Two for the Money

by Max Allan Collins

  “Correct,” Felix said, his smile damn near feeble.

  Nolan said, “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your help. You deserve credit for thinking of Joey Metrano. We’d been in trouble if we picked the wrong guy to work over.”

  Nolan had said that to unruffle Felix’s feathers, and it worked nicely, sparking Felix into a rambling, self-glorifying explanation of how he had known that if Charlie were alive, Joey would know, and of Charlie’s friends and relatives in the Family, Joey would be easiest to break, and so on. Nolan tried not to fall asleep. Across the pool, the phone on the snack bar counter began to ring during the closing moments of Felix’s oration.

  Nolan said, “That’ll be for me,” and went after it.

  The switchboard girl said, “I’ve got a long-distance call from Iowa City for you,” and Nolan said, “Put him on,” hoping Jon had better tidings this time around than last.

  “Hello?” a voice said. Not Jon’s. A female voice.

  “Yes? This is Logan.”

  “Uh, is your name Logan or Nolan or what? Jon says Nolan and then tells me ask for Logan and . . . oh, Christ, I suppose that’s unimportant, I mean . . .”

  She was almost crying.

  “Hey!” Nolan said. “Who is this? What’s wrong?”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be upset. Jon said if I got worried, really got worried, I should call you. He explained that this was . . . a dangerous situation. That men with guns were involved.”

  “Settle down. My name is Nolan. All right? I’m Jon’s friend. All right? And I’m your friend, too. Now tell me your name.”

  “Karen.”

  “All right, Karen. Now what’s the problem?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, I really am, I shouldn’t be bothering you, I’m just easily upset, I guess.”

  “Why are you upset, Karen?”

  “It’s Jon. He said he’d be back by eight, and, well, you know what time it is now.”

  That was bad.

  “It’s nothing to worry about, Karen.”

  “There was something else . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well, he gave me a number to call. I was supposed to try him there, before bothering you. He said don’t bother you unless I was really upset or worried or something.”

  “Do you know whose number it was?”

  “Jon said it was a doctor he was going to see.”

  That made sense, Nolan thought. “Go on, Karen.”

  “Well, I called the doctor a half hour ago and he said . . . he said he hadn’t seen Jon. He doesn’t even know Jon, he says. Didn’t understand what the hell I was talking about.”

  Shit.

  “Okay,” Nolan said. “Don’t worry. You did right calling, Karen. You’ll hear from me soon.”

  Her sigh of relief came over clear on the phone. “Thanks,” she said. “I mean it, thanks. Whatever the hell your name is.”

  “Now give me your address and phone number.”

  She did, and Nolan found a note pad to jot them down.

  After he’d hung up, he went over to where Sherry was swimming and told her to go back to the room and wait for him. She nodded yes, grabbed up her towel, and scooted off. Nolan walked over to Felix and said, “Looks like you get your wish after all.”

  Felix looked up from his third martini and said, “How’s that?”

  “My friend in Iowa City is in trouble, I think. You go get Greer and have him ready to go in the parking lot within fifteen minutes or I’m leaving without him.”

  Three

  1

  The sun was hot and high in a practically cloud-free sky and Jon was feeling lousy. It was Tuesday afternoon, just an hour and a half after he’d left his uncle at the antique shop to join Karen at her apartment, and he was on his way back already. The late breakfast at Karen’s had been fine; she was a good cook and Jon enjoyed that side of her as much as anything. But her ten-year-old pride and joy, Larry, had a dentist’s appointment at four, and, of course, Karen had to drive the kid there and be by his side throughout the great ordeal. And so Jon had been rushed through the breakfast, forced into throwing those delicious eggs and sausage down his throat as if he was shoveling coal into a boiler.

  “Why,” Jon had asked her, through a mouthful of eggs, “did you ask me over if you were in such a goddamn hurry? You didn’t say anything about the kid’s teeth on the phone.”

