Money Trouble Page 3

  “Two.”

  “Omaha police don’t ride tandem. That means one of them called for a backup. Why? Why did they stop Gregg in the first place?”

  “Just like it said in the newspaper. There had been a holdup a couple days earlier and Gregg’s car sort of matched a description the police had. Of the getaway car.”

  The girl returned with drinks. I couldn’t tell you what round we were up to, but I was about ready to go down for the count.

  Carolyn, for her part, showed no sign of flagging. She took a healthy slug of her new drink and said, “You want to know what he was holding?” I waited politely. “A wallet. One of those big zipper wallet things? Gregg had it on the seat next to him. He always took it out of his back pocket when he drove.” She made some more of her drink go away. “He went back into the car for his driver’s license, for chrissake, not a gun. Gregg never even owned a gun.”

  She seemed awfully positive for a woman who couldn’t say for certain whether or not her husband had spent his summer vacation knocking over banks and sleeping with other women. But I didn’t pursue it. For one thing, she was talking again, and it’s rude to interrupt.

  “He didn’t have the money on him.” She demolished another cigarette in the Olympia ashtray. “Not the seventy-eight thousand, I mean. And he didn’t have it in the car. They didn’t find any in the house, or the backyard, or the safe-deposit box, or my desk at work, or my sister’s house. They didn’t find anything, no money, nothing to show that there had been any money.”

  “Except that one fifty-dollar bill he was carrying when he died.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “No. And it’s not likely Gregg would have left a deposit receipt lying around,” I said. “Do the cops have anything else to connect him to the robberies, anything concrete? The gun the holdup man used? The ski mask? Identifiable clothing?”

  She was shaking her head. “None of that stuff. And the guy just wore ordinary clothes, you know? Shirt and slacks. Only thing unusual was, he wore long-sleeved shirts, with the sleeves down and buttoned. In this weather! And gloves. Those cloth work gloves you can buy anyplace.”

  “Huh. Did Gregg have any tattoos?”

  “No. Why?”

  “The sleeves and the gloves might’ve been hiding tattoos, or other identifying marks, on the guy’s arms or hands. Any scars or anything?”

  “Gregg? No. Yes. A scar, a kind of puckered pit, on his right—no, left thigh. A kid stabbed him with a scissors when he was about eight years old—”

  “Not too useful,” I said. “Unless the gunman wore cutoffs. I assume they didn’t find the gloves or any clothing that could be positively linked to the robberies. Okay. Then what sort of reasons do the cops have for pestering you?”

  She was still playing with her glass, now making interlocking moisture rings on the table. The jukebox was silent, and the volume on the TV was up. The network was pumping out reruns of old television series and trying to get us to believe they were the late movie.

  “That’s easy,” she said. “Desperation. They don’t have anything else to go on. They keep the heat on me, that takes the heat off them.”

  “Uh-huh. I haven’t heard about any holdups since Gregg died.”

  Her eyes came up and met mine. “Got killed. There haven’t been any. The police, and a lot of other people, have been sure to let me know that. But it doesn’t automatically make Gregg guilty, does it? I mean, what if the real crook decided he was pushing his luck staying around here, and moved on? Or what if he figures that everyone thinking Gregg robbed those banks puts him in the clear as long as he lays off? Seventy-eight thousand dollars is a lot of money, Ivan. I could get by for a long time on seventy-eight thousand.”

  “You and me both.” I drank some beer. The beer, and the ones that had gone before it, were beginning to gang up on the back of my tongue. I figured I’d better start tapering off. “Yes, it could all be the way you say. Or it could be that Gregg was guilty, so naturally the holdups stopped when he got stopped.”

  “Then where’s the money?”

  I shrugged. “You yourself said you were at work all day, sometimes into the evening, and Gregg was out a lot. Plenty of time to knock off the banks and secrete the loot—plus the gun and the clothes he wore in the holdups—someplace nobody knows about. Not even you.”

  “Yeah. I thought of that …”

  “What about accomplices? A couple of the tellers thought the gunman had someone—or ones—waiting for him outside. The cops have any thoughts along those lines?”

