The Girl With the Long Green Heart

by Lawrence Block

  I gave him a look.

  “Well, forget I asked.”

  I took a cigarette, lit it. The gnawing inside wouldn’t go away. I told Doug that Gunderman should be here by now. “He doesn’t get places late,” I said. “He’s always on time. It’s one of his virtues.”

  “Maybe he wants to play hard to get.”

  “Isn’t it a little late for that? You don’t walk around with your skirt around your waist for a month and then play hard to get when you finally work your way to the bedroom. He should have been here with bells on. He should have been here before I was, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re getting a little jumpy, Johnny.”

  He was right. I was getting more than a little jumpy, and I liked it less and less. I do not like it when people act out of character. I do not like it when patterns are broken. And I like it least of all toward the end of the game, when it is either in or out and no mending the fences once they break. Things can be shaky in the early stages. You aren’t committed, nobody is committed, and you can all feel your way, and back and fill to make things right. But there is no backing or filling as you approach the wire. It has to be perfect, clean and sweet, and any deviations from the norm do not sit well with me.

  “Sit down, Johnny.” I hadn’t even realized I was pacing. I went on pacing. “Sit down, damn it, you’re making me nervous.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “You know what’s the matter with you?”

  “What?”

  “You’re losing your goddamned nerve. A few years in San Quentin and you get shaky in the clinches. Johnny, you couldn’t ask for a smoother job than this. Will you sit down and relax?”

  I looked at my watch. “No,” I said, “I won’t.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling him,” I said.

  I grabbed the phone and rang the Royal York. The desk man was a long time answering. I asked him if Mr. Gunderman was in, not to bother him but to see if his key was there. He took his time and then told me no, the key was not in the box.

  “Ring his room,” I said.

  Doug told me I was crazy. I waved him off. The clerk plugged me in and let the phone ring. He let it ring a long time. Nobody answered that phone.

  “Shall I check his room, sir?”

  I looked down at my hand. The fingers were trembling slightly all by themselves. “No, don’t do that,” I said steadily. “He must have left and taken his key with him. It’s perfectly all right.”

  The clerk didn’t pursue the subject. I thanked him, and he rang off.

  I said, “No answer. He didn’t leave and he doesn’t answer. He always gets places on time and he’s not here yet.”

  “Johnny—”

  “Come on, will you?”

  “Where?”

  “His hotel.”

  He looked at me as if he was measuring me for a straitjacket. “He’s on his way over here, Johnny,” he said levelly. “Now calm down, will you? He took his key with him, the way you told it to the clerk, and in one minute he’s going to walk through that door, and—”

  I took him by the arm and yanked. “You can wait until hell’s six feet deep in snow,” I said. “He’s never coming through that door.”

  “Johnny—”

  “And we’re going over there. And fast.”

  “Johnny.” He drew himself up straight. He was trying not to look at all nervous, and he was almost making it. “This is my set-up,” he said. “I’m not letting you blow it.”

  “It’s blown to hell and back,” I told him. “Move.”

  Our cab seemed to crawl. The traffic was thick and the driver less than aggressive. We filled the back of the cab with cigarette smoke and the odor of cooling sweat. All the way there I had the very bad feeling that I had somehow dreamed this entire scene before. Sometime in the depth of sleep I had lived through this episode, and in the morning the memory was gone like smoke. Once I had dreamed this, and I should have remembered the dream. It would have made things much simpler.

  When the cab stopped I threw a five at the driver and did not wait for change. On the way into the lobby I told Doug to follow me and not say anything or do anything spectacular. “We are not stopping at the desk,” I told him. “We are going straight to his room. I know where it is.”

  He didn’t answer. He had lost the sense of the play. He knew only that something was very wrong, and that I was probably out of my mind, and that it was easier to go along with me than to make me listen to reason. I got us to the elevator and rode one floor above his. I got us out of the elevator, and we went down the stairs to the right floor and along the corridor to his room.

  Doug said, “I don’t get it.”

  “You will.”

  “He’s probably at the office right now. Or he’s sleeping; he got bombed last night and he’s sleeping it off.”

  “If he’s at the office he can wait for us,” I said. “If he’s bombed, we’ll apologize for interrupting him. We’ll say we were worried about him, that we wanted to check.”

  “I still say this is stupid.”

  “You don’t know what stupid is,” I said.

  I knocked heavily on Gunderman’s door. One thoroughly wishful corner of my mind expected him to lumber to the door and open it. I did not really expect this, and I was not at all surprised when it did not happen. I reached into my hip pocket and got out my wallet. I took out a gas company credit card.

  “Johnny—”

  “Shut up.”

  The corridor was empty. I worked the credit card between the door and the jamb, and Doug nudged me, and I withdrew the card and waited for a man with an attaché case to emerge from a room down the hall and make his way past us to the elevators. When he was gone I wedged the credit card back where it belonged.

  Hotel room locks are nothing at all, not in the fleabags, not in the good places either. I popped the bolt back and turned the knob and pushed the door open.

  “If he’s in there—”

  If he was, he hadn’t bolted the door. You can’t snick back the inside bolt that way. You only get the one that spring-locks the door from the outside.

