Two for the Money (8 page)

Werner said, “It’s not like you were demoted or anything, Charlie.”

“Shut up!”

Nolan stabbed his cigarette out in the ashtray resting beside the lamp on the nightstand. He repeated what he’d asked before. “What do you want, Charlie?”

Charlie’s eyes slitted, and two small, penetrating coals glinted out at Nolan. Charlie had self-control back, and he had it in spades. He said, “I want you to sweat, Nolan. I want you to sweat blood.”

“Talk sense, Charlie. You know I don’t have your feel for the melodramatic.”

The little man sat up, composing himself as though he were a family patriarch preparing to carve a holiday turkey. “All right, Nolan. We won’t waste time with a lot of needless talk. I’ll make it simple and spell it out for you. This is what I want, all I want . . . one hundred thousand dollars. That’s all, Nolan. One hundred thousand dollars.”

Silence held the room for a full minute.

Nolan sat back in the chair and got a fresh cigarette going and weighed Charlie’s words. Werner sat leaning forward, mouth half open, trying to comprehend what was going on. Charlie sat straight, hands folded.

Finally Nolan cut through the silence.

“Okay, Charlie,” he said, “it’s a lot of money, but I won’t bitch about it. We can call it interest on the twenty thousand I took from you sixteen years ago. All I need is your word you won’t leak the Earl Webb name, and you can have your hundred thousand.”

Charlie’s features grew tight, seeming to converge toward the center of his face. “You miss my point . . . I don’t want any of
that
money. That would be too easy. You got to go out and get
new
money for me.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Nolan. Go out and get it for me. Earn it. Steal it. Counterfeit it if you can do a good enough job. But you got to be able to show me where you got it. I want to pick up the newspaper and see such-and-such jewelry store got hit, or so-and-so rich bastard was robbed. Don’t even think about using any of the Earl Webb money to pay me off.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I don’t want you to. Because it would be too goddamn fucking easy.”

“I can’t pull a job, not now.”

“Sure you can, Nolan. You’re a pro.”

“After what you did to me in Cicero, there isn’t a decent man in the business who’ll be willing to work with me.”

“That’s a problem you’ll just have to iron out.”

“This is insane. I’ve quit, Charlie, can’t you understand that? I’m an old man and I’m not even fifty yet.”

“You can quit. After this one. After this one last job.”

“Yeah. And every guy I ever knew who tried pulling off one last big one with retirement in his head got it blown off trying.”

“That’d break my fucking heart.”

“What the hell’s the difference? One hundred grand out of a Webb account is just as good as any one hundred grand I could come up with through a job!”

“Calm down, Nolan,” Charlie said, his tone condescending. “I never saw you so upset before. What’s happened to you?”

“Okay,” Nolan said. “You want me to sweat blood for you. All right. I’ll sweat it for you.”

“Good,” Charlie said, “good. We’ll set a deadline . . . say one month from tomorrow? Pay the money, and you got your cover back and the funds that go with it. If you can’t
make payment by then, you’re going to have to do your future dealing with the Chicago P.D., the FBI, the Treasury boys . . .”

“I think I get the idea.”

“I thought maybe you would.”

“What’s my guarantee you won’t expose the cover after I pay off?”

“You know there isn’t any, outside of my word.”

“Then why should I do it, Charlie?”

“Well, Nolan, as you pointed out, we’re both getting on in years, myself even more so than you. I’m growing more sentimental in my old age and figure, why not settle this account with Nolan and have it over and done? But I can’t just say ‘Forget it.’ The Family knows I’ve sworn to even scores with you, so I can’t let it end with, ‘Be seeing you.’ Yet I’ve so much as been told not to kill you, so what am I to do? There’s such a thing as saving face.” Charlie let out a short laugh. “What I’m giving you is a
chance.
Sure, you can’t be positive I’m leveling with you, but this way you
got
a chance of getting that cover of yours back. Any other way you got zero.” He put his hands on his knees, but not so firmly as before. “That’s my offer. Pay up a month from tomorrow . . . if you’re ready sooner, just call Werner and tell him, and we’ll set up a drop for the money. And then you can have your goddamn cover name back and retire a happy bastard.”

Nolan reached over into the lamp, brought out the .38, and held its nose under Charlie’s.

