Authors: Max Allan Collins
“Me. I’m bankrolling the job. I absorb all cost, then when we divide the take, we split five ways and I get two cuts.”
Jon said, “Sounds okay to me.”
Grossman unlatched the door on his side, shoved it open with his foot. “We’ll see if the old man is as big as his talk.” He pulled Shelly out after him, saying, “Let’s go, babe.”
“Two days,” Nolan said.
The girl said, “See you later, Jon. Nice meeting you, Nolan.”
The car door closed and Nolan and Jon sat and watched the two of them walk to the Mustang and get in, then roar out of the lot.
A few moments went by and Jon made a face and said, “I’m sorry about his attitude, Nolan.”
“That’s okay.”
“All those goddamn insulting questions . . .”
“It’s okay. At least they were the right questions.”
“Well . . . what do you think?”
“The girl.”
“What?”
“If we got a problem, she’s it.”
“What do you mean? Shelly a problem? You kidding, Nolan?”
“Hardly. Grossman has it bad for her, but she likes to sleep around.”
“How in the hell can you say that?”
“It’s a look she’s got. Like she’s got an itch in her pants and wants to have it scratched as many ways as she can.”
“Oh, Nolan . . .”
“Grossman’ll be okay unless she sets him off, but then it’s going to hit the fan.”
“I think you’re miles off base, Nolan.”
“Maybe so. But when you work with lovers, whether husbands and wives or a couple of gays or just a pair like those two doing the boy meets girl bit, jealousy’s a very real problem.”
“Well, I’ll admit Grossman loves her.”
Nolan put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I don’t want to shake you, kid . . . but if Shelly tried to fool around with one of us, Grossman could go off the deep end, and we might end up having to kill the poor bastard.”
Jon pulled off the gravel road and guided his Chevy II down the half-mile drive leading into the circular cinder court that was shared by a ramshackle one-story gray farmhouse and matching barn. He halted the car in front of the house’s rickety steps, grabbed the sack of groceries off the seat beside him, and walked up the steps, over the sagging porch and inside.
A mere forty-eight hours had gone by since the meeting at Junction; but they’d been an endless forty-eight hours for Jon, filled with Nolan’s tedious arrangements and planning, most of which were left completely unexplained.
First, Jon had gone with Nolan to the real estate agent in Port City, who recommended the farmhouse and barn, which was on the Illinois side, fifteen miles and at least twenty minutes by car from the high bridge spanning the Mississippi downtown, that joined Iowa and Illinois. The agent called ahead for them and when they got there, an elderly farmer was waiting to show them around. Nolan’s story was that he wanted to rent the place for a three-week duck-hunting vacation he’d be spending with his son, a role played for the occasion by Jon. The farmer explained he’d been renting the spread to satisfied hunters for years now, and said at a hundred and fifty bucks a week in advance, what with the pond and duckblind and all, it was a bargain. At that kind of money, Nolan later told Jon, it was anything but a bargain, though it did provide an ideal setup: a secluded place with plumbing and telephone, and a logical cover besides.
The coming night would be their first at the farmhouse, since the farmer had needed time to get the water turned on and the phone hooked up. Nolan had stayed at Planner’s in
Iowa City the previous two nights, Jon’s quarters being even less suited for two than for one.
In the early afternoon Jon had sat quietly and watched while Nolan got on the phone and began getting things going. One of the calls he placed was to a man named Werner, and judging from the half of the conversation Jon could hear, Nolan had contacted the man just to let him know he’d be working in the area. He also spoke to someone called Irish about getting a car. Nolan said he needed a station wagon with a good engine in it, one with solid pick-up, and also asked that its trunk-well be built into a special compartment large enough to accommodate two fully stuffed laundry bags.
For much the rest of the afternoon, Jon sat in a chair in the open-beamed, sparsely furnished living room, enjoying the nearby blaze of the fireplace that provided the house its heat. He’d borrowed a portable TV from Planner, but none of the daytime shows were worth the effort of turning the thing on, so he just lolled around with a drawing pad and sketched.
