Hush Money

by Collins, Max Allan

  Another thing about Wagner, he’d saved his money. Wagner had dreamed of retiring early and getting into something legitimate, more or less. It was a dream Nolan could understand; he had it himself. The difference was Nolan’s fifteen-year savings turned to so much air when a carefully-built cover got blown, making it impossible for him to go near the bank accounts where even now that money was making tens of thousands of dollars interest every year.

  Wagner had been lucky. He got out early (age fifty) and with a nest egg so big Godzilla might’ve laid it. He bought the old Elks Club in Iowa City and turned it into a restaurant and nightclub combined. The old Elks building was three floors, counting the remodeled lower level, which Wagner converted into a nightclub below, supper-club above, and banquet room above that. It was Nolan’s dream come true, only Wagner’d made it work where Nolan hadn’t.

  But Wagner’d made it work too well. Wagner went after the restaurant business with the same vengeance he had heisting. And at fifty-two he’d had his first heart attack. Slow down, the doctor said, among other things. At fifty-three he’d had his second heart attack. Slow down, goddamn it, the doctor said, among other things. And now, at fifty-four, he was on his way to his third and had, on the spur of the moment, invited his old friend Nolan over to ask him if he wanted to buy in and be his partner and take some of the load off and help him avoid that third and no doubt fatal heart attack.

  Wagner looked relaxed, anyway. He was wearing a yellow sports shirt with pale gray slacks, like his complexion, only healthier. Nolan was dressed almost identically, though his sports shirt was blue and his pants brown.

  Their clothes began and ended the similarity of the two men’s appearances. Wagner was white-haired, cut very short but lying down, like a butch that surrendered. His face was flat: his nose barely stuck out at all. It was a nebbish face, saved only by a giving, sincere smile. Nolan’s face, on the other hand, seemed uncomfortable when it smiled, as if smiling were against its nature. He was a tall man, lean but muscular and with a slight paunch from easy days of Tropical non-work. He had a hawkish look, high cheekbones and narrow eyes; perhaps an American Indian was in his ancestry somewhere. His hair was shaggy and black and widow’s peaked, with graying sideburns. He wore a mustache, a droopy, gunfighter mustache that underlined his naturally sour expression. Nolan did have a sense of humor, but he didn’t want it getting around.

  Wagner skirted the pool table, almost bumping into it, bringing the drinks back from the bar too fast.

  “Take it easy, Wag,” Nolan said, taking the Scotch from his friend. “I’m out of breath just watching you.”

  “Shit, I’m just excited to see you again after so long. Didn’t Planner ever mention I was in town?”

  “I guess maybe he did once. But it slipped my mind.”

  Wagner and Nolan had run into each other on the street this afternoon, in Iowa City. Planner was the business associate of Nolan’s, dead now, whose nephew Jon had been Nolan’s companion on his last three “adventures,” as Jon might put it.

  “I’m sorry as hell about Planner. I guess I was the only one at his funeral from the old days. The only one there who knew him before he retired.”

  Planner, too, had been active in professional thievery and had retired—or semi-retired—twenty years ago. In his remaining years, Planner (as his name would imply) had continued to help Nolan and other pros in the planning of jobs, using his Iowa City antique shop as a front.

  “I never did get the story on how Planner got it, Nolan. I mean, I don’t buy him dying of old age, for Christ’s sake. He was too tough an old bird for that. I wish I had his ticker.”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly pass away in his sleep.”

  “That’s how it sounded in the paper.”

  “It better have, considering what I paid out to Doc Ainsworth for the death certificate.”

  “What really happened?”

  “He was watching some money for me, and some guys came in and shot him and took it.”

  “Jesus. Did you find those guys? And your money?”

  “The guys are dead. Or one of them is, anyway. The other one was what you might call an unwitting accomplice, and I let him go. I’m getting soft in my old age.”

  “What about the money?”

  “Gone. Irretrievable.”

  “Well, what money was it? I mean, from one job or what?”

  “It was all of my money, Wag. Everything I had.”

