“Vern Tinklenberg,” Garber said. “I knew he’d be here.”
“I wish he hadn’t come,” Johanna said.
“You know what, Sugar? Me, too.”
Garber moved up behind Tinklenberg and listened to him tell his tale. He knew the story well.
“They used to have ski jumping over at Como Park,” Tinklenberg said. “This was back in the thirties, early forties. I remember this one time, a guy dared me to go down the jump. Double-dared me. You know how kids are. I couldn’t back away from a double-dare. So I climbed the ramp with my toboggan—I had this long, wooden toboggan. I went down the jump, flew off the bottom. Suddenly, I’m airborne. Seemed like I was up there forever, holding on to the toboggan for dear life. It was actually kinda fun for about five seconds. Then I came down, hit the hill. Hard. Next thing I know, I’m spread-eagle over the hood of some guy’s car, my toboggan smashed to bits, and the guy’s asking if I’m all right. He wanted to take me to the hospital, only I’m more afraid of my mother than I was of being hurt. So I go home, make up a story about the toboggan getting run over by a car, never told my mother anything until three days later when they took me to the hospital cuz I had three broken ribs and one of them punctured my lung. I’ll tell you, if I wasn’t already in the hospital, that’s where she would have put me.”
Tinklenberg’s audience laughed politely, Garber included. He moved out from behind him.
“That’s a good story, Vern,” Garber said. “Funny.”
Tinklenberg smiled in recognition. “Hi, Al.” He stopped smiling.
“’Cept it didn’t happen to you,” Garber said. “It happened to Bob Foley. I know cuz I was the one who double-dared him.”
“What are you talking about, Al?”
Garber circled Tinklenberg, putting a worn wooden picnic table between them.
“You’re a fraud,” he said. “A phony. You’ve never done anything in your life worth talkin’ about so you tell other people’s stories, pretending they’re all about you.”
“That’s B.S.” Tinklenberg turned to his audience. “Al’s always been jealous. Ever since we were kids. Cuz I was always better than him.”
“Who are you kidding?” Garber said. “You’ve never been better than me at anything. Ever.”
“I hit more home runs than you. I scored more goals, killed more Nazis, made more money; my wife was prettier.”
“Lies, lies, lies. Is that how you wanna go out? Rowing across the River Styx in a boat of lies?” Garber found his granddaughter and smiled at her. “Like that, Sugar? River Styx?” He turned back to his adversary. “You were always second best, Vern. At least that’s what your wife told me. You know what I’m talking about.”
“You sonuvabitch,” Tinklenberg said. “Ruth would never have had anything to do with you.”
Garber held his hands away from his body, palms up.
“A gentleman never tells,” he said.
He found Johanna again and gave her a wink and Johanna wondered if Garber really did sleep with Tinklenberg’s wife or if he was just needling him.
“You’re a liar,” Tinklenberg shouted.
“I’m a liar? Look up the word in the dictionary, pal, and there’s your photo, both front and profile like the way the cops take ’em.”
Tinklenberg made a move as if he was about to go over the picnic table for Garber. But Garber calmly held his ground. He reached behind him underneath the sports jacket and produced a gun. There was a collected gasp from the neighbors who had gathered round to watch the confrontation; more than one reached for a cell phone. Garber held up the gun for everyone to see.
“Know what this is?” he said.
“It’s a Luger,” Tinklenberg said.
“That’s what we call it. The Krauts call it Pistolen-08.”
“Big deal. I have one just like it.”
“Except I took mine off a German officer at the Remagen Bridge. You paid fifty bucks for yours in London.”
“I got mine off a prisoner.”
“You bought it from Jack Finnegan. He told me.” Garber smiled some more. “Second best again, Vern.”
He leveled the gun on Tinklenberg’s chest.
“Grandpa,” Johanna called.
Garber waved her away with his free hand.
“Sugar, please,” he said. “I’m trying to make a point.”
“Don’t, Al, please, you can’t,” Tinklenberg said. “You can’t—please—don’t shoot me.”
“Why not? I won’t live long enough to go to trial for it, much less prison.”
“Al.”
“You stole my tombstone, Vern. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? You stole it just like you’ve stolen my stories and took them for your own, stories about my life and the lives of a lot of other men better than you. Well, why not? Why not steal my tombstone? Your whole life you’ve been chasing after me—hell, you haven’t had a life. You’ve been too busy living mine. Didn’t do nearly as good a job, either. Take the tombstone. What do you think, people are going to point at it and say ‘Tinklenberg, what a man, his monument is ten percent bigger than Al Garber’s?’ That ain’t gonna happen. You know what’s gonna happen? They’re going to point and say, ‘It’s bigger than Al’s monument, but not nearly as good. It’s second best.’ Just like the life you’ve lived.”
Garber thumbed back the hammer on the Pistolen-08 and extended his arm.
“No, Al.” Tinklenberg brought both his hands up to defend his face. He screamed. “No.”
Several neighbors joined in.
“No.”
Garber squeezed the trigger.
Click.
