Mink Eyes

by Dan Flanigan

  You’re confusing me with someone who cares, O’Keefe thought.

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s from Zeitzman Corporation. Their union contract is coming up for renegotiation, and there’s been some threats of sabotage. They want us to put one of our men in the plant and see what kind of scuttlebutt we can pick up.”

  “Scuttlebutt? You mean ‘spying.’ Are they trying to bust the union?”

  “They say not. They say they just want to protect themselves from violence.”

  Several seconds passed; the men said nothing, as if a barrier had come between them.

  “This is a major breakthrough, Pete. It’ll be our single largest fee this year, and there’s a ton more business where this came from.”

  “I was just thinking, when I was a kid, all my people were union people. Everybody.”

  “So were mine, but it’s a different world out there now.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  When he arrived at the bank, Jerald Ullman’s secretary told him that Mr. Ullman had been called out of the bank on an emergency matter, and that just before leaving, Mr. Ullman had told her to tell Mr. O’Keefe that he apologized that he had to break their appointment and could Mr. O’Keefe call tomorrow to schedule their appointment for another time.

  “I need to talk to Mr. Tolliver then,” said O’Keefe.

  “I’m afraid he’s gone for the day, too.”

  “Did he leave before Mr. Ullman did?”

  She hesitated, he could tell the impertinence of the question shocked her, but she seemed to see no alternative other than to answer it.

  “Well, yes he did. Just a little while ago, in fact.”

  So, O’Keefe thought, Ullman had seen Tolliver leave, knew that Tolliver would not be around to answer my questions, and then ducked out himself. A mistake to tell Ullman that I was leaving town tonight. Or maybe it wasn’t. It led Ullman to reveal himself. O’Keefe had not expected the interview with the banker to yield much of anything, but the banker kept acting like a man with something to hide, and that was itself a revelation of sorts.

  He found Ullman’s phone number and address in the telephone directory. He let Ullman’s phone ring ten times, but Ullman was either not home or not answering the phone. A family that delivered newspapers out of a rust-red minitruck topped with a camper shell gave him precise directions to Ullman’s house.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE HOUSE WAS a tiny box of peeling, dirty-white paint at the dead end of a dead-end street. A detached garage, stripped of its doors, seemed almost as large as the house itself. The house looked abandoned, but there was a five-year-old Chevrolet in the garage. O’Keefe knocked intermittently for several minutes. He intended to keep knocking for a very long time, until Ullman’s nerves were on the verge of screaming out loud, until he would do anything, even confront O’Keefe, to stop that knocking.

  “Who is it?” a voice said from the other side of the door.

  “Peter O’Keefe. Sorry to disturb you, but I couldn’t wait ’til tomorrow.”

  Several seconds passed in silence as the man on the other side of the door tried to decide what to do. O’Keefe hoped Ullman would realize that this was best—an interview at his home, away from the prying, busybody eyes of his coworkers at the bank.

  “I promise I won’t take long,” O’Keefe said.

  “Just a minute,” he heard Ullman say through the closed door. “I was sleeping.”

  A few moments later Ullman let him in. Ullman wore a washed-out and wrinkled white shirt, unbuttoned down the front and exposing a gray-white T-shirt, a dark pair of suit pants, no shoes, and a droopy pair of dark socks that looked like they had been worn for several days. The man tried to smile, but he could not quite pull it off, as if he no longer could summon the will to play the various parts the world expected of him. The failed smile only made him look more hungover and bedraggled.

  “Sorry I stood you up,” he said. “I was sick. I’ve been sick a lot lately.” And Ullman looked sick too. O’Keefe wondered if he had been wrong about Ullman having something to hide other than a drinking problem and a numbing despair.

