Money, Money, Money

by Ed McBain

  “I am very sure. Yes, Miss Hobson. My ambition is to play five songs on the piano.”

  “Because … and this is a possibility you may wish to consider, Mr. Weeks … perhaps you have no talent.”

  “Oh, I have talent, all right.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “I have talent to spare. I think I’m just in some kind of slump, is all. Not bein able to get past those first three notes.”

  “But those first three notes are one and thesame note! Bom, bom, bom,” she said, demonstrating, striking the note three times in succession. “Night. And.Day!” she said, striking the same note again and again and again. “It is impossible for you to be having trouble with the identical note struck three times. It is physically impossible, Mr. Weeks. Bom, bom, bom,” she said, hitting the note again. “It’s so simple arodent could tap it out with his nose.”

  “It isn’t that I haven’t been practicing,” he said.

  “Bom, bom, bom,” she said.

  “It’s just I caught these two murder cases …”

  “Please,” she said, and lowered her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, I know you don’t like to hear about …”

  “I truly don’t.”

  “I’m just trying to explain I’ve been very busy. And also, I’ve begun writing a book.”

  Helen turned to look at him.

  “Yeah,” he said, and grinned. “A novel.”

  She kept staring at him.

  “A novel,” she said. “My.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  He went on to explain that he’d been a cop for almost twenty years now, and a detective for fifteen of those years, so he knew a little bit more about police work than your average run-of-the-mill aspiring writer, didn’t he?

  “I’m sure you do,” Helen said.

  So he’d picked up what he guessed was some sort of form letter this editor at Wadsworth and Dodds …

  “Which is where I’m investigating the second murder …”

  … writes to people who make inquiries and it had really been very helpful, and had probably started him on yet another worthwhile career, though not one so satisfying as yet as playing the piano …

  “If I can just get past those first three notes,” he said.

  “Thesamenote, Mr. Weeks. It is theidentical note. Bom, bom,bom,” she said, pounding the G key.

  “His name is Henry Daggert,” Ollie said.

  “Whose name?”

  “This editor at Wadsworth and Dodds. He’s a senior editor and vice president. I practically memorized everything he wrote.”

  “But you can’t memorize the first note of this song,” Helen said, tapping the sheet music. “Such asimple note, too. Just think of the three notes as thesame note, can you do that? Place your index finger over the G key, and strike it once, bom. Let it resonate, and then strike it again, bom. Can you do that?”

  “Oh sure,” Ollie said.

  Helen looked at the keyboard somewhat despairingly. “We have a few more minutes,” she said. “Do you think we can try it one more time?”

  AT FIRST , he insisted he knew no one named Cassandra Jean Ridley. Knew no one named Frank, either. Ofany last name whatever. No Franks at all in his busy life as a Texas Ranger.

  But this was sunny Mexico.

  So they used a cattle prod on his testicles.

  He all at once remembered the good-looking redhead and this man named Frank Whoever, but all he’d done was introduce the pair,“Verdad,” he said in Spanish, he scarcely knew them at all, really. Cassie—the guys in the bar used to call her Cassie—was an attractive redhead, and Frank was just someone he’d seen around, nice-enough fellow, he thought they might hit it off together, didn’t even know his last name,verdad, amigos.

  “I’m a Texas Ranger,” he told them. “What I do mostly is border patrol, trying to keep the wetbacks out, you know …”

  He actually used the word “wetbacks”in the presence of two Mexicans who were holding a cattle prod an inch away from his quivering balls …

  “No offense meant,” he said immediately. “The point is …”

  The point was he knew nothing about any money that was flown south of the border by Lieutenant Ridley or anyone else, knew nothing about any deals made between these two obviously fine gentlemen here and anyone in the entire universe, did not know anything about Frank Whatever-His-Last-Name-Was, whom he’d only met in a bar, did not know how much a key of cocaine was worth, did not even know what cocainewas, ask him any other question, he was very good at geography.

  They gave him a longer jolt this time.

  His balls shriveled right up into his throat.

  Okay, he told them, the man’s name is Frank Holt, I knew him only as an independent contractor who was normally very reliable. I had no idea what kind of deal was going down in Mexico, I merely put together a man and a pilot. The man needed a delivery and pickup, and the pilot had to be willing to take risks—which, by the way, Lieutenant Ridley had taken plenty of during the Gulf War, from what he’d heard about her. He believed she’d been decorated for valor, in fact. An honorable woman who’d served her nation well in times of dire stress, he felt sure she would not have had any part of a scheme designed to bilk anyone out of fair payment in exchange for his goods, whatever those goods might have been, though he’d had no idea the lady would be picking up cocaine across the border. He told them he’d certainly hadn’t the faintestnotion that counterfeit money was being flown to Mexico in exchange for what was undoubtedly very high-grade coke indeed, the two gentlemen here seeming trustworthy and entirely professional. In short, he’d been a mere instrument of convenience, an enabler, a facilitator, so to speak, an all-around nice guy who’d tried to be helpful, was all. If the gentlemen here had got stung, Randolph L. Biggs hadn’t had anything to do with it. They would have to look elsewhere for satisfaction.

