North of Nowhere

Chapter Seventeen

He was standing behind the bar when I walked in. He didn’t even look at me. He kept talking to the man in front of him, his voice low. There were a couple other men at the bar, a few more at the tables. The Tigers were playing on the big screen again.

“Bennett, I want to talk to you,” I said.

“Be with you in a minute,” he said, his eyes still not moving.

“It can’t wait.”

“Just a minute, Alex.”

“At least pour me a beer while I’m waiting.”

He finally looked up at me. If he even noticed the shape I was in, it didn’t register on his face. “I’m a little busy right now,” he said, his mouth tight. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Bennett, what’s going on?”

He looked down at the sink in front of him, his hands still on the bar. From the moment I had stepped into the place, he hadn’t moved his hands.

An ashtray on the bar. Smoke rising. That smell, sickly sweet.

The man in front of Bennett, sitting on the bar stool-I hadn’t looked at him when I came in. Now I did. His hair was so blond it was white, his skin so pale that in the summer he’d turn red as a beet as soon as he stepped outside. His eyebrows, you could barely see them.

He looked over at me, the same way he had looked at me when I was lying on Vargas’s floor.

“We’re having a conversation,” he said. “What’s all the fuss about?” The last word a very Canadian “aboot.”

“There’s no fuss,” Bennett said. “Alex is just here to have a beer.”

“It looks like Alex needs a little ice for his face, too,” the man said. “He seems to have run into a cement truck.”

He didn’t take his eyes off me. I wiped the blood off my chin with the back of my sleeve and stared right back at him. I took a step toward him. He didn’t even blink.

“Alex, don’t,” Bennett said. “Please don’t move.”

I looked away from the man, saw Bennett’s hands still on the bar. It all fell into place. The man was wearing a jacket on a day that was far too warm for it. It was zipped most of the way down, and the man’s right hand was inside. I didn’t have to guess what he was holding.

“I’m not alone,” he said. “I’d rather we didn’t have to shoot our way out of here, but we will if we have to.”

I looked behind him. Ham was sitting at one of the tables, looking like his head was about to explode. Another man sat next to him. He wasn’t quite as blond as the man at the bar, but otherwise the family resemblance was unmistakable.

“Your brother,” I said. “Was he the third man at our party?”

“You know who the third man was,” he said.

“News to me.”

“You were in this from the beginning.”

“Again,” I said, “news to me. You wanna start making some sense?”

“I told you,” Bennett spoke up. “Alex had no part in this.”

“There you go again,” the man said. “Every time you say that, I get more upset. I do wish you’d stop.”

“I’m telling you the truth,” Bennett said.

“How about you, Alex?” the man said. “Are you gonna tell me the same thing?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then why are you here? Just dropping in for a beer? And some bandages?”

“Why were you in my cabin?” I said.

“Just doing a little research,” he said. “Trying to recoup some business losses.”

“Why don’t you come by again tonight? I’ll make sure I’m home this time.”

“You know, I’m starting to feel unwelcome,” he said. “In fact, I’d say it’s gotten downright hostile in here.”

“You haven’t seen hostile yet. Believe me.”

He smiled. “If you had any idea,” he said. “My God, you people actually think you can get away with this. It’s almost funny.”

“I saw one of your partners today,” I said. “Two bullets in the back? That must have been you. Pretty gutless, wouldn’t you say?”

His smile vanished. “You’re about to end your own life, friend.”

“I’m ‘aboot’ to end my own life? How come you Canadians talk so funny, anyway?”

“Alex,” Bennett said. “For the love of God…”

“I’ll be in touch with you again,” the man said as he stood up. “Soon.” He circled around me, never turning his back. His brother stood up and went out the door first. Then my new friend slowly backed his way out the door, giving me a little wink.

As soon as the door closed, I went to the window.

“Alex, what are you doing? Get away from there!”

I ignored him. I watched the men get into a black Audi. It was not the same car from Leon’s videotape, and not the same license number, although the plate did come from Ontario.

I went back to the bar. “Give me a pen,” I said, grabbing a napkin.

“What?”

“You can take your hands off the bar. He’s gone. Give me a pen.”

He finally unfroze himself, pushed himself away from the bar, and found me a pen. I wrote down the plate number on a cocktail napkin. Bennett leaned over the sink as though he was about to throw up.

When Margaret came out, carrying a plate of food, she stopped dead in her tracks. “What’s going on?” she said. “What’s wrong? Alex, what happened to your face?”

Bennett shook his head. Ham kept sitting at the table, staring at the door.

“You can pour me that beer now,” I said. “And then you can start talking.”

