The Girl with the Long Green Heart

Seventeen

Doug had a few things to do. He had to clear out his apartment, and he had to turn the Barnstable offices into a ghost town. We were on too many official records and we had scattered too much correspondence to strike our sets completely, but Doug could wipe out some of the more obvious traces. This is easy when you have all the time in the world. We had to move fast, and we had to do what we could.

But that was a minor headache. The important thing was something else again. We had two definite facts to contend with — there was a dead man in a closet in the Royal York, and there was a man named Wallace J. Gunderman who had disappeared. If anybody matched the name and the body, then we were in trouble. The longer it took them to put the two together, the better off we were. We had given the body a name and a logical way of dying. Now we had to take the Gunderman identity and find a way to let it trail off and dissolve like smoke.

He had return reservations to Olean for the late afternoon. I called the airport and changed his reservations, asking them for the first plane to Chicago. They had a flight at three-fifteen. I booked a seat on the plane in Gunderman’s name.

Doug was waiting for me at the office. He had called Helen Wyatt to tell her that things had gone sour, and that she should let the other hired hands know as much. They didn’t stand any chance of getting involved — Gunderman alone had seen them, and he wasn’t going to tell anyone — and by the same token they weren’t likely to involve us. It was a courtesy call. When the ship sinks, a good captain at least lets the crew know about it.

“I’m packed and ready,” he said. “Got any cash?”

“A couple of hundred. You?”

“A little more. And there’s a little over twelve thou in the bank, the Barnstable account. If we can get it.”

“No problem there. A day or two from now it might be tight, but nobody’s going to put a freeze on our account for the time being.”

He whistled soundlessly. “We can’t get rich this way. Anyway, it’s a stake. I’m out a few thou but not as much as I expected.”

“You’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

“Terry Moscato.”

His face fell. “That’s ten grand.”

“Plus interest. Eleven thousand. That leaves us with cab-fare.”

“We can’t pay him.”

“We damn well have to. You don’t cross the man who bankrolls you. That’s one thing you don’t do. You can lie to your partner—”

“I’m not the only one, Johnny.”

“All right. Put a lid on it. You don’t stiff Moscato, not because it’s a case of honor among thieves but because you’d wind up dead. I mean it. He’s the easiest man to work with as long as you’re good, but if you play him bad you’ve had it. He is hard.”

“Eleven thousand dollars.”

“We’ve got twelve or so in the bank. And I’m holding Gunderman’s check for forty more.”

He’d forgotten about it. This was easy to do. We’d been crossed and skinned and sliced up for bait, and it was hard to regard that cashier’s check as anything more than a prop she’d left for the police to play with. Besides, it was a dead man’s check. A dead man’s check is not negotiable. It’s evidence of a receivable asset, and you can hold it as a claim against the estate of the deceased, but you cannot scrawl your name across the back of it and pass it to a friendly neighborhood teller. It’s locked up tight. Our check was signed by Gunderman, and he was as dead as you can get.

“But nobody knows this,” I said. “It’s going to be a long time before they know he’s dead. We can get rid of the paper long before then.”

“Discount it and sell it?”

“I think it’s easier to cash it. Just shove it the hell through the Barnstable account.”

“And when that check works its way back to his bank?”

“That’s days from now. And who’s going to look at it, anyway?” I crushed a cigarette in the ashtray. “There’s a big unknown here. I’m not sure how she’s going to play it. Right now she’s sure we’re going to get picked up for this one by nightfall. She left a deep wide trail and it leads straight to us and she’ll be expecting a call sometime this evening telling her that her husband is dead.”

“That’s the part I can’t believe.”

“That he married her?”

“Yeah.”

I made him believe it. Then I carried it further. She’d be waiting for that call, and by early evening she’d be starting to sweat. Cool or not, the act of killing was going to get to her sooner or later. And when she had time to think about it, she couldn’t miss seeing that it would be tough for her to keep her fingers clean once they picked us up and we talked.

Because we would have to talk, and we would have to sing out her name loud and clear. We might not be able to prove it. If we did, we were still up to our ears in it; as parties to the con game felony we were legally parties to the murder, like it or not. So we were in trouble, but she was going to have some of it rub off on her. She might not do a bit for murder, might not serve any time at all, but she would have it much easier if we escaped free and clear, and she couldn’t help figuring that out in time.

All of this left her a handy out. She could sit on her hands for a while, saying that Gunderman had gone off on a business trip and she didn’t know when he would be back. Finally she could report him missing, but by this time she could have all the Barnstable correspondence cleared from his files. If our cashier’s check cleared his bank, she could head it off and get rid of it.