Charlie turned as white as his teeth, and small beads of sweat began making their way down his brow.

“Give me a reason,” Nolan said, “why I shouldn’t blow your head off and be the hell done with all this.” He turned to Werner and said, “You can contribute, too, old friend.”

“The Family would find you, Nolan,” Werner said.

“Maybe. But then you’d be just as dead, wouldn’t you, Charlie?”

Charlie said, “Put it away, Nolan.”

“You haven’t given me a reason yet.”

“If I don’t show up in my Chicago office tomorrow morning, kiss Earl Webb good-bye. That’s a reason.”

“Should I trust you, Charlie?”

“I won’t renege on this, Nolan. Pay me and I swear the slate between us is clean.”

“Clean?”

“Clean. Now put the gun away.”

“No. I trust you, but not that much.” He paused, then said, “Take off your ties and belts, men. Slow motion, please.”

When they had, Nolan said, “Werner, take Charlie’s tie and tie his hands behind his back. Tight as you can without cutting off the circulation.”

Werner looked as though he thought Nolan was pushing what was left of their friendship a little too hard, but any argument he had ready died when the .38 barrel began to swing his way.

After Werner had tied Charlie, Nolan kept gun in hand as he secured Werner’s hands in back, then bent down and strapped the belts around their ankles.

Charlie said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Nolan. Turning me down like this leaves you with nowhere to go.”

Nolan said, “I’m not turning you down, Charlie. It’s just I’m getting edgy in my old age. How do I know this summit meeting of ours hasn’t been just so much bull to set me up for an easy kill? I figure this’ll keep you boys away from the phone till I’m out of the hotel and gone.”

Werner let out some pent-up venom. “Damn you, Nolan! Don’t you know
yet
that we don’t handle things that way anymore? This was a business meeting until you started to . . .”

Charlie said, “Shut up.”

“Charlie,” Nolan said, “I’m going to play your game. I’ll dig up a job somewhere and you’ll get paid . . . but back out, or cross me in any way, and you’re going to die. A promise. You’ll just die.”

Charlie started to say something, but Nolan whipped
open the nightstand drawer and grabbed the two wadded handkerchiefs and shoved one into Charlie’s open mouth. Werner started to say something, and since Charlie wasn’t in a condition to shut him up, Nolan did it for him with the other wad of cloth.

Nolan holstered the .38, plucked the Colt from behind the pillow, and shoved the gun in his belt. He looked over at Charlie and thought about what a melodramatic sonofabitch Charlie was. Then he remembered his words to Charlie before stuffing the gag in his mouth, and glanced over at the lamp where he’d hidden the .38, and he had to laugh.

A couple of melodramatic sons-of-bitches, he thought, and headed for the door.

Downstairs in his suite Nolan unlocked the closet and got out the .38 he’d stowed there, jamming it in his belt. Tillis’s Luger he left in the closet, leaving the door open. Next he removed the other revolver from this room’s nightstand lamp and dropped the gun in his coat pocket.

No matter how silly precautions seemed in retrospect, Nolan knew only a dead man could afford not to take any.

He went into the bathroom and found Tillis, who was nodding off to sleep.

“Hey Tillis.”

The big black shook his head and said, “Uh, what, uh, hey man . . . must’ve dozed off. What’s happening? You kill Mr. Charlie or what?”

“No. Just fixed him and Werner so they’d stay quiet a while. When I get to where I’m going, I’ll call the desk over here and have them send somebody up to untie you. Then you can go up and let Charlie and Werner loose. They’re in room 714.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You tell Charlie I’m going through with his offer. But tell him don’t underestimate me.”

“I’ll tell him, Nolan. He can take my word for it.”

“Your Luger’s in the front closet. That’s about it, Tillis. See you.”

“See you.”

Nolan walked out of the suite and took the elevator back up to the other room. He got one of the guns out before going in, though it was hardly necessary. Charlie and Werner were quite secure on the bed, hadn’t budged: Charlie’s eyes were bored, Werner’s indignant.

Grabbing up his bag and dumping all guns into it save the one in his shoulder holster, Nolan went for the window and the fire escape beyond. He climbed down into the alley and started walking.

It was twelve blocks to the Y and that third room he’d rented.

Planner sat behind the counter in his antique shop, puffing away at a Garcia y Vega and waiting for Nolan.