He picked up a mug, pulled the tap, then set the mug down in front of me with a bang. The foam ran all over the bar.

When Ham finally got up and came to the bar, Bennett told him to take over.

“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” Margaret said.

“I’ll tell you later,” Bennett said. “I need some air.”

I was behind him so fast the door didn’t even get a chance to shut. “Who was that man?” I said. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know his name,” he said.

“The hell you don’t. He was one of the three men you got to take down Vargas.”

He stopped in the middle of the parking lot. He turned to me. He was standing so close, and being a good five inches taller, he had to look down at me. He didn’t say a word.

“Start explaining,” I said.

He shook his head.

“I already look like hell, Bennett. I’ve got nothing else to lose. Start talking now or we go right here.”

He let out a long, tired breath. “Come with me,” he said.

I followed him around the lot, and back to the river. I saw the dock where I had left Vargas after our little lunch date. There was a picnic table back there. Bennett sat down, and then I did the same, directly across from him. A couple of boats passed by. The sun was setting. It was another goddamned beautiful sunset and this was how I was spending it.

“How’d you figure it out?” he said.

“I didn’t. Not at first. That was the problem. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had just thought about it for a while.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was thinking it was all a setup,” I said. “I was thinking it had to be a setup. Using your car, planting that stuff at Gill’s house, and then at Jackie’s house…”

“How do you know about that?”

“I saw the videotape, Bennett. Leon showed it to me.”

“Yeah, the police certainly liked that tape,” he said. “I assume Vargas gave it to them. Of all the luck in the world, to have that son of a bitch tape the damned thing…”

“That’s just it,” I said. “Of all the luck. Who would have figured?”

“What do you mean?”

“You couldn’t have guessed that would happen. Nobody could have.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“The setup,” I said. “It just doesn’t work. If somebody was setting up all three of you, why use your car and then return it here? That doesn’t set you up at all. Without that videotape, there’s nothing to tie you into it. Only Jackie and Gill.”

He thought about that one for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I see what you mean.”

“What were you going to do? Call in an anonymous tip? Tell them Jackie and Gill had some of the stolen property on their premises?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You get the money,” I said. “And Jackie and Gill take the fall.”

“Alex, you got it all wrong. That’s not why we did this.”

“Who’s ‘we,’ Bennett? Who was involved in this? Start by telling me who the third gunman was. It wasn’t that other man in the bar?”

“No,” he said. “It was my son.”

“Your son is six foot fucking six,” I said. “He wasn’t there that night.”

“I have more than one son, Alex.”

That stopped me for a second. “I didn’t know that. I’ve never seen him.”

“My oldest, Sean, he lives down in Cleveland. He came up here to do it.”

“And this other guy, the one who turned up dead. Danny Cox is his name?”

“Yeah, that’s him. He was one of Sean’s old friends from high school. They used to run around together. Danny was a real hood back then, used to get into trouble all the time, and Sean would sometimes be right there with him. He ended up spending the night in jail once, when Danny and him got loaded and went out joyriding. The cop clocked them doing a hundred and ten down I-75. They stopped to piss in the middle of the road. Otherwise, the cop might not have even caught up with them. Anyway, Sean looked up Danny and asked him if he’d be interested in a little something…”

“A little something.”

“Yeah.”

“When that guy had the gun pressed to my head,” I said. “That was a little something.”

“Well, Danny knew about this other guy, over in Canada, who could get some guns, and who apparently had a little experience with these types of things. I was a little apprehensive, but Danny told me it would all go down a lot better if they had a pro involved.”

“You brought in a pro,” I said. “This is getting better by the minute.”

“This guy, as far as I know, they just call him ‘Blondie.’ Obviously, he’s even more of a heavy hitter than Danny was aware of.”

“You may have something there,” I said, “what with Danny lying there in the morgue with two bullet holes in him.”

Bennett looked behind him, out at the river. The sun kept going down and painting everything bright orange.

“Alex, this whole thing wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

“You know, I just remembered something Vargas said. He said that kick in the ribs you took was all for show. He was right, wasn’t he? That was all part of the script.”

“It was supposed to be,” he said, rubbing his side. “Danny got a little carried away with it.”

“So Danny and Blondie were the downstairs men. Your son Sean was the guy who emptied the safe?”

“That’s right.”

“And it was Sean who delivered the stuff to Gill and Jackie-by himself, after he dropped the other two guys off.”

“Yes.”

“So tell me, how much did you get? Everybody seems to have a different number in mind.”

He looked me in the eye. “Nothing, Alex. Sean got nothing.”