  “Hey, no sweat. And I’m sorry to bother you at home. But I gotta leave town, and I just have to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  Ullman only shrugged, turned away, and walked into the house, leaving O’Keefe to close the door and follow. One glance and you had seen half of the little house, which consisted only of a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom, a dining nook, and a living room, with a small back porch appended to it like an afterthought. On a small table in the dining nook there was a quarter-full bottle of Jim Beam, a glass that had been drunk empty, and an ashtray containing a half-smoked cigarette broken in two because it had been stubbed out so hard. Ullman had not been sleeping. He had been sitting there drinking whiskey and smoking, and when O’Keefe had knocked on the door, Ullman had jammed the cigarette down into the ashtray in anger.

  “You want somethin’? Coffee? A drink?” When Ullman said the word “drink,” his voice lifted, a lilt of hope. He was not talking about Coca-Cola.

  “What do you have?” asked O’Keefe, pretending he had not seen the bottle of Jim Beam.

  “Bourbon.”

  “Bourbon’s fine.”

  “Anything in it?”

  “A little water.”

  “Have a seat,” Ullman said and shambled off into the kitchen.

  The furniture looked like it had been picked up at garage sales from people down on their luck. There was a tan, vinyl easy chair, mottled with old stains of grime and maybe sweat, next to it a tiny end table and on it a shadeless lamp with a pull chain of tarnished metal beads dangling from the naked bulb, underneath the lamp an old brass ashtray, scarred and scratched, half full of ashes and cigarette butts smoked down to the filters. There was a dull-brown couch littered with newspapers, in front of it a glass-topped coffee table whorled with fingerprint stains and on it another ashtray stuffed tight with cigarette butts, a wooden pencil sitting on top of a half-finished crossword puzzle, a beer can that looked empty, a plastic plate containing a dried-out crust of white bread, a smear of mustard, a half-eaten pickle. No windows. No pictures on the wall, just water stains.

  He heard Ullman struggling with an ice-cube tray out in the kitchen. A color photograph on a dusty, chipped, and battered credenza attracted the eye because it provided the only real colors in the room. Ullman, looking very different than he looked now, posed with a woman and two children—a teenaged boy and a little girl. What had happened between them? What will happen to me and Kelly?

  “Fucker!” he heard Ullman mutter, then a banging, probably the ice tray against the kitchen sink. O’Keefe decided to sit at the little table in the dining nook, where Ullman would have to sit directly and intimately across from him. The table wobbled when he rested his elbows on it. The Formica tabletop, though covered with some kind of fake walnut treatment, was metal-hard with sharp edges, not made for skin to touch it.

  Ullman came from the kitchen carrying a glass half full of ice and a pitcher of water. He sat down across from O’Keefe and pushed the bottle of Jim Beam across the table.

  “Help yourself,” he said. “That way you’ll get it right, the way you like it.”

  “Sorry about the cheap shit,” Ullman said as O’Keefe mixed the bourbon and water. “The good stuff is a little beyond my budget these days.”

  When O’Keefe finished, Ullman took the bottle and poured himself a straight shot. His hands shook as he brought the glass to his mouth. You could tell he was embarrassed about that but not enough to keep him from taking the drink. O’Keefe thought Ullman must be in his late forties, but there lingered a boyish look to him, as if he had not really grown to manhood but had leaped in one jump from a dewy, lithe boy, pretty like Lenny Parker, to a bloated and blowsy middle age. The confident, elegant, and supple youth still lived on in that partly inflated balloon of flushed and sagging skin.
The prince was turning into a frog. No country boy here, O’Keefe thought, this boy grew up in the grassy suburbs, at country clubs, on golf courses and tennis courts, and in frat houses. Wisps of the blond hair of his youth still clung precariously to his scalp. He also had blue eyes and soft, white skin, but the eyes were streaked and the complexion spotted with red from too much whiskey. O’Keefe noticed a tiny patch of blond stubble under the banker’s chin that he had missed when shaving that morning, the sign of a drunk or a man in too much of a hurry or both. His teeth were stained, like his easy chair and his coffee table and the walls of the rooms in his house.

