$20 Lust

6

She wasn’t just surprised to see me. She was totally astounded. Her eyes went round as saucers, then darted from me to the satchel and back and forth. They had love in them, but I wasn’t sure whether the love was for me or for the money.

I didn’t care.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You did it. You actually did it!”

I tossed her the satchel. She unzipped the zipper and upended the bag over the bed. Money spilled out of it, neat stacks of twenty dollar notes with cute little rubber bands around them.

“Look at it,” she said reverently. “Fifty thousand dollars. Did you ever see that much money before?”

Once, when I was a little kid about to graduate from grammar school, they took the lot of us to Washington to look around and admire the miracle of democratic government. The package deal included a visit to the bureau of engraving and printing, and in the course of a half hour I saw well over a million dollars. But I didn’t have the heart to tell her about it.

Besides, this was different. The dough at the bureau was not my money. This was.

“Tell me how you did it,” she said. “Oh, I knew I was doing the right thing when I told you about it. You saved everything, Ted. Tell me how you did it. Tell me everything.”

I told her everything, omitting only the occasional temptations to forget the whole thing that had crossed my mind in weak moments. Her eyes shone all the way through and there was a special gleam in them when I told how I’d made a mess out of the monkey’s face. The recounting of the fight, one-sided as it was, seemed to give her a special charge.

When I had brought the yarn up to date I relaxed and took her in my arms. But she didn’t relax. I could sense the wheels going around inside that pretty head. And I wondered if her mind ever slept.

“Bunkie Craig,” she said.

I looked at her, questioningly.

“The one you pushed around. That’s who it must have been. The others wouldn’t carry a gun, but he’d be naked without one. And the description fits. It must have been him.”

Naturally the name meant nothing, but it was comforting to know that the gorilla wasn’t some innocent bystander. I nodded.

“You should have killed him.”

My eyebrows went up. “What’s the matter? Did you hate him that much?”

“I hated him, but that’s neither here nor there. You should have killed him.”

“Why?”

“He saw you,” she explained patiently. “Before they didn’t know who you were, didn’t realize there was anybody helping me. Now they know. If you had killed him he wouldn’t be able to finger you.”

“Dead men tell no tales?”

“Something like that.”

I shrugged it off. “He won’t tell any tales for a while, Cindy. He’ll be in the hospital first.”

“But not forever. Maybe it won’t make a difference, but I wish you’d finished him permanently. I hate to take chances.”

I tried to shrug it off again but I didn’t quite make it. I was getting a new picture of her now, a picture with a lot less of the softness and gentleness; a picture of a woman who could be as cold and calculating as an adding machine. I suppose it should have scared me. Somehow it didn’t.

“We’ll get a good night’s sleep now,” I said optimistically. It was after four and there didn’t seem to be too much chance of our getting a night’s sleep. A morning’s sleep, perhaps. But there wasn’t much left of the night.

“Then we catch a plane in the morning to Phoenix. I’ll buy a car there and we’ll head for a small town, pick up a copy of Editor & Publisher and look at the newspaper listings. From there on it’s a cinch.”

“My clothes are in my room.”

“You’ll buy new ones in Phoenix.”

“I can’t go on the plane like this.”

“Neither can I,” I said. “I need a jacket and a tie at the very least. And you need something a little more formal than dungarees and a shirt of mine. But for fifty grand I can stand a few hours of mild embarrassment. So can you.”

She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Of course I can. I wasn’t thinking.”

“We’ll take a hack to Idlewild,” I went on. “We’ll check first on the phone, catch the time so that we don’t have to sit around the waiting room. We might be spotted. It’s not worth the chance.”

“Right.”

“Once we’re in Phoenix we’ll be clear. As long as we’re in New York we’ve got to be on guard. I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

She nodded, agreeing.

There wasn’t anything more to say. I reached for her and hauled her down on the bed, pulling her close to me. Her body was warm and her eyes very beautiful. She looked very tired but I didn’t let that stop me.

I was tired myself. The fun and games with Bunkie Craig had hardly been designed to relax a person. On top of that I’d had more in the way of horizontal harmony in the past twenty-four hours than most men have in a month.

Still, I needed her. I was tense and my nerves were strung tight and fine as piano wire. I had to relax and I needed the relaxation she could bring me.

I unbuttoned her shirt. I played with her breasts until her nipples saluted me.

I took off her pants.

I found other things to do with her.

