Soft Touch

by John D. MacDonald

  But there was nothing like what I looked at when I whipped that piece of cloth aside. Nothing. I was one man when I pried the locks loose. And I was somebody else after I looked at the money. And I knew in some crazy way that I couldn’t ever go back to being the man who pried the locks, no matter how desperately I might want to.

  I was sitting on my heels. I looked up at Vince in the chair. Our eyes met, and we looked at each other in a strange way for a moment or two, with shame and guilt and a high, wild, uncomfortable exaltation. And looked away in awkwardness.

  “At a time like this,” Vince said, “what does one say?”

  “One says count it.”

  The bills were wired together in bricks about four inches thick, two strands of wire around each brick twisted tightly about one inch from the end of each brick, and cut off. The bricks were tightly fitted into the suitcase. I pulled one out. The top and bottom bill were both hundreds. Neither was new. I bounced it in my palm and frowned at it. Vince asked to see it and I handed it to him. He held it between his knees and riffled the tightly packed edges of the bills with the thumb of his left hand.

  “Probably five hundred of them,” he said.

  “Fifty thousand in a block.”

  “So how many blocks?”

  I pulled them out, counting them as I pulled them out. It seemed to be a thing you should do slowly, but my eye kept racing ahead. Sixty-eight blocks of hundreds. And one block of five-hundred-dollar bills, the same size.

  “I can’t do it in my head,” Vince said breathlessly. “Jerry, that block of five hundreds. That’s a quarter of a million bucks. Get a pencil and paper and we’ll—”

  “Hold it.” I took the scrap of paper out of the bottom. It had been hidden by the money. Figures typed on an ancient machine with a worn-out ribbon, type badly out of alignment. I looked at it and handed it to him.

  I got a pencil and paper from the desk. Sixty-eight times five hundred made thirty-four thousand, so there were five hundred in a brick. I wouldn’t have expected there to be thirty-four thousand hundred-dollar bills in existence. Two million for Vince and one for me.

  “Carmela is out?” I said.

  “You heard the man. So everything over three is down the middle.”

  So I had one million three hundred and twenty-five thousand bucks all my own. I looked at the stacked money. “We’ll have to bust a brick.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The wire was too heavy to untwist. I used the tire iron. I tore the top bill badly. When the wire popped, the bills took up a hell of a lot more room. I reassembled the toppled stack and cut the deck in half by eye. I counted one half. Two hundred and sixty-two of them. So I took twelve off and put it with the other stack. I took my two hundred and fifty bills over and put them in my suitcase, under my underwear. Small change. Twenty-five thousand lousy bucks. The torn one was on top. I waved it at Vince. “Better throw this one away.”

  “Hell no. Give it here and take one of mine.”

  “Can you spare it?”

  “For a friend.”

  I got out the cigarettes and lighter. He held the torn bill. I lit it. He held it out and lit my cigarette and then lit his own. He held it by the corner until it burned down to his fingers.

  “Never thought I’d get to do that,” he said.

  And suddenly we were laughing in a gasping, gone way as if we were hopped up or had lost our minds. Then I remembered his five hundred and wanted to return that to him, but he said no, I was insulting him. We divided the big pile. I came out with twenty-six bricks of hundreds. He said he would take the five hundreds. Where he would be, he said, he could unload them easier.

  I looked at my stack and arranged it in a new way. I looked at his stack of money. And felt a sudden twinge of resentment. His was a fatter, more florid, more overwhelming pile. Then told myself I was being a child. Once we knew the split, I packed it all back in the tin suitcase. Though the locks were gone, I had pried so carefully they would latch and keep the bag shut. I put it in the big closet and shut the door. I brought him more water, then helped him into the bathroom, then helped him undress and get into bed. He said he had begun to stiffen up. I knew the feeling.

  I went out and drove around and found a diner and ate and brought him back two hamburgers and a container of coffee. When I unlocked the door I had the ridiculous hunch, but absurdly strong, that he and the money would be gone.

