I’ll play for any kind of money, even dimes and nickels, so long as everybody agrees that a nickel is worth something. Otherwise it’s not fair.
Joe Crow was sitting at the kitchen table in his underwear, eating a peanut butter sandwich and paging through a brochure from Bobick Realty, when the telephone rang. It rang four more times before he managed to swallow what he had in his mouth and answer it with a passable, if slightly thickened, “Hello.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Rich.”
“Who?” Crow turned the page in the brochure.
“Rich Wicky.”
“Dickie?”
It took Rich Wicky a second to reply. “Right. You got a minute?”
Crow looked at the clock radio on his kitchen table. Two-thirty in the afternoon, and he hadn’t thought of a reason to get dressed yet. He had been looking at photographs of lake properties, reading the brief descriptions. It wouldn’t hurt to look, he thought. A guy had to have a dream. His head was full of acres, feet of shoreline, elevations, and abbreviations such as “FP.” Fireplace? Front porch? Either would be fine. None of the listings in the brochure was for an island. That would be something, to have his own island, a place to be with himself. No phone. No Dickie Wicky.
“Joe?”
“Yeah, I'm here.”
“I need to talk to you about something.” Wicky paused.
Crow waited, trying to imagine what it could be. He had never seen or talked with Dickie Wicky other than from across a card table, nor had he ever wanted to. He didn’t even like playing cards with the guy. Wicky was everything Crow had avoided becoming—overweight, overfamiliar, overpaid—and he was a user, both of people and of substances. Crow liked users about as much as he had liked himself when he was using, which was to say, not at all. He decided in that moment to buy an answering machine. He had never liked the things, but if it would screen out one call from a guy like Dickie Wicky, it was worth the price. He turned to the next page of the brochure: “Bird Lake, 210' lksh, secluded, on pt, cozy 4 rm getwy, FP, grt fshng.” It was hard to see the cabin in the picture because it was surrounded by trees. He liked that. “$140,000.” That was a bit of a problem, since his entire net worth would come in at something like twenty thousand dollars, most of it tied up in his Jaguar XJS. The three thousand he had won last night was a start, but not nearly enough. Was there such a thing as a cabin on an island for ten or twenty thousand?
“You still there?”
“I'm here. What’s on your mind?”
Wicky cleared his throat. “I got a little problem. Listen, Joe, you do, like, odd jobs, right?”
“I'm not really looking for work, Dickie.” Milo, Crow’s oversize black tomcat, bumped against his leg.
“I heard you did some investigating work for Frank Knox.”
“I did him some favors.” Crow set the peanut-butter-covered knife on the linoleum floor. Milo set to work, scraping it clean with his rough tongue. Crow had served some papers for Frank Knox and chased down a reluctant witness to an auto accident, but that was about it. Aside from his poker winnings, he was professionally and financially adrift, waiting for something to inspire him.
“You used to be a cop, right?”
“Not much of one. Dickie, what is it you’re looking for?”
“It’s sort of complicated. Do you think you could come down here?”
“Where is 'here'?”
“Litten Securities.”
“That’s downtown, right?”
“We're in the Mills Building.”
“Maybe you ought to tell me what you want to talk about. I don’t want to waste your time.”
“A business proposal.”
“I don’t have any money to invest, Dickie.”
“You won’t need any money. But there might be something in it for you.”
“You want me to sell Amway, you can forget it.”
“I don’t want you to sell Amway. Look, I’ll pay you for your time. A consultation fee. What would you charge me for a half hour of your time? Just to listen.”
“Three hundred dollars,” Crow said, hoping to discourage him.
Wicky did not hesitate. “How about ten o'clock Friday morning?”
After agreeing, reluctantly, to meet with Dickie Wicky, Crow put on his gray sweats, brewed a cup of strong coffee, and went out onto the porch to drink it. He brought the real estate brochure with him. Milo, who had finished with the peanut butter knife, followed, his kinked tail held proudly aloft.
Crow rented the top half of a duplex on First Avenue, an eighty- year-old clapboard house that, unlike most of the properties in this marginal neighborhood, retained all of its windows, was vermin-free, and sported a coat of white paint less than a decade old. His porch, which ran the length of the house, faced a row of rapidly aging brownstones, each building containing its own unique mix of humanity. Crow could sit in his wicker chair for hours, watching his neighbors live their lives.
He looked again at the brochure from Bobick Realty. In the north woods, sitting outside his cabin, he would be watching the birds and the squirrels. He would see a deer, or a fox. Or maybe he would be on the dock, watching a red-and-white bobber dance on the afternoon chop.
Was that what he wanted? The idea of isolation was seductive. If he could be alone with himself, away from all the crazy people, maybe he would find out what he wanted from life. If he could capture that long quiet moment, all would become clear. Here, in the city, the distractions ruled.
