“I still believe you have things mixed up.”
“I’m not interested in opinions. You want to do some business, or you want to keep fucking around?”
“You’ve got it backwards, Sal. You hired Charlie Dodds to take me out.”
“That’s past history. You come up to the lake uninvited, you provoked my father, you started that beef out on the road. I mark it off even. That’s the way I see it.”
“What’s the offer?”
“What d’you mean, what’s the offer? I spelled it out to you yesterday.”
“No, you didn’t. You said three or four grand a week. Are you going to pay that kind of money for house security?”
“We’ll set you up with your own action. You manage a club in Vegas. All you got to do is count the receipts. You know what the skim is on a half-dozen lobby slots?”
“I’m about to go on trial.”
“You’re breaking my knob off.”
“No, I think you’re trying to do a number on me, Sal. You’ll talk a lot of shit about the big score out in Vegas, let me think I got no worries about Harry Mapes, then a little time passes and I’m back in Louisiana in handcuffs.”
“You think I’m playing games while that crazy fucker is shooting at me?”
“That’s your problem. My big worry is prison. That and your shitheads coming around my house.”
“I told you, there ain’t anybody after you now. What is it I can’t get through to you? This is a simple deal. You make money, I make money, Mapes gets whacked. You’re home free. I guarantee it. People don’t get out from under us. You were a cop. You know that.”
“I don’t think I want to do business with you, Sal.”
“What?”
“I think you’re about to take another fall.”
“What is this? What the fuck are you up to, man?”
“Don’t call here again. I’m out of your life. Don’t even have thoughts about me.”
“You shit-eating motherfucker, you’re setting me up… It won’t work, cocksucker… it’s entrapment… you tell that to Nygurski… I’ve got lawyers that’ll shove it up his ass.”
I placed the receiver quietly in the cradle and went outside and sat down on the steps beside Dixie Lee, who was reading the comics in the newspaper. He turned the page and popped the paper straight between his hands.
“Don’t start telling me about it. My system’s puny as it is. I just as soon drink razor blades,” he said.
I called Nygurski at his house a few minutes later. He wasn’t home, so I put Alafair in the truck and we drove back to the Heidelhaus. This time the yellow Mercury with the cracked back window and the University of Wyoming sticker was parked in the shade of the building behind the dumpster.
I parked in the main lot, away from the Mercury, took Alafair inside and bought her a Coke by a stone fireplace that was now filled with a huge tropical aquarium.
I went up to the male cashier at the bar.
“I backed into a yellow Mercury by the side of the building,” I said. “I think it might belong to somebody who works here. I think I just scratched it, but I’d like to make it right.”
“Next to the building? Right out there?” he asked, gesturing toward the side of the restaurant where the dumpster was located.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“It sounds like Betty’s. That’s her down the bar.”
She was around thirty, blond, thick across the stomach, overly rouged, too old for the Bavarian waitress costume that she wore.