  Wagner stroked his thin gray face, and Nolan could see embarrassment flickering nervously in the man’s eyes. Embarrassment because Wagner had earlier, on impulse, proposed to Nolan that he join with Wagner in the restaurant business—but that proposal had been made on Wagner’s assumption that Nolan would have a healthy nest egg of his own.

  Nolan took him off the hook. “I’m not broke, Wag, if that’s what your latest heart attack’s about.”

  Wagner grinned. “Jesus, Nolan, I’m sorry if I . . .”

  “Fuck it. Money, I got. Not as much as I’d like, but enough to buy in, I think. I think I can muster seventy grand.”

  “Oh, well, no sweat, then.”

  “If I bought in, I’d want it rigged so I could eventually take over the entire ownership. I want my own place, Wag.”

  “I know. That’s how I used to think. It’s how I still think, but I got to slow down, Nolan, you know that. I’m thinking maybe I’ll spend the winters in Florida, or something. You lay some heavy money on me and I can go buy me a condominium and stay down there half the year or something, you know? I got to slow down.”

  Wagner said all that in about five seconds, which indicated to Nolan how much chance there was of Wagner slowing down. He could picture the little guy running along the shore in Florida grabbing up seashells like a son of a bitch.

  “Look, Wag, this appeals to me. You don’t know how this appeals to me. But I got a funny situation going with Chicago.”

  “I thought you said . . .”

  “Yeah. Everything’s straight. All the guys who wanted me dead are dead themselves. But I’m in with these guys, the new ones, and they been treating me pretty good. I got a not bad set-up with them as it is. And there’s some complications you don’t know about that I can’t tell you about.”

  “But you will think about it.”

  “Sure I will.”

  “I’d like to have you aboard, Nolan.”

  “I know you would. I’d like to be aboard, Wag. The only thing I don’t like about you, Wag, is it makes me so fucking tired watching you take it easy.”

  “Well, I am taking it easy, Nolan, damnit.”

  “Then what are you shaking your goddamn foot for, Wag?”

  Wagner’s legs were crossed and he was shaking his foot. He stopped. He grinned at Nolan. “You buy in and I’ll take it easy. You’ll see.”

  “Well, I want to be sole owner of the place, Wag, but I’d rather buy you out eventually, than have you die on me and leave me the damn place in your will. So quit running life like it’s the goddamn four-minute mile or something, will you?”

  “Jesus, Nolan. Now you’re a philosopher.”

  “It’s just my arteries hardening. It goes with senility.”

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Fifty.”

  “You look younger. You look like you always did.”

  “Not with my clothes off I don’t. I mean, I’m not going to show you, but take my word for it. I got enough scars you could chart a map on me.”

  “Hey, you want to check my books over, Nolan, look into how I been running the place?”

  “Let’s think about it first. If I seriously think I’ll want to buy in, then we’ll go into that. How about getting me another Scotch?”

  “Sure!”

  “But take your fucking time, Wag. Nobody’s holding a stopwatch over you.”

  While Wagner was building new drinks, the phone rang. Fortunately it was on the bar, otherwise, Nolan supposed, Wag would’ve gone running after it like a firema
n responding to the bell.

  “For you,” Wagner said. “It’s that lad, Planner’s nephew.”

  Nolan went to the phone. “What is it, Jon?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Nolan, but you better get over here right away. There’s some guy with a gun here who wants to talk to you.”

  “Christ, kid, what the hell’s happening? You okay?”

  “Yeah, I got things in control, I guess. But I’ll feel better about it with you here.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  He slammed the phone down, said, “Got to be going, Wag, catch you later,” and headed up the stairs two at a time.

  From down below him Wagner said, “Hey, Nolan! What’s the rush?”

  6

  THE FLOOR was covered with comic strips. Old Sunday pages from the thirties, forties, early fifties, spread across the floor of his room like a four-color, pulp-paper carpet, but God help anybody who dared walk across that carpet; Jon’d kill ’em. Hell, some of the pages were so brittle, around the edges anyway, that heavy breathing was enough to turn precious paper into worthless flakes.

