“The old bucket looks pretty good,” Banner said with a nod toward the Impala. “Last time I saw it, it was bashed up and splattered with black paint.”
“Insurance is a wonderful thing. But looks aren’t everything. I’m afraid the old red beast is getting ready to head for that big used-car lot in the sky. And that will be a sad day because (a) I’ve had this car a long time and (b) there’s no earthly way I can afford another one. Unless I find Gregg Longo’s hidden millions.”
She looked at me. “You said you don’t think this has anything to do with the Longo business. But you don’t believe it, do you?”
I looked at the car as if I was thinking of buying it. “No,” I said. “I don’t. Take everything I said—”
“Please.”
“—and it could be that way. Sheer coincidence. They really do happen, coincidences—all the time. That’s what makes detective work such a bitch.”
“Challenge. My captain says the job’s a challenge. He also says there are no problems, only ‘opportunities.’ ”
“Oh, one of those assholes.” I sat on the trunk of the car, my feet on the back bumper. Banner leaned against the front of her car, arms folded under her breasts. “Mystery fans hate coincidences, but they make the game. It could be coincidental that Abel, who was connected to my Longo investigation, is now dead. Or that Eloise Slater, who also is connected to the investigation, is palsy with a fellow who’s palsy with another fellow whom I’ve been shadowing in another matter. Or that the guy everyone’s so palsy with used to work with Longo’s widow. Or that Lou Boyer’s handing out fifty-dollar notes that were stolen in the robberies attributed to Longo. Or that, or that, or that. Any of them could be a genuine grade-A, fourteen-karat coincidence. All of them could be. But it puts a real strain on a guy to go on trying to believe that, you know?”
“Woh yeah,” Banner said. “And in the meantime there are seventy-eight thousand unaccounted-for dollars lying around somewhere. Well, seventy-seven thousand nine hundred, taking away the fifty Longo had on him and the fifty Boyer passed. All right, ace detective, what do we do now?”
I slid off the car. “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I think I’m going to see if I can eliminate the middleman.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The only thing you can say about Omaha rush hour is that it is only an hour or so, not half the night like in the other, bigger cosmopolitan capitals and jet-set havens. Since I don’t work nine to fivish like real people, I forget about what the disc jockeys call “drive time,” and am trapped more often than I’d like to admit in one or more of the four or five work or school tangles. Of course, it always happens when I’m in the mood to get from point A to point B with minimum hassle.
Like this evening, for instance.
The snake of cars progressed slowly, when at all. Noxious fumes hung in the air, concentrated, held down by the hot, heavy atmosphere. I got stuck behind a moron who evidently had an LSD flashback behind the wheel and didn’t come around until the left-turn arrow had gone from green to yellow to red.
I got a look at his license plate as he turned into the wall of outraged horns from oncoming traffic. The familiar blue plates with white numerals. Iowa. But of course. The driving prowess of Iowans is famous, or infamous—too much corn on the brain or something—and stereotypes such as these aren’t conjured out of thin air. Go anywhere throughout the rest of the Midwest, from Indiana across to Colorado, Missouri to Minnesota, and you will encounter virtually unanimous concurrence that “IOWA” is an acronym for “Idiots Out Wandering Around.”
When I finally got my left turn made, I took a slight risk and quit Dodge for the longer but occasionally faster route along side streets. Sometimes, when the traffic is heavy, the roads less traveled are a good way to make time. Sometimes they’re a good way to get killed, too, because the city doesn’t have as many stop signs as it could stand, and you never know when there’s going to be another clockwatching fool—from Iowa, likely as not—also trying to make time but traveling in a route perpendicular to yours. That’s the “slight risk” I mentioned.
