Drowned Hopes Part 22

Which Tom didn't seem to mind. While the vehicle made about four miles an hour-an hour and a half to Cronley, at this rate-and Dortmunder hunched over the steering wheel, forehead pressed to the windshield as he looked for axle-breaking holes out there, Tom chatted casually on, saying, "This is one of my oldest stashes, you know. Just after the war, it was. GI Joe comin home from everywhere, the streets lined with sharpers with decks a cards in their hands, just waiting. There was a fella in Cronley, stayed at the hotel there, had a girl named Myra. Lotta soldier boys got off the train there, headed back to the farm, or transfer to another train. Those days, you could take the train from Cronley down to Wichita Falls or up to Wichita or over to Amarillo, or all kinds of places. This fella-what was his name? - doesn't matter. Him and Myra, they worked those soldiers pretty good, the fella play some poker with them up in the hotel room, Myra stand around looking s.e.xy. So I got in good with Myra for a while, had her give me the high sign when there was a lotta money in the room, leave the door unlocked, and me and two other guys walked in and took it." Tom nodded. Without moving his lips, he said, "Hee-hee." Then he said, "Those other two guys, they didn't know about me and Myra. So they run into the elevator and I shut the door on them and yanked the power and carried the cash to the room Myra'd rented for me."

Dortmunder said, "Yanked the power? You mean you shut off the electricity in the hotel?"

"To confuse things," Tom explained.

"With your partners in the elevator?"

"Ex-partners," Tom corrected, and did his chuckle again, and said, "The soldiers got kinda rough on them two until the law got there."

"Didn't they search the hotel?" Dortmunder asked.

"Oh, sure," Tom said. "But Myra fixed me up so I was her sister, and-"

"Sister!"

"Myra was the one with the looks," Tom said. "But I was the one with the brains, so when the deck-a-cards guy found out Myra'd been in with the hijackers-"

"How'd he find out about that?"

"Well, how do you think, Al?" Tom asked.

"That's how," Dortmunder said, steering around the dangers in the road.

"So by then," Tom said, "I was outta there. But I couldn't take much of that cash with me, so I left it right there in the hotel, where it was safe."

"How much?"

"We got sixteen thousand in the heist, so I took along two with me, left fourteen."

"And now," Dortmunder said, as the little tires of the machine plunged into the holes and clawed up the other sides, "you think this fourteen grand is gonna still be there, forty years later."

"Absolutely," Tom said. "I'm not comin all the way out here, Al, for the fresh air. And not to look up Myra either."

"How old would she be now?" Dortmunder asked.

"She wouldn't," Tom told him. "Broads like Myra don't live long."

Not for the first time, Dortmunder found himself wondering just what in h.e.l.l he was doing in a.s.sociation with Tom Jimson in any way at all. Back in prison there hadn't been any choice in the matter-cell a.s.signments hadn't become negotiable until he'd been in there considerably longer-but in any case, back there he always had the comfort of knowing there was armed a.s.sistance constantly within shouting range.

What do I care about the people in that valley? Dortmunder asked himself, as the little white LEM progressed toward the dead Cronley. If I went there, walked around one of those Dudsons, people look out their windows, they see me, they'd call the cops. Saving that valley from Tom Jimson isn't my obligation, dammit. I got into this thing because he startled me, that's all, and it didn't seem like it was gonna be that hard, take that long, have so many problems. So now I'm in it, and here I am in Oklahoma, like some kind of pioneer or something, driving this beer keg with wheels. Makes no sense at all.

"There it is," Tom said, breaking a long and uncharacteristic silence.

Dortmunder slowed the vehicle almost to a dead stop so he could risk looking up and out. They'd just come over a low humpback ridge, and out ahead of them now was more greenery than Dortmunder had seen since the salad on the plane. This greenery, though, was mostly trees, short squat trees, deeply green, a thin platoon of them stretching to left and right. Since they'd spent most of the afternoon crossing this miserable imitation road, the trees' shadows spread long pointing fingers out to the right, as though suggesting visitors would be advised to take a detour. Sticking up above this linear forest were a couple of buildings and a church steeple.

