The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

The Happenstance Snatch

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1966.

Banty was all brains and no luck. That was his trouble. You kept thinking he was a guy on his way to somewhere, with all those brains under black curly hair, but he never did have the luck when he needed it. It makes no difference how smart or good-looking you are; you aren’t going to attain your objective if you don’t have a little luck here and there along the way.

You take the triplets Banty held in a stud game in Kansas City. Anyone would consider it the best kind of luck in the world to hold a hand like that in a game of stud, one in the hole and two showing, and anyone with any brains at all would back it up with his grandmother’s pension if necessary. But what seems like good luck one minute may turn out to be bad the next, and it’s just about as bad as luck can be, when you consider the consequences, to hold triplets when the guy across the table is holding a straight. About the only way you could make it worse would be to bet your triplets with money you didn’t have on the table, or anywhere else, and to have someone like Archie Flowers holding the straight. And Banty did. And Archie was.

I wasn’t there, but Banty told me about it. I hadn’t seen him around for a day or two, so I went up to his room to see if he was there, and there he was. He hadn’t shaved, and he’d been drinking. He’d have been drinking still, except that the bottle was empty and he didn’t have enough money to buy one that wasn’t.

“What’s the matter, Banty? You don’t look good.”

“Look, stupid,” he said, “don’t come up here telling me how I look.”

He called me stupid lots of times, and some of the times I didn’t like it, even though it was true, which I admit, but I never made a big thing of it because we had been pals for a long time, and I kept waiting around for him to start having the luck to go with his brains, and hoping that some of it, when he did, would rub off on me. Anyhow, I let it pass, not saying anything, and pretty soon he told me about the stud game and losing a bundle on the triplets.

“How much did you lose?” I asked.

“Three grand.”

“Where did you get three grand?”

“I didn’t have it,” he said, “and that’s what’s got me worried.”

“You mean you owe Archie Flowers three grand?”

“Minus about five hundred that was on the table.”

“That leaves twenty-five hundred.”

“You’re a real genius, Carny. You can do arithmetic problems in your head.”

“Well, I don’t blame you for being worried. How long did Archie give you to raise it?”

“I’ve got until morning, and morning’s coming too soon. You got any money?”

“Not that kind, Banty. You know that.”

“I don’t mean the kind it would take to pay off Archie. I mean enough to get me out of town.”

“Not enough to get you far enough.”

“How much is that?”

“Maybe a hundred. Maybe a little less.”

“That’s better than nothing. What I’ve got to do is get away and give this some thought, and you can’t think very clearly in the hospital with a broken head, not to mention other bones, and you can’t think at all, if bad comes to worse, on a slab in the morgue.”

“Where you planning to go?”

“I was thinking about going down to Uncle Oakley’s farm.”

“Who’s Uncle Oakley?”

“Not is. Was. He’s dead. He had this farm down in the hills, about a couple hundred miles south, and he left it to my cousin Theodore when he died, but Theodore doesn’t live on it and can’t sell it, because it’s nothing but a shack on forty acres of rock. So there it is with no one home, and it’s a place to go until I can think of a better place.”

“What I’d like to know is how you plan to raise twenty-five centuries on forty acres of rock.”

“Never mind. I’ll do the thinking, which is out of your line. Uncle Oakley’s farm is safe, if not productive, and that’s what’s important at the moment. My mind is made up to go there, and now’s the time for us to start.”

“Us? Did you say us?”

“Certainly I said us. Do you expect me to go off to the hills without even someone to play two-handed stud with? Besides, there will be a certain amount of work to do, and you may be useful.”

“Dammit, Banty, I don’t want to go down to Uncle Oakley’s farm.”

“The hell you don’t!”

“I don’t, and I won’t, and that’s all there is to it.”

“All right, Carny. We’ve been pals a long time, and I thought we’d be pals forever, but I guess I was wrong. If you won’t go, you won’t, and I won’t either, and I hope I never see you again. You get out of here and don’t come back, and don’t even bother coming to my funeral if Archie Flowers kills me tomorrow for not paying off the twenty-five hundred I owe him.”

Well, how do you feel and what can you do when a pal talks like that? You feel like a heel, that’s how, and you do whatever he asks to get him out of the trouble he’s in, that’s what, and that’s how I felt and what I did. Banty packed some things in a bag, and we went over to my place on Troost, a room over a secondhand furniture store, and I packed some things in a bag, and we started out together for Uncle Oakley’s farm in Banty’s ’56 jalopy. While we were driving south out of town, I counted the money I had, and it came to $98.63. Banty took it and put it in his pocket and said he’d pay me back every cent of it, even though I’d be using my share of it for food and cigarettes and things like that, and even though he was furnishing the car for the trip besides. It shows how Banty was. He was a free-spender and knew how to treat a pal.