They might make the murder connection after a while, but we’d be light years away by then and she wouldn’t steer them toward us. They might not pin the Gunderman label on the Royal York corpse at all. We were trailing Gunderman to Chicago and losing him there. And good hotels don’t publicize men who get murdered on the premises. It’s bad for business. The Royal York would keep the newspaper publicity to a minimum on their dead man. Gunderman might wind up permanently missing. Evvie would have enough control of his money to live it up for the seven years it would take to declare him legally dead. Then she could take the whole bundle.

She might not like it that way, but she could drift into the pattern very easily. As the wife of a missing man, she could live as lush a life as ever. She didn’t have to stay in Olean. And once the seven years played themselves out she was home free.

The bitch didn’t have it so bad. She’d spend seven years waiting for an Enoch Arden decree, and they’d go a lot faster and pass a lot more pleasantly than the seven years I had done in Q. When they ran out, she’d pick up the pot of gold. All I’d landed was a brass check and a night-man slot at a bowling alley.

When I ran out of words we stood there smoking and listening to the silence. He broke it first. “We can come out clean,” he said, and his voice turned it into a prayer.

“Maybe. And probably not. If I had to lay odds I’d guess that they’ll tag us for murder inside of a month and spend three months trying to find us before they write us off. Our prints are on file, but that doesn’t matter if we never get mugged and printed. We’ll be across a national border. We’ll have different names and different haircuts. I think we ought to make it, but we won’t come up smelling of roses.”

He thought it over. I thought about that warm woman and how well I’d been had. I had never felt so much like a mooch. The depths of her eyes, the little sounds of liquid desperation she made in bed. It was hard to believe that all of these things could have been counterfeit.

Forget it. It was every mark’s story, in technicolor on a wide wide screen with a cast of thousands. He was such a nice man, Mommy. I can’t believe such a nice man would steal my candy. He seemed so sincere, Mommy—

Forget it.

I went to our bank and deposited Gunderman’s check to our account. I let the same teller handle a withdrawal for me, and I took an even twenty thousand dollars in cash. This didn’t throw her. The cashier’s check was as good as gold, and I could have tried to get the full amount in cash if I had wanted to. I didn’t. I took the twenty thou from the one girl, and I had another girl certify a check for thirty-one thousand dollars payable to P. T. Parker in U.S. funds. I went to my other bank where I had the Parker account, deposited this check and bought five bank drafts payable to cash for varying amounts ranging from five to ten thousand dollars each.

In a third bank, I used the Canadian cash to buy a few more bank drafts and a handful of traveler’s cheques. I held out eleven thousand in U.S. dollars. In the main post office, I packed away the bank drafts in individual envelopes and mailed them off. I shipped a few of them to Robert W. Pattison at the Hotel Mark Twain in Omaha. I scattered the rest around the Midwest, mostly in Kansas and Iowa, sending them to various names at various general delivery offices. I mailed a little less than half of them from the Toronto Post Office and kept the rest aside.

There was just enough time for a telephone call before my plane was ready to go. It took a few tries to reach Terry Moscato. I finally got him.

I said, “I think you know me. Can you talk now?”

“I know you, and I can talk, but no names or details. Go ahead.”

“It’s done. It went to hell, but it’s done. I have the goods you want and I’d like to deliver.”

“I’d be glad to have you make delivery. Are you sure you’ve got the right size?”

“Size eleven,” I said.

“That’s fine. Can you come to town for delivery?”

“Not very easily.”

“If I arranged a pick-up,” he said carefully, “there would be an additional handling charge.”

I didn’t want him to send a boy, handling charge or no. “I was thinking about the mails,” I said.

“I don’t like that.”

“Not from this port. A standard interstate shipment, registered and insured.”

The line was silent while he thought this over. There is nothing safer than registered and insured mail. But he still didn’t like it.

“Railway Express,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“Definitely. The same drop.” And he rang off. I wondered what he had against the mails.

They were already calling my flight when I remembered two things. The gun and the money. I had the murder gun and a pair of bloody pajamas in my suitcase, and I had eleven thousand dollars of Moscato’s money keeping them company.

On an ordinary flight this wouldn’t have mattered. It’s against some silly law to carry a gun on a plane, but no one normally paws through your baggage or frisks you as you enter the plane. This was not an entirely normal flight. This was a flight from one country to another, and that meant going through Customs.