  But he was asleep. I thought he should eat so I woke him up. He managed one hamburger and half the coffee.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “Now we see how I mend.”

  “It isn’t going to be very fast.”

  “If the meat doesn’t start to spoil, ten days should do it. Then I can be on my way.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ve got a spot and a way to get there. And Carmela’s little booboo means I don’t have to make a side trip.”

  “What I don’t know won’t hurt you?”

  “Precisely.”

  “So for the ten days?”

  “The safest and most comfortable place I can think of, Jerry, is your house.”

  I thought that over. He was right, but it was an imposition. I wanted to be rid of him. He could be tied to the mess a lot more readily than I could.

  “Look, did you enter legally?”

  “This time, yes.”

  “But I take you home and it increases my risk.”

  “That’s a fair statement.”

  “The more the risk, the more the profit, Vince.”

  He looked at me for long seconds, then yawned and said, “Name it.”

  “One more stack of the little ones.”

  “That’s a hell of a high rate. That’s a hell of a rental.”

  I do not think the man who pried the suitcase open would have tried to make that kind of a deal. But I wasn’t that man. I wasn’t as soft as he was.

  “The alternative, Vince, is I find you a place to stay. I’ll look in on you once a day and bring food.”

  “What will that cost me?”

  “There’s no charge.”

  He shut his eyes. Just when I thought he had fallen asleep he opened them. “Okay. Your house. Now you’ve got twenty-seven toys to play with. Maybe you can gouge a few more out of me.”

  “Kindly go to hell, Biskay. It’s no skin off you anyway. Five of your bundles of little ones would have gone to Carmela. So you’re still four bundles ahead. And, my friend, I could have swung that car out of there while you were playing volleyball with Zaragosa.”

  He shut his eyes again and said, “Good night, dear old pal. That’s why I picked you, remember? Because you wouldn’t drive away.”

  The next day he was in agony whenever he tried to move. We didn’t get on the road until a little after ten. He slept frequently, and groaned aloud in his sleep. When I found a drive-in for lunch he couldn’t eat.

  When I looked at him in the late afternoon his eyes had an odd look. I put the back of my hand against his forehead.

  “Fever?” he asked.

  “Man, you feel like a stove.”

  “It’s the leg.”

  “We’ve got to find a doctor.”

  “Hell with it. I’m tough. Keep rolling, lieutenant.”

  But an hour later, just outside of Birmingham, he started spouting off in Spanish, and he tried to open the door at sixty-five. I yanked him back. He went quickly into a stupor, mumbling constantly.

  I signed us into a motel the other side of Birmingham, on 78 to Memphis, and had a hell of a job getting him into the room. I got a unit way in the back. He was out. I thought of how easy it would be to just walk out with the money. All of it. Just idle speculation.

  I took enough money with me and went back to Birmingham and found a cheap doctor on a cheap street who thought five thousand in hundreds was all the money in the world. Enough to warrant not reporting the wounds of a man who had accidentally shot himself. Twice. I brought him back to the motel and he dispensed shots and pil
ls and dressed the wounds, and I took him back where I got him. He said Vince shouldn’t travel for a few days.

  I was up at dawn. Vince was weak and lucid. His eyes looked sunken. I explained about the doctor and what he had said. Vince said that if I could get him into the car, he could ride in it. I borrowed four blankets from the motel to make a bed in the rear of the wagon, and left a fifty-dollar bill in an envelope for the manager, just in case he had corrected the license number I had written down.

  Vince had a hell of a day. The pain of travel turned him a yellow-gray. After dark I parked beside the road and slept for two hours. Then I went on through the night, through Springfield and Preston and Kansas City, pushing the car. We got home at five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, road-raveled and exhausted. I hoped Lorraine wasn’t home. She wasn’t. Nor was Irene. I got him in and up the stairs. He couldn’t walk up. I didn’t want to risk a fall. He sat on each stair and helped as much as he could when I hoisted him up to the next one. He’s lost a lot of weight fast, but he was still too damn big to carry.