“Ted—”

“I was a good boy, Cindy. I beat up the bad guy and got the money and brought it straight to you. Wasn’t I a good boy?”

“You were a very good boy.”

“And a good boy deserves a reward, doesn’t he?”

“Of course.”

“Do I get my reward, Cindy?”

I got my reward.

Her hips heaved me to heaven and her mouth drained my mouth and her breasts were softer than snow. She made everything worthwhile — the risks, the flight, the whole thing. I had earned my half of the fifty grand when I got the satchel from her apartment. Now she was earning her half flat on her back in a big double bed in room 53 of the Sheraton-McAlpin, earning it very well.

It began, it endured, it ended.

I slept.

She woke up before I did. I felt her lips on mine and I opened my eyes. I reached for her and she jumped away, a pixyish smile on her face.

She looked good in the morning.

“Rise and shine,” she said. “We’ve got a plane to catch.” I tried to put my eyes into focus. It didn’t work. I sat up in bed and stared at the wall.

“What time is it? I better get dressed and call the airport.”

“I called them already.”

“From here?”

She nodded and I swore under my breath. “You should have called from a payphone,” I said. “They can trace it this way. If the switchboard operator is in on it—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You know what the odds against that are?”

I knew. I still didn’t like it.

“When does the plane leave?”

“Three-thirty.”

I calculated rapidly. “Call Room Service,” I said. “Have them send up some ham and eggs and a pot of coffee. Then we’ll sit around here until a quarter past two. That way we’ll get to Idlewild just in time.”

“I already did,” she said. “I hope you like your eggs scrambled.”

The food came and we ate it, then sat around until it was time to go. I settled with the hotel, grabbed a cab for the airport. It was silly, but I was tense as a wire on the way. The weather was good and the ride was pleasant but I couldn’t relax.

“Did you reserve tickets for us?”

She nodded.

“What name?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Stone. Same name as we used at the hotel.”

I got mad at her. “That was pretty stupid. If they trace us to the hotel they’ll be able to trace us to Phoenix. That wasn’t too bright, Cindy.”

“I had to. The call went through the switchboard. I couldn’t use another name.”

“That’s why you should have called from a payphone, dammit. Jesus, of all the brilliant moves—”

She looked sick to her stomach and I forced myself to relax. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It probably won’t make any difference. They’ll never even trace us to the hotel.”

I tried to sound sure of myself. If I did I was a good actor.

Because I was scared.

I picked up the tickets at the TWA desk and paid for them with some of McGuire’s twenties, hoping the serial numbers hadn’t been recorded anywhere. It didn’t seem likely but it gave me something else to worry about. Not that I needed it. There was plenty to worry about as it was.

We waited by the flight gate for the plane to open up for us and I felt about as conspicuous as a whore in church. We weren’t exactly dressed for the flight. She was attired cleverly in dungarees and one of my shirts and I didn’t look a hell of a lot better. I had on a pair of khakis and a dirty white shirt without a tie. I needed a shave pretty badly — a few more days without one and we could head for Frisco, get a loft on North Beach and pose as beatniks.

And the satchel was much too heavy. I had the eerie feeling that anyone looking at it could tell at a glance that it was loaded with money that didn’t belong to us. I wanted to put it in my pocket or something. It really worried me.

They called our flight and we were the first passengers on it. We found seats up front and I let her have the one by the window. I set the satchel in my lap and tried to cover it up with my hands. It didn’t work.

The plane filled up. The stewardess welcomed us aboard and said some other silly things, we put out our cigarettes and fastened our safety belts, the flight took off. It was a smooth takeoff and smooth flying all the way. The ham and eggs stayed in my stomach.

The three of us landed at Phoenix — me, Cindy and the fifty grand. The three of us got out of the plane and into a cab. Cindy and I looked like wilted flowers. The money was fresh as a field of daisies.

I checked us in at the De Milo Arms, a slightly better-than-average hotel off Schwerner Square in the middle of downtown Phoenix. Now we were Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Harris. The Ronald Stones had disappeared for good.

The bellboy tried to take the satchel from me but I didn’t let him. He led us to our room and I tipped him and he disappeared. When he was gone I locked the door and put the chain on. I pulled down the window shade, then sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the satchel.

The money, miraculously, was still there.

“Look at it,” she said. “Just look at it.”

