“Say, Nickie?”
“Huh?”
“Want some free advice?”
“What’s that?” he asked, not wanting any advice from me at all.
“This afternoon, call up Meriwether Vending and order a couple of punchboards. They’ll even tell you which cops to pay off.”
“That’s illegal,” he said righteously.
“No shit. But you’ve always had the only bar in town without at least one punchboard. Makes the local people nervous. They think you’re up to something really illegal, if you’re afraid to have a few punchboards.”
“I’ll be damned. I wonder how come Ma—how come I never thought of that?”
“Because she’s still a stranger here,” I said quietly.
“Huh?” But he had heard me.
“Nothing.”
“Keep in touch, Milo,” he said, then walked away, muttering to himself, his boots slapping the carpet.
When I finished the first drink, I remembered the lunch that Nickie had beat me out of. It could go on the expense sheet. I left the other drinks untouched. As I walked through the lobby, Nickie was engaged in a serious conversation with an expensively dressed man. The motel manager, I thought, another of Mama D.’s inevitable cousins. He listened politely to Nickie, nodding his head without interest, as if he were being told a very boring story by a child. He was listening to Nickie but he was watching me.
—
On the way back to the office, I drove by Wild Flower Estates, down to the end of Wild Rose Lane. Wanda wasn’t visible, but there was a new Mustang parked in the garage. Poppy-red or something like that. I wrote the license number down, then poked around the neighborhood, looking for a place to stake out the house. On the next street up-slope, a house was under construction. I knew the builder, so Freddy and Dynamite could hang out there without calling attention to themselves.
Back in the office, I called the builder, and after I reminded him that he had borrowed the money for his first house from my father, he agreed that he could use an extra hand in the daytime and a free nightwatchman. Then I started to make out another deposit slip, my second in two days, which didn’t happen too often. I stopped, looked at the roll, thought about the IRS. The money was mostly twenties and fifties, with only a few hundreds, and the bills looked like they had been carried around in a wino’s pockets, stuffed hither and yon, then ripped out at a wild moment and scattered across a damp bar. I wondered if Nickie had taken to rolling winos, but he was such a coward that the idea was ludicrous. Nearly as comical as the idea of paying taxes on unrecorded cash.
I took out five hundred and put the rest into the large safe in the corner which said CATTLEMAN’S BANK AND TRUST, MERIWETHER COUNTY, MILTON CHESTER MILODRAGOVITCH, PRESIDENT. That had been my grandfather. My great-grandfather wanted his son to have an American name. There was also a sign hanging from the handle which claimed that the safe was an antique and asked prospective safecrackers not to use dynamite or a crowbar or acid. A combination was printed at the bottom of the card. The wrong combination. It wasn’t much of a joke, but then it wasn’t much of a safe either.
When I leaned out the window to see the bank clock, it was only eleven, but I thought I’d have lunch anyway. On Nickie.
Eight
So Nickie had a friend who had plenty of money and a practice wife. Nickie, with his little boy’s allowance and too real wife, must have been furious with envy. Perhaps that explained the odd flashes of hostility. But it was too lovely a day to worry about it.
As I strolled down to Mahoney’s, careful not to jostle the tourists who clotted the sidewalks as if they owned both the streets and the summer morning, I begrudged them the day. But I only lived there; they were the paying customers, rubbernecking and crowing and snapping endless color slides of the cobalt sky and the peaks—white-hot with new snow above the dark cool reaches of pine—and the lower slopes, which blazed with new grass, bright yet tender, yellow-green beneath the clean rush of sunlight.
