound you up?” Banner’s usually hoarse voice had a tight, keyed-up edge to it … which I chose to ignore.

  “I am suffused with the joy of simple, honest, and productive labor. I’ve spent the last hour or two rethinking and reoutlining a good portion of the new book—deciding what should stay and what must go and what use to make of the former. My home looks like the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, junk everywhere, but me, I’m feeling pretty damn virtuous.”

  “Allow me to spoil your good mood, then.”

  “You’re welcome to try, although I doubt wheth—”

  “Your pal Marlon Abel. He turned up sort of dead this afternoon.”

  Neither of us spoke for the space of several heartbeats. Then I said, “I was wrong. About your spoiling my good mood, I mean.”

  There was no good reason to insist on seeing the place. There wasn’t even a bad reason. I just wanted to, is all.

  Abel’s place looked about as I would have guessed. His room was on the third floor, rear. A long, cramped space. A sprung sofa shoved against one bare wall. A card table and folding chairs against the other. A portable TV on a dresser near the sofa, the set turned so that someone lying on the sofa could view it. A twin bed, unmade, shoved into an alcove separated from the main room by a bead curtain and a good imagination.

  Sink, mini fridge, and a two-burner gas range filled a nook next to the “bedroom.” The bathroom was down the hall.

  Abel—or the earthly remains thereof—was long gone, of course. That’s why there was no reason for my wanting to see the place. Banner had told me, and I had believed her, but it wasn’t enough. Eventually she relented and agreed to meet me and let me in.

  “He collected it over there,” Banner said needlessly. “Needlessly” because the rusty brown splash across the wall and sofa back said the same thing. “Sometime between eleven a.m. and one-thirty, when the landlady found him. She’d come to collect. No answer at the door, but she heard the TV. She figured he was home, ignoring her, trying to dodge the rent. So she used her key.”

  “Bet that’s the last time she does that,” I said. “But if the door was—”

  “Spring lock,” said Banner. She stepped back a couple of feet and showed me the inside doorknob. “Push the button, pull the door closed after you, and it’s locked.”

  I made a circuit of the place. It didn’t take long. The apartment was a mess—unmade bed, dirty clothes on the floor, a week’s worth of dishes in the sink, garbage that wanted desperately to be taken out—but so tiny and so sparsely furnished that it was impossible to spend any time on it.

  “Abel must have been standing about where you are,” Banner said. “The killer, about where I am. Abel was facing him.” I turned away from the bloody sofa and looked at her. “They argued, who knows, and the killer went for his gun.” She reached around behind her as if taking a wallet out of her back pocket and came around with two fingers of her right hand extended. “It was fast: Abel didn’t have time to duck or try to run or anything. No place to run to: He was cut off from the door, trapped in the room.” She cradled her right hand in her left. “Pow, one shot. He takes it over the left eye and sits down hard.”

  I nodded. “Anything?”

  “No one heard. The neighbors work days, except for an old man in the basement front, and he’s deaf as a post. Just one shot, from a .22, the street’s pretty noisy … anyone who might’ve heard it probably didn’t, and anyone who did probably isn’t saying. It’s that kind of a neighborhood. Chances are he’d’ve sat here a good long time if today wasn’t rent day.”

  “What about his job?”

  “He quit showing up a couple of days ago. We checked.”

  “What about his pal. Patavena.”

  “What indeedy.” Banner pulled one of the metal chairs away from the cheap card table and sat. I grabbed the other chair and did likewise. “We dropped by his street-repair job. He didn’t show up for work today. We dropped by his residence—makes this place look like the Ritz—but he wasn’t there either.”

  “He clear out?”

  “Could be. Hard to tell with these crappy little slums. This place, for instance. My first thought was, The joint’s been tossed. But it hadn’t.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Uh-huh. The place is a wreck, but it’s too neat a wreck, if you know what I mean. Too natural a wreck. Likewise Patavena’s dive. There’s nothing there, but is it because he took everything and split, or because he doesn’t have anything?” She shrugged. “Yours is as good as mine.”

  “Is there anything to tie Patavena into this?”

  Banner ran a hand through her hair. The room was hot and close, and small dark commas of hair clung to her forehead and neck. She was wearing a pink cotton shirt, light gray pants, and a gray loose-knotted
ribbon tie a little like the kind James Garner wore on Maverick.

  “Nothing. There’s nothing to tie anyone to it. But Abel and Patavena were as thick as—Well, hell, you know all about that. It’s funny that the one is among the missing and the other is among the dead.”

  “Funny.”

  “Look, Sherlock, what’s going on?” Banner’s tone was casual, almost offhand.

  “You flatter me,” I said. “You think this has to do with me?”

  “Do I think you’re involved? No, of course not. Do I think it involves you? Maybe. You had a couple of run-ins with these two, Patavena and Abel. I find it peculiar that one of them suddenly winds up dead.”

  “But I can’t see how or where it would fit into the Longo investigation.”

  “Unless they found the money. Patavena killed Abel and rabbitted. Or someone else killed Abel and scared off Patavena.”

  “But Longo didn’t have the money.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know that the world is round, but all the evidence points that way. Longo didn’t have the money. Period. But as for these two characters finding it if he had … well, I don’t think either of them could find his own ass with both hands and a mirror. Guys like them, they live on the fringe, Banner. You know it as well as I do. Look around. The room, the building, the neighborhood. Maybe a junkie killed him for pocket money. Maybe he got into an argument with a drinking buddy, and the buddy didn’t feel like losing. Who knows? It’s a violent world.”

  “Uh-huh.” Banner wiped the back of her neck. “You’re right. And life’s full of its little coincidences.”

  “It is that. A guy and a gal know a guy who used to work where a gal works … coincidence.”

  Banner stood. “That’s it: You’ve had too much of this heat and so have I. Can we go now? Have you seen what you came for?”

  I followed her to the door. “I guess so,” I said. “Seeing as I don’t know what that might have been.”

  The hallway was no less uncomfortable than the apartment, but a faint draft provided the illusion of ventilation. Banner locked and resealed the apartment, replacing the yellow tape that had been thumbtacked across the doorway. We trooped down filthy bare wooden steps to the alley behind the building, where Banner’s unmarked Ford was parked behind my car.