Most of Jon’s sketches were of Nolan, who sat close by at a large, round poker table, appropriately poker-faced, scratching with a stub of a pencil at sheets of paper borrowed from Jon’s supply. Nolan would wad spent sheets up every five minutes or so and toss them to the floor, then go on to a fresh page and start again. Every now and then Nolan would get up between pages and put in a call to Jon’s uncle to ask him a technical question of some kind, or a word of advice on a particular aspect of the planning, returning afterwards to his paper-scratching.
Like Nolan’s, Jon’s sheets of paper were wadded up when spent and dumped on the floor. Every hour or so Jon would walk around and collect the balls of paper and pitch them into the fire one at a time, like a kid tossing pebbles in a pond.
When Jon entered the living room with the sack of groceries, he found Nolan still at the poker table, working at his latest sheet of paper.
“Hello, Nolan.”
“Kid.”
“I’ll just go in and get these groceries put away.”
“Okay.”
“I got some beer and pretzels for the meeting.”
“It’s not supposed to be a picnic, but that’s okay.”
Jon went into the kitchen, with its rusty sink, dusty-shelved cabinets, faded white walls. The yellow formica table with its matching plastic-covered chairs and battered refrigerator and stove were 1950s classics. He unloaded the sack, filling one of the cabinet shelves with a dozen cans of vegetables, then transferred a wrapped package of hamburger, a small bag of potatoes, six six-packs of Schlitz and eleven TV dinners into the refrigerator. He left the box of pretzels on the table, then walked into the living room and sat in the chair by the fireplace. He picked up a brass poker and stirred the gently burning logs.
He had a queasy feeling, a mixture of fear and loneliness. He knew with Nolan in on this thing, it should go smoothly, but he and Nolan had spoken very little in the past two days, and that made him feel ill at ease. In Iowa City he’d had to sit by while Nolan discussed possibilities with Planner, and he tried to absorb all he could, but it was hard. And today, of course, he’d been hearing half conversations, the terse Nolan half—which was frustrating to say the least—and Nolan had spoke to him rarely.
“Kid,” Nolan said.
“Yeah?”
“What time’s Grossman and the girl going to get here?”
“When I called him I told him six-thirty, like you said to. It’s ten after now.”
“You make clear the instructions on how to find this place?”
“Clear enough. Gross’ll find us. Those turn-offs on all those country roads are confusing, but he shouldn’t have any trouble.”
“Is that beer cold?”
“It was in the cooler where I got it, in that grocery store in the little town up the road, and less than a five-minute drive back.”
“If that means it’s cold, get me one, will you?”
“Sure, Nolan.”
Jon was on his way back into the living room with two cans of Schlitz when the door buzzer sounded. He dropped the cans off with Nolan on his way to answer it and said, “They’re a little early.”
“Probably allowed extra time to find the place,” Nolan said; but Jon noticed his right hand seemed to be drifting casually toward the revolver in the shoulder holster under his left armpit.
Jon opened the door a crack and Grossman shoved it open the rest of the way and came in, Shelly following behind him.
“Hi, everybody,” Jon said.
Grossman nodded, throwing his denim jacket over a nearby chair. He was in his standard outfit of tee-shirt and worn jeans.
“How are you, Jon?” Shelly asked, Jon helping her out of her coat and hanging it on the rack by the door. “Is everything going all right?” She was wearing a baby blue sweater that accented the uplift of her breasts, and blue jeans that clung like a coating of cloth paint. As he helped her out of her coat, Jon brushed against those breasts ever so slightly and not entirely accidentally, but Shelly only smiled and gave him a warm look.
“Nolan’s been working awful hard,” Jon told her. “So I guess things are going fine.”
Grossman walked over by the poker table, gave Nolan a half-nod, and stared into the burning fireplace. The girl walked over next to him, then turned toward Nolan and said, “How are you, Nolan?”
“Preoccupied. Sit down, will you? Everybody?”
Jon joined Grossman and Shelly and they all found places around the big table.
“Anybody else want beers?” Jon asked.
Grossman’s grunt was affirmative and Shelly said, “I’d like that, Jon.”
“Better bring the pretzels, too, kid.” Was that sarcasm in Nolan’s voice, Jon wondered, or just his own paranoid imagination at work?
Two minutes later Jon came back with the extra beers and the box of pretzels and sat down. Nolan spoke again.
“Okay,” he said, “we got a lot to talk about. Before I say anything about the plan I’m working on, there’s some incidentals to get out of the way.”
