Suspended Sentences

The Shopping List

“The Shopping List” was written out of a simple desire to write a detective story — red herrings, clues, solving a mystery puzzle, building to a surprise ending, all that. I rarely try to construct such plots; call it laziness if you like. The story was written to satisfy a curiosity. If it fools you, it worked.

It was awkward. She wouldn’t tell him the truth, obviously, but she’d always had trouble lying.

He phoned, as she’d known he would, on Tuesday afternoon. “I’ll be out of town on business until Friday. Not sure what time I’ll get back — don’t count on me for Friday dinner. But I’ll get tickets for that play Saturday night—”

Marie closed her eyes. “Oh, Severn, I’m sorry, I just can’t make it Saturday.”

There was a moment’s silence but then his deep reassuring voice rumbled down the line: “Sunday, then. I’ll get tickets.”

“Sunday’s fine.” She closed her eyes in relief. He really was marvelous. He took her on faith — no questions, no protestations. She said softly into the phone, “I don’t know if I can wait that long to see you. I do love you, darling — and I’m sorry about Saturday.”

“See you Sunday then. Around six, so we can have dinner first. Love you, honey.” Then he was gone and she cradled the phone, but her hand remained on it as if to prolong the thread of contact.

After a while she bestirred herself. She went through the apartment to the foyer and rummaged in her handbag for the list.

The handbag was on the sconce below the oval mirror and she examined her reflection briefly and wondered what Severn could possibly see in her: plump plain Marie, dark brown hair she never could do anything with, creases here and there that presaged the looming fortieth birthday — not a whole lot to draw the attraction of a man like Severn. He was thirty-five and successful; he’d been divorced for several years. When she’d asked him why on earth he wanted to keep seeing her, he’d only said, “You’re comfortable, love. I’ve had my fill of abrasive ambitious women.”

His ex-wife, she’d gathered, was a beautiful but brittle careerist — some sort of talent agent or casting director; Marie wasn’t sure — Severn rarely talked about her. “It wasn’t really a marriage. We both backed into it, trying to get out of things.”

Marie looked away. At first, after her mother had died and she’d moved into this apartment, she’d meant to take down the mirror from the foyer wall — she didn’t like mirrors; they only reminded her of her unattractiveness. But occasionally Aunt Leah and Uncle Arthur would come around to dinner or one of the office girls would give her a lift home and stay for a drink — mainly, Marie thought, because most of the office girls lived out in the Valley or down in Orange County and it was easier to have a drink at Marie’s while the Freeway traffic thinned out before driving home — and guests always liked to have a mirror by the front door so they could make sure their faces were on before they ventured out onto the Beverly Hills sidewalks.

She found the list in her handbag and studied it. She never remembered to do things unless she wrote them down. Severn kidded her about it.

She’d miss him desperately in his absence for the next few days; but in a way she was grateful for it. She’d be able to get everything done and she wouldn’t have to tell lies to Severn to explain why she was going to be out so much this week.

A few of the items had already been checked off — she’d taken care of them ten days ago during Severn’s last business trip out of town; but there was still a great deal to do.

1. Toy gun. Must look real. Revolver type.

2. Suitcases (2).

3. Clothes. Ned’s suit size 44 short. Shirts 16 neck, 33 sleeve. Waist 38, inseam29. Shoes 10 1/2-C. Socks, shorts, etc. Remember Ned prefers brown, doesn’t like blue.

4. Car. Can be old but must run well.

5. Make airline reservation: San Diego to Mexico City for late Monday afternoon Feb. 18th, in name of Arnold Creber.

7. Sunglasses. Reflector Type.

8. Blond wig, man’s. Ned’s bat size is 7 1/4.

9. Ned arrives LAX Feb 16th, 730p.m. Take suitcases, etc. Leave envelope at Delta information desk.

10. Make reservation in Creber name at a Burbank motel, Feb. 16th & 17th.

She’d taken care of all the easy things on the list and left the difficult ones for last. Tomorrow on the lunch hour she’d take care of the toy gun. Then Thursday she’d have to take a sick day and visit the used-Car lots.

