“Anyway,” Cole said, his distaste lingering in his sour expression, “we know when the stamps go out—third of the month—and that on the fifth they’re in mailboxes. Lyle and Cindy Lou just go out and about like good little mailmen, rain nor hail nor sleet, only in reverse. Taking letters out of mailboxes, not putting in.”
“It’s that easy?” she said. Repressing, and that petty?
“Yup,” he said. “It ain’t so small-time, either,” he added, as if reading her thoughts. “There can be as much as two hundred bucks’ worth in one envelope. Also, some people sell ’em to us direct. We pay a quarter on the dollar.”
“People sell their own food stamps?”
“People got things they want to buy and not eat. Sure. And we got some bars that we do business with.”
“Bars? You can’t buy liquor and cigarettes with food stamps . . .”
“Of course not—not ’bove board.”
“Oh,” she said. It was easy enough for Angie to figure how that could work: a bartender letting a customer use a dollar food stamp for thirty cents or so worth of booze or smokes.
“It’s a safe way to make a little extra bread, honey,” Cole said, in his fatherly way. “You won’t get caught. You almost can’t get caught. What are you doing, except moving some paper around? It ain’t even embezzling, really.”
“It is criminal,” she said.
“Much in life is,” Cole granted.
She said she wanted to think about it, and, after a particularly slow week in her father’s store, she called Cole Comfort and said yes. She never dated Lyle again. Once a month she drove to the farmhouse and got a supply of food stamps, bringing them cash in return. The Comforts always wanted cash.
And her dad, her sweet dad, tough ex-marine that he was, was so blessedly naive. He really thought business was up.
It crushed her to have to pull the rug out.
But it was time. She’d had a call from the Department of Social Services; an investigation into food stamp abuse was under way. An appointment to “interview” her had been set up. She didn’t know what this meant exactly, but she did know it was time to get out.
She’d socked a few thousand away, and bought a few toys outright (the Mazda, for one) and got her father on his feet, even if it was only temporarily. She didn’t know where she was going, but she did know she’d been in Jefferson City long enough. With her nest egg and her college degree and her looks, she could go anywhere, if she could just weather the Department of Social Services storm.
For right now, however, she was at the Comforts’, for one last time.
She was greeted at the door by Cindy Lou, a cute curvy strawberry-blond freckle-faced sixteen-year-old in a calico halter top and short jeans and bare feet with red-painted toenails. Somewhere between Daisy Mae and Lolita.
“Daddy’s upstairs figuring the books,” Cindy Lou said, ushering her into where John Wayne and Elvis, as always, ruled. “He’ll be down in a jif.”
And he was, in his usual Hee Haw apparel and his almost seductive smile. He said to Cindy Lou, “Take the pickup and get ’er gassed.”
She clasped her hands together in front of breasts that Angie would have died for. “Can I, Daddy?”
He reached in his pocket and withdrew a twenty and, grinning shit-eatingly, said, “What’s it look like?”
She snatched it out of his hands, and he patted her round little butt in a less than paternal way as she departed. Angie wondered for a moment whether Cindy Lou was old enough to have a license, before dismissing it as a foolish question.
He bade her sit on the couch again, which she did, where he poured her Old Grand-Dad and she carefully, tactfully, explained her position. Lyle was watching MTV, in headphones. Rick James was on the screen, silently screaming, but this time Cole didn’t hurl a TV Guide. Maybe he was getting more tolerant.
Or maybe he was just preoccupied.
She withdrew from her purse an envelope of cash, which he riffled through, smiling absently; he usually gave her a thick packet of food stamps at this point. He was preoccupied tonight.
“This investigation,” Cole said, tucking the money away in a deep coverall pocket, “what have you heard, exactly?”
“Nothing,” she said, shrugging expansively.
“They ain’t even talked to you yet.”
“Just on the phone. It’s only an appointment.”
“Are you worried?”
“Sure I am. But I don’t see how they can prove anything.”
“Damn,” Cole said. His smile was as rueful as it was pretty. “This has been one sweet little scam—but I’m afraid its days are numbered.”
“This investigation is that serious, you think?”
