Hush Money (15 page)

“He’s a mob guy.”

“He’s a mob guy. You’re screwing a mob guy’s daughter in a mob guy’s motel. There you have it.”

Jon swallowed. “Are you mad at me, Nolan?”

“Mad? No. Hell, I admire you. You got balls, kid.”

“What should I do, Nolan?”

“Have fun, I guess. That’s a nice looking piece of ass you lined yourself up with. Maybe it’ll have been worth it.”

“Okay, so I fucked up. I admit it. But how was I to know? You bring me along and don’t tell me a damn thing . . .”

Nolan slapped the toilet lid down and sat. His tone softened. “I know. It is my fault. If I’m going to bring you into these things, if I’m going to trust you to be capable of helping me out, I shouldn’t keep you in the dark all the time. It’s my fault. But Christ, kid, think with your head, not your dick. A grade-school kid could put two and two together and come up with four, right? You should have put me and that girl’s father together and come up with hands-off-the-daughter.”

Jon nodded. “I was an asshole.”

“You and me both. We’re doing our talking in the right room.”

Jon grinned. “They say all the assholes hang out here.”

Nolan grinned back, said, “Go out and have something to eat with your girl friend. Take her back to the room soon as possible and make sure none of the help sees you going in.”

“I shouldn’t take her home, huh? And I shouldn’t mention knowing who she is and all?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I shouldn’t mention knowing who she
i
s.
”

“Look, lad, she probably doesn’t even know who she is herself. She probably figures Daddy is in the motel business and leaves it go at that.”

“What’s going on, anyway?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Bullshit! You just got through saying how—”

“I know, but it’s complicated and there isn’t time. But listen. If somebody should come looking for me, which I doubt, because I don’t see anybody in Des Moines linking the Ryan name to me, but if somebody does, just play it straight. Just say you’re a friend of mine and I’m out handling some personal business. Got that?”

“Nolan, what the hell else could I tell anybody? You haven’t told me shit about what’s coming off around here.”

“That’s so when your girl friend’s father starts pulling out your toenails with pliers to make you talk, you won’t have a thing to say. Now get going.”

13

NOLAN DIDN’T EXPECT
anybody to be home. He’d gotten the credit card out of his wallet to open the door, looked around the apartment-house hall to make sure no one was watching him, and then, as he was about to slide the card between door and jamb, decided maybe he’d better ring the bell, just to be sure. And now he was looking into the very pretty, very blue eyes of Steve McCracken’s sister, Diane.

“Yes?” she said.

She was wearing a white floor-length terry robe, and her platinum hair was tousled; she’d obviously been sleeping, her face a little puffy, her eyes half-lidded, but she was still a good-looking young woman. Not alert at the moment, but good- looking.

“Diane?” Nolan said, palming the credit card, slipping it into his suitcoat pocket.

She had opened the door all the way initially, but now, her grogginess receding, her lack of recognition apparent, she stepped back inside and closed the door to a crack and peeked out at Nolan, giving him a properly wary look, saying “Yes?” like, who the hell are you and what the hell do you want?

“I’m Nolan. Remember me?”

The wary look remained, but seemed to soften.

“Chicago,” he said. “A long time ago.”

The door opened wider, just a shade.

He smiled. “Make believe the mustache isn’t there.”

And she smiled, too, suddenly.

“Nolan?” she said.

“Nolan.”

“Good God, Nolan . . . it is you, isn’t it? I haven’t seen you since I was a kid, haven’t even thought of you in years. Nolan.” She hugged him. She had a musky, bedroom smell about her, which jarred him, as his memories of her were of a child, and a homely one at that.

“Come in, come in,” she was saying.

He did.

It was a nice enough apartment, as the new assembly-line types go: pastel-yellow plaster- pebbled walls; fluffy dark-blue carpeting; kitchenette off to the left. There was a light blue couch upholstered in velvetlike material, and matching armchairs, only bright yellow, across the way. Over the couch was a big abstract painting (squares of dark blue and squares of light yellow) picked to complement the colors in the room, he supposed, but succeeding only in overkill. He didn’t know why exactly, but the room seemed kind of chilly. Maybe it was the emotionless, meaningless abstract painting. Maybe it was nothing. He didn’t know.

“Excuse the way I look.” she said, sitting on the couch, nodding for him to join her. “But I stayed home from work today. Not really sick, just felt a little punk, little tired. Nothing contagious, I’m sure, so you don’t have to worry.”

Nolan didn’t have to be told she’d stayed home from work: he’d known she would—or rather should—be at work, and had hoped to avoid an old-home-week confrontation with McCracken’s sister by simply searching her apartment when she wasn’t there. But here she was, in the way of his reason for being here, which was to locate her brother’s address or phone number or some other damn thing that might lead Nolan to him.

“What brings you to Des Moines, Nolan? God, I can’t get over it. All these years.”

“I was in town on business,” Nolan said, “and it occurred to me I should look you up and say how sorry I am about you losing your folks. We were good friends, your father and mother and I. I was real close with your dad especially, as you know.”

She didn’t say anything right away. Her face tightened. Her eyes got kind of glazed. She seemed to tense up all over. Then she said, “It’s been over a year since he died. He and mother. They were getting back together, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” Nolan said. “I didn’t even know they’d broken up.” Which was untrue, but might prompt an interesting response.

