“I wouldn’t fuck around, I were you,” the guy said. “You think Felix came all the way from Chicago just to check out the fuckin’ Howard John son’s.”
“Maybe he likes the clams,” Nolan said.
“I’m laughin’,” the guy said. “I were you, Nolan, I’d shake a fuckin’ leg.”
“Don’t call me Nolan,” Nolan said.
“Oh? Why the fuck not?”
“Because,” Nolan said, “I don’t know you and you don’t know me, and it’s an arrangement that’s worked fine ’til now, so leave it alone.”
Jon said, “Nolan, I had no idea he works for that Felix character. I mean, the guy broke in the house and came up on me when I was asleep, and I saw his gun and...”
“You did the right thing. It’s just a little surprising Felix would send such low-caliber help around. I didn’t know the Family was hurting so bad.”
“Hey, Nolan,” the guy said, “tell you what. How ’bout you suck my dick and choke on it?”
Nolan went over and grabbed the guy’s ear and twisted. “Be polite,” he said.
“Christ! Awright, awright! Christ almighty, let go my fuckin’ ear! Here on out, I’m Emily fuckin’ Post!”
“Okay,” Nolan said and let go of the ear.
The guy sat with one hand on his ear and the other covering his nose and eyes with Kleenex; if he’d had another hand to cover his mouth, he could’ve been all three monkeys.
Nolan reached over and picked the phone off the coffee table and tossed it on the guy’s lap.
“Make a call,” Nolan said. “I want to talk to Felix.”
“Call him yourself, motherfucker!”
“I thought I told you to be polite.”
“Okay, okay! Shit. Jesus.” The guy stopped to look at lie Kleenex and decided his nose was no longer bleeding. He composed himself. He dialed the phone and when he got the desk clerk he asked for Felix’s room.
“This is Cotter,” the guy said. “Well, I’m here with Nolan now is where I am.... Yeah, at the antique shop... Well, I had a little trouble... No, just a little trouble. I guess you might say I didn’t handle this the best I could... Yeah, I guess you could say that too. Look, Nolan wants to talk to you.” Cotter covered the mouthpiece and said, “Hey, I was supposed to bring you out to see him right away, and now I’m calling up and you’re wanting to talk to him and it’s making me look bad. Give me a goddamn break and don’t go into the, you know, little hassles we been havin’. I mean I come out on the shitty end of the stick anyway, right? A fuckin’ half-hour nosebleed, you twistin’ my fuckin’ ear off my head, and I’m sittin’ here with my balls needin’ a fuckin’ ice pack or something, so give me a goddamn break, what do you say?”
“Sure,” Nolan said and took the phone.
“Nolan?” Felix said. “What’s going on there?”
“Hello, Felix,” Nolan said. “Say, are you missing an incompetent asshole? One turned up here.”
“Nolan, I apologize,” Felix said. “I don’t know what’s been happening there, but you have my apologies. This was a rather hastily contrived affair and I regret its being so rough around the edges.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean, Felix?”
“I have a room here at the motel, Nolan. This is a very important matter I’ve come to discuss with you, a matter of utmost urgency. Can you come out here straight away so we can put our heads together?”
“Well, I tell you, Felix. We put our heads together maybe four or five times so far this year and each time it’s in a motel room. Every damn time I see you it’s in a motel room. I start to feeling like some cheap whore meeting a businessman on his lunch hour.”
Felix laughed at that, trying to keep the laugh from sounding nervous, and came back jokingly, “Now how can you compare yourself to a whore, Nolan, with the kind of money you make?”
“Call girl, then. What’s in a name? Either way you get screwed.”
“Nolan...”
One nice thing about Felix was that he was afraid of Nolan. Nolan had learned early on that intimidation was his most effective means of dealing with Felix, which was one of the big advantages of going through a middle-man lawyer instead of dealing with the Family direct.
“Felix, maybe you don’t think it’s important, maybe you don’t think it’s worth talking about, but when you send a guy around who breaks into my friend’s house and sticks a gun in my friend’s face, I guess I get a little — I don’t know — perturbed, you could say. So I don’t think I want to come see you at Howard Johnson’s, Felix, whether you come all the way from Chicago to see me or China or where. You come here and we’ll talk, if I’m over being perturbed by that time.”
“Nolan, I don’t even have the car here.”
“Take a cab, Felix. Hitchhike. Walk. Do what you want.”
Nolan hung up.
Cotter said, “Thanks a whole fuckin’ bunch, pal. Now I’m really gonna get my fuckin’ ass fried. Thanks, fucker, thanks for—”
“Jon, take that Kleenex he’s been bleeding in and stick it in his mouth, will you? I’m tired of listening to him.”
“Hey,” Cotter said. “Here on out, I’m a deaf mute.” And he covered his mouth.
Nolan dragged a chair over by the window and had Cotter sit in it.
“You watch for Felix,” he told him. “And let us know when he’s here.”
So Cotter sat by the window and Nolan and Jon sat at the table in the kitchen, from which they could see Cotter plainly through the open archway.
Jon asked Nolan if he wanted a beer, and Nolan said no, he’d been drinking Scotch all night and maybe he ought to have some coffee before Felix got there. Jon fixed instant coffee and had a cup himself. They didn’t say much for the next few minutes, just sitting and drinking their coffee and enjoying the silence. Finally Nolan spoke, in a soft tone that their guest in the outer room wasn’t likely to pick up, “Kid, you did all right out there.”
“Yeah, well I hope I didn’t screw things up for you with that Family lawyer.”
“I can handle Felix. He ought to know better than to send the likes of that around.”
“How was your friend?”
“Wagner? Okay for a guy whose hobby is heart attacks.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. He’s one of those guys who pushes himself all the time. Runs all day, then goes home and runs in place. He owns that restaurant downtown, that Elks Club they converted.”
“I hear it’s really something. Seafood restaurant, isn’t it?”
“Haven’t been in there myself.” Nolan sipped his coffee. “He asked me in.”
“He asked you in? He asked you to buy in, you mean, as a partner?”
“Yeah.”
“Well?”
“Well what.”
“You going to do it?”
“Don’t know. Might be hard. You know where I stand with the Family.”
Jon lowered his voice even further. “You mean that if they found out about Detroit they might get pissed off? Is that what you mean?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“But don’t you want out of the Tropical? Aren’t you getting bored with that?”
“The word is numb.”
Out in the other room, Cotter said, “A cab’s pulling in. Felix is getting out.”
By the time Nolan got downstairs and outside, Felix was sitting in the back seat of the Continental, waiting with the door open for Nolan to join him. The plush interior seemed large even for a Continental, but perhaps the diminutive Felix just made it seem that way. The lawyer was wearing a gray suit, so perfectly in style he might have picked it up at the tailor’s that afternoon; his shirt was deep blue and his tie light blue. He had a Miami suntan, and a face so ordinary, so bland, if you looked away for a second you forgot it. His hair was prematurely gray and cut in a sculpted sort of way that made it look like an expensive wig. Felix was older than thirty and younger than fifty, but Nolan wouldn’t lay odds where exactly.