Two for the Money (22 page)

It took several more minutes for the older man to notice his son’s discomfort. He was too busy concentrating on the antique shop across the road. The shop was a two-story white clapboard structure, resembling a house more than a business establishment, and in fact marked the point where the business district trailed off into residential, the downtown and University of Iowa campus being some four blocks of filling stations and junk-food restaurants away. Directly across from the Dairy Queen was a Shell station, and next to that was the antique shop; directly across from the antique shop was a grade school, an old empty brown-brick hulk, deserted for the summer, separated from the Dairy Queen by a graveled alley. And down the street were homes, modest, aging, but well kept up, strewn along this quiet street lined with lushly green shade trees. The older man nodded to himself; yes, this was a street you could retire on, like this man Planner had.

“Dad?”

“Hmmm?”

“How’s it going, Dad? How you feeling?”

“Fine,” he said, still not noticing how ill at ease his son was acting.

He continued to watch the antique shop, studying it. The lower level of the building was divided in half by a recessed door set between two window displays showing assorted
junk on either side: old metal advertising signs (“Coca Cola,” “Chase and Sanborn,” “Call for Philip Morris!”) and china and kids’ metal toys and tea kettles and phonograph records and mason jars and crap, just plain crap, how anyone could pay money for crap like that the older man couldn’t fathom. The windows were many-paned, sectioned off with metal, like stained glass, and in the midst of each display hung a sign saying, “Antiques—Edwin Planner, proprietor.” With pleasure, the older man had been noting the lack of business the antique shop was doing; it had been two o’clock when they first arrived, and now, at three-fifteen, not a soul had gone in or out.

But if this man Planner felt badly about his nonexistent customer flow, he certainly didn’t show it. The older man had watched carefully as the shop’s proprietor peeked outside, glancing up at the hot sun in the cloudless sky and smiling. Planner was a lanky old guy, balding, wearing baggy pants and a red tee-shirt, puffing a cigar. Twice Planner had done this, and the third time he peeked out and smiled, the older man had smiled, too, and glanced at his son to share the good cheer, and then he noticed his son’s discomfort.

The boy’s legs were crossed tight, like a woman afraid someone was after her privates, and he was shaking his foot. His face was bloodless pale and he was gritting his teeth. The older man sighed.

“Go get me an ice cream cone,” the older man said.

His son said, “What?”

“Go get me an ice cream cone.” The older man gave his son a dollar.

“Uh, how many dips?”

“Two.”

“Okay, Dad. Dad?”

“Hmm?”

“Uh, what flavor?”

“Doesn’t make a damn to me. Strawberry.”

“I think all they got’s chocolate and vanilla.”

“Vanilla.”

“Vanilla, okay.”

“And Walter?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Go to the can, too, why don’t you, before you piss all over the front seat.”

Walter let loose a shaky grin, then saw his father wasn’t joking, and retracted it. He got out of the car and walked around to the back of the Dairy Queen building to the restrooms. The men’s was clean, very clean, as white and wholesome as ice cream itself. He felt guilty when in his extreme need and nervousness he overshot the stool and before he flushed it, he got down on the floor with toilet paper and wiped up his mess. After he was finished doing that, he felt silly, felt he was acting irrationally, and he put the seat down and sat and held his face in his hands. Shit, he thought, I got to get my head together. Christ, he thought, don’t let me make an asshole out of myself in front of him.

He went to the sink and washed his hands, then brought the cold water up and splashed it against his face. After the heat of the day, this cold water was heaven. He splashed more cold water on his face, more, more, and it felt good, then suddenly it didn’t feel good, it felt lousy, and he went to the stool and frantically slapped the lid up and emptied his stomach.

Back in the car, the older man was watching a young guy walk around from behind the two-story structure. Must be a rear entrance back there, he thought, and this must be that kid they told me about. Planner’s nephew. He watched the boy walk past the Shell station and head toward the Iowa City business district. The boy was short, maybe five-six or-seven, but he was strongly built, his arms muscular. His hair was curly brown and long, stopping just this side of an Afro, and the older man wondered if there was any chance in hell the boy was on his way downtown for a haircut. He was wearing worn, patched jeans and a white tee-shirt with some cartoonish thing on the front. About Walter’s age, the older man thought, maybe a little younger.