  “What’re you bitching about?” she had said. “The price is right, isn’t it? I thought maybe you’d lower yourself to go along with me when I take Larry to his dental appointment.”

  “That’s my idea of a good time,” he’d said.

  “Oh,” she’d said angrily, “go read a comic book.”

  Larry had been sitting at the table the whole time and the kid would flash an innocent smile now and then, batting his lashes at Jon. Larry had red hair and freckles and big brown eyes, like the kids in paintings you can buy prints of by sending in three toilet paper wrappers and a dollar-fifty. Jon hated Larry.

  Jon supposed he was jealous of the kid. It was hard getting used to going with a girl—woman—who was the mother of a ten-year-old kid. Karen looked younger than thirty, and was very pretty, with long, wild, dark hair and the same brown eyes as the kid, only on her they looked good. She also had a body that wouldn’t quit.

  But still it was odd, strange getting used to. Karen’s apartment was large enough that privacy wasn’t a real problem, and Larry kept pretty much to himself, having a stamp collection or some silly such thing he played around with all the time, shut tight in his room. When Larry did decide to intrude, however, he intruded big, and could, with his big-brown-eyes coaxing, dictate the course of an evening’s activities. The new Brian DePalma film they had planned to attend could be turned into the latest revival of “Son of Flubber”; a night of Cantonese dining at Ming Gardens could be transformed easily into greasy take-out tacos; and on television the educational channel’s showing of “The Maltese Falcon” on the Bogart Festival would lose out to a made-for-TV movie with someone who used to be on “Laugh-In.” When a need of Jon’s was balanced against a need of Larry’s, no contest, Larry won every time.

  So Jon hated Larry, and felt quite sure that the feeling was reciprocal, even though the kid rarely said a word. But with those shit-eating big brown eyes, who needed the power of speech?

  Jon had met Karen in her candle shop, which catered to a head crowd, selling incense and Zig-Zag papers and hash pipes and posters and the like, in addition to countless candles, most of which Karen made herself. He went there to buy underground comics and posters, and after a while he was haunting the place, checking for new stuff (which was ridiculous, since he bought so much mail order) but mostly just getting to know Karen. At first it was just that he was fascinated watching her boobs act as a bouncing billboard for various causes, in tee-shirts ranging from NO NUKES to SAVE THE WHALES. Later he found out she was funny and bright and crazy, when she got politics off her chest.

  Jon realized that probably the primary reason he and Karen got together was because both of them were straighter than they appeared to be: Jon with his frizzy hair and Wonder Warthog tee-shirts, Karen with her equally frizzy, longer hair and ERA slogans. The turning point in their relationship was that day in the Airliner when they had been sitting drinking beers and Jon had made a confession. He told Karen sheepishly that he was not into the dope scene, in spite of his looks and certain bullshit comments he’d from time to time made. Karen had grinned and admitted the same thing, that despite her latter-day hippie appearance, she was a painfully straight, divorced woman of thirty with a ten-year-old child.

  Which was the first Jon heard of her age, her broken marriage, and her kid, but he hadn’t minded, as the shared confessions had played like a scene in a movie and fantasy was something he could really get into, so they had laughed, toasted beers and joined forces.

  Jon never got the details of her marriage. He did know that her husband was an attorney who lived in Des
Moines and came from a long line of attorneys. Jon gathered that the marriage had come out of those prehistoric times when the pill was not so common and have-to marriages were, and Karen had dropped out as an undergrad to play wife and mother while her hubby was put through law school by his wealthy family. Later on, she proved a burden to her husband, mostly because she was “intellectually inferior” (she hadn’t even made it through college, after all). Her husband may have been a hypocritical bastard, but he was no dummy: he’d let Karen have pride-and-joy Larry and asked next-to-no-visitation rights.

  And his alimony and child-support payments were generous, too. Karen’s monetary situation was such that she could hold a long-term lease on the building, which had as a bottom floor her candle shop and above that the five-room, remodeled apartment she and Larry lived in; another apartment above that she rented out. The building was in the heart of Iowa City’s shopping district, on the back side of a block that faced the U of I Quadrangle, the candle shop bookended by a pair of busy record stores. The setup provided her a lucrative source of income.

