Drawing Dead (26 page)

“Well?” Ben said.

Tommy had his hands over his ears. “Shut up a minute. I'm thinking. Cat, you better scoot. Your old man's on the way over. I don't want to have to give him back that ten K.”

Ben said, “What ten K is that?”

“Shut up. I gotta think.” He waited until Catfish was out of range, then said to Ben, “That meathead says he wants to
buy
the Galactic Guardians Fund.”

From
the pay phone in the Whitehall lobby, Wicky could see through the back wall, all glass, out onto the pool patio. He hung up the phone and watched Catfish, swimsuit the size of a sanitary napkin, kiss Tommy Jefferson and walk away. It was impossible, unthinkable, but he was seeing it. Smiling bitterly, he crossed the lobby to

the piano bar, hiked himself onto a stool, and ordered a gin and tonic. When his drink arrived, he asked the bartender if she thought that women were more devious than men. “Absolutely,” she said.

Wicky smiled and sipped his drink. “You're wrong,” he said.

Just keep telling yourself, “They want to believe. They all want it. They want it so bad it hurts. They're scared to death they're going to be left out.” Pretty soon you get so you can smell it right over the phone wire.

—Richard D. Wicky, V.P.,
training a new registered representative

Sometimes,
especially while they were lying in bed, Joey Cadillac liked to ask Chrissy Swenson for advice. He would explain his problem carefully, laying it out point by point, then tell her what he thought he should do. Chrissy would nod, frown, laugh, and shake her head at the right places, then think carefully before telling him that what he was about to do was the right thing. Joey always told her she was a smart girl, and he never kicked about the rent.

Sometimes, she knew, the stories that Joey told were not exactly true. Like the story about the bruise on his back.

What he'd told her was, he'd been robbed by two big black guys with bike chains and guns. They'd cornered him in his office, after hours, nobody else around. One of them had kept a gun on him while the other one hit him with the chain and kicked him in the head. He said they took two thousand bucks off him.

The bruise was nasty. She believed the part about the chain, but she'd heard from Margie, her friend at J.C. Motors, that the person who had done the damage was a girl in a motorcycle jacket. According to Margie, the perpetrator was neither large nor black.

She didn't believe what Joey was telling her about the comic book guys, either.

“What I wanna do, what I was gonna do, was I was gonna find 'em and, you know, have a face-to-face with the both of them, make sure they understand that it ain't right to fuck a guy like me over. Only Freddy, he can't seem to connect. It's like they been avoiding him. Like, they don't return his phone calls. I dunno, you just can't figure some of these guys out. What, do they think Freddy's some kind of dangerous animal or something?”

Chrissy, who had met Freddy Wisnesky, thought that they probably thought exactly that, if they had any sense.

“Anyways, sooner or later I figure Freddy will get the message across and I can forget about it, put the whole stinking mess behind me, maybe even get my car back. Except it's taking forever, and Freddy's up there in Minneapolis—”

“Minneapolis?”

“Yeah, your hometown, babe. So I'm stuck down here with business negotiations to take care of, and Freddy's sitting in some parking ramp, waiting for some crazy broad to show up.”

Chrissy said, “Huh?”

“Never mind. So then I get this call from this guy I never heard of before, says his name is Rich Wicky, if you can believe that, says he knows a way I can get hold of the two guys and my car and make a bunch of money, all at the same time. He's got this big plan, he says. All he needs is to borrow Freddy for a few days. It sounds like bullshit to me, but I say I'll think about it. So I been thinkin' about it, and I don't know. Whadaya think, babe?”

“Hmmm,” Chrissy said, making two lines appear on her forehead.

“ 'Cause I think the guy's full a shit, calling me up that way, feedin' me a bunch of crap.”

“That's what I think too,” Chrissy said.

“Only there might be something to it. I told Freddy, I told him to go along with the guy for a few days. Might be this guy knows something. But now I'm thinking I ought to talk to Freddy again, have him put the question to the guy.”

“Hmmm,” Chrissy said.

Joey shook his head sadly. “You can't count on nobody.”

“You can count on me,” Chrissy said.

