Two for the Money (44 page)

“I don’t believe you,” Greer said, and shot Angello through the throat.

Angello’s .38 went off, but Nolan had had sense to duck and roll as Greer fired, and Angello’s gun clattered to the floor and he clutched with both hands under his double chin and flopped onto his back and gurgled and died.

Nolan said, “Jesus.”

Greer came over and helped him up. “Where’s Charlie?”

“Shit,” Nolan said, and headed for the kitchen.

When he got there the elevator had gone to the bottom. Charlie had somehow found strength to punch DOWN. Nolan pressed the button and heard the elevator whine and
moan and start its ascent. When it got back up, Charlie was still inside the cage.

He was sitting against the steel wall, his lower tee-shirt and shorts soaked with red. His eyes were shut.

Nolan crouched down beside the little man and yelled as though Charlie were a hundred yards away. “Charlie! For Christ’s sake, Charlie!”

The close-set eyes flickered.

“Charlie,” Nolan said, putting a hand on the little man’s shoulder. “Thank God you’re alive.”

“Never thought I’d live to . . . hear you . . . say that, Nolan.”

“Where is it, Charlie? What did you do with my money?”

“I won, Nolan. I beat you.”

“You want me to help your boy, don’t you? Well, where’s the money, what’d you do with it?”

“You promise . . . promise you’ll . . . help Walter?”

“I’ll do whatever you want, just what did you do with my money!”

“You’ll keep your word . . . if I tell you what I did with it?”

“Yes, dammit! Don’t die on me, you son of a bitch!”

“All right,” Charlie said, and he told Nolan what he’d done with the money. The look of dismayed surprise on Nolan’s face tickled Charlie’s ass and Charlie let out one big, raucous belly laugh and held his bleeding belly and died that way.

Nolan got to his feet unsteadily. He felt as if he, too, had been ripped into by Angello’s grease gun. He stepped out of the elevator and wandered into the kitchen, took a seat at the Formica-top table, sat and stared at the cluster of empty Schlitz cans in front of him, pressed his hands against his temples.

Greer said, “What’s going on?”

Nolan pointed toward the vestibule and Greer went over and saw Charlie and came back.

“That’s a nasty gash on your forehead,” Greer said.

Nolan said, “Get me a beer, will you? Should be some in that refrigerator.”

Greer brought Nolan a Schlitz, got one for himself and sat with Nolan at the table.

“You okay, Nolan?”

“I don’t know yet.” He gulped down the beer. He belched. “That was nice shooting in there. I take back what I said about snub-nose .38’s.”

Greer grinned. “How do you know I was aiming at Ange?”

Nolan managed to return the grin, said, “Where’d you come from, anyway? I didn’t expect you to show up like the fucking marines.”

“Came straight from Iowa City. Felix called me and said to get my butt up to this place.”

It hadn’t taken Felix long to track down Eagle’s Roost. “How’d you beat Felix’s boys up here?”

“I didn’t. Not the first wave anyway. Two Family guys, friends of mine, are lying back in those pine trees with their guts shot out of them. Didn’t you hear gunfire?”

Nolan shook his head no. “Angello was using a grease gun with a silencer. You make more noise breathing than it makes shooting.”

“What was he up to, anyway?”

“Covering his tracks. He was in with Charlie.”

“Shit. Wait’ll Felix finds out.”

“That’s what Angello must’ve been thinking. He knew he was up shit crick when the Family got onto Charlie. I figure he killed Tillis and Harry because they were his fellow conspirators and could implicate him. Same goes for killing Charlie. He probably hoped to make it look like I was going around shooting the guys responsible for taking my money, and leave it looking like Charlie and me killed each other in a crossfire.”

“Maybe he was after the money, too.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What
about
the money?”

“Gone. All of it. Gone.”

“How, for Christ’s sake?”

Nolan told Greer what Charlie did with the money. Greer shook his head, said, “Old bastard must’ve been crazy.”