We got out of town on a highway going south, and after a while we came to a service station, and Banty drove in and stopped at the pumps, because the car needed gas. There was a little restaurant attached to the station, a short-order joint for truck drivers, really, and this reminded Banty that he’d been on a bourbon diet for quite a while, until the bourbon ran out, after which he’d been on a diet of nothing at all, nothing being all he could afford after the stud game. We went inside and had hamburgers and pie and coffee, which took maybe half an hour, and when we came out again, the jalopy was gone, but the attendant said he’d only parked it off to one side, out of the drive. He’d parked it in an open space between the station and a place next door, and this place was one of these highway nightclubs, and it wasn’t any cheap dump, not by a long shot. It was built of gray stone and glass brick, and there was a formal hedge all around it, and a lot of green plants growing in stone urns along a curved drive coming up to the entrance from the highway. When someone opened the front door, going in or coming out, I could hear music for a few seconds, a classy jazz combo, and I wished Banty and I could go in there and have a few drinks and some fun, but we didn’t have the time or the money, and so we got in the jalopy and started south again for Uncle Oakley’s farm.

We drove along pretty fast for about an hour, and then I went to sleep. I must have slept for almost another hour, and when I woke up we were at least a hundred miles down the highway with maybe another hundred to go. Banty was smoking a cigarette and humming a little tune off-key. I listened to the tune for a while, trying to place it, but I kept thinking all the time that I could hear something else, another sound besides the engine and the wind and Banty’s humming, but I couldn’t decide what it was exactly, or if it was really anything at all besides my imagination. I kept listening and listening and trying to decide what it was and where it came from, if anything from anywhere, and finally I decided it was the sound of snoring in the back seat, which didn’t seem likely. I turned my head, though, to see if it possibly was, and damned if it wasn’t. The sound was snoring, and it was a girl doing it.

“Banty,” I said, “who’s that girl in the back seat? You know her?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Banty said. “You crazy or something?”

“Honest.” I said. “There’s a girl in the back seat, and if you’ll only listen you can hear her snore.”

Banty listened for a few seconds, his head cocked, and then he pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped the car and listened for a few seconds longer before twisting around slowly and looking over the back of the seat. I had a wild notion all of a sudden that I was seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, he seemed so unconcerned, but then he cursed softly under his breath and pinched the end of his nose, which was a gesture he had when he was puzzled by something, and I knew she was there, all right, and Banty saw her.

“Wake her up and throw her out,” he said.

That suited me fine, because I don’t mind saying that I’m afraid of strange women who turn up all of a sudden in places where they aren’t wanted or expected. I reached over the back of the front seat and shook her a little, but she only turned away on her side and made a little whimpering sound, and drew up her knees like a kid sleeping, clutching them in her arms.

I shook her again, harder, and said, “Come on, come on, you crazy dame, get out of there!” and pretty soon she came wide awake in an instant and sat up with a jerk. She yawned and rubbed her eyes and began to scratch in her short, tousled hair.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“You’re in the back seat of my car, that’s where you are,” Banty said.

“Really? Is that really where I am? Actually in the back seat of your car?”

“That’s what I said,” Banty said, “and what I want to know is how the devil you got there.”

She kept on scratching in her short hair, staring at us with wide eyes, but she didn’t seem to be scared or confused or anything like that. In fact, there was a little smile on her face that gave me a notion she thought it was all pretty funny, a good joke on someone, but I couldn’t see the joke. What I could see, now that she was sitting up looking at us, was that she was too pretty for her own good, and maybe mine and Banty’s, and I wished she would pull down her dress, which was one of these sheaths that keep riding up.

“Well,” she said, “I confess I’m a little vague about it, to tell the truth, but I must have simply come out of the Roman Gardens and crawled into your car and gone to sleep. I can’t think of any other way it could have happened, so that must be the way.”

“What’s the Roman Gardens?” Banty asked. “Is that the place back up the highway with all the hedges and plants and things growing around?”

“That’s it. It’s a nightclub, and I went there with a friend of mine named Tommy. I drank quite a few martinis, and so did Tommy, and he was getting some unacceptable ideas, and matters were complicated by all the martinis I had drunk, which made it impossible for me to be as clever defensively as I usually am. Finally, as I recall, I went to the powder room and then on outside with the intention of getting some air to clear my head. I was feeling dizzy from the martinis, and I thought I’d sit down for a while until I wasn’t dizzy anymore, and the back seat of a car seemed like a good place to sit. I got into one which was handy, and which now turns out to be yours, and it would have been all right, of course, except that I apparently went to sleep, and here I am.”