  In fact, that was a problem Jon was doing his best to take care of now. He was sitting in the middle of the strip-covered floor, sitting like an Indian waiting for the pipe to be passed to him, and was painstakingly trimming the yellowed edges of the pages with barber shears, returning each strip, when properly trimmed, to its respective stack. He had already cut the pages up and sorted them, stacking each character individually—Li’l Abner, Terry and the Pirates, Joe Palooka, Alley Oop, dozens of others. Later, on another day, he would tackle the oppressive job of arranging them chronologically. Even a diehard comics freak like Jon had his breaking point, after all.

  Jon was twenty-one years old. He was short—barely over five and a half feet tall—but with the build of a fullback in miniature; he’d worked his tail off to get in shape, through Charles Atlas muscle-building courses (anytime a bully wanted to kick sand in Jon’s face, Jon was ready) and continued on with isometrics and lifting weights. His hair was brown and curly—a white man’s Afro—his eyes blue, his nose turned up in a manner he considered piggish but most girls, thank God, found it cute. He was wearing his usual apparel: worn jeans, tennis shoes, T-shirt with satirical superhero Wonder Warthog on the front.

  His life was wrapped up in comic art. He was an aspiring cartoonist himself and a devoted collector of comic books and strips and related memorabilia. He had no profession, outside of comics, having dropped out of college several years ago because of a lack of funds. He’d intended to go back when he got the cash, but when he finally did get it (from that bank robbery he’d been a part of, with Nolan) he’d had so much money that going back to school seemed irrelevant.

  The comic-strip “carpet” Jon was presently in the midst of was a fitting accompaniment to the rest of the room. The walls were all but papered with posters of famous comics characters, which Jon had drawn himself: Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Buck Rogers, Batman, recreated in pen and ink and watercolor, uncanny facsimiles of their original artists’ style. The room was a bright and colorful shrine to comic art, and had come a long way from when Jon’s uncle Planner had first turned it over to him, a dreary, dusty storeroom in the back of the antique shop, its gray walls and cement floor straight out of a penal colony bunk- house. Jon had changed all that, first with his homemade posters, then with some throw rugs, circles of cartoony color splashed across the cold cement floor; and his uncle had donated a genuine antique walnut chest of drawers and almost-matching bed with finely carved headboard, neither of which Jon had spared from the comic art motif: bright decals of Zippy the Pinhead and the Freak Brothers, and taped-on examples of Jon’s own comic art, clung to the fancy wood irreverently. Boxes of comics, each book plastic-bagged and properly filed, stood three-deep hugging the walls, and a file cabinet in one corner was a vault that guarded his most precious comic artifacts.

  On the wall next to his drawing easel was one of the few noncomic art posters in the room: Lee Van Cleef decked out in his “man in black” spaghetti western regalia, staring across the room with slanty, malevolent eyes. Jon felt the resemblance between Van Cleef and Nolan was almost spooky, though Nolan himself was unimpressed. Nolan was, in many ways, a fantasy of Jon’s come to life: a tough guy in the Van Cleef or Clint Eastwood tradition and a personification of the all-knowing, indestructible super-heroes of the comic books as well.

  Initially Jon had been almost awestruck in Nolan’s presence. It was like coming face to face with a figment of his imagination and was unnerving as hell. Now, however, after two years of on-and-off close contact with the man, Jon realized Nolan was just another human being, an interesting and singular human being, yes, but a human being, imperfect, complete with human frailties and peculiarities. Take Nolan’s tightness for example. Monetary tightness, that is, not alcoholic. Nolan was a penny pincher, a money hoarder whose Scrooge-like habits were too ingrained to be thrown off even when on two separate damn occasions his miser’s life savings had been completely wiped out.

  But the man was tough, no denying that. Jon knew of twice when Nolan had pulled through when he had enough bullets in him to provide ammunition for a banana-republic revolution. That alone was proof of the man’s toughness and perhaps indicated a certain shopworn indestructibility.

  Nolan was in Iowa City, but Jon hadn’t seen him yet. He’d called Jon in the early afternoon to say that he was in town and that he’d stopped at the Hamburg Inn to grab a sandwich, where he’d run into an old friend named Wagner, with whom he was now spending the evening. Tomorrow Jon and Nolan would be driving in to Des Moines to sell some hot money to a fence—the money from the Detroit heist, which was all in marked bills.

