“Like I said, I knew you were a straight shooter. I respect that. I happen to think you’ve got it all wrong. I don’t think you understand me at all. But that’s all right. That’s not why I brought you out here.”
“Are you gonna finally tell me why you did?”
“It’s simple,” he said. “I wanted to ask your opinion.”
“On what?”
“On what happened the other night. And who might be responsible.”
“I don’t see why you’re asking me,” I said. “And to go to all this trouble…Hell, I know it wasn’t fun getting robbed, Vargas, but if you only had five thousand dollars in the safe…”
“That’s the figure I gave the police.”
“Okay, so it was more. A lot more?”
He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.
“Why would you want to keep a lot of money in your safe?” I said. “A guy like you, I figure you’d invest it in something. This way, you don’t even get any interest…”
“Yeah, no interest,” he said. “I also don’t have to give a big chunk of it to the IRS. Or to my first wife, for that matter. But let’s not talk about why I had money in my safe, or how much, or how it got there. I just want it back. I thought you might be able to help me.”
“You already have a man working for you.”
“Yes,” he said. “Your ex-partner, it turns out. Wasn’t that an interesting development.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But you’re the one with the experience,” he said. “You’re the one who wore a badge, down in Detroit. You’re the one with the bullet in your chest.” He looked down my chest, like everybody does when they happen to be talking about it. Someday I’ll get used to it.
“Look, Vargas…”
“Let me lay it out for you, Alex. Then you tell me what you think. That’s all I want. Then we’ll go back, I promise.”
“Lay it out.”
“Besides myself,” he said, “there were only five people in this world who knew about that safe. Not even my wife knew about it.”
“Come on, how could she not know?”
“I had the builder put that in. She hardly saw the place until it was done. Anyway, I’m at a poker game a couple of months ago. At O’Dell’s place, in the back room. Bennett was there, Jackie, Gill, Kenny, and Swanson. That was before I had any idea about Swanson and my wife, mind you. That was back when I still thought I was happily married. I had a few drinks that night. Too many, I suppose. I was losing a lot of money, and I said something stupid like maybe I had to go into my safe, to get some more cash.”
“That was it? That’s all you said?”
“All right, I may have said a little more. You know, I may have bragged about it a little. All the cash I had in my wall safe, and how my wife didn’t know about it. How she’d spend it all. Or something. Hell, I don’t even remember half of what I said.”
“So based on that…”
“Based on that, my first reaction to the other night is that it had to be Swanson. He knew it was poker night. He knew I’d be there to open the safe. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what you’d be thinking?”
“I only met Swanson once,” I said. “At Jackie’s place. We didn’t say more than ten words to each other. So I don’t know what to tell you.”
“But just based on the list of suspects, Alex, isn’t Swanson the name you’d come up with?”
“I know you can rule out Jackie,” I said. “And Bennett and Gill. I don’t know Kenny…”
“Assume it’s not Kenny,” he said. “Kenny’s got no reason to do this. No reason at all.”
“Okay, then that leaves Swanson. Assuming that nobody else knows about the safe.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“That’s it? That’s the opinion you wanted from me? Just to agree with you on that?”
“That’s what I was thinking at first,” he said, “but now…Let’s say that certain things have caused me to see it another way.”
“Certain things. Like what?”
“Let’s talk about you for a minute,” he said.
“Why do you want to talk about me?”
“Leon had some interesting things to say about you. So did Roy.”
“By Roy, I take it you mean Chief Maven? What are you, best buddies or something?”
“Not at all. He’s just a good police chief trying to solve a crime. Naturally we talked about the other men who were at my house that night. He seemed quite…agitated when your name came up.”
“Why am I not surprised…”
“Leon paints a very positive picture of you,” he said. “Maven, maybe not so positive. But I put both pictures together and I see something very intriguing. A failed baseball player, a failed cop. A failure as a private investigator even, although naturally Leon didn’t come out and say that. He did say that he hasn’t spoken to you in a while, and that you seem to have changed. I’m thinking, with everything you’ve been through, all the hard knocks you’ve taken, what do you have to show for it? You’ve always done the right thing, stayed on the straight path, for what?”
“I don’t have a few million dollars like you do,” I said. “Is that what you’re getting at? Would it occur to you that I don’t care about that?”
“You’ve never committed a crime in your entire life,” he said, “but now maybe you’re in a state of mind where you’d be…a little more receptive to the idea of trying something.”
“I can’t believe this. You really think I did it.”
“No,” he said. “Not at all. I know you didn’t set this whole thing up. But maybe, just maybe, if some person…or persons…were to approach you with this idea of playing a key role in a takedown.”
“A takedown,” I said. “My God, you are completely insane.”
“You were the inside man, weren’t you? You’ve been around criminals, and around guns. You knew how something like this works, what bases had to be covered. You knew how to make sure it went smoothly. With you right there on the scene, how could it not? If anything unexpected happened, you’d be there to deal with it.”
“This is quite a yarn you’re spinning,” I said. “It’s downright entertaining.”
“At first, I’m thinking, why do it with all those other people there? Why not just catch me alone? Or just me and my wife? Then it hits me. This way is better. This way is actually a lot safer. If I was by myself, I might have tried something stupid. Figure what the hell, it’s just me here, I’m gonna try to disarm this guy, shoot it out. And if it was me and my wife…Somebody putting a gun to my wife’s head? Again, assuming that I didn’t know she was screwing Swanson behind my back and I still gave a fuck what happened to her? I’d be a madman. I could do anything. Try to take them all on at once.”
“I seem to recall you just about wetting your pants the other night,” I said. “But go ahead. I don’t want to ruin your fantasy.”
“With five guests in the house, five men who I feel some responsibility for, but not so much that I’m crazy about it, you knew I’d play along. No problem at all.”
“Okay, so if I was brought in as the inside man,” I said, “then who asked me? Whose idea was this, Vargas?”
“You know who we’re talking about.”
“Who? If it’s not Swanson and it’s not Kenny, who are we talking about? Jackie? Gill? Bennett? Hell, didn’t Bennett take a nice shot to the ribs trying to protect you?”
“That was just for effect,” he said. “He was acting. I know he wouldn’t have done it if it was for real.”
“Do these men know that you’ve foiled their grand plan?”
“No,” he said. “I thought I’d bring it to you first. If you can round up all the money and give it back to me, maybe I’d be willing to drop the whole thing.”
“That’s big of you.”
“Stop playing games with me,” he said. His face was red now. Hell, his whole head was red. “It’s bottom-line time. I could just as easily go back to shore with one less person on board. A tragic accident, and you on the bottom of the lake.” He stood up from his chair. The dog stood below him, right between his legs. Two against one.
“I assume you’ve got a gun,” I said.
“I don’t need a gun,” he said. “You know why?”