You are losing it, you old bastard, he thought, as he drove to the airport to fly back.
32
LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS
Two months earlier
LEON KAYE WAS the most respected rare-coin dealer in Little Rock, and his high-end retail outlet, The Coin, was swank, plush, serene, and soothing. There, he found and sold and bought and traded the most unusual specimens of the world’s four-thousand-year history of money, with a mid-South clientele of many well-off collectors. If it was money, or looked like it, he was interested. He was represented as well on the Internet, which meant globally, and was an active traveler who would view and bid on spectacular items as they periodically came up. He dressed as one might expect, in sedate J.Press blazers and charcoal suits; shirts, blazing white, from Brooks Brothers; ties so trustworthy, they put you to sleep; and of course Alden wingtips, jet-black, and narrow in the British fashion. Manicured, buffed, coiffed, polished, shined, and blow-dried, he looked like a wealthy priss who’d been to Yale.
But there was another Leon Kaye whose eccentricities might have surprised, perhaps even dismayed, his many respectable clients. They never realized that he was also Mr. K of Little Rock’s nine Mr. K’s Pawn & Gun Shops, whose proud claim, on billboards all through the black, Hispanic, and poor-white neighborhoods of the Queen City, was I Buy Gold. I Buy Silver. I Buy Diamonds. I Buy Guns! Hell, I Buy ANYTHING. He did too. Then he sold it for more.
All his shops prospered, as a pawn license, extracted only via great criminal or political leverage from the Arkansas state licensing bureaucracy, was an excuse to xerox money. He also owned a few car washes, three strip malls, a laundromat, and the larger interest in a chain of Sonic Drive-Ins throughout the area. And a restaurant or two. And a porn shop or two. And a bar or seven, including three of the strip variety. He owned a Jeep agency, a country club, of which he was president and head of the greens committee, and a private airplane.
No one ever said of Leon that he lacked a nose for opportunity, and when opportunity came, he was shrewd in manipulating his way toward it. This is why he sat in the back room of The T&T & A$$ Club—his, naturally—in Little Rock’s seedy little tenderloin, talking intently to two large men.
They were Braxton and Rawley Grumley. By profession, they were skip tracers, a sort of modern-day bounty hunter, by which effort they man-tracked those who’d skipped out on the money owed bail bondsmen—and bail bondsmen aren’t the sort of fellows who can let such a thing happen. They take even the smallest sums quite seriously, and there is no humor or irony in their business. In all states, the law is vague on what skip tracers are allowed to do to recover the missing man, but some states allow more leniency than others. Arkansas allows a lot of leniency, which is why Braxton and Rawley had a ninety-seven percent recovery rate. They were extremely good at finding people, and though they looked like Country-Western singers channeling ’50s professional-wrestling-style types, they were technically adept, cunning, cruel, and relentless—all career prerequisites. It was also said they could be influenced to do certain other things for the right clients, and for the right fee, and nothing would ever be said about it.
They were large men, and one tended to notice them. They liked red or purple (or both) cowboy boots and belts, polyester jackets, paisley scarves, gold chains, tattoos of the figurative, heroic variety, and polished white teeth. Each had a blond pompadour and wore a selection of gaudy but expensive rings on hefty fingers. If you looked at the fingers, you noticed the hands, and if you noticed the hands, you noticed the knuckles, and if you noticed the knuckles, you noticed the scars. They looked like their hobby was beating up radiators.
“All right,” said Braxton, the more loquacious of the two, “we are here, Mr. Kaye. You have our attention, and I assume you will soon be making us a pitch.”
“Boys,” said Mr. Kaye, who for this meeting had forsaken the Ivy trad look and was in jeans and a jean jacket—the so-called Arkansas Tuxedo—over a Carhartt work shirt, and who had driven to work not in his black Benz S but in his white Cadillac Escalade, with its vanity license plate I PAY CASH, “I want you to think back with me to the year 1934. Maybe you saw the movie Public Enemies? John Dillinger, Tommy guns, bank robberies, and, boys, think on this: cash. Lots and lots of cash. In thirteen months the Dillinger Gang stole over three hundred thousand dollars, and most of it was never recovered.”
