Free Two for the Money by Max Allan Collins Page B

than anybody.
    The bell over the door jangled as it opened and Planner looked up to see if Nolan was there. No. Kids from the school let out across the street, in for three o’clock “penny” candy. Planner waited for the several minutes the kids took picking out their candy and gum from the double shelves by the door and accepted the coins they offered in return. The bell rang again as the door closed behind them and Planner flicked the ash off his Garcia and leaned back in his chair, puffing.
    Planning jobs he’d always been good at. He had a knack for that sort of thing, but he’d been glad to get out of the active end and into a front like this one. The on-the-job stuff, the something’s-gone-wrong-plan-on-the-job scene played hell with his nerves, and when he’d turned fifty he’d gotten this place and was glad of it.
    His “buying” trips out of town, which were frequent, served to give him a cover that let him innocently case all sorts of business establishments and, as a kindly old eccentric antique dealer, ferret out all kinds of information about cash on hand and where it was kept.
    The bell over the door jangled, and this time it wasn’t kids.
    A figure in a gray suit filled the doorway. The man stoodjust over six feet and wore a lean, hard-featured, high-cheekboned face, with narrow eyes and a thick mustache. His hair was black, widow’s-peaked, with only the hair along his sideburns completely given to gray. He dropped his bag to the floor and turned the OPEN sign around in the window, facing the CLOSED side out, then flipped the lock and drew the shade.
    “How are you, Nolan?” Planner asked.
    “All right. Getting cold, isn’t it.”
    “Haven’t been out today. Come by bus?”
    “No. Didn’t have the money. Hitched a ride in Davenport.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah, struck up a conversation with a guy and convinced him I got wiped out gambling. Said I had to come here to get a stake.”
    Planner stabbed out his Garcia and reached under the counter for a new one. “Well? Isn’t that true, Nolan, in a way?” He fired the fresh cigar with a wooden match and said, “Interest you in a Garcia y Vega? No charge, of course.”
    “No thanks. Cigarettes got first call on my lungs. You do still have that eight thousand I left with you last year, don’t you, Planner?”
    “Of course.”
    “Your safe in the back room?”
    “No, upstairs in my wallsafe. Don’t draw interest, but then it don’t get taxed, either.”
    “Let’s go up, then. I’ll need the money whether or not I take this job you got for me.”
    Planner nodded, stepped from behind the counter, and guided Nolan into the backroom and then across it, through a pathway between its many boxes to the stairway at the rear. He led Nolan up the stairs and into the newly remodeled second floor. He smiled, showing off both his pine-paneled living quarters and his new teeth, and Nolan nodded appreciatively.
    “You manage to live well, Planner. This must be the third time you remodeled since you moved in.”
    “Fourth. I like new things. I work all day downstairs with the old, so I live at night around the new. How do you like the modern furniture?” Planner had bought the stuff knowing that when he tired of it, he’d turn it over to Jon, whose one-room apartment was all but bare.
    “It’s okay,” Nolan said, patting a white plastic armchair. “I hope it’s kinder to my ass than it is to my eyes.”
    “Still the same old tactful Nolan. Drink?”
    “No thanks. Could we get to the job?”
    Planner motioned past the chair toward the circular couch, and both men sat. Planner said, “You still aren’t much for conversation, are you, my middle-aged friend? Don’t the years mellow you at all?”
    “Grow mold on me is more like it.”
    “I looked older at thirty than you do at fifty.”
    “I’m not quite fifty yet, but if you don’t mind, could the two old women cut the beauty-parlor age tally and get on with business?”
    “In your own