You lose sight of this when the two countries are the States and Canada. Customs inspections are cursory at best — every fifth car going over a bridge, a quick peek in suitcases on a plane ride. If your contraband is something as innocuous as a fifth of undeclared Scotch, you don’t break out in a rash worrying about getting tagged. When you’re packing eleven thousand dollars that you can’t explain along with a gun that’s just been used in a murder, it gets a little sticky.

There was no place to stash the gun, no handy way to conceal the dough. I ducked into the men’s room and got the suitcase open. I ripped the pajamas apart, flushed the singed and bloody pieces down the toilet along with the Olean label and tucked the rest in the trashcan. I parceled up the stack of hundred-dollar bills. There were a hundred and ten of them, and by balancing them off in various pockets and lodging a healthy sheaf of them in my wallet, I managed to spread them over my person without bulging anywhere.

That left the gun. And I didn’t dare dump it anywhere in Canada, because a ballistics check would tie it to the dead man in the closet, and this would not be good at all. I couldn’t know where she bought the gun. It might have come out of Olean originally, and that was the sort of link I did not want to supply. Ideally the gun would be broken down and spread out over a score of sewer systems. In a pinch it would be wiped free of prints inside and out and dropped into a river a thousand miles away from Toronto. But it couldn’t stay in the city, and it couldn’t ride on my person, and it could not nestle in my suitcase.

They called the flight again. I couldn’t miss it or they would start paging Wallace J. Gunderman over the P.A. system. This was not precisely what I had in mind. The Customs inspection wouldn’t come now, at least. It would come when we got to O’Hare. I could sneak the gun onto the plane. But I couldn’t take it off or leave it behind.

Beautiful. I wedged it into a pocket. It looked as inconspicuous as an albino in Harlem. I grabbed my suitcase and ran for the plane.

The plane was mostly full. I had an aisle seat just forward of the wing. My seat partner was a youngish woman with a sharp nose and acne scars. She read a Canadian magazine and ignored me entirely. I fastened my belt and put out my cigarette and told the stewardess that I did not want a magazine, and we left the ground and aimed at Chicago.

The .38 was burning a hole in my pocket. There were any number of ways to get rid of it and none of them looked especially attractive. I could stow it under a seat, set it on top of the luggage rack, even make a stab at dumping it into somebody’s suitcase. Whatever I did, it was an odds-on bet that the gun would turn up within an hour after landing, and probably before then. I took a hike to the john, and that was no help at all. Just the bare essentials. No handy hiding place for a hunk of steel that was hotter than... well, hotter than a pistol.

I tried to think it through and couldn’t get anywhere. I kept coming back to the job itself, how smoothly it had gone, how thoroughly it had gone to hell for itself. I was a long time hating a girl named Evelyn Stone. I thought about a hundred different ways to make her dead and couldn’t find one mean enough for her. She had conned me as utterly as a man can be conned. She had not merely made me trust her. She had made me love her, and then she stuck it in and broke it off deep.

A funny thing. I wanted badly to hate her, but I kept losing my grip and easing up on all of that hate. I couldn’t hold onto it. She had not betrayed any love because she had faked and manipulated that crock of love from the beginning. Ever since she first latched onto Doug in Vegas, long before she ever set eyes on me, I was her pigeon. She never owed me a thing. If I had seen her within the first couple of hours after we found Gunderman’s body, I probably would have killed her. The rage was fresh then. Time took the edge off it in a hurry. I couldn’t even summon up any really strong craving for revenge. I might never be a charter member of her fan club, but the real gut-bucket hate was gone.

Evelyn Stone had played our little game according to the rules; it was only sad that she and I had been on opposite sides, and that I had not known this. But there was one person who had broken the rules. Right at the start he forgot the one cardinal injunction. Never, under any circumstances, do you play fast and loose with your partner.

Doug crossed me from the opening whistle. He must have known all along that I had a weakness for women, an irritating habit of going overboard for them. So he didn’t bother telling me that he’d pushed Evvie over on her round little heels. That set everything in motion. Once he established the pattern, she played us off so neatly that we never felt the strings. He had not meant to mess me up. It was just the way he chose to run his show. It had to be his show all the way — his ego wouldn’t let go of it — and that made him improvise, keeping part of the picture hidden, keeping me just far enough in the dark so that things had a chance to go to hell for themselves.

You don’t do that to your partner. That’s the one thing you don’t do, and he’d done it and set Evvie up so that I wound up doing the same thing. And if I didn’t hate her any more, that didn’t mean I was in love with the whole world and at peace with mankind. Not at all.