Grossman gulped down a third of his beer in one multiple swallow, then wiped his mouth with his hand and said, “Such as?”
“Might as well start with you, Grossman.”
“So now I’m an incidental?”
Nolan got his cigarettes out from his breast pocket, shook one free, and lit it, tossing the pack on the table for anybody else who might want one. “Jon told me you did some dealing in Iowa City. That so?”
“Yeah, big deal. You a narc all of a sudden or something?”
“What d’you push?”
“Just a little pot. Nothing hard. And I never got busted, if that’s your next question.”
“Smoke it yourself?”
“Do I smoke dope, you mean?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Yeah, I smoke it. And I like it. So what?”
“So don’t smoke it anymore. Not till you’re out of my life.”
“Why the fuck not? You think the noxious weed’s going to turn my brain to cottage cheese or something? And you who supposedly been around.”
“Christ you’re stupid! What do you think it would do to this operation if you were to get busted for possession tomorrow?”
“I won’t get busted.”
“That’s right. Because you’ll be clean. If you got any stuff stashed in your apartment in Davenport, flush it down the stool when you get home tonight. I’m not shitting you, Grossman. After tonight, if I find one joint on you, I break you in half.”
Grossman started to get up. “I don’t have to take this kind of crap off you, old man. Come on, Shelly.”
“Gross,” Shelly said, “This is our last chance to maybe get
free.
Isn’t that worth taking a little crap over?”
Grossman shrugged and said, “I guess you’re right, babe.” He sat back down, looked at Nolan. “I just gave up dope, okay, old man?”
“Good,” Nolan said. “Now, something else. Have you been seeing Shelly in Port City, Grossman?”
“Some,” he said.
“How much?”
“Some, I said.”
“Once a week?”
“More.”
“Daily?”
Grossman shrugged again, finally nodded.
“Do you mind explaining to me,” Nolan said, “how the hell you expect anyone to believe that a girl could be taken hostage during a robbery by a guy she’s been shacked up with for two months?”
Grossman reddened and Shelly, sitting between Jon and Grossman, leaned over toward Nolan and touched his hand. “Nolan,” she said, “Gross has been very careful. If we go out, he takes me to Davenport for the evening, or Iowa City. Otherwise, he’ll come up and spend time with me, alone, in my apartment. The girls at work know I have a boyfriend, but none of them have ever seen him.”
“I take it you’re living alone, Shelly?” Nolan said.
“Yes.”
“Where’s your apartment?”
“Above the Old Town Mill.”
“What’s that?”
“A restaurant. A bar.”
“Downtown?”
“Sort of.”
“Then somebody’s sure to have seen you two together, as much as you see each other, with the apartment downtown and over a bar.”
Grossman sat and thought about that.
Nolan continued. “You people have got to start
thinking.
There is a thing, a little thing, called common sense. It’s too late to do anything about you and Shelly being seen together, Grossman, except work on an appearance change for you; and, of course, you’ll stop seeing her.”
“What do you mean?” Grossman slapped the table. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“You won’t see her, except at these prearranged meetings. Starting today you’re a priest.”
“Look, Nolan, how about I just be careful, okay?”
“How about you just abstain.”
Jon said, “It’s only for a week or so, Gross.”
Nolan said, “Shelly, I’ve got something for you to do, too, that’ll put you to some trouble.”
“Yes?”
“Today is Saturday. A week from today I want you to take a bus up to Davenport and get fitted for a short black wig. Be sure it’s a good, expensive one. In the meantime, at work next week, tell your girlfriends at the bank that you’re going to get your hair cut and styled, getting it cut short. On the following Monday, the day of the robbery, you’ll wear the wig to work and tell everybody, well, your hair’s cut, and how do they like it?”
Grossman said, “What’s the point of that?”
“We have to be able to make a radical change in appearance after the hit if we expect to get away with it. After the robbery, our ‘hostage’ will slip off her wig and still have all her long hair, but dyed blonde. The FBI and cops will be on the lookout for a girl with short black hair.”
“It sounds good to me,” Shelly said, “but a wig can slip
when you’re wearing it, and sometimes you have to adjust it. Besides, there’s no guarantee a wig will fool everybody. Somebody at work is bound to notice it.”