“You got some more coffee for me?”
“Sure.”
She poured coffee, sat back down, and said, “I don’t blame you for skipping the funeral, Nolan. I don’t blame any of those other people who worked with him, either, for not coming. I mean, how the hell are they supposed to know he’s even dead, right? You people don’t keep in such close touch, I mean. If you hadn’t happened to call, even you wouldn’t be here, right? So his bar customers are there. Nobody else, except for his first fucking wife, the bitch who sucked him dry for alimony and child fucking support—she has the balls to be there. With his two kids, who that bitch has already ruined. Jesus.”
“Hey. Take it easy. Who the hell did you think would be there?”
She slammed her fist on the table, and the coffee cups jumped. “Where were those fucking bookies? They’re there when it’s time for Breen to pay up. They’re there with a hot tip for the sucker. They’re there extending credit at shylock rates. But when Breen’s planted in the fucking ground, oh, no. They aren’t there then, even though they fucking put him there!”
So that was why she hadn’t cried: she was too angry. She was too pissed off about her husband’s death to mourn him yet.
“Is that what happened?” Nolan asked. “Do you think it was somebody he owed money to who killed him?”
“Well, the cops say it’s robbery. He probably had, what, fifty bucks in the till, and the cops say his head was blown off for that. Can you buy that, Nolan? Fifty bucks got his head blown off? Not me, no, I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it at all.”
“Mary, people been killed for a lot less.”
“I know, but people like my husband? A guy like him, a professional thief who always dealt in the thousands of dollars, getting wasted by some cheap punk for a few bucks? I mean, it’s too cute, too . . . you know, ironic, too ... it’s bullshit, is what it is.”
“Maybe. Wasn’t there someone with him when he was killed?”
Her jaws clenched. She rubbed her cheek, as if she was sanding wood. “Yeah there was someone with him. There was a bitch with him. But what about this morning, at his funeral, Nolan, where were they then, his bitches, his young goddamn cunts? Where were they? They’d lay him, yeah, but not to rest. Shit”
“Mary.”
“Will you tell me something? Will you tell me something, Nolan? Am I some ugly old woman? Am I a wife you cheat around on?”
“Settle down. You’re not old, and you’re not ugly. But Breen did cheat around on you. You know that. I know it. I also know seven years ago, before you and Breen were married, when you and Breen were just going together, when you were just a barmaid of his yourself, that one time you and I went for a ride when it was snowing out.”
Her mouth quivered a little, and she said, “Yeah, well, I knew then. I knew that he loved me, in his way, that he wanted to marry me, but that he was getting in other girls’ pants every chance he could get and I had to strike back somehow. Not that I told him, or wanted him to find out, Christ no. But after that I could live with it better somehow, live with his running around on me. And what the hell, I liked you, Nolan. But you were hopeless. You were a goddamn wall no woman could hope to get behind and make something at all permanent with you. Maybe now there’d be a chance, but then? No way. And so we went for a ride in the country that time, and it was snowing, and it was something special to me. I never cheated on him again, did you know that? And when he cheated on me, when I knew he was or thought he was, I’d remember that time, hold it close to me like some precious goddamn stone, and . . . shit I’m going sentimental on you, Nolan. Can a tough guy like you take it? Jesus.”
“Mary. Do you think it could be the barmaid?”
“Do I what?”
“The killing. Could it have been somebody after the barmaid. A jealous husband. Jealous boyfriend.”
“Maybe. Maybe. I hadn’t thought of that but maybe. Or one of his other bitches, jealous of the new one. Are you saying you agree with me, Nolan? That you think something’s strange about his death?”
“Yeah, I agree. Or sort of agree. Coincidences bother me. I know they’re possible. I been caught up in them before. But I never believe in a coincidence till I look down its throat and up its ass. Then I believe in it. Not until. So. Could you give me a list of the people Breen was involved with, with his gambling?”
“Easily. We didn’t have any secrets where his gambling was concerned. Hell, I helped him handicap. I never caught the bug, but I was around the gambling scene too long not to be at least semi-involved.”
“Good. What about his girls?”
“In that case he was a little secretive. Mostly the girls working in the bar, I guess. They would stay on as help till they tired of him, or vice versa, but usually vice. He was not the best lay in the world, you know.”
Nolan smiled. “That’s not the way he used to see it.”
“Well, he wasn’t really in a position to know, if you know what I mean. Hey, Nolan, what are you going to do? Play detective? Find the killer? I didn’t know you read Mickey Spillane.”
“You want me to level with you, don’t you, Mary?”
“Of course I want you to level. Did you come clear from Iowa to bullshit me?”
He spread his hands. “Personally, I don’t give a damn who killed your husband. Matter of fact, he ran out on me one time. Justifiably, but I just mention it by way of showing I don’t owe him any posthumous favors. However. In this business, when somebody you worked with is killed, in circumstances that are even remotely suspicious, it doesn’t pay to ignore the matter. Your husband worked with me on a lot of jobs. Something out of one of those past jobs might have crawled out of the woodwork and killed him. Which affects me, obviously. So I can’t feel comfortable till I find out who was responsible for your husband’s killing. Plus, I admit I got some feelings for you. I figure maybe you would feel better if you knew what was really behind his death.”