“Here’s your cone, Dad.”

The older man turned his head and nodded to his son and took the cone. Walter came around the front of the car and got in and sat, feeling queasy as he watched his father eat the ice cream. Walter said, “Did I see a kid come out of the shop?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t see anybody go in there.”

“It’s the guy’s nephew or something. He lives there.”

“Oh. You didn’t say anything about that.”

“I wasn’t sure whether the kid lived with him or not.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I’m glad he’s left.”

“How come?”

“Don’t be stupid. It’ll be easier with just the one guy.”

“Oh. Yeah, of course.”

The ice cream tasted good. And he felt good, knowing the kid wouldn’t be in there. He had no compunction about what he was going to do, but killing or even hurting some kid Walter’s age was something he didn’t care to do. He’d gone into this knowing it would be like the old days. It had to be like the old days, like coming up in those years when brains weren’t enough, you had to have balls, and balls meant shooting who you had to when you had to and the hell with manners. He had to have the right frame of mind if he expected to deal with Nolan and come out on top. So sure, this was like the old days, this was a situation where if you had to be hard, you were hard. But these last ten, fifteen soft years made it hard to be hard; it was like sex, he could still get it up, if need be, but he wasn’t no tiger anymore.

He was glad the kid wouldn’t be around. Some old son of a bitch, what did that matter, but some damn kid? That was something else.

At two o’clock, just as the two men with guns were pulling into the Dairy Queen parking lot across the street, Planner was lighting a cigar and wondering when the phone call would come. The cigar was a Garcia y Vega, at least one box of which Planner kept under the counter always; he liked cigars, Garcia y Vegas especially, and if the occasional customers who walked into his antique shop were irritated by the smoke, well, fuck ’em. The phone call he was waiting for was from Nolan, a man who played a part in Planner’s other and primary occupation, which was planning jobs for professional thieves.

The antique shop, however, was more than just a front. Long before the thought of using an antique shop as a front had ever entered his mind, Planner had been a collector of antiques, though like many collectors he was a specialist and only one small branch of antiquing held a fascination for him.

Buttons.

Planner loved buttons.

Not buttons that hold your clothes together (though there were collectors of those around, too) but political buttons and advertising buttons and anything that pinned on, including sheriff’s and other cop badges, if they were old enough. The mainstay of his collection was the political buttons, the pride being his Lincoln tokens and the large picture buttons of Hoover. These were in a frame upstairs, while others of lesser value and importance, but gems nonetheless, graced a display case in the front of the store.

It was that display case that let other dealers who came around know that despite the junk quality of most of the
merchandise in the shop, Planner was a dealer who knew what he was doing, worthy of respect. It was with great pleasure that he would turn down offers from fat-cat dealers who would drool at the generous assortment of political buttons in the airtight case, the Willkies, the Wilsons, the Bryans. If he was feeling really generous, he might sell them one Nixon or a Kennedy or perhaps a Goldwater, but not often, as even recent buttons brought a pretty penny, since during the last three or four presidential campaigns a man had to contribute five or six bucks before the party would give him a picture button of the candidate. And who could guess what a McGovern/Eagleton would one day be worth?

If he was feeling particularly ornery, Planner would show dealers the Lincoln tokens and the Hoovers upstairs and would listen to their eager bids and pretend to consider and then calmly refuse. Even if a dealer got down on his knees (which had happened a couple times) Planner would shake his head solemnly no. Back downstairs, to rub salt in the wound, Planner would point out the barrel of buttons next to the front display case, a barrelful of zilch buttons Planner sold to the school kids for a quarter a throw.

Also, from dealers who came around and from stops he made to keep his “buying trips” looking honest, Planner had managed, over these past thirteen or fifteen years, to fill in the gaps of his own collection, picking up damn near every button he needed. But even before he got into the antique trade, Planner had had one of the best goddamn button collections in the U.S. of A. (if he did say so himself) and so, when he was picking out some way to semi-retire, the antique hustle had been a natural.

