Drawing Dead (18 page)

“Check it out, my man,” said Natch as he descended the steel staircase. “Close the door behind you. This is a controlled environment—constant fifty-five degrees and sixty percent relative humidity. I've got an electrostatic precipitator that'll knock the lint right off a gnat's pecker.” Crow closed the door and followed Natch down the steps. He could hear the hum of the climate control kicking in, restoring the atmosphere to its prescribed parameters.

The basement of Ephemera was a single rectangular room twenty feet long by twelve feet wide. The walls were pure white and, with the exception of a row of filtered vents, featureless. A set of flat files, chin high, ran the length of the room on two sides. A flat white table, nothing on it but a blue notebook, sat in the center of the room. After the barely controlled clutter and reek of the shop upstairs, this was like stepping into the far future. Crow gave Natch the stunned look he was waiting for.

“This is where I keep all my good shit,” said Natch, showing a set of long, smoke-stained teeth. “Check this out.” He opened a file drawer, gently lifted out a flat plastic package, and set it on the table. It was a comic book, yellow cover, Batman and Robin swinging from ropes high over Gotham City.

“You were talking about
Batman #1
? Well, there it is. Kind of gives you goose bumps, don't it?”

Crow leaned closer and inspected the comic. It looked to be in perfect condition, but it also had a dated look, like a visitor from the past. “This is worth eighty thousand dollars?”

Natch shook his head. “You don't get it, do you? Man, I look at these things and I get a rush you wouldn't believe. Guys like you, all you want to know is how much it's worth. That's how come this business has gotten so fucked up the last decade. You know those prices you were quoted? They told you this comic is worth eighty thousand, right? Well, I am ever so fucking sorry to tell you this, my man, but comics like these do not
sell
for, they
trade
for.”

“I don't get the difference.”

“Look, man, this here is what you call a key issue. It's got historical significance, it's got a primary character, and there're only about a dozen other mint-condition copies on planet Earth. But if I wanted to sell this comic for cash money, I could get fifteen, maybe twenty thousand for it—assuming I could even find a buyer. And this is the good shit.”

“How come I keep hearing these big numbers thrown around?”

“Those are trades, man. All these old comics get rated by
Overstreet's
or one of the other price guides. They're worth anything from their cover price up to maybe ten or twenty thousand dollars. If that. There are maybe four or five very rare and important comics that could sell for fifty thousand in perfect condition. Not many comics are worth more than a few hundred. When you hear about these huge figures, a hundred thousand dollars, what you're hearing is what the comic
traded
for. That means that a guy who trades
Batman #1
for eighty thousand dollars probably got a little bit of cash, if any, plus a stack of comic books that is supposed to be worth the eighty thousand.”

“And the comics he gets aren't worth that much?”

“It's in everybody's interest to pump up the nums, my friend. Except for the small collector. The guy who really loves comics, he gets screwed. Big trades kick up the value for the pros but leave the little guy sucking air. But nobody ever pays a hundred thousand cash for a comic book. I'm not saying it won't ever happen—with these auction houses getting into the act, there are some real cash-for-comics sales happening, but the true nums aren't like that. That's one of the reasons comic values have been inflating like crazy the past few years. You get a few responsible dealers that say 'Now wait a minute,' but those guys get left in the dust. It's like the stock market, only without the SEC.”

“I can see why Dickie likes it.”

“That's the dude sold you this shit? Those guys are raising four hundred thou, spending three quarters of it to acquire a collection that sounds like a dealer's wet dream and probably is. You ever hear of Edgar Church? This John Jones character sounds an awful lot like Edgar Church. Too similar. The Church collection is legend in the comics business. It surfaced about twenty years ago. Hit the market like a goddamn tidal wave. We'll never see a collection like that again, my friend. Only in our dreams. This Galactic Guardian thing? Dreams, dude.”

Crow nodded glumly, staring at the Batman comic on the table. A memory tugged at him.

“Do you have any old Spider-Man comics?” he asked.

Natch said, “Spidey? I've got most of the older ones. You have a particular issue in mind?”

“There was this one with a green guy that flew around on a little rocket. The Green Goblin.”