  That was all Jon knew about the former daddy of Larry, picked up here and there from bits and pieces of conversation. Jon didn’t know the guy’s name (the bitterness ran so deep in Karen she’d reverted to her maiden name) but Jon hoped one day to look up the (he assumed) red-haired, freckle-faced butthole and punch him out.

  These were the things that Jon reflected on as he walked the six blocks from Karen’s downtown apartment to Planner’s antique shop. The beautiful breakfast that had been rammed down his throat was showing no signs of settling in his stomach, and he was generally disturbed over the unkind words he and Karen had tossed back and forth at one another.

  He walked around to the side of the antique shop and as he was crossing the cement porch, his right foot hit something wet and he slipped and fell. He landed on his ass but broke his fall with the heels of his hands, which slid off the cement and skidded back across the gravel surrounding the porch.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, after the fact, and just sat there for a moment, half on porch, half on gravel. Then he got up, slowly, and examined his scraped but not badly bleeding palms, deciding the injury wouldn’t impair his drawing too much. He dusted himself off with the untenderized sides of his hands.

  He went over to the porch to see what had made him slip and saw a trickle of red, smeared where his foot had hit it, a stream trailing from the door across the cement stoop onto the gravel. He touched the red wetness and smelled his fingertips, looked at them, rubbed them together. What the hell was this, he wondered. Not paint; it’s too thin.

  “What the hell,” he said aloud, shrugged, wiped the damp stuff off his fingertips onto his Wonder Warthog teeshirt and tried the door.

  Locked.

  Jesus, how many times had he asked his uncle not to lock the side door? But the old guy kept on doing it, anyway, wanting to keep the air-conditioning inside. It was a nuisance to Jon because his uncle had the only key to the side door and wouldn’t let it out of his keeping for Jon to have a duplicate made. Jon had a key to the front and that was enough, his uncle reasoned. Yet his uncle was always complaining about Jon coming through the front way and scaring off the customers with his bushy hair and crazy teeshirts.

  This was the last straw, Jon thought. He and Planner got along, got along famously, but there were certain things that, dammit, just required an argument. And this locked-door business was one of those things.

  He walked around to the front. The “Closed” sign was turned facing out for some reason, and he couldn’t see Planner when he peeked in. The old guy probably stepped out for a sandwich, Jon thought. Probably over at the Dairy Queen right now.

  Or maybe Nolan called, and Planner had to leave to make some kind of preparations for Nolan. That was it. Nolan called.

  He dug the key out of his pocket and opened the front door. “Planner?” he said. He repeated his uncle’s name three more times, each progressively louder, and getting no response, he locked the door again. If Planner wanted the place closed, then closed it would be.

  The air hung with traces of smoke from one of Planner’s Garcia y Vegas, which didn’t do Jon’s still-churning stomach any good. The air-conditioning kept it from getting too damn stale in there, but nothing known to man could completely wipe out the memory of those potent cee-gars of Planner’s.

  Jon got behind the counter and sat down in Planner’s soft old easy chair. His stomach continued to grind away in its attempt to digest breakfast; his conscience nagged him slightly about the semi-arguments he’d had with Karen. He found himself staring at the phone on the counter.

  “What was that dentist’s name?” he muttered to himself. “Paulson? Paulsen?” He picked up the phone book and tried to find the listing and couldn’t. Finally he looked in the yellow pages under “Dentists-Orthodontists” and found it: Povlsen. Odd damn spelling. He dialed the number and asked the girl who answered if Karen was there and was told just a moment.

  “Yes?” the voice said.

  “Hi, Kare.”

  “Hi, Jon.” Her voice was neutral; she couldn’t make up her mind whether she was mad or not.

  “Listen. I want to tell you something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I mean, you can talk, can’t you? Has Larry had his teeth worked on yet?”