“Here you are, and there you go,” Banty said. “Get out of here and go back to Tommy.”

“How far have we come?”

“About a hundred miles.”

“In that case, don’t be absurd. A girl can hardly walk a hundred miles anytime at all, let alone on high heels at night by herself on a highway.”

“That’s your problem, sister. I didn’t invite you go crawl in my car and go to sleep.”

“Well, that’s no reason why you can’t be a gentleman about it. What was done is done, however unfortunate, and you will simply have to take me back where you found me.”

“This is where we found you, sister, and this is as far as we take you.”

She was looking at Banty with this queer little smile still on her face, as if she was still convinced that she was a good joke on someone, but I could have told her, knowing Banty, that the joke was on her, and it wasn’t a very good one, either.

“I promise to make it worth your while if you take me back,” she said.

“How much?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“Come off. Where would a tramp like you get a grand?”

“You might be surprised. Take me back, I’ll give it to you.”

“Let me see it.”

“You insist upon being absurd, don’t you? You must not be very intelligent. I don’t have it with me, of course.”

“You don’t have it anywhere. I may not be very intelligent, sister, but I’m intelligent enough to know when a common little tramp is telling a fat lie. Besides, I happen to need about three grand at the moment, and I couldn’t take less for my trouble.”

“All right. Three thousand. It makes no difference to me. It isn’t my money.”

“No? Whose is it?”

“My father’s, of course.”

“Oh, sure. You old man’s a millionaire, that’s what he is.”

“That’s right. He is.”

“What’s his name?”

“His name is Arnold Gotlot, and I’m Felicia Gotlot, and we live at Number One, Gotlot Place. It’s a private street that belongs to my father, and so it’s named after him, and we have the only house on it.” Well, if she was a liar, she was a good one. She said it casually, with the sound of truth, as if it were something she was used to saying, and she couldn’t have picked a better old man if she had tried all night, for Arnold Gotlot was a millionaire, sure enough, and everyone knew that much about him, although not much more than that, for he was a reclusive old devil who didn’t say much and wasn’t seen much and, in fact, made a kind of principle or something out of his privacy.

Banty had begun to pinch the end of his nose now, which might be a good sign or a bad sign, depending on what caused it and what came of it, and he and Felicia Gotlot, if that’s who she was, were still staring at each other and seemed to be taking each other’s measure. I was on Banty’s side in whatever might develop, but I was beginning to have an uneasy feeling that I might not be backing the winner.

“In my opinion,” Banty said, “you’re a liar.”

“In my opinion,” she said, “you’re a fool.”

“Get out,” he said.

“If I do, you’ll be sorry.”

“You’re the one who will be sorry if you don’t,” he said.

“Kidnapping’s a serious offense,” she said. “Isn’t it Federal? Don’t they put you in the gas chamber for it?”

Well, now, just like that! Just like explaining something simple to a kid. I felt as if I’d been hit in the belly with a ball bat. It even shook old Banty up. His mouth popped open, and he stopped pinching the end of his nose, and I could tell that he was trying to keep a clear head in spite of being surprised and confused by what she’d suddenly said.

“What do you mean, kidnapping? Who’s kidnapped anyone?”

“That depends on whether you take me back to Kansas City,” she said. “If you don’t, I’ve been kidnapped, and you’d better believe it.”

“You think you can get away with something like that? You just told us you were loaded on gin and went to sleep in the back seat.”

“That’s what I told you. What I tell my father and the police could be something else entirely.”

“Banty,” I said, “I don’t like it. Let’s take her back and be done with it.”

“Wait a minute. I’m thinking.” Banty was pinching the end of his nose again, staring at Felicia Gotlot with odd intensity, and it was apparent that he was thinking hard and fast about something that just come into his head. “I’m beginning to believe this dame. She is Felicia Gotlot, all right. Look at that dress. It doesn’t look like much, and there isn’t much to it, that’s for sure, but I’ll bet it cost three, four hundred at least, if it cost a penny. Look at that bracelet on her wrist. Those are real diamonds, if I ever saw one. Look at that fur piece. It could be mink, and I’ll bet it is.”

He started out talking quietly enough, but the more he said, taking inventory, the more his voice changed. It didn’t get louder or faster, nothing like that, but a kind of excitement came into it, something you could feel more than hear. After the inventory, he was silent for quite a while, still staring at her, and that sense of excitement was as real then, when he was silent, as it was before, when he was talking. All of a sudden he reached inside his coat with his right hand, and I thought he was reaching for a cigarette, but he wasn’t. He was reaching for a gun, a .38, and he pointed it over the back of the seat at Felicia Gotlot.