She hated all of it. It was complicity — she’d be a criminal. But it was the price Ned had exacted from her. The insurance hadn’t come anywhere near covering all the expenses of Mom’s last illness and Ned had been despicably, and typically, cold-hearted about it. “Let her die and get it over with. Pull the plug — let her go.”

“Ned!” She’d been astonished, shocked. “She’s your mother too, you know.”

“She’s a dying old woman. Making a few doctors rich won’t change that.” Then he’d given her that quick easy selfish smile. “I’ll make you a deal, sister. You want to lavish money on the old woman, fine. I’ll let you have the money. But I want a quid pro quo. You’ve got to do a few things for me. Now get out your notebook and let’s see you make one of those lists of yours. First I’m going to want a toy gun...”

That had been a year ago, at the prison in Atlanta. She’d only visited him once more after that, to tell him about the funeral and ask him when he expected to be released on parole. She’d left quickly, unable to face his indifference to Mom’s death.

Now he was getting out, just as he’d planned, and she had to keep her part of the bargain. But it would be all right. After Monday he’d be far away in some distant part of the world and she’d never have to see, or even think about, her brother again.

Thurston found a parking space just off McDonough Boulevard and walked to the entrance gate. The long gray building had a forbidding institutional massiveness. Only a discreet plaque identified it: Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. The “Big A.”

Thurston was expected. His credentials got him in. A guard escorted him to a small outer office where he waited a few minutes with a magazine before he was admitted to the Deputy Warden’s sanctum.

The Deputy Warden was a large man with a bushy sand-colored mustache and a beer gut and the plaid-shirt look of Good Ole Boy who spent his free days hunting with coon hounds and swapping lies in roadhouse taverns.

“Well, now, Mr. Thurston, they didn’t tell me exactly what you want down here but we be happy to oblige you if we can. Now you represent the insurance company, that right?” He pronounced “right” as if it were “rat” and put heavy emphasis on the first syllable of “insurance.”

Thurston said, “I work for a private-investigation company. But we’re under contract to the insurance people, yes. Indirectly I work for the insurance company. We’re still hoping to recover the bonds that Marks stole.”

“I can see where they might be just a little bit interested in something like that. They had to pay off the claim in full, I expect?”

“In full,” Thurston agreed drily. “We didn’t recover any of it.”

“But I thought Marks confessed?”

“He did.”

The Deputy Warden glanced through a stapled sheaf of papers — possibly the file on Edward “Ned” Marks. “They were bearer bonds, I see. No registered owners, no signatures. Even if you get ’em back, how’re you fixin’ to identify them?”

“They’ve got serial numbers.”

“Well,” the Deputy Warden said, “he’s behaved himself here, kept mostly out of trouble, served easy time. Stays out of most folks’ way. I haven’t had much contact with him. No occasion to. The ones I see are mostly the troublemakers. So there’s not a whole lot I can tell you about him.”

The Deputy Warden cocked his head over on one side. “You know, that’s a pretty fair rate of pay — seven hundred thousand dollars for twenty-eight months easy time. Works out to about twenty-five thousand a month, doesn’t it. Good pay, yessirreebob. If he gets to keep it.” The eyes narrowed into a shrewd smile. “You’re fixin’ to see he doesn’t get to keep it.”

Thurston said, “Well, I’m fixing to try. He’s due for release tomorrow morning. I’d appreciate it if you’d point him out to me but not let him see me. I’ve seen his photographs But they’re a few years old and I’d rather have him identified for me in the flesh, just so there’s no possibility of a mistake.”

“And then you aim to shadow him when he leaves here, that it?”

“Every step of the way.”

Thurston sat in the car in a No Parking zone — “Violators will be towed away” — with art angle of view on the Big A. It looked rather like the Reichstag from this angle — the old one, he thought; the one Hitler had burned down in ’33. Thurston took an interest in history, particularly the kind that was told photographically. He had a growing collection of rare old plates — even a few Matthew Brady originals. It was the sort of thing you did when you lived alone, and Thurston preferred to live alone.

He wasn’t antisocial. But he’d learned there wasn’t anybody whose face he wanted to look at every night and every morning — or at least he’d thought so until recently.

