Hard Cash

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Yeah, well, the shotgun she had kind of took the fun out of it.”

  “Would you rather been out front getting your ass bored off by Rigley?”

  “I don’t know—he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy to me. Victim of circumstances, looks to me.”

  “Victim of circumstances, my ass. We’re the damn victims, and he’s the blackmailing little son of a bitch who’s screwing us in the ear with his goddamn circumstances.”

  “Come on, Nolan. You know who’s screwing us in the ear, and it isn’t Rigley.”

  Nolan yawned again, then said, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s the bitch doing it. Christ, you’d think getting screwed by her would be more fun.”

  They drove in silence for a while. Soon the trailer courts on the left-hand side of the highway signaled Iowa City’s closeness, and as they came into town, the clear highway gave way to snow-packed, icy city streets. Then they were turning down the quiet residential lane at the end of which was the antique shop. It was a street of double-story homes with modest, well-tended lawns and lots of trees—a beautiful, shade-bathed street in summer, equally beautiful in winter, with the bare branches of the trees catching handfuls of snow and holding them, occasional white strokes of an artist’s brush in a scene predominantly gray. But right now only the gray seemed apparent to Jon: skeletal, dead branches on skeletal, dead trees, the houses themselves dark and cheerless. Energy conservation was leading to less brightly lit Christmas seasons than those of the recent past: the bright colored lights were at the moment unlit, the nativity scenes on lawns and Santas climbing in chimneys were minus spotlights, and only for a few hours each evening would the seasonal glow be switched on at all. The world still looked like a Christmas card to Jon, but a gloomy one, sent by an atheist.

  Nolan pulled the Buick into one of the spaces alongside the antique shop, and they got out. The shop was a two-story clapboard building that looked more a part of the residential area it bordered than the business district it began, with a Shell station next door and various chain restaurants (like the Dairy Queen across from the Shell) nearby. Jon had kept the shop closed since his uncle’s death, and had no intention of continuing in the antique business. There was a guy—a friend of Planner’s—set to come next month and make a bid on all the antiques and junk in the place, and after that Jon was considering turning it into a candle shop, to be run by Karen Hastings, his on-again-off-again girl friend (off-again at the moment, though he felt he could patch things up, if he decided he wanted to) and running a mail-order business himself in old comic books and related items. Actually, things were beginning to settle into place in Jon’s life: he had invested his money in the Pier with Nolan, and it was a good investment that should keep both of them solvent for untold years to come; and he had inherited the antique shop and its contents, which would provide more cash and a place to live and do business out of; and he had Karen, if he got around to patching up their relationship; and his artwork was getting better all the time and getting close to where he really thought he might actually be able to make a living drawing comic books. And a fresh, new year was coming up in a matter of days.

  And now this.

  Another robbery.

  He and Nolan went in. Nolan went upstairs, Jon to the room in back on the first floor, where he slept and kept his studio. It had been a storeroom when his uncle Planner turned it over to him, a dusty, dirty oversize closet that Jon had converted into a shrine to comic art, plastering the gray wood walls with colorful homemade posters of Dick Tracy, Batman, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and half a dozen other comic heroes, drawn by Jon unerringly in the style of their original artists. A few splashes of bright color in the form of throw rugs transformed the cement floor into something livable; a few pieces of furniture—the genuinely antique bed and chest of drawers given him by Planner—turned storeroom into bedroom. A drawing easel and a file cabinet containing his rarest comic artifacts, and boxes of comic books lining the walls made the room a cartoonist’s studio. He had consciously decorated and organized the room so that it would be a cheerful, constant visual reminder of who he was.

  There was also a poster of perennial movie bad guy and sometime spaghetti western hero Lee Van Cleef, wearing his black mustache and dark gunfighter’s outfit, fondling the six-gun on his hip, looking a hell of a lot like Nolan. The six-gun, and the .357 Magnum Dick Tracy was brandishing, and Flash Gordon’s ray gun—these and other implements of the fantasy violence he’d so enjoyed for so many years—irritated and disturbed him tonight, and he thought, What a bunch of bullshit, and left the room.