“Hard to say. I can tell you this—they started registering the mail with the food stamps in it. Anything over ninety bucks gets registered. Recipient has to sign.”
“So your kids can’t go raiding mailboxes anymore.”
“Not like they could. It’s just too damn bad.”
She shrugged. Smiled. “It was fun while it lasted.”
“Sure was,” he said, and hit her on the side of the head with the Old Grand-Dad bottle. She heard the glass break against her jaw, felt her skin tear, a flash of pain, then darkness.
She came out of it, once, for a moment, hearing: “A girl, Pa? I don’t want to kill no girl. I was with her before.”
That was when, for the first time, dying violently occurred to her.
2
IN NOLAN’S LIFE, right now, comfort was very important.
He’d lived hard, for fifty-some years, and it seemed to him about time to take it easy. This was the payoff, wasn’t it? What he’d worked for, for so very long: the good life.
Not that he wasn’t still working. He liked to work. His restaurant-cum-nightclub, Nolan’s, nestled in a nicely prosperous shopping mall, was doing a tidy business and he put in, oh, probably a fifty-hour week. He did all the buying himself, and kept his own books, did all the hiring and firing as well as playing host most evenings. No, he didn’t greet his patrons at the door—he had a hostess for that —but he did circulate easily around the dining room, asking people if they were enjoying their meals; and in the bar he’d move from stool to stool, table to table, chatting with the regulars.
Right now he was at home, though, in the open-beamed living room of his big ranch-style house, home on a Friday night (a rarity), a gaunt-faced, rangy man stretched out in a recliner, stroking his mustache idly, watching the reason for staying home on a Friday: a boxing match on HBO, a black guy and a Puerto Rican bashing each other’s brains out on a twenty-seven-inch Japanese TV screen. Nolan’s idea of world unity.
The room around him was cream-color walls and modern furnishings and soft browns. What he wore matched the room, though he hadn’t intended or even noticed it: a cream-color pullover sweater and brown corduroy trousers and brown socks and no shoes, vein-roped hands folded over a slight paunch.
The paunch bothered him, but not much. He’d been a lean man so long that in his mind he still was. Eating the food at his own restaurant had done it to him, and he’d taken up golf to halfheartedly work the budding Buddha belly off. Toward that end, he rarely rode in the cart, walking, trying to make it feel like a real sport.
He was enough of a natural athlete to break one hundred the first month he played, which frustrated the rest of his regular foursome, who, like him, were in the Chamber of Commerce, with stores in or near the Brady Eighty mall. Harris owned a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts outlet, a twenty-four-hour operation, and frequently handed Nolan a free dozen, which didn’t help his weight, either. Levine owned the Toys ‘R’ Us franchise in Brady Eighty. DeReuss, the wealthiest and quietest, was a Dutchman who owned a jewelry store in the mall. After eighteen holes, the foursome would go to the country club bar and drink and talk sports and women. Nolan liked the three men. He felt, at long last, as if he’d joined the real world. The legit world.
He sometimes wondered, in ra
re reflective moments, for instance between rounds tonight, what his friend DeReuss who owned the jewelry store would say if he knew Nolan had, in his time, heisted many similar such stores, albeit never in a mall. He didn’t know where his three golfing chums had got their financing; but Nolan had done it the good old-fashioned American way: he’d gone out and taken it.
For nearly twenty years, prior to this current respectability, Nolan had been a professional thief.
Jewelry stores—along with banks, armored cars and mail trucks—were his pickings, though not easy. He prided himself on the care he took; he was no cheap stick-up artist, but a pro—big jobs, one or two a year, painstakingly planned to the finest detail, smoothly carried out by players carefully cast by Nolan himself. Nobody got hurt, especially civilians; nobody went to jail, especially Nolan. He ran the show. He always had.
Well, not always. He’d started with the Family, the Chicago Family that is, but not in a criminal capacity. And certainly not in the heist game; in his experience, Family guys themselves rarely got into honest stealing, though they frequently bankrolled it. Unions and vice were where the Family was comfortable doing their stealing, and Nolan wanted none of either.
He hadn’t meant to go to work for the Family at all; he didn’t know that the Rush Street club where he was hired as a bouncer was Outfit-owned until he saw the manager paying off one of Tony Accardo’s cousins.