“Get up front,” he said. “Never mind getting out. Just crawl over.”

I said, “You lost your marbles, Banty?”

“Don’t ask questions,” Banty said. “She wants a kidnapping, she’ll get one. A real one.” The excitement was so big inside him now that his voice began to shake a little from it, but the gun in his hand was steady. “Don’t you get it, Carny? This is the big break. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This is good luck coming after bad. And it just walked in. Just walked right in and went to sleep. A rich little tramp with a load of gin. It’s like fate or something. A man can’t turn his back on fate, Carny. A man who did that would never have any luck again, never as long as he lived.”

It scared me, honest, hearing him talk like that, almost as if he were in a kind of spell, and he meant it all, every word of it. I knew it, and Felicia Gotlot knew it.

“I don’t want any part of it,” I said.

“It doesn’t make any difference what you want,” he said. “You’ve got part of it whether you want it or not. This is a snatch, as of right now, and you’re in it just as much as I am. You take my advice and play along, Carny, because the stakes are big. Five hundred grand against the chamber. Think of that, Carny. A cool half million. Peanuts to old Gotlot for his precious daughter. Maybe we could make it a million. I’ll think about it.”

There was no use arguing with him, or trying to get him to be reasonable at all in that queer mood he was so suddenly in, and Felicia Gotlot understood this as well as I did, for she simply crawled over the back of the seat with a big display of nylon that I’d have appreciated more some other time. She settled down between me and Banty, and Banty handed me the .38 and said, “If she makes a sound or a move, belt her over the head with it,” and we went on down the highway toward the forty acres of rock that Uncle Oakley had left to Cousin Theodore.

We had the devil of a time finding it in the dark, because it was a long way off the highway on a little gravel road leading into the hills, but we finally found it, after a lot of wrong turns and dead ends, and it was hardly worth finding at all, let alone with so much trouble, for it was nothing but a three-room shack made of rough native lumber that was as gray and weathered against the side of its hill as all the rocks around it. It turned out, though, that there was a good fishing stream on the place, and Cousin Theodore came down here often to fish. As a consequence, the place was stocked with sheets and blankets and cooking utensils and things like that, including a lot of canned goods.

There wasn’t any gas or electricity, only kerosene lamps and a wood stove in the kitchen for cooking, and Banty, who had clearly been here before, found some kerosene and lit some lamps while I watched Felicia Gotlot to keep her from getting away, although I don’t know where she’d have gone in those dark hills so far from anywhere. The truth is, she didn’t seem to have going anywhere in mind at the moment, and I don’t blame her.

One of the three rooms was a bedroom, with nothing in it but a bed and a chest with a mirror over it, and we put Felicia Gotlot in there. There was no way of locking her in, which was a problem, and Banty said we’d have to tie her feet and hands.

“It isn’t necessary to tie me,” she said. “There’s nowhere to go, and I wouldn’t know which direction it was if there were.”

“We’ll tie you anyhow, just to be safe,” Banty said. “It won’t hurt you, and it won’t be for long, because this job is hot, and I intend to work fast with it.”

She kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, and we tore a sheet into strips to tie her with. We tied her hands together and her feet together and tied her at both ends to the head and the foot of the bed. We left enough slack so she could move some and be fairly comfortable, but not enough so she could sit up or reach her feet with her hands by bending. Then Banty went out to the kitchen to build a fire in the stove and make some coffee, but I hung back after he was gone. I don’t know why I did, exactly, except that I was feeling kind of bad about tying her to the bed that way, like an animal or something. To tell the truth, I admired her and respected her and wished we weren’t doing to her what we were. You had to admire and respect her, I mean. She had plenty of moxie, besides being kidnapped and all, without crying or making a big fuss, and she knew it was her fault for talking too much, letting Banty know who she was, after getting loaded on gin and crawling into the car and going to sleep. She took the blame, as I figured it, and was quiet and sensible.

“You want some coffee?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well, good-night, then,” I said.

“Go to hell,” she said.

I went out to the kitchen instead, and Banty and I sat down at a table and had some coffee when it was ready.

“When you’ve had your coffee,” Banty said, “you’d better get some sleep because after I leave in the morning you probably won’t get much.”

“Where you going?”

“To Kansas City to get the money. Half a million. I’ve decided not to press our luck.”

It seemed to me he was already pressing it, but I didn’t say so. “You’d better get some sleep yourself,” I said.