Dortmunder said, "Trees on account of a river there, huh?"

"Al, you're a regular woodsman," Tom said.

"And that's your town, huh?"

"That's my stash," Tom said. "The tall building there, that's the hotel."

"Tall building," said Dortmunder.

"You can laugh, Al," Tom said, though Dortmunder had done no such thing. "But from Myra's room up there on the top floor, you could see for miles."

"See what for miles?"

Tom did his chuckle. "Well, us, for instance," he said.

THIRTY-SIX.

Guffey watched the little white car roll slowly toward town. The binoculars made it seem closer than it was, but flattened everything out. The scope on the 3003 was better; more definition. He could just about put a round through the windshield into either one of those bobbing heads from here, at this range. If he wanted to. Not that there was any particular reason to shoot those two strangers down like dirty dogs; not yet, anyway. Not until they got close enough, not until he could see who they were.

And what if it was-Guffey's leathery old hands trembled on the stock of the rifle-what if one of them was him?

Tim Jepson. At long long last.

"The fella that ruint my life," Guffey whispered through dry cracked lips. He lowered the rifle and his rheumy old eyes watched unaided as the small white car rocked and bobbed slowly this way. Tim Jepson.

Except it wouldn't be, of course. It never had been yet, no matter how long he waited, no matter how much he cultivated his patience. In twenty-six years, it had never once been Tim Jepson coming back to Cronley, coming back to pick up his fourteen thousand dollars.

But it would be! Someday! Someday it would be! But never today.

At first, in the early sixties, the occasional visitor-trespa.s.ser? invader? transient? - to the recently dead town of Cronley had been mostly just another looter hoping to find plumbing fixtures or bra.s.s doork.n.o.bs the previous looters had missed. Those had been tough, gritty, nasty city people in greasy green work clothes, driving slat-sided trucks and smoking cigars. They reminded Guffey of the toughest element back in prison, and so he kept out of their way, moving his few possessions with him, and not one of them had ever even known Cronley still possessed one last resident.

In the latter sixties, a different kind of visitor started to arrive: young dropouts in bright-colored clothing and headbands, like goofy Indians. They came in beat-up Volkswagen buses, they lit a lot of campfires, they played mopey music on portable phonographs, and they planted corn and tomatoes and marijuana. Only the marijuana came up, and soon each hopeful band decided to drop back in; Guffey would watch their buses jounce away over the ridge.

Very few of the dropouts became aware of the old hermit of Cronley, though a few of the girls did catch him peeping at them while they skinny-dipped in the river. Most of the girls got scared and mad, and told their boys, and Guffey would have to go off again and hide in the woods for a few days until they stopped looking for him; but one girl had beckoned with a crooked little finger and a crooked little grin, and my goodness! That was Guffey's only s.e.xual experience since before he'd gone to prison-over forty years now, it must be-but it was a humdinger. Well worth remembering. Kept a fella going when the nights got cold.

The hippies and yippies and trippies and flippies thinned out in the early seventies, and for a few years Guffey had Cronley absolutely to himself. Then, starting in the late seventies, the professors began to show up: archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, social historians. Men and women alike, they wore khaki trousers and heavy boots and lots of clothing with labels that read L. L. BEAN. (Guffey stole some of their gear to replenish his own worn-out stuff.) Eventually, though, grant money must have veered off in some other direction. It had been almost ten years now since Guffey had seen a safari-hatted, heavy-booted professor out around these parts. More recently there'd been a little spate of carpenters and architects and interior decorators looking for wood; barn wood, staircase newels, old and interesting panels. They encouraged the further deterioration of Cronley pretty well, but that was a short-lived fad, over and done with while the town was still moderately full of good wood. Guffey guessed it must be three, maybe even four years since another human being had ventured out this way.