“Did they take the money out of the safe or not?”

He held up his hands. “All right, look. I’m telling you what happened. Sean came up and did this thing with Danny and this other guy. Naturally, there has to be some money involved. You gotta pay off Danny, and of course you gotta pay off this Blondie character. The thing is, when they came back here and split up the money in the car, there was thirty thousand dollars in the bag. Fucking Vargas, I should have known. All his big talk about being connected and having all this cash in his safe. Thirty fucking thousand, that’s only ten per man.”

“Not exactly the score of a lifetime.”

“No, and I’m sure this Blondie wasn’t too happy about it. I guess what Sean did was, he told them each to take half of his share, because he knew it wasn’t what they were expecting. So now they’ve each got fifteen. Still not a hell of a lot. But what are you gonna do?”

“Bennett…”

“This Blondie guy has been thinking about this for three, four days now, Alex. He’s feeling like he made a big mistake working with amateurs, and he’ll never do it again, right? Then he picks up the newspaper and sees me and Jackie and Gill getting hauled into jail, and he thinks, holy fuck, did I get played for a sucker. Because if all three of us were involved in this, which is certainly how it looks, I gotta admit, then it stands to reason that we were all in on the money.”

“Bennett, wait…”

“And you, too,” he said.

“Me.”

“You heard what he said. He thinks you must have been the ringleader.”

“Based on what?”

“Based on the fact that he’s a pro, Alex. Based on the fact that he had a list of everybody who was supposed to be there that night, and you weren’t on the list. He figures if you were the last minute wild card, you must have been added for a reason. So he checks up on you, finds out some things. That you were a cop, and then a private eye. And some other things, it sounds like. He didn’t say exactly what. But it sounds like you’re a known commodity.”

“You did act surprised that night,” I said, “when you saw me come in with Jackie.”

“Yeah, I was. But at that point, it was too late.”

“So now the pro from Canada thinks everybody has a big chunk of the money, and he’s getting ripped off. And of course I’m the mastermind.”

“He must have figured Sean was hiding most of it. Remember they were wearing those big plastic bags. You could hide a lot of money in there. I mean, that must be what he was thinking. So now he wants the rest of the money. All of it. Or what he thinks is all of it. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Alex.”

“Go to the police. Tell them everything that happened.”

“Then what happens to my son?”

“You should have thought about that before.”

“So he goes to jail. And I go to jail. And Blondie still thinks we stiffed him. What’s going to happen then, Alex? What’s going to happen to my wife?”

“Fuck, Bennett.” All the adrenaline I was riding on suddenly ran out. I was tired and sore, and I needed very much to eat some dinner and drink some beer and then go to sleep. When I woke up, maybe this would all have been a bad dream.

“You gotta help me, Alex.” He was looking down at the table.

“You think so?”

“You gotta.”

“You got your son to rip him off,” I said. “And you used your best friends for cover. Why should I help you now?”

“This wasn’t about the money, Alex. Not for me.”

“What are you talking about?”

He took a long breath and looked me in the eye. “Sean was in trouble. He had this debt, you see. These men he owed the money to, down in Cleveland…They owned him, Alex. I wanted to help him out. Is that so hard to believe? I wanted to help out my son.”

“So you told him to come rob the house,” I said. “At gunpoint. While we were all there.”

“No, that was sort of his idea. I just told him, I said, I know this guy with some money in his safe. A real son of a bitch who I happen to hate-somebody who could use a good sticking up anyway. Hell, maybe it would even make him move back to Bay Harbor, forget about building up here.”

“So he tells you to make sure we’re all there when it happens.”

“Yeah, he said it would go down better that way. If Vargas was alone, he’d think it was one of us behind it. With all of us there, it looks more like a random hit.”

“Because who, after all, would be so dumb or crazy to do it while we’re in the house…”

“Yeah, something like that.”

I sat there and thought about it. It didn’t get any more believable.

“There were no bullets in those guns,” he said. “Did you know that? At least, there weren’t supposed to be. Although, hell, I bet Blondie’s gun was loaded.”

“That’s even more stupid,” I said. “What if Vargas was armed? He could have drawn on your son.”

“I guess that was another part of me being there, to make sure everything went down the right way.”

“All right, now this business about giving Gill and Jackie that stuff…”

“That was part of the deal.”

“What deal?”

“With my son. I told him, you take this money and get yourself out of your situation, but you gotta do one thing for me. You gotta take this stuff and give it to my friends.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“You saw those things up there, Alex. He shouldn’t have them. They don’t belong to him.”

“So you told your son to take them.”