“I’ll catch a few hours after I get back to KC. Then I’ll call old Gotlot and arrange for the payoff.”

“What if he won’t pay?”

“He’ll pay. I’ll tell him we’ll kill his precious daughter if he doesn’t.”

“What if he won’t?”

“Then we’ll kill her.”

“I hope he pays,” I said. I took a drink of coffee and wished it was whiskey. “What then?”

“I’ll drive back here with the money, and we go on south.”

“What do we do with Felicia?”

“We leave her here, tied to the bed. We’ll send a letter to the police after we leave, telling where she is. She’ll get hungry and thirsty waiting, but she won’t be hurt any.”

“Just a minute. We’ll have to wait until we’re a long way south before sending the letter, and the postmark will tell which way we’re heading.”

“There’s the difference between you and me, Carny. You’re stupid, and I’m not. We’ll send the letter from the nearest town. Only we’ll send it to the police in New York or Los Angeles or someplace like that, and they’ll have to call back to KC. It’ll give us plenty of time to get a long way away, and no one but us will know which way it is.”

“I have to hand it to you,” I said. “You’ve been doing a lot of thinking, all right.”

“I’ve always been a thinker,” he said. “I’ve just been waiting for my luck.”

“I don’t like leaving Felicia Gotlot tied to the bed for so long,” I said, “and I admit it.”

“You’ll like the quarter million well enough,” he said.

“When will you be back with it? That pretty green moolah.”

“Forty to fifty hours at the longest. I’ll work fast.”

“It’s a lot of money. I never thought I’d have so much.”

“Get some sleep,” he said.

I tried, but I didn’t do much good at it. I lay down on an old leather sofa in the living room and closed my eyes, but I kept seeing things behind my lids that I didn’t want to see, and I kept thinking about how Banty had never had any luck, and wondering if he could possibly have any this time, when we needed it most, and altogether it must have been a couple of hours before I finally went to sleep, which was almost time for me to wake up again. Banty woke me, and I got up, and he was ready to leave. It wasn’t light outside yet, but you had the feeling that it would be all of a sudden before long.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

“Good luck!”

“Keep an eye on that dame. She’s tricky.”

“You can count on me,” I said.

“I’ve got to,” he said, “and I do.”

He went out, and I could hear the jalopy start up and move off down the gravel road toward the highway, the sound of it growing fainter and fainter until it was gone completely, and then I went into the kitchen and lit a kerosene lamp and made a fire in the wood-burning stove. There was a full pail of spring water that Banty had brought in last night, and I put coffee on to perk and checked the supplies to see what I could find for breakfast. There was no bread or eggs or milk or butter, of course, nothing fresh, but there was a package of ready-mixed pancake flour and some cans of condensed milk. I found a skillet, made some batter with the flour and condensed milk, and fried some pancakes in the skillet that looked as good as you could want, if I do say so myself. By this time the coffee was done, and I went through the living room into the bedroom where Felicia Gotlot was, and she was awake.

“You sleep all right?” I asked.

“Wonderful,” she said. “It’s so comfortable being tied in bed that I’m going to sleep that way all the time from now on.”

“You want some breakfast?”

“If that’s coffee I smell, I’ll have some of that.”

“It’s coffee, all right. If you promise to behave yourself, I’ll untie you and you can come out to the kitchen.”

“My behavior, it seems to me, is pretty well determined. It’s your behavior that concerns me.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t bother you any.”

I untied her, and she swung her legs over the side of the bed, smoothing down the narrow skirt that had slipped up her thighs in the night. After rubbing her wrists for a minute and bending over to rub her ankles afterward, she stood up and went out ahead of me into the kitchen. I poured two cups of coffee and divided the pancakes into two stacks on a pair of tin plates that I found in a cabinet.

“I’d like to wash my face and hands,” she said.

“Go ahead. There’s some water in the pail there.”

“Where did it come from? Is there a well or something?”

“Not a well. A spring. There are springs all through these hills. Springs and caves.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

“I was born down here. Not far from here.”

“Truly? I had the impression you were probably hatched from a billiard ball someplace in KC.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Never mind.”

She washed in the cold water, using a pan beside the pail, and dried herself on a towel hanging from a nail in the wall. Then she combed her short hair with her fingers, lacking anything else to do it with, and we sat down at the table and began to drink coffee and eat pancakes. She ate as if she were hungry, which she probably was, and didn’t complain about not having any butter for her pancakes or sugar and real cream for her coffee, nothing like that. She was altogether a remarkable young dame, I’ve got to admit it, besides being the prettiest one I had ever seen close up in my life, or far away either, for that matter, in spite of being rumpled and tousled with last night still in her face.