Planner liked cigars, liked them a lot, and always kept a box of Garcias under the counter and handy. Yes, he realized that smoking cigars hurt business—the air in a dust-trap antique shop did damage enough to customers’ sinuses without the proprietor further polluting the atmosphere. And he supposed the image he presented of a lanky, balding old eccentric in red flannel shirt and baggy trousers didn’t exactly boost sales, either.

But then Planner didn’t really give a damn about selling antiques.

A real antique, he reasoned, wasn’t for selling, since an antique’s foremost value is its age; older it is, more valuable it gets. Sell today, take a loss tomorrow. For that reason, any time he ran across a genuine antique, he packed it carefully away in his back room.

He did sell some things, of course. Some people’ll buy anything. Most of the junk that had been in the place when he bought it twelve years before, the old pots and kettles and china and beat-up furniture and the like, was long gone by now. Every time his junk-antique supply ran low, he replenished it with more of the same, picked up dirt-cheap at flea markets and yard sales around the state.

When other dealers or knowledgeable buyers came in looking, they’d find little of interest in Planner’s shop, except for the buttons. The buttons were something else again.

Planner was a nut for buttons. He liked buttons better than cigars and almost as much as he liked money. Not coat
or shirt buttons, but the kind that pinned on—political buttons, advertising buttons, sheriff badges. The political variety, especially, was a penchant of his.

He kept a display case of buttons up front, plate-glass and well locked. There were boxes of the less valuable ones in the back room, and a barrel of worthless ones in the front marked two for a quarter. Some of the real prizes were upstairs in his plush (if he did say so himself) living quarters, on the wall in frames, his Lincoln tokens and big picture-buttons of Hoover among them. He took real pride in seeing the looks on dealers’ and collectors’ faces when they saw the buttons in the case, the Wilsons, the Willkies, the Bryans; even the recent ones were relatively valuable, since during the past few presidential campaigns a person had to contribute five or six bucks to get a picture button of his or her man.

Of course it was an expensive habit, but it fitted in well with his antique shop front, which was a natural for faking the books for the tax boys. Because, after all, buttons weren’t his only specialty; there was his business specialty, too, which was planning jobs for men like Nolan.

This one, though, this one he was going to offer Nolan today, would be a different case, since he hadn’t worked this package out. Usually a job was completely planned down to number of men and list of suggested personnel, with detailed procedure and, whenever possible, blueprints of the target.

Not this job; this would be different, because at this point, Nolan was anything but a popular boy.

He hated, really, even having to offer such a low quality proposition to Nolan, but there wasn’t a choice. And if it wasn’t for his faith in Nolan and a vested interest in Jon, he wouldn’t have had even this job to offer.

Jon was his nephew, his late sister’s boy, and he, too, was a collector. Comics were Jon’s field, strips and books. Planner was always keeping an eye open for comic strip tie-in items for Jon, things like Big Little Books and the counterpart Big
Big Books and rare comic books and radio tokens and Sunday pages from the ’30s and ’40s.

Jon and he had become even closer with Jon’s mother gone and the boy living here in Iowa City and going to the University. Jon teased Planner about his name (“Planner” had been a trade nickname in the early, active days of his career, and when he opened this shop he’d taken the name as a permanent alias, prefacing it with “Edwin”). He said the name sounded like something out of Dick Tracy; but then everything was like something out of Dick Tracy to Jon.

Nolan could watch after Jon. There were few men left in the field like Nolan, men who treated the heist trade
like
a trade. A craftsman, Nolan was, one of the last going. Planner knew Nolan could help Jon along better than anybody.

The bell over the door jangled as it opened and Planner looked up to see if Nolan was there. No. Kids from the school let out across the street, in for three o’clock “penny” candy. Planner waited for the several minutes the kids took picking out their candy and gum from the double shelves by the door and accepted the coins they offered in return. The bell rang again as the door closed behind them and Planner flicked the ash off his Garcia and leaned back in his chair, puffing.

Planning jobs he’d always been good at. He had a knack for that sort of thing, but he’d been glad to get out of the active end and into a front like this one. The on-the-job stuff, the something’s-gone-wrong-plan-on-the-job scene played hell with his nerves, and when he’d turned fifty he’d gotten this place and was glad of it.