Money Trouble Read online

  Also by William J. Reynolds

  The Nebraska Quotient

  Moving Targets

  Money Trouble

  Things Invisible

  The Naked Eye

  Drive-By

  MONEY TROUBLE

  WILLIAM J. REYNOLDS

  Copyright © 1988 by William J. Reynolds

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by

  Brash Books

  PO Box 8212

  Calabasas, CA 91372

  www.brash-books.com

  As always, for Peg.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a summer of thunderstorms and bank robberies. The thunderstorms were spectacular affairs—jagged bolts of lightning that rent the dusty, yellow-gray Midwestern skies. The holdups were unspectacular—a lone gunman who dropped into various Omaha suburban banks and strolled out with the “undisclosed sum” you hear so much about in these cases.

  The police had little to work with. Eyewitness descriptions were, as usual, fuzzy. The banks’ surveillance-camera pictures were, as always, even fuzzier. The witnesses at least agreed that the robber was a slender white man in a dark-blue or black ski mask. That was good to know: From the pictures you couldn’t even tell if the robber was human.

  They couldn’t agree about whether he drove off in a blue sedan, a black coupe, or a one-horse open sleigh. They couldn’t agree about whether he had accomplices waiting in a getaway car—they couldn’t agree about make or model, either—or whether he worked alone. They couldn’t agree about whether he’d been gruff, polite, or as silent as a Trappist.

  They could agree, and did, that the thief had carried a big black handgun. Probably a .38 or a .45, based on the sketchy descriptions. And that was at the heart of the identification problem. When you’re staring down what they used to call the business end of a gun, other details get trivial real fast.

  Whoever he was, he was making a life of crime look awfully attractive. I knew of at least one underemployed free-lance writer and sometimes private investigator who wasted a lot of hours that summer daydreaming about ill-gotten gain.

  That would be me.

  It seemed easy enough. No heavy lifting. No paperwork. No income tax. And I already owned a gun.

  I owned the gun—a couple of them, in fact—because I still owned the papers that said the state of Nebraska didn’t mind too much if I conducted investigations, civil and criminal, within its boundaries. Of course, there were any number of individuals who felt differently. I was one of them. I had been doing investigation work in one form or another all my life. First as a reporter, then as a soldier, then as a rent-a-cop in someone else’s agency, then as co-owner of my own shop, then free lance. Investigation, all of it. Sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. Sticking it into someone’s life—someone who seldom wanted it stuck there—because someone else wanted me to stick it there, and that someone else was signing the checks.

  Is this any way for a good Midwestern boy to make a living?

  I didn’t think so either, and I had the bank balance to prove it. Somewhere along the line I turned back to the typewriter—where I started, almost twenty years ago—supplementing my meager income with short articles for magazines whose names would mean nothing to you. Somewhere further along the line I decided that writing, though no more financially stable than sleuthing, was at least a pleasanter pastime. When I could steal the time, I worked on a novel—a detective novel, of course. I would become the Hammett of the Heartland, the Chandler of the Corn Belt, the Macdonald of the Midwest—you get the gist. My goal became to develop my fledgling literary career to the point that it could support me and simultaneously to phase out the detecting.

  Looks good on paper, I know, but the reality was far less smooth than the plan might lead you to think. Since I hadn’t had the guts to set fire to my P.I. permit, “the old job” hung constantly in the background. I couldn’t forget that I had something to “fall back on,” and I did, often. When the checking account was terminal, when the writing wasn’t going the way I would have liked, when I was tired or insecure or just plain bored, I went back to the old job, for all the wrong reasons. And I hated myself a little more each time.

  It was a good thing I was too poverty-stricken to afford slugs for those guns of mine.

  I was in the middle of another bout of private-detectivitis. Ironically, it followed the publication of my novel. After The Book had been accepted by a notably devil-may-care publisher, I had plunged into The Next Book with fervor, or perhaps it was fever, the likes of which I’d never seen, much less experienced. I backslid a couple of times, taking on a case or two to keep the landlord happy, but, by and large, it looked like the sun had gone down on my detective days, and not a minute too soon for me.

  Then disaster struck.

  The Book was published.

  And the words stopped.

  Now I languished in some kind of postpartum depression—stupor, call it—and every day the dust grew thicker on my old Smith Corona. Meanwhile, my on-again, off-again marriage was off again, with my wife, Jennifer, off again, to Aruba or wherever else was “in” that season. My twelve-year-old Impala had spent most of the summer in the hospital. One of the magazines I regularly free-lanced for had just gone the way of the Titanic, meaning a severe shrinkage of my already pint-sized income. And I was back on the investigations treadmill, knocking out a couple of bread-and-butter assignments, which, though quickly finished, had kept me away from my typewriter, which made me depressed, which …

  Well, you can see why, at the midpoint of the summer and my doldrums, knocking over a bank or two seemed almost a good idea. Break the monotony and pick up a few quick bucks, too. What could be better?