There was one daughter, now thirteen, the souvenir of his youthful romantic illusion, but she was confined to a home for the severely retarded. She didn’t recognize him on his infrequent visits, so he didn’t feel he had any real ties. He read books, collected his photographic history, played poker quite often, enjoyed his own simple cooking, worked out three times a week in a health club, dated several women most of whom were divorcees; but lately he’d been seeing more of one woman than of the others.

He enjoyed most of all his work. Thurston had been a licensed investigator ever since he’d been discharged from the Military Police in 1968.

He had specialized in insurance cases for seven years now; he had a record of recoveries that no other agent in the company could match, and he took pride in it.

The Ned Marks case had been a special challenge from the beginning. It had come across his desk a year ago; another agent had handled it originally but he’d retired and now it was Thurston’s. The self-confident brashness of the Marks theft had intrigued him from the start, mainly because it appeared that Marks had expected to be caught.

Marks had been neither surprised nor chagrined when they’d arrested him two days after the bearer bonds had disappeared from the vault of the Sherman Oaks bank where he’d worked for eight months as a junior mortgage officer.

Thurston had inherited a thorough dossier on Marks and he’d committed the salient references to memory. It was a personal history of dreary familiarity to Thurston, who had read a thousand such dossiers and long since lost his capacity for surprise.

Marks was thirty-seven. He’d served in Vietnam, but in a clerical capacity in Saigon — not out in the boonies. There was only one prior arrest on the rap sheet. At the age of eighteen he’d stolen the landlord’s typewriter and sold it for $25, which he then lost in a schoolyard crap game. His mother had bought another typewriter for the landlord and the case had been dropped.

After his army service and two years of G.I. Bill attendance at a junior college in Santa Ana, Marks had gone to work for a former Vietnam buddy in a shady scheme to sell cut-rate (and worthless) vitamin pills to minor drugstore chains. When the venture went bankrupt under the threat of F.D.A. scrutiny, Marks had drifted into other jobs, mostly in the sort of selling operations that were next door to frauds but just within the law — mail-order junk, real-estate scams, pest exterminating. According to the dossier, one employer had fired him because she suspected him of having embezzled $3000, but nothing was proved and no charges had been brought against him.

Thurston had dealt with Marks’s kind before: the cruel solipsists, the me-first sharpies with clever brains and the moral convictions of hungry pariah dogs.

Among the confidential reports in the dossier was an interview with a casual chum of Marks’s who’d worked as a bartender in Van Nuys. “He said he’d just got himself a job in some bank over there someplace around Ventura Boulevard. He said it didn’t pay much. So I ask him why he took the job, and he gives me that funny smile, like, you know the way he smiles like he knows something nobody else knows, and he gives me, you know, that old Willie Sutton line about I go to banks because that’s where the money is. You know.”

So he might had had it in mind to rip off the bank even before he applied for the job there. In any case he’d had eight months to study the operations — the bank’s arrangements for the handling of negotiables. On the morning of the theft Marks had gone into the vault to get a deck of traveler’s checks, and according to his confession he’d simply slipped the sheaf of bearer bonds under his shirt and walked out with them.

By the time the theft was discovered that afternoon, he’d been out to lunch for an hour and had had plenty of time to dispose of the bonds, at least temporarily. Like everyone else who’d had access to the vault he was searched thoroughly that evening before leaving the bank; they hadn’t found anything on him then. But within a day or so the F.B.I. and police had built up a strong circumstantial case against Marks — access, opportunity, fingerprints on the bond shelf, and mainly the simple fact that the movements of everyone else were accounted for.

When they arrested Marks he was indignant at first, insisting he was innocent; but apparently his lawyer had persuaded him that the evidence against him was too potent to deny. In a cheerful abrupt switch Marks had confessed and entered a plea of guilty to a relatively minor larceny charge, in a bargaining agreement reached between his lawyer and the prosecutors. The federal judge, in sentencing him, had imposed the maximum penalty because of Marks’s adamant refusal to make restitution; but the maximum punishment was only four years, which meant about two and one-half years of actual prison time, given the parole system. And because he was judged a nonviolent white-collar offender, Marks had been remanded to the Atlanta facility, which was the government’s principal institution for the incarceration of sophisticated or genteel prisoners. Ever since a counterfeiter named Handy Middlebrooks had become Inmate Number One in 1902, the Big A had been the Feds’ hostelry for the quiet ones: Eugene Debs, Rudolph Abel, Earl Carroll, Congressman John Langley, Governor Warren McCray. Cons elsewhere called it The Country Club.

