Max Collins - Hard Cash

He parked the Buick in the driveway, behind a battered green Mustang he recognized as Breen’s. There were no other cars in the drive, though there was room; none were parked along the curb in front, either. Which surprised Nolan. Breen’s funeral had been in the morning, and this was fairly early afternoon, so he’d expected a bunch of cars belonging to friends and relatives who’d be making sympathetic shoulders available to the bereaved widow. But then, it would be like Mary Breen to tell everybody to get the hell out. She always was a private person, who at a time like this wouldn’t be about to put up with the hypocritical condolences of, say, her brother Fred, who had never really gotten along with Breen anyway and probably at this very moment was entertaining visions of taking over the bar for himself, or her mother, a café waitress at fifty-four, who felt her daughter had married below her station.

The street was quietly middle class, not unlike the one in Iowa City that the antique shop was on. The house was a brown brick two story, a shade smaller than most in the neighborhood, but then, only Breen and Mary had lived there, so it had been plenty big, Nolan supposed. There was snow on the ground in spots, and the sky was overcast, and he guessed it had been a good enough day for a funeral: a somber day but not a depressing one, really.

There were two sets of four cement steps up a tiny terraced lawn, and another set of four steps to the door, which had a plastic Christmas wreath on it. Nolan knocked.

She answered right away.

She looked good. She also looked sad, of course, but he didn’t think she’d been crying, or anyway not much.

“Nolan,” she said with soft surprise. “I didn’t expect you to come.”

He had said he would try to, on the phone yesterday, but evidently she had figured he was just saying that.

“It’s cold out here,” Nolan said. “I didn’t come all the way from Iowa City to stand on a stoop and freeze my ass off in Indianapolis. Invite me in already.”

She grinned and shook her head. “You’re something. Come on in.”

He did, got out of the coat, and Mary took it and went somewhere with it. He was in a small vestibule. The stairs to the second floor were in front of him, a study to the left, the living room to the right. It was Breen’s house, all right; a gambler’s house. Nothing but the essentials: some serviceable, warehouse sale furniture; bare hardwood floors, not even a throw rug; a console TV that looked ten years old at least and was probably black and white; bare walls. That was the living room, if you called that living. The study was pretty good size but was also mostly empty, just a desk with chair and a single filing cabinet. It was actually a bigger room than the living room, and Nolan thought he knew why: Breen must have done the bar’s bookkeeping out there so that he could call it his office, which would rack out to a sizable tax deduction.

Mary came back from wherever she put the coat and said, “Let’s go out in the kitchen.”

She fixed him coffee out there. It was a bright room, white trimmed in red, with all the necessary appliances and some unnecessary ones too. Mary was not the type of woman who would let Breen extend his gambler’s stinginess where she was concerned, not without a hell of a fight, anyway.

She was a good-looking woman. She looked like what Marilyn Monroe would have if the movie studios hadn’t fixed her nose and bleached her brown hair and told her not to smile with her gums showing. She was Marilyn Monroe at forty-one, a housewife Marilyn, getting a little pudgy.

She sat at the kitchen table with Nolan. She was wearing a dark green turtleneck sweater and dark green pants. Her eyes were light green, not red at all.

Nolan looked into the light green eyes and said, “Isn’t it time you cried?”

She looked into her coffee. She smiled. Her gums showed. It was a nice smile anyway. Fuck the movie studios.

“I’ll get around to it,” she said.

“Tell me about the funeral,” he said.

“Do you really want to hear about the funeral?”

“No.”

“Why did you come?”

“I thought you might want somebody to talk to who knew the score.”

She laughed. Not much of a laugh, but a laugh. “Nobody at the funeral knew what he was, you know. Except for Fred, who knows vaguely. But nobody else. It was mostly his regular customers from the bar. None of you people. Not that I expected any of you. I know it’s a thing you people have, not poking into each other’s private lives. It’s a sensible thing, seeing each other only when you’re working. It’s a cold business. Necessarily cold, I guess.”

“I came.”

“You did come, Nolan. Damn it if you didn’t. But you didn’t come to the funeral. Why?”

“I don’t go to funerals.”

“Neither did he. Till today. Tell me something, Nolan. Do you ever think of me?”

He sipped his coffee. “Every winter. When it first snows. I think of you then.”

She smiled again, faintly this time, and said, “The back seat of a car. Like a couple teenagers.”

“Well, we were younger.”

“Yeah, but not that young. Snowing to beat hell, and we’re out in the country, God knows where, in the damn car parked with the engine going and the heater going, and I’m in that fuzzy coat and you’re dropping your drawers. Christ. Maybe we were that young at that.”

“You got some more coffee for me?”

“Sure.”

She poured coffee, sat back down, and said, “I don’t blame you for skipping the funeral, Nolan. I don’t blame any of those other people who worked with him, either, for not coming. I mean, how the hell are they supposed to know he’s even dead, right? You people don’t keep in such close touch, I mean. If you hadn’t happened to call, even you wouldn’t be here, right? So his bar customers are there. Nobody else, except for his first fucking wife, the bitch who sucked him dry for alimony and child fucking support — she has the balls to be there. With his two kids, who that bitch has already ruined. Jesus.”

“Hey. Take it easy. Who the hell did you think would be there?”

She slammed her fist on the table, and the coffee cups jumped. “Where were those fucking bookies? They’re there when it’s time for Breen to pay up. They’re there with a hot tip for the sucker. They’re there extending credit at shylock rates. But when Breen’s planted in the fucking ground, oh, no. They aren’t there then, even though they fucking put him there!”

So that was why she hadn’t cried: she was too angry. She was too pissed off about her husband’s death to mourn him yet.

“Is that what happened?” Nolan asked. “Do you think it was somebody he owed money to who killed him?”

“Well, the cops say it’s robbery. He probably had, what, fifty bucks in the till, and the cops say his head was blown off for that. Can you buy that, Nolan? Fifty bucks got his head blown off? Not me, no, I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it at all.”

“Mary, people been killed for a lot less.”

“I know, but people like my husband? A guy like him, a professional thief who always dealt in the thousands of dollars, getting wasted by some cheap punk for a few bucks? I mean, it’s too cute, too... you know, ironic, too... it’s bullshit, is what it is.”

“Maybe. Wasn’t there someone with him when he was killed?”

Her jaws clenched. She rubbed her cheek, as if she was sanding wood. “Yeah there was someone with him. There was a bitch with him. But what about this morning, at his funeral, Nolan, where were they then, his bitches, his young goddamn cunts? Where were they? They’d lay him, yeah, but not to rest. Shit”

“Mary.”

“Will you tell me something? Will you tell me something, Nolan? Am I some ugly old woman? Am I a wife you cheat around on?”