She scared me. She sounded like a knight gazing upon the Holy Grail. I wondered just how much she would do for fifty thousand dollars, just how much she had already done. There was something phony about her story of the con game operation, something that didn’t quite ring true. I’d been thinking about it on the plane ride but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was fairly certain she’d lied somehow about her own part in the proceedings but I wasn’t sure how or why.

And I didn’t want to think about it.

What did it matter? We were free, clear, safe. We were in Phoenix and no one knew it. We had fifty thousand dollars and the world belonged to us.

She echoed my thoughts. “We’re safe, Ted. We’re out of New York and no one knows it. We’re safe.”

I was too exhausted emotionally to say a damn thing.

She stood up. “I’m taking some money and going shopping,” she said. “You stay here until I come back. Then you can go out and see about a car, pick up some clothes for yourself, things like that. Okay?”

It was okay with me.

I waited until she was out of the building. I watched through the window and saw her head down the street toward the section where the stores seemed to be.

It was only four-thirty. We’d gotten a break — the time in the plane had been largely offset by the time belts we had crossed on the way. There was still time for her to get some shopping done, maybe even time for me to see about a car after she got back.

Meanwhile I had things to do.

I picked up the phone, called Room Service. I told them to send up a fifth of Jack Daniels and some ice. I signed for the tab, slipped the bellboy a buck and smiled while he thanked me.

The Jack Daniels was silky smooth and I needed it desperately. I made myself a tall cool one and relaxed in an easy chair with it, sipping it slowly and tasting it all the way down.

I had a lot of thinking to do.

With the liquor clearing my head and with Cindy’s pleasantly disturbing body out of my way I could concentrate on all the things that were hard to concentrate upon otherwise. The con game was too elaborate to be a lie and her story was a little too rough to be entirely true. I could have ignored it all but something made me go back to it, run it through my mind for a quick check. I knew a little about the standard bunco routines from my police beat days, and I couldn’t quite see how an innocent doll like Cindy could have come home with fifty thousand dollars that belonged by all rules to the smoothies who’d conned it out of McGuire in the first place. Con men don’t work that way. True, there’s a maxim that every con man is by definition a sucker. The big boys in the business don’t hold onto much of the money they pick from the marks. But there are several ways of being a sucker, and the idea of Cindy Sims walking off with their take struck me as a little on the silly side.

I told myself to relax and forget it. Suppose she was lying. What earthly difference did it make? I had the money and the girl and that ought to be enough. The money made it fun to be awake and the girl made it fun to go to sleep. To hell with reality.

But something nagged at me. Maybe it was the combination of the liquor that cleared my head and the fact that she wasn’t there to muddle me up again. I don’t think I could have looked at her and thought about how she must be lying to me. But with her out of the room it was easy.

Did it make a difference? If we split up now it didn’t. If I took my twenty-five thou and she took hers it didn’t matter at all. I’m not the type to get conscience traumas. For twenty-five grand I can forget a hell of a lot of things, such as the moral aspects of almost anything.

But we weren’t going to split, and with the two of us together as man and wife, her role in the episode became very relevant. I knew next to nothing about her, just the superficial trivia that she had seen fit to tell me. The dream I’d been dreaming called for full knowledge of her, full knowledge and full understanding and full love. And my knowledge of her was far from full.

I sipped my drink and thought about her. There were so many points to her story that didn’t ring true. According to her, Cinderella Sims was her real name, wished on her by highly imaginative parents. But she had picked another name to work under in Tahoe, Lucille Kraft or something like that.

This made no sense at all. If her name had been, say, Hepzibah Klunk, I could see why she would change it on the job. But why alter something simple like Cindy Sims, something a hell of a lot more euphonious than Lucille Kraft?

It didn’t jibe.

Nor did the innocent pose fit with the wish that I had killed Bunkie Craig. Nor did the careful pose fit with the sloppiness of calling the terminal from the hotel room. There were too many inconsistencies and they were sticking out all over the place.

They bothered me. Bothered me a hell of a lot. I wanted to quit thinking about them but I couldn’t.

I could check on her, up to a point anyhow. I could get in touch with Tahoe and run both her names through the hotel, could find out if that much of her story was true. But there was no rush. She wasn’t going to do anything to me, not now, and she wasn’t going to take the money and ditch me. I was fairly sure of that.

