Scratch Fever

by Collins, Max Allan

  “That’s right,” a sleepy female voice said. “He wasn’t really going anyplace. Just wanted some sleep. Like I do. Do you mind?”

  “So he wasn’t going out?”

  “I was supposed to say he was out and take messages.”

  “I see. Tell me. Did anybody check in last night after two?”

  “Everybody checked in last night after two. Couples, mostly. Get the idea?”

  “Any singles? A man maybe?”

  “No single men. There was this girl.”

  “Girl?”

  “Pretty brown-haired girl. Not real big.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “I don’t know. T-shirt and jeans, I guess.”

  “Do you remember anything specific? There’s money in it if you do.”

  “Well. The T-shirt had the name of a rock group on it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not some big group, like Kiss or something. A band from around here, whose name I recognized.”

  “What was it?”

  “The Nodes. Ever hear of ’em?”

  Julie went back to the check-in desk and, for twenty bucks, the clerk tore herself away from her crossword long enough to give her the key to room 13. There Julie found a note, presumably from Infante, saying he’d gone out for a bite to eat and a movie. She looked around the room carefully. She noticed two things: there were no towels in the bathroom, and there was a damp spot on the floor near the bed.

  She was driving back to the house, down the tree-lined country lane along which Ron also lived, when she noticed a car, apparently abandoned, pulled into one of the access inroads to a cornfield. She must have passed it before, on her way to the motel, but hadn’t noticed it. Now she did: a Mazda. Infante’s car.

  She stopped and got out and had a look, not touching anything. It was empty; the keys weren’t in the dash. But she had a feeling the trunk wasn’t empty.

  She got back in her Porsche.

  Somehow that kid Jon had gotten a message to Nolan. Maybe there was another phone at the Barn, one she hadn’t known about. Maybe Jon had used Bob Hale’s private phone. That was probably it. Damn! Whatever the case, the kid had obviously got to Nolan, because Nolan was here already; Infante was dead, most likely; and she was shit out of luck.

  She pulled into the driveway of her house and stood poised in front of the pillared structure like the heroine on the cover of a gothic paperback. There was no sign of Nolan yet. The only other car around was Harold’s Pontiac Phoenix, in the garage, where it was supposed to be. She went in the back way, through the kitchen, gun in hand. But there was nobody in the house except Harold, still sitting in the study, listening to Beatle records: “All the lonely people . . .”

  “What are you sneaking around for?” he asked, turning down the stereo, eyeing the little automatic in her hand.

  “He’s here,” she said, putting the gun back in her purse. “Nolan’s here.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  She went upstairs and started packing a bag. He was at her side as she did.

  “I’ll get in touch with you,” she said. “It may be a few months.”

  “I’m not going with you?”

  “No. The Paddlewheel is too good a thing to throw away. We’re going to try to hold onto it. You’re going to hold onto it for me.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I don’t know yet. And when I do know, I won’t tell you. If you don’t know, you can’t tell anybody.”

  That hurt him. “Tell anybody? What . . .”

  “Look. Nolan will show up, and when he does, the less you know, the better, because you’re probably going to have to take some heat from him. But he’s not going to kill you or anything.”

  “Well, that’s nice to know.”

  “Harold. Just play dumb. You can handle it.”

  “Your confidence in me is overwhelming.”

  The bag was packed.

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll come through for me. You always have.”

  He smiled wearily; he nodded.

  “Now,” she said, carrying the bag out of the room, heading down the stairs, Harold trailing after, “you go to the Paddlewheel. I’m going to need that getaway money.”

  “The hundred thousand?” Harold said.

  “Yes. I can live a long time on that.”

  She was at the front door. He grabbed her arm. Softly.

  “Don’t leave me,” he said.

  “Harold,” she said, pulling away, “I’m not going to leave you. I’m just getting my butt out of here before it gets shot off. I’ll be back. I like my life here. I’m not giving it up easily.” She kissed him on the mouth, hastily, and said, “I’ll meet you at the Paddlewheel in twenty minutes, half an hour.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Ron’s.”

  He grabbed her arm again, hard this time. “Why?”

  “To tell her to let that kid go, that’s why. That should cool Nolan off a little.”

  He let go. Licked his lips nervously. “Oh,” he said.

  “See you at the club.”

  The person who answered the door at the farmhouse seemed to be Ron, but Julie couldn’t be sure. It was a not unattractive woman with makeup on and a peasant blouse and jeans; also a choking cloud of perfume. Yet this apparently was Ron.

  And Ron’s attitude didn’t seem to have changed: she was more than willing to kill the kid, for a price.

  Only when she went upstairs to do it, she was gone too long, and Julie followed up after her.

  Ron was alone in the room. She was busy undoing handcuffs that were hanging on the bedposts. Her gun, a long-barreled revolver, was on the nightstand. The window was open; cold air was coming in.

  Ron seemed startled when she noticed Julie in the doorway.

  “Little bastard got away,” she explained.

  “I see,” Julie said.