Natch put the Batman comic away, then opened the blue notebook and flipped through it. The pages were covered with tiny, cramped entries. It looked like an accountant's ledger. He ran his finger down a page of entries, stopped, and said, “Far out.” He went to a file on the other side of the room, opened it, and handed Crow a comic book in a plastic sleeve. “Number fourteen,” he said. “Introduces the Green Goblin.”

Crow looked at the cover. Spider-Man clinging to the top of a cave, being attacked by the Green Goblin. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He had once owned this comic book, or one exactly like it. It was as if he was looking through a window back onto his childhood. He looked at Natch, who was grinning.

“Can I take it out of the plastic?”

Natch smiled and said, “Maybe there's hope for you yet, dude.”

The
walk home from Ephemera seemed to take hours. Crow let himself in, walked out onto his porch, picked up Milo, draped him over his shoulders, and stood watching the traffic pass below. After a time, Milo grew impatient and inserted a set of claws into his perch. Crow bent forward and let the cat dismount. What the hell, he decided. He swallowed his pride and phoned his old man to see if he could borrow a car. The way he was feeling, there wasn't much to swallow.

Sam O'Gara answered the phone with his characteristic unintelligible croak.

“Sam, this is Joe.”

“Son!”

“How you doing?”

“I got a devil in my belly. Doctor says it's acid, on account of the snoose, but I think it's the Big C, son.”

“Sounds rough. Say, you got a vehicle I could borrow for a few days?”

“Your old dad's dying, and you want to borrow his car?”

“Sam, you've been dying since the day I met you. You'll still be dying ten years from now. I'll have it back before then.”

He listened to his father's harsh breath.

“ Welp, I got this big red fucker you can use.”

Sam
O'Gara lived across the river in East Saint Paul—an hour and a half on the bus—in a former shotgun shack that he had expanded in every direction. It looked like a piece of dirty popcorn. Sam shared his home with four cats, two dogs, and an occasional girlfriend. He boasted that he could make one cat last longer than any three women.

Sam made his living as a shade-tree mechanic and used-car dealer, buying, fixing, and reselling as many cars as it took to meet the monthly food bill. He always had two or three vehicles in various states of disassembly in his backyard and had been at war with the city housing inspectors ever since Crow could remember. “Ain't no car. It's a sculpture,” was one of his favorite and most effective lines.

Crow found him back by the alley, with most of his wiry little body inside the engine compartment of an old Ford flatbed truck. It was the only red vehicle in sight, so Crow assumed that this was the “red fucker” he had come to borrow. The body looked as if it had been painted in the dark with a stiff brush. A matching set of spotted yellow mutts that looked more like hyenas than dogs jumped up from their resting place in the shade of a rusted-out blue Chevy and charged. Crow froze and waited, ready to protect his groin with one hand and his throat with the other if they failed to recognize him.

Sam looked up and shouted, “Chester! Festus!” The dogs stopped a few feet away, growling. Crow had to run this gauntlet every time he visited Sam. He slowly lowered himself into a crouch. The dogs consulted each other, then one of them came forward slowly, sniffed his proffered hand, and started to wag its tail. The other mutt joined in. Crow rubbed the dogs' heads, stood up, and joined his father. He leaned over the grille. Sam was pulling the valve cover.

“What's going on?” Crow asked.

“Just a little adjustment I got to make.” This was a typical Sam O'Gara ploy. If he wanted to borrow the truck, Crow would have to spend the next hour passing tools over the fender, listening to the old man's bullshit.

“I just need it so it runs, Sam.”

“Yep. Just a litde adjustment's all she needs. You want to grab that fucker for me?” He pointed a grease-blackened forefinger toward a row of tools on the far fender. Crow handed him an open-end wrench.

“Not that fucker, t'other one.”

Crow had never heard his father call a tool by any other name. He put his hand on a smaller wrench.

“That's the fucker,” Sam said, looking full into his son's face for the first time.

As always, Crow felt a javelin of recognition pierce his gut. Strip away the wrinkles, whiten the teeth and eyes, and add a few pounds—it was as if he was looking into a mirror made of slow glass, seeing his future in this foul-mouthed old man. Crow had been eighteen years old the first time he met his father. The old man had come to watch him graduate from Westland High School. Until then, Crow had not even known he was alive. The first thing the old man had said to him was, “I'm the fucker knocked up your mama, son.”