But I lived to tell the story and to pull up across and down from Monroe James’s little brick-façade house. I sat behind the wheel, trying to think of a good way of determining whether the house was occupied without tipping my hand. In the crime novels, the hero or sometimes the villain sinks a coin in a pay phone, and if no one answers, concludes that the joint’s vacant. Nice dream, but in real life it isn’t so easy. Modern telephones are equipped with bell silencers; people unplug their modular phones; people use answering machines to screen their calls. I figured I might as well save my quarter.
I was still considering and dismissing possibilities when a by now familiar-looking Toyota made the turn off of Western Avenue and came to a rest against the curb three houses down from James’s.
Interesting, I thought. Although I would have bet cash money that the two men would have another meeting of the minds erelong. Their parting the evening before, in the lot of the Antenna Lounge, had had that see-you-soon look to it.
Desotel climbed out of the Toyota, pulled a gray leather-and-suede attaché out after him, and sauntered down the sidewalk toward the house. The front yard sat four, four and a half feet above street level. Three brick steps took you from the sidewalk to a narrow brick walk that took you to a wider brick stoop at the front door. Desotel mounted the steps, knocked on the door, and waited. He didn’t so much as glance at his surroundings.
Monroe James admitted him. He gave a quick one-two glance up and down the street. It was a nervous response is all; he didn’t take the time to actually see anything. Like me in my car, for instance.
I drummed a muted tattoo on the steering wheel. Waiting. Thinking.
Something was going on in there. Hell, child, you don’t have to be a detective to know that. Even if I hadn’t been tailing Loverboy for days, even if I hadn’t tripped over James two or three times already, even if I wasn’t an innately suspicious man—if I had just stepped out of my house across the street to pick up the paper and saw one guy park three doors down when there was plenty of free parking right in front of the house he then proceeded to walk up to without looking left or right, then saw the other guy sneak a peek both ways up the street when he let the first guy in … well, wouldn’t you wonder what that was all about?
Me too.
I pulled the little Vivitar tele camera from under the front seat and unwrapped it.
Whatever was happening inside, or was about to happen, was illegal or embarrassing enough for the participants to be behaving very oddly. A photographic record of the proceedings might be just the thing to persuade Loverboy to do right by Mike Kennerly’s client and end all that alienation-of-affection nonsense.
There was little doubt in my mind that such blatant blackmail would be abhorrent to Kennerly and that he would refuse to be a party to the foul deed. Luckily for him, I wasn’t going to tell him the gory details.
I checked the camera, making sure the battery was properly juiced up and the film indicator still showed 2, meaning I didn’t have a roll of snapshots of the underside of the front seat as photographed through a Ziploc bag. For important junk like this, I always advance the film to the second exposure. If you’ve ever noticed that, when you get your pictures back from the drugstore, the first snap is almost always fucked up somehow, you know why I always start out a roll of film with a picture of the palm of my hand.
I slipped the camera into my shirt pocket and scoped out the street. Two kids on bikes, towing a kid on a skateboard. But they were toward the far end of the block and moving away from me. A guy up the street was adjusting a sprinkler on his lawn, but he would go inside soon: He wasn’t dressed for yard work. No one else, no one that I could see, at any rate.
I got out of the car. Almost as an afterthought, I slid back in and fished the revolver out of the glove compartment. Then I went around and opened the trunk and rummaged through my Official Double-Oh-
Seven Disguise Kit.
The disguise kit is this: a bunch of junk.
Disguise isn’t Sherlock Holmes making himself up to look like an antiquarian book dealer; it isn’t wigs and false noses and cheeks stuffed with tissue paper—all that Peter Sellers shtick in the Pink Panther movies. Disguise is more like sleight of hand, diverting the audience’s attention. Putting on or taking off a jacket. A hat. Glasses, plain or dark. That’s disguise.
From the disguise kit, an old blue Nekoosa Paper cardboard box with a lift-off lid, I pulled out a pale blue workshirt and quickly donned it over my sport shirt, tucking the tail into my jeans. I found a dark-blue workman’s cap and put it on. A small clipboard with a pale green pad went under my arm. I closed the trunk lid.