  “So, gentlemen …”

  Villada nodded to Ortiz.

  Ten seconds later, Biggs was telling them that Frank Holt’s real name was Jerome Hoskins and that he worked for a company called Wadsworth and Dodds, back East in the big bad city.

  CARELLA FINALLY REACHED Captain Mark William Ridley at a little past six that evening. He was cognizant of the fact that it was already midnight in Binsfeld, Germany, but when he’d tried earlier that day, he was informed that the captain had still not returned to base.

  Now—at six-oh-six exactly on the face of the squadroom clock—Carella listened to the captain’s voice coming over the line from somewhere outside Frankfurt, explaining at great length that Spangdahlem’s commanding officer, the brigadier general in charge of the 52nd Fighter Wing, had decided to divide more or less evenly among the base’s five thousand U.S. active-duty military members and their seven thousand dependents, the holiday season’s twelve-day sequence that had begun on December 21, the start of Hanukkah, and would end on New Year’s Day.

  “That is because our wing mission is to be constantly ready at all times to promote stability and thwart naked aggression,” he said.

  “I see,” Carella said.

  “In order to achieve U.S. and NATO objectives,” Ridley added, “yessir.”

  Carella wished the man didn’t sound as if he’d been drinking.

  “I drew December 21 to December 27,” Ridley said. “I just got back from Italy fifteen minutes ago. Did I understand you to say you are a detective, sir?”

  “Yes, I am,” Carella said.

  “Why are you calling me here in the Rhineland, may I ask, sir?”

  Carella was calling to tell him his sister was dead.

  He took a deep breath.

  He guessed he’d performed this drill a hundred times before, perhaps a thousand times before, telling a wife or a mother or a father or a son or a brother or an aunt that someone near and dear was suddenly, inexplicably dead, and then listening to the silence or the tears or sometimes the hysterical laughter that greeted this unexpected, unwanted news from a total stra
nger, he guessed he had spoken these same damn more or less identical words a million times before it sometimes seemed.

  Ridley was silent for several moments.

  Then he said, “It comes in bunches, don’t it, sir?” He sounded suddenly quite sober. “First my wife leaves me …”

  He fell silent again.

  Carella waited.

  “I’m sorry,” Ridley said.

  Carella suspected he was crying, but he could hear no tears over the crackling line. He waited.

  “Captain,” he said at last, “I wonder if I could ask you some questions. I know this is a bad time …”

  He let the sentence trail.

  Ridley said nothing.

  “Captain?” Carella said.

  “Yes. Yes, sure,” Ridley said. “Go ahead. Sure. I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “We read some letters you sent to your sister …”

  “Yes, we corresponded a lot.”

  “In one of them, you made reference to one ofher letters …”

  “Yes.”

  “… where she told you she’d be flying a job early in December …”

  “Yes.”

  “… which apparently she felt would change her circumstances considerably, was how she put it in the letter to you, which you were quoting.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was that job, Captain Ridley? Would you know?”

  The captain was silent.

  “Sir? Apparently she wrote to say she’d be moving East sometime after this job …”

  “Yes.”

  “… be there long before Christmas, in fact, was apparently what she wrote to you, if your letter was quoting her exactly.”

  Again, the captain was silent.

  “You see, sir, she was killed just before Christmas, and we were wondering if this job she flew had anything to do with her murder.”

  “How was she killed?” Ridley asked.

  “Someone stuck an ice pick in her,” Carella said.

  And waited.

  “She was flying dope,” Ridley said.

  “To Mexico, is that right?”

  “Yes. Four runs.”

  “On December seventh, she flew to Mexico for the last time, is that right?”

  “Yes. How do you know that?”

  “There was an entry in her calendar.”

  “She called me right afterward.”

  “Called you there in Germany?”

  “Yes.”

  “To say what, Captain?”

  “That she’d flown the four runs, and they turned out to be a piece of cake.”

  “How do you know they were drug runs?”

  “She told me.”

  “On an open phone?”

  “No, in one of her letters. After I warned her not to do anything that might get her in trouble. She assured me these would be short flights, simple pickups and deliveries. Just like chickens or sandals, she said. Just like that.”

  “Where was she flying? From where to where?”