Now, watching the entrance from his illegally parked car, Thurston wondered if even this — the choice of site for his 28-month incarceration — had been part of Ned Marks’s plan. In his confession Marks had said, “I am relieved and glad to have the uncertainty over with. No longer must I be in suspense as to whether I will be apprehended for my crime. I freely confess my wrongdoing but ask for leniency in view of the fact that I did not at any time place anyone’s life or good health in jeopardy.” Marks apparently had been coached by his lawyer to talk like that.

It was transparent self-serving piety but perhaps there was some truth in Marks’s expression of relief. He hadn’t tried very cleverly to destroy evidence. He hadn’t provided an alibi for himself or tried to put the blame on anyone else. He hadn’t even complained when the maximum sentence was passed.

Now Marks had paid his debt to society and the insurers had paid theirs to the bank — and it was Thurston’s job to get it back.

The Deputy Warden had given him a look at Marks yesterday through a window — Marks hadn’t seen him — and now Thurston had no trouble recognizing him when Marks walked out of the Big A and loitered a few minutes until a radio-call taxi drew up for him. Marks was short and a bit on the plump side. Thinning dark hair, a tiny mustache, the vanity of a small-time con artist.

Thurston put his rent-a-car in drive and shadowed the cab at a leisurely distance. He was fairly certain Marks would go straight to the airport but with nearly three quarters of a million dollars at stake it was worth playing by the rules.

When Ned Marks boarded the flight for Los Angeles, Thurston was eight rows behind him in an aisle seat and reasonably certain that Marks hadn’t made him yet.

The tall guy was either a cop or F.B.I., Ned Marks guessed. Trying to look inconspicuous. But he was still there even though Ned had spent ten minutes in the men’s room and the rest of the passengers had gone on to baggage claim by now.

Well, that was all right. At least now Ned knew what the guy looked like. Tall and fashionably shaggy, a lot of loose brown hair. Could have been an actor in a shaving cream commercial. Good muscle tone, it looked like, but that was all right too; Ned wasn’t going to get in the ring with the guy.

He went across to the information desk and waited his turn in the line. The cop, or whatever he was, had gone over to one of the car rental counters. Ned said, “My name’s Arnold Creber. I think someone left an envelope here for me?”

“Could you spell the name, sir?”

Two minutes later he had the envelope and was out on the curb waiting for the shuttle bus. He didn’t bother to look up when the tall cop got on and walked past to sit down a few seats behind him. The guy was a fool if he didn’t think he’d been spotted by now.

The envelope contained the car keys and a note from Marie. He skipped the lecture part and focused his attention on the parking lot designation — Lot 6, Row D. The license plate number was on the key tag.

He got off the bus carrying just the little shoulder bag — the things he’d had with him 28 months before when he’d checked into Atlanta, and his $428, and the car keys.

The cop was hanging back, bumbling around the parking lot pretending He couldn’t remember where he’d left his car. Ned found the clunker where Marie had parked it. First he checked the trunk. The suitcases were there. He got in and turned the key, dubious about the cheap old car, but it started right up and he grinned amiably at the tall cop when he drove out onto the oval airport drive. Left the stupid oaf standing there flatfooted.

Well, there might be another one covering him in a car. So he did a few maneuvers designed to disclose a tail — up and down Freeway ramps. There was a brown car half a block back when he turned onto the Freeway again and he wasn’t sure about it, but when he got off the Freeway at the Ventura Boulevard exit he didn’t see any brown car in the mirror. It didn’t matter a whole lot. Let them follow him if they wanted to waste time and gas.

She’d decided to tell Severn part of the truth. Otherwise he’d be bound to get at least a little bit suspicious. She couldn’t just say nothing at all.

“Severn, darling,” She embraced him in the doorway and drew him inside. “I’ve fixed your favorite — Wiener schnitzel and asparagus. Would you like a drink? What time’s the show?”