Since then, they had maintained a cautious and distant relationship, trading favors back and forth, keeping the scales in balance. Crow had never been comfortable with his father, never felt quite the way he imagined a son should feel, but he stayed in touch. Whenever he asked the old man for help with something, it was with a measure of shame, as if suddenly he was not complete without the part that had sired him.

“How come you need wheels all of a sudden, son? Thought you had some fancy-ass fucker you was driving.”

“It's in the shop.”

“Shoulda brought it on over. I'd a fixed 'er up for you.”

“It's a Jaguar, Sam.”

“So what?” He pulled a tin of Skoal from his pocket, snapped his forefinger against the tin top, opened the can, and took a pinch between grease-blackened fingers.

“So it'd be like asking a veterinarian to take out my appendix, that's what.”

Sam inserted the Skoal into his cheek, then pulled a Pall Mall from behind his ear, lit it with his battered stainless-steel Zippo. Crow could almost feel the double dose of nicotine ripping through the old man's arteries. “You got trouble with your appendix, son?”

Deep down, everybody thinks they deserve to make as much money as the next guy, and they're scared to death they won't make as much. That's what you got to tap into. That's why when one guy hears that this other bozo bought five hundred shares of Dumb Ass, Inc., he's gotta do it too. It's like those…what do you call them? Lemons. Like when the lemons march into the sea.

—Richard D. Wicky, V.R, training a new registered representative

“Yeah, Oz?
Listen, I'm glad I caught you. You know that Galactic Guardians? No, no, I got you the three units, just like I said I would. I said I would, didn't I? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, the reason I called, some more units just became available. No. No. No. What happened is, one of the guys that bought a bunch of it ran into a cash problem and he's trying to unload a few units. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I don't know yet—how many would you be interested in? Uh-huh. Yeah. No, he just wants to get his money back. Two thousand a unit. I don't know. Sure, I'm pretty sure he could let loose of three more. And, Oz? You can just make the check out to me. I run it through Litten here, you got your transaction cost. We don't need that, right? Yeah. Okay. Three units. You got it, buddy. You want any more, let me know, okay? Yeah. Thanks, Oz. See you tomorrow night at Zink's. Right. Bye.”

Wicky set the phone back on its cradle, shook his paperweight, watched the snow settle. He picked up the phone and dialed another number.

“George! Rich Wicky here! You been watching the market today? It's looking real shaky. I'm thinking it's about time to sell that Unisys. Yeah. Uh-huh. At least you'll get the tax break. Yeah, I really think you should. In fact, I'm getting a lot of my people out of the market altogether—things are just too uncertain right now. They're saying it could go down another three hundred points before it makes a new bottom. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, you know, the money markets aren't paying much now. I'm getting a lot of guys into this limited partnership I found. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. The thing is, this one's different. You read that article about comic books in the Journal a few days ago? Well, let me tell you…”

It was after six o'clock when Wicky left Litten Securities. His efforts to unload the rest of his Galactic Guardians were not going well. He still had another eighty-six units to dump, and he'd used up most of the juice he had with his existing clients. They weren't buying his line. Something must be coming through in my voice, he thought—they can smell fear right through the phone lines.

He decided to stop at Myron's Pub for a martini, something to get his mind off his troubles. Jack Mitchell was sitting at the bar with one of the new guys—a wimpy-looking kid, all decked out in his new Brooks Brothers suit, wearing it like it was alive. First day on the job, out for a few drinks with one of the big boys. Mitchell introduced Wicky as Litten's number-one sales animal. Even called him “Rich” for once, so of course Wicky had to buy a round of drinks. It was the kid's first martini. Mitchell was wearing his cherry-popping smile. In about twelve hours, the kid would be experiencing a hangover to die from. Mitchell was keeping his hand on the Brooks Brothers shoulder, keeping the kid focused, saying, “You can talk on the phone all day long, read your script to every little old lady from Thief River Falls to Winona, but the real business happens right here in Myron's. This is where the deals are made. Right, Rich?”