  I pushed the door open. I went inside, and Doug came after me, and I remembered to shut the door after us. We went inside, and there was the bed and the chair and the dresser and some clothes scattered, and there was what I had somehow known we would find. Because I must have dreamed it all one night, dreamed it and forgotten it somewhere in the dark places of the night.

  There was Gunderman, sprawled on the floor between the bed and the wall. He was in his pajamas, loud blue cotton pajamas. He had been shot twice at fairly close range. There were two holes in his chest, quite close together, and one of them must have placed itself in his heart because there was not much blood around. Almost all of it was on his pajamas, with just a little soaking into the rug.

  Doug was making meaningless sounds beside me. I looked back stupidly to make sure that the door was closed. It was. I looked around the room. The gun was not too far from the body. I went over to all that was left of our pigeon and knelt down beside him. I touched the side of his face. His flesh was cool but not cold, and the bits of blood were drying but not yet dry. Someone with a better background than mine could have said with assurance just how long dead he was. It was out of my line. I never had all that much to do with dead men.

  “Oh, Johnny—”

  I walked over to where the gun lay. A good manly gun. Guns were not my line either, but I knew the make and model of this one. A .38 Smith and Wesson with a three-inch barrel and a safety on the grip. I knew it well.

  “Don’t touch it, Johnny.”

  I picked up the gun.

  “Brilliant,” he was saying. “Oh, brilliant. Now you’ve got your prints all over the damned thing, Johnny.”

  I knew better. They were already there. I’d put them there long ago in another town in another country. Get me one of my cigarettes, John—and that gun in her purse, waiting to be found, waiting to be gripped. She�
�d never touched it after that. She let me unload it and put it away myself. She never laid a finger on it—until later, alone, with gloves on, once to load it and once this morning to fire it, twice. I looked down at that dead man and envied him.

  Sixteen

  “She killed him,” I said. I was a little shaky and my eyes weren’t focusing properly. “This . . . I put my prints on this gun a week ago. It was her gun, she conned me into picking it up and playing with it.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  “Olean. She—”

  “You took a trip a week ago? You didn’t tell me.”

  “She was—” the words came slow, “nervous, she said. She thought things were falling in. It turned out to be a false alarm, but in the middle of it she set me up to find the gun for her.”

  “You never said a thing.” His tone was flat, hard.

  “She didn’t want me to.”

  “She what?”

  “I was hung on the girl,” I said.

  “Give me that again.”

  I turned on him. “I was in love with the bitch,” I said, “and I was taken. But how the hell did she get here? I talked to her last night. She called me last night, dammit, and she called long-distance. I don’t get any of this.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “What?”

  “I thought she was calling Gunderman.”

  I grabbed his arm. “Give me that again. From the beginning.”

  It was his turn to look worried. “She flew into town yesterday afternoon,” he said. “So she would be here after the job was over.”

  “After the job—”

  “We were going to fly to Vegas. The two of us.” I did not say anything. “Well, she’s a good piece, damn it. She didn’t want you to know because she said you tried and struck out.”

  “I got the same line.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The hell I am. What kind of a damn fool are you, flying her to Toronto? What’s the brilliant point of that?”

  “Johnny—”

  “I talked to her last night. First an operator, person-to-person, and then—”

  He was just shaking his head. “I thought it was Gunderman, Johnny. Oh, Jesus. She said she wanted to call Gunderman and make it seem like a long-distance call. I sat right there in the room with her. I told her how to fake the operator’s voice. She held a handkerchief over the phone and talked very distinctly and a little nasally with the phone about six inches from her mouth. And then took the handkerchief off and got close to the phone when she was playing Evvie again. Oh, she is cute.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I sat there in the room and thought she was talking to him.”

  She was very cute. I thought back to the conversation, trying to remember. “She asked for me,” I said. “By name. Were you in the room when she played the operator bit?”

  “I must have been.”

  “Then—”

  “No, she wanted a drink. I went into the kitchen. I thought I heard—oh, damn it.”

  I’d admired her timing before. The slipped kiss in front of his office building, the sweet way she had of playing things like a true-blooded professional. And I had thought she was only playing one side. She’d played all three of us, and played us off the wall.

  She had never mentioned my name. And she had thrown me a conversation that she could as well have thrown to Gunderman. How she missed me, and how she hoped everything would go all right, and how she couldn’t wait to see me again. I remembered now that she had sounded a little less hip than usual. No grifter argot. It wouldn’t have done the necessary double duty. She never missed a trick.

  “Johnny, if you had said something—”

  “Me?”

  “You said she didn’t mean a thing to you. If I knew she did I would have seen her angle. You blew this one, Johnny.”

  I forced myself to stay steady. “You’re a pretty one,” I said. “You’re so in love with yourself you can’t see straight. You’re so damned busy being the hottest puff of smoke since the Yellow Kid. You put this on the screw from the beginning.”

  “How?”

  “You balled her in Vegas, didn’t you?”

  He told me so with his eyes.

  “You should have said it then. You should have let this thing play straight from the beginning, but you had to be goddamned cute about it. I’d like a chance at you, Rance.”