  “I don’t know how he got out of these things,” she said, taking the handcuffs over toward the dresser, turning to lay them on top of it, facing a mirror all but obscured by taped-on pinups of Elvis Presley and others.

  “Neither do I,” Julie said, and picked up the revolver and shot Ron through the head.

  She put the gun in Ron’s hand; with some luck, it would pass for suicide. Ron would just be that sullen lesbian who finally ended it all.

  And now Julie was pulling her Porsche into the unlit Paddlewheel lot. Harold was already there; his Phoenix was over by the front door. They were closed Sundays, so there was no problem with staff or customers being around. There was no sign of Nolan, though that didn’t mean anything. She got the little automatic out of her purse. Her suitcase was in the trunk; she was ready to go. All she needed was her money, and no Nolan.

  She walked to the front door and unlocked it, glad Harold hadn’t left it open. At least he was thinking. She went in, locking the door behind her. Harold had turned on a few lights, just enough to for her to navigate, and to get a look at some of what she was leaving behind.

  She walked through the entryway, past the hat check area and the rest rooms, and stood for a moment at the top of the few steps that led down into the dining room. It was a big room, full of tables with red cloths and candles; a mural of a paddlewheel boat extended along the wall at left; and a huge picture window stood across a room from her—with a magnificent river view—though with this rainy, murky night you couldn’t see much of it now. The room otherwise had been left the natural (though sandblasted) brick of the warehouse it had been; the kitchen was off to the left.

  She was proud of what she had accomplished here. When she took over a year ago, the restaurant had barely been breaking even, though of course the casino downstairs (which then as now was open on Friday and Saturday nights only) had been doing a good business. If she hadn’t seen the potential of the place, that time Harold brought her here to eat when she was staying with him after the Port City robbery, she wouldn’t be in this mess, she supposed; she wouldn’t
have settled so dangerously close to where she lived before. But she’d seen the potential, all right. And found from Harold that the original owner—a guy named Tree, with mob connections—had moved to Des Moines to open a similar place, leaving this one to be run, rather incompetently it seemed, by hired hands. So she’d approached Tree and his Family friends with an offer to buy controlling interest in the place, and she had really made a go of it. She was, it turned out, a natural businesswoman.

  And that was the surprise, really; all those years she was working in a beauty shop, waiting for some rich fucker to come along and make her life easy, it never occurred to her that she might want to work, that a life of luxury was a bore and the challenge of making money was almost as good as spending it.

  Oh, she liked eating well and living well; she liked her fancy house and her antiques.

  But what she really liked was her role as owner of the Paddlewheel; she liked that as much as the money that came with it. And she wasn’t going to give it up. She’d be back. She would be back.

  She headed down the stairs, a stairway enclosed only from the railing down, and crossed the small casino room, with its card tables and several craps tables and one roulette wheel, and slots off to either side, and walked toward the bar, off to the right of which was Harold’s cubbyhole office.

  He was sitting behind his desk; the money was on top of it. Stacks of money packets, still in their bank wrappers.

  “Put that in something,” she said.

  His eyes looked sad, like a basset hound with glasses. “I don’t have anything.”

  “There’s a paper sack lining your wastebasket. Use that.”

  He nodded, emptied his wastebasket on the floor, removed the sack, and started filling it with the packets of money; he looked like a bag boy at a supermarket.

  “What about Ron?” he asked.

  “Dead,” she said.

  He flinched, but he kept dropping packets in the sack. “What happened?”

  “The kid got away. I don’t know how he managed it. He killed her before he left. Put the gun in her hand to try to make it look like suicide.”

  “My God. So they’re both loose?”

  “I wouldn’t sweat the kid. He’s probably wandering around a cornfield somewhere. It’s Nolan who’s the threat. Okay, that’s good. Hand it here.”

  He handed her the sack. The desk was between them.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said.

  “I’ll miss you, too,” she said. Meaning it.

  “You will be back?”

  “I’ll be back,” she snapped. “I’m no idiot. This is a good gig.”

  “Yes. Right.”

  She leaned across the desk and gave him a big, long kiss on the mouth. She smiled at him. She really did hope he could live through whatever Nolan might do to him. “I’ll be back before you know it, lover.”

  He mustered a pathetic, self-pitying smile. “Do that,” he said.

  “Are you going to stay here for a while?”

  “Yes. I’m going to work on the books.”

  “He’s liable to show up any time. Nolan, I mean.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Good I don’t want you to. I don’t want you getting into it with him. You have to be just some poor innocent sucker I involved in this, as far as he’s concerned, understand?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, then. Take care of yourself.”

  “You too.”

  He was still standing behind the desk when she left him.

  Approaching the stairs, she heard the sound of footsteps above. Faint, but definitely footsteps. She ducked around the side of the stairs, knelt so that the enclosed part of the stairway hid her. She put her sack of money down. She still had the automatic in her hand.

  Somebody was coming down the stairs.

  It seemed like a year before the figure emerged at the bottom. He’d been looking around the room, slowly, as he came down, apparently.

  It was Nolan, of course.