I wondered if Nickie’s friend was among the vacationers, out West for two weeks of expensive fun. Somehow, I’d never thought of gangsters on vacation, thinking perhaps that they enjoyed their work more than some poor slob condemned to an eternal salesman’s smile, more grimace than grin, or spot-welded next to an assembly line, slapping door handles on Gremlins as they trundled endlessly past in mechanical cortege. But perhaps not. What did I know about the rigors of organized crime? The nearest I had been to it was an occasional hard look from one of Mama D.’s cousins when my voice was too loud or my tip too small. Maybe organized crime was hard work—all that corruption and graft and worry, the discreet violence undertaken with an air of urbane toughness. Hell, I had been corrupted on the local level, and the paltry payoffs I had received to overlook the punchboards and electronic slots were so small that they seemed almost moral in a world that made folk heroes out of airline hijackers and box-office successes out of Mafia dons, with never a mention of the Mafia to avoid legal action; a world where politicians were for sale but overpriced; where giant corporations shouted the ideals of capitalism, then fixed prices; where even the President shaved without looking in the mirror.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so smug, not when I was walking down the street with a pocketful of dirty money, money I had lied to obtain and would lie to keep and would spend without a single twinge of conscience. But then, that’s one of the great things about living in America: moral superiority is so damned cheap.
So I could saunter into Mahoney’s, out of the sunlight and the dark clusters of vacationers, a smile on my face, no guilt in mind, and wish Nickie’s friend a grand time out West, lots of fun and summer adventures and jerky home movies. Shots of him feeding candy to a surly sow bear with cubs. Or walking into a swollen creek in brand-new chestwaders. Or traversing a glacier in sparkling white sneakers. Or roasting his weenie in Old Faithful.
But in the cool shade of Mahoney’s, the regulars were always on vacation, patiently waiting for their turn at that great trout stream in the sky, where the fish are always rising from deep clear pools to take the fly snugly in their mouths, where the women wait quietly on the banks, lovely and kind, where the nearest bar is only a cast away, and when you go in, your friends greet you with fond jokes and the bartender never mentions your tab.
“By God, boys, this is the life,” I exclaimed to three of the best as I joined them. Simon, Fat Freddy, and Stonefaced Pierre. They greeted me in dulcet tones—a belch, a grunt, a soft murmuring babble.
“Where did you get the goddamned fish, boys?” I asked, pointing at the mound of bones, as clean and white as cat’s teeth, heaped in the center of the table.
Freddy leaned back, intent upon his toothpick. Simon tilted forward into his open notebook. Pierre glared at me with marbled eyes. They ignored, as if it were a corpse, the remains of the last of the smoked steelhead, which Leo and I had brought back from Idaho and which, all things considered, only cost thirty or forty dollars a pound to catch.
“Well, hell, boys, if it was one of mine, I hope you enjoyed it,” I said, then waved at Leo for a round of drinks, circling my finger in the still air. A torpid fly tried to land on it, but missed and buzzed aimlessly away. Leo brought the shots and beers with a sheepish grin, so I knew who had divided the fish among the loafers. I handed him a twenty anyway, told him to put the change against my tab. He muttered something snide about the change being only a drop in some cosmic bucket. I told him to set them up for the house. On my tab.
When he rang the bell behind the bar, three sleeping winos rose from their stools, grinning, and two slipped in from the street. A small band of long-haired kids drifted toward the bar like calves at milking time. Everybody waved at me as if I were a movie star—one of them was the slim girl from Reese’s front porch—then fell upon their drinks eagerly, ignoring me.
Once things had settled down, I gave Freddy a handful of Nickie’s bills and told him to round up Dynamite, a rental car and a mobile telephone, set
ting my wino hounds loose on Wanda of Wild Rose Lane. I had used them before; they made a great team, cheap and carefully sober when working for me and oddly invisible. They were both local characters, recognized winos, and downtown they faded before the eyes of the good, sober folk. In the suburban developments, they used part-time jobs for cover, and looked like winos drying out or working a few days to support another binge. Their obvious failure to deal with life was a more effective means to cloud men’s minds than any secret of the East.
