No Questions Asked

5

I was up and about the Lord’s business the next morning by 7:30 and so was the thief, who called at 7:35.

“You awake?” the high voice said.

“I’m awake.”

“You talk to Spivey?”

“Yes. Last night.”

“What about the money?”

“He can get it when the bank opens. They open here at nine. How do you want it?”

The voice didn’t have to think about that. “Old hundreds and twenties. Make sure they’re old.”

“No fifties?”

“All right, some fifties. But not too many.”

“How about a hundred thousand in twenties, another hundred thousand in one-hundreds, and the rest in fifties. That’ll make a neat little package.”

“How neat?”

“It’ll fit into either a large attaché case or a small suitcase. I’ll throw in whichever one you want as part of the service.”

“Make it a small suitcase.”

“All right. What next?”

“Next after you get the money is that you be back in your hotel room by ten. If we don’t call then, we’ll call you at eleven.”

“What about Jack Marsh?” I said.

“What about him?”

“It would be nice if I could talk to him. You know, see whether he’s had his breakfast yet.”

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

“Then you wouldn’t know if you’re talking to him or just to some guy who said he was Jack Marsh, would you?”

“No, I don’t suppose I would.”

“So there’s not much point in your talking to him.”

“I think Max Spivey would like to talk to him. He knows Marsh.”

“We don’t talk to anyone but you, St. Ives. Get that straight.”

“All right, but you can at least tell me how Marsh is.”

“Sure, I’ll tell you how he is. He’s fine. Does that satisfy you?”

“It might satisfy me, but not the cops.”

“No cops. That’s why we sent for you, because they said you wouldn’t run any cops in.”

“I don’t run them in, but that doesn’t mean I can always keep them out. Especially the FBI.”

“I’ll tell you what you can tell the FBI.”

“What?”

“You can tell them that if they want Marsh back all safe and sound, they’d better stay out of it until we get our money. Is that clear?”

“It’s clear.”

“We’ll be in touch,” the high voice said, and once again the phone went dead.

I hung up and crossed over to the window. It was no longer snowing but it was still overcast. There seemed to be about six or seven inches of snow covering Lafayette Square. There was nobody in the square except for a woman, all bundled up in a brown scarf and brown coat, who was feeding bread to some pigeons out of a paper bag. The pigeons reminded me that I was hungry and that I hadn’t had any coffee, so I went back to the phone and called Max Spivey to tell him what the thief had told me and to see whether he would like to join me in some breakfast.

While I waited for Spivey in the dining room I drank coffee and scanned the Washington Post, which said that there was a fifty-fifty chance of its snowing some more and that the schools in Washington and the surrounding counties would be closed, although the federal government offices would remain open. They ran a picture on the front page of a massive traffic tieup out on Shirley Highway, and the caption said that some drivers had been stuck in it until nearly nine o’clock the night before.

Spivey came in and sat down, and the waiter hurried over and poured him some coffee and took our orders. Spivey said that he wanted orange juice, four eggs over easy, ham, hash brown potatoes, if they had them, and a large order of toast. I said that I would like some rye toast and a soft-boiled egg.

“You on a diet?” Spivey said after the waiter went away.

“No, it’s just that breakfast isn’t my favorite meal. It doesn’t offer enough variety, I guess.”

“Big as I am I have to stoke the furnace. But you’ve got a point there. About variety, I mean.”

“I was trying to think whether I’d ever run across your name before,” I said.

“Like where?”

“Maybe on the sports page.”

“You mean because of my size?”

“Well, you’re big enough and you move okay.”

He shook his head. “I got a trick left knee. I played some football in high school but my knee went in my senior year and that did it. I boxed a little in college but I never took it anywhere.”

“How long have you been with Pacifica?”

He thought about it. “About twelve years now. I started out in sales, in the tits and ass stuff, as a matter of fact, and then I switched to claims and I guess I was pretty good at it because they made me a vice-president a couple of years ago.” He looked at me. “You might say I’m the vice-president in charge of trouble.”

“You get a lot of it?”

“Enough. When the economy goes sour, the phony claims start to rise. People lose their jobs and go through their savings, if they’ve got any. Then they borrow every cent they can, and when that’s gone they sit around and look at each other and wonder what the hell they’re going to do next. They have fantasies, you know. They sit there with no money and wonder what it would be like if the other one stepped in front of a truck and all that insurance money suddenly fell into their lap and how noble and brave they’d be at the funeral. Well, you know what happens. They rig up something, but they usually rig it up too fancy, and the homicide boys move right in. But sometimes they keep it simple, and it looks like just what they wanted it to look like, an accident, and the cops say it’s accidental death and so does the coroner after the autopsy. Everybody knows it’s an accident except us.”

“How do you know it isn’t?”

He shook his head. “We just know. It doesn’t smell right. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t even taste right — you know what I mean? So we run it through the computer again just to get the odds on that particular accident happening to that particular person at that particular time. Then we sit there and look at what the computer says, and then we look at each other. And sometimes, when the smell is bad and the taste is sour and the computer results are a little colicky, we call in somebody like Jack Marsh and tell him to pick up where the cops left off and see what he can find.”

“And he’s pretty good at it?” I said.

“He’s got a feel for it. Some do and some don’t.”

“What’s his background?”