  Carolyn dragged her glass across the table, smearing the intertwined rings she had so carefully made. “They questioned some of Gregg’s friends. The guys who used to work for him. The guys he’s been hanging around with since he’s been out of work …”

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing that’s convinced them to take the pressure off of me.”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled it. The air in the bar was stale, stuffy. Cigarette smoke had dehydrated me, my throat, my eyes, even my skin.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  When the sun left, it didn’t bother taking the heat with it. Heat oozed up from the streets and the sidewalks and hung in the midnight air. Sweat popped out on my face and under my arms and on my back as soon as we left the bar. Carolyn had parked in a lot a few blocks over. I walked with her. Cars, pedestrians, hookers, and kids on skateboards or squat, ugly BMX bikes all danced an elaborate minuet in the streets. Residents sat on vinyl-upholstered kitchen chairs on their front stoops, fanning themselves with magazines. An old guy with a face like the face on an iodine bottle sat on the sidewalk across the street, head back, mouth open, eyes closed. He wore a shiny suit with wide lapels, no shirt, no socks, no laces in what was left of his shoes. One hand was wrapped limply around a paper bag from which protruded the neck of a long green bottle.

  “Hot town,” I said. “Summer in the city.”

  “I liked that song,” Carolyn said.

  “They wrote a song like that?” I said. She laughed, but the catalyst was liquor and not my inimitable wit.

  We reached her car without incident. She fumbled with her purse, fumbled further for her keys, found them, and unlocked the car door.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Are you going to take my case?”

  “ ‘Case,’ is it? You watch too much TV. Listen, Carolyn, you want to waste money, waste it on a lawyer. If half of what you tell me is true, the cops don’t have anything on Gregg and they certainly don’t have anything on you. That makes their actions harassment. Get a lawyer and get the lawyer to get you an injunction. The cops stop bothering you, you get your head on straight again and life goes on. You said it yourself: What’s the difference now if Gregg did it or not? You just want to be left alone.”

  Carolyn smiled dreamily and patted the side of my face. “You’re cute,” she said. “I work in a law office, and know what? The place is lousy with lawyers. They got me the big fat papers, but so what? All’s it means is that the cops have to be more … What’s the word I want …”

  “Discreet? Furtive? Circumspect …”

  “Sneakier.”

  “That was my next guess.”

  “The cops just have to be more sneakier, that’s all. If I think they’re hassling me, I have to take them to court and prove it.” She turned down the corners of her mouth. “Swell.”

  I swallowed some night air. It was moist, unrefreshing—not much better than the recycled, reconstituted, “conditioned” junk I’d been torturing my lungs with for the past three hours.

  “What the hell,” I said, getting rid of the air. “The week’s already a write-off. Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll poke around a little, just for a day or two. Ask some questions, talk to some friends of mine downtown—that’s detective jargon—see what I can see. Maybe I can find something out. Maybe I can at least convince some cops I know that they’re
barking down the wrong trail.”

  “Thanks, Ivan. That’s all I’m asking for.”

  Somehow she was in my arms.

  The last time I had held her, the night had been much like this. Hot. Humid. Electric. It was the summer between our freshman and sophomore years in college. It had been a bad summer, uncomfortable, and I don’t mean just the weather. Whatever we had had, love or infatuation or plain old sexual attraction, somehow it had derailed while we were apart during the school term. That is, it had derailed for Carolyn. Not me. I felt the same and Carolyn felt bad and I felt betrayed, and neither one of us had the maturity or the experience to understand and explain our feelings.

  We had gone out on what I think I knew would be our last date. We saw a movie, we drove around, we parked. We talked about everything except the thing that was on our minds. We made love—funny expression for it—on the backseat of my uncle’s ’66 Catalina. Then I took her home and I held her, on the front steps of her folks’ house on Center Street, under the pale yellow light they always left on when she was out.

  “Good night,” she said when it was time to say good night.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  “Good night,” she said when it was time to say good night.

  I took my arms from around her, she turned toward the car and dropped her keys.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said.