Freddy was so happy to be working again that he discarded his frayed toothpick, replacing it with a brand-new one that smelled faintly of mint, then he rose and strode out of the bar, his shoulders back, his spine mightily erect, his stomach as rigid as a barrel. Pierre also rose, but more slowly, like a statue coming reluctantly to life, and headed for the john at a furious totter, where he would lean against the wall and wait for his tired bladder to empty, staring at everybody who came in, waiting until somebody, usually Leo, helped him rebutton his pants. Simon, who had overheard my talk with Freddy, scribbled madly in his red notebook.
“Bastard,” he muttered when he glanced up.
“What?”
“Let that fat bastard work for you, Milo. You must be crazy.”
“Hush, Simon.”
“I could have done it, I could have.”
“Simon, you can’t drive a car.”
“That doesn’t make any difference,” he said, then stared at me for a minute. “I hear the lady is back in town.”
“What lady?”
“Don’t be a wise-ass, Milo. What’s she doing back in town?”
I told him.
“What have you found out?” he asked.
I told him that too.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Well, goddammit, Simon, I don’t know, but when I get through, I’ll give you a written report.”
“I don’t like the smell of this whole thing, Milo,” he said, disregarding the irony. “Let me help.”
“Why don’t you take that goddamned overcoat off before you have a heat stroke?”
“Hell, boy, it’s cold.”
“That was yesterday, Simon.”
“It’s always yesterday in here, boy.”
“It’s at least a day behind, but I’m not sure if you have the right yesterday.”
“This was your old man’s coat, wasn’t it?”
“Looks like one he used to have.”
“Looks like it, hell. It is.”
“Okay, so what?”
“Wanna buy it, boy,” he said slyly, then grinned. “Make you a good deal.”
“You old fart.”
“If you’re going to sit there and call me names, boy, you have to buy me a drink.”
I waved at Leo, and he brought the drinks.
“To your old man,” Simon said, raising his shot glass. We drank, then he asked, “So what’s in your mind?”
“She paid for three days, so I’ll give her three days. Try to find somebody who knew him, I guess, and ask some more stupid questions.”
“Reese knew him,” Simon said, smirking. “Ask him.” Then he giggled like an old woman.
“Maybe I’ll just do that,” I said, but my threats were as empty as Nickie’s. Simon laughed so hard that I thought he would choke. To death, I hoped. “What’s so funny?”
“You, boy, you.”
“Thanks.”
“Anything for a friend. Want some help?”
“What did you have in mind? Fart and hope he faints?”
“That’s not funny, Milo,” he grumbled, falling into a sulk. “Goddamned faggot.”
“Yeah, but don’t tell him,” I said.
“Maybe if you took Jamison along,” Simon said thoughtfully, “Reese might behave.”
“Jamison wouldn’t help me across the street if I was an old lady. Besides, I don’t know where lovely Lawrence lives now. His old house is empty,” I said. “And the neighborhood kids are tearing it down, stick by stick.”
“I’ll bet Jamison knows where Reese is holed up.”
“Probably does,” I said, meaning to walk over to the police station to ask him just as soon as I finished my drink.
“Want me to help? I could ask around. Like before. I found him before you did,” he said.
“I don’t know, old man, you might get hurt,” I answered, which made Simon so mad he lost his small connection with reality, spitting and sputtering curses. He became a foolish, tired old drunk, unruly gray hair and liver spots, his horny fingers knotted so tightly around the pencil stub that it seemed the lead must squirt out, spraying like ash across the empty glasses and fish bones.
“All right,” I said, “you can help.”
“Thanks,” he managed to say. But not as if he meant it.
“Anything for a friend.”
“Sure.”
“You remember the old lady in the window? Next door to Reese’s?”
“Yeah, sure. Why?”
“Why don’t you go by and talk to her. See if you can get a description of some of the people who were living there. Maybe it will give us somebody to talk to who won’t try to kill us.”
Simon nodded his head so furiously that he banged his chin on the rim of his beer mug, then held his mouth as if he had a rock under his lower plate.