“I knew him in college at USC. Then he went into the Army and they put him into counter-intelligence. In Germany. He must have been good at it because he came out a captain. After that he tried college again, but it didn’t work out, so he quit and went with the L.A. police. It was about then, about ten years ago, that he looked me up and every once in a while we’d have a few drinks together. I was still in sales then. In feet, I’d just sold a big policy to Joiner Goodwater on his rare book collection. It was quite a collection back then.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Well, I’d met Maude Goodwater, and just to be polite because it was a big policy I’d asked her and her father out to lunch. For some reason the old man had to cancel out, and it was just Maude and me. Well, we went to this place, and there was Jack Marsh at the bar on his day off so I asked him to join us. That’s how they met I introduced them.”

“And they’ve been together ever since?”

Spivey shook his head. “No, they went together for a couple of years, and then Maude met somebody else and married him. It lasted about five years, I guess. He wasn’t much. I think he was in public relations for a bank or something. Anyway, she left him, and then when her father died it was in all the papers, and Jack Marsh saw it and called her up. They started seeing each other again, and about a year ago they started living together.”

“But Marsh wasn’t with the Los Angeles police anymore?”

Spivey shook his head. “It was too slow for him. I don’t mean the action, I mean the promotion and the pay and all. Jack picked up some pretty expensive tastes when he was in Europe. So he quit the cops and went with a big insurance company as a claims investigator and really found his niche, I guess. He was good and he was mean, and the company liked that. He was so good, in fact, that he got an offer for a hell of a lot more money from another company. But instead of taking it, he resigned, and set up his own shop as a private investigator specializing in claims work. He did real fine right from the start. He makes a lot of money. He should. He charges enough.”

Spivey wiped up the last of his eggs with a piece of toast and popped it into his mouth. “I’ve been talking a lot,” he said. “I must be nervous.”

I thought he looked about as nervous as the floor. “You want some more coffee?”

He shook his head. “We might as well go get it.”

The waiter brought over the check, and Spivey reached for it and signed his name and room number to it. He left a dollar bill for the waiter, and we got our topcoats and caught a cab outside of the hotel.

The cab driver was a Nigerian, and he had the heater up as high as it would go. He complained about the snow and the cold and told us about how nice and warm it was in Lagos and how on days like this he wished he were back there instead of here where he was studying to be an engineer.

He was a terrible snow driver, possibly because it was the second time he had ever seen any, and we went into a couple of breathtaking skids before we pulled up in front of a People’s drugstore. Spivey waited in the cab while I went in and bought a small, cheap plastic suitcase for $4.98 plus tax. After two more skids, one little one and one big one which made me close my eyes, the driver let us off at the Riggs bank on Pennsylvania Avenue across from the Treasury building.

In the bank Spivey asked for a Mr. Bilanow who was a vice-president and who, like all bankers, wasn’t at all pleased with the notion of parting with $250,000 that he couldn’t charge any interest on. He also wanted to make sure that Spivey was indeed Max Spivey of the Pacifica Life and Casualty Company, and it was only after Spivey produced his driver’s license, three credit cards, and a letter of introduction from the Bank of America, which was the corresponding bank in Los Angeles, that Bilanow said, “Well, yes, Mr. Spivey, everything seems to be in order. Now how would you like it?”

Spivey looked at me. “Old bills,” I said. “A hundred thousand in twenties, a hundred thousand in hundreds, and the rest in fifties.”

Bilanow wrote it down in a neat hand, excused himself and left us sitting at his desk while he went over to a teller’s cage. He was gone about ten minutes, and when he returned he was carrying a wire basket that was full of money. He put the basket down on the desk. “I suggest you count it, Mr. Spivey,” he said and then stepped back as though he wanted to be out of the way.

Spivey looked at me. “That’s just one hell of a lot of money, isn’t it?”

“For one book it is,” I said.

“Or for anything else. Let’s count it.”

I put the suitcase up on the desk, and we started counting the money into it. It was all in one- and five- thousand-dollar packets, and it nearly filled the suitcase.

“Is it old enough?” Spivey said.

“It looks all right,” I said.

“You’re the judge,” he said and closed the suitcase.

Bilanow stepped forward with some papers for Spisign. While he was signing them, Bilanow said, “Mr. Spivey, I offer the suggestion that one of our security people accompany you back to your hotel. It’s only a suggestion, of course.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“You could ask somebody to go out and get us a cab though,” I said. “I’d rather not stand around on a corner trying to hail one with a quarter of a million dollars under my arm.”

Bilanow said that he would see to it and left to find somebody who liked to go out and hail cabs in near-freezing weather. I hefted the suitcase and then put it back down on the desk.

“How much does it weigh?” Spivey said.

“Exactly?”

“Well, close.”

“Fourteen pounds and maybe twelve or thirteen ounces. That’s not counting the suitcase.”

“Jesus, how can you be so sure?”

“There’re four hundred ninety bills to the pound. There’re seven thousand bills in there and after that you just do a little long division in your head.”

“Yeah, I guess you would know about things like that.”

“Uh-huh. I would.”

“You want to take it over now?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, when are you going to take it over?”

I pushed the suitcase a little toward Spivey. “When the thief tells me where to bring it,” I said. “That’s when I’ll take it over.”