by Ed McBain
“Well, well,” he said again.
“That’s not plain view,” Will said.
“Now it is,” Horne said, and fanned the bills. “Where’d you getthese little mothers?”
“Same crap game,” Will said.
Horne began counting.
“This is a lot of money here,” he said.
“Yeah, it was a big crap game.”
“Looks like five, six thousand dollars here.”
“More like eight,” Will said.
“You won eight thousand dollars in a crap game?”
“I got lucky.”
“Who was in this game?”
“Bunch of guys I never saw in my life.”
“So let me get this straight, Will,” Horne said. “You’re asking me to believe that one or more of the men in this crap game of yourscould have been the kidnappers to whom these bills were paid as ransom, is that it?”
“I guess that’s it,” Will said.
He knew he was already in the toilet. He knew Horne would yank out a gun and a pair of handcuffs in the next minute. He’d be spending Christmas Day in jail for a goddamn kidnapping he didn’t do.
“Listen,” he said, “you really do have the wrong person here.”
“Maybe so,” Horne said, and gave him a long, hard look.
Will’s hands were shaking. He put them in his pockets so Horne wouldn’t see. He hated himself for being so goddamn scared here, but he couldn’t help it. A kidnapping was serious stuff.
“Tell you what,” Horne said.
Will waited.
“What I think I should do is confiscate this money here,” Horne said. “Give you a receipt for it, check the serial numbers downtown, get back to you later today.”
Sure, Will thought.
Secret Service or not, every cop in the world was identical to every other cop, and they were all fuckin crooks. Next thing you knew, eight thousand bucks would find its way into a fund for the widows of Secret Service men who had died in the line of duty. Only thing he didn’t understand was why Horne was granting a possible kidnapper the opportunity to flee. He watched as the man meticulously copied the serial numbers on all the bills, signed the sheet of paper with the numbers on it, and handed it to Will. He looked for his parka, found it where he’d draped it over one of the chairs, and put it on.
“I don’t have to warn you not to leave the city,” he said.
“Not while you’ve got all my money,” Will said.
“See you later,” Horne said, and put on the hat with the ear flaps, and walked out of the apartment.
It was twenty minutes to five.
So what do I do now? Will wondered.
Hell, I’m an innocent man here!
Except for the burglary.
But Horne hadn’t been interested in any burglary, Horne didn’t even know any burglary hadhappened. Horne had been interested only in the hundred-dollar bills that had maybe or maybe not been paid as ransom in a kidnapping case he was investigating—but how come the Secret Service? Anyway, that was the entire scope of Special Agent David A. Horne’s interest. The money. Check the serial numbers. If they match, come fetch old Wilbur here.
But let’s say the serial numbers donot match. I mean, out of all the millions of apartments in New York City, what are the odds on my breaking into the only one that happens to be the apartment of a redhead who’d done a kidnapping and stashed the ransom money there? What are the odds on that kind of thing happening? I mean,really. A thousand to one? A million to one? I’ll take odds like that on a horse any day of the week.
So the odds have got to be in my favor, right? The serial numbers will not match, Horne will come back with my money, I’ll sign off on the receipt, and he’ll apologize for having taken so much of my time.
I hope, he thought.
AT FIVE MINUTES TO SIX that Thursday evening, Cass walked into Eyewear Fashions, Inc. on Stemmler Avenue and Twenty-second Street. The evening was clear and cold. Pinprick points of stars dotted a black sky, and the streets and sidewalks glistened with fresh snow, but Cass did not have a white Christmas on her mind. All she wanted to do was find the man who’d taken her money and her mink stole and her long sable coat, which should have been keeping her toasty warm on this frighteningly cold day. She’d been a cold puppy all her life, and the first thing she’d purchased from the money she’d earned on the Mexico job was the sable. Hell with people who went around in the nude protesting the wearing of furs. Anyone ever tried to spray paint on her furs was somebody who’d better already own a funeral plot.
Instead of the stolen sable, she was wearing the short red fox jacket over blue jeans and a green turtleneck sweater, freezing her ass off nonetheless. One of the reasons she’d left Fall River, Massachusetts, was that it had been so damn cold up there. That and her father shouting hell and damnation at her day and night. Her mother was a mathematics teacher. Cass guessed she thought it made sense to marry a Presbyterian minister and then present him with two daughters, one of whom grew up to be a holy person like Papa. The second and youngest, Cassandra Jean Ridley herself, fed up to here, ran away from home instead. Went to live on a commune in New Hampshire, which was even colder than it was here on this street corner in Isola. Left there when the group’s youth advisor came into her room naked one midnight clear, determined to read to her out loud a short story fromHustler magazine. Cass clobbered him with a frying pan.