  We got down on all fours and hunted for the keys. I found a piece of broken glass that glinted in the feeble light just the way you’d hope a set of keys would glint. In fact, the keys soaked up light like a black hole, and I found them only by brailling the filthy asphalt.

  I stood. When Carolyn held out her hand for the keys, I closed my fist around them. “How ’bout I drive,” I said.

  “Sexist pig,” she said mildly.

  “I resent being called a pig,” I said. “As for ‘sexist,’ well, you can open your own damn door.”

  I slid in behind the wheel and reached across to pop the lock on the passenger’s side.

  The house was a big old two-story frame number on Seventh near Hickory, a neighborhood that used to be called Little Italy. The fact is, it still was called Little Italy, but the term had grown increasingly less accurate as the blocks’ ethnic complexion had changed. Call it what you will, it was a good, working-class neighborhood, and if the houses and the yards and the kids who played in the yards were a little shabby around the edges, it was because of a shortage of money, not concern.

  I settled into the living room, a big square space at the front of the house, while Carolyn disappeared elsewhere. The place was decorated tastefully though not expensively. A handcrafted carpet left just a foot or so of hardwood floor exposed on all four sides. Pale, faintly pin-striped wallpaper gave the room a soft, inviting cast. The dark, wide woodwork either had been spared the painting frenzy that ruined a lot of doors and moldings in the forties and fifties, or someone had done a fine job of refinishing.

  It was a good room. It was a lot like Carolyn—neat, attractive, without flash or gaudiness or pretense. I leaned back into the sofa, crossed my ankles on a three-legged footstool, and closed my burning eyes.

  Eventually, Carolyn returned and sat beside me. “Water’s on for coffee,” she said. She had changed from the summer dress she’d worn at the bar and now wore blue terry-cloth shorts and a red Cornhuskers T-shirt.

  We sat together on the sofa, the lights low, our eyes closed, and talked. Talk, talk, talk. Twenty years’ worth. A lot of it was the same talk we’d had in the bar. A lot of it was about things—lives—refusing to turn out according to plan. A lot of it was about how things—lives—go wrong. Carolyn’s life, my life, Gregg’s life. The business went bad, the marriage went bad, the life—lives—went bad. He started drinking heavily, he started hanging around with unsavory companions, he stopped being Carolyn’s husband and went back to being the weasel, the loser he’d been in school all those years ago.

  On toward one, one-thirty, Carolyn began to come on to me. Just a little. I played back. Just a little. The night was sultry, and we’d both had a few drinks, or a few too many, and I’m human, or pretty close ever since I left Krypton. Her mouth was warm and inviting. So was the rest of her. The T-shirt came off easily and I caressed her. She had my shirt half-unbuttoned and was nipping gently at my chest, my belly …

  And about the time things started to look interesting, her breathing became deep and regular, and I realized she’d dozed off.

  This sort of thing never happens to Mike Hammer.

  I held her for a while, then slowly disentangled from her and went in search of the coffee she had promised. It was that or a cold shower.

  The coffee was instant, which is to say it was lousy. How can the FTC let these guys get away with saying “Caffeino Instant tastes as good as fresh ground”? I’ve never had a cup of instant coffee that tasted as good as fresh ground, as in dirt, let alone fresh-ground coffee.

  I downed two cups. They perked me right up, not that I needed much perking.

  Figuring it gauche to leave one’s hostess en dishabille on her living-room sofa, I hoisted her up and carted her to the front stairs. She mumbled and grumbled some as I hauled her into what appeared to be the master bedroom, but she neither protested nor assisted.

  I eased her onto the bed, onto a light-blue pin-dotted spread. There was a small lamp on the bedside table, a ceramic lamp with a square blue shade. I turned it on, and she turned away from the light, murmuring in her sleep.

  I took a long minute to study her. I took a long minute to remember other hot, still nights a long, long time ago.

  On a mirrored dresser were some framed photographs. Carolyn’s parents, now deceased. In the picture, they were much older than I remembered them. Some people I didn’t recognize, perhaps Gregg Longo’s people. A wedding photo, Carolyn and Gregg when everything was bright and shiny.

