Hard Cash by Max Allan Collins Page A

at ease. And it did. Rigley’s tic, his overall nervousness, seemed to have disappeared. He was smiling, sipping his Manhattan.
    “However,” Nolan said, “I’m afraid all of your work maybe was for nothing.”
    “What do you mean?” Rigley said, brows knitted.
    The girl was silent, but her expression asked the same question.
    “Now, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand my motives,” Nolan said, “but I think it would be best all around, for all concerned, if we called it off.”
    “What?” Rigley said. Almost shouted. “Call it off? Call off the robbery? Why, for Christ’s sake?”
    Nolan shrugged. “The only way I can explain it is by saying I’ve reached fifty years of age and never spent a day of it in jail, even though for the better part of the last twenty I was robbing banks like yours, Rigley. And do you know how I managed that? Managed to stay alive and not behind bars? By being careful. By having certain rules. By demanding certain conditions . . . ideal conditions . . . for any heist I was part of.”
    “What in hell could be more ideal than this?” Rigley demanded. “What in hell more could you ask in a bank robbery than the help of the president of the bank? I mean, I’ve heard of inside tracks, but this is ridiculous.”
    “You’re right,” Nolan said, nodding. “But I’m not talking about the job itself.”
    The girl, who had the painfully skeptical expression of a doctor listening to a patient explain how he caught clap off a toilet seat, leaned forward and said, “Then just what are you talking about?”
    And Nolan told them about the break-in Friday. He told them of two men (neither of whom Jon got a look at) who came in, rummaged through the entire antique shop, including opening a safe, apparently but not necessarily looking for money, and were interrupted by Jon, whom they promptly conked on the head before getting the hell out.
    Before Rigley and the girl could begin expressing their obvious disbelief, Jon leaned forward, parted his hair, and showed them the bump. Then he sat back and said, “And that ain’t special effects, boys and girls. I’m too much of a coward to let myself be conked on the head just to back up a phony story.”
    “All right,” the girl said, taking over (as Rigley seemed too confused at the moment to actually talk), “suppose it’s true. What exactly does any of that have to do with anything? Two people break into your shop and try to rob you. So what?”
    “First let me tell you about something else,” Nolan said. “Something that happened to a friend of mine. A guy who set up a robbery Jon and I were on not long ago, and who worked with me on a lot of things over the years. Real pro. Thursday night he was murdered. For the contents of a cash register, amounting to maybe fifty bucks. He ran a bar, you see, and after closing, somebody came in and blew my friend’s head all over the wall.”
    Nolan paused for dramatic effect, but the girl was not impressed. She said, “I still see no relationship to what we’re doing here.”
    “Maybe there isn’t any relationship. I’d go so far as to say there probably isn’t. But I don’t like coincidences. A thief, a friend of mine, is killed for nickels and dimes. Call it cute, or ironic, or anything you want. Only the next day, two guys break into where I live, and Jon interrupts them before much damage is done, but anyway they’re apparently trying to rob us. Again, ironic, cute, robber gets robbed. Big laugh. But suppose something’s going on. Some old friends or enemies of mine are in the neighborhood with something in mind.”
    “Isn’t that rather far-fetched?” Rigley said, finally regaining his faculty of speech.
    “Isn’t it rather far-fetched that within twenty-four hours, a few hundred miles apart, two professional thieves who did a lot of work together are the object of two robberies themselves? One of them killed, head blown off by a shotgun like the one you were waving around