Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (29 page)

“As we know. But some of that income, you see what I’m saying, is what you call disposable. That mean he’s gonna feed it down the sink, get it all ground up?”

“No, he’s gonna blow a chunk of it over the bar,” Harry said. “Get some new overalls he doesn’t really need because he’s sick of the ones he’s wearing.”

Cedric held up his hand. “Okay. That money he used to pay for the drinks, what is it, ten dollars, twenty dollars?”

“At these prices, he’d be hammered.”

“We’re not concerned with the condition of the man’s head, Harold. What we’re doing is following the money. Tell me what happens to it after that.”

“Doris here sticks it in the till,” Harry said. He had no idea what the woman’s name was. The men called her sugar or darling, but she looked like a Doris if Harry ever saw one.

“Zackly.” Cedric sounded pleased with Harry’s conclusion. He was on the verge of making a profound point. “And then?”

“It gets counted up and deposited in some bank.”

“You got it, son, you got it. Then what?”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “The bank uses it to give somebody a loan, and they invest their profit someplace else. It’s really not that complicated, Cedric. I mean, no offense, here.”

“None taken,” Cedric said. “The idea is, it all got to go somewhere. Now what would you say if that same plumber, what he did with his disposable income, he kept it in a shoebox at the bottom of his closet? He weren’t saving it for nothing, he was just stacking it up so he could look at it, count it once in a while when he was alone. Defying the natural law of money. Interrupting the flow, what you think about that?”

“I don’t think anything,” Harry said. “I used to hide my money in a sock in my laundry bag, eight, nine hundred bucks, whatever I had laying around the house.”

He thought about where his money was now, in the first checking account he’d ever had. It cost him twelve dollars a month if the balance dipped below a grand, which in Harry’s case, it never climbed above. Twelve bucks a month. A hundred and forty-four a year. His money was costing him money. The dirty sock didn’t seem like such a stupid idea.

“But that was so you could spend it later,” Cedric said. “You wasn’t hoarding it just to have it, like some fucking King Midas.”

“Everything he touched turned to gold,” Harry said.

“It ain’t money that’s the root of all evil,” Cedric said. “That shit is neutral. It’s the love of money. Seven thousand dollars, in a shoe box at the bottom of your closet, is about the most unnatural love I ever heard of.”

Though he was trying to keep the volume down, Cedric’s voice pitched way up high, his words coming out in a shrieked whisper. This was a ton of passion for a parable, which of course, it wasn’t.

“I happen to know where that bundle is ripe for the plucking. Let’s say me and you, we go get it.” This was delivered in a low, tight hiss, barely audible above the Garth Brooks tune honking out of the jukebox.

“That would be the money interrupting the flow,” Harry said. “The seven thousand in a sock.”

“Shoe box,” Cedric said.

“At the bottom of a closet.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“This closet,” Harry said, “would most likely be in somebody’s house, now wouldn’t it? And we would most likely have to gain entrance to this house through some means of stealth. That would make it a burglary, which I believe is in direct violation of a very specific Florida statute.”

Cedric blew air through his teeth, as if he knew what kind of guy Harry was all along. “And this would be the first statute you violated,” he said, “in all your lily-white thirty-five years.”

“I’m thirty-six,” Harry said.

“And you done a lot worse than burglary, and don’t you tell me no different.”

Harry said, “We used to pull burglaries when we were kids and didn’t know any better. You got a very low riskreward ratio on your hands.”

Cedric was laughing. “You’d think it was funny, too, if you knew how easy this job was.”

“Then what do you need me for? The less guys involved, the less your chances of getting caught.”

“We ain’t gonna get caught.”

“No, we’re not,” Harry said, “cause I’m not going.”

“What I need,” Cedric said, turning his cup between his palms, “is a set of wheels. If I go in and grab the cash, the man’s gonna suspect it was me. But if there’s a bunch of other stuff missing, I’m covered. Now how’m I gonna get that stuff out of there? Load it onto a bus?”

