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body back on a train for the . . . funeral. I had to have them keep the casket closed. . . .”
    “Don’t waste your tears on the dead, Sid,” Nolan told him. “You got to mourn somebody, mourn the living—they got it tougher.”
    “You . . . you don’t understand how it is . . .”
    Hell, Nolan thought, dust doesn’t give a damn. But he said, “Sure, Sid, sure.”
    “Let me tell you about her, Nolan . . .”
    “I got to be going now, Sid.”
    “Yeah . . . yeah, that’s right. I can’t tell you how much I . . . I appreciate this . . . Nolan, thanks.”
    “Sure.” He headed for the door. “See you around.”
    “Yeah . . . uh . . . so long, Nolan . . . you going by bus?”
    Nolan looked at him and said, “You ask too many questions, Sid,” and closed the door.
    Tisor watched through the picture window and saw Nolan board a city bus routed for downtown Peoria.
    There Nolan found a Hertz office and rented a midnight- blue Lincoln in Tisor’s name. He drove it back to his motel, packed and cleaned up, then checked out.
    He could make Chelsey by noon if he kicked it.
     
     
    6
     
     
    GEORGE FRANCO was a satisfied man.
    He was not happy, but there was satisfaction, a certain contentment in his life.
    He realized this as he lay on the soft double bed in his penthouse apartment, watching his woman get dressed. She was a leggy whore, with good firm breasts, and she was taking her time about fastening the garter snaps as she replaced her black hose. Her tousled black hair fell to her shoulders, and her once-pretty face wore a tight red line for a mouth. George liked the look of her hard, well-built body, but he didn’t like her equally hard face which spoke of something other than love.
    But she was his woman, hired or not, and he was lucky to have her and knew it. Especially when you were a repulsive glob of fat, as George resignedly recognized himself to be.
    She was dressed now, as dressed as possible considering the black sheath hit mid-thigh. She did her imitation of a smile for him and said, “Tomorrow, same time, Georgie?”
    “Yeah, Francie. Tomorrow. Sure was good today.”
    The whore smiled some more and said, “Yeah, sure was,” because that was her job. Her fingers rippled a little wave at her employer and she left.
    George sat up on the bed, poured the last shot out of the bottle of Scotch he and the woman had emptied during the day—the courthouse clock across the way was bonging four—and he drank it down. He held his liquor well, he knew he did; it was the one thing he could do well. Then he settled back with a good cigar and thought about his life.
    Satisfied, content. Not happy, but you can’t have everything.
    After all, he had fifty cent cigars when he wanted them, and a fifty dollar woman when he wanted her. He lived in a five hundred buck a month secret penthouse (over a drugstore) with five rooms and two color TV’s and two cans and two big double beds and three bars and lots of soft red carpet. His bars were well-stocked with all the liquor he could possibly drink; and he had all the food he could eat, as prepared by his personal chef, who came in twice a day. The chef lived down the street in an apartment shared with George’s maid.
    There were disadvantages, George realized that. People still didn’t like him. They never had, they never would. It was a kind of reverse magnetism he possessed. His woman, for example. You can only buy a woman from the neck down, he told himself over and over again, but you can never buy the head, except for the mouth of course. And his men, the ones who were supposed to protect him, they didn’t like him. And his chef didn’t like him—the chef could stand George, and seemed to kind of like him, but that was only because George was a good eater and, as such, a pleasure to cook for.
    Hell, he thought, not even his brothers had liked him.
    Not to mention his father.
    But Momma ( requiescat in pace ) had liked him.
    The best move he had ever made