She gave me an uneasy feeling, and I didn’t like it. It was the kind of feeling you get over some girl when you’re a kid, before you’re old enough to know better, and it makes you think crazy and act crazy. It’s bad in a kid and worse in a man. I wasn’t acting crazy yet because I hadn’t had time, but I found myself wishing all at once that she was someone besides who she was, Felicia Gotlot, and I was someone besides who I was, a guy called Carny, and that there was a chance of our being something to each other besides what we were and had to be but she wasn’t, and I wasn’t, and there wasn’t. I hoped Banty would hurry back from KC, and meanwhile, I decided, I’d better think less about her and more about the quarter of a million dollars I was going to have all for my own to spend as I pleased.

It had got light outside, and by the time we’d finished our cakes and coffee it was light inside too, light enough to blow out the kerosene lamp, which I did. We washed up the tin plates and the skillet and went into the living room, and it looked like a long day, waiting and waiting for Banty and wondering all the time where he was and what he was doing and how long he would be, and it was made longer and worse by having started so early, and by the problem of what to do with Felicia Gotlot.

I decided not to tie her up again until night, unless she tried something tricky that made it necessary, and I told her this, and she said thanks, she appreciated it. Sarcasm.

“Remember I’ve got this .38 in my pocket,” I said.

“I remember.”

“Don’t think I won’t use it if you make me.”

“Would you?”

She found some old magazines and began to leaf through them, and I smoked and watched her for a while. Then I thought I’d have another cup of coffee, and went after it, and she said she’d have another cup too, and so I brought it. I sat down and began to drink my coffee, and she drank hers, but she kept looking at me over her cup with this odd expression.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

“You,” she said.

“Well, cut it out.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking about what you might have been like as a kid in these hills.”

“I was dirty and ragged and ignorant.”

“You must have had a lot of fun.”

“Sure I did! My old man was a drunken bum and my old lady was a drunken slob.”

“Is that why you left home?”

“Partly.”

“What’s the other part?”

“Just to get away from these rocks and see if I could find a dollar to carry in my pocket.”

“Did you find one?”

“I’ve been doing all right.”

“Now you’re going to do even better, aren’t you? Now you’re going to have a whole quarter of a million dollars to carry in your pocket.”

“That’s right.”

“No, it isn’t. That’s wrong.”

“You think so? Wait and see.”

“Do you really imagine that fellow you called Banty can pull off something like this?”

“Sure. Why not? Banty’s smart.”

“I doubt it. Anyhow, he’s weak. He doesn’t have anything inside. He’s just some curly hair on top of nothing.”

“You don’t know him, that’s all.”

“I don’t have to know him. All I had to do was look at him and hear him talk. You’ll find out. He’ll botch the job and squeal on you, and both of you will end up in prison, and maybe in the gas chamber.”

“Shut up. If you haven’t got anything sensible to say, just keep your mouth shut.”

“Take my advice. Get out while you can. You could get away if you left right now.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“It makes no difference to me, really. I just hate to see you get into any more trouble than you’re already in. That Banty’s bad luck.”

“I should tie you in bed and leave you there.”

“Have it your own way,” she said.

She shrugged and began leafing through another old magazine, and I began to think again about Banty and try to figure when he’d probably be back. He hadn’t told me any schedule, of course, because that was something he’d have to work out in KC after he got there, but I figured he’d probably contact Arnold Gotlot tonight, or maybe even this afternoon, since the job was hot. Besides, he wouldn’t want to prolong his chances of running accidentally into Archie Flowers or one of his boys. He’d tell Arnold Gotlot about having Felicia and wanting the half million to give her back alive, and then he’d probably hang up and let Gotlot think about it for a while. Later on, maybe tonight or early tomorrow, he’d call again from another phone and set the time and place exactly for the payoff. I didn’t know where the place or when the time would be, naturally, but I knew, knowing Banty, that the place would be one he’d choose carefully and the time would be soon, and it was my bet that it would be tomorrow night. That meant Banty would be back early the next morning at the latest, probably between midnight and daylight.

As I expected, it was a long day and a bad one, and I thought it would never pass, but it did. We ate something from cans about noon, and something else from cans before dark, and between the two times, Felicia Gotlot went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed and had a nap. I was tired and sleepy myself, having started the day so early after a hard night, but I didn’t dare go to sleep because of having to watch Felicia Gotlot, to see that she didn’t run away, maybe hitting me over the head or shooting me with my own .38 before running. I made her leave the door to the bedroom open so I could see her lying in there from where I sat, and I played Old Sol ten times with a pack of cards I found, and he beat me every time.