“Do you ever think about it, Nolan?”
“About what?”
“Dying. Death.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“When you think about it, you get paranoid. Then you’re slow when you should be fast. Punchy when you should be alert.”
“Is that what happened to my husband?”
“Maybe. Sometimes you can’t avoid it. Sometimes you get hit by a truck even when you look both ways. That’s the way it is. Life. A gamble.”
She smiled, rather bitterly, he thought. “Well, my man never was much of a gambler.”
“I’m sorry about Breen. I really am. He was a good man.”
“Even if he did run out on you once?”
“Even then. I’d have done the same in his place.”
“That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Survival.”
“You could put it that way.”
“Nolan. Tell me.”
“What?”
“Why did he do it?”
“Heisting, you mean? You know why. To support the gambling.”
“Not the heisting. The women. Why . . . why wasn’t I enough?”
“Why did he gamble? Why can some men quit smoking and others puff away, even after they’ve seen the X-rays? I don’t know. I don’t understand people. I can barely tolerate them, let alone understand them.”
She sighed. “More coffee?”
“No.”
“I loved him, Nolan.”
“Yeah. Well, you must have. To put up with his gambling and his women both. And not every woman can stand being married to somebody in my business.”
“I thought you were out of the business.”
“You’re never out.”
“I guess not Listen, there’s . . . there’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Okay.”
“I want to talk upstairs. There’s something of his I want to give you.”
“Okay.”
She led him upstairs.
Into a darkened room.
The shade was drawn, but some of the light from outside was seeping in; overcast day that it was, the seepage didn’t amount to much. But he could see the bed, the double bed, and he could see Mary, disrobing.
She stood and held her arms out to him.
She stood naked and said, without saying it, Am I so ugly? Wouldn’t I be enough for most men?
She would have been plenty, for just about anybody. Sure, her thighs were a little fleshy, and there was a plumpness around her tummy, and she had an appendix scar. And her breasts didn’t look quite as firm as they once had. But big breasts never do, and they were nice and big, pink nipples against ivory flesh. He walked over and put a hand on one of the breasts, felt the nipple go erect. He put his other hand between her legs. He put his mouth over hers.
There was carpet up here. Downstairs, bare floors. But up here, on Mary’s insistence, no doubt, was plush carpeting, tufted fuzzy white carpeting, and they did it on the floor, and when she came, she cried finally, and they crawled up on the bed and rested.
Outside, it snowed.
7
SHE WALKED HIM out to the car. They had rested for several hours, and then she fixed him something to eat—nothing fancy, just a sandwich—and it was early evening all of a sudden, and he was saying he had to get back. Something doing in Iowa City tomorrow, he said, and she got his coat for him.
She’d been surprised how good he looked. She hadn’t seen him for several years, since the last time he’d stopped at the bar to talk to her husband about some job. She’d heard from her husband of Nolan’s troubles, that he’d been shot damn near to death several times the last couple of years, and she’d expected that to show on him. No. Some gray hair at the temples, but Nolan stayed the same. Handsome, in that narrow-eyed, mustached, slightly evil way of his. His body remained lithe, muscular; scarred but beautiful. He’d felt so beautiful in her. . . .
“You’ll be back then?” she said, leaning against the car, by the window. He was behind the wheel; the engine was going. The snow had let up.
“I’m going to poke into your husband’s killing a little, yes,” he said. “But it’s not the movies. No revenge, Mary. I don’t believe in that. I’m doing it to protect my own ass.”
She smiled. “And my ass has nothing to do with it.”
“Well. Maybe just a little. Take care of that ass, okay, till I get back and can take over?”
“Sure. And watch your own while you’re at it. Next week, did you say?”
“Probably. I’ll probably give you a call.”
And he was gone.
She went back into the house, into the kitchen, and drank the last of the pot of coffee she’d made.
She wondered if Nolan would really find her husband’s murderer, and if he did and took care of whoever it was, would she feel any better about it?
Now she felt very little. Anger, there was anger. Some sorrow. But more than anything there was confusion. Her husband had been blown to hell by a shotgun. In the company of one of his barmaid bitches. Naked, the two of them.
She wondered if there was any significance to the bitch’s body being in the back room, while her husband had been in the outer bar. To open the cash register, she supposed; it would have been locked after closing, and he would have had to reopen it for the thieves. She wondered if she should have mentioned any of that to Nolan. And that one other strange thing: the bottle her husband had had in his hand. He’d evidently grabbed for that bottle off the shelf just as he’d died, or as he’d realized he was about to die. What kind of crazy reflex action was that? To grab a bottle of Southern Comfort off the shelf?
8
FRIDAY, WHILE NOLAN drove into Indianapolis to see Breen’s wife, Jon drove to Cedar Rapids in his Chevy II to buy a pair of hunting jackets. He didn’t know why he was buying the jackets, exactly, just that Nolan had told him to.
He was also supposed to stop at a place called Blosser’s Costume Shop and Theatrical Supply to pick up a package for Nolan.
