“What?”
“You can take your hands off the bar. He’s gone. Give me a pen.”
He finally unfroze himself, pushed himself away from the bar, and found me a pen. I wrote down the plate number on a cocktail napkin. Bennett leaned over the sink as though he was about to throw up.
When Margaret came out, carrying a plate of food, she stopped dead in her tracks. “What’s going on?” she said. “What’s wrong? Alex, what happened to your face?”
Bennett shook his head. Ham kept sitting at the table, staring at the door.
“You can pour me that beer now,” I said. “And then you can start talking.”
He picked up a mug, pulled the tap, then set the mug down in front of me with a bang. The foam ran all over the bar.
When Ham finally got up and came to the bar, Bennett told him to take over.
“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” Margaret said.
“I’ll tell you later,” Bennett said. “I need some air.”
I was behind him so fast the door didn’t even get a chance to shut. “Who was that man?” I said. “What’s his name?”
“I don’t know his name,” he said.
“The hell you don’t. He was one of the three men you got to take down Vargas.”
He stopped in the middle of the parking lot. He turned to me. He was standing so close, and being a good five inches taller, he had to look down at me. He didn’t say a word.
“Start explaining,” I said.
He shook his head.
“I already look like hell, Bennett. I’ve got nothing else to lose. Start talking now or we go right here.”
He let out a long, tired breath. “Come with me,” he said.
I followed him around the lot, and back to the river. I saw the dock where I had left Vargas after our little lunch date. There was a picnic table back there. Bennett sat down, and then I did the same, directly across from him. A couple of boats passed by. The sun was setting. It was another goddamned beautiful sunset and this was how I was spending it.
“How’d you figure it out?” he said.
“I didn’t. Not at first. That was the problem. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had just thought about it for a while.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was thinking it was all a setup,” I said. “I was thinking it had to be a setup. Using your car, planting that stuff at Gill’s house, and then at Jackie’s house…”
“How do you know about that?”
“I saw the videotape, Bennett. Leon showed it to me.”
“Yeah, the police certainly liked that tape,” he said. “I assume Vargas gave it to them. Of all the luck in the world, to have that son of a bitch tape the damned thing…”
“That’s just it,” I said. “Of all the luck. Who would have figured?”
“What do you mean?”
“You couldn’t have guessed that would happen. Nobody could have.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“The setup,” I said. “It just doesn’t work. If somebody was setting up all three of you, why use your car and then return it here? That doesn’t set you up at all. Without that videotape, there’s nothing to tie you into it. Only Jackie and Gill.”
He thought about that one for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I see what you mean.”
“What were you going to do? Call in an anonymous tip? Tell them Jackie and Gill had some of the stolen property on their premises?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You get the money,” I said. “And Jackie and Gill take the fall.”
“Alex, you got it all wrong. That’s not why we did this.”
“Who’s ‘we,’ Bennett? Who was involved in this? Start by telling me who the third gunman was. It wasn’t that other man in the bar?”
“No,” he said. “It was my son.”
“Your son is six foot fucking six,” I said. “He wasn’t there that night.”
“I have more than one son, Alex.”
That stopped me for a second. “I didn’t know that. I’ve never seen him.”
“My oldest, Sean, he lives down in Cleveland. He came up here to do it.”
“And this other guy, the one who turned up dead. Danny Cox is his name?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He was one of Sean’s old friends from high school. They used to run around together. Danny was a real hood back then, used to get into trouble all the time, and Sean would sometimes be right there with him. He ended up spending the night in jail once, when Danny and him got loaded and went out joyriding. The cop clocked them doing a hundred and ten down I-75. They stopped to piss in the middle of the road. Otherwise, the cop might not have even caught up with them. Anyway, Sean looked up Danny and asked him if he’d be interested in a little something…”
“A little something.”
“Yeah.”
“When that guy had the gun pressed to my head,” I said. “That was a little something.”
“Well, Danny knew about this other guy, over in Canada, who could get some guns, and who apparently had a little experience with these types of things. I was a little apprehensive, but Danny told me it would all go down a lot better if they had a pro involved.”
“You brought in a pro,” I said. “This is getting better by the minute.”
“This guy, as far as I know, they just call him ‘Blondie.’ Obviously, he’s even more of a heavy hitter than Danny was aware of.”
“You may have something there,” I said, “what with Danny lying there in the morgue with two bullet holes in him.”
Bennett looked behind him, out at the river. The sun kept going down and painting everything bright orange.
“Alex, this whole thing wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
“You know, I just remembered something Vargas said. He said that kick in the ribs you took was all for show. He was right, wasn’t he? That was all part of the script.”
“It was supposed to be,” he said, rubbing his side. “Danny got a little carried away with it.”
“So Danny and Blondie were the downstairs men. Your son Sean was the guy who emptied the safe?”
“That’s right.”
“And it was Sean who delivered the stuff to Gill and Jackie-by himself, after he dropped the other two guys off.”
“Yes.”
“So tell me, how much did you get? Everybody seems to have a different number in mind.”
He looked me in the eye. “Nothing, Alex. Sean got nothing.”
“Did they take the money out of the safe or not?”
He held up his hands. “All right, look. I’m telling you what happened. Sean came up and did this thing with Danny and this other guy. Naturally, there has to be some money involved. You gotta pay off Danny, and of course you gotta pay off this Blondie character. The thing is, when they came back here and split up the money in the car, there was thirty thousand dollars in the bag. Fucking Vargas, I should have known. All his big talk about being connected and having all this cash in his safe. Thirty fucking thousand, that’s only ten per man.”
“Not exactly the score of a lifetime.”
“No, and I’m sure this Blondie wasn’t too happy about it. I guess what Sean did was, he told them each to take half of his share, because he knew it wasn’t what they were expecting. So now they’ve each got fifteen. Still not a hell of a lot. But what are you gonna do?”
“Bennett…”
“This Blondie guy has been thinking about this for three, four days now, Alex. He’s feeling like he made a big mistake working with amateurs, and he’ll never do it again, right? Then he picks up the newspaper and sees me and Jackie and Gill getting hauled into jail, and he thinks, holy fuck, did I get played for a sucker. Because if all three of us were involved in this, which is certainly how it looks, I gotta admit, then it stands to reason that we were all in on the money.”
“Bennett, wait…”
“And you, too,” he said.
“Me.”
“You heard what he said. He thinks you must have been the ringleader.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on the fact that he’s a pro, Alex. Based on the fact that he had a list of everybody who was supposed to be there that night, and you weren’t on the list. He figures if you were the last minute wild card, you must have been added for a reason. So he checks up on you, finds out some things. That you were a cop, and then a private eye. And some other things, it sounds like. He didn’t say exactly what. But it sounds like you’re a known commodity.”