It provoked Severn’s measured smile. Everything he did was deliberate; his equanimity was endless. “Wonderful, yes, and eight o’clock. Oh, I booked a table at Scandia, so I’d better cancel it.” He kissed her cheek and went toward the phone.

“Vodka and orange juice?”

“Great, sure.”

“I found a lovely white wine to go with dinner. At least the man in the store promised me it’s lovely.” She made his screwdriver and returned from the kitchen with it in time to see him hanging up the phone. He turned, appraised her, and smiled.

“New dress?”

“Heavens, no. I’ve had it for just ages.”

“I haven’t seen it before.”

She thought back. “No, that’s right, I don’t think you have. You’re so sweet to remember things like that.”

“Well, I like it. Wear it again, okay?”

She sat down by him and took his hand. “I have something to tell you. The reason I couldn’t see you last night—”

“You don’t need to explain anything.”

“I had to do some things for my brother.”

His glance came up quickly. “I don’t think you ever mentioned having a brother.”

“His name’s Ned. Edward. I haven’t really made a secret of it — it’s just that I don’t like talking about him. It makes me angry just thinking about him. The way he treated Mom—”

Severn put his arm across her shoulders. Marie said, “He’s been in prison, you see—” And stopped; she hadn’t meant to go that far.

“Prison?”

“He stole money from a bank. A lot of money. Oh, he didn’t hold them up with a gun or anything like that. He worked there — he just stole some bonds.”

“Like embezzlement, you mean.”

“I don’t know. He just stole them, you know? Anyway he’s served his sentence and he’s free now, and I don’t imagine I’ll ever have to see him again.”

“Sounds as if it’s just as well. You’ve got your own life to lead anyway. Oh, by the way, we’re invited to dinner at the Ibbetsons’ Friday night — Andy’s just finished a survey for one of the supermarket chains and I guess the bonus is burning a hole in his pocket. Anyway Andy and Phyl want to take us to El Padrino Friday. I said I’d have to check with you first.”

“I’d love to.” And she loved, too, the way he’d changed the subject so gently. She looked at the clock. “I’d better put the schnitzel on. It’s a peace offering — for standing you up last night.”

But he wouldn’t let go of her hand, wouldn’t let her rise. “The crazy thing is, Marie, I missed you.”

“I don’t honestly know why on earth you should. I ‘m nobody’s vision of a heartthrob.”

“Well, I’m hardly the most scintillating character in the world myself. But we care about each other. That means a lot.”

“Don’t be soppy.” She went into the kitchen, calling back over her shoulder, “Two cutlets or three? They’re pretty small.”

They probably had a make on the license plates of the car he was driving; that tall cop in the airport parking lot had a got a good look at it. So Ned didn’t use it Monday morning. He left it parked in a slot behind the motel and took a cab into Studio City. He carried his suitcase through a building and out across Ventura to a bus stop, waited fifteen minutes — the service sure wasn’t getting any better around here — and finally boarded a bus, still watching everything at once. If he’d seen anything suspicious he’d have aborted and tried another way, but nobody was watching him that he could see; there hadn’t been anyone sitting in arty of the parked cars near the bus stop and no one got on the bus with him.

He rode twenty minutes to Van Nuys Boulevard, phoned another taxi from there, and got off several blocks from his destination. He walked the rest of the way, into a small branch bank just west of the San Diego Freeway on Wilshire Boulevard.

He wondered if she’d ever looked inside the envelope. There was no sign it had been unsealed. Probably it had never occurred to her to snoop. She was a naive simp.

It had taken him months to prepare it all. Before he’d stolen the bonds. The false passport had been the hardest part. He’d known a guy from the army who’d put him in touch with another guy — he suspected they had some kind of narcotics deal but he didn’t ask and didn’t want to know — and finally he’d got the passport from a thin little guy in Tijuana.

He’d spent all those months establishing the Arnold Creber identity, right down to the Social Security number and the credit cards and the New Mexico driver’s license, and the little savings account in this nondescript Santa Monica bank.