  “They repo’d it,” Ullman said, and O’Keefe’s face signaled confusion. “The house,” Ullman clarified. “The bank repo’d it, and nobody would buy the dump and so they let me live here for just the price of the taxes and the insurance and the upkeep.” He laughed a little death of a laugh. “Not much upkeep though, as you can see.”

  “Sounds like a good deal.”

  “Yeah,” Ullman said bitterly. He took another drink. “So what can I do for you?”

  “All I’m trying to do is figure out what happened.”

  “Join the club.”

  “You loaned Lenny some money, right?”

  “No.”

  O’Keefe’s look showed Ullman that he did not understand. Ullman smiled triumphantly, as if he had made an important point, then said, “I loaned the money to the corporation. The corporation’s assets were the collateral. I looked at the file after you called. Got a corporate resolution and everything. The money was supposed to be used for corporate business. If Lenny did something else with it, I can’t help that.”

  “Mr. Ullman, I want you to understand I’m not here to go after the bank or you or try to get out of the loan or anything else. I’m just trying to figure out what happened down here.”

  “Well, like I said, join the club. My God-damned job’s on the line over this deal. The collateral won’t even come close to paying off the loan.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Too damn well.”

  “Did you know him socially?”

  Ullman nodded his head.

  “How about the business, the mink farm? What did you think of that?”

  “I thought it was a dumbass business, but he had all that equity, all those investors. And he lived like a king.”

  “Is that why you made him the loans?”

  “Maybe that was it. And maybe it was because I was tired of the same old dull shit down here. Trucks and tractors and farms and cows and women that look like cows.”

  O’Keefe thought of Tag, what her presence would have meant in a town like the one Ullman lived in, and Ullman seemed to divine O’Keefe’s exact thought.

  “Hell,” Ullman said, “I probably had it in the back of my mind that if I loaned him some money, I could get myself into his wife’s pants.”

  Ullman laughed, and O’Keefe tried to laugh with him so Ullman wouldn’t see any outward expression of the wound he had just inflicted.

  “Well, I’ll tell you this, Mr. Ullman,” O’Keefe said, desperately trying to play along with the joke, “you may have just proved yourself to be the most honest banker I ever met.”

  “Well, it’s not hard to have honesty when you don’t have anything else.”

  O’Keefe looked puzzled again.

  “You see, they’re gonna fire me over this loan, I know they are. I’ve been in this position before. Scapegoat. That’s me. The scapegoat. They just use you, then spit you out. Well, fuck ’em.”

  “Ought to be plenty of other jobs in banking, huh?”

  Ullman swallowed the last of the bourbon and set his glass down too hard on the table. “Not for me. Like I said, I’ve been in this position before. Wrong place, wrong time.” O’Keefe quickly drained his drink to catch up with Ullman, and they poured themselves another round.

  “Where were you before this?”

  Ullman smiled, fox-like, as if he suspected O’Keefe of laying a trap for him.

  “St. Louis. Other places.”

  “Never worked up in my city?”

  “Nope,” he said casually, but O’Keefe could sense though he could not see, a movement somewhere underneath the skin of Ullman’s passive face.

  “No family here?”

  “Nope. Families are like bank presidents. They don’t like to have failures hanging around.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “Then don’t.”

  O’Keefe took a long swallow of the bourbon and water. He needed it to steel himself for the next question.

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Get in her pants?”

  Ullman changed into the other half of himself then, the teenage boy boasting of his female conquests, real or not, to his leering companions.

  “I’ll take the Fifth on that,” Ullman said, his smile tainted with cruelty. “What’s the deal? You jealous or what?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, in your case I understand there’s no doubt about who got into whose pants.”

  “So the Sheriff’s been talking around, huh?”

  “It’s a small town. What do you expect?”

  “I’m trying to find them. Lenny and Tag. Either of them or both of them. Any ideas?”

  “None.”

  “I thought you were a friend of theirs.”