Lo: Unspecified Tradesman of the Month.
The James house was the third from the corner. I walked down to the corner, left the sidewalk, and wandered around the side of that house and into the backyard.
Meter reader, I had decided. Gas, electric—didn’t matter. No one pays the least attention to meter readers, as long as the meters in question are in the yard and not the basement; no one knows when they come and go, what they look like, what exactly they do.
I checked the electric meter on the back wall of the house at the end of the block. It looked okay to me, and I pretended to make notes to that effect on the clipboard. I did the same thing at the next house. It seemed to me that those people were pulling a lot of juice: That disk whirligig was doing about ninety R.P.M.
James’s house was next. The electric meter was conveniently located near the dining-room window. The air-conditioner compressor was conveniently situated beneath the dining-room window. The dining-room window was inconveniently closed, the air conditioner being at work, but a guy can’t have everything.
I didn’t glance around before hopping up onto the compressor. Glancing around makes you look suspicious.
I did, however, duck back down almost immediately, which wasn’t exactly a nonchalant thing to do. But how was I to know Desotel and James would be sitting at the dining table, not three feet from the window? I couldn’t hear voices, not with the racket from the compressor under my feet.
I snatched off the cap, shoved it into my waistband at the small of my back, and had another go at it. Slowly.
The dining room wasn’t so much a room as an extension of the living room, which was at the front of the house. The kitchen, presumably, was to the left, my left, behind and above the garage. At the dining table, as I mentioned, their backs not quite to me, were Desotel and Monroe.
On the table in front of them were two briefcases, gaping wide—Desotel’s posh gray leather/suede attaché and a cheap vinyl case, the kind you can buy in any dime store.
Both of the briefcases were loaded with cash.
“Loaded” means loaded. An ant would not have had room to curl up for a catnap in either of the briefcases.
If this was what a “financial consultant” did for you, I thought, I have got to get one.
Monroe James was doing the talking. I could tell by the way his head and hands occasionally moved: No words came through the glass or over the noise of the air conditioner. I had the feeling he was still trying to sell Desotel on something. But what? Clearly not insurance. No drugs, jewels, industrial papers, or illegal arms were lying around. Desotel had carried in only one of the cases, meaning James had already had the other there. Did one contain counterfeit money? Which one, James’s or Desotel’s?
At about that moment I realized three things: (a) I was in a good spot to be noticed by one or more of James’s neighbors, who might easily call the cops; (b) I was in a good spot to be noticed by Desotel or James, if either happened to glance toward the window or even just had good peripheral vision; and (c) if I didn’t want to have to tail Loverboy all over hell and half of Arkansas until I was old and white, I had better quit rubbernecking and get busy.
I slid the Vivitar out of my shirt pocket, thumbed the telephoto-lens button, and composed the frame. As it were.
Desotel was the perfect model. He sat as still as the pink flamingo in your front yard, Monroe James to his left, the two briefcases full of cash on the table in front of them. I held my breath and squeezed off a shot … wondering if the auto-flash would give me away. It didn’t. The camera didn’t think it needed the extra light and I didn’t need to take off like a scared rabbit. I took half a dozen more shots, making sure to get enough of Desotel’s profile to ensure easy identification.
I would have played out the roll, but seven shots were all I could work in before Monroe James noticed me and all hell broke loose. Or most of it, anyway.
James yelled—through the glass, I couldn’t hear what, but I caught the drift. Desotel jumped eighteen or twenty feet off his chair. James leaped up and headed for the front door.
Pausing only to grab something from a china-cabinet drawer in the living room.
I didn’t feel like sticking around to see what he had grabbed. But I was in a lousy position for getting back to the car. By going out the front way, James would effectively cut me off from the street. I should have had an escape route planned before I ever climbed up to the window … but I didn’t. The story of my life. Now I scanned the backyards in a panic. I could cut through them to the next street … but the yard behind James’s and the next one down were both fenced in by tall redwood-stained barricades that Spenser could probably leap over like a kangaroo, but not me.