  He went upstairs. The lights were off, but he knew his way around. Nolan was already sacked out. Snoring. Jon stretched out on the couch. He just didn’t want those fucking fantasy faces staring at him, even in the dark; he couldn’t sleep in that room tonight. He didn’t know why exactly, he just couldn’t.

  But he didn’t have trouble getting to sleep. It should have been a sleepless night, the way his state of mind was, but he was just too goddamn tired to be an insomniac, after his afternoon of running through the woods with a sketch pad up his butt, and an evening that included riding/hiding on the floor in the back seat of Nolan’s car and sneaking in back of that cottage and wrestling a shotgun away from that damn amazon, and shit . . . too tired to do anything now but sleep . . .

  And dream.

  He dreamed he was on a heist. Not the Port City bank heist, past or future. Nolan wasn’t in the dream, either. And it wasn’t a bank at all. It was a museum. He was trying to steal a diamond. It was like some movie he’d seen once. He was in a museum, trying to steal a diamond, and he had people helping him, people he’d gone to junior high and high school with, people he hadn’t seen in years. One was a kid with greasy black hair and a bad complexion, who’d shared a joint with Jon in the john at a high school dance and Jon had gotten nauseous and afraid of being caught. And now here this kid was, years later, helping him steal a diamond from a museum. And there was a girl, that sluttish girl Jon had taken behind the bleachers at a football game in junior high and gotten his hands in her pants, and a week later, when some skin started peeling off his fingers, he’d wondered if he could have caught some awful disease off her or something, she was here too, with the greasy-haired kid, and they were stealing this diamond. And then cops. Cops came rushing in. The museum was dark at first, just a big pool of black with a circle of light on the display case where the diamond was. But now cops were rushing in, and it was a huge white room, full of light. There weren’t any walls in sight, just blinding white light and cops in blue with guns, rushing at them. He knew some of the cops: one of them was the art professor he’d argued with at the U of I before dropping out—the professor who had told him comics were junk and to whom Jon had said, Who are you to say, with your crappy fucking abstract pretentious art. And another cop was a guy his mother had lived with for a while, an ex-army sergeant who’d hated Jon and got drunk one night and tried to beat Jon up and Jon had cleaned his clock—he was there, a cop, shooting. And old Sam Comfort, the man Jon had killed. He was a cop too. Shooting. And the sluttish girl and the greasy-haired kid, they turned into other people all of a sudden, they turned into Shelly and Grossman, the two friends of Jon’s who’d been in on the Port City heist, who had died in the bloodbath aftermath of that heist, and who were dying again, as the cops, the prof and the ex-army sergeant and Sam Comfort were shooting .357 Magnums at them while Jon tried to run but his legs were rubber and there were no exits anywhere, just smooth white walls, and Shelly and Grossman were dying again, spurting blood in slow motion like the movies, Grossman screaming Jon’s name, Shelly flopping onto the display case with her blonde hair streaked with blood . . .

  “Kid.”

  “Uh, what, uh ... ?”

  “Hey. It’s okay.”

  “Nolan?”

  “You were dreaming.”

  “Dreaming?”

  “Yeah, dreaming, and making a hell of racket at it. Like to wake the dead.”
<
br />   He sat up. It was daylight. His mouth tasted foul.

  “What the hell time is it, anyway?”

  “About ten o’clock.”

  “That’s impossible, I just fell asleep here a . . .”

  “Yeah, you just fell asleep. Nine hours ago.”

  “Shit,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I don’t feel like I slept at all. I’m tired as hell.”

  “You wore yourself out dreaming and making noise.”

  “Goddamn nightmare.”

  “I didn’t figure it was a wet dream.”

  “Not the one I remember, anyway. I was dreaming all night, I think, but I only remember that last one I was having.”

  “Yeah, well, I never dream.”

  “Everybody dreams, Nolan. You just don’t remember yours.”

