At two o’clock, just as the two men with guns were pulling into the Dairy Queen parking lot across the street, Planner was lighting a cigar and wondering when the phone call would come. The cigar was a Garcia y Vega, at least one box of which Planner kept under the counter always; he liked cigars, Garcia y Vegas especially, and if the occasional customers who walked into his antique shop were irritated by the smoke, well, fuck ’em. The phone call he was waiting for was from Nolan, a man who played a part in Planner’s other and primary occupation, which was planning jobs for professional thieves.
The antique shop, however, was more than just a front. Long before the thought of using an antique shop as a front had ever entered his mind, Planner had been a collector of antiques, though like many collectors he was a specialist and only one small branch of antiquing held a fascination for him.
Buttons.
Planner loved buttons.
Not buttons that hold your clothes together (though there were collectors of those around, too) but political buttons and advertising buttons and anything that pinned on, including sheriff’s and other cop badges, if they were old enough. The mainstay of his collection was the political buttons, the pride being his Lincoln tokens and the large picture buttons of Hoover. These were in a frame upstairs, while others of lesser value and importance, but gems nonetheless, graced a display case in the front of the store.
It was that display case that let other dealers who came around know that despite the junk quality of most of the merchandise in the shop, Planner was a dealer who knew what he was doing, worthy of respect. It was with great pleasure that he would turn down offers from fat-cat dealers who would drool at the generous assortment of political buttons in the airtight case, the Willkies, the Wilsons, the Bryans. If he was feeling really generous, he might sell them one Nixon or a Kennedy or perhaps a Goldwater, but not often, as even recent buttons brought a pretty penny, since during the last three or four presidential campaigns a man had to contribute five or six bucks before the party would give him a picture button of the candidate. And who could guess what a McGovern/Eagleton would one day be worth?
If he was feeling particularly ornery, Planner would show dealers the Lincoln tokens and the Hoovers upstairs and would listen to their eager bids and pretend to consider and then calmly refuse. Even if a dealer got down on his knees (which had happened a couple times) Planner would shake his head solemnly no. Back downstairs, to rub salt in the wound, Planner would point out the barrel of buttons next to the front display case, a barrelful of zilch buttons Planner sold to the school kids for a quarter a throw.
Also, from dealers who came around and from stops he made to keep his “buying trips” looking honest, Planner had managed, over these past thirteen or fifteen years, to fill in the gaps of his own collection, picking up damn near every button he needed. But even before he got into the antique trade, Planner had had one of the best goddamn button collections in the U.S. of A. (if he did say so himself) and so, when he was picking out some way to semi-retire, the antique hustle had been a natural.
Sometimes, sitting behind the counter, smoking a Garcia y Vega, Planner would wonder if he could actually make a living selling antiques, you know, straight-out legitimate. Even though he purposely filled his shop with unspectacular horseshit, he did pretty good, better than he needed to with a situation that was basically a front. But the little old ladies in tennis shoes would ooh and ahh at the god-damnedest junk, and he would constantly (three or four times a year) have to spend a day going to flea markets and yard sales and load his station wagon with more bottles and jars and furniture and china and kettles and toys and crap and more crap. When he’d bought the place, it had been jampacked with junk, which he’d thought would last for years and years. Six months, it had been, and he was out scouting flea markets to replenish his supply. Occasionally he’d run onto an honest-to-God antique for next-to-nothing and these he would pack carefully away in one of his back rooms. One day he might sell them, but not now. Somehow it seemed crazy to sell an antique, a real one that is, since an antique’s value is its age, and tomorrow it’s going to be older and hence more valuable.
