The Cinnabar Club

Chapter One: Ten Thousand at Midnight

One hundred and four degrees at nine in the evening, and the Truckee running so low you could count the stones in it.

Sal Brennick had the front window propped open with a copy of the Nevada statutes, which was the most use he'd ever gotten out of them, and the fan on the file cabinet turned back and forth like a man saying no. The heat came off Sierra Street in slow waves. Out past the Sierra, off toward the flats where the government did its business, the horizon flickered white every so often, a soft pulse behind the mountains. Heat lightning with a grudge, the papers called it. Down at the Riverside they'd put chairs on the roof to watch.

Sally Brister came out of the back room with two bottles of beer she'd been keeping in the evidence icebox, which held no evidence and never had.

"Fourth one tonight," she said, meaning the flash. "My sister says it curdles milk."

"Your sister thinks television gives you rickets."

"She's not wrong about everything." Sally set the bottle down on the corner of his desk, on the ring it had made the night before, and went back to her chair by the phones. She was forty-one, widowed by Anzio, and she typed faster than most men talked. The sign on the glass said BRENNICK BAIL BONDS — 24 HOURS. Underneath, smaller: NOTARY.

He was not a private detective. He said it about twice a week, most often to people who wanted him to be one. He was a man who lent the county money against other men's promises, and who went and got the men back when the promises rotted. Fifteen percent, non-refundable, and a great deal of driving.

The phone rang at eleven-forty. Sally listened, wrote, hung up.

"Felony assault and carrying," she said. "Booked at eight this evening. Dealer at the Cinnabar Club named Eddie Braddock. They found a fellow in the club lot with his skull opened up. Man's alive, more or less."

"Bail?"

She looked at the card again as if it might have changed. "Fifty thousand."

Sal put the beer down. "For a dealer."

"That's what the man said."

Fifty thousand dollars was murder money. It was money for a man who had shot a district judge. For a blackjack dealer with no record, on a charge where the victim was still breathing, a decent judge sets five. Somebody wanted Eddie Braddock in a cell with the key thrown into the river, and somebody else had leaned on a judge to make it happen. That was a fact worth knowing, and Sal turned it over the way you turn over a coin you suspect.

"Nobody'll write it," he said.

"Then it's a short night."

It wasn't. At midnight exactly the street door opened and let in a breath of air no cooler than the room, and a woman came in carrying a hatbox.

She was maybe thirty. Dark red hair, done properly, not the way women did it in Reno in August, which was to say not surrendered. A gray dress with a white collar, no jewelry but a thin watch. Her face was calm the way glass is calm. She looked at the fan, at the water stain in the ceiling, at Sally, and then at Sal, and she made her decision about all four of them in about two seconds.

"Mr. Brennick."

"That's the name on the door."

"My name is Jean Halliwell. I sing at the Cinnabar Club. Eddie Braddock is my brother." She set the hatbox on the desk and took the lid off. "Fifty thousand at ten percent is five. I have ten. The extra five is for the risk and the hour."

The bills were hundreds, banded, new. Sal took a band out and riffled it under his thumb and put it to his face, which people always found strange until he explained it, and he never explained it. Money out of a mattress smells like a mattress. Money out of a bank smells like paper and ink. This money smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and machine oil and the particular sour dust that gathers in a room where men count for eight hours a day. He'd smelled it before, in the back of every club in this town.

"Count room money," he said.

"It's money."

"It's the Cinnabar's money."

"It's mine." She said it without heat. "I've sung six nights a week for two years and I don't drink and I don't gamble and I have no children. Where did you think it would come from, Mr. Brennick — a violin case?"

Sally, at her desk, made a small sound she turned into a cough.

"Sit down," Sal said.

She sat. She did not cross her legs, or take out a cigarette, or do any of the things that a woman does when she wants the room slightly on her side. She simply waited, hands in her lap, and let him look at her, and he had the unpleasant sense that she was more comfortable being looked at than he was doing the looking.

"Your brother put a man in the hospital."

"So they say."

"Who was the man?"

"A drunk from Sacramento, I'm told. He grabbed at a girl in the lot. Eddie has a temper and no sense." A pause. "He also has a bad heart, though he'd rather die than say so, and he will not last thirty days in that jail."

"Fifty thousand is a strange number."

"Judge Cruthers plays golf," she said. "I don't pretend to understand who he plays it with."

Sal turned a pencil end over end. There were four good reasons to say no. The first was the money's smell. The second was the bail figure, which meant powerful people wanted this man buried and would not enjoy seeing him walk out. The third was that a sister who is really a sister brings a photograph, a mother, tears, something. This one had brought ten thousand dollars in a hatbox at midnight and nothing else at all.

The fourth reason was that she interested him considerably more than he liked, and a man ought to notice when that's happening and step back from the edge.

He wrote the bond.

"Understand the arrangement," he said, filling in the blanks in his hard slanted hand. "I put up fifty. Your ten sits in my safe as collateral. Eddie appears on the twenty-eighth and every date after, and when it's finished you get your ten back less my fee. If Eddie runs, I have thirty days to bring him in. If I don't, the county takes my bond, and then the county takes my building and my license, and then a man of forty-six starts over selling insurance in Winnemucca." He turned the paper around. "Sign there. Address here."

She signed. Her handwriting was small and even. She wrote an address on Bell Street.

"Will he run?" Sal asked.

Jean Halliwell looked at him for what felt like a long time.

"No," she said.

And she was lying — he knew it the way you know a note is flat — but she was lying about something considerably larger than the answer, and that was the thing that kept him awake later, when the heat sat on his chest at three in the morning and the swamp cooler dripped and the flat white flicker came again from beyond the mountains.

He went down to the jail at one and did the paperwork, and at two-fifteen they walked Eddie Braddock out into the sally port in a suit that had been good three years ago.

He was thirty-five or so, dark, good-looking in a way that would go soft in five years, hands soft as a woman's from twenty years of dealing cards, and there was a nervous brightness in him that Sal disliked immediately. Not the shakes of a man who's been in a cell. The jumpy energy of a man who has gotten away with something and can't stop tasting it.

"Mr. Brennick," Eddie said, and shook with both hands. "Say. I appreciate this. I honest to God appreciate this."

"Appreciate it on the twenty-eighth at nine in the morning."

"I'll be there with a haircut." He laughed. Nobody else did.

Jean was waiting at the curb by a two-tone Buick. Eddie went to her and she put a hand on his arm and said something short and low. Whatever it was, the brightness went out of Eddie's face like a lamp switched off, and he got in the car without another word.

She looked back once. She didn't wave.

Sal stood in the sally port and watched the taillights go down Court Street. Sally would have said something about it. Sally would have said, that's not the way a sister touches a brother, and she'd have been right.

He thought: nobody in this town has ever paid me five thousand dollars extra for the hour.

He went home and lay in the dark and thought about the smell of the money.

Four days later, Eddie Braddock was gone.