  “I don’t dream. You want breakfast? I’m fixing myself some.”

  “What, eggs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll have a couple, over easy.”

  “You’ll have them scrambled.”

  “Scrambled’s fine. And bacon.”

  “Sausage.”

  “Sausage. Just what I wanted anyway.”

  They sat in the kitchen and ate.

  “Kid.”

  “Yeah, Nolan?”

  “This is really bothering you, isn’t it.”

  “What?”

  “The idea of hitting that bank again.”

  “No. I’m okay. Really.”

  “I don’t like it any better than you do.”

  “Yeah, sure, I know that, Nolan. Forget it. It’ll be a snap.”

  “Look. I think maybe we better call a man in.”

  “The way Rigley has it mapped out, just the two of us is plenty.”

  “No, I think an extra man would be better.”

  “What for?”

  “Somebody ought to stay behind and keep an eye on the bitch. I don’t trust her.”

  That was bullshit, and bullshitting wasn’t Nolan’s style. Jon didn’t know how to react. “Me, you mean? I should stay behind and watch her?”

  “Yeah. We’ll call in somebody else to help on the job itself.”

  “You don’t . . . don’t think I’m up to it, Nolan?”

  “You’re up to it. You done fine every time so far, and we been through some rough weather the last couple years.”

  “What, then?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t trust the bitch, is all.”

  “It’ll mean less money.”

  “Well pay the guy a flat rate. Anyway, I don’t care about the money so much. The money is fine, sure. A person can always use more money. But I’m more interested in protecting our interests here in Iowa City, seeing to it the job goes smooth so we can come back home and go on with our happy retirement.”

  “Whatever you think is best, Nolan.” Jon was ambivalent toward Nolan’s suggestion—relieved to be off the line of fire, hurt that Nolan might not feel him up to the pressure.

  “So who you got in mind, Nolan?”

  “Well, I pretty well kept a lid on my retirement. Lots of people in the trade think I’m dead, think the Chicago boys got me. And it’s nice being dead, if you know what I mean. Nobody to come ’round tempting me with prospective heists—except for an occasional bank president, of course—and nobody to come ’round looking for a handout. Besides, I don’t have that many friends left. Most of the people I worked with in recent years are punks, present company excepted, who I’d just as soon stay dead to. Most of the good people are dead. It’s that kind of business. So anyway, I’ll call in Breen, since he knows I’m here already and is a good enough man and can probably use the money.”

  Jon nodded. “Breen would be fine. Unnecessary, but fine.”

  After breakfast they went out in the front room, and Nolan stopped a moment and looked at the Christmas tree on top of the television set but said nothing. Then he sat on the couch and used the phone on the coffee table.

  Jon wasn’t paying attention to the conversation at first, but it didn’t take long for it to become apparent something was wrong on Breen’s end. When Nolan hung up, Jon asked him what the deal was.

  “Breen’s dead,” Nolan said. “Somebody blew him apart with a shotgun last night.”

  6

  NOLAN HAD never been to Breen’s house before, but he didn’t have trouble finding it. Indianapolis was an easy town to get around in, for all its size, a town whose streets crisscrossed like a big checkerboard. And anyway, he’d been to Breen’s bar a number of times, and the house was in the same neighborhood.

  He parked the Buick in the driveway, behind a battered green Mustang he recognized as Breen’s. There were no other cars in the drive, though there was room; none were parked along the curb in front, either. Which surprised Nolan. Breen’s funeral had been in the morning, and this was fairly early afternoon, so he’d expected a bunch of cars belonging to friends and relatives who’d be making sympathetic shoulders available to the bereaved widow. But then, it would be like Mary Breen to tell everybody to get the hell out. She always was a private person, who at a time like this wouldn’t be about to put up with the hypocritical condolences of, say, her brother Fred, who had never really gotten along with Breen anyway and probably at this very moment was entertaining visions of taking over the bar for himself, or her mother, a cafe waitress at fifty-four, who felt her daughter had married below her station.