Harry said, “That’s your problem, Cedric.”

“Plus, it never hurts to have a lookout. Pretty easy work for thirty-five hundred, cash money.”

Harry had to piss and he had to use the phone. It was back by the men’s room, a single stall minus a door and a trough spotted with pink urinal cakes. It smelled like a paddock.

He dialed his house and got the answering machine, Aggie leaving instructions for what to do in case you wanted to send a fax.

“Hey, it’s me,” he said. “You there? Aggie? It’s about eight o’clock.” He was taking a guess at the time by the color of the dying day through the chicken-wired bathroom window. “I’m having a beer with the painting guy. Have a good night at work, sweetheart. I love you. Bye.”

Cedric’s cup was empty when Harry got back to the bar. “How you like to go look at some titties?”

“Sure,” Harry said. “I don’t wanna drive too far, though.”

“It’s just up the road,” Cedric said. He was about to leave a seventy-five cent tip for Doris.

Harry told him to pick up his change. He counted his money and left a ten-dollar bill on the bar..

Cedric said, “What you doing, boy?”

“I’m leaving a tip.”

“Ten dollars? You leaving a ten dollar tip?” Cedric was aghast. “That’s too much. That’s way too much.”

“No such thing,” Harry said, feeling like a big shot, “as too much tip.”

Cedric wasn’t exaggerating about how close they were to the go-go joint. Tucked between a triple-X bookstore and a tire discounter pushing steel-belted radials, it was maybe a mile from the last place. Cedric led the way past the bouncer, a house of a man attempting to fold his arms across his chest. He settled for the fingertips of each hand in its opposite armpit.

It was a cut-rate operation, huffing and puffing behind the trend to glamorize titty bars. They took chairs in front of the stage, a plywood square ringed by Christmas lights and backed by mirrors smoked with golden swirls. A waitress got on them right away. Another peroxide blonde, she was sporting a Dale Evans costume, hat included. Her breasts sagged under a fringed vest. Cedric went for a beer, and Harry ordered a scotch, not bothering to call the brand.

The dancer was nearing the end of her act, down to a g-string and a pair of high-heeled sandals too small for her feet. The last toe on each foot hung outside its shoe. Doing a loose march to “Disco Inferno,” she stopped center stage, and shook her tits. Harry could make out the stretch marks on her jiggling stomach. She beamed a smile at the audience, her tiny teeth overwhelmed by a set of gums that went on forever. Cedric slid a dollar into her g-string and she left the stage to zero applause.

That message Harry left on the answering machine: He sounded drunk, even in his own ears, over the din of everybody’s lies and the bloodless Nashville pop that passed for country music. He sounded drunk because he was drunk, drunk on scotch and beer.

He hoped Aggie wouldn’t get the message. He hoped she was gone for the night. He was going to dive on the answering machine the second he walked in the door, erase that shit flickering with his boozed-up voice.

The waitress came back, Cedric lifting his beer off the tray, and told them some amount Harry didn’t hear. He handed her a twenty and told her to keep five dollars for herself. She stepped away quick, like she wanted to escape this juicehead blunder before Harry caught on.

A bony Indian girl was doing a quarter-hearted grind to a ballad Harry remembered from way back. He was trying to think of the band that had a hit with it, an overworked cover of an even older tune, pure FM-rock, like at Sailor Randy’s. The original version was in the old man’s record collection. Done by the Everly Brothers, he thought. Don and Phil.

The stripper had a broad, flat face, deadpanning an expression of drunken boredom.

“Cowboys and Indians,” Harry said.

“Hey, cool it,” Cedric said, looking around.

“Why? That’s what it is,” Harry said, louder this time, “fucking Cowboys and Indians.”

“This motherfucker is full of guys from the Rez. You wanna find out how mean they are, keep it up.”

Cedric returned his attention to the stage, where the woman took off her red rhinestone top to expose small tits arranged high on her chest, big, brown baloney nipples.