Mr. Kaye let that sink in, but Baxter and Rawley were not the type to be impressed by old-time crime stories.
“Sir, we are Grumley,” said Braxton. “We have been working our side for one hundred and fifty years, against revenue agents, sheriffs, constables, federals, even congressional investigating committees. Millions done passed through the Grumley hands. That amount of swag, and supposed big shots like John Dillinger do not impress us, no more than a Moon Pie without a Dr Pepper to wash it down, so to speak, if you get my drift.”
“I do, I do. However, three hundred thousand in cash is nothing to scoff at, but suppose—think about this—that cash were uncirculated 1934 bills, valued far more than for its face value. Depending on the bills, it could be worth twenty times as much, dispensed carefully and discreetly to collectors, of whom there are many. Three hundred thousand times twenty comes to six million dollars, and think how nice that would be, especially when the only thing you have to do is follow a seventy-year-old man who has a line on where it’s buried. He has a map, he just ain’t figured out what it’s to.”
“Is he dumb?”
“He’s not. He’ll figure it out. He’s known for figuring it out. He always figures it out. He’s working on it now. His father was good at figuring out before him, and his father’s father before him. All of them, more or less, of the law. All of them, more or less, having conked many a head with the Grumley label. And that’s the second part of this pleasure for you. It has a personal angle which you will oh so enjoy. So what I have for you is an odd confluence of opportunity. Cash money, unaccounted for and long forgotten, very rare, thus immensely valuable, untraceable in ways that many large sums might not be. Maybe other relics of extreme value. All of it being searched for by a fellow named Swagger, of the Polk County Swaggers. You know the family?”
“I know the family,” said Braxton. Rawley cracked a pistachio between his large white molars, spit a spray of shell grit into the air, and ate the meat.
“There’s Grumley sleeping eternally underground, and four or so yet in prison because this Swagger fellow got involved in preventing a certain Grumley enterprise at the Bristol Speedway,” said Braxton.
“I know that.”
“What else do you know?”
“His daddy, Earl, was involved in the so-called Veterans’ Revolt of 1946, which was far bloodier than history tells us. Grumley deaths occurred in a plethora of Hot Springs shoot-outs, and in the end the town’s spirit was broken, and instead of becoming Las Vegas, it became another decaying Southern town that the Interstate passes by. Earl was also, for a time, the bodyguard of the famous Congressman Uckley, a power in Washington in the ’forties and ’fifties, which made him untouchable, though in the end he got touched. The father’s father was Polk County sheriff, way back in the ’twenties and ’thirties. He worked close with Judge Tyne’s machine, and whenever the machine had to enforce its will on the unruly Grumley, Grumley head got busted, Grumley tail went to prison, and Charles Swagger did the busting and imprisoning. Does all this sound familiar?”
“We are well versed in our own family history,” said Braxton. “Grumley have long memories.”
“I thought Grumley might. So listen hard, fellows . . . More pistachios, Braxton?”
“I’m Braxton,” said Braxton. “I don’t eat pistachios. That’s Rawley, with the pistachios. I talk for both, but don’t think he ain’t listening because he is, very carefully. He’s the smart one. I just got the gift of gab.”
Mr. Kaye nodded, and proceeded with his sto
ry. A short time ago, he had been approached by a fine Little Rock law firm to advise them on an old piece of money. Imagine his amazement when it turned out to be an AC 1934-A thousand-dollar bill of a very rare variety. It was a Friedberg 2212-G, graded as 66EPQ by PMG. Rated “Gem Uncirculated.” Pretty close to perfect. It was easily worth ten thousand dollars on its own, and with a pack of uncirculated siblings still linked by Mint seal, its value went up astronomically. So Mr. Kaye advised the young associate who had sought the appointment and arrived with the bill, sensibly sealed in plastic. The young man was not discreet, as so many of them aren’t, and soon revealed to Mr. Kaye that it had been recovered from a strongbox in the foundation of a house being torn down. And the strongbox included some other items, including a .45 automatic, an FBI badge, an odd metal contrivance that could have been a machine-gun part, and a map of some sort that pointed to yet more buried treasure, but was oriented to the wall of a structure that was only known to the creator of the map.