And I’d be wide open to a shot if I tried to skirt the yards either way.
I hopped down from the compressor, snatched the cap from my waistband, and wrapped it around my fist before I smashed in the window in the door of James’s walk-out basement.
James had a TV/exercise-room arrangement in the main area. Very nice, although I had scant time to admire it as I zigzagged between furniture and workout equipment.
I made it to the stairs as James, having come around the house, made it to the basement door.
The door was at an angle of about forty-five degrees from the stairwell. James had a .45 in his fist. He stopped inside the doorway and fired spasmodically, popping off three or four shots that shattered the drywall several inches wide of my head. I crouched and turned and fired back. It was just like on television, where the bad guy lets go a hundred rounds that all miss while the good guy squeezes off one well-aimed shot that ends the show, only this time the good guy missed, too. James’s Exercycle would never be the same, but at the moment he didn’t seem to care. He flung himself against the south wall, the wall into which the stairwell was set. I couldn’t see to aim unless I stuck my head out from the stairwell, in which case he’d blow it off like a gopher’s. He couldn’t see to aim unless he crept down and peered around into the stairwell, in which case, I’d return the compliment.
That’s the sort of situation that can give you an upset tummy real fast, so I decided to get out of it A.S.A.P.
Two choices: Duck through the connecting door to the garage, which was at my back, and get across the street to my faithful old bucket of bolts. Or duck upstairs and take my chances with Loverboy.
If the object of the lesson had only been to get the goods on Loverboy, I’d have followed the former course, gotten the hell out of there, and taken my pictures to Fotomat. But the game had expanded. There were things to be got to the bottom of.
I hightailed it upstairs.
The door opened into the kitchen. I slammed it shut behind me and grabbed a vinyl-covered chair to prop under the doorknob. A ridiculous precaution: The hollow-core door wouldn’t stand up to a strong sneeze, and James could always circle around and come back through the front door if he felt like it.
Desotel was still at the dining table. He had his attaché closed and latched and was struggling with the other one. It was overstuffed and he was too greedy—or stupid, or rattled—to dump some of the cash and split.
I waved the gun at him. “Lousy idea, Jonny.”
He pushed the cheap briefcase away f
rom himself like it was on fire. It slid off the table and hit the floor, bundles of long green spilling on the carpet.
“Don’t shoot me!” he squealed.
“Okay. Sit down.”
He did. I hurried through the living room to the front door, which stood open. I slammed it shut and gave the dead-bolt knob a twist.
“Talk fast, Loverboy, the clock’s running. What’s going down?”
Desotel was white. Not white as in Caucasian, white as in Casper the Friendly Ghost.
“Did you kill Monroe?” The way he shivered, you’d have thought the room was cold. It wasn’t.
“I haven’t killed anyone today,” I told him. “Yet. Talk.”
“I— We’re switching the money.”
Switching the—“You’re laundering James’s dirty cash.”
He nodded frantically.
“Through the club. The restaurant.”
More nodding.
That was what James had been trying to sell Desotel—the idea of running dirty money through the bar and restaurant that Desotel managed. And a tony, overpriced place like the Olympic Club … hell, when dinner for two sets you back a hundred bucks, thousands, much of it cash, had to go through a joint like that every day. The bar probably did even better. Laundering the loot would be easy and, if you were halfway careful, safe. You pay suppliers with dirty money, you make change with dirty money, you slip a little into the daily deposit, only a little, so no one gets suspicious … fantastic. You could probably change over ten thousand inside of a week before anyone asked a single question. With a suitable percentage going to your inside man, of course.
The briefcases held the first exchange. Desotel’s—that is, the club’s—nice clean green for James’s filthy lucre.
James’s …
“Where’d he get the dough?”
Money Trouble Page 18
