Gordon moves to the bed and sits.
Stella moves to the doorway between the bedroom and kitchen, the Beretta still trained on Gordon.
“So,” she says. “Where is it?”
He looks at her as if he hasn’t the foggiest idea.
“Mr. Happer told me to give you ten seconds to come up with the money you took off Smutt.” Stella narrows her eyes, “One. Two. Three—”
“I gave him the four hundred.”
“Four. Five. Six—”
Gordon raises his head and says, “Go ahead and shoot me. There’s no money.”
“Seven. Eight. Nine—”
“If I had it, you think I’d be dumb enough to have it on me? I spotted your Chevy as soon as I left the Governor Nicholls Wharf.”
Stella squeezes off another round, which knocks the lamp off the end table next to the bed.
“Dammit!” Gordon groans in pain. “I don’t have any more money. Smutt blew it all.”
Stella brushes her hair away from her face with her right hand and tells him, “Mr. Happer doesn’t believe you and I don’t believe you.”
Gordon clears his throat and says, “Mr. Happer and me go back a long way, lady. He knows better.”
A cold smile crosses Stella’s thin lips. “I’ll just whack you and toss the place. I’ll still get my fee.”
“This is crazy. I tell you, there’s no more money.”
Stella aims the Beretta with both hands again, this time at Gordon’s face. She says, “So you and the old man go back a ways, huh? Well, I’m the one he calls when things go badly. And you’re as bad as they come.”
Gordon nods at her. “I seen you around. I know all about you. And you got me all wrong, lady.”
Stella watches his eyes closely as she says, “When Smutt left the Fairgrounds, he went straight to his parole officer’s house and paid the man off. Three grand. Stiff payoff, but Smutt figured it was worth it. Then he went to two restaurants, gorged himself. Then dropped some cash at the betting parlor on Rampart.”
She watches Gordon’s pupils. A pinprick of recognition comes to them as soon as she says the words “Six grand. He had about six grand left. You took it off him.”
“No way.”
Stella fires again, into Gordon’s belly, and he howls.
“That’s it.” Stella’s smile broadens. “Keep denying it.”
“I don’t have it!” Gordon slumps backward.
Stella levels her weapon, aiming at Gordon’s forehead. She pauses, giving him one last chance.
“I don’t!” he screams.
She squeezes off a round that strikes Gordon in the forehead. Stepping forward, she puts two more in his head before he falls back on his bed. For good measure she empties the Beretta’s magazine, putting two more in the side of the man’s head.
She picks up all eight casings and slips them into the pocket of her coat. She leaves his Bersa under the bed. Let the police match it to the Smutt murder. Then, slowly and methodically, she tosses the place.
An hour later, she finds the six thousand in the flour container on Gordon’s kitchen counter. The giveaway — what man has fresh flour in a container?
Mr. Happer, sitting back in his captain’s chair, bats his eyes at the TV as Peter Ustinov taps out an SOS on his bathroom wall, a large cobra poised and ready to strike the rotund detective. Stella, standing at the desk’s edge in the trench coat outfit from last night, recognizes the scene and waits for David Niven to rush in with his sword to impale the snake.
When the scene’s tension dies, Mr. Happer turns his deep-set eyes to Stella and says, “Okay. You got the money?”
Stella shakes her head.
Mr. Happer’s eyes grow wide. “It wasn’t there?”
“I tore the place apart. If he had it, he stashed it.”
“Dammit!” Mr. Happer slaps a skeletonic hand on his desk. He picks up the remote control and pauses his movie. His black eyes leer at Stella’s eyes as if he can get the truth just by staring. She bites her lower lip, reaches down, and unfastens her coat. She opens it slowly as Happer’s gaze moves down her body.
Stella lets the coat fall to the floor and stands there naked except for the thigh-high stockings, which gives her long legs the silky look. Rolling her hips, Stella sits on the edge of the desk. Mr. Happer stares at her body as if mesmerized. It takes a long minute for his gaze to rise to her eyes.
“You sure you tossed the place right?”
Stella nods.
Mr. Happer picks up the remote and looks back at the TV. The riverboat is moored now, against the bank of the wide Nile River.
“Well, the word’ll get out. Make it easier later on,” Happer says. “That’s what the big boys do.”
Stella climbs off the desk and picks up her coat. As she closes it, she looks at the old man. Mr. Happer turns those black eyes to her and says, “You sure you tossed the place right?”
She’s ready, her face perfectly posed. “I’m sure.”
“Okay.” Mr. Happer looks back at the TV and mouths the words as Peter Ustinov speaks. Without looking, he opens his center desk drawer and withdraws an envelope. He slides it over to Stella, who picks it up and puts it in her purse.
“Good work,” Mr. Happer says.
“Thanks.” Stella turns and leaves him with his Ustinov and David Niven and riverboat floating down the Nile.
On her way down the stairs she looks at the dark Mississippi water and whispers a message to the dead Gordon. “So you and Mr. Happer go back a long way. Well, we go back a longer way.”
And I have tools, plenty of tools to work against this man, against all these men.
Three minutes later she spots the tail, a dark blue Olds.
Pete Dexter
The Jeweler
From Esquire
The old man ordered the soup of the day again, homemade noodles and chicken served with bread and a glass of house wine, and wiped at his nose with his napkin the whole time he ate. It was February, and everybody on the East Coast had the flu. The old man looked like he should have been home in bed, but his habits were set deep. At ten to six every morning, for instance, he stepped out of his front door in his bathrobe and slippers to retrieve the Inquirer. Two hours later he came out again, dressed in an overcoat, and walked to the end of his block and caught the SEPTA bus to work. Twice this week he’d given his seat to young women. Exactly at one o’clock he left the store, walked the four blocks to the restaurant, and had his soup of the day and wine, always sitting at the same table near the kitchen. The tab always came to six dollars, and he always left a dollar for the waitress. She had a snake tattooed around the fleshy part of her arm, and beneath it the name Jerry was written in script.
The man who had been keeping track of the old man’s habits was named Whittemore, and he noticed the hair in his plate as soon as the waitress set it on the table. The hair lay across his fish and was anchored at one end in a little white paper cup of tartar sauce, moving slightly in the air from the overhead fan, like something dying in bed but not quite dead. He moved closer and saw that most of the hair was black, but out toward the end, away from the tartar sauce, there was a bulb of root where it was brown.
The waitress was a blonde, so the hair had come from the kitchen, which was worse in a way than if it had just belonged to the waitress herself. She had the tattoo, of course, and a stud in her nose — a small pearl — and a stained blouse, but this was the human being, after all, that they’d sent out to greet the public. Christ knew what they looked like back in the kitchen.
“Is everything all right, hon?” She came back to his table empty-handed from the other side on the way to the kitchen. Whittemore looked up and saw the back of the stud glistening inside her nose. A week ago, when he first walked in and saw the pearl, he thought it was some kind of growth.