Two for the Money (9 page)

His “buying” trips out of town, which were frequent, served to give him a cover that let him innocently case all sorts of business establishments and, as a kindly old eccentric antique dealer, ferret out all kinds of information about cash on hand and where it was kept.

The bell over the door jangled, and this time it wasn’t kids.

A figure in a gray suit filled the doorway. The man stood
just over six feet and wore a lean, hard-featured, high-cheekboned face, with narrow eyes and a thick mustache. His hair was black, widow’s-peaked, with only the hair along his sideburns completely given to gray. He dropped his bag to the floor and turned the OPEN sign around in the window, facing the CLOSED side out, then flipped the lock and drew the shade.

“How are you, Nolan?” Planner asked.

“All right. Getting cold, isn’t it.”

“Haven’t been out today. Come by bus?”

“No. Didn’t have the money. Hitched a ride in Davenport.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, struck up a conversation with a guy and convinced him I got wiped out gambling. Said I had to come here to get a stake.”

Planner stabbed out his Garcia and reached under the counter for a new one. “Well? Isn’t that true, Nolan, in a way?” He fired the fresh cigar with a wooden match and said, “Interest you in a Garcia y Vega? No charge, of course.”

“No thanks. Cigarettes got first call on my lungs. You do still have that eight thousand I left with you last year, don’t you, Planner?”

“Of course.”

“Your safe in the back room?”

“No, upstairs in my wallsafe. Don’t draw interest, but then it don’t get taxed, either.”

“Let’s go up, then. I’ll need the money whether or not I take this job you got for me.”

Planner nodded, stepped from behind the counter, and guided Nolan into the backroom and then across it, through a pathway between its many boxes to the stairway at the rear. He led Nolan up the stairs and into the newly remodeled second floor. He smiled, showing off both his pine-paneled living quarters and his new teeth, and Nolan nodded appreciatively.

“You manage to live well, Planner. This must be the third time you remodeled since you moved in.”

“Fourth. I like new things. I work all day downstairs with the old, so I live at night around the new. How do you like the modern furniture?” Planner had bought the stuff knowing that when he tired of it, he’d turn it over to Jon, whose one-room apartment was all but bare.

“It’s okay,” Nolan said, patting a white plastic armchair. “I hope it’s kinder to my ass than it is to my eyes.”

“Still the same old tactful Nolan. Drink?”

“No thanks. Could we get to the job?”

Planner motioned past the chair toward the circular couch, and both men sat. Planner said, “You still aren’t much for conversation, are you, my middle-aged friend? Don’t the years mellow you at all?”

“Grow mold on me is more like it.”

“I looked older at thirty than you do at fifty.”

“I’m not quite fifty yet, but if you don’t mind, could the two old women cut the beauty-parlor age tally and get on with business?”

“In your own charming way you’re trying to tell me how bad you need this job.”

“Yeah. I’m anxious as hell for it, as a matter of fact. I only hope it’s a good one.”

Planner leaned over a transparent blue plastic coffee table and sprinkled his Garcia ashes into a tray shaped like the state of Florida, and said, “Jobs for you are a scarce commodity, Nolan. Any job, let alone good ones. You and I both know that the word is out you’re in bad with the syndicate people.”

“They’re calling it the Family this year.”

“I don’t care if they’re calling it Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, it’s the syndicate and you’re on their shit list.”

“I’m glad you told me so I could find out about it.”

“I only mention it so you know the position I’m in. You know I never sold you nothing but a good package, and
now when I got to offer you a, well, bad risk, I want you to know why.”

“A bad risk.”

“I won’t pretend that it isn’t. It’s something nobody else wants.”

“Don’t build me up like this, you’ll only disappoint me.”

“Oh, it gets worse, Nolan, don’t let me fool you.”

“Worse?”

“You’d be working with virgins. Three amateurs so green their biggest hit to date is maybe a cookie jar.”

“It does get worse, doesn’t it.”

“It’s two men and a woman. Or two boys and a girl, is more like it. The boys, who got less years between them than you got by yourself, have one score to their credit: a filling station last summer they took for a big sixty bucks. The girl never did anything wrong except maybe cheat on her boyfriend.”

“An all-star lineup.”