  Then the stickup artist went and got himself killed by the cops, spoiling the fantasy but no doubt saving me from perdition.

  I read all about it in the mighty Omaha World-Herald. The robber—they were still calling him “the suspect,” but in such a way as to indicate that they thought the chances of him having been innocent were about as good as your chances of pogo-sticking to the moon—had been shot to death by Omaha police on a stretch of road south of the old stockyards. His name was Gregg Longo, he was thirty-nine, he was white, he was unemployed, he was married, and he had lived in Omaha all his life.

  Gregg Longo. The name and uncommon spelling prodded a long-dormant synapse somewhere deep in my memory, but nothing bobbed to the surface. I’d lived in the Big O nearly all my life, too, and I’d met a lot of people and snooped around in the lives of a lot more people. No telling where I’d come across Gregg Longo, the name or the man.

  Besides, I had to play Paul Drake.

  As played by William Hopper, Perry Mason’s pal, Paul Drake was probably a
s close as television has ever come to an accurate portrayal of a private investigator. Drake did what most private detectives do most of the time, namely, legwork for someone who’s too busy to do it himself. Like Drake, most P.I.s derive ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of their work from lawyers trying to make or break cases. Most of the remainder comes from insurance companies, but the big ones, the ones most inclined to do any investigatory work at all, have their own staff investigators.

  Playing Mason to my Drake was Mike Kennerly, who is a good deal smaller and quieter than Raymond Burr. Kennerly has thrown me any number of nourishing bones over the years. Years, hell: that month alone. This particular bone had to do with a divorce case that he was obliquely involved in. Kennerly’s client had had an affair with a married man. Now the man was in the process of getting de-married, and the wife in turn was suing Kennerly’s client for alienation of affection. Alienation of affection is a Middle Ages kind of claim. Basically, you say, Here sat my husband, fat, dumb, and happy, until this witch came and put a spell on him—“wickedly, maliciously, and intentionally”—and wrecked our storybook marriage, boo-hoo.

  Well, of course, the best and fastest way for Kennerly’s client to beat the idiotic rap would have been for Loverboy, the soon-to-be ex-husband, to climb up on the stand and testify that there was no affection to be alienated. That would be the gentlemanly, the sportsmanlike way to handle the matter. Unfortunately, Loverboy was neither a sportsman nor a gentleman. He dropped his wicked, malicious, etc., girlfriend like a hot rock the moment the lawsuits started flying, no doubt on the advice of his divorce lawyer.

  All was not black, however. Kennerly’s client was certain that she had not been Loverboy’s first extracurricular activity—for the very good reason that Loverboy had told her as much—and Kennerly was working to induce one or two of her predecessors to testify. That would weaken the case considerably. The case would collapse under its own weight if the soon-to-be ex-husband had already taken up with a new little cookie.

  Enter our hero.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, my job was to keep an eye on Loverboy. And a numbingly boring job it was, too. Most P.I. work is. I’d spent the past week or so keeping Loverboy on a leash. Loverboy, whose given name was Jonathon Desotel, was the restaurant-and-bar manager of the Omaha Olympic Club, one of those places where the well-to-do get together to congratulate themselves for being well-to-do enough to have their own club where they don’t have to associate with the not-so-well-to-do. The routine I’d been running went like this: Pick up Desotel at the Olympic at around noon, follow him to lunch, follow him back downtown, then drop by again at about five to escort him home, where I’d keep an eye on him for two or three hours. Next a.m., tail him downtown and begin the routine again.

  So far Desotel hadn’t worked in any nooners, and the only moonlight action he was getting was with HBO.

  I’d wasted the better part of another evening sitting in my car in the parking lot of Loverboy’s apartment complex, alternately keeping an eye on the guy’s balcony and a paperback edition of The Big Sleep, which I was pretending to read. You can tell what kind of a funk I was in by the fact that even Chandler couldn’t grab my attention.

  The mood stayed with me all the way back to Decatur Street, where I checked the mail to see who all I owed money to and listened to the messages on the machine to see which of my creditors was getting antsiest fastest.

  But there was only one message, at the end of a string of hanger-uppers—you know, the people who won’t talk to the machine but who will later complain that I’m hard to get hold of. The caller didn’t identify herself. She didn’t need to.

  The message began, “Ivan …”

  Ivan. A faint shiver gripped me when I played back the tape that sultry summer night. It had been a lot of summers since I’d heard that voice. It had been a lot of summers since anyone had called me Ivan. No one else had, before or since.

  Correction: Someone, the same someone, had called and left a message nearly a month earlier. If “message” is the word for it: “Um, Ivan? This … this is Carolyn … I—No. Never mind.”

  That was all. I had replayed the tape until the halting, disjointed words were caught firmly in memory, but they said no more to me on the second or third or tenth run-through than they had on the first.

  And, at the same time, they spoke volumes.

  Carolyn.

  A voice and a name from twenty years out of the past.