Joey nodded. “I guess that's right. By the way, I got a few guys lined up to play some cards next Friday. You want to make sure we got lots a snacks and booze and stuff?”

“Sure, Joey,” Chrissy said, keeping her face carefully composed. She hated poker night. The games lasted till morning, sometimes all the way into the next night, and her condo always reeked of stale smoke and male sweat for days after. “You want me to get anything special?”

Joey thought. He was lying on his back, looking at his belly. Somewhere on the other side of the fleshy mound, his pecker was hanging all limp and happy now. “How about some a them Cheetos,” he said. “The things that get your fingers all orange. I like them. And maybe a couple extra bottles of Remy. And some Coke.” He looked again at his formidable gut. “Make that diet Coke, doll. Some a the things you been doing, I'm getting kind of curious what my pecker looks like these days.”

Tom
and Ben looked at each other, then back at Wicky.

Tom said, “It sounds like we got us another John Jones Collection.”

“Only difference is, this one's real,” Wicky pointed out.

“The Jones Collection is real,” Tom insisted.

During their earlier, occasionally heated discussion, it had become apparent to Wicky that, on some level, Tom actually believed in his own invention. Wicky was familiar with this phenomenon, having often observed it in the brokerage business. One minute Tom would be laughing at some poor fool who believed the story, and the next he would be making an earnest effort to convince him that it was, in fact, true.

After four lobster cocktails, a tray of nachos, and two more bottles of Dom Perignon, the three men were still sitting outside near the pool. Wicky had his suit jacket off, his tie and collar loosened, shoes and socks off, and his trousers rolled up to expose pasty shins to the last rays of sunshine. Several vintage comic books were strewn carelessly on the patio.

Ben was paging through an old five-ring notebook, pausing, making a clucking sound now and then with his tongue. “You want us to sell them?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the notebook.

“You keep asking me that,” Wicky said. He was enjoying himself. “All I want you to do is find the buyers. I handle all the paper.”

“You've seen the comics?” Ben asked.

“Some of them. He had a few of them at his house in Saint Paul, said he kept them there for his grandkids to read. And he had that notebook. His brother kept every comic book he owned catalogued right there in that notebook.”

Ben paused and pointed at one of the entries. “Look at this. The first seventy-four issues of
Captain America
. Incredible. Cap, he's my favorite. You say they're all boxed up?”

“He's got them all stashed at some cabin up north, he says. Most of the boxes haven't been opened since 1951. He says as far as he knows they're in perfect shape.”

“But you haven't seen them.”

“They're real, Ben. You met the guy, you wouldn't doubt it for a minute.”

Ben nodded and turned a page. “A lot of junk here,” he said.

“Like I told you, it includes damn near every comic published during the forties, all the way up through 1950.”

Ben closed the notebook.

“And you want us to sell them,” Ben said again. “Let me ask you this: what's in it for us? Are you thinking of us as partners?”

Wicky shook his head. “Not exactly. I want you to handle the marketing as part of the merger agreement.”

Tom laughed. “You mean the takeover.” He looked at Ben. “I don't want to listen to any more of this shit. We don't need this guy.”

“Sure you do,” Wicky said, pouring the last of the champagne into his glass. “The GGF, as you both know, has no assets other than the cash, or whatever's left of it, that you've accumulated from our investors. The Jones Collection itself does not exist. We could keep selling partnership units, but within six months, a year at the most, the whole thing is gonna come tumbling down. We could start paying off the original investors, turn it into a Ponzi scheme, keep it going a few months longer, but eventually it's gotta come down. None of us wants to be around for that one.” He tossed back the champagne. “So what we do is, we absorb the whole GGF thing into my new Justice Society Fund, merge the two entities, then market the new collection and use the proceeds to get the original partners their money back—or at least enough of it so it won't be worthwhile for them to come after us. You follow?”

Tom snorted. “Yeah, we follow, all right. I say why the fuck should we bother? You made your cut on the GGF sales, we got ours, so why do we need this Justice Society bullshit? Let's just buy the old man's collection, whack it up three ways, and be done with it.”

“That's fine for you guys, but I've got a career here. I've got a job, condo, a wife. I got roots here and a name to protect.”

