Finders Keepers

Tom could have cared less about the man driving the Mercedes-Benz. Not paralyzed was good, but—

‘How bad did I get it? No bullshit – be honest.’

She met his eyes but couldn’t hold them. Once more looking at the get-well cards on his bureau, she said, ‘You … well. It’s going to be awhile before you can walk again.’

‘How long?’

She raised his hand, which was badly scraped, and kissed it. ‘They don’t know.’

Tom Saubers closed his eyes and began to cry. Linda listened to that awhile, and when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she leaned forward and began to punch the button on the morphine pump. She kept doing it until the machine stopped giving. By then he was asleep.

1978

Morris grabbed a blanket from the top shelf of the bedroom closet and used it to cover Rothstein, who now sprawled askew in the easy chair with the top of his head gone. The brains that had conceived Jimmy Gold, Jimmy’s sister Emma, and Jimmy’s self-involved, semi-alcoholic parents – so much like Morris’s own – were now drying on the wallpaper. Morris wasn’t shocked, exactly, but he was certainly amazed. He had expected some blood, and a hole between the eyes, but not this gaudy expectoration of gristle and bone. It was a failure of imagination, he supposed, the reason why he could read the giants of modern American literature – read them and appreciate them – but never be one.

Freddy Dow came out of the study with a loaded duffel bag over each shoulder. Curtis followed, head down and carrying nothing at all. All at once he sped up, hooked around Freddy, and bolted into the kitchen. The door to the backyard banged against the side of the house as the wind took it. Then came the sound of retching.

‘He’s feelin kinda sick,’ Freddy said. He had a talent for stating the obvious.

‘You all right?’ Morris asked.

‘Yuh.’ Freddy went out through the front door without looking back, pausing to pick up the crowbar leaning against the porch glider. They had come prepared to break in, but the front door had been unlocked. The kitchen door, as well. Rothstein had put all his confidence in the Gardall safe, it seemed. Talk about failures of the imagination.

Morris went into the study, looked at Rothstein’s neat desk and covered typewriter. Looked at the pictures on the wall. Both ex-wives hung there, laughing and young and beautiful in their fifties clothes and hairdos. It was sort of interesting that Rothstein would keep those discarded women where they could look at him while he was writing, but Morris had no time to consider this, or to investigate the contents of the writer’s desk, which he would dearly have loved to do. But was such investigation even necessary? He had the notebooks, after all. He had the contents of the writer’s mind. Everything he’d written since he stopped publishing eighteen years ago.

Freddy had taken the stacks of cash envelopes in the first load (of course; cash was what Freddy and Curtis understood), but there were still plenty of notebooks on the shelves of the safe. They were Moleskines, the kind Hemingway had used, the kind Morris had dreamed of while in the reformatory, where he had also dreamed of becoming a writer himself. But in Riverview Youth Detention he had been rationed to five sheets of pulpy Blue Horse paper each week, hardly enough to begin writing the Great American Novel. Begging for more did no good. The one time he’d offered Elkins, the commissary trustee, a blowjob for a dozen extra sheets, Elkins had punched him in the face. Sort of fu

He didn’t hold his mother entirely responsible for those rapes, but she deserved her share of the blame. Anita Bellamy, the famous history professor whose book on Henry Clay Frick had been nominated for a Pulitzer. So famous that she presumed to know all about modern American literature, as well. It was an argument about the Gold trilogy that had sent him out one night, furious and determined to get drunk. Which he did, although he was underage and looked it.

Drinking did not agree with Morris. He did things when he was drinking that he couldn’t remember later, and they were never good things. That night it had been breaking and entering, vandalism, and fighting with a neighborhood rent-a-cop who tried to hold him until the regular cops got there.

That was almost six years ago, but the memory was still fresh. It had all been so stupid. Stealing a car, joyriding across town, then abandoning it (perhaps after pissing all over the dashboard) was one thing. Not smart, but with a little luck, you could walk away from that sort of deal. But breaking into a place in Sugar Heights? Double stupid. He had wanted nothing in that house (at least nothing he could remember later). And when he did want something? When he offered up his mouth for a few lousy sheets of Blue Horse paper? Punched in the face. So he’d laughed, because that was what Jimmy Gold would have done (at least before Jimmy grew up and sold out for what he called the Golden Buck), and what happened next? Punched in the face again, even harder. It was the muffled crack of his nose breaking that had started him crying.

Jimmy never would have cried.

He was still looking greedily at the Moleskines when Freddy Dow returned with the other two duffel bags. He also had a scuffed leather carryall. ‘This was in the pantry. Along with like a billion cans of beans and tuna fish. Go figure, huh? Weird guy. Maybe he was waiting for the Acropolipse. Come on, Morrie, put it in gear. Someone might have heard that shot.’

‘There aren’t any neighbors. Nearest farm is two miles away. Relax.’

‘Jails’re full of guys who were relaxed. We need to get out of here.’

Morris began gathering up handfuls of notebooks, but couldn’t resist looking in one, just to make sure. Rothstein had been a weird guy, and it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he had stacked his safe with blank books, thinking he might write something in them eventually.

But no.

This one, at least, was loaded with Rothstein’s small, neat handwriting, every page filled, top to bottom and side to side, the margins as thin as threads.

—wasn’t sure why it mattered to him and why he couldn’t sleep as the empty boxcar of this late freight bore him on through rural oblivion toward Kansas City and the sleeping country beyond, the full belly of America resting beneath its customary comforter of night, yet Jimmy’s thoughts persisted in turning back to—

Freddy thumped him on the shoulder, and not gently. ‘Get your nose out of that thing and pack up. We already got one puking his guts out and pretty much useless.’

Morris dropped the notebook into one of the duffels and grabbed another double handful without a word, his thoughts brilliant with possibility. He forgot about the mess under the blanket in the living room, forgot about Curtis Rogers puking his guts in the roses or zi

‘These’re full,’ he told Freddy. ‘Take them out. I’ll put the rest in the valise.’

‘That what you call that kind of bag?’

‘I think so, yeah.’ He knew so. ‘Go on. Almost done here.’

Freddy shouldered the duffels by their straps, but lingered a moment longer. ‘Are you sure about these things? Because Rothstein said—’

‘He was a hoarder trying to save his hoard. He would have said anything. Go on.’

Freddy went. Morris loaded the last batch of Moleskines into the valise and backed out of the closet. Curtis was standing by Rothstein’s desk. He had taken off his balaclava; they all had. His face was paper-pale and there were dark shock circles around his eyes.