I tried to decide whether or not it made sense to stick the dough in the hotel safe for the time being. That would keep her from taking off with it, but it would also let on that I felt something was a bit smelly in the state of Denmark. That phrase, by the way, has always been a source of consternation to me. There’s very little that is rotten in the state of Denmark. Denmark has always been one of my favorite countries, and if there was something rotten it was in the state of Arizona.

I mused on that point, drank a little more of the Jack Daniels, then took the elevator to the lobby to see what, if anything, was happening at the local newsstand. They didn’t have Editor & Publisher. The newsie told me I could get it across the street, that he only carried a small line for people who wanted something to kill time with. I decided that walking all the way across the street took more effort than I felt like dispensing so I went back to the room and waited for Cindy.

She came back looking very beautiful in a sexy black blouse and a pair of white slacks. I don’t imagine the white slacks were very practical — one wearing and they’d look as though they’d been slept in — but on her they looked so good that it didn’t matter. I talked to her about nothing very important, gave her a quick kiss and went out, hoping that both she and the money would be there when I got back.

I bought a lightweight gray suit, a batch of shirts and some underwear, leaving my clothes for the department store to donate to charity or something. Probably to burn, because they certainly weren’t good for much else anymore. Then I picked up a copy of E & P, breezed through the listings while I downed a cup of coffee and a toasted English, checked a few ads that looked like better-than-average possibilities and headed back to the hotel.

She was there and so was the money. She told me how good I looked and I told her again how good she looked and we necked for awhile, stopping before we got too caught up in what we were doing to take time out for dinner.

Dinner was a pair of blood-rare steaks in the best restaurant in town, juicy red meat with baked potatoes and a drink before and Irish coffee after. Dinner made a big difference — I felt so completely at peace with the world that I didn’t care whether or not the money was there when we got back to the room.

It was. We looked at it, smiled, shoved it under the bed and got undressed. There was something strange about making tender love on top of fifty thousand in nice green twenty dollar bills, but we got used to it. It wasn’t too hard.

In fact, after not too long we forgot all about those nice green twenty dollar bills. We got sort of carried away with what we were doing, and the room turned upside down, and the lights went out and on and out and on again, and my heart started punching holes in my chest, and... well, you get the general idea.

Afterwards I put my face between her warm breasts and inhaled the fragrance of her until sleep came. It’s a pleasant way to go to sleep.

Very pleasant.

Which was a fortunate thing, because the next day was not.

After breakfast the next morning I made what I thought was an eminently reasonable suggestion. I told her I was going to take the money and deposit it in a Phoenix bank. It made good sense. That way there was no chance of it getting lost or stolen. We didn’t have to watch it like hawks.

Moreover, it gave us an aura of respectability that cash would not give us. Money in the bank is a lot more solid in appearance than money in a wallet or a black leather satchel. It would give us a foothold on the problem of establishing credit. Imagine walking into a newspaper broker with a bagful of twenties, for Christ’s sake. That would be one for the books.

And, of course, there was another unspoken point involved. If the dough was in a joint account, neither of us could steal it from the other. I didn’t mention this and neither did she, but naturally we both thought of it instantly.

She wouldn’t hear of it.

“We have to have it in cash,” she said.

I asked why.

“Suppose we have to run. Suppose they get onto us and we have to leave town.”

“How?”

“It could happen.”

I didn’t know how in the world it could but I let it pass. I told her that you didn’t have to be in town to keep an account open, that checks on the account would clear in any bank in the country, that Reed and his rover boys could hardly take the dough away from us if we kept it in the bank.

She still wouldn’t hear of it.

A bell rang somewhere in my head and I let it drop. I pretended to agree with her, told her we might need it in a hurry and that she was one hundred percent right. I hoped she’d believe me, that she wouldn’t think I was suspicious.

I was very suspicious.

I made up some story that I can’t remember, something about going out to see a newspaper broker to see what was available that wasn’t listed in E & P. Once I got away from her my hands started to shake. Something was wrong, very wrong. I didn’t know what it was and I sure as hell wanted to find out.

There were two possibilities and either or both of them could be the answer. One was that she was planning on ditching me as soon as she felt secure, that she wanted the cash around so she could take it along. But I couldn’t quite swallow it — she was as secure as she would ever be right now. She had had plenty of chances to ditch me while I was buying my suit the day before.

There was another possibility. Something could be funny about the money. It could be hot, with the serial numbers listed. In that case it could be spent a little at a time but not in quantity. If we stuck the lot of it in a bank we were through.

Or it could be counterfeit.