  The guys who say time travel is impossible must never have loved and lost, because at the sound of that almost-forgotten but unforgettable voice, I was instantaneously flung back in time two decades. Failed jobs, a bad marriage, an aimless, sometimes pointless life—all of it melted away, evaporated, like a snowball on a griddle. The slightly paunchy body of a middle-aged would-be writer and would-like-not-to-be private investigator may have been standing at the cluttered counter of a tiny kitchenette in a badly furnished apartment in a not-swell part of Omaha, Nebraska—but an eighteen-or nineteen-year-old kid was a billion miles away and teetering on the brink of a life that held nothing but promise.

  Promise and Carolyn.

  For a day or so after receiving the nonmessage, I tried to find her. I could have if I had pursued it diligently. But after a few strikeouts, I decided that if she had wanted to be found, she could easily have left a number on the machine. And if she didn’t want to be found … well, why, after all these years, did I want to find her?

  But now, a month later, here was the voice again. This time the voice was tempered with a kind of resolve, an almost palpable determination. There was no hemming and hawing. There was no hanging up in the middle. There was a message.

  “It’s been a long, long time, Ivan,” Carolyn said. “The question is, has it been too long or not long enough?”

  I dragged a thumbnail down the side of the squat brown bottle between my hands, shredding the label. “Ivan,” I said. “How did you ever get started calling me that?”

  She smiled. It was a soft, sad, weary kind of smile. Carolyn had changed only a little since long ago. Her dark hair was shorter, wavy now, and not quite so dark. Her lush figure was now perhaps ten or twelve pounds too lush, and a small, intriguing double chin had settled under her own wide, square jaw. The laugh lines around her mouth and eyes were deeper and didn’t quite disappear when her smile did. Other than that, for all outward appearances, she was the same Carolyn Greco, and I could have picked her out of a crowd of thousands.

  “Don’t you remember?” she said huskily. “High school. Someone said your first name sounded like something out of The Brothers Karamazov—”

  “They did make us read that, didn’t they?”

  “—and ‘Ivan’ was born. It’s better than what your parents stuck you with, and tons better than your last name. ‘Nebraska.’ For cryin’ out loud, who names himself after a state?” My grandfather, for one. When he was fifteen years old he came over from the old country—alone—determined to make it to California. He made it as far as Omaha, working on the railroad all the live-long day, and when he got here, he decided, in a bizarre and probably alcohol-fueled fit of patriotism, to name himself after his new home. Nebraska. Well, why not? People are named Ireland and England and London. Virginia, even, and Georgia. His original tag had consisted of nothing but consonants, so Nebraska is certainly no worse. And look at the bright side: What if he had ended up in South Dakota?

  But Carolyn knew the story as well as I did. I didn’t go into it. Instead, I matched her light, easy tone and said, “I don’t know. Shall we ask Joe Montana? Or maybe Bob Montana?”

  She laughed. “Who’s Bob Montana?”

  “Used to draw the ‘Archie’ comic strip. I think he’s dead by now, so we’d better stick with Joe.”

  “I’ll ask him next time I see him.” She smiled at me. “Don’t you miss high school?”

  I downed some beer. “Not a lot.”

  She finished her drink and signaled th
e bartender. The bar was just a bar, a neighborhood joint in the shadow of the Mutual of Omaha tower. Vat 69 on the rocks and Michelob Classic Dark was about as exotic as the menu got. There was the ubiquitous color TV over the bar, and the Musivend in the corner featured a queer mix of top forty, moldy oldies and such oddities as Julius La Rosa’s “Eh, Cumpari!” I had suggested it as a meeting place because it was dark and private, underpopulated and cool, a slightly dank oasis in a still, hot town. The mercury had crept steadily upward all day, dragging with it that almost electric tension that signifies another storm brewing.

  “I do. High school was about the last time I really felt I knew what I was doing, where I was going. I feel like I’ve been blundering around ever since.”

  “You were then, too,” I said. “We all were. We were just too stupid or cocky to know it.”

  “You’re probably right.” Carolyn shook a cigarette out of a pack of Kool filters on the plastic tabletop between us. “At least you’re doing what you always said you would.”

  I peeled a match out of a book, ignited it, and held it to the tip of her cigarette. Who says chivalry is dead? “Where’d you get an idea like that?” I said.

  “You’re writing. Got one book out, another in the pipe, I call that pretty good. But you always said you were going to be a writer.”

  “I was going to be a reporter. There’s a difference.” I dropped the match into a black glass ashtray that said Olympia Beer in white on the rim. “Truth is, I’ve been both, a journalist and a writer, and I’d rather be a writer. But I’ve sure taken a roundabout way of getting there, and I ain’t there yet, not by a long shot. What about you? Last I heard, which was a long damn time ago, you were back east gearing up for law school. I didn’t even know you’d moved back to Omaha.”

  She nodded. “About, oh, six years ago. Mom was real sick. I moved back to take care of her until the end.”

  “I’m sorry. Why didn’t you call, let me know you were back?”

  A one-shoulder shrug behind a veil of blue smoke. “I thought you probably hated me.”