“Well, it’s not quite as bleak as I’ve been painting it. I know one of these kids, and real well. He’s my nephew, and a bright kid, smarter than hell, and strong. Went to nationals in high school wrestling at one of them medium weights. He found this job himself and had me check it out for him. If it goes right, it could be a big haul.”

“What is it? Two filling stations?”

“It’s a bank.”

“A bank. Great. I could pick up a couple slobs from out of a bar and pull a smash-and-grab on a bank. I need more money than that. I got a debt to pay.”

“This is better than smash-grab, Nolan. This is an inside job.”

“How so?”

“The girl I mentioned. She
works
at this bank. Been there close to three months now. She’s trusted. With that kind of inside help, you might be able to clean the place out.”

“Sounds a bit more promising, I admit.”

“Could run as high as seven hundred and fifty thou, you
hit it the right time.”

“How planned out is it? You make up one of your regular critiques for me?”

“No. This is my nephew Jon’s job. He has his own ideas about how to handle it. But he doesn’t begin to understand the potential there, he’s got no idea how big a take is possible in a case like this, if it’s done right. But you and I do, Nolan. I figured you’d want to meet the people and work with them a while before making final plans. You know, weigh their capabilities and plan from there.”

“Jesus. How much do you want for this dream package?”

“Not a cent.”

“What? Since when does Planner run a charity house for heistmen on the skid?”

“Just look after my nephew, okay?”

“Goddamn. This must be one hell of a lemon.”

“You can make it work, Nolan.”

“Thanks. You having faith in me makes it all better.”

“Some thanks I get. I got no other job I could give you, anybody else wouldn’t give you anything at all.”

“Yeah. It’s a pisser. Well, I suppose I get the details from your nephew.”

“Right. He’s got a place downtown, an apartment over the Hamburg Haven. Know where it is?”

“Sure.” Nolan got up. “I could use my money, Planner. I’ll need it to finance this triumph.”

“Sure,” Planner said. He walked over to the frame that housed the two big Hoover buttons and lifted it off its nail to get at the wallsafe behind it. He twirled the combination dial and yanked the safe door open. He got out a manila envelope and, as an afterthought, took out a small white box.

He handed the envelope to Nolan. “Here you go. All there, eight thousand in hundreds.”

Nolan peeked in at the money. “I wouldn’t think of counting it, Planner, you know that.”

“Yeah, yeah. And here, take this, too.” He handed him the white box.

“What’s this?” Nolan asked, giving the box a quizzical onceover.

“Something for my nephew, something kind of valuable I picked up for him the other day and haven’t had a chance to give him yet. Thought maybe you wouldn’t mind dropping it off.”

“Sure. What is it?”

Planner let his face wrinkle into a sheepish grin. “A Dick Tracy Crimestopper badge,” he said.

Iowa City depressed Nolan.

It wasn’t the Midwestern atmosphere that bothered him, or even Iowa itself—he liked being left alone, which was basically what people did to each other in Midwestern states, as opposed to East Coast rudeness, West Coast weirdness and Southern pseudo-hospitality. Iowa City was a college town, and that depressed Nolan.

Or more specifically, college-town girls depressed him. Maybe it was this new awareness of what he was beginning to view as the onrush of senility. Or just an awkwardness that came from being around people he couldn’t relate to. But these young girls, damn it, all looking so fuckable and at the same time untouchable, in their jeans and flimsy tee-shirts. . . . He guessed it was ego; he didn’t like looking at a desirable woman without at least the remote possibility of getting in.

Not that he’d ever been much for playing the stud, that wasn’t it; sex was a gut need to be filled when time and circumstance allowed. But with young girls like these, daughters and possibly granddaughters of the one or two generations of women he’d had intercourse with, he had no
basis for rapport, no way, man, none at all to relate with such creatures. Conversation was enough of a pain for Nolan without having to struggle for whatever wave-length these children were on this week.

As he walked the blocks between Planner’s antique shop and the Hamburg Haven, the thirty-above Iowa wind biting through his light suit into the healed-up wound, he had the strange feeling that this kind of sexual mind-wandering put him in the category of would-be child molester.