There was a moment of perfect silence while dozens of ears strained to hear the sharp snap of a gunshot. When it didn’t come, the silence slowly filled with the distant sound of a police siren coming closer, the shouts of neighbors, and with Garber’s loud, unrestrained laughter.
“Oh, you should see your face,” he said.
Tinklenberg’s eyes were wet with tears; a stain spread along his pants from his crotch and down his leg. He cursed Garber but there was no energy in it.
“Hey, I just did you a favor, Vern. Now you have a story to tell that really is your own.”
Garber found his granddaughter and smiled.
“Remember, Sugar,” he said. “Tombstones, they don’t matter all that much. I mean, who gives a crap, really? What matters, is that you live well and have a little fun. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
He laughed some more. Laughed as he dropped the unloaded Pistolen-08 into his pocket. Laughed as he made his way back to the dance floor. With a little luck, he figured he could get in a few more dances before it was time to go.
“Last Laugh” Copyright ©2009 by David Housewright. First published in Once Upon A Crime, Nodin Press.
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Author’s Note: This story came to me while I was having lunch in a small town along the Mississippi River with my wife. It was originally titled Meg and Josie’s Hotel, Restaurant and Bar Across From Karla’s Kut and Kurl in Alma, Wisconsin. But cooler heads prevailed.
Obsessive Behavior
They tossed my room after the fifth day. Actually, Josie searched it while Meg banged my brains out in her living quarters in the back of the hotel. I would have preferred Josie. Meg had bluer eyes, blonder hair and bigger breasts, but the lovely, doe-eyed Josie gave off a girl-next-door vibe that more than once made me reconsider my life choices. It was easy to see why Johnny the Boy Scalise had fallen for her, why he had trusted her with the combination to his safe.
Josie hadn’t found anything in my room. That’s because I had brought nothing that would have identified me as a PI; I didn’t even bring my guns. Still, I had taken a chance letting Meg seduce me. Josie was sharp—all three of them were sharp—yet they lacked experience, otherwise they would have known that the smart move was to go for the cell phone in the pocket of my sports jacket that Meg had stripped off before leading me to her bedroom. They would ha
ve seen all those numbers in the call log with the 312 prefix for Chicago and they would have been frightened. If they had re-dialed the last number I had called, they would have been have been frightened even more.
I didn’t want the girls to be frightened. I wanted them relaxed, calm. Only Johnny the Boy had crossed me up. He had told me to sit on the girls until he arrived. That was six days ago and still no sign of him. You simply cannot hang out for that long at Meg and Josie’s Hotel, Restaurant and Bar—that’s its actual name—without making people suspicious. The joint was located in Alma, Wisconsin, a 19th Century-style European village filled with inns, bed and breakfasts, art galleries, gift shops and restaurants that was perched on a narrow strip of land between the Mississippi River and a five hundred-foot-high limestone bluff. It catered to tourists chasing walleye or the fall colors, birders attracted by the nesting grounds of bald eagles and rail buffs enticed by the thirty trains that passed through the town each day. Yet while many people came and went, as a rule they didn’t linger for long. But still there I was after nearly a week, keeping to myself and neither fishing, birding nor trainspotting. Of course, the girls were alarmed. I would have been alarmed, too. Especially if I was on the lam with three point two million of a gangster’s ill-gotten dollars.
I liked the girls very much, had liked them even before I met them. Johnny had called them whores, skanks, bitches. They weren’t. They were professional women, graduates of Northwestern University; they could speak five foreign languages between them. Brenda worked in public relations, Cassidy was an economist and Linda was trying to parlay an art history degree into a career in high fashion as a hair stylist. Just about everyone I met while searching for them spoke of their kindness, their generosity, their unbridled sense of fun. Their only crime, it seemed, was falling in with the wrong crowd.
Brenda had taken up with Johnny the Boy, Cassidy with his Number One henchman, and the third—Linda—she was their roommate. Things went from bad to worse almost immediately. Cassidy was sent to the emergency room when the henchman lost fifty large betting on the Bears in the 2006 Super Bowl—he had to take his frustration out on someone. The incident so appalled Brenda that she broke it off with Johnny. At least she tried to. Johnny refused to take no for an answer, ignoring the restraining order forbidding him to go anyway near Brenda, threatening her friends with rape and murder if she didn’t wise up and scaring off every lawyer that tried to come to her rescue.
This lasted for nearly a year. Then poof, the girls were gone. The cops couldn’t find them, although they didn’t look very hard, and neither could Johnny. It became apparent that the girls were living under fake IDs that were as solid as anything provided by the U. S. Marshall’s Witness Security Program because three years of relentless effort by some very good bounty hunters couldn’t put a dent in them.
To pull off a magic act like that, they would have needed help. So I went to a guy I knew who specialized in disappearances. Johnny’s boys had interrogated him, too, and got nothing, but he owed me a favor and to pay it off he told me a story. It was about three beautiful princesses who had begged—literally begged—a good wizard a traveling bard had spoken about to help them escape from an evil monster. The wizard liked the princesses very much, plus it didn’t hurt that they had a boatload of treasure. The wizard hid them in the forest until he was able to conjure a spell that rendered the princesses invisible. It was the finest work he had ever done—his masterpiece—and he boasted that no one would ever find and hurt the princesses again.