That same manager was stupid enough to short the Family on its piece of the proverbial action, and left in a nervous hurry one night. Nolan never knew whether the little man had made it to safety or the bottom of Lake Michigan, and he didn’t much care which. All he knew was it opened up a slot for him—soon he was managing the club himself, and still doing his own bouncing, making a name with the made guys, who eventually tried to get Nolan to join the Sicilian Elks himself, only he passed. They resented that, and tried to pressure Nolan into bumping off a guy he knew pretty well, and Nolan balked, and somebody else killed the guy, which somehow led to Nolan shooting (through the head) the brother of a Family underboss. Messy.
That had sent him scurrying into the underground world of armed robbery, which—with the exception of the aforementioned occasional bankrolling, a money source Nolan never sought —rarely touched Family circles. In that left- handed world he’d made his mark, and a lot of money. And, eventually, time cooled his Family problems—he had outlived the bastards, basically, and was now on more or less friendly terms with the current regime. He’d even operated a couple of clubs for them.
But he wanted to have something of his own. He didn’t like having Family ties; it wasn’t his idea of going straight, and straight was where he had always hoped to go, deep in the crooked years.
So here, finally, in the Quad Cities, a cluster of cities and towns on the Iowa/Illinois border, which is to say the Mississippi River, he had settled down and bought his restaurant and gone there: straight.
Funny. It all seemed so long ago—half a dozen guys standing around looking at maps and blueprints and photographs spread out on a motel-room bed or somebody’s kitchen table. Cigarette and cigar smoke forming a cloud. Beer and questions and arguing and bragging. Some really great guys—like Wagner and Breen and Planner. And once in a while a real asshole—like any one of that crazy Comfort clan. Well, Sam Comfort and his boys were all dead now, and their vendetta against him was just as dead. Nothing to worry about.
The black boxer won, and Nolan was yawning through some situation comedy, of the cable variety—stale pointless jokes and naked female breasts, not pointless—when the phone rang. He used the remote control to turn down the TV sound and walked to the kitchen where the phone was on the wall.
“Nolan,” he said.
“Hi. Is the fight over, or am I interrupting?”
It was Sherry. The hostess at his restaurant. She lived with him, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old California blonde from Ohio, young enough to be his daughter. But she wasn’t.
“The fight’s over. You’re not interrupting anything. How’s business?”
“I love you, too. Business is fine. You wouldn’t want to come down and work a few hours, would you?”
“Need me?”
“I always need you. But at the moment I’m thinking of the bartender.”
“Crowded,” he said, smiling.
“There’s money in your voice,” she said. “You really love the stuff, don’t you?”
“What else is there?”
“Me.”
“You’re in the top two.”
“You really know how to sweet-talk a girl. Get down here, will you? The regulars are asking for you.”
“It’s nice to be loved.”
“So I hear,” she said, hanging up, but there was no real bitterness in her voice. It was just a game they played.
She knew he loved her, or at least he assumed as much. That is, assuming he loved her. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure what love was, exactly, except something in movies and on TV, and on his TV right now, sound down, were some girls soaping themselves in the shower, which wasn’t love exactly, but was close enough.
He showered, too, alone, and shaved and splashed on Old Spice, an old habit, and put on a blue suit and a dark blue tie and a pale blue shirt, all of them quite expensive. He bought them locally, at the mall, where he got a discount; and he only wore such clothes to his restaurant, enabling him to deduct them.
Nolan loved money so much, he hated to spend it. He knew it was ridiculous—he wasn’t going to live forever, and these were the years where he was supposed to be enjoying himself, and, damnit, he was. He’d bought this fucking house (he only thought of it as a “fucking house” when he remembered what it cost him) and had expensive toys, like his silver Trans Am and several Sony TVs and stereo equipment and the sunken tub with whirlpool and like that. But he knew each one of the toys had taken Sherry’s nudging to get bought.
He smiled, thinking of her, slipping into a London Fog raincoat, twenty percent discount from the Big and Tall Men’s shop at the mall. He’d met her at the Tropical, a club he ran for the Family a few summers back. She was a waitress and he’d fired her for spilling scalding hot coffee in a customer’s lap. Then she sat on his, and they wound up spending the summer together. When she wasn’t in a bikini, poolside, she was in his bed and wasn’t in a bikini.
