THIRTY-EIGHT
“Damn,” Della said one morning at the breakfast table a week after the robbery. “If I’d known you were having that much fun I would have come up there myself some night.”
“It wasn’t all that lurid, I promise you.”
“Does this mean the end of the legendary Weilback poker game?” she asked.
I shook my head and laughed indulgently. “Of course not. The city will go on a reform bender for a few months, but this business will all blow over and things will be back to normal before you know it.”
“But the town will be rid of Will Scoggins.”
“Yes, and Clifton Robillard too,” I pointed out.
“He’s completely disgraced, isn’t he, darling?” she asked. “I mean his reputation is absolutely ruined.”
“It appears that way,” I said.
She was up getting us more coffee a few minutes later when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” she said, and headed off toward the living room. She was back in a matter of seconds with Ollie Marne in tow.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” I said.
“Sit down, Ollie,” Della said. “Would you like some breakfast?”
“That’s nice of you,” he replied. “But I’ve already eaten. I might take a cup of coffee, though, if you still have some.”
“What brings you calling this early?” I asked.
“Oh, I had a little news I thought you night find interesting.”
“Really? What’s that?”
He looked at me with his hard, impassive little eyes and smiled his benign, Shmoo-like smile. “Ever heard of a couple of guys named Tobias Perkins and Charles Needam?”
I shook my head. “No. Should I have?”
“Probably not, but I sure as hell know who they are. They’re both old-time bank burglars. Master safecrackers, is what I’m talking about.”
“Ahhh … I see. And you think they did the bank job.”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Then what?” Della asked.
He burst out laughing. “This is a great story, so don’t you two hurry me.”
We both grinned. “Take your time, Ollie,” I said. “Savor it.”
“Don’t worry. I will,” he said. “Perkins has been straight ever since he got out of the pen about ten years ago. Needam? Well, nobody knows for sure about him the last few years, but apparently he’s going straight now. See, both these guys are almost sixty, and they’re ready for a little peace and quiet. But according to Perkins, about three months back a guy he knows in the outfit up there in Kansas city wanted to give them five hundred dollars each to come down here and talk to a man about a job. That’s all … Just talk. No strings attached. Perkins knew what kind of job they were talking about, but for him five hundred bucks is nothing to sneeze at. So down they came and who do you think they meet with once they are here?”
“It must have been Clifton Robillard,” I said.
“Right you are. And as you probably have also figured out that he wanted them to crack his bank—”
“But why?” Della asked. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Sure it does,” Marne said. “It was to cover up his embezzlement.”
Her mouth hung open for a few moments, then snapped shut. “I got it!” she said excitedly. “The papers said almost three hundred thousand dollars was taken in the robbery, right? But only ninety-four were found at the tourist court in Sweetwater.”
“Correct,” Marne said. “And the difference between what the books showed was stolen and the amount of money found at Sweetwater is what he embezzled from his own bank.”
“Does this happen often?” she asked.
“It’s happened a jillion times in the past, even way on back into frontier days. It’s harder to pull off these days, but occasionally some rascal like Clifton has a shot at it.”
“How did you find out about this, Ollie?” I asked.
“Hell, every cop in town knows about it. That was what Bob Crowder’s trip up to Kansas City was all about. You see, Perkins and Needam got to worrying that somebody had seen them with Robillard, and they were afraid the job would be hung on them even though they’d turned him down. So they called Crowder.”
“How about the contact up in Kansas City?” I asked.
“He’s dead now, but it was a mob hit. They’re in the clear on that too, and Clifton Robillard is finished. They’re going to testify in court, and Crowder says they’ll be fine witnesses. And why not? Hell, what have they got to gain by lying?”
THIRTY-NINE
It was to be our first Christmas together. The previous year my job had taken me to Washington right before the holidays, and I hadn’t returned to Memphis until after New Year’s. This year we wanted something special. We took the Ford and drove far out into the country hunting a tree. It took a while, but at last we found a dense, perfectly shaped cedar we could both agree on, and hauled it home in the back of the wagon. That evening I put a stack of Christmas carols on the turntable and we got mildly plastered on rum punch and had a ball decorating the tree. Later we made love on the sofa once more, and then fell asleep, our arms and legs twined together, only to waken much later when the fire had burned down and the room had grown chilly. We stumbled off to our bedroom, giggling at ourselves. The next morning Della departed for Dallas on an overnight trip to do her gift shopping, leaving me alone at the breakfast table with my morning coffee. She had no more than rolled out of the drive when I got three phone calls in rapid succession. The first was Ollie Marne inviting us to a Christmas party at his home. The second was from Manlow Rhodes with a similar invitation, this one a dance at the Cottonwood Country Club. The third was from Chicken Little. “We need to talk,” I heard his voice say across the distance.
He had business in Fort Worth the next day. I suggested that we meet at Cattleman’s Steakhouse, which had just opened that year. He objected on the grounds that it would be too crowded at noontime. We finally settled on Nana’s Café, a hole-in-the-wall joint run by Nana Puckett, a woman I’d known for years. Nana was the widow of a once-famous rodeo star named Clyde Puckett, a tiny, acerbic man who’d been the country’s top bull rider until a two-thousand-pound Brahman stomped him to death in Phoenix a decade earlier. Her café was only a block from the Stockyards Coliseum, and I’d been there many times.