And he had to admit he liked the young look these girls had, the freedom of dress, long-flowing hair or mass of Shirley Temple curls or shortcut boyish; even those in grubby outfits managed to look fresh and clean, without appearing virginal, and Christ, where were the girls that showed it like that and had it to show when he was their age? Winter coming on and they weren’t even wearing bras; he’d
never
get used to that.

As far as the young men were concerned, Nolan saw that their lifestyle reflected a similar freedom of dress and grooming, but they carried their lot of freedom around so conspicuously it might well have been heavy.

An idealistic bunch, Nolan thought, stupidly idealistic, perhaps, or maybe just stupid, but a different bunch than the one he had grown up a part of, and Nolan could almost feel an envy for these kids who were getting a shot at mistakes he’d only dreamed of making.

He approached the Hamburg Haven, a brick two-story in the middle of the block, its windows streaked with grease and other moistures, and ignored the main entrance, opting for the doorway to the far left which led up a flight of stairs. From the look of the stairs Nolan figured they could hold his weight for once up, but he wouldn’t count on round trip. He took a chance and climbed them, knocked at the paint-flaked door at the top.

The door jerked open like a bad film cut and in its place was a five-feet six-inch figure in jeans and gray sweatshirt, with a mass of curly brown Harpo-like hair, intense blue
eyes, and a little piggish turned-up nose in an otherwise well-featured face.

“Jon?”

“Mr. Nolan?”

Nolan nodded.

The boy seemed to be struggling to put the clamp on his enthusiasm, but Nolan could see the same look an eager puppy has jumping up and down in the bright eyes.

“Come on in, Mr. Nolan, come on in.”

Nolan stepped in and closed the door behind. After he got a look around, he weighed going back out again as a strong possibility.

The room’s crumble-plaster walls were practically wallpapered with posters, not the standard clever-saying type or famous movie star or once-the-rage psychedelic, but hand-drawn posters depicting comic-strip heroes, and a few store-bought movie posters of actors Nolan didn’t recognize.

The posters were hung, four by two feet, uncanny recreations of Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant, Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, Batman, and several other comic characters not familiar to him. The movie posters, fewer in number, were unrecognizable to him, with one exception: Buster Crabbe, playing either Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, he wasn’t sure which. Among the others was a gaunt-faced Western character with a mustache and pipe, dressed in black.

There was also a cot in the room, and next to it a drawing board with papers and pencils scattered on the floor around it. The room didn’t have a kitchenette, just a hotplate on an old table and a tiny icebox. The can had both a stool and a tub, but no door. A closet, also doorless, contained skyscraper piles of comic books. Also in the room was a steel cabinet, an office file, which in the midst of the pop-art ruin made as much sense to Nolan as a naked girl in a church choir.

Nolan said, “Why the file?”

Jon said, “The top drawer is for my really rare comics. I collect them, uh, comics that is. It’s my hobby.”

“What’re the other two drawers for?”

“Pardon?”

“In the file.”

“Oh. The second drawer’s for other rare things, you know, Big Little Books and daily and Sunday strips from old papers, stuff like that.”

“Leaves a drawer.”

“Clothes. That’s where I put them, I put my clothes in the bottom drawer.”

Nolan nodded. He looked around the room again, made an effort to suppress the gigantic sigh inside him wanting out, and reached in his pocket to get the white box Planner had given him.

Nolan said, “Here you go, kid. For the second drawer. Your uncle sent this over.”

The boy took the box, opened it, and his eyes lit up as if he had a candle inside his head, his outer shell staying passive. “Uh, thanks for dropping this off, Mr. Nolan, thanks a lot.”

“Yeah. Well. I got to be going. Nice meeting you, kid.”

“Hey . . . hey, wait a minute!”

Nolan was opening the door. “What?”

“What about the . . . the, you know . . .” he dropped his voice, to a conspiratorial whisper, “. . . the robbery?”

“Forget it, kid.”

“Bullshit. You came here to talk business. Now, now shut the door and come back in here and talk it.”

Nolan hesitated and the boy reached over and slammed the door shut.

“Wait, don’t tell me,” Nolan said, “I just figured it out. We hit the bank, I take the cash, you take the dimes and we drop you off at a newsstand.”

“You show both your age and your ignorance, Nolan. It’s been years since comic books sold for a dime. I suppose you remember when they were a nickel.”