“Hi,” she said to the man behind the counter, “my name is Harriet Daniels,” which was the name of the woman who’d run the rooming house she’d lived in down in Eagle Branch, Texas. “I found an eyeglass case with your store name on it, and I was wondering if you could help me locate the owner of the glasses.”
“Well, gee, I don’t know,” the man said.
“You are?” she asked.
“Wesley Hand,” he said.
He was perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine, a round little man with moist blue eyes and a pleasant looking face except for the complexion. He looked sincerely concerned about the eyeglass case she now put on the counter top. He also looked bewildered. She guessed that was his natural expression.
“Is there some way you could do that for me?” she asked. “Help me locate the owner?”
“That might be difficult,” he said. “Except for some very special prescriptions, most eyeglasses …”
“Isn’t there some machine or something you can put them on?” she asked. “To see what the prescription is?”
“Well, sure, but …”
“Because maybe it’s one of thespecial ones, you see.”
“Well …”
“I would appreciate it,” she said, and flashed what she hoped was a warm and convincing smile.
“I close at six,” he said, and glanced up at the clock.
“Well, how long would it take …?”
“And I have to be someplace.”
“The thing is, I found them earlier today,” she said. “So chances are he’ll be missing them by now.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So could you put these on your machine and see if …?”
“Not now,” he said. He was already moving around the counter toward a small closet on the side of the shop. “Call me tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. He was putting on his coat. “I appreciate it,” she said, and smiled sweetly.
You prick, she thought.
HORNE CAME BACK to see Will at ten-thirty that night. He came unannounced, and when he pressed the buzzer downstairs to say he was there, Will was enormously surprised. He’d never expected to see those hundred-dollar bills again. Tonight, Horne was wearing a blue car coat with a faux fur collar, wide wale, dark brown corduroy trousers, and a brown fedora. By comparison to this afternoon, he looked positively dapper.
“Will, I must apologize,” he said.
“Why’s that?” Will asked.
“These arenot the ransom bills.”
“I didn’t think they were,”
Will said, but he was tremendously relieved nonetheless.
“We checked the serial numbers, and except for that one bill they simply didn’t match. So … I’m sorry for whatever inconvenience the Department may have caused you …”
“What department is that, by the way?”
“Why, the Treasury Department,” Horne said, looking surprised. “The U.S. Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department.”
“I didn’t know that,” Will said.
“Not many people do,” Horne said. “So if you’ll just let me have that receipt I gave you earlier today …”
“Okay,” Will said, and fished in his wallet for it.
Horne carried the receipt to the kitchen table, sat, removed from his briefcase a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, and handed them to Will.
“If you’ll just count these,” he said.
“I’m sure I can trust the Treasury Department,” Will said.
“Even so,” Horne said, “I’d feel safer if you counted them.”
Will sat across from him at the kitchen table, and began counting the bills. Horne took out his pen and drew a straight line under the list of serial numbers on the receipt. Just below the line, he wrote the wordsReceipt of $8,000 acknowledged in full. It took maybe a minute and a half for Will to count all eighty bills. They were all there.
“If you’ll just sign this,” Horne said, and handed him the pen, and passed the receipt across the table to him. Will signed his name to it. Horne folded the receipt and put it into his briefcase.
“Mr. Struthers,” he said, and extended his hand. “Please keep your nose clean.”
“You, too, David,” Will said, and opened the door for him. Horne stepped out into the hallway. Will closed and locked the door behind him. He listened at the wood until he could no longer hear Horne’s footfalls in the hallway or on the steps. Then he whirled away from the door, grinning, and slapped his hand on his thigh and shouted, “Will Struthers, you are one lucky son of a bitch!”
CASS’S PHONE RANG at precisely two minutes past ten on Friday morning. Today was the first full day of Hanukkah, the twenty-second of December, three days before Christmas. The man calling was Wesley Hand.
“The optician?” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Hand?”
“I checked the glasses …”
“And?” she said at once.