And now this little white car. With his natural sense of caution, as the car approached the outskirts of town Guffey gathered up his few belongings, left his room on the top floor of the Cronley Hotel, and made his way down the peeling, scabrous hall to the stairs. The elevator hadn't worked for years, of course, and in any event Guffey would never ride that elevator again. That or any other elevator, but especially that one. That elevator was where his troubles had begun.

It was him and Eddie Hobbs and Tim Jepson when it started. Jepson was older than him and Eddie. They knew he was a hardcase, and they wanted to be hardcases just like him, and when he invited them to throw in with him on the hijacking, it had just seemed like a lark, kind of. They weren't going to rob anybody good, after all, but were going to hit up a card shark, a fella that had been taking advantage of the returning GIs. That's the way Jepson had presented it, and him and Eddie, nineteen and dumb and fresh off the farm, had gone right along with it.

And Jepson had betrayed them. Stuck them in an elevator without any power and took off with the loot. Him and Eddie were frantic in that elevator, in the dark, and things didn't improve any once the lights came back and the elevator started again to move. When it reached bottom, they knew, when it reached bottom and the door slid open, all h.e.l.l would break loose.

And it did. The trouble was, n.o.body else bought the idea that him and Eddie were stealing from a card shark. The way everybody else saw it-including the soldiers who'd been in that room with playing cards in their hands when him and Eddie and Tim busted in with guns in their hands-who him and Eddie were stealing from was soldiers.

Brave soldiers, just barely home, the war just barely over. People who would steal from soldiers didn't get much benefit of the doubt in those days.

In the next few years, Guffey got beat up a lot. It started the instant that elevator door opened, and there were all the soldiers who'd been playing poker in that room upstairs. The cops were there by then, too, but they were in no hurry to break up a good solid thrashing, so it was quite awhile before him and Eddie were carried from the hotel to the hospital.

That was the last Guffey ever saw of Eddie, who had some sort of aunt who knew a state legislator or something, and so got his case separated from Guffey's. Eventually, Guffey went on trial, where he drew the maximum, twenty-five to forty, because it was soldiers and because he'd been carrying a gun and because he already had a little record from some wildness in his youth (which was why he wasn't in the army), but mostly because Tim Jepson had got away with all the money.

Guffey's reputation had preceded him to the state pen, where first the guards beat him up and then the other prisoners beat him up and then the guards took a turn again. That slackened off after a while, but just around then some ex-soldiers began to show up in the prisoner population. Most of them felt they'd faced injustice in one way or another while they were in uniform, and Guffey was a handy way to gain redress.

Somewhere in through there, a fellow named Mitch Lynch came in, doing a heavy term for a long-con frammis against an oilman in Tulsa. Guffey didn't recognize Lynch as the sharper him and Eddie and Tim Jepson had hijacked, but Lynch recognized Guffey as one of the a.s.sholes who'd come storming into his private suite with a gun in his hand, so Lynch set himself the task of beating the h.e.l.l out of Guffey, only to discover it was already gone. The h.e.l.l had been beat out of Guffey; having a go at that little fella was like punching out a mop. Lynch ran him around the track a couple times, but got no real satisfaction out of it, and gradually, in some weird way, Guffey and Lynch became friends. Acquaintances, anyway.

It was from Lynch that Guffey learned how Lynch's girl Myra had betrayed Lynch for Tim Jepson, and then how Tim had betrayed Myra to Lynch before taking off with the dough. Or, not with the dough; that was the interesting part.

Myra had sworn to Lynch that Tim was stashing most of the sixteen thousand he'd taken in the robbery-fourteen, she was pretty sure-somewhere right in town, that he didn't want to have to travel with a suspicious amount of cash on him, and that he figured he'd just leave the money there until he needed it someday.

Lynch had questioned Myra pretty rigorously on the subject of where Tim had hidden the fourteen thousand, and so he was d.a.m.n certain in his mind that Myra didn't know the answer, or she would have told him. "Someday I'm gettin out of here," Lynch said, more than once. "And when I do, I'm goin back to Cronley, and I'm gonna wait. Get a job, do whatever, I don't care. Because someday that son of a b.i.t.c.h is gonna show up."