Like our meeting at the Fan Tan, Little was already waiting for me when I arrived. After the waitress had taken our orders, the old man looked across the table at me with an expression that made me think of the Grim Reaper. “Lum Shamblin is dead,” he said.
“Wha—?”
He shook his head sadly. “I couldn’t do nothing to stop it.”
“Willie?” I asked.
“No. Willie didn’t have a thing to do with it. It was woman trouble. Lum had been seeing a married woman. She wasn’t but twenty-two, and her husband was about ten years older. He was also mean as hell, from what everybody says. He’d beat her up a few times, and didn’t give her much attention nowhere except in the bedroom, so she took to seeing Lum on the side. Then last Friday night her husband give her a really good shellacking, and Lum was able to talk her into leaving and going with him. The husband drove a bread truck for that big bakery there in Tulsa, which meant he left home about four every morning and was gone most of the day. They’d been careful, but he must have suspicioned something. The next Tuesday she and Lum were packing up her things about ten in the morning when he come home unexpected, and shot and killed both of them with a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
“It sounds pitiful, and I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.
“It was pitiful, and it’s left us with problems.”
“How so?”
“Lum’s momma is old and sick and I think she ought to get his cut, but Willie’s raising sand for a three-way split now that Lum is dead. He says the old lady didn’t take any of the risk and she’s not entitled to any of the money.”
“Hell, let her hav
e my share,” I said. “Then everybody will be happy.”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t work that way. That ain’t the way we started out to do it, and be damned if I’m going to stray from our appointed course. And there’s one other hitch. Willie don’t want to wait till after Christmas to get the money.”
“But that’s what we all agreed on, Little. I was going to bring it up to Tulsa right after the holidays.”
“Yeah, I know. But it seems like agreements don’t mean too much to him no more. If I’d knowed he was going to be such an aggravation I wouldn’t have brought him in on this business in the first place.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I checked him out myself, and from what I heard he’s solid.”
“Oh, he is,” Little said. “During the job itself you couldn’t want nobody better, but he’s got to where he’s a damn squirrel the rest of the time. See, my whole reason for putting the money in the well in the first place is that the heat’s always the worst the first couple of days. It’s been my policy to get rid of everything that can tie me to a job as soon as possible. Then you can go back in a week or a month or even a year if you have to, and pick it up. But he didn’t like doing that from the start.”
“It was the smart way to do it. With the bank job they could have had roadblocks all over the county, and there we would have been. They would have searched an out-of-state car for certain.”
“Yeah, and this was my last job, no doubt about it, and I wasn’t about to take chances. Hell, if it wasn’t for the principle of the thing, I’d tell him where the money is and let him go get it. I’ve got more than enough for me and Annie to live on from here on out. But I be damned if I’m going to let him strong-arm me this late in life. Besides, there’s something else about him that’s worrying me.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded. “It’s a story I heard a little while back, and I believe it, because the old boy that told me about it don’t lie. Anyhow, he said that about three years ago Willie done a little five-year-old girl.”
“You’ve got to be joking.…”
“I wish I was,” he said, shaking his head sadly.
“But why?”
“Money. Pretty big money. A bunch of bootleggers wanted to scare the hell out of a guy, a jeweler in Little Rock that was gonna testify against one of them in a murder case. He had four kids and this was supposed to show him what would happen to all of them if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.”
“Who was behind it? The Kansas City outfit?”
“Oh, hell no. The Dagos won’t mess with nobody’s family, and especially not with their kids. It was a bunch of white trash peckerwoods out of the Mississippi Delta.”
“And Willie did it for sure?”
“Yeah, he done it all right enough.”
“Then we can’t let him have all the money now,” I said. “We’d just look weak, and there’s no telling what he might come back on us with later on.”
The waitress came with our food, and we ate our meal in near silence. Finally the old man looked across the table at me with a sad expression on his face. “I hate for something like this to come up,” he said. “And I hate that I put you in this position. Fifteen or so years ago, back when I first met Willie, he was a lot different. I don’t know what happened to him, but in them days he wouldn’t have done nothing like that little girl. Like I said, he just got to where he liked killing too much.”
“Forget it,” I said. “We’ve been friends too long for you to think you have to apologize when you’ve done your best.”
“Son, I’m awful glad you feel that way.”
“Then what do you think we ought do?…” I asked.
“Well, I guess we could just tell him to go to hell,” Little said. “Then you bring it on up to Tulsa after the holidays like we planned.”
I shook my head. “No. Let’s compromise with him. There’s really no reason not to go ahead and get the money and split it up before Christmas. That’s apparently the only thing that will shut him up.”
“If you’re sure you want to do it like that. It could be dangerous. Willie don’t like you, and he may have ideas.”
“I’m aware of that, and I think we ought to be prepared,” I said.
He smiled a grim smile and nodded. “Don’t worry. We will be.”
“Good. Why don’t the two of you meet me in front of that newsstand on Roosevelt at five o’clock on the evening of the twenty-third.”