  She wished she had a bigger gun, but the automatic would have to do. She grabbed it by its short barrel and clubbed him on the back of the head with the butt, and he went down.

  18

  NOLAN EASED into the Paddlewheel lot. Over to the left a Porsche was parked; a Pontiac was parked up near the front door. No one in either car, apparently. Nolan put the Datsun in park, leaving the motor on, the car turned sideways so that it blocked the exit of the lot. The rain wasn’t coming down hard, but it was insistent, pattering the roof of the car as if the sky was slightly leaky.

  “I’m going in,” Nolan said.

  “I’m going with you,” Jon said.

  “No.”

  “Nolan . . .”

  “I know. You’re pissed. You been put through the mill, and you’re pissed. That’s just what I need right now: you—acting like a psychopathic nut.”

  Jon didn’t say anything; he affected a sort of scowl; it came off more like a pout.

  It was deceptively peaceful, sitting in this car in the rain, rain shadows from the streaky windshield throwing abstract patterns on their faces. Rain dancing on the car roof. Contemplative. And underneath it, a current of something not at all peaceful.

  Leaning up from the back seat, the girl said, “How do you even know they’re in there? Maybe they took some other car and left these behind.”

  “You’re right,” Nolan said. “They could even be outside there in the bushes, waiting for us to get out of the car.”

  “Oh, nice thought,” the girl said, her sarcasm not quite masking her fear.

  “Going in after them is probably a bad idea in the first place,” Nolan said. “The smart thing might be to wait outside for them. If they’re in there, they’ll have to come out sooner or later.”

  “Then why not wait?” the girl asked.

  “Impatience,” Nolan said, shrugging. “Also, as you say, we don’t know for a fact they’re in there. You know what’s on the other side of that building? The river. Which means they may have hopped in a boat and gone to Iowa already.”

  “Or,” Jon said, “they might be inside, getting that money together I heard her and Ron talking about, and then go for a boat ride.”

  Nolan nodded. “Except I think Julie’ll go and leave that big boyfriend of hers behind for me to play with.”

  “Yeah,” Jon said. “You’re probably right.”

  “I think she’s in there,” Nolan said. “This has all been breaking too fast for her to be anywhere else.”

  “Won’t that place be locked up?” the girl asked. In the rain, with its sign off, the building across the graveled lot looked much more like a warehouse than a restaurant.

  Nolan reached in his pocket for the ring of keys. “I got these at that farmhouse,” he said. “Jon said that Ron was a night watchman of sorts at the Paddlewheel. With any luck at all, these’ll get me in.”

  “You want this?” Jon asked, holding the long-barreled .38 out to Nolan in his palm, like an offering.

  “You hold onto that,” Nolan said, picking up the 9 mm from the seat between him and Jon. “I’ve got over half a clip left in this, and a spare, so if I have to exchange a few rounds with ’em, I can.”

  “Jesus,” the girl said.

  “But if you hear gunfire, you’ll know it’s them, not me,” Nolan went on, pointing to the silencer attached to the automatic. “So you may have to come in and back me up.”

  “Where does that leave me?” the girl said.

  Nolan turned and looked at her. “Just get behind the wheel and stay with this car blocking the way as long as you can. If Julie and her boyfriend come piling out of there with guns in their hands, before us, you got my permission to haul ass out.”

  “Why don’t we just leave?” the girl said. “Why don’t we just go home? This is crazy.”

  “I’m sorry you’re involved in this,” Nolan said. “But I to
ld you I could drop you at a bar or motel or something, and you said no. So just keep your eyes open, and pitch in if you’re needed.”

  Nolan got out of the car. So did Jon. He came around to Nolan’s side. Nolan was looking around, looking for movement; he hadn’t been kidding when he’d told Toni somebody might be waiting in the bushes. The rain was coming down harder now—not a downpour, but they were getting wet standing there.

  “You’re going to have to do it this time, Nolan.”

  “Kill her, you mean? Yeah, I know. I’m not nuts about shooting a woman, even if it is Julie. But that bitch is the fucking plague.”

  “It has to be done. You’re sure you don’t want me with you?”

  Nolan smiled, put a hand on the kid’s damp shoulder. “You’re my insurance policy. Come in if you hear shooting. Otherwise, stick with the girl. Let’s get her out of this alive, what do you say?”

  “I’m for that,” Jon said, smiling.

  “I’m going in a side door,” Nolan said, pointing off to the left of the brick building. “Bob Hale gave me a rough layout of the place. The kitchen should be over there. I’ll leave the door open, in case you have to follow me in.”

  “Right.”

  “See you in a few minutes, kid.”

  “See you.”

  Nolan headed across the gravel at a slow jog. The gravel extended around the side of the building, where he found two doors, the first having no window, the second, down a ways, having a window with a grillwork through which he could make out what seemed to be the kitchen.

  He started trying the keys on the ring; the fifth one opened the door. The Yale lock made a click that sounded loud as a gunshot to him, but he went on in, not hesitating, standing just inside for a while, leaving the door ajar, listening to see if his coming in had attracted anybody’s attention. He stood there a good three minutes and heard nothing.