The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

But I was stumped. Gurley Flynn and Dolan were coming out of the train station together, her in a black cape with a carpetbag, him in that same ill-fitting suit with his bowler hat. So she’d come back after all. Well, that would be more money. But where was Reston? I reached into my pocket for a dollar coin, dropped it on the table, and was about to stand when a shadow fell and I looked up to see Early Reston. “Del Dalveaux,” he said, like we’d met before. It is the strangest aspect of aging—how faces blur, a language you no longer speak. Up close this man seemed familiar, but perhaps the way a common face is reminiscent of others—thin, weary, plain—an age that might be twenty-five or forty-five, so ordinary in appearance that only another agency man would appreciate the difficulty of achieving such anonymity, like walking in snow without making a footprint. “You have me at a disadvantage,” I said, my hand finding my .32. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said. “Has any man ever had the great Del Dalveaux at a disadvantage?” He took the chair next to mine. “Brand hired you?” he asked. “Indeed,” I said, my hand square on the Savage grip. “And you?”

Del D and Early W