He pulled the silver sporty machine out of the garage, closing the overhead door behind him with a push of a button, wondering if some smart crook would come through the neighborhood trying various frequencies on some homemade open-sesame doohickey till he got it right and got in. More power to him, Nolan thought, and besides, my alarm will nail the bastard.
He glided down the hill—it was a cold clear November night—and turned left, toward Moline, coasting along a stretch that alternated between parks and commercial and residential, a Quad Cities pattern. He was still thinking about Sherry. Still smiling.
What had started, that one summer, as two people using each other—a cute lazy cunt who wanted to stay on the payroll and was willing to do it by screwing the boss, lecherous dirty old man of fifty that he was—had turned into something else. Something more.
They liked each other. The sex was good, and the summer was over too soon. He had asked her to stay on, and she almost had, but her mother had a stroke and she had to go home, so they parted company, reluctantly, and he promised her she’d hear from him again. A year ago or so, when he bought Nolan’s (which had been the name of the place even before he bought it, and she often accused him of buying it so he wouldn’t have to spend money on a new sign), he had thought of her and invited her to work for him and, if she liked, stay with him. Despite her scalding-coffee-in-the-customer’s-nuts past, he made her hostess. And she’d done very well at it. She was beautiful, of course, but she had that midwestern gift of making immediate friends out of strangers. She, more than anyone or anything else at Nolan’s, was responsible for the heavy return business, the regulars who haunted the place.
&n
bsp; He crossed the free bridge at Moline. The river was choppy tonight; the amber lights of the cities on its either shore winked on the water. Did he love her? He supposed so. He liked her, and that somehow seemed more important.
He stayed on Highway 74 and curved around onto Kimberly, a wide street whose valleys and hills were thick with commerce; he glanced at the little shopping clusters, wondering how they were doing. He knew Brady Eighty was hurting everybody else—but it might be temporary. New kid on the block always got more attention—for a while.
He turned right on Brady Street, a four-lane one-way clear to the Interstate now, and enjoyed the almost Vegas-like glow of fast-food franchises and other prospering businesses. The Quad Cities economy wasn’t good—the farm implement industry, a major component of the area’s economy, was withering away, and other local industries were suffering as well. But Brady Street glowed in neon health: pizza and tacos and hamburgers; used cars, stereos and videotape rental. People always have money for the important things.
Like drinking, he thought, with a wry private smile, turning toward his club. At this point on Brady, the businesses began to give each other some breathing room, and the food wasn’t so fast—although Flaky Jake’s, for all its yuppie pretension, was still a hamburger joint, and Chi-Chi’s peddled tacos, even if they did slop guacamole and sour cream on them. This was motel country, too: Ramada, Best Western, Holiday Inn. At the left as he passed, in a valley of its own, lay the sleeping behemoth—North Park—the massive, sprawling shopping mall whose parking lot was an ocean of cement that even after closing was swimming with cars—movies and restaurants kept it so. North Park was Brady Eighty’s biggest (in every sense) competitor, and conventional wisdom had said a new mall nearby couldn’t hope to compete with its scores of shops, including four major department stores.
But Brady Eighty wasn’t exactly a new mall. It was a refurbished one. The Brady Street Shopping Center, an open-air plaza with two rows of shops facing each other, had opened back in the early sixties, one of the first in the Cities. Over the years it had fallen on hard times, and was almost a ghost town when a Chicago-based group, led by a smart operator named Simmons, bought everybody out but a few willing-to-stay stalwarts and remodeled the place into an enclosed mall. The Brady Street location—Highway 61, just a whisper away from Interstate 80—made it the first shopping area you saw when you got off the Interstate; provided the easiest shopping-center access for half a dozen small towns outside of Davenport; and had a varied selection of shops, within a smaller, easier-to-deal-with area than North Park’s miles of mall. “Brady for the ’80s,” the slogan went, and Nolan wondered idly what would happen to the catch phrase now that the nineties were breathing down the decade’s neck.
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