Sometimes, sitting behind the counter, smoking a Garcia y Vega, Planner would wonder if he could actually make a living selling antiques, you know, straight-out legitimate. Even though he purposely filled his shop with unspectacular horseshit, he did pretty good, better than he needed to with a situation that was basically a front. But the little old ladies in tennis shoes would ooo and ahh at the god-damnedest
junk, and he would constantly (three or four times a year) have to spend a day going to flea markets and yard sales and load his station wagon with more bottles and jars and furniture and china and kettles and toys and crap and more crap. When he’d bought the place, it had been jampacked with junk, which he’d thought would last for years and years. Six months, it had been, and he was out scouting flea markets to replenish his supply. Occasionally he’d run onto an honest-to-God antique for next to nothing and these he would pack carefully away in one of his backrooms. One day he might sell them, but not now. Somehow it seemed crazy to sell an antique, a real one that is, since an antique’s value is its age, and tomorrow it’s going to be older and hence more valuable.

In that way, and many others, the antique shop was more than a simple front. In addition to feeding Planner’s button habit, and turning a nice dollar itself now and then, the antique shop was just the sort of nebulous one-man business operation that made it damn near impossible for the IRS to get to you. Just the same, Planner reported a healthy income and gave the feds their healthy share, faking his own bookkeeping, which required both math skill and imagination. It was a time-consuming task, doing the books and other records, but he would find ways to amuse himself, such as inventing wild merchandise when writing up fake sales slips, his favorite being “One Afghanistan banana stand, $361.” He had told that one to Nolan once, thinking he would laugh, but Nolan had said, “That’s a little silly, isn’t it? You’re getting senile.” Nolan implied that if Planner got too goddamn cute with his records, the IRS would smell something, should they go sniffing. Planner didn’t think so. Anyway, the tax boys, classically, didn’t care how you made your money, they just wanted their piece of your action.

Probably the best angle was that as an antique dealer, Planner could make frequent buying trips and on them gether the information that would enable him to put together “packages” for clients like Nolan. These trips
aroused no suspicion whatsoever, neither locally nor wherever he chose to go.

On the trips he got his information by playing the role of a cantankerous but friendly old antique dealer, and while putting on the eccentric act had been a chore at first (fifteen, sixteen years ago when he got started) he found that now, at sixty-seven, the role was much easier to play convincingly. People weren’t surprised when an old guy like him would want to talk for a while, and he could always manipulate a stranger into a lengthy and rewarding conversation. The information was easy to get: he’d act paranoid and tell about his shop and how he was afraid of being robbed and ask about alarm systems and safes and such. He’d admire the layout of, say, a jewelry store and tell about how he was thinking of remodeling his place along similar lines and just how is everything put together here, exactly. He’d express dissatisfaction with his present payroll system for his staff of ten employees (all nonexistent, of course) and ask advice. And on and on. No trick to it.

He puffed his cigar and grinned to himself. It was a damn good life. Much better than it had been for those years and years he’d spent actually working on jobs, the bank hits, the armored cars, the payroll robberies, all of it. When he was young, he’d found it stimulating, but before long (oh, even into his late twenties) his nerves had started to bother him. Planning ahead of time was one thing, but being on the job when the shit hit the proverbial fan and you got to improvise is another thing entirely. He worked things out so that at age fifty he could “sort of” retire, which he had, and a good thing too. He wouldn’t like to work in the field the way things were now. He wouldn’t enjoy working with the kind of people that were in the trade these days, if you could even call it a trade anymore.

Planner had been in the trade when it
was
a trade. He started young, young enough to have worked with Dillinger a few times. There wasn’t anybody around today, needless to say, who could compare to Dillinger, except for Nolan, who
was almost an old-timer himself, and that guy Walker, and a few others, Busch, Peters, Beckey, not many. Every string you put together these days has got somebody you can’t be sure of, he thought, and one or maybe two somebodies you never heard of and got to trust what some other somebody told you about ’em. It was hard to find pros these days, people who really knew what they were doing.