  I got him undressed and into a pair of pajamas and into the guest room bed where he had stayed such a short time before.

  The total job took forty minutes. Then I faced the problem of the money. Lorraine has too active and inquisitive a mind. And I knew she’d be prying to find out where I’d been and what I’d been doing. I horsed the black suitcase down the cellar stairs. The house had oil heat but it had originally been designed for coal with an automatic stoker. I kept the hardwood for the fireplace in the bin. They could load it directly into the basement from the truck and then stack it. There was a lot of it—oak, birch and maple—nearly two cords, all stacked. I figured that damn suitcase weighed better than a hundred pounds, and the poorly designed handle cut and pinched your hand. I put on the bin light, laid the suitcase flat and restacked the wood over it, working so fast I drove splinters into my hands. We hadn’t used the fireplace much the previous winter. Fireplaces go with long contented evenings of marriage. We had come to the point where we had a fire only when we had a party.

  There were enough short chunks so I could do a fair job. I went back up and washed my hands and dug out the more obvious splinters with Lorraine’s eyebrow tweezers. I wanted a shower badly, but there was still the problem of the twenty-five thousand in my suitcase. I transferred five hundred to my wallet, put the rest in a heavy manila envelope, took the bottom drawer of my bureau all the way out and fastened the envelope to the back of it with masking tape. It was bulky enough to keep the drawer from shutting all the way, but I judged it safe enough.

  It was after six. I went in to check on Vince. He was sleeping lightly. I sat on the edge of the bed and he woke up.

  “How are you doing?”

  “My God, I’m glad to get off that highway. Hell is a place where they keep you in a station wagon.”

  “We haven’t had much chance to talk. I’ve got to tell Lorraine something.”

  “Don’t tell her much.”

  “Making a big mystery out of it is just as bad.”

  “I see what you mean, Jerry.”

  “It would be nice to leave bullets out of it. Give her the idea of bullets and she’ll take off from there. Three drinks and she’ll make a big deal out of it. It’s got to be something dull.”

  “There isn’t a duller damn thing in the world, Jerry, than somebody else’s operation.”

  “Good idea, but what kind?”

  “Make it a bursitis sort of thing. They opened up my shoulder and my hip and scraped guck off the bone or whatever the hell they do.”

  “Okay. You told me when you were here before that you were going to have the operation. You can say you told Lorraine too. She hears so much when she’s swacked that she doesn’t remember that she’ll go along with that. So I stopped in to see how you were doing. But where?”

  “Make it Philadelphia.”

  It sounded all right. I’d brought Vince back home. Lorraine wouldn’t object, not about Vince. Not with the way she reacted to him.

  “How about the money?” he asked.

  “It’s safe.”

  He looked at me. “That’s nice. That’s a good thing to know. But where is it?”

  “I told you it’s safe.”

  He rolled up onto his left elbow with an effort. The low sun came through the west windows. The beard stubble was touched by the sun, dark, yet with a look of copper.

  “Jerry, let’s try to keep this thing under control. It’s a lot of money. It is so damn much money that it can distort you, bitch up the way you think when you’re standing too close to it. I think I should know where it is.”

  “In the cellar. In the coal bin. I stacked cordwood over it.”

  He sighed as he lay back. “That’s just fine,” he said.

  And I heard the brisk and busy chugging of Lorraine’s Porsche as she swung into the drive.

  I went downstairs, met her as she came into the kitchen. “Well, hello indeed,” she said. She wore a brief gray swimsuit, a hip-length blue terry beach coat. Dampness had coiled her dark hair tightly.

  “Swimming?”

  She took an ice tray over to the counter. “Heavens, no! I’ve been tea dancing. Did you have a nice little trip, dahling?”

