As for Otto Mainzer, the bastard was a bastard, that was all there was to say about him. As long as Mainzer kept his rotten personality within bounds Carlow would control himself, but once this job was over if Mainzer wanted to go on being cute Carlow would be happy to bend a tire iron over his head. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d stretched out a bruiser who thought he could have it over Carlow because of the difference in their sizes, and it might not be the last, but Carlow thought it would probably be the one he’d enjoy the most.
In the meantime, tonight’s work was mostly dull. The highlight had been watching Parker’s woman cross her legs; from then on, the night had been downhill. All he had to do was stand around behind the truck a lot, looking into the open manhole and making believe he was a power-and-light worker, and when Mainzer brought him more of the boodle he had to go into the truck and stash it.
Only once in the last hour had he seen a police car, and that had gone on by him without a glance. Other than that, traffic had been so light as to be almost nonexistent, and pedestrians going by on the sidewalk were as rare as dodo eggs. Occasionally Mainzer had to wait out of sight in the doorway while groups of conventioneers, most of them carrying cargoes of alcohol, straggled by and into the hotel, but these delays were never long. Carlow did his work methodically, spent most of his free time thinking about his tentative plans for the next car he wanted to build, and when at ten minutes to three the man in the topcoat and hat walked over and stood in front of him Carlow at first didn’t even see the gun in his hand. He said, “What’s up, buddy?” thinking the guy was going to ask directions or something like that.
But the guy said, “You are. Let’s take a walk.” And motioned with the gun.
Then Carlow saw it, and a feeling like ice water ran down the middle of his back. He looked at the guy’s face again, and he just didn’t look like law. Carlow said, “I’m easy. No need to get excited.” And moved his arms out from his sides, so he wouldn’t look as though he was reaching for anything.
“That’s the way to be, all right,” said the other. “Let’s go inside.”
“Sure.”
The guy wanted him to go into the office building. Carlow left the truck and walked across the sidewalk and pushed open the door, the man with the gun coming along behind him.
Inside, Carlow saw the dim form of Mainzer lying on the floor near the foot of the stairs. I’m going to get it, too, he thought, and then pain came curving in a bright hard flash around both sides of his head and turned the world to white darkness.
Six
BILLY LEBATARD felt like Judas Iscariot. He stood there in the brightly lighted bourse room, packing coins into case after case, and though in a small way he did feel the excitement and the thrill that he thought natural to a scene like this, what he mostly felt was sick and rotten and miserable and the worst kind of Benedict Arnold.
Because this was much worse than the other times, the two or three times when money had been short and he had helped professional criminals to rob coin dealers. Well, not helped exactly. He’d merely pointed out in each case a good subject, and told the robbers what they needed to know about their victim’s movements, and then afterward he’d brought the stolen coins for something less than half of their retail value.
Of course, no matter how you looked at it, those times had been just the same as this one, just as bad, just as crooked. But this one felt worse. Mostly, probably, it was because those other times the victims had been individual dealers he hadn’t really known all that well, men he’d only met a few times around the convention circuit, and this time the primary victims were going to be the members of the Indianapolis Coin Association, the host club for this convention. And they were people Billy had known for years, people who had befriended him, had invited him to their homes, had accepted him and welcomed him and thought of him as their friend.
Billy Lebatard well knew the value of friendship. He’d been a shy and lonely child, and at times it had seemed as though his entire life would be lonely, and numismatics had saved him. Fellow hobbyists share something important to them which the outside world considers unimportant and frivolous, so that in a small way all hobbyists are social outcasts; a true social outcast can become less noticeable in their midst.
Billy was the younger of two boys, his father being a druggist with his own small store down in Beach Grove. The older boy, Dick, had gone off to be a Greenwich Village beatnik at an early age, but Billy had been more the stay-at-home type. The family had assumed that he would be going to college, but when two months after high-school graduation his mother and father both died in a bus accident on their way home from a druggists’ convention in Columbus, Ohio, Billy suddenly discovered he had no true desire to go to college, nor to do much of anything else. He had inherited the house in Mars Hill and the drugstore and about twenty-two thousand dollars; he was eighteen years old; and he had no ambition. He sold the drugstore, split the inheritance with Dick, continued to live at home, and devoted more and more of his time to his hobby of coin collecting.
The transition from hobbyist to dealer had been gradual, and he’d already been a dealer in a small way months before he first took a table at a coin convention. His business had expanded until he could usually make a living from it, with only those few slumps when he’d taken to fencing stolen goods. Until Claire had come into his life he’d had neither desire nor need for a great deal of money.
Claire showed up because Dick had a wife out there in New York, and the wife had an airline pilot brother, who a couple of years ago had chosen to live in the Indianapolis area. For some reason Dick had suggested that the pilot look Billy up, which he did, bringing his good-looking wife Claire along, but Billy and the pilot hadn’t hit it off together at all, and Billy saw neither of them again until over a year later, when Claire called to ask if he could recommend a local undertaker.
When he heard that the pilot was dead, something stirred in Billy’s mind, and the most violent physical lust he’d ever experienced shook him like a fox shaking a rabbit. He craved Claire, craved her beyond rationality. For as long as possible he hid this craving behind a facade of helpfulness, and when at last he did make his shaky, clumsy, terrified proposition she had cut him dead with such cold viciousness that he retreated at once to helpfulness again, trying to make believe that nothing had ever been said on either side.
It was a while after that that Claire had come to him and told him she needed seventy thousand dollars. She wouldn’t tell him why, and she wouldn’t make any real promises, but the implication was very clear that if Billy could come up with the needed money his earlier proposition would be reconsidered in a much kindlier light.
And now here he was, stealing other people’s coins, surrounded by hard, violent, self-assured men, betraying all the people who had ever befriended him. At the other end of the room was Claire, who had never even allowed him to kiss her, and moving back and forth was the man named Parker, who Billy was sure had actually been to bed with Claire.