“Not hard to do some inferring, now is it?” asked Mr. Kaye. “Nineteen thirty-four was the year of the big bank robberies, the Dillinger–Baby Face Nelson–Pretty Boy Floyd combine. As I say, three hundred thousand dollars in all vanished, never to be recovered. The badge and pistol suggest that the grandfather may have been, for some time at least, an agent, as any history of the Bureau will tell you that in 1934 Mr. Hoover took in a batch of Western and Southern gunfighters to go bullet to bullet against the Dillingers. Charles Swagger of Blue Eye, victor in the famous Blue Eye First National shoot-out of 1923, and First World War hero, in two armies, might certainly have been one, and they would have been well served by him. There was indeed lots of killing. Gunfights all over the Midwest, agents down, gangsters down. But, as I say, no big-money stash ever turned up.
“Now we have a direct link to those days, direct evidence of purloined money taken in robbery but also not returned to authorities, as perhaps Charles Swagger, accustomed to the Arkansas way of doing things, might have allowed himself. I have made discreet inquiries and I have learned that the grandson, Bob Lee Swagger, seventy years old but spry, also a war hero, as well as a rancher, father, businessman, and a man bent on weird quests for his own private satisfaction, is now researching his grandfather and trying to find out what happened. A necessary part of that search will be placing the map against its palimpsest—”
“Its say what, Jack?”
“Ah, its objective correlative.”
Rawley spit a large gunk of pistachio off into space. It landed on Mr. Kaye’s desk.
“Its thing, whatever it is that is the basis of the diagram. As described to me—I have not seen it—it’s a crude penciled rendering of the wall of some kind of building, with a diagonal, broken line radiating from a given point to the northwest, delineating about ten steps, orienting to and just passing a circle that must denote a tree trunk. There, X marks the spot, and I’m guessing the X might be something that Charles Swagger made off with in 1934 when his FBI career came to an end. Whatever this is will certainly be of value, perhaps great value. Would it not be a shame if, at that moment, Mr. Swagger were interrupted, his family legacy taken from him and put to other, more profitable uses. Imagine how disappointed he’d be.”
“Hmm,” said Braxton.
“You have the means to make this happen?”
“Sir, we track men for a living. This is easily doable by us, discreetly and with sophistication. So what remains is the deal.”
“Seventy/thirty?”
“Seventy for us, thirty for you.”
“Now, boys, let’s not get greedy. Standard recovery in your business is fifteen percent. I give you twice that to show good faith. You have to show good faith too. And I believe I qualify for a Grumley family discount, since Grumley accounts will be settled.”
“Perhaps. Sixty-forty, but you pick up expenses.”
“Sixty-five/thirty-five. Yes to expenses, but only with receipts. No ‘Miscellaneous: $68,925.32,’ or anything like that.”
“And,” said Braxton, “the haircut fee.”
“The haircut fee?”
33
624 NOYES
CHICAGO
August 1934
CHARLES WORKED FOURTEEN STRAIGHT DAYS, after his two days off, and didn’t have another day to himself until halfway through the month. On that day, he ate the usual diner breakfast, while he read more fairy tales in the Trib and Herald-Examiner, checked yesterday’s ball scores and saw Tietje had taken another loss for the Sox, making his fine showing at the game Charles saw even more of an oddity. It was probably too late for them to make much of a move anyway, and it was equally clear the North Siders weren’t going to do anything memorable either. In a few weeks, college football would begin, but Charles had no feeling for Illinois teams and doubted the papers would pay much attention to the Arkansas Razorbacks. Maybe all this crap would be wrapped up before then and he’d get back in time to follow the season. But he doubted it, as Baby Face sightings were random and refused to fit into any pattern, and he’d heard nothing from Uncle Phil. And the same was true of others on the Public Enemies list, like Pretty Boy, Homer, the Barkers, and Alvin Karpis. Lots of work left to do.
