Hard Cash (9 page)

Cora said, “George,” the way a razor slices across a wrist.

“Baby,” he said, “I’m just not up to it. And I’m not going to let myself ruin the night for you by going along and complaining constantly. You go on with the Harrisons. I insist. You’ll have a fine time without me. I’ll just be a party-pooper tonight, and you know it.”

“Well,” Cora said, softening slightly, but still with an edge, “I’m not
about
to stay home. I’m not going to miss this play. It’s supposed to be one of Neil Simon’s best.”

Ray Harrison said, “I just don’t understand why we should have to drive all the way to Iowa City for a little culture.” He obviously would have liked to stay home himself, but was being bullied into it by his publicly silent but apparently privately vocal wife. He made a plea to Rigley. “This restaurant we’re going to try ought to be worth the trip, George. The Pier. Ever tried it before?”

“Uh, no,” Rigley stuttered. “Never have.”

“Say,” Ray said, “you do look sorta sick at that.”

And then Cora finally gave in, as there wasn’t that much time to waste arguing, with an eight o’clock curtain to make. And, too, she’d buckled under the element of surprise, as she always did when they argued. They fought so seldom that when Rigley
did
stand up for his rights, he almost invariably won just on the sheer novelty of it. He’d been counting on that.

He was alone in the house now, with the aftermath of the cocktail party: the discarded glasses and napkins and half-eaten sandwiches and the general disgusting mess well-to-do people leave behind them after such affairs. He wandered aimlessly through the rambling house, sipping his Manhattan, thinking about his wife, his life, his situation. He ended up in Cora’s bedroom. Their bedroom, before he started sleeping across the hall. Blue wallpaper with open-beam wooden ceiling. Cream-color satiny spread on the queen-size bed. Nightstand by the bed. Their wedding picture was on it He went to the nightstand and opened its single drawer. Amidst the jewelry boxes was the gun. The .32.

He didn’t touch it He just looked at it, pearl-handled silver .32 automatic there with the jewelry in the drawer, and thought about his wife.

And suddenly he was sick.

Sick with fear and self-hatred and God knows what other wretched emotions, and the emotional sickness brought with it physical sickness as well, and he rushed to his wife’s private bath and heaved into the stool, heaved out all the cocktail-party booze and chip-dip and crust-trimmed sandwiches, heaved till there was nothing left to heave and then heaved some more.

When he was finished, he went across the hall and got out of the suit and took a shower and got into some comfortable, casual clothes. It was Saturday night. He had a meeting to go to.

Bank business, of a sort.

11

NOLAN RODE
. Jon drove. It was Jon’s
car, the Chevy II. Thursday night they’d taken the Buick, Nolan’s car or, rather, the car Nolan had been left to use by his business partner, Wagner, who was currently enjoying the Florida warmth while Nolan and Jon froze their asses off in Iowa. Nolan felt it unwise to have one certain car seen several times in the area of the Rigley cottage within these few days, even though the cottage was pretty well isolated and there wasn’t really much chance of anybody seeing either car. When he explained all that to Jon, the boy said, rather skeptically, “Well, I guess it doesn’t hurt being careful.”

And Nolan said, “It’s not that being careful doesn’t hurt, kid. It’s that being sloppy can kill you.” Jon hadn’t seemed so skeptical after that.

Is that the turn up there?” Jon asked

“Is it?” Nolan said.

It was, but he wasn’t about to tell Jon. He’d spent all day with Jon, driving the gravel and blacktop back roads of the area, familiarizing himself and the kid as well with all the possible routes between the cottage and Iowa City and the cottage and Port City. And he had it all down, himself. But Jon would be doing the driving, so it was Jon who had to know where he was.

“It’s the turn,” Jon said. “I recognize that farmhouse over there.”

“Well, then. Turn.”

Jon turned. He said, “I’m only having trouble because it’s dark. It won’t be dark the day of the heist, you know.”

“If you can find your way around these roads in the dark,” Nolan said, “daytime won’t be any problem.”

Jon thought about that, seemed to get the point, yawned and said, “Anyway, they keep this blacktop nice and clear. Not like some of those others we were on today.”

It hadn’t snowed since Thursday, but it had stayed cold, and the ground was snow-covered.