People like Dickie Wicky were everywhere.
What did Dickie want?
Sipping his coffee, wishing he had quoted a five-hundred-dollar consultation fee, Crow watched four kids from the building directly across the street holding the corners of a blanket, moving up and down the sidewalk, their faces tilted skyward. He watched them for several minutes, his mind drifting from Dickie Wicky to the north woods, before he started to wonder what they were doing. At first he couldn’t see it; he was looking too high. The four blanket holders, three blond girls and a little Hmong boy with a purple Batman cape, were shouting something at the sky, but Crow could not understand their words over the steady stream of cars and buses roaring down the avenue. Finally he spotted the object of their attentions, a calico kitten on a ledge between the second and third stories. As the kitten moved along the ledge in one direction, the blanket crew would follow, trying to remain in rescue position. Now that he had a context, Crow could hear what they were shouting: Jump, kitty, jump!
He sighed and let a smile melt across his face. “Jump, kitty, jump,” he said. Milo, sitting on the porch rail, twitched his tail. Crow watched until the kitten, the first to become bored with the game, followed the ledge around the corner of the building to the fire escape and descended to safety. Crow drained the last of his coffee, let his head hang over the back of the wicker chair, felt the muscles in his scalp and face loosen. He closed his eyes and willed his body to go slack, hazily remembering an afternoon, thirty years before, spent trying to rescue a cat from its comfortable perch twenty feet up a shaggy walnut tree. Had the rescue succeeded? He couldn’t remember, but he suspected it hadn’t. Perhaps the cat had found his antics entertaining, a good way to pass a summer afternoon.
“So how you doing on these comic book guys?”
Freddy went blank.
“The comic guys! The comic guys!” Joey Cadillac shouted. He was having a bad day. His best customer, one Bubby Sharp, had been pulled over while test driving one of the new Cadillac Allantes, a slick little cherry-red two-seater with the Italian body and a sixty-thousand-dollar invoice. He’d lost his best car and his best customer, just like that.
And now Freddy Wisnesky, mind like a fucking color crayon, needed something to do. Joey picked up a pencil and broke it into two pieces, then broke the halves into quarters. He could not break the quarters, so he crushed them between his desktop and a brass paperweight shaped like a 1959 Cadillac.
“I dunno, Mister C.” Freddy shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “The guy I talked to a few weeks back, he said they went to Minneapolis.” He didn’t like it when his boss was disturbed, which was most of the time. “You want me to go up there?”
“Minneapolis?” Joey couldn’t get his mind off Bubby Sharp, the dumb shit taking the red Allante, two days off the truck, less than a hundred miles on the speedometer, taking it out and running it up to a hundred miles per on the Kennedy, getting his ass stopped by the cops. Fucking cokeheads, Joey thought. If they weren’t half his business, he wouldn’t have nothing to do with them.
“That’s what the guy said. He said he heard 'em talkin' about it. He said the one guy had a girlfriend up there.”
“Who’s that?” Joey wasn’t tracking. He kept thinking about his red Allante. The way Joey heard it, when the cops start flashing him, Bubby panics and cans it, which in the Allante takes him right up to one twenty, and the next thing, he’s got every cop on the North Side coming at him.
“Catfish.”
“Catfish?” Sounded like one of his customers. The guys he sold cars to all had goofy names—Dogboy, Tacoumba, Mohammed. Or Bubby. Fucking Bubby, gets himself boxed in at the tollway entrance, gets the shit beat out of him, which he deserved by all accounts, and then they find a quarter pound of coke in the gym bag on the passenger seat. Of course, Bubby says he never saw it before. Shit. With a little luck, Joey might get the Allante back from the cops in three months. Even worse, Bubby would be spending his next decade in the joint instead of paying cash for a new-color Caddy every time he moved a few kilos.
“So now you want I should go up there?” Freddy asked again.
Joey forced his mind to the business at hand, the comic book guys. Unfinished business. A few weeks back, when Freddy found out that they had fled to Minnesota, Joey decided that he had more important jobs for Freddy right here at home. As much as he’d wanted to take care of the comic book thing, sending Freddy all the way up to Minnesota seemed like a lot of trouble. Besides, he’d had a few large and uncertain payments coming due, and Freddy’s presence had ensured their prompt receipt. Also, Jimmy Spencer, his chop-shop manager, had a guy on a six-to-nine-month state-funded vacation, and he had needed an extra hand in the shop. But two weeks of Freddy Wisnesky was more than enough for Spence, and he’d sent him back to Joey with a note: “No thanks. I want my cars taken apart like that, I’ll get a guy in here with a backhoe.”