  “Not really. Just some weekends at their pool and cruising around the lake in their boat sometimes. No big deal.”

  “No trips out of town?”

  “No trips out of town,” Ullman answered by carefully repeating O’Keefe’s question, and his face changed, as if an invisible hood had been drawn over it, and O’Keefe suspected Ullman was lying.

  “I hear they traveled to Florida a lot. And Arizona.”

  “I hear that too, but I never went with ’em.”

  “No guess where they might be?”

  “Well, from what happened out at that mink farm, I’d guess if they’re not dead, they’ll be dead soon.”

  Ullman seemed to enjoy that idea, and O’Keefe wanted to reach over and grab him by the throat and squeeze hard. Not kill him, just terrify him so he would think he was dying when he passed out for lack of oxygen.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Obviously they got involved with the wrong people.”

  “How would the ‘wrong people’ ever have found this little town?”

  “Lenny raised money in the cities, not here. That’s where he found them. Or they found him. Same difference. Trapped either way. Once they’ve got you, they won’t let you go.”

  “You talk like one who knows.”

  “I know business. There isn’t much difference. They’re just businessmen with guns and garrottes.”

  “You ever heard of someone called ‘Mr. Canada’?” O’Keefe asked and watched the invisible hood drop once again over Ullman’s face.

  Ullman just shook his head, his face impassive, but O’Keefe thought he detected a muscle twitching somewhere in some deep part of Ullman’s face, and the fact that Ullman said nothing more, asked no questions, showed not the slightest curiosity about the man with the odd name—that absence of reaction, like the dog that failed to bark in the night—told O’Keefe a very important story.

  “I understand that most of the money you loaned Lenny was borrowed in just the last few months.”

  “That’s right. He worked it perfectly. Just like a bust-out.”

  “Bust-out?” O’Keefe said, as if he didn’t understand.

  “You know, just like the criminals do when they take over a business. Buy all they can on credit, pocket the money, then fold up the business. I’ve seen bust-outs before, but I never thought I’d see one in this burg.”

  “People tell me Lenny changed a lot in the last year. Did you notice that?”

  “I noticed he wasn’t around as much as he used to be.”

  “Nothing else? No personality
change?”

  “What personality? The pious little fucker didn’t have a personality. He was a robot who wasn’t programmed for anything but separating fools from their money.”

  “I don’t see you as a fool, Mr. Ullman.”

  “I was talking about the investors, not me. And if this,” he said, gesturing around the room, “doesn’t look like a fool’s paradise, I don’t know what would.”

  “Maybe you’ve had some rough times like you say, Mr. Ullman, but a fool you’re not.”

  “That’s your opinion,” Ullman said, as if O’Keefe had insulted him.

  “What about her?”

  “Tag?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean, ‘what about her’?”

  “You think she was in on it with him?”

  “Who knows? I’d say no, but she was a mystery. I mean, what the hell was a piece of ass like that doing with a twerp like Lenny in the first place?”

  O’Keefe was afraid he really would reach over the table and grab Ullman by the throat if he stayed any longer, so he too abruptly stood up to leave. Ullman stayed in his chair and poured himself another drink.

  “Thanks,” O’Keefe said.

  “Thanks for what? I’d say I didn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  Ullman shrugged, drained his whiskey glass and, his fingers twitching toward uncontrollability, took a long drag off his cigarette.

  “How about telling me where to get some good food around here? I hear there’s a place called Angie’s that’s supposed to be good.”

  Ullman had not expected the question. He forgot to drop the invisible hood this time. He looked nonplussed.

  “No. Not here . . .” He caught himself then and looked like he wished he hadn’t said that.

  “Where is it then? Is it close?”

  “No. Who told you about a place called ‘Angie’s’?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe it was Jane or Tag.”

  “Well, there’s no Angie’s around here.”

  “Where is it then?”

  Ullman hesitated and then said, “I think there’s a place in St. Louis called that. I really don’t know.