And the safe-deposit box. Arnold Creber’s safe-deposit box. Containing $700,000 in negotiable, highly portable bearer bonds.

They didn’t even half fill the suitcase. Hardly any weight at all when he carried it back out to the waiting taxi he’d phoned for, got in, and said, “Burbank. I’ll tell you where when we get there.” And turned to watch the road behind.

Nobody followed him.

Ned clasped the suitcase on his lap and smiled, thinking about baccarat tables, haute cuisine, and mademoiselles in bikinis.

He changed taxis near the Burbank Studios — a two-block walk, a phone call, a ten-minute wait for another cab in a fast-food dump — and got off on a side street and walked a while, and was back in the motel room by noon. Plenty of time left.

He redistributed the bonds in his luggage, packed most of the clothes Marie had bought for him, got into a cheap suit — it wasn’t a bad fit, really, but her penuriousness irritated him as usual — put the toy revolver in his belt, and stood before the mirror adjusting the blond wig over his half-bald head.

It didn’t go with his eyebrows, he realized, nor with the dark beard stubble. So he shaved as closely as he’d ever shaved in his life and used the nail scissors from his dop kit to chop his eyebrows down to nearly nothing; then he dusted them with talc. What the hell, they’d grow back in time. Small enough price to pay.

The blond guy in the mirror was a stranger, sure enough. He grinned.

He circled the clunker at a distance. Nobody was watching it. He drove it around the block. Still no surveillance. So he got the suitcases out of the motel room, stowed them in the car, and drove away.

An hour later he was boarding a PSA flight at Burbank Airport, San Diego bound.

The security detector hadn’t sniffed out the toy revolver because it was made of plastic, like all the cheap junk they sold these days. When Ned was a kid even a toy gun used to be made out of real metal, but no more.

Well, never mind. After today he’d be able to buy a platinum gun if he wanted one. But at least the toy looked real. Remember how John Dillinger broke out of prison with a gun he’d carved out of a bar of soap and blackened with soot and ashes.

At San Diego he went along to the Aeronaves counter and got out his ticket, from Marie’s envelope, and the passport. Arnold Creber, citizen of the world. He flashed a confident smile at the dark girl and she smiled right back, but that was when he caught a sidewise glimpse of somebody coming up fast, and he turned to see the two men striding toward him: a uniformed cop and the tall guy with all the brown hair.

The uniformed cop said, “Excuse me. Edward Marks? Like to see you a minute.” The paper in his hand had to be a warrant.

“My name’s not Marks. You got me confused with somebody. My name’s Creber.”

“Sure. Arnold Creber,” said the tall guy with the brown hair. “Just come along, all right’ It won’t take but a minute.” And the tall guy smiled slowly.

Nobody ever said Ned Marks doesn’t think fast. So fast it took the uniformed cop completely by surprise when Ned whipped out the revolver, leveled it at the tall guy, and darted his left hand against the uniformed cop’s throat. He whipped around behind the cop and jammed the revolver against his collar.

“Back off,” he snarled at the tall guy. “Now!”

He heard a quick intake of breath — the airline girl.

But the tall guy only kept smiling that slow infuriating smile. He calmly stepped forward and plucked the gun from his hand.

“You shouldn’t play with toys, Ned.”

“How... how the hell did you know?”

“We’ve got a warrant to search you and your luggage for stolen bonds.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Just a private cop, name of Thurston. My company works for the insurance company you hooked for seven hundred thousand dollars.”

“Nobody followed me here,” Ned said. “Nobody. How could you’ve found me?”

Thurston only answered that one with his slow smile.

Thurston brought the receipt into the office and dropped it on Andy Ibbetson’s desk. “The San Diego police will keep the evidence until they’ve sent Marks to Chino for transporting stolen property. Then we get it back.”

“About time.” Andy pushed the receipt toward his In pile. “Nice job. You can buy a round-the-world vacation on the bonus for this one.”

“For two?”

“You that serious about her?”

“I am. But she may not feel the same way about me when she finds out I read the shopping list in her handbag.”

“That’s how you knew he’d be at the San Diego airport with the loot, huh?”

“In the name of Arnold Creber. In a blond wig. Carrying a toy gun,” said Severn Thurston.