“Some rich bastard farmer owns most of this,” Nolan said, gesturing to the side of the road that was cornfield; trees lining
the river were on the other side. “County keeps the roads around here clear for him and a couple others like him.”

“Yeah, well the Iowa City streets are still packed with ice and snow.”

“Maybe if you bought a couple hundred acres of farmland in downtown Iowa City, that’d change. Hey, slow down.”

Jon did, but said, “What for? Rigley’s cottage isn’t for a half-mile or so. And anyway, I’m only doing forty-five in the first place.”

“Stop a second. I want to get a look at that cottage there. Rigley’s closest neighbor. See anything?”

It was a small, paint-peeling clapboard cottage, crowded by trees, close to the river, on stilts—nothing lavish, nothing at all like Rigley’s. No cars were around. No lights on inside.

“Nothing,” Jon said.

“Rigley says the people who own it don’t use it much. Trying to sell it. He says they don’t use it at all this time of year.”

“Looks like he’s right”

“Looks like.”

They drove on.

The little bluff Rigley’s cottage sat on was the only clear spot along a good three-quarters of a mile of thickly clustered trees—long, tall, skinny things growing close to and even in the water like weeds gotten out of hand. Ugly damn trees. Especially in their wintertime gray and skeletal state, though Nolan figured they probably weren’t any beauties even in the green of summer. The close-to-a-mile stretch of land Rigley’s cottage was in the midst of was damn near swamplike, and accounted for the isolation of the cottage in an area otherwise heavily populated with cottages and cabins. The bluff, an island clearing in the sea of tree-littered and marshy land, provided safety from flooding, which made possible the houselike luxury of the cottage. Isolated as it was, it seemed acceptable to Nolan as a meeting place; even suitable, perhaps, as a place to gather after the heist to split up the take.

A gravel drive cut through overhanging trees to the cottage, which wasn’t visible from the blacktop, and as he pulled onto the drive, Jon said, “You think these hunting jackets are really necessary?”

They were wearing the hunting jackets Jon had gone to Cedar Rapids to pick up.

“Yes,” Nolan said. He had already explained that as hunters they wouldn’t raise undue suspicion in the wooded river area.

“So who’s going to see us with all these trees and everything?”

“People in cottages across the river, maybe. Anybody else who happens to be driving along that blacktop back there.”

“But it’s dark out. It’s the darkest damn night I ever saw, Nolan. The river’s right over there, and I can’t even see it.”

Nolan was getting a little bored with Jon’s questions and complaints and said, very deliberately, “It won’t be dark the day of the heist, you know.”

“Oh. Yeah. So we’ll be wearing the jackets then, too.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know that”

“Now you do.”

“That doesn’t explain the Santa Claus suits.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Jon sighed and said nothing. He pulled the Chevy II in beside Rigley’s Eldorado and parked it. They got out. The cottage was dark.

“Listen, kid, I want you to do something for me in there.”

“Sure. What?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass? What do you mean?”

“I mean don’t be a smart-ass in there. Be nice to them.”

“Nice to them! After all that shithead and his bitch did to us, you say be . . .”

“Nice to them. I’m going to be nice to them. I’m not going to like it, but I’m going to do it. So are you.”

“Why?”

“Think about it. If you can’t figure it out, I’ll tell you later. Now let’s go in.”

He went up four wooden steps and knocked.

The girl, Julie, answered right away. She looked good. Pink fuzzy sweater caressing her abundant boobs, pink plaid slacks hugging the accommodatingly wide hips. She was one fine piece of ass, Nolan had to admit, even if she was kind of heavily made-up, especially around those huge brown eyes of hers, as if they needed any emphasizing.

She didn’t ask them in; she just held open the door and stepped aside. A cold, businesslike bitch, her attitude contrasting with the almost blatant sexual come-on of her makeup and wardrobe. All of which, she seemed to be making clear, was exclusively for Rigley. Nobody else was to get any ideas.

Which normally would have been fine with Nolan. He didn’t believe in getting sexually involved with somebody else’s woman, at least not on a heist, he didn’t. But he didn’t like the bitch’s icy attitude. He wanted to break through that. He wanted to build both her and Rigley’s confidence in him.