Well, so far, Lynch had been wrong on just about everything. He hadn't gotten out of prison, not standing straight up; an exercise yard argument in 1952 had ended with a sharpened spoon handle stuck through Lynch's ribs and into his heart. And even if he'd lived to get back to Cronley, it would have been empty by then, so there wouldn't have been any job for him. And up till now, Tim Jepson had not come back for his fourteen thousand.

When Guffey had been released from prison, after doing eighteen years of his time, the man who'd come blinking out onto the street was a lot older than his chronological thirty-seven. He no longer had any of his own teeth. So many of his bones had been broken so often that he moved like an arthritis sufferer of eighty. And he'd pretty well lost all capacity to live as a social animal. He was a solitary, who either cowered or snarled. He couldn't hold a job, couldn't keep a room to live in, couldn't get on a bus without making some kind of trouble. His parole officer hated him, and his parole officer was well known to be a living saint.

It was when Guffey found himself seriously considering what sort of crime he could commit that would guarantee his old cell back that he knew he had to take corrective action real quick, and that's when he remembered Tim Jepson, the man who had ruined his life, and Mitch Lynch, the man who had planned to be patient and alone and await his revenge. The memory of those two men, and the thought that Cronley had no people in it, was enough. By bus, by stolen bicycle, and at last on foot, Guffey made his move.

For twenty-six years, Guffey had been Cronley's only resident, waiting, nursing his resentments, rebuilding his shattered ego, creeping around the occasional visitor, waiting for the one visitor.

Over the years, too, Guffey had searched for that fourteen-thousand-dollar stash. He'd never found it, but he knew it was here. Tim Jepson would've been clever in how he hid it; that cleverness proved the money was here, somewhere in this town. And some day, Tim Jepson would come back for it.

Today?

The front marquee of the Cronley Hotel had long since fallen in. The sidewalk, where in the forties and fifties doormen had pocketed quarters from the drummers to hail them cabs to take them out to the illegal roadhouses outside town, was now a mess of ancient rubble, across which Guffey snaked and squirmed, toting his rifle and burlap bag, his knapsack (stolen from a professor) across his bony shoulders. The last rays of sunlight gleamed along the length of California Street. Down at the end there, the little white car jounced into view, turning this way, yellow sunlight glaring back from its windshield.

Not professors, these people, and not hippies. No, and not scavengers, either, in search of twentieth-century plumbing or nineteenth-century moldings.

Tim Jepson? Come for his stash at last? Guffey gripped his rifle tight and slithered away down the alley beside the hotel.

THIRTY-SEVEN.

Dortmunder was annoyed, disgusted, irritated, irked, and p.i.s.sed off. "And now," he said, "I'm gonna have to drive back over that G.o.dd.a.m.n road in the dark."

"Well, they'd have a room for us at the hotel," Tom said. "No problem about that."

"No? There are some problems."

They were in the town now, on the main drag, and on both sides of the street were two- and three-story wooden or brick buildings with storefronts on the ground floor. All the gla.s.s had been broken out of all the windows years ago, and here and there structures had been partly consumed by ancient fires. The concrete of the main street and its sidewalks was all broken into great chunks, like ice floes, heaved and buckling, covered with dirt and debris, around all of which Dortmunder had to steer. A few business names painted over storefronts were still faintly visible.

ZOMONSKI'S LADIES WEARPHILCO * GROSSER'S APPLIANCES * ADMIRALOLEKSIUK RADIO & TVVICTORY TAXINEW ATOMIC DINER "For one thing," Dortmunder said, "there's nothing to eat. That diner's closed."

"It wasn't much good when it was open," Tom commented. "Well, looka that," he said. "The marquee fell off the hotel."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Used to be a big marquee stuck out over the revolving doors," Tom explained. "Said 'Cronley Hotel' on both sides, had a big fancy C on the front."