  “Yes. That is, the doctor’s working on him right now.”

  “Well, why aren’t you . . . ?”

  “The doctor said I . . . I shouldn’t be in there . . . said Larry was too old for that sort of thing.”

  Good man, Jon thought.

  “Kare?”

  “Yes, Jon?”

  “Thanks for breakfast. Thanks for asking me over.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

  He got out of the chair and sat up on the counter. “And listen, something else . . .”

  “What?”

  “When are you going to be done at the dentist’s?”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe I want to fill your cavity.”

  She laughed and said, “That’s medicine I’ll gladly take. I’ll be home in half an hour.”

  “Good,” he said, and suddenly noticed the trail of red across the floor down at the end of the counter. “Hey, Kare, hold on, will you?”

  “Sure, Jonny.”

  The thin red streak led from the side door across the floor and around into the first backroom. What the hell was it, anyway? It wasn’t . . . blood?

  He followed the red trail into the second backroom.

  And found the slumped shell of his uncle.

  Jon started to shake.

  He approached his uncle tentatively, bent down saying, “Unc? Uh . . . Planner?”

  He shook his uncle’s shoulder and could feel how slack the body was, and turned him off his side and saw Planner’s face, saw the queer smile, saw how white the face was, saw the blood his uncle was soaking in, and ran back to the phone.

  “Je . . . jesus,” he sputtered into the receiver.

  “Jonny?”

  “Listen . . . something . . . something terrible’s happened.”

  “What should I do, Jonny?”

  “Nothing. Go . . . go home when . . . Larry’s through and . . . I’ll call you in an hour. O . . . okay?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I . . . will be.”

  He hung up.

  Shaking, he felt the cramp buckle him over, overpower him, and he heaved his breakfast onto the old wooden floor of his uncle’s antique shop.

  2

  The housing addition had a vaguely English look to it, rough wood, watered-down Tudor architecture, occasional stone. It was more plush than your run-of-the-mill housing addition, carefully laid out on gently rolling hills, each lawn spacious and immaculately tended, though the spread-out nature of the addition and the lack of trees made it look barren and lonely and cold against the clear sky. It was on the edge of Iowa Ci
ty, on one of the less-traveled routes out of town, just beyond a modest commercial area dominated by a Giant grocery store, Colonel Sanders Chicken, and filling stations. On the other side it was surrounded by sprawling farmland, and at that very moment a farmer was on a tractor working slow and hard along the horizon, making the cluster of houses seem out of place and somehow irrelevant, to the farmer’s life at least. Though the houses were not crackerbox identical, there was still a housing addition sameness to them, which was only emphasized by the contrived effort to avoid repetition that amounted mainly to alternating one-story homes with split-levels. Walter slowed as he approached one of the one-story homes, focusing his vision on the number on the door, making sure this was the one he was after.

  This particular house was dark wood with light stone and sat on a corner next door to a house that was light wood with dark stone. It was just another house in another (if elite) housing addition, with the only noticeable difference being that this had a red Mercedes Benz in the driveway instead of a Ford LTD or a Cadillac. The house was a surprise to Walter, as the whole addition had been. It was not the sort of neighborhood where he’d expected to find the home of a dope peddler.

  Of course Sturms was more than a dope peddler, Walter supposed, though he didn’t know what else you’d call him, really. Supplier, maybe. From the looks of the housing addition Sturms evidently thought of himself as a district sales manager or something.

  Walter had a low regard for people who dealt in drugs, and knew his father, Charlie, shared that low regard. Once they had discussed the subject and his father had told him that the Chicago Family was only into drugs because they had to be, and they were in it mainly as financeers, not fucking around with diddly-shit pushers and such.

  Walter guessed that in Iowa City circles Sturms was probably considered to be “the Man,” which wasn’t particularly impressive, since most towns have one. Just the same, Charlie had assured his son that Sturms was important, in a small-time way, because he was the dope guy in Iowa City, and Iowa City was one of the big drug centers in that part of the midwest.