  “Texas to Mexico to Arizona.”

  “What kind of pickups and deliveries?”

  “Money for drugs.”

  “How much money?”

  “They didn’t tell her. It was in locked suitcases.”

  “What drug? Heroin? Cocaine?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she knew, either.”

  “Who was she working for?”

  “A man named Frank Holt. He was the one who gave her the suitcases with the money in them. He was the one buying the stuff.”

  “Who is he, do you know?”

  “Some guy she got introduced to in a bar in Eagle Branch. This is why I thought it all sounded so risky. I mean who the hellwere these people? She said they were okay. Ordinary guys, she told me. Guys trying to make a buck. One of them was a Texas Ranger she’d dated once or twice. The guy who introduced her to Holt.”

  “What washis name? The Ranger?”

  “Riggs? Briggs? Something like that.”

  “How much were they paying her?”

  “Alotof money.”

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a lot,” Carella agreed. He was thinking they had to be big buys. You didn’t pay fifty grand a pop for a two-bit pickup and delivery.

  “How’d they pay her, did she say? Was it in hundred-dollar bills?”

  “I don’t know. She got fifty on a handshake, the rest after the last run.” Ridley paused. “Plus what they tipped her.”

  “What do you mean? Tipped her?”

  “Yeah, they tipped her.”

  “Who did?”

  “The Mexicans in Guenerando. They gave her a ten-thousand-dollar tip. She told me she was going to buy a couple of fur coats.”

  The line went silent.

  “Did she ever buy the coats?” Ridley asked. “Would you know?”

  “She bought the coats,” Carella said.

  FAT OLLIE WEEKS stopped by after his piano lesson to see if anybody up the Eight-Seven wanted to go for pizza or anything. They went to a place on Culver and U. Ollie ordered a large pie for himself. Meyer and Carella shared a nine-incher. The men were off-duty, they ordered beers all around.

  “You look tired,” Ollie told Carella.

  “Must be all this accounting work,” Carella said.

  Ollie bit into a wedge of pizza. Cheese and sauce spilled onto the lapel of his sports jacket. He dipped up a dollop of mozzarella with the tip of his forefinger, and daintily brought it to his mouth. Licking it off, he asked, “What accounting?”

  “On the Ridley case.”

  “What accounting?” Ollie asked again.

  “I’ve been trying to chase down all her money. I spoke to her brother in Germany half an hour ago …”

  “The one whose wife dumped him,” Ollie said, nodding. He was already on his second slice of pizza. “The one who sent the wedding band.”

  “That’s the one. He told me she got paid two hundred grand for picking up some dope in Mexico.”

  “We’re in the wrong racket,” Ollie said.

  “Plusa ten-grand tip.”

  “Dope dealers are tipping people nowadays, huh?”

  “The way I figure it, she kept the ten grand aside for petty cash. Struthers stole whatever was left of it.”

  “Eight thousand bucks,” Meyer said.

  He was wondering how many calories were in the slice of pizza he now picked off the tray. Ollie seemed to have no such problems.

  “Popped two hundred grand into her safe deposit box,” Carella said, “and then slowly transferred it into two separate checking accounts and a savings account.”

  “Placement and layering,” Meyer said.

  “Smurfing,” Ollie agreed, and picked up a third slice of pizza.

  “All accounted for,” Carella said. “And, incidentally, all good money. What’s left of it.”

  “Who says?”

  “A lady at the bank.”

  “Reliable?”

  “Maybe.”

  Ollie raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “But for the moment, let’s say the two hundred grand isnot counterfeit, okay?” Carella said.

  “Okay. Two hundred large in nice clean money.”

  “That leaves only theten grand she got as a tip.”

  “Only?”Ollie said. “That’s bigger than the weekly collection from Riverhead.”

  Cops were always joking about payoffs from Riverhead or Calm’s Point being short or being late or withheld for one reason or another. Some of the cops weren’t joking. Meyer figured Ollie for an honest cop, though. Only a cop with a clear conscience could eat the way Ollie did.

  He watched him as he washed down the third slice of pizza with a huge swallow of beer, thought What the hell, and bit ferociously into his own pizza wedge. With his right hand, Ollie signaled to the waitress for another pie. With his left hand, he was reaching for a fourth slice. Meyer wondered what he would look like if he had three ha
nds.

  “A ten-grand tip from the boys in Mexico,” Carella said. “Which Cass keeps around the house to use for incidentals while she’s distributing thebig money in her various accounts. Okay. Struthers breaks in, finds eight thousand—or maybe more—sitting in a shoe box or wherever, and swipes it. He tries to spend one of the hundreds, but gets nailed by the Secret Service, who tell him they’re investigating a kidnapping …”