  Jon was getting a little groggy. The images of Li’l Abner, Alley Oop and company were starting to swim in front of his eyes, and maybe it was time he took a break and sacked out a few hours.

  He checked his watch (early 1930s Dick Tracy), and it was almost nine-thirty. He’d been at this since just after lunch. He’d driven out to the country this morning to pick up the strips from an old farmer named Larson who had boxes of funnies up in his attic, stored there since the childhood of his two long since grown daughters and forgotten ’til Jon’s ad, seeking old comic books and strips, came out in the local tabloid shopper. Jon had all but stolen the pages—there were thousands of them, easily worth a quarter to a buck per page—and felt almost guilty about it. But the old guy seemed tickled as sin to get fifty bucks in return for a bunch of yellowing old funny papers, so what the hell? As soon as he had finished a quick lunch at the Dairy Queen across the street from the antique shop, Jon had gone to work, cutting up the pages and stacking them for future, more thorough sorting.

  There was a reason, he knew, for his going at the project with such manic intensity. Every time something went haywire in his life, he turned to his hobby, to comics, spending more than he should, both time and money. Collecting old comic books was no kiddie game; it was a rich man’s hobby, roughly similar to the restoration of old automobiles but potentially more expensive. He’d gotten in the habit as a kid, when he was living with first one relative and then another, while his mother (who liked to call herself a chanteuse) toured around playing piano and singing in cheap bars. He’d never lived in one town long enough to make any friends to speak of. The relatives he stayed with, for the most part, provided hostile quarters where his was just one more mouth to feed and not a mouth that rated high on the priority list either. So he’d gotten into comics, a cheap ticket to worlds of fantasy infinitely more pleasant than the drab soap opera of his reality. Ever since then, he had turned to comics for escape. He was, in a way, a comic-book junkie. He needed his daily dose of four-color fantasy just as a heroin addict needs his hit of smack and for similar reasons. And prices.

  But who could put a price tag on escape, anyway? To Jon, comics were the only happiness money could buy, a physically harmless “upper” he could pop to his heart’s conte
nt.

  Take yesterday, for example. He’d gone over to see Karen. Karen was the thirty-one-year-old divorcee he’d been screwing for going on two years now. She had brown hair (lots of it—wild and flowing and fun to get lost in) and the sort of firm, bountiful boobs Jon had always hoped to get to know first-hand. She was great company, both in and out of bed, and looked and acted perhaps ten years younger than her age, while at the same time being very together, very mature, mature enough to run a business (a candle shop below her downtown Iowa City apartment) that was making her disgustingly wealthy. Sounds terrific, right? A rich, fantastic-looking woman, with a beautiful body and a mind to match, as faithful and devoted to Jon as John Wayne was to the flag, a woman absolutely without a fault.

  Or almost.

  She did have one fault. The fault’s name was Larry.

  Larry was her ten-year-old, red-haired, freckled-face pride and joy. Larry was the one thing about Karen that Jon didn’t like. Jon hated Larry in fact. Larry was a forty-year-old man hiding out in a ten-year-old’s body. Larry schemed and manipulated and did everything in his considerable power to break up his mommy and Jon.

  And yesterday he had damn near succeeded.

  Yesterday Larry had been sitting across the room in Karen’s apartment, staring at Jon with those shit-eating brown eyes, saucer-size brown eyes like the waifs in those godawful Keane paintings, and he gave Jon the finger. The goddamn kid just sat there and out of the blue thrust his middle finger in the air and waved it at Jon with a brazen defiance only ten-year-olds and Nazis can muster. Karen was in the other room making lunch. Jon glanced toward the kitchen to make sure Karen wasn’t looking. He got up and went over and grabbed the. finger in his fist and whispered, “Don’t ever finger me again, you little turd, or I’ll break your goddamn finger off and feed it to you.” Jon let all that sink in, then released Larry’s finger and returned to his position on the couch, proud of himself; he’d handled the situation well. Nolan would’ve approved.