That seemed impossible. I took a twenty from my wallet and looked it over. It looked just like every other twenty I’d ever seen in my life, but of course I was no judge of twenties. If it was a phony it was one hell of a good one. I could even see the red and blue threads in the paper, the ones that counterfeiters aren’t supposed to be able to duplicate.

I wondered.

If it was counterfeit, it sure as hell figured that she wouldn’t want me depositing a load of it in a bank. We’d be in the jug in a minute. But if it was counterfeit that knocked the props out from under her whole story. No mark could unload fifty grand worth of schlock on a con ring. No mark would have access to counterfeit dough.

Counterfeit. Queer, schlock, funny money.

Was it possible?

And if it was, how in hell could I check it without getting nailed for trying to pass it?

The first thing to do was run the Tahoe story through the mill. If that checked I could forget the rest and save myself some headaches. If it didn’t, I could worry about it later.

I put in a person-to-person call to the manager of West of the Lake in Tahoe, knowing that I’d get straight dope from him. I’d never heard of that particular club but it was a dollars-to-doughnuts cinch that it, like every other club in Nevada, was syndicate property. And syndicate people in legit business are the best damned businessmen in the world. You’ll never find a crooked roulette wheel in a Nevada house, or a fast-fingered stickman, or a slippery dealer. They play things straight as can be. The house percentage is enough.

The manager was a man named Rogers. He was very obliging and most willing to check on the two prospective employees who had given his name as a reference. If they had ever worked there he would let me know about it.

No, he said, he had never employed a Lucille Kraft. No, he also said, he had never employed a Cinderella Sims either.

As a matter of fact, he added, he used only men as cashiers. Hadn’t had a girl in a cashier’s cage in, well, five years at the very least.

I managed to thank him before I dropped the receiver on the hook and sat down, my head spinning and my mind going around in very strange circles.

Next I had to check the dough.

It was a gamble but I had to take it. I found the best way to do it, the simple approach. I walked into the first bank I came to, found the assistant manager and told him I’d picked up a twenty in Detroit and I wanted to know whether it was good or not. “Something funny-looking about it,” I told him. “I wouldn’t want to pass it off to anybody and have them get stuck with it.”

It sounded like just the sort of thing a solid citizen might say.

He took it, studied it and snapped it a couple times. “You wait right here, Mr. Cannon,” he told me. “I want to have a look at it under the glass. It looks okay but you never know for sure unless you look real close.”

He disappeared with it and I wanted to turn and run. I’d given him a phony name and a phony story, and if he was calling the cops I was through for sure. But if I ran now I was dead no matter what happened. I forced myself to wait, lit a cigarette and pretended to be calm.

He was back in a minute.

“You got one hell of a fine eye,” he told me.

“Counterfeit?”

“It sure is. Wouldn’t have spotted it myself, to tell you the truth. See here around the seal?”

I looked where he was pointing.

“Little different than it’s supposed to be. You got another twenty on you for comparison?”

I told him no. I did, but it was just as phony as the one in his hand. Just as phony as the whole fifty thousand bucks’ worth.

“Don’t suppose it matters. It is a wrong one, though. And a real pretty job.”

I thanked him very thoroughly and got up to go. It was about that time that I realized he still had my twenty. That was all I needed. I had to get it back.

I was nonchalant.

“Say,” I said, “you wouldn’t mind if I took that bill for a souvenir, would you? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t try to pass it or anything. I’d sort of like to keep it as a reminder of how I got stuck for twenty bucks.”

He hesitated. I kept my mouth shut. If I sold him too hard he might tumble.

He sighed. “We’re supposed to report any counterfeit to the police,” he said, and my heart sank. That was all I needed. “Then they send the bill to Washington, check you out to make sure you’re okay just as a matter of form, and I don’t know what all. I suspect they have a special ceremonial burning of the bill in the Justice Department.”

He laughed. I tried to chuckle along with him.

“You say you picked this up in Detroit?”

I nodded weakly.

He thought some more, then shrugged. “Tell you the truth, I’m damned if I can see what good it’ll do to bother the police. Just waste their time, and yours and mine as well. Why don’t you just take this along with you and forget you ever showed it to me?”

I could have kissed him. I thanked him again, returned the bill to my wallet and strolled out of the bank. My knees were knocking together and I thought I was going to fall apart at the seams. I needed a drink badly, and that wasn’t all I needed.

I needed an explanation.