Tom laughed. “Yeah. 'dickie Wicky.' Why the hell you want to protect a name like that?”

Wicky smiled and let it roll off. “I'm not looking for you guys to kick back any money here. Whatever you siphoned off the GGF, which I assume is just about the whole quarter million plus, you keep. All I want is for you to sign your general partnerships in the GGF over to the Justice Society Fund. And find me some buyers with ready cash. And maybe make a short-term loan, say fifty or sixty thousand, to make the purchase.”

“No fucking way,” said Tom.

“Why do you need our money?” Ben asked.

“Because I want you guys to help me market the collection. And because if you're personally invested in the program, I know you'll make it happen. Call it good-faith money.”

Tom looked at Ben. “He doesn't trust us,” he said, eyebrows ascending.

Wicky shrugged. “If I wanted to, I could do it on my own. I'm just trying to create a paper vehicle so that I can take care of my investors without the whole thing coming down around us. You guys don't seem to realize the position you've put me in with this Galactic Guardians thing. When it hits the fan, and it will, I'll be lucky if I just lose my license. I hang around and wait for it to happen, I might end up in jail. Selling blue sky is one thing, selling a black hole is another. You guys got me into this mess, I'm offering you a way to do the right thing, plus cover your own butts and make a little money too.”

“No fucking way,” Tom repeated.

Ben was still paging through the book. “Basically, you want us to gift you the GGF, is that correct?”

“Right,” said Wicky. “Gift it to me.”

“And find a buyer for this collection.”

“Yes.”

“And loan you some cash.”

“Exactly.”

“Short term.”

“Very.”

“And if we don't, you attempt to implicate us in the resulting legal difficulties.”

“I would have no choice.”

“But we would be long gone by then.”

Wicky shrugged.

Ben said, “We have to think about it.” He handed the notebook back to Wicky. “I'd like to meet this person.”

“No problem. But if you guys think I'm going to let you within a mile of my little old man before we've got a solid deal, you can forget it.” Wicky rolled down the bottoms of his trousers. “You guys think it over and call me in the morning. I gotta get going. I'm taking a friend of mine to the Twins game tonight. I haven't been to a ball game in years. You guys interested in coming along? You might enjoy meeting my friend Freddy.”

“Freddy?” Ben asked.

“Freddy
fucking Wisnesky, man—I can't believe it,” Tom said for perhaps the twentieth time. They had moved inside, to the bar just off the hotel lobby. Tom was drinking rum and Coke with a slice of lime, a cherry, and a handful of filberts floating on top. He took a plastic bottle of Tylenol from his pocket and shook a few purple tablets into his drink.

“You shouldn't eat those with alcohol,” Ben said, sipping his Per- rier. “It erodes your stomach lining. You'll get bleeding ulcers.”

“I get ulcers, it's on account of that fucking Dickie and Freddy.” He swirled his drink and swallowed. Most of the customers in the small bar were suited business types coming down off a day of phone calls and meetings. Tom and Ben were wearing their bathing suits, Hawaiian shirts, and flip-flops. The cocktail waitress, a slim redheaded woman, stopped at their table and gave Tom her best smile.

“How is your drink, Mr. Tucker?” Like everyone on the wait staff, she had gotten the word on his tipping habits. The tall one, Mr. Hogan, never tipped at all, but Mr. Tucker let loose of fifties like they were ones.

Tom told her it was great, the best drink he'd ever had. She smiled happily and walked off, giving him a little ass wiggle to remember her by.

“I don't understand why they're so nice to you,” Ben said. “They act like I'm invisible.”

“That's 'cause you're a cheapskate.”

Ben frowned and sipped his Perrier. He cleared his throat. “This proposal of Dickie's, it might be to our advantage,” he said. “It would get our names off the Galactic Guardians Fund.”

“What the fuck are you talking? They aren't our names anyway,
Fink
.”

“Good point,” said Ben Fink. “In any case, the only thing that really concerns me is the front money. If our man Dickie wants to run his own fund, I really don't mind. But I do worry about the money. I don't like putting it up, even short term. If we do that, we'll have to have control of the collection.”