A little while after dark, I was so tired and sleepy I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I told her I was going to bed and she’d have to go too.

“Are you going to tie me in bed already?”

“That’s right.”

“Would you let me sit up by myself if I promise not to do anything you told me not to?”

“No.”

“You aren’t quite as dumb as I thought you were.”

“I’m not dumb enough to think you wouldn’t lie to me if it suited you.”

“I’m quite an accomplished liar. I have a particular talent for it.”

“And that’s the truth,” I said.

I tied her in bed the same way Banty and I had tied her before. She didn’t fight it, or try to talk me out of it anymore, but just lay there quietly looking up at me with that odd little smile on her face.

“Enjoy yourself while you can,” I said.

“You aren’t as dumb as I thought,” she said, “but you’re still pretty dumb.”

“You may change your mind,” I said.

“What makes you so sure Banty’s coming back?”

“He’ll be back.”

“Well,” she said, “half a million is twice as much as a quarter million, and I don’t see what’s to keep him from going north or east or west instead of south.”

Then she closed her eyes, still smiling, and I don’t mind admitting that I couldn’t put what she’d said out of my mind, and I couldn’t sleep because of it, tired as I was and much as I needed to. I got up and began smoking cigarettes, but I had to quit after a while because I only had about half a pack left to last me until Banty came back, if he ever did, and I sat there in the dark for almost ten years trying to convince myself that he surely would. Finally I lay down on the sofa again and shut my eyes, but I kept seeing Banty heading any direction but south, and it was after midnight before I went to sleep and began dreaming about the same thing. It was a dirty trick of Felicia Gotlot’s to put me deliberately in such a frame of mind, and I hoped she was having as much trouble sleeping as I was, but she said the next morning she hadn’t.

I got back at her a little by leaving her tied in bed until the middle of the morning, but then I let her up for coffee, and let her stay up afterward. Things were strained between us, though, and it wasn’t until afternoon, after we’d had something to eat out of cans, that she finally said any more to me than was strictly demanded by necessity. Then she said she was sick of staying inside all the time and would like to take a walk.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Oh, come on. We could just walk up the hill to the crest and back. What harm could it do?”

“Well, none, I guess.”

The truth was, I wanted to get out of the house myself, and I was glad to go. We walked on up the hill at an angle to the crest, and it was something to see how well she managed to walk among the rocks in her high heels and tight skirt, and she was, as I’ve said, pretty remarkable at more things than you’d think. There was a fallen tree near the crest, and we sat down to rest on the trunk of the tree. It was mighty nice up there, if you care for rocks and scrub timber, and I could see, glittering in the sunlight at the foot of the hill below the house, the good fishing stream that Cousin Theodore came here to fish in.

“I’ve made up my mind to tell you something,” Felicia Gotlot said.

“Don’t bother,” I said.

“I’ve made up my mind to tell you the truth, and you’d better listen.”

“I’ll bet it’s the truth!”

“You know why I’ve made up my mind to tell you? Because you’re not a really bad fellow, only dumb. It’s that bad Banty who makes you do things that get you into trouble, but Banty won’t do it anymore, because Banty won’t be back.”

“There you go again, and you may as well quit.”

“I don’t mean because he’ll run away. I just said that to bother you and make you realize how dumb it is to trust someone like that Banty. I mean because the police will get him.”

“Not Banty.”

“Yes, they will, and I’ll tell you why. Do you want me to tell you?”

“Suit yourself.”

“The police will get him because when he goes for the payoff, whenever and wherever it is, Arnold Gotlot will have enough men there to fight a small war.”

“No, he won’t. Not after Banty tells him what will happen to his precious daughter if he tries any tricks.”

“That’s what I’ve been getting around to telling you. Nothing is going to happen to Arnold Gotlot’s daughter, and Arnold Gotlot knows it, because his daughter is at home this minute with a broken leg, where she has been for nearly a week.”

“What the hell you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Felicia Gotlot’s leg, which is broken. She fell off a horse.”

“Oh, sure. And I suppose you’re Felicia Gotlot’s grandmother or someone like that. Is that it?”

“No one like that at all. My name is Amanda Swanson, and I’m a maid in the Gotlot home. Felicia likes me and humors me, and when I go out at night she lets me wear her clothes and jewelry. When that Banty was so nasty last night, refusing to take me back to Kansas City and all, I lied about being Felicia because I thought it would impress him and make him take me. Then when he got the idea to kidnap me, it was too late to tell the truth, because he wouldn’t have believed me. Besides, I didn’t like him, and wanted to get him into trouble, which I have, and he deserves every bit of it.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re always telling lies, you said so yourself, and you’re lying now.”