“Yeah,” Nolan agreed. “Like the rest of us.”

Nolan told Greer to relay word to Felix about the money, told him he’d be at the Tropical waiting for Felix to come talk. There would be plans to cancel, new arrangements to be made.

Jon had the Olds hotwired and ready to go in the boathouse garage, but it was unnecessary, because Nolan had found Charlie’s keys on the kitchen counter. Nolan and Jon laid Walter in the backseat; somewhere along the line the sock had been taken out of his mouth, but he wasn’t saying much anyway. Nolan didn’t answer any of Jon’s questions about what had happened or where the money was. Finally Jon asked if he could run upstairs and get something before they left, and Nolan said okay. When Jon came back with a box full of comic books, Nolan didn’t even say anything; he just opened the trunk for the boy and thought, well, at least somebody got something out of this.

They drove out of the garage, stopped to unlock the gate, where Nolan told Jon to get in the backseat with Walter and untie him.

Nolan started driving again and talked to Walter in the rearview mirror. “Your father is dead.”

Walter made a move to grab Nolan and Jon stopped him.

“Easy,” Nolan said. “I didn’t kill your old man, one of his own cohorts did. What I’m doing now is answering his dying request, God knows why, and hauling your ass away from that place before more Family people show up.”

“Where . . . where are you taking me?” Walter said.

“I’m going to drop you off at your sister’s apartment in
Dekalb. She’ll be glad to see you, I think, if she isn’t off feeding the world’s hungry.”

They were passing through the subdivision of summer homes now. Nolan slowed the Olds and let a little boy and girl in swimming suits cross in front of him.

Walter said, “Won’t they . . . they be coming after me?”

“I don’t think so. You’re no threat to anybody. I’ll do some talking for you.”

“But . . . I’m supposed to be
dead
. . .”

“It’s not your fault they mistook some poor bastard in a car crash for you.”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . .”

Nolan glanced back at the kid. “It’ll work out. Get yourself a job in an office.”

“Nolan,” Jon said.

“Yeah?”

“Are you going to say anything about the money, or aren’t you?”

“Forget about it.”

“What do you mean, forget about it?”

“It’s gone, kid. Up in smoke. Let it go.” He pulled off the subdivision drive onto the blacktop. He was thinking about Sherry, about climbing in the sack with Sherry and forgetting things for a while.

“Nolan,” Jon said, getting pissed, “what the hell happened to our money?”

Walter knew. Walter was smiling.

“Charlie burned it,” Nolan said.

I’m grateful to Charles Ardai and Hard Case Crime for choosing these two novels—collected here as one book, for the first time—as part of their new noir line. I believe Charles would have put them out individually, but I see them as one big novel now, and requested their publication in this manner.

Bait Money
was my first published book, written during 1969 and ’70, when I was attending the University of Iowa. Its sequel,
Blood Money
, was actually written several years later, in between two other novels of mine (
No Cure for Death
, the first Mallory—though the second published—and
The Broker
, in which hired killer Quarry was introduced). When Curtis Books bought
Bait Money
(the news came on Christmas Eve, 1971), I almost immediately began a sequel. I did
Blood Money
so quickly, and it sold so quickly, the books came out simultaneously, as a matched pair.

Two interesting things about the Curtis Books publication, both having to do with names.

The books had been submitted as by Allan Collins. As a “junior,” I grew up using my middle name, to avoid confusion with my father (Max), which is why if you see me at a mystery or comic con, you may hear me called “Al” or “Allan” by my closer pals and my wife Barb. But when I signed the contracts with Curtis, I used my full legal name: Max Allan Collins Jr. Then, when advance copies of the books arrived (around Christmas of ’72), the byline was suddenly MAX COLLINS. No one had told me of this decision (later I heard an editor correctly thought “Max Collins” sounded more like a mystery writer) and I first learned of it
when I saw the published novels. “Max Collins” was my father’s name, and he seemed delighted. I was not.