So now Freddy needed something to do. It wasn’t like you could tell him to go hang out until needed. A guy like Freddy had to be kept busy, or he’d get in some kind of trouble. The comic book guys were perfect. What the hell, Joey thought, it would get Freddy out of his hair for a while, and it would take care of that stabbing sensation he got in his stomach every time he thought about the Stasis Shields. The memory of opening the phony comic book up, Chrissy sitting right there watching, made his veins bulge. Now was the time.
“You want to go to Minneapolis? Why the fuck not? Isn’t that what I told you before? Didn’t I tell you to find those guys?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then do like I told you. I don’t care if you have to go to fucking Timbuktu.”
“What car you want me to take?”
“Take whatever you want. Wait a minute. Don’t take an Allante, f'chrissake. Take something I can afford to lose. You like convertibles?”
“Sure.”
“Go over to Spence’s shop and tell him to give you the blue ragtop we just took from Ohio. Have him throw on a new set of plates. Needs a muffler, but it ought to get you to Minneapolis. Okay?”
“Okay. Can I have some money?”
“Everybody wants money. Didn’t I give you some money a week ago? My fucking wife wants money. My squeeze wants money. The cops want money. My lawyers want money.” He swept the shattered remains of the pencil off his desk. “How much money you want?”
Freddy shrugged. “Whatever you think I’ll need, Mister C.” Mathematical reasoning ability was not Freddy’s strongest asset.
Joey Cadillac glared at Freddy. How do you argue with a guy like that? He unlocked a desk drawer and pulled out two packs of twenties. “There’s two thousand. Try not to spend it all on ties.”
Ellis Ward’s Big and Tall was having a slow day. Ellis Ward, former third-string tight end for the Bears, was standing in the window looking up Clark Street, thinking, as he did on a daily basis, that it was time he got into some other business, something he could make some real money at, when he heard a sputtering roar, then saw Freddy Wisnesky pull up in a baby-blue Cadillac convertible that must’ve been fifteen years old. It sounded like the muffler had been blown out.
“Thank you, Lord,” said Ellis Ward as he watched Freddy, a decidedly big and tall man, extract himself from the Cadillac and lumber toward the front entrance. Ellis moved to the door to greet him. “Mr. Wisnesky, how are you today?”
Freddy looked down at himself. “I'm okay,” he said. “You got any new ties?”
“I sure do. We just got in some real beauties. Genuine Chinese silk. Take a look, right over here, Mr. Wisnesky. I’ve got our florals in their own little section now, just for you. Check out the daisies, one of our classiest new patterns.”
Freddy picked up the bright yellow-and-white tie, held it up against his chest. It glared cheerily against his rumpled, unevenly gray suit. “I like it,” he said, handing it to Ellis. “I’ll take it. What else? What’s this one?”
“Those are carnations,” Ellis said. He had no idea what flower had inspired the pink explosions, but then neither would Freddy.
“I like it,” Freddy said. He picked out another tie, a darker floral pattern that was actually not too bad. “This too. What else you got?”
“Take a look at this beauty.” Ellis had a theory: The uglier and duller the customer, the uglier and brighter the tie. Freddy Wisnesky, with his sideways nose, muscled lips, and lightless eyes, illustrated this theory vividly. He didn’t even need the hair between his eyebrows or the wart on his chin. Ellis thought that Freddy and his ilk might be using the ties to distract people, and maybe it worked.
Twenty minutes later, Freddy had selected every floral-patterned tie in the store, a total of nineteen ties. He always did. Ellis always kept a good supply of bright florals in stock for Freddy Wisnesky, who always bought every last one of them and never questioned the price, a fact that Ellis had noted early in their relationship. As he was wrapping the ties, he asked, “When are you going to let me fit you with a new suit, Mr. Wisnesky?”
Freddy looked down. “Something wrong with my suit?”
“No, of course not,” said Ellis. “I just thought you might feel like a change of pace. You know, maybe a double-breasted, or something in a tropical weight. . .”
“You don’t like my suit?”
“I do, I like it.”
“You sure?”
Ellis Ward experienced a moment of indecision. He was reasonably certain that Freddy Wisnesky owned only one suit, the wrinkled and stained gray polyester he was wearing, and, possibly, two or three cheap, dingy-looking white shirts. And about five hundred ties with flowers on them. Ellis decided not to risk a good thing. “I like it a lot,” he said, ringing up the nineteen ties. The tie thing was too good a deal to risk by offending Freddy. Ellis bought most of the floral ties from an importer working out of Hong Kong. He paid about $2.50 apiece.
“With your discount, that comes to nine hundred dollars even, Mr. Wisnesky.”
Freddy handed him the bundle of twenties. Ellis Ward counted off forty-five of them and handed the rest back. Ellis Ward never shortchanged a customer.