  “Any time.”

  I almost swung. I don’t know what stopped me, but I almost swung, and that would have torn it for good. It’s not a good idea to start a fight and draw a crowd, not when you’ve got a corpse on the floor and the murder gun carries your prints.

  I looked at him and said, “Later.”

  “All right.”

  “We’ve got to dig out from under.”

  “Pick up the gun and leave.”

  He was full of bright ideas. I told him how far we’d get. We were tied to Gunderman a hundred different ways. There were too many papers in his office with our names on them, too many connections. This had to be staged just as neatly as any blow-off operation. We were blowing off a dead man instead of a live one. That was the only difference. It took just as sure a touch, just as firm a sense of the game.

  It took two cigarettes. Then I had it. I said, “There’s a way. You’ll need a suitcase. And a wallet with fake identification.”

  “I’ve got both at the apartment.”

  “Good. You leave the hotel now. Go out a back entrance, grab a cab, go to your place.” I went over to the window. “I hope your fake ID sets you up in some far-away place.”

  “I’ve got papers for California. Los Angeles, I think.”

  “Good. Throw a few things in a suitcase. California labels, nothing else. You’re close enough to his size to do it. Then get in another cab and come back to the hotel. Go to the desk and check in under the phony name. Get a room as close to this one as you can. The same side of the building. Tell them you want to face whatever the hell that street is out there. One floor away is fine. One floor away is better than the same floor, actually. You with me?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Check in, go to your room, and then get back here. I’ll have it set up. We’ve got a few things going for us. He checked in yesterday afternoon. The kid on the desk now never saw him, not yesterday afternoon and not last night. We’ve just about got time. Move.”

  “Johnny?”

  “What?”

  “I can’t figure the cross. He had the money with him. It might still be around—”

  “It won’t be. She took it.”

  “Even so. She gets seventy thou instead of seventeen-five. She doesn’t figure to kill for the difference, does she?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said.

  When he left I shut the door and bolted it after him. I did not want any hyperefficient maid stumbling in on me. Then I walked into the john and washed my hands and dried them on a towel and went back to get things in motion. I found his suitcase on the floor of the closet. I packed his clothes in it. I went through the dresser and the pockets of his clothes and picked off everything that gave a clue as to who he was and where he came from. All of this went into the suitcase. I got his money belt—you don’t see them much anymore, but he’d had one and she would have known about it. I wasn’t surprised to find it empty.

  There was a cashier’s check in his wallet, drawn to the order of the Barnstable Corporation and made out in the amount of forty thousand dollars. I tucked this in my own wallet, then thought a moment and switched his wallet for my own. If I was going to be him I might as well do it right.

  When I first started to move him, I thought I might be sick. I got past the first rush of nausea and then things settled down. He wasn’t a corpse, he was just a dead weight. I dragged him a few feet away and checked the carpet where he had lain.

  It wasn’t bad. Not too much blood, really, and the carpet was nylon and not especially absorbent. I wetted some toilet pa
per and wiped it so that it looked clean. Spectroscopic analysis would show blood for weeks, but if things broke right nobody would come looking, and if things went wrong they wouldn’t need bloodstains to hang us.

  I tried to keep busy that way. As long as I was doing things, moving and staying active, I didn’t have to think so hard about things that were better unexamined. Like the sweet way she’d set it up. Like the reason she worked the cross.

  She hadn’t killed him for the simple arithmetical difference between seventeen and seventy thousand dollars. She had killed him for the whole bundle. She wanted everything, everything that belonged to Wallace J. Gunderman.

  She’d get it, too. Because the bitch had married him. I lit a cigarette. He’d as much as told me the night before, and I had been too damned stupid to pick it up then and there. All of that coyness—I’d taken it for granted he was acting that way because he thought I was hung on Evvie while he was actually keeping her and using her to keep me on his team. But the words he’d used made more sense now. He had married her.

  It made more sense that way.

  And other parts made sense. The attitude he’d shown all those times pointed out one thing—since his wife died, he had been the one pushing for marriage and she had been busy putting him off. It added up a million times as sensibly that way. She had waited, and she had finally gone and married him just in time to be his widow.

  What was he worth? A few million? And to that you could tack on a whole load of extras, like the hate she had for him and the kick she must have felt when the gun went off. It all tallied out to a lot more than the seventeen and a half thousand dollars that she was supposed to get out of the deal. It added up to many miles more than a roadhouse in Colorado and a broken-down grifter for a husband and “Hearts and Flowers” for a theme song.

  We were supposed to get stuck with it. We’d be tied up tight, and she could keep herself in the clear. She had never put anything on paper. We could never drag her into it. We could only tighten the noose around our own necks.

  I lit another cigarette and wished to hell Doug would get back. We had a chance, I thought. Getting to his hotel room on time had opened it up for us. And Doug was about his build—that helped. And the timing with the hotel clerks. We did not exactly have the odds on our side, and if we had held those cards in a poker game I would have thrown our hand in and folded. But you can’t ever fold when your whole damned life’s in the pot. You have to play whatever’s dealt.