The sharp-nosed girl beside me stirred in her seat. Down the aisle, the stewardess began serving the meal, the usual airline fare, as sterile and tasteless as the stewardess herself. I broke off my woolgathering and thought about the gun.

There’s always a way. I let the girl serve me my dinner. I ate about half of it and drank a cup of lukewarm coffee. When she took my tray away, my knife wasn’t on it. It was on my lap.

I reached down between my knees and worked on the front edge of my seat with the knife. It was a steak knife, sharp enough on the edge of the blade but not too keen at the tip, and this made it slow going. Once I broke through the vinyl it got easier. I had to keep stopping; the stewardess was walking back and forth, as busy as a speakeasy on Election Day, and my seatmate had turned restless and was given to looking my way. But before too long I had a good hiding place arranged, with the slit just wide enough to admit the gun but small enough to retain it and to pass unnoticed for a good long time.

I couldn’t think of a clever way to pull the gun out of my hip pocket without attracting attention. Finally I went to the john again and came out with the gun wrapped in a paper towel. I sat down again, and when the opportunity came I slipped the gun out of its paper envelope and wedged it into the seat. Someday someone would find it there and wonder how in hell it got there. But they would have no idea what passenger on what flight put it there, and by then it wouldn’t matter anymore.

We landed five minutes ahead of schedule at O’Hare. The Customs man asked me if I had anything to declare, and I said I hadn’t. He asked me how long I had been in Canada. I told him something. He opened my suitcase but didn’t do more than glance in it before passing me on. I could have had three pounds of heroin and an M-l rifle in there and he never would have noticed it.

I stayed at the terminal long enough to practice Gunderman’s signature, copying it from his driver’s license and a few other cards in his wallet. I’m fair but not perfect with a pen. I would never fool an expert, but I might not have to. I would sign his name once, on the hotel registration card, and that would be all. If I could come fairly close, that would probably be good enough.

I cabbed to the Palmer House. They had a single available and I took it. I signed in, did a fair job with the signature, and went to my room. I had a couple of things to do in Chicago and more than enough time to do them.

I packed eleven thousand dollars in a cigar box and packaged it with tender loving care. At the Railway Express office, I shipped it to Terry Moscato’s address and insured it, appropriately enough, for eleven thousand dollars. I told the clerk the parcel contained jewelry. He could not have cared less.

On the way back I called the Palmer House and asked for myself. They rang my room and told me that I wasn’t there. I thanked them. I went to the hotel and the clerk told me there had been a call for me, and gave me the message I had left. I thanked him and went to the room to pick up the envelopes from the suitcase, a handful of bank drafts to be mailed to different places. I bought stamps from a machine in the lobby and mailed them. I went to a movie house on South Dearborn and sat through most of a double feature. I had dinner across the street from the theater and decided to use Gunderman’s credit card and sign his name a second time. I did an even better job with the signature this time around.

The rest was just putting in time. I hit a couple of bars and sorted things out in my mind. By now Doug was probably in Omaha, waiting for me. I’d get there in time to help him pick up the bank drafts that I was scattering all over the Midwest. I tried to figure out just how much cash I was going to realize on the deal. We’d wind up holding something like forty thou, give or take a little, and Doug would draw ten off the top, the original working capital that he’d contributed. The rest would get cut up straight down the middle. No matter how you counted, that made my end in the neighborhood of fifteen grand.

I had another beer and thought about it. It wasn’t all that bad. Getting anything at all was a fluke — hell, beating the murder rap was a fluke, as far as that went.

Fifteen thousand dollars. It was possible. Bannion could give a certain amount of ground; if I played him right, I could get his place for less than I’d figured, and if I couldn’t find the right pitch to hand that old lush I might as well call it a day. If I arranged the right sort of financing and played it close to the vest for the first two or three years, I just might manage to handle the deal after all. It would be close, but it might work.

Ideally, I should have more money to play with. But dreams rarely come true, and never materialize without losing a certain amount of their glow. The original dream sparkled like diamonds — plenty of money and a girl to make it all worthwhile. If I could just squeeze by I was still coming out with a rosy smell.

I called the hotel again and found another bar to play in. It turned out to be a long night. Somewhere toward the tail end of it I spent enough time in a joint on North Clark to pick up a semi-pro hooker with oversized breasts and too much makeup. We went to her place and made a brave try, but I couldn’t do anything. This didn’t come as much of a surprise. I may have stopped hating Evvie, but I hadn’t yet lost the taste of her. That would take a while.