“As I told you, most prescriptions fall into routine categories,” he said, “what we call plus-one biopters, absolutely commonplace. That was the case here. But I remembered the frames. He insisted on the mocha brown frames, even though I said they wouldn’t go well with his coloring.”
“Whatwashis coloring?” Cass asked.
“Dirty blond hair, blue eyes, the mocha brown frames were all wrong. He’d have done much better with the midnight blue.”
“But he insisted on the brown.”
“Yes.”
“Which is how you remembered him.”
“Yes.”
“What was his name?” she asked at once.
“I have it right here,” he said. “It’s Wilbur Struthers.”
“Do you have an address for him?”
“I do,” Wesley said. “Are you sure it’s okay for me to give this to you?”
“Oh, yes, I’m positive. May I have it, please?”
“Well …”
“Please?” she said.
“Well,” he said again, and read off the address like a prisoner of war revealing under torture the location of an infantry division.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Cass said.
“YES?” a man’s voice said.
“Delivery,” she said.
“What kind of delivery?”
“Pair of eyeglasses,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m from Eyewear Fashions. Somebody found your glasses, brought them in this morning. Did you want me to bring them up?”
“Thank you, yes, come on up. Hey, terrific. It’s 2C, on the second floor.”
The buzzer sounded. Cass opened the entry door at once and felt in her tote bag for the reassuring grip of the Browning automatic. No elevator, of course. She climbed the steps to the second floor and yanked the gun out of the bag as she came down the corridor. She used the muzzle to tap gently on the door to 2C.
When Will opened the door, he saw the redheaded woman whose apartment he’d ripped off. Moreover, she was holding in her fist what appeared to be a .45 automatic. He tried to slam the door shut on her, but she hit it with her shoulder at once, shoving it in against him, almost knocking him off his feet, he hadn’t realized she was that strong. She was in the apartment in a wink, slamming the door behind her, and whirling on him with the automatic pointed at his head.
“Where’s my money?” she asked.
“Don’t get excited,” he said.
“My money,” she said. “My furs,” she said. “You’re a thief,” she said. She kept using the gun for punctuation, which made Will believe she was somewhat unstable and therefore capable of hysterically pulling the trigger.
“Don’t get excited,” he said again. “Everything’s here, all of it’s here, no need to go waving the gun around like that.”
She was maybe five-eight, five-nine, taller than she’d looked from the rooftop across the way, a tall good-looking redhead wearing a red fox jacket open over blue jeans and a bulky green turtleneck sweater that made her look like Christmas although it was still three days away.
“Get it,” she said.
“Would you mind putting up the gun?” he said. “Makes me nervous, you standing there with a gun in your hand.”
“Get my stuff,” she said.
“Right away,” he said.
“You fuckingcrook,” she said.
He wanted to tell her that a Khmer Rouge soldier had once pistol-whipped him with a weapon just like the one in her hand, but instead he went to the closet and took from it the long sable coat and the mink stole, and carried them to where she was standing alongside the sofa, the gun still in her hand, and dumped them onto the cushions, and then went back to the closet to take down from the shelf the shoe box containing what he’d last counted out for Horne as $8,000 dollars in hundred-dollar bills. He was hoping she knew how to handle that big gun in her fist because he sure didn’t want to get hurt here.
“Take off the lid,” she said, and waved the gun again.
“It’s all here, I just counted it last night.”
“That what you do in your spare time, you crook? Count other people’s money?”
“I’ll be happy to count it for you now,” he said, taking the rubber-banded white envelope from the box. “Or you might want to put down the gun and do it yourself.”
“You count it,” she said.
He removed the rubber band, took the bills from the envelope, began counting the money for the second time in as many days, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred, nine hundred, a thous …
“Stop!” she said.
“What?” he said.
“Hold it right there!”
“Why? What …?”
“That isn’t my money,” she said.
“What do you …?”
“That isnot my money! What are you trying to pull here?”
“Ma’am, I can assure you …”
“That isnot my money! My money had funny marks on it. And it smelled sweet.”
“Lady,all money smells sweet.”
“Where are the marks?”
“What marks?”
“The writing, the funny writing!” She picked up a handful of bills, spread them open like a fan. “Do you see any writing on these bills? These bills are clean! Smell them! Do you smell anything sweet?”
“No, ma’am, but …”
“What did you do with my money?”