“We’ll be there,” he said. “And by the way … Tobe wanted me to tell you that the take from that job was almost three hundred thousand.”
“I know you must have wondered about the money found in Sweetwater,” I said. “I’ll give you the whole story when we come up after Christmas,” I said.
“You can if you want to. It’s none of my business, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it except that he asked me to. He also wanted you to know it was a pleasure doing business with you.”
“Tell him the pleasure was all mine.”
A short while later we stood and shook hands, and then I watched Chicken Little leave the café, a trim, erect old man in his neat gray suit and snappy fedora.
FORTY
As Little and I had agreed, they picked me up in front of the newsstand on Roosevelt Avenue at five on the evening of the twenty-third. They were in the old man’s black Ford two-door sedan with Willie at the wheel and Little in the front passenger seat. I was lost in my thoughts when Willie broke the silence. “Hey! You got a big Christmas planned?” he asked. I looked up to see his muddy eyes dancing beneath the bill of his seedy cap as he gazed into the rearview mirror.
“Not really,” I replied. “I’m not big on celebrations.”
“That’s a shame,” he said. “What are you going to do with your share of the money?”
“I don’t know. Buy some oil leases, I guess.”
“Oh, ho!! Going into business, huh? Not me. I’m gonna have fun with mine.”
“Just how does a man like you have fun, Willie?” I asked.
He’d been watching me in the mirror when suddenly the right tires began throwing up gravel as he let the car drift onto the shoulder of the road. He quickly whipped the wheel and the Ford swerved back up on the highway.
“Shut up and drive the damn car,” Little said. “You go to fooling around and you’re liable to get us all killed.”
“I just want to have a conversation here,” Willie said angrily. “You know, a little exchange of opinions.”
“We don’t need no conversation,” Little replied.
Willie was quiet until we reached the place where we turned off onto the county road. Then I heard that private little laugh of his, and it sounded like it came from an empty room. “You asked what I do for fun,” he said. “Well, I like to watch.”
“Watch what?” I asked in spite of myself.
“Whatever’s going on. I’m a big watcher.”
“You shouldn’t need much money for that,” I observed.
He gave me a throaty chuckle this time, and once again I could see his eyes darting around in the mirror. “It depends on what you wanna watch and where you go to watch it. The more classy your tastes are, the more it costs.”
“Willie, just be quiet and pay attention to the road,” Little told him. “You keep this up and you’ll have a wreck, I tell you.”
“I happen to think some good talk spices up a drive in the country,” Willie said, glaring over at the old man. “That’s all.”
“We can do without the spice right now,” Little replied.
Willie fell silent for a few seconds, then began humming some melody off-key while he patted the wheel in slow time to the music. Finally I recognized the tune as “Nearer My God to Thee,” and I felt like laughing.
“Is that your favorite hymn?” I asked.
“Yeah!” he said, his eyes reappearing in the mirror. “Ain’t it great?” He lapsed back into silence for a couple of minutes, then resumed his humming. The little F
ord sped along toward the setting sun through a bleak and frozen land. The scrub oaks in the creek bottoms were bare and lifeless and the pastures had been grazed down to the quick. We passed through a field that must have held a thousand acres of ranked cotton stubble that hadn’t gotten over a foot high before the drought hit. Off to one side of the road I caught a glimpse of a coyote shivering on the crest of a low bluff, its coarse, ratty fur ruffled by the icy wind. Ahead, the dull orange orb of the sun looked cold and depleted as if the dead earth had sucked the very life from it. Darkness would be falling soon, and with it would come the end of the day.
“You don’t talk much, big guy,” Willie said at last. “You’re as bad as Chicken Little here.”
“What’s there to talk about?” I asked.
Willie chuckled once again.
“Here’s the turnoff, Willie,” Little said. “You almost missed it fooling around. You need to keep your mind on business and look where you’re driving.”
We pulled up behind the old house just as the sun began to drop below the horizon. Willie killed the engine and we climbed from the car.
“Get the keys and open the trunk,” Little told him.
Once the trunk lid was up, Willie stepped back away from the vehicle. “Go on and get the magnet out,” Little said, exasperation beginning to creep into his voice. “Do I have to tell you everything?”
“I guess I’m thinking about other things,” Willie said as he leaned over into the yawning trunk of the Ford. He jerked and tugged at something back in its far recesses for a few moments, then straightened up. “Damn it! It’s stuck in there.”
“What?” Little asked.
“It’s too damn strong. It’s stuck to the floor of the car.”
“If it wasn’t strong it wouldn’t pull that sack and that fourteen-pound weight out of the bottom of the well,” Little explained patiently. “Can’t you understand nothing?”
“Move over and let me get it,” I told Willie. As I turned my back to him the hair on the nape of my neck tried to stand up on end. Near the rear of the compartment sat a large industrial magnet. An eyelet had been affixed to a semicircular handle that was cast into its top. A short length of heavy chain that ended in a coil of half-inch rope was fastened to the eyelet with a spring-loaded clasp. I reached in and easily jerked the magnet loose with one hand, then hauled it and the coil of rope out of the trunk.
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