“Yes.”

“And give them to Gill and Jackie. Like Robin Hood.”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Gill told me those artifacts are worthless. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t. Hell, what can I say? They looked like they were important-you know, with all those Indian markings on them…”

“And that stupid cup, just because it had the Royal Navy flag on it…”

“That cup meant something to Jackie,” he said. “That much I know. You should know it, too.”

I threw my hands up.

“His father, Alex. You know about his father.”

“No, I don’t.”

“He never told you the story?”

“No.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Tell me.”

“Okay,” he said. He took a breath and settled into the story. “Jackie’s father was named Elias Connery. Eli for short. He came over here around 1939, just before the war. He was a deckhand on an ore freighter. You know how when the ships go through the locks, sometimes they’ll sit in Whitefish Bay for a while, waiting for the weather to clear? Back then, there used to be all these little boats that would come out to the freighters, and take the men to shore to go to the bars. The Coast Guard would be running all over the place, trying to round them up and send them back. Anyway, young Eli, he came ashore with a bunch of other guys and ended up right here at O’Dell’s. This is where he met Jackie’s mother. She was a barmaid here. In fact, this is where Jackie was conceived, right down the street at her house.”

“I thought he was born in Glasgow.”

“He was. Eli’s mother found the letter she wrote him, and made her come over. I guess she figured it was still safe, as long as she came over on an American ship, on account of them not being in the war yet. Eli had already enlisted in the Royal Navy by then. He was serving on a corvette, based out of Scapa Flow.”

“That was the emblem on the cup.”

“Yeah, that’s why I knew he’d want it. Especially with Eli going down right here in the lake.”

“What do you mean?”

“Alex, hasn’t Jackie told you anything about this?”

“No, Bennett. He hasn’t.”

“They all moved back here to Michigan when Jackie was twelve years old. There were a lot of jobs here after the war, especially for experienced seamen. A lot of men from Scotland came over to be skippers on tugboats. That’s what Eli did. He was a real character, Alex. He used to spend a lot of time here at the bar. I remember him saying that the lake was more dangerous than any ocean. It was just as deep in some parts, and other parts were shallow, with jagged rocks waiting to tear you apart. Anyway, that’s when I met Jackie. We got in a fight the first week he was here. After that, we were buddies. Fifty years now. He was the best man at my wedding, did you know that?”

“Yeah, that much I knew.”

“He was in love with my Margaret. Did he tell you that, too?”

“He might have hinted at it. But tell me about his father. You said he went down in the lake.”

“Yeah, in 1965. Last they heard from him, he had his boat out by the Devil’s Chair. They never found it, Alex. Not a trace.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re not telling me you think that cup belonged to Jackie’s father.”

“I told you, there were a lot of Scottish men on the lake back then. It could have been anybody’s. Hell, maybe it was his. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, Alex. Either way, I wanted Jackie to have it.”

“Did you ever think to ask Vargas for it?”

“I mentioned it once. He didn’t even say a word. He just gave me that little look with the eyebrow and his big fat bald head. He didn’t even bother to open his mouth and say ‘No.’ All the more reason to take it from him.”

“Yeah, he really had it coming.”

“That’s right, he did. Running his mouth off all the time, about what a big shot he is, how’s he’s gonna build these big houses all over the place. And all the money he’s got hidden away in that safe of his. Which he didn’t even have, turns out. Fuck him, Alex. That’s what I say. He deserved everything that happened.”

“And Jackie and Gill, they deserved to be arrested. And this old friend of your son’s, he deserved to get killed.”

“I told you, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Hell, this whole thing went wrong, from beginning to end. I told you, Sean even gave up his whole share of the money, trying to make this Blondie guy happy. He got nothing out of this, Alex. He got completely screwed here.”

“I can’t listen to any more of this,” I said, standing up. “I’ve gotta get out of here before I throw your stupid ass right in the river.”

“Alex, you gotta help me.”

“I was helping you,” I said. “You let me run around like a maniac, trying to prove you were innocent.”

“I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t know what to do. But now I really need you. This guy is gonna be back, Alex. He thinks we’re all in on this. You included. You heard what he said.”

“You go to the police, Bennett. And then I’ll help you.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Then you’re on your own,” I said. “You made your deal with the devil. You can live with it now.”

“I have to kill him, Alex. It’s the only way. When this Blondie comes back, I have to kill him.”

I stood there looking at him in the dim light. A cool evening wind drifted in off the river.

“Just when I think you can’t get any dumber, Bennett…”

“Alex, please. I’m begging you.”

“Good night,” I said. And then I left.