He had two jobs to do today. First, he had to buy a car. He was tired of all this public transportation, or signing out, then signing in, a Bureau Ford or Hudson, which every hood in Chicago recognized as Division cars anyhow. The buy took an hour and a half, the transaction facilitated by him paying in cash from the squirrel fund he’d brought north with him. There was a place up Halsted, a garage run by a Mulligan, who was an ex-cop and gave the boys in blue and State Troopers, as well as G- and T-Men, good deals. Charles paid three hundred fifty dollars for a 1933 dark green four-door Pontiac, a flat-8, said to be in good shape. He was more drawn to a Plymouth coupe, but he saw that the Pontiac would do better for hauling agents around, if it ever came to that, and wife and child, if he ever got back to that.
That set him up for his second job, the dinner he would have at Sam’s place that night in Evanston. In the big new car, the drive was easily handled, pleasant. No traffic on the Outer Drive. The city fathers were glamorously developing the lakefront, and new hotels, including a pink thing called the Edgewater Beach, were rising, turning the zone into a kind of Miami.
At Belmont, the drive turned into the traffic-light-stunted Sheridan Road, and Charles poked through the edge of the North Side until he reached a cemetery, said to be a holding spot for gangsters waiting to get into hell, that marked the passage between Chicago and the pleasant city of Evanston. Evanston had elms, lots of them, and old, big houses, lots of them, and colleges, lots of them, and traffic, not so much of it. Within a few minutes, he found the intersection of Sheridan and Noyes, turned left, and halfway down the block came to 624, a vast place roughly thrown together of brown timber and sandstone boulders. It had porches everywhere and a roof line as complicated as Texas history, with gables and mansards and crests somehow forming a whole, which seemed to indicate an interior rich in passageways, secret rooms, unexpected stairways, closets everywhere, odd-shaped bedrooms, as if sort of invented on the spot, not drawn from any plan. The house sat under trees, between Sheridan and the next main stem, an Orrington Avenue, on a large chunk of land, guarded by a front porch that looked like the entrance to a castle of some sort. The whole thing in fact was a castle or fortress in mentality, presumably unassailable by anything short of Big Bertha or some other piece of Krupp hellaciousness.
He parked, went up the stairs, knocked, and Sam opened, immaculate in three-piece and tie, and brought him in. Charles was glad he’d worn his own suit, though he didn’t ever not wear it.
If the atmosphere outside was Medieval, the atmosphere inside was childish. Children lived here, lots of them, and their smell, clutter, noise, and business were everywhere. Sam led him through a foyer to a grand living room that ran half the length of the house, uttering pleasa
ntries.
“Thanks so much for coming up, Charles. I hope it wasn’t difficult.”
“No problem, a nice night for a drive.”
“Pardon the mess, but having six children is like having six horses under the same roof. You never get it cleaned up, you just get the mess under control, temporarily. Here, meet the brood and the heroic brood mare. KIDS!” he yelled.
They seemed to come out of holes in the walls, from under the furniture, through windows, down chutes and up ladders, more or less assembling themselves into a skittish mass of constrained energy and temporary attention. He was introduced one by one to towheaded boys and girls cut from the same perfect mold, running from fourteen years down to fourteen months, all more or less clean, more or less civil, but minds clearly set on adventures and mischief, not the tall, stolid figure before them.
Then the Mrs. Her name was Betty, still a beauty, tawny, blond, and sturdy. She’d been cooking but disengaged easily enough and greeted Charles graciously, making him feel her whole purpose in life was to ease his way. She was like one of those good officers’ wives he’d met in the war stateside, a campaigner, game, tough, worked like a dog without a complaint, and always there for everybody who needed her.
It wasn’t lost on Charles that this was a life worth aspiring to: respect, progeny, the best in shelter, prosperity, the best that America had to offer a man from nowhere, as he was, as Sam was.
“I’ll spare you the tour,” Sam said. “Unless you like socks, dirty underwear, unmade beds, broken toys, dolls missing heads, single shoes, and the odor of a monkey den.”
Charles laughed.
“Sounds like a few barracks I’ve been in,” he said. “Don’t think it would faze me much.”
“Actually, now that we’ve got a little time, I’d like to talk to you. Away from the office, so that no one will worry about it and spread rumors and Hugh Clegg won’t panic and wire the Director and Mel won’t figure it’s about him and call a news conference.”