  The street was quietly middle class, not unlike the one in Iowa City that the antique shop was on. The house was a brown brick two story, a shade smaller than most in the neighborhood, but then, only Breen and Mary had lived there, so it had been plenty big, Nolan supposed. There was snow on the ground in spots, and the sky was overcast, and he guessed it had been a good enough day for a funeral: a somber day but not a depressing one, really.

  There were two sets of four cement steps up a tiny terraced lawn, and another set of four steps to the door, which had a plastic Christmas wreath on it. Nolan knocked.

  She answered right away.

  She looked good. She also looked sad, of course, but he didn’t think she’d been crying, or anyway not much.

  “Nolan,” she said with soft surprise. “I didn’t expect you to come.”

  He had said he would try to, on the phone yesterday, but evidently she had figured he was just saying that.

  “It’s cold out here,” Nolan said. “I didn’t come all the way from Iowa City to stand on a stoop and freeze my ass off in Indianapolis. Invite me in already.”

  She grinned and shook her head. “You’re something. Come on in.”

  He did, got out of the coat, and Mary took it and went somewhere with it. He was in a small vestibule. The stairs to the second floor were in front of him, a study to the left, the living room to the right. It was Breen’s house, all right; a gambler’s house. Nothing but the essentials: some serviceable, warehouse sale furniture; bare hardwood floors, not even a throw rug; a console TV that looked ten years old at least and was probably black and white; bare walls. That was the living room, if you called that living. The study was pretty good size but was also mostly empty, just a desk with chair and a single filing cabinet. It was actually a bigger room than the living room, and Nolan thought he knew why: Breen must have done the bar’s bookkeeping out there so that he could call it his office, which would rack out to a sizable tax deduction.

  Mary came back from wherever she put the coat and said, “Let’s go out in the kitchen.”

  She fixed him coffee out there. It was a bright room, white trimmed in red, with all the necessary appliances and some unnecessary ones too. Mary was not the type of woman who would let Breen extend his gambler’s stinginess where she was concerned, not without a hell of a fight, anyway.

  She was a good-looking woman. She looked like what Marilyn Monroe would have if the movie studios hadn’t fixed her nose and bleached her brown hair and told her not to smile with her gums showing. She was Marilyn Monroe at forty-one, a housewife Marilyn, getting a little pud
gy.

  She sat at the kitchen table with Nolan. She was wearing a dark green turtleneck sweater and dark green pants. Her eyes were light green, not red at all.

  Nolan looked into the light green eyes and said, “Isn’t it time you cried?”

  She looked into her coffee. She smiled. Her gums showed. It was a nice smile anyway. Fuck the movie studios.

  “I’ll get around to it,” she said.

  “Tell me about the funeral,” he said.

  “Do you really want to hear about the funeral?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you come?”

  “I thought you might want somebody to talk to who knew the score.”

  She laughed. Not much of a laugh, but a laugh. “Nobody at the funeral knew what he was, you know. Except for Fred, who knows vaguely. But nobody else. It was mostly his regular customers from the bar. None of you people. Not that I expected any of you. I know it’s a thing you people have, not poking into each other’s private lives. It’s a sensible thing, seeing each other only when you’re working. It’s a cold business. Necessarily cold, I guess.”

  “I came.”

  “You did come, Nolan. Damn it if you didn’t. But you didn’t come to the funeral. Why?”

  “I don’t go to funerals.”

  “Neither did he. Till today. Tell me something, Nolan. Do you ever think of me?”

  He sipped his coffee. “Every winter. When it first snows. I think of you then.”

  She smiled again, faintly this time, and said, “The back seat of a car. Like a couple teenagers.”

  “Well, we were younger.”

  “Yeah, but not that young. Snowing to beat hell, and we’re out in the country, God knows where, in the damn car parked with the engine going and the heater going, and I’m in that fuzzy coat and you’re dropping your drawers. Christ. Maybe we were that young at that.”