Neither was mystery writer Michael Collins, whose real name is Dennis Lynds. He called and requested I stop using that name. I offered to use a pen name—Dennis Lynds—which he didn’t find very funny. A few years later, both of us wrote novels called
The Slasher
and the two “M. Collins” mystery writers caused all sorts of bibliographic nightmares. That was when I added “Allan” into the byline: to better set myself apart from the other Collins (who is now a good friend of mine), and to reclaim my byline, at least in part. I guess I’m the only writer in history whose pseudonym is his real name.

The other name problem was with Nolan himself. Nolan was originally conceived as a pastiche of Richard Stark’s Parker, also a mono-named thief (more of this later). But again, someone at Curtis Books—an editor, or perhaps someone in the art department—decided that Nolan needed a first name. So they gave him one—Frank—in all of the cover copy.

Frank is not Nolan’s first name. I don’t know what his real first name is, but it’s not Frank . . . though you’ll find “Frank Nolan” listed as one of my series characters in scads of reference books. Yet another bibliographic nightmare. . . .

The Richard Stark “Parker” novels and the comic mystery fiction of Donald E. Westlake were the last two enthusiasms of my pre-professional life. Stark and Westlake were the final writers I discovered before turning pro, in the sense of authors who would influence me. I read both these guys for a good year or two before I found out these seeming opposites were one man (had their books side by side on the shelf already, and merely removed a bookend and slid them all together).

My previous heroes had been Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and James M. Cain . . . plus many writers of paperback originals for Gold Medal, Lion Books, and other pulp publishers of the
’50s and ’60s (I didn’t start reading this stuff till the early ’60s, but haunted used bookstores). My first novels, written in high school, were Spillane pastiches; I attempted to market these, and of course failed, but along the way learned to write. When I hit my late teens, the Richard Stark books hit me hard—the idea that a “bad guy” could be the lead character, that a man with a code could be a crook, not a cop.

Now I’d already shelved (temporarily, as it turned out) my desire to write private eye novels in the Mike Hammer/Shell Scott mode. Already private eyes were seeming quaint to me, rooted in another era, and I didn’t feel like writing about cops. I was a long-haired hippie (according to my father, anyway) and was disillusioned by cops clubbing kids in Chicago at the Democratic convention, among other outrages of the day. So the anti-establishment notion of Stark’s Parker appealed.

I played catch-up, reading other writers of “crook books,” in particular W.R. Burnett and Horace McCoy (whose
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
remains one of my half dozen favorite novels). And soon I set about to write my own Stark-like novel, with the notion of hitting the contemporary scene as hard as I could—no crime writers were dealing with my long-haired hippie generation. The result was a novel called
Mourn the Living
, which ended up being serialized long after the fact in
Hardboiled
magazine and in recent years has been collected into hardcover form by Five Star. The Nolan character was called Cord in that book (I changed it to Nolan many years later, since the character really was the same, down to the backstory).

The book did not find a publisher, though it was good enough to get me into the Writers Workshop (undergrad) at Iowa City, where I began to work with my mentor, the fine mainstream novelist and short story writer, Richard Yates. Dick Yates had a lot to do with pushing me across the line from imitator into creator, and helped me understand the needs of character over plot, though he was highly complimentary
about several minor characters in
Mourn the Living
. He paid me the best compliment of my career: “You’re a real writer.” (This, he believed, in spite of my genre leanings.)

I had taken a tentative step toward writing about the midwest in
Mourn
, and took a greater leap with
Bait Money
, which was initially called
First and Last Time
. I set the story in my own home area—Muscatine, Iowa (Port City) and the Quad Cities (home of John Looney,
Road to Perdition
’s real-life gangster). Essentially, my wife Barb helped me rob the bank where she worked; I in fact used the bank’s own security plan as a guide (it’s quoted at the front of the book). The book is called
Bait Money
because I loved the sound of this real banking term my bride shared with me.