  I studied Longo’s face. It was familiar yet unfamiliar. I recognized him because I knew who he was, but if you’d stuck the picture in my face cold, I’d’ve never got it. Twenty years ago Gregg Longo had been a skinny greaser with bad skin. Fifteen years later—the wedding photo was five years old—he was slightly built, standing no taller than Carolyn, who may have been wearing high heels. But his dark hair was Vitalis-less, even if he did wear it in Lord Fauntleroy bangs, and his skin had cleared up nicely. He wore a gray tux and a pink bow tie with diamond tips, a pink silk square in the breast pocket of his coat, a pink rose at his lapel, and all I could think of was what a jerk-off he’d always been. Gregg Longo and Carolyn Greco. Married. Jesus.

  Carolyn wore a long, intricately stitched ivory gown. No hat or veil or headdress. Her hair had been darker and longer then. It contrasted sharply with the dress. All brides are beautiful, they say, but Carolyn more so than others, I thought. Somewhere inside me there was a twinge, a pang—a sudden, gnawing, vacant feeling.

  I put down the photograph and turned toward the bed. Carolyn hadn’t moved.

  I finished undressing her. Then I lay down beside her.

  Some time later, I got up, turned out all the lights, and let myself out of the house.

  I got up the next morning, which was more of an accomplishment than those puny words indicate. I threw together a pot of coffee and stood under a hot shower for a few weeks and was sitting in my car slurping from a big thermal mug when Loverboy left his house at seven-thirty. I followed him downtown—by now I knew his route better than he did—made sure he got his little Toyota snugly parked, and watched from a no-parking zone as he entered the Olympic Club at eight-oh-three.

  I wrote down every fascinating detail in my Official Detective Z-9 Notebook, finished my coffee, and pushed the car out into the driving lane.

  You see the holes here as well as I do. I follow Jonathon Desotel to work, I follow him at noon, I follow him home and keep an eye on him for a few hours. I assume that when he goes to work he goes to work and stays there. What’s to say he doesn’t enter via the front door at eight-oh-
three, exit via the back door at eight-oh-four, and slip off to do exactly what we hoped he was doing? What’s to say he doesn’t take a long coffee break mid-afternoon? What’s to say he doesn’t sneak out for a couple of hours after I leave in the evening, always returning home where I pick him up the next morning? Nothing. Except perhaps the law of probability. Desotel had no reason, no concrete reason, to suspect he was being watched. He hadn’t made me; I was certain of that. Therefore there was no cause to suspect he’d take extraordinary measures in conducting his, er, affairs. If Loverboy was paranoid enough to believe without evidence that his every move was being watched, then he probably was paranoid enough to tread the straight and narrow, at least for the duration.

  It was a gamble, but Kennerly and I thought it a reasonably safe one.

  Besides, ’round-the-clock surveillance is an expensive undertaking, requiring at least three and preferably five pairs of eyes if you’re going to make anything more than a half-assed job of it. Kennerly’s client never could have afforded it. Random surveillance isn’t as thorough, but it’s loads cheaper. Especially at my rates.

  There’s always a dollar sign in front of the bottom line, isn’t there?

  I cruised around and down the block and crammed my heap in front of a meter across from OPD headquarters, which is not one of the city’s sexier buildings. Somewhere in the back of my head was the invaluable though never-verified knowledge that Lovely Rita, Meter Maid, didn’t hit the pavement until nine, so I ignored the parking meter’s gaping maw and jaywalked over to the police station.

  I went in and got a copy of the report on the shooting of Gregg Longo.

  On TV the good guys have to resort to all sorts of conniving for a peek at police reports. In real life the reports are almost always available to the public, or any member of it who wants to pay the outrageous photocopying fee. If you’re insomniac, I heartily recommend an armload.

  Usually the details of a police shoot are far less cut-and-dried than survivors prefer to believe. The Longo shoot was no exception. Gregg Longo’s Monte Carlo fit a superficial description given by a bank employee. An OPD uniform on routine patrol spotted it. He radioed for backup—the suspect was thought to be armed—and, when it arrived, signaled Longo to pull over.