What rough patch exactly?
Steve went on: “Sandy here wants a bull to hey-diddle-diddle the cows on her farm. What’s your dream, Johnny?”
The cabbie gestured around him, sloshing the whiskey in hand; his eyes traveled to where the walls met the ceiling as if that were where heaven began.
“Place of my own like this would be just about goddamn perfect,” Hagan mused. “Can you picture it? Motel down in Florida, beach for a back yard, away from the Saint fuckin’ Looie snow.” He snorted in self-contempt. “Rolling drunks in your cab only takes a guy so far. Why hustle johns for whores out of a Chevy... no offense, Sandy... when you can run a ring of ’em right out of your own clean and comfy motel? Drivin’ cab is no kind of life for a real man. A place like the Coral Court — hell, half as nice — would cover what it takes for a guy to make his support payments and make a bet when he feels like it, maybe buy a new suit of clothes now and again, and never feel the pinch.”
“Everybody needs a dream,” I agreed.
“Well, yours is gonna come true, Johnny,” Steve said, saluting him with an already empty whiskey glass. “Like Sandy and her farm and that male nympho bull I’m gonna buy her... I’m gonna set you up for life, kid. And Nate, you are not forgotten in this — I’m gonna kick back ten percent of whatever you arrange for me with the Chicago boys. Consider that a promise.”
Sandy, not too subtly, said to Steve, “That new bag you had Johnny buy? You need help shifting the money into it from that footlocker and suitcase?”
Steve took no offense at this breach of etiquette. He just shook his head gently and said, “No, suit bag’s for clothes we’re gonna buy this afternoon, me and Johnny. Now, Johnny boy, first you should drop Sandy off at a cab stand, where she can get a ride to the airport for her L.A. trip. Use the car you rented and come back here after. Sandy, I got a couple more letters for you to mail from out there. Then, Johnny, rent me a nice apartment in a quiet, refined neighborhood where I can lay low for a while. If it hadn’t been for one man’s slip-up, none of this would be necessary. But it is. Pay a month’s rent if you have to.”
“Okey-doke,” the cabbie said.
“And can you score me some fake I.D.? Know anybody can provide that?”
“There’s a guy.”
Sandy was listening intently. I could hear her wheels turning: the last thing she wanted was to get on an airplane to the West Coast and leave the fortune in those metal suitcases behind.
“I need the rest of that twenty-five hundred back,” Steve said to Hagan, “but keep five C’s — a man without money is nothing. Use what’s left after buying my new I.D. to fix yourself up with some classy new threads.”
Hagan complied. At her host’s prompting, Sandy gathered her extra things and got ready to leave. Then she gave me a wry look that said, Maybe next time, and thanked Steve for the grand. He said no thanks were necessary and she could get in touch with him about that Guernsey bull through Hagan, on her return from the Coast.
Before following the cabbie into the hall, Sandy gave the footlocker and suitcase a longing look — the kind a man wishes a woman might give him before parting.
When they’d left, Steve poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey and gave me one I hadn’t asked for. He went to the window and parted blades of the blinds to watch the Plymouth go, then returned to his spot on the edge of the bed.
“Nate, I wanted to talk to you alone.”
As if sending Sandy to L.A. to mail letters had been all about giving us a little privacy.
I sipped whiskey. I’ve never cared for the way it burns when it hits bottom. “What’s on your mind, Steve?”
His unblinking gaze was unsettling. “I want to play it straight with your friends in Chicago. I got no desire to have the Outfit unhappy with me.”
“Sound thinking.”
“So I’m not going to lie to you.” He pointed to the footlocker and black suitcase. “That’s not insurance money or from a bank vault, either. That’s ransom dough. The Greenlease kid.”
I’d been pretty much convinced of that since the moment I first saw Steve’s sweaty smear of a face. But hearing it still landed hard.
“I’m no fool,” he said. “That money is bound to be marked. Means I have to settle for whatever I can get. But you can help.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “You know these Chicago people. They’re your business associates. Maybe even your friends. And the more they give me, the more I can give you, right?”
“How many others are in this with you, Steve?”
“I got a girl named Bonnie. I stowed her in an apartment because she came a little unglued after we took the boy. She drinks too much.”
“Does she.”
He nodded, looked into his own glass, finding no irony there. “I said somebody slipped up, remember? And I guess you could say somebody was me.”
“How so, Steve?”
He jerked a thumb at himself, defensively. “I thought up the plan. The whole thing was mine. I have a real mind for this kind of thing — in my time, I robbed stores, and stuck up a whole string of taxi cabs... ha, don’t tell Johnny! Never a hitch, except maybe that bank job... just bad luck, after I case the place and plan so perfectly, it turns out to be closed on Saturdays. But when I was doing time, I got really good at planning.”
I had a regular criminal mastermind here.
“You see, I come from a wealthy family, but I had a bad run of luck with some businesses, legit ones that chewed up my inheritance. In stir, I got to thinking about the rich kids I grew up around... and a kidnapping seemed like a safe, easy way to get rich again. If only... if only I hadn’t got mixed up with that crazy bastard.”
“What crazy bastard, Steve?”
“Tom Marsh.”
Marsh? M?
He sighed, shook his head. “He was just somebody I ran into in the Netherlands Hotel bar, in Kansas City. We hit if off right away — talked the same language. You know, words and expressions only ex-cons use. He had charm and he was tough. But he had bad qualities I didn’t pick up on.”
“Such as?”
“Well, he was low-class. Had tattoos on his arms and chest. And he was a perverted son of a bitch. You think I woulda snatched a kid if I knew I’d thrown in with a short eyes?”
The flesh on my arms goose-pimpled and the hair on the back of my neck bristled.
“Short eyes” was prison slang for child molester.
“And,” Steve continued, “Marsh has been looking after the Greenlease boy ever since Bonnie picked him up at that school. In a nice quiet house in a nice quiet neighborhood, never mind where. Marsh swears he’s leaving the kid alone — that he knows if he touches him, in that way, it could sink the whole damn deal. But how can I trust a goddamn kiddie-diddling drug addict?”
Good point. “He still has the boy?”
Steve nodded. “He was supposed to deliver the kid to a hotel in Pittsburg, Missouri. But he hasn’t yet. He thinks we can squeeze another round of money out of Greenlease. Greedy, grasping prick! When I found that out, I grabbed the money, and Bonnie and me took off.”
“Then it’s Marsh you’ve been on the lookout for,” I said, nodding toward the blinds.
“Yes! Yes.” He sat forward, the dull eyes getting some real life in them now. “I want to do the deal with your Outfit boys, score some real money for me and Bonnie, and you, of course... then I’ll call the cops and tell them where to find Marsh and the boy.”
“If he hasn’t killed him.”