Which was good enough for me. Except Johnny the Boy started demanding results. I explained that while I had great faith in my craft, it was unlikely I could do in a short time what others couldn’t accomplish over a period of years and he should forget the whole thing. Johnny didn’t see it that way.
“They claim you can find anybody,” he said.
“That’s not entirely true.”
“It better be.”
Johnny the Boy suggested that I try harder and then started listing the names of family members and friends that might suffer due to my lack of success. I didn’t think for a moment that he was bluffing. I understood Johnny’s obsession. If it should become known that three girls fresh out of college had ripped him off and gotten away with it, well, a lot of Johnny Boy’s rivals would look upon it as a sign of weakness, something you just didn’t show in his line of work. Already there were rumors that Tony the Ant and Jimmy Legs were preparing to move on him, which was why Johnny the Boy so rarely left the fortress he had built for himself on Lake Michigan.
I didn’t like it, but I went back to work in earnest, accumulating every piece of information about the girls that I could. See, the key to finding someone who is hiding in plain sight is the past. People are creatures of habit. After spending a lifetime doing a specific thing in a certain way, it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to change. A fugitive who was an accountant, goes back to being an accountant; a used car salesman might give up cars, but odds are he’ll sell something else. The girls had been footloose and fancy free for over three years now. Possibly they were sliding back into their old lives, whether they had meant to or not. Possibly they were making mistakes.
I catalogued the magazines the girls had subscribed to and bought the subscription lists to all of them. I compiled the names and addresses of the business organizations they had joined and secured a list of members. I examined the membership directories and subscription lists of every public-relations-related association and newsletter I could find. I searched the motor vehicle licenses and registrations of forty-nine states and the criminal records of every county in all fifty states. I hired an information broker and had her hunt through bank accounts that had been opened within the past three years. I paid an IRS agent under the table to check on any female who was either depositing large sums of money in an account on a regular basis or passing large sums from one account to another. The most time consuming thing I did was look up the names of every woman between the ages of twenty and thirty who was issued a license by a State Board of Cosmetology somewhere in the U. S. in the past three years. Then I cross-referenced it all. It took me three months to find Karla’s Kut & Kurl, opened just nine months earlier in Alma. Once I had that, it took three hours to find Meg and Josie’s Hotel, Restaurant and Bar.
I drove out there. I popped into Karla’s Kut & Kurl for a haircut. I recognized Linda instantly. She was all sweetness and light and she gave me the best haircut I ever had. While she was working a young woman entered the shop. With tears in her eyes she hugged Karla, thanked for profusely and told her that she was the kindest person ever. After the woman left I asked Karla what it was all about.
“She had a problem,” Karla said. “I helped. No biggie.”
I pressed but Karla wouldn’t give me any more. I liked her for that.
After the haircut, she told me if I was looking for a meal or place to hang my hat, I couldn’t do any better than Meg and Josie’s place across the street. She leaned in and whispered.
“We’re friends, so if you tell them I sent you they’ll treat you just as shabbily as they do me.”
The hotel registration desk was on the left as you entered the front door; the bar and restaurant were on the right. The restaurant had a nice lunch-hour trade; I didn’t see a single empty table. Brenda met me at the door with a menu in her hand.
“I’m Josie,” she said. “Can I help you?”
“Karla sent me,” I said.
Josie hooked an arm under mine.
“Would you like to sit at the bar?” she asked.
She led me there before I could reply. She sat me on a stool and waved over the woman who was tending bar. Cassidy smiled as brightly as Brenda.
“Meg,” Josie said. “This young man is a friend of Karla’s.”
“Oh,” Meg said. “Are you married?”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“Neither is Karla.”
For the next ninety minutes, t
hey joked with me as if I was someone they were trying to set up with their little sister. That and the meal made it the most enjoyable lunch I could remember.
All during the drive back to Chicago I tried to think of how to avoid telling Johnny the Boy what I knew. There was no way. I liked the girls very much, but I had family and friends that I liked more. I told him everything. He asked about his money.
“They own a hotel,” I said. “They own a hair salon. I don’t know anything beyond that.”
Johnny’s henchman grinned.
“They’ll tell us before we’re done with them,” he said.
I didn’t like the implication, but what could I do?
Johnny the Boy gave me fifty grand in an envelope. That in itself made me nervous. Johnny wasn’t the kind to give away fifty-K unless he intended to take it back. He then said he would pay me another ten large to go back to Alma and watch the girls until he arrived. It wasn’t a request and I didn’t take it as such. I drove back that night, settling into a room third floor front. The stretch of the Great River Road that passed through Alma was designated a National Scenic Byway, although there wasn’t much to see from my window. Just the river, railroad tracks, a boat ramp, Lock and Dam Number Four and directly across from the hotel, the neon lights of Karla’s Kut & Kurl. But that’s where I spent most of my time, watching, waiting.
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