“Cedric, man, these chicks are nasty.”

Cedric said, “Nasty, right?” He was wearing a huge grin, his eyes glued to the gawky Indian girl.

“I mean like un-fine. This bitch is stone-cold ugly. She wants to take her clothes off while I’m watching, she ought to pay me.”

Glazed and lifeless, she timed the dramatic movements in her limbs to the singer’s tortured treatment of the lyrics, like whatever emotion she was feeling was in her fingers.

“Nazareth,” Harry said.

Cedric said, “What?”

“The name of the band. Nazareth. Had a big hit with this tune when I was a kid.” Cedric was giving him a skeptical look. “I couldn’t remember at first. Then it came to me.”

The corners of Cedric’s mouth crept up. “What’re you thinking about, son?”

Harry said, “Nothing.”

“No, I’ll tell you what you’re thinking about,” Cedric said. “You’re thinking about a shoe box that’s got seven thousand dollars in it.”

Whatever property taxes were being spent on around here, it wasn’t streetlights. The four-room cottage was silhouetted against a moonless horizon, not even a porchlamp burning to scare them away. Most of his fear was dulled by booze, but the adrenaline that flowed on any job was pulsing, a flutter in his gut that if you didn’t feel, you were probably dead. Harry, at this moment, was feeling very much alive, but it wasn’t the thrill of the job that was moving him. It was something else.

The steady drone of air conditioners whirred up and down the quiet street. Television shadows bounced through windows. All of a sudden, there looked like lots of chances to get caught. Dozens of potential witnesses with nothing to do but take a gander outside and see a man with his arms full, waddling toward a ’91 Grand Am, its lights off and its motor running, Florida license plate number 3TG-7751.

Child on the way, thirty-five hundred dollars could come in handy. And you didn’t change a man overnight. That just wasn’t how it worked. But looking at the cottage they were about to go into, all Harry could think about was the look he’d see on Aggie’s face if it went wrong.

“Ced, I’m not gonna do this one.”

“What the fuck,” Cedric said. “We’re here now.”

“I’m still on parole.”

“So?” Cedric said. “Who ain’t?”

“Sorry, man. I’ll drive you home.”

“Fuck that shit,” Cedric said. He got out of the car and slammed the door. He started walking toward the busy street that brought them here.

Harry put the car in gear and rolled down the passenger window, Cedric staring straight ahead, his brilliant plans shot down in flames.

“Get in the car, Cedric. The cops are gonna pick you up just for walking around this neighborhood.”

Cedric kept walking. “I can take the bus. Don’t need no pussy-ass white boy.”

“That’s shitty, Cedric. I didn’t say anything about you being black.”

They had reached the corner and Cedric’s last chance to reconsider. Harry said, “Do you want a ride, or not?” and when Cedric didn’t answer, Harry rolled up the window and hit the gas and drove back home to Sunrise.

After the fifteenth ring, somebody picked up the phone at Sailor Randy’s, the voice on the other end hollering over the noise. It wasn’t Bryce Peyton. Harry had to say Aggie’s name three times. Two long minutes later, Aggie came on with a suspicious hello, loud music and loud voices behind her. Somebody emptied a bucket of ice into a bin.

“Hey, how you doing?” Harry yelled into the halfdark.

“I’m doing fine,” she said. “How’re you?”

“Good,” Harry said.

“I can’t talk to you right now. I’m really slammed.”

“You still wanna get married?”

“Did I want to in the first place?”

“I just wanna be with you.”

“We’ll talk about it when I get home.”

“I’ll be asleep.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

Harry said, “I was drinking.”

“No shit, Harry. Listen, I’m all backed up here. I gotta go.”

The room was doing a see-saw. He closed one eye on it, got it to level off, and flopped on the couch. This was him, just about ready to be redeemed. Married or not, on or off probation, father-to-be, the future was bound to arrive, anyway. Harry was going to sit right here and wait for it.