  “It was all right. I brought back a house guest.”

  She dropped ice in her glass and whirled and glared at me. “What kind of a ridiculous …”

  “You remember Vince telling us about the operation he had to have. That bone thing on his shoulder and his hip.”

  Her eyes clouded. She bit her underlip. “Sort of vaguely, I guess.”

  “I dropped in on him in Philadelphia to see how he was doing.”

  “You went all the way to Philadelphia!”

  “I’ve been a lot of places. He wasn’t set up too well there. So I talked him into coming back with me. He’ll have to stay in bed a while.”

  “The poor lamb!”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Goodness! I don’t mind. Irene might. But she certainly hasn’t had much to do around here lately. Gosh, I told her she could go after lunch. What about food for Vince?”

  “He won’t want much. Soup and toast. I can eat out.”

  “I’m having dinner at the club. I can fix him something before I go.” She looked at me closely. “Jerry, you look like hell. You look haggard.”

  “I did a lot of driving.”

  She carried her full drink upstairs. When I went to our room I heard her talking to Vince, heard his deep voice as he answered her.

  I took a fast shower. When I went into the bedroom in my shorts Lorraine stood in her robe by my bureau looking at a folder of paper matches.

  “You certainly did get around, darling. These matches are from a motel in Stark, Florida.”

  “I … I didn’t get that far. I must have picked them up in another motel. Maybe it’s a chain.”

  “The checking account is down to practically nothing. What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’ll put some in. But not much. Lorraine, you’ve got to take it easy. Things aren’t the way they used to be.”

  “Whose fault is that? You could start again with Daddy on Monday, couldn’t you?”

  “Just take it easy, will you?”

  “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. What are you going to do about a job?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “So your dear dear friends wouldn’t loan you a dime. I’m not surprised. You’d better decide what you’re going to do. People are going to think you’re a little touched. Doesn’t Vince look horrible?”

  “I guess he was pretty sick.”

  “I don’t think he was in any shape to ride so far.”

  “He’s tough.”

  After she showered she fixed soup and toast for Vince. Then she changed from her robe to a cocktail dress. I stood at Vince’s window and watched her drive away, the top down on the little car, her black hair tied in place with a colorful kerchief. I heard th
e rattle as Vince set his tray aside.

  I helped him to the bathroom, and then got him settled for the night, water, pills and alarm clock on the night stand. I felt that there was something we should talk over, but my mind was too dulled by fatigue. I was too damn tired to eat out. I put Vince’s tray in the kitchen. I ate the piece of toast he had left, drank most of a quart of milk and went to bed, and sleep came so fast it was like drowning in a pool of warm black ink.

  6

  When I woke up at ten Lorraine was still asleep. Irene had Sundays off. I went down and got the Sunday paper out of the hedge where the carrier had thrown it, put coffee on, and went through the paper carefully.

  There was a long and leisurely analysis of the Melendez revolt. Señ Raoul Melendez had unfortunately hung himself in his cell in the federal prison in the capital. The rebellion was completely crushed, and the stockpiled arms had been taken over by General Peral’s army. All key figures in the revolt were either dead or under arrest. Melendez’s extensive holdings had been taken over by the Minister of the Interior. The curfew had been lifted, and it was believed there would be no adverse effect on the tourist industry.

  Near the bottom of the long article was one significant little paragraph. It followed the account of Carmela de la Vega’s unfortunate flight.

  Also being sought is Melendez’s personal pilot and confidential aide, an American-born naturalized citizen of the country named Vincente Biskay. It has been established that Biskay left the country by commercial air transport on May fourth, four days before the rebellion. His destination is not known. In view of his close association with Melendez over a period of years, it is not considered likely that he will return. Informed sources believe that Biskay may seek political asylum in Cuba where the Melendez family retains extensive interests. Biskay was regarded as a man of mystery and a soldier of fortune.