"That pile of rubble up there? Is that where I'm headed?"

"That's it, all right," Tom said, and then he shook his head and said, "I dunno, Al. I traveled with people had better dispositions than you got, I can tell you that."

"Not on that road you didn't," Dortmunder told him, and came to a stop at the pile of rubble in front of a five-story brick structure polka-dotted with gla.s.sless windows. "Are you sure?"

"Tallest building in town, Al," Tom told him. "Marquee or no marquee, this is the Cronley Hotel."

"Tom," Dortmunder said patiently, "are you sure your stash is still in there? After all this time?"

"Absolutely," Tom said, opening his door. "And let's go get it."

It felt good to get out of the car, even here in Cronley. Dortmunder stood, pressed knuckles into his waist at the back, and stretched as he said, "Looks to me like this place, this whole town's had a lotta breakage, probably looting. Forty years, Tom, a long time. You sure n.o.body found it by now, nothing happened to it?"

"Absolutely not." Tom had opened the back door on his side, was prying his bag out. He paused to look over the top of the little white lemon at Dortmunder and say, "We're gonna need our flashlights in there, Al. These people ain't paid their electric bill in a long time."

"Okay, okay." Dortmunder opened his back door and yanked his own bag out. "If this isn't some wild-goose chase."

They opened their bags more or less companionably together on the hood while Tom explained, "Ya see, I hadda hide the money, in cash, in the hotel. I couldn't leave the place for a few days, while I was being Myra's sister Melissa. And I hadda figure they'd know, sooner or later they'd know I hid it, and they'd know it had to be in the hotel. So it had to be someplace they weren't going to look. Not behind a picture that could be taken down, not inside a window frame that could be opened up, not down inside the tubes of a bra.s.s bed that could be moved out. It had to be somewhere n.o.body would look, and that wouldn't be moved, and what I come up with is a place that's gonna be there forever, unless they turn this into a reservoir, and from the look of the area, Al, I don't find that much of a worry. Let's see, I need my wrench and my hammer, too, and that's it."

As they put their bags away on the tiny backseat, Dortmunder said, "So where's this magical place you found?"

"You'll see it, Al, soon enough," Tom said, and shut his door. "I don't think we gotta lock," he said.

Slowly and carefully they made their way over the rubble to the gaping entrance to the building. Years and years ago the entire revolving door, with its roofplate and its floorplate, had left Cronley lashed to the back of a pickup truck, so the entrance was now considerably less grand than when Cronley's Chamber of Commerce had wanted the town known as "Gateway to the Great Was.h.i.ta-Kiowa-Jackson Super-Region." Stepping through this portal, Dortmunder and Tom switched on their flashlights and shone them over dust, dirt, rubble, and decay. Carpets and wall sconces and the facings on brick pillars and even the entire front desk were all long gone, leaving a stripped and grubby sh.e.l.l.

"Lobby looks like h.e.l.l," Tom commented. "We go back this way, behind the manager's office. We want the stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt."

As they made their way through the debris, around slopes of plaster dust, porcupines of lumber piles with nails sticking out, tangles of wiring with frizzy ends, Tom said, "What I did, I had Myra get me a few empty wine bottles from the kitchen. With their corks."

Dortmunder said, "Wine bottles? I thought this was a dry state. I thought that was the trouble."

"You don't understand, Al," Tom said. "It's hypocrisy makes the world go round. Oklahoma was a dry state, but you could drink in a private club if you were a member. So all the hotels and restaurants were private clubs."

"Jesus," prayed Dortmunder.

"Well, yeah," Tom agreed. "How you became a member of the club in a restaurant was to order something to eat, and how you became a member of the club in a hotel was by checking in."

"I don't get it," Dortmunder said. "Why go through all that?"

"Well, I figure they had their reason," Tom said. "The stairs oughta be- Cripes, somebody even took all the doors. I hope they left the stairs."

"I hope they left your stash."