“I’ll do it,” he mumbled, pounding his notebook as if he intended to make notes in iron. “You can count on it.”
“All right. But promise me you won’t go anywhere else. And stay sober.”
He nodded again, lifting his beer in agreement, but when he felt it in his hand, he set it down quickly, grinning.
“I’ll finish my letter, Milo, then go see her before it rains.”
“It’s not going to rain, you old fart.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Not with you about rain, old man.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Try to find Reese.”
“Be careful, boy.”
“You be careful, old man.”
“Sure,” he said. “You care if the kid died on purpose or by accident?”
“Not really.”
“You got no curiosity, boy,” he said, turning back to his letter. “And you don’t care about nothing but the lady, huh?”
“Who are you writing to?”
He glanced up in disgust.
“What are you complaining about now?”
“Somebody ripped off my Social Security check. Right out of the mailbox.”
“What the hell can the government do?”
“Replace the son of a bitch!”
“You don’t need the money.”
“What the hell difference does that make? I deserve it!” he shouted. And maybe he did.
“Take care,” I said, standing and patting his shoulder. Beneath the heavy tweed, his body felt as feeble as an old woman’s. Stringy flesh on the verge of corruption, bones nearly dust. But he didn’t look up, busy now with his protest, flailing at the political system with scrawled words. In the tranquil bar, among the wrinkled faces on the walls, secure from time, his nattering murmur was as peacefully eternal as a creek’s plaint to stones, a hushed and wisely gentle sound, a finer silence, as much a part of my life as the rising and falling cycle of Hell-Roaring Creek. I ruffled his hair for luck, touched the parchment scalp, the fragile skull, making my amends, then I left him there in his repose.
On the way out, I glanced at the girl, Mindy, thinking to ask her about Reese, but she and a young boy were watching a fly circle the inside of a foam-encrusted beer mug, watching it with the vapid concentration of the perpetually stoned, so I left her alone. Outside, in the brilliant summer noon, among the creep of traffic and bedizened tourists, I realized that I hadn’t had a vacation in years. They seemed too tiring to chance another. But I wondered if Helen Duffy needed a vacation, wondered where we might go, how tired we might be when we came back, and I smiled benignly at the frantic tourists.
A
s I walked over to the police station, I thought about what Simon had said about the Duffy kid. He was right about one thing. I didn’t care about the kid. What little I’d seen of him around the bars hadn’t filled my heart with joy, and what I’d learned about him hadn’t convinced me that my first impression was wrong. He might have been confused and unhappy, but he was still a bad kid. But I didn’t think I’d tell Helen Duffy that.
I took a shortcut through an alley to avoid the crowded sidewalks, and at the far end a freak walked up to a large man dressed in logging clothes. The kid held his hand out shyly, as if he were panhandling, but the man hit the kid in the face, knocked him across the alley into a pile of garbage cans. I ran up, grabbing the man from behind as he advanced on the fallen kid to work him over with his boots. The kid didn’t move, except to touch his swelling eye and brush away yesterday’s garbage.
“Police!” the man shouted. “Police!” He struggled in my grasp, swinging and kicking backwards with his high-heeled boots, catching my right shin. I changed holds and threw him against the wall, then hobbled over and kicked the fight out of him.
“Okay,” he groaned, clutching his gut as he rolled out of the garbage, lettuce pasted to his hair with Thousand Island dressing. “Take the goddamned money,” he grunted, then tossed his wallet at my feet. “You guys just leave me alone, okay?”
“You guys? What the hell were you picking on the kid for?”
The kid tried to stand up, but slipped in the slops, falling to his hands and knees. I stepped over to see how he was, and the man lurched to his feet and ran down the alley, his heavy boots thudding, shreds of lettuce scattered behind him like dollar bills. I picked up his wallet and started after him, shouting, then the kid stood up again and ran off in the opposite direction, leaving me the alley and the wallet.
The Wrong Case Page 14