Free Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) by Spider Robinson

half turned in her chair to face him.   “But there isn’t any doubt, is there, sweet?”
    Willard was frowning so ferociously he looked like a migraine victim.   “Not in my mind,” he said, and opened his arms.  
    They hugged each other hard.
    The Doc cleared his throat again, perhaps half an octave higher, and said in his very softest, gentlest voice, “The first one who tells me who that guy is might very well be allowed to live.”
    Willard sighed.   “That guy,” he told us all, stroking his wife’s hair, “pretty much   has to be the son of Tony Donuts.”
     
    *   *   *
     
    “I believe you,” I said.   “That’s so weird it almost has to be true.   But it doesn’t tell me anything, yet.   Who exactly is Tony Donuts?”
    “A memory, now.”   He shuddered, and I don’t think it was theatrical.   “Not a good one.”
    “Well…mixed,” Maureen said.  
    “He was a mixed cursing,” her husband agreed.   “I can’t deny that.”
    “Willard and I knew each other for years,” Maureen said, “and at various times we were partners, lovers, friends.   For awhile we weren’t anything at all.   Then Tony Donuts came into our lives and brought us back together…and when the dust settled, we were married.”
    “Whoa,” Long-Drink exclaimed.   “And that’s not enough to make him a good memory?   What was he like?”
    Willard looked thoughtful.   “Picture the monster that just left here.”
    Long-Drink frowned.   “Okay.”
    “Two inches taller, fifty pounds heavier, ten years older.”
    With each successive clause, Long-Drink’s frown deepened.   “ O -kay.”
    “With a permanently abcessed tooth.”
    Long-Drink’s eyes completely disappeared from view beneath his eyebrows.   “Ah,” he said.
    “That was Tony Donuts on a good day.”
    There was a brief silence, as we all tried to picture such a creature.   “I see,” Long-Drink said, though it’s hard to imagine how he could have; by now even the bags under his eyes were obscured.
    Fifty-Fifty spoke up.   “How’d he get that name?   Was he a cop, once?”
    Willard briefly sketched a smile.   “No, Marty.   He was born Antonio Donnazio, that’s part of it.”
    “And the rest?”
    Willard grimaced.   “With children present, I hesitate t—”
    “One time he was raping a woman named Mary O’Rourke,” Erin said, “and her husband kept trying to stop him.”   She saw Willard’s surprise.   “Lady Sally told me the story once.   So Tony decided to secure Mr. O’Rourke out of the way, and the tools at hand happened to be a mallet and a pair of large spikes.   Afterward one of the crime-scene cops voiced the opinion that Mr. O’Rourke’s scrotum now looked like a pair of donuts, and the name stuck.”
    “So did O’Rourke, it sounds l- oooch ,” Long-Drink said, the last syllable occasioned by the heavy shoe of Doc Webster.
    “So how did you two get mixed up with him?” I asked Willard, to change the subject.
    He sighed, looked down, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.   “Well…this was back in the days when some people called me The Professor.”
    Yipes.   I had a sudden flashback of several decades, and made a clumsy attempt to interrupt him.   “Uh, look, we don’t really need to go into this level of detail—”
    Maureen was shaking her head.   “Thanks, Jake, that’s sweet—but it’s okay: there isn’t a single want or warrant outstanding for anyone of that name, in this or any jurisdiction,” she said.   “There never was.”   You could hear the pride in her voice.   Not many worldclass confidence men can make that claim.
    “In the course of business,” Willard continued, ignoring my interjection, “I found myself in sudden urgent need of a fair amount of really good funny money.   Fifty large, to be exact.   So sudden and urgent that I was willing to deal with Tony Donuts, who had only recently finished murdering the best counterfeiter in the country and