And of course it was like Nolan to give Jon a task or two to carry out without explaining the task or two’s significance. Jon was used to it. But he still questioned Nolan about such seemingly absurd assignments, getting nothing in particular back from the man for his trouble.
“Hunting jackets?” he’d asked. “What for?”
“One for you,” Nolan said. “One for me.”
“Okay, one for me, one for you, sure. But for what purpose, Nolan? I mean, hunting jackets? And why go all the hell the way to Cedar Rapids to get them?”
“Just do it. Yours is not to reason why.”
“I don’t believe you sometimes, Nolan.”
“And buy one of them at one store, and the other at another.”
“Why?”
“Because I want the jackets bought at separate stores.”
“Jesus. Okay. All right. I’ll do it. But what’s the costume thing about? Will you tell me that?”
“Ask for the manager. Blosser, the manager-owner. He’s a friend of mine. He knows about me. You can talk freely. He has a package for me. Oh, he may have you try something on. In fact, maybe you ought to insist on trying one of them on.”
“One of what on?”
“One of what’s in the package.”
“What is in the package?”
“Let me do the thinking.”
“Wait a minute, let me see if I got this straight. I buy the hunting jackets and pick up the packages, you do the thinking. Is that the way it goes?”
“That’s it exactly.”
“Well, I just hadn’t had it explained to me properly before. Once it’s explained to me, then I understand. But would you tell me one thing?”
“What?”
“Why do I still bother asking you questions?”
“Kid, that’s one question I wish I could answer for you.”
And so he had driven to Cedar Rapids, had bought one hunting jacket (a green plaid) in his own size, at a sporting goods store downtown, and another (a red plaid) in Nolan’s size, at a sporting goods store in an outlying shopping center, paying cash in both instances, as Nolan had also instructed.
He realized the hunting jackets had something to do with the robbery. That was self-evident. What galled him was that he couldn’t figure out what, and he knew Nolan wouldn’t tell him till the last moment.
The costume shop was on the way out of town, in a rather run-down section that was commercial along the main strip that ran through the area, but back behind which was a neighborhood that could be called lower middle class if you were in a charitable mood. It was a one-story, faded brick building sandwiched between a bait shop and a used book store that was, damn it, closed. Jon peeked in the windows of the old book store and saw thousands of used paperbacks in ceiling-high bookcases, and what looked like some old comic books and for sure some Big Little Books in locked showcases similar to those in Planner’s shop. He ran across such shops every now and then, and they were invariably closed. He sighed, shrugged, and went on into the costume shop.
The interior was spare but not seedy, with a counter and a waiting room area, similar to a laundry. An attractive if hard-looking woman of thirty or so was behind the counter, with coal-black hair, a beauty mark to the left of a red-painted mouth, and braless bouncing breasts under a satinlike yellow blouse. She looked as though she was preparing to audition for a local production of Carmen.
“Hi, honey,” she said casually, and Jon looked around to make sure she was talking to him.
She was, so he said hi himself, and did his best to return her suggestive smile. Maybe the woman did look sort of cheap and whorish, but she was also sexy-looking, in a second-rate men’s magazine way.
“What can I do you for?” she said. She was chewing gum. Not blatantly, though—not a cow chewing cud—but playing with it in her mouth, playing with it with her tongue.
“Uh, I’d like to see Mr. Blosser.”
“Not here.”
“Oh. You expect him soon?”
> “Nope. Won’t be back today.”
“Well, uh, I was supposed to pick up a package for a friend of his. A Mr. Nolan?”
“Oh, sure. Your name must be Jon.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“I’m Connie. The boss’s daughter, in case you was wondering.”
“Oh. Yeah, well, I’m pleased to meet you, Connie.”
“I’m sure. How is Nolan these days?”
“Fine. Fine. I didn’t know you knew Nolan.”
She grinned. She really was a good-looking woman, cheap or hard or not. “I know him. You ask him if I know him or not.” She laughed and her breasts jiggled.
Jon swallowed. “Okay, I’ll tell him you said hello.”
She reached under the counter and flopped two large white string-tied suit-type boxes up in front of her. “Here. This one is yours. It’s a small. You better try it on.” She motioned him behind the counter, and he followed her through a narrow hallway to some dressing cubicles in the rear of the store. She handed him the box marked “Small” and left, pulling the cubicle’s curtain shut on him.
He opened the box.
There was something red in it.
Red and partly white. Trimmed in white.
The red was a cheap but plush-looking velvetlike material; the white was fluffy stuff—cotton, he guessed. There was also red gloves of the same material, trimmed in the same white fluff.
It looked like a Santa Claus costume.
He took it out of the box.
It was a Santa Claus costume.
He put it back in the box and went back out front, quickly, leaving the costume behind.
“That was quick,” the woman said. “Fit okay, does it?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know . . . I didn’t try it on.”
“How come?”
“Well, there has to be some mistake.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, it’s a . . . would you come with me a minute?”
He took her back to the dressing cubicle and showed her.
“Yeah,” she said. “A Santa Claus costume. So?”
“This is what is supposed to be in this box?”
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