“They were divorced ten years ago, shortly after we moved to Des Moines, in fact. I never really knew the reason why. It didn’t make sense to me as a kid and it doesn’t now. Mom had been unhappy in Chicago, didn’t like what Daddy was doing there, with that nightclub and everything, and she seemed so happy when he said we’d be going to Des Moines, that he’d be getting out of the nightclub business and was going to manage a motel in Des Moines. But then we got here and a few months later, poof. Funny, isn’t it? They both loved each other. They saw each other all the time, were welcome in each other’s homes. But for some reason Mother refused to remarry and live with him again.”

“And your mother never said why?”

“No. And I don’t know why she relented toward the end there, either.”

“They were sure in love when I knew them.”

“You were out of touch a long time, Nolan. How come?”

“Didn’t your father ever tell you?”

“No.”

“I had a falling-out with the people who employed your father and me.”

Years ago, in Chicago, Jack McCracken had run a club across from Nolan’s on Rush Street; both clubs belonged to the Family. Nolan and McCracken were best of friends but had parted company out of necessity when Nolan made his abrupt, violent departure from the Family circle. It would have been dangerous to the point of stupidity for Nolan to associate with anyone linked with the Family, and vice versa, so he hadn’t talked to McCracken for more than a decade and a half, hadn’t even heard of his old friend’s death until last night, when Felix told him.

“But you didn’t have a falling out with Daddy, did you? Just the people you two worked for.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t understand, Nolan. Just became you didn’t get along with your employers, yours and Daddy’s, doesn’t mean the two of you couldn’t still be friends.”

That answered a big question. Unless she was playing it cute, Diane had no idea her father had worked for the Family in Chicago, and that his later employers, the DiPretas, were also mob-related.

“We just ended up in different parts of the country, Diane. Drifted apart. Happens to friends all the time. You know how it is. I didn’t hear about your parents dying till just recently or I’d have got in touch with you sooner. So what have you been up to, for fifteen years? Your braces are off, you aren’t flat-chested anymore. What else?”

She sighed and grinned crookedly. “I’m still a little flat-chested, now that you mention it. Say, what time is it?”

“It’s after one.”

“Have you had lunch yet?”

“No.”

“So far today I haven’t felt like eating, but seeing you after so long kind of perks me up. I got some good lasagna left over from dinner last night. If I heat it up, will you help me finish it off?”

He wished he could have avoided all this. She was pleasant company, sure, but he didn’t want to sit around chatting all afternoon. He had to find Steve McCracken and soon: Frank DiPreta clearly had theories about the assassin which included McCracken as a possibility; and what with the tossing of a grenade this morning and the sniping of Vince early this afternoon, things were happening too fast to be wasting time in idle chatter.

But he did like her. And she could, most probably, lead him to her brother.

So for forty minutes they talked and ate and got along well. She fed him salad and lasagna, he fed her a terse, imaginary tale of working on the West Coast as a salesman, then finally ended on a note of partial truth, saying how he’d recently been trying to get back into the nightclub business, and was in Des Moines working on that. Then she went on to an equally terse account of going to college for a couple of years at Drake, getting married, having a child, getting divorced. She told it all with very little enthusiasm, and when she spoke of her ex-husband, Jerry, it was as if she were encased in a sheet of ice. Only when she talked about her six-year-old daughter Joni did she come to life again.

Eventually they were back sitting on the couch and he got around to it: “Listen, Diane, how’s your brother, anyway? I’d like to see him while I’m in town.”

She paled.

She touched a lower lip that had begun trembling and said, “Uh, Stevie . . . well, uh Stevie, he’s just fine.”

“What’s wrong, Diane?”

“Wrong?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing at all.”

And she broke down.

He went to her and gathered her in his arms. Let her cry into his shoulder. He let her cry for several minutes without asking any more questions.

And he didn’t need to. She began telling him what he wanted to know on her own.

“Nolan, I don’t know how the hell it happened you showed up today, after all those years, but thank God you did. I need somebody right now. I need Daddy, is who I need, but he’s dead—goddamnit, he’s dead. And Stevie’s acting crazy. I . . . I wasn’t sick today, you know, not really. I was emotionally . . . I don’t know, overwrought, or disturbed, or something. Depressed, upset, scared, you name it. Last night Stevie came for dinner, and he just acted so crazy. He’s been a little strange since he got home from service a few weeks ago. He got an apartment but then told me not to come over. I mean I know where he lives, but he said a condition of the landlord’s was no visitors. I just don’t believe that—it’s silly, crazy—but Stevie was coming over here often enough that I didn’t mind, didn’t ever question what he’d told me about the landlord’s silly rule. He did give me a phone number—it came with the apartment—but then last night he came over and said not to call him any more unless it was an absolute emergency. He’d get in touch with me now and then, he said, but not to call him and not to give his phone number or address to
anybody
under any circumstances. He made me promise that. And then he said he wouldn’t be able to see us for a while, Joni and me. Wouldn’t be coming over any more. He said there was a good reason but that he couldn’t tell me. He would still be in town, still be around, but he couldn’t see us. I . . . I almost got hysterical. I sent Joni downstairs to her friend Sally’s, and I pleaded with Stevie, begged him to tell me what was going on. I even got to where I was screaming at him after a while. Then I got mad, furious with him, and that didn’t do any good either. And he left. He just left, Nolan, and said he’d call now and then. I . . . I just don’t know what to think.”