And that wouldn’t be any simple task. As he stepped inside, Nolan could feel waves of uneasiness shimmering in the room like heat over asphalt. He got out of his hunting jacket. Jon was doing the same. The girl made no move to hang them up. No hostess-playing for her. Nolan handed his coat to Jon to hang up.

The fire was going. The animated outdoor-scene beer sign was also going. There were no other lights on in the room. All the shutters were shut, as if the overcast, black night out there was high noon or something. Rigley was behind the bar, mixing up a pitcher of Manhattans. He was casually attired, for Rigley anyway: yellow and gray pattern turtleneck sweater and (Nolan saw as Rigley came around the bar to greet them) gray slacks that looked as if they’d never been worn before—in fact, they hardly looked as if they were being worn now.

Pitcher of Manhattans in one hand, Rigley extended the other, giving Nolan a smile as white and perfect as it was insincere. Rigley’s executive cool was even phonier tonight than usual: the tiny ice cubes inside the pitcher were clinking around, keeping time with the banker’s trembling hand, and yes, the tic at the edge of his right eye was going again. Nolan had the urge to take the man by the shoulders and shake him and say, “Settle down, damn it!” But it passed.

Rigley lifted the pitcher as if making a toast, and said, “Can I pour you one, Logan?”

“That’d be fine,” Nolan said. “Jon’ll have one too.”

“I don’t think I want . . .” Jon began, then caught Nolan’s look and said, “That’d be . . . nice. Thank you.”

The girl was looking at Jon’s T-shirt, which had some underground comic character on it (a guy with a pointed head and five o’clock shadow in a clown suit, labeled “Zippy the Pinhead”) and she seemed almost on the verge of a smile. And suddenly she was speaking. Saying to Jon, “I like it. Your shirt. It’s really cute.”

“Yeah, well, thanks,” Jon said.

“I wouldn’t mind having one myself.”

“Well,” Jon said, looking at her breasts with a cheerfully awestruck expression, “I’m not sure if they come in your size.”

And the girl smiled. Even showed some teeth. She was proud of those big boobs of hers, and Jon had said just the thing to win her over. A more obvious off-color sort of remark might have soured her, especially had it come from Nolan; but Jon’s boyish, almost naive manner put it over perfectly. Nolan nodded his approval at the lad, who then proceeded to nearly undo the good he’d just done by blurting, “Couldn’t somebody turn on some lights? I’m going fuckin’ blind in here.”

Rigley looked puzzled for half a second, then embarrassed, as evidently he was the one who’d thought dimming the lights would provide the appropriate atmosphere for crime and conspiracy.

Nolan looked at Jon and Jon looked away, and Nolan said to the girl, “Maybe if you could turn on that light behind the bar, there,” and the girl did.

The awkward moment passed, and Rigley went back to what he was doing, which was distributing Manhattans to each of the four seats at the table.

Nolan told everybody to have a seat.

He waited for everybody to get settled and was about to begin when Rigley got up quickly, saying, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and brought back a manila folder, identical to the one he’d shown Nolan Thursday night. The one chock-full of blackmail material. And there was almost another awkward moment, as Nolan felt himself getting mad all over again.

This time, thankfully, the folder contained material of a more agreeable nature: the photographs of the interior and exterior of the bank that Nolan had requested of Rigley, as well as a listing of employees and a timetable of their work activities, plus a floor plan prepared for the occasion by Rigley, which indicated where each person worked and where each alarm button was located, and a wealth of other pertinent information. Rigley had done a good job, and Nolan told him so.

“And I have to admit,” Nolan continued, “your basic plan for the robbery is a good one. Some refinements would be necessary, of course, and I’d need to go over these photographs and plans and such you brought me first, but otherwise I see no reason why your scenario wouldn’t be followed very close. Almost to the letter.”

All of that was true—it was a good plan—but the point of all the compliments was to put Rigley at ease. And it did. Rigley’s tic, his overall nervousness, seemed to have disappeared. He was smiling, sipping his Manhattan.

“However,” Nolan said, “I’m afraid all of your work maybe was for nothing.”

“What do you mean?” Rigley said, brows knitted.

The girl was silent, but her expression asked the same question.