“I admit I’m a good liar, and I lie when it pleases me, but now it pleases me to tell the truth, and you’d better believe me. I know old Arnold Gotlot like the palm of my hand, and I know how he hates con men and blackmailers and crooks of all sorts. The minute Banty contacts him, he’ll start laying the trap to catch him. He won’t let on or say a word about Felicia’s being at home, because that would scare Banty off. What he’ll do, he’ll play along and agree to everything, setting the trap all the while, and then, probably tonight, it’ll be the end of Banty, and if you don’t get out of here right away, it’ll be the end of you too.”

I’ll say that I was excited, and I almost lost my head. All I wanted to do, all at once, was to start running and keep on running, without ever looking back, until I couldn’t run any farther, and I wished I’d never seen or heard of Felicia Gotlot, or Amanda Swanson, whichever she was, or of Banty either. I was sort of crazy for a minute, that’s what I was, and I did actually jump up and take a couple of steps downhill, almost on my way, when I suddenly stopped and thought better of it.

“Hold on,” I said. “How do I know you weren’t telling the truth before, and telling lies now?”

“So far as that goes,” she said, “you don’t.”

“You’re Felicia Gotlot, all right. You’re just trying to get me to run away so you can walk somewhere and call Kansas City and get Bandy caught.”

“Your concern for Banty is touching. Too bad he wouldn’t feel the same about you. However, you could prevent my going anywhere by tying me in bed again. It wouldn’t matter much to me. The police will be here sometime tonight in my opinion.”

“Banty will be here, that’s who. He’ll be here with half a million dollars, and I’ll be right here to get my share of it. Nothing doing, sister. You’d just as well quit lying, because it won’t do you any good.”

“I was wrong,” she said. “You’re just as dumb as I thought you were at first. You’re simply too dumb to take proper care of yourself.”

“You’d better quit calling me names too. I’m getting tired of it. Come on. Let’s get back down to the house.”

She walked down ahead of me, without saying another word. In the house, she went directly to the bedroom and stayed in there all the rest of the afternoon, until it was time to open some more cans, and afterward she went back and stayed in there alone all evening until I decided it was time to tie her in bed again in case I fell asleep, although I was getting more and more nervous as it got later and later, and didn’t feel like sleeping in spite of being as tired as I can remember ever being.

“So you’re really going to wait for Banty,” she said.

“That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Pleasant waiting,” she said. “Wake me up when the police come.”

“That will be a couple days after Banty and I are gone,” I said. “I hope you don’t get too lonesome in the meanwhile.”

“It will be an interesting speculation for you,” she said. “Maybe it will help to pass the night faster. It ought to be quite exciting as time grows shorter and shorter. Will it be Banty or the police? The police or Banty? A simple thing like that can get into your head and drive you crazy if you don’t get it out soon enough.”

You can see that she’d done it again. Just like she’d done it last night about Banty running off with the money. She’d put it in my head, and I couldn’t get it out. It stayed right there and kept repeating itself over and over again, first one way and then the other, Banty or the police, the police or Banty, and to make matters worse I ran out of cigarettes. I gathered up all the butts I’d left in saucers around the place, and I smoked these, a few drags off each one, but pretty soon they were all gone too, and it was only about ten o’clock with a long, long time still to wait.

I didn’t know exactly how long, of course, and I began trying to guess, and I guessed four hours. There wasn’t any reason for guessing four instead of three or five, but it somehow made me feel better and surer to have a certain time to look forward to. I guessed that Banty would make the contact for the payoff at eleven sharp, which would leave him three hours to get back down here if he hurried, which he sure as hell would, and after eleven I began to try to follow him along the highway in the jalopy, placing him at certain places at certain times. As it turned out I wasn’t far wrong, for he was only about fifty miles away in my head when someone suddenly kicked the front door open, and five cops jumped into the room with their guns out, and every cop was nine feet tall.

Well, that’s the way it ended, and it’s over, and I’m almost glad. As you can see, Banty was bright but had no luck, and I had no luck and was stupid besides.

Not that Felicia Gotlot, though. She was bright and lucky both, besides being the best liar I ever met. It was simply impossible to know when to believe her, because she told the truth like a lie and a lie like the truth. I don’t hold anything against her, though. I liked her, and still do, and I remember that she tried her best to get me out of it before it was too late, which it now is. The prettiest and altogether the most remarkable woman I’ve ever known was Felicia Gotlot — Amanda Swanson, I mean.