“You know the Du-Parr’s restaurant up there?”
“Sure.”
“Meet me there at six tomorrow with the money in a paper bag.”
“You bet.”
He tried to turn around but I cuffed him again.
“You’ll see my face tomorrow,” I said. “When the job’s over.”
“But how will I know it’s you?”
“I’ll be reading a book,” I said. “War and Peace by Tolstoy. You can read, can’t you?”
“Sure I can,” he said, but I wasn’t convinced.
“Then get your ass outta here. Go on, run!”
I pushed Alan Tremont out onto the curb and he ran. He was good at running. Most thieves are.
WHEN I GOT BACK to the gas station Tilly Monroe’s big blue Buick was the only car left. I stood across the street for a good ten minutes weighing my luck in life up to that moment. I had been shot before, and stabbed and sapped and kicked. I’d been on a few hit lists. There were still a few people around who would have liked to see me dead.
But Tilly had no reason to want to hurt me. He didn’t even know my real name.
I DIDN’T NEED TO WORRY. Tilly Monroe was slumped down dead over a scattering of playing cards and cash. His hands were up at the sides of his head as if he were trying to surrender before he was slaughtered.
Five twenty-dollar bills had been dropped on the side of his face. They were old, 1934 issue, silver certificates from a time when the government backed up its currency.
My watch said four A.M.
I took the twenties and left for work.
IT WAS ALL IN THE AFTERNOONExaminer. Tilly Monroe shot dead, Eggersly Oliphant mysteriously missing, an argument over a poker game was the suspected cause of the falling out between cousins. But there was also evidence that there had been illegal activities surrounding the garage. Police detective Benjamin Suffolk told the press that Eggersly had been suspected of moving stolen cars for the past eleven months.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “And they’d’a gone on suspecting him for eleven years if not for those twenty dollar bills.”
“What’s that, Mr. Rawlins?” Willis Long, my newest janitor and pet project, asked.
“Nuthin’, Willie,” I said. “It’s just that some people in this world bigger fools than even young men like you.”
“The fool fool himself that he’s happy is better off than the smart man foolin’ that happy don’t mean a thing.”
“That gonna be your new song?”
“Maybe it is. Maybe.”
* * *
AT TEN-THIRTY I decided to ring the doorbell. The last visitor left the Sea Breeze Lane home at about nine-fifteen. I’d spent the time yawning and napping in the front seat of my car. I hadn’t gotten a good sleep for two nights. An old white woman opened the door.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Is Amiee in?”
“She’s not seeing anyone.”
“I’m not anyone, ma’am. I’m Easy Larry.”
“That’s all right, Myra,” Amiee said from about twenty feet away. She was wearing a long-sleeved blousy white dress that went all the way to the floor. Her hair was brushed out but not styled. Her nose was still wayward and sexy.
“But, Amiee,” Myra complained. “How would this look?”
“Go into some other room and close your eyes, dear,” Amiee said as she approached.
Myra huffed off through a doorway and I never saw her again.
“There you are again,” Amiee said.
There was fire in her eyes and my gut. But I wasn’t there for kisses.
“And there you are, the grieving wife abandoned by a faithless husband, cheated of her domestic bliss.”
“Why, Easy Larry, I do believe that you have read a book or two.”
“Where’s Ed?” I asked.
Amiee’s brash smile disappeared then. She looked down and shook her head.
“He’s upstairs cryin’ his heart out. The doctor came with a sedative for me but he ended up givin’ it to Eddie. He’s up there right now cryin’ in his sleep.”
I took the thirty-year-old twenty-dollar bills from my pocket and handed them to the siren.
“Where’d you get these?” she asked.
“Somebody had used this instead of pennies to cover Tilly’s eyes.”
“Oliphant,” she said uttering her own last name as if it was already alien to her.
“What does it mean?”
“That either Tilly or Eggersly robbed the safe. My husband got these from his first gas station back at the end of the war. It was the first money he made fixing a fancy car.”
“And he kept it in the safe?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that Tilly was such a fool that he’d throw down this money in a poker game?”
“Maybe he would. I don’t know that Eggersly ever told Tilly about that hundred dollars.”
“Was Tilly up in here with you the night the safe was robbed?”
Amiee hesitated for a moment before saying, “Yeah. He knew I was open to him when I knew Gator was with his whore.”
“Then that rules him out,” I said. “Who else knew about the bills?”
The truth dawned in Amiee’s eyes. I could see it clearly.
“Where was Ed when you were playing with Tilly?”
“Tilly come over after Ed was asleep.”
“You think he might have ever got up and went to the toilet?”
ED WAS MOANING and shifting around in his bed. When we came in he cried and called out, “Mama?”
“Sh, baby, go back to sleep.”
It was definitely a boy’s room. It smelled of sour socks. There was a little box record player on a table and three baseball bats leaning into a corner. He had comic books and stacks of blue-lined paper jumbled on his desk. There was an accordion paper file folder in the closet that contained Oliphant’s receipts and maybe forty-two hundred dollars in cash.
“You stay here,” Amiee said. “I’ll go downstairs and get rid of Myra.”
When she was gone a few minutes I pulled an orange stool up to the side of the bed.
“Ed?”
“Uh.”
“Eddie.”
“Mmmm. What?” he whined.
“Are you awake?”
“No.”
“Why did you rob your father’s safe, son?”
“Tilly wanted to sell me the dirt bike. He said he wanted a hundred dollars.”
“What are you doing?” Amiee was standing at the door.
“Where’s Myra?” I asked.
“Already gone. What were you doing to Ed?”
“He was getting upset. I was just trying to calm him down.”
Amiee needed love in her life, not for herself but for the boy. She smiled and touched my sleeve, then motioned for me to follow downstairs.
We spent almost two hours at the kitchen table wiping down every surface of the accordion file. Not the money; I took that.
“I guess he was just doin’ what boys do,” Amiee said at one point.
“Don’t believe it,” I said. “He stole that money and then paid Tilly for a motorbike with those twenty-dollar bills the day of the poker game. He was workin’ some serious mojo there.”
“What do you mean?” Amiee asked. But she knew.
“Tilly’s been up in here with you.” I said. “Up in Ed’s father’s bed on Tuesday nights. He knew it.”
“I’ve seen you looking at my nose,” she said. “You know it used to be straight. I had what they call an aristocratic nose.”
I adjusted my dishwashing gloves. They were small on me and made my hands sweat.
“Oliphant broke it,” she sneered, “that was back when he still loved me. But I didn’t care about that. What made me mad was how he ignored Eddie. Wouldn’t stay around for a baseball game or ask about school. That’s why Eddie worked down at the garage. It was the only way he could see his father.”
“Sons love their fathers,” I said. “He set up Tilly. Did a good job of it too. Even if his cousin would have said that he got the money from Ed, Oliphant would have never believed it.”
“But he didn’t think his father would have killed him,” Amiee said.
“He wasn’t thinkin’ about what would happen at all,” I said. “Only how he could make his father as mad as he was.”