Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“I can do better for you than some crackers down in Florida,” he said gruffly. “But I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about now. I want to hire you to help me get Bethie back.”

I shook my head. “You can’t pay me for that, Anson.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I won’t take the money. Did you even think I would?”

“No. I guess I just wish you would. I’m going to have to lean on you some, Lou. It seems a lot to ask as a favor.”

“It’s not such a much,” I said. “All I’ll be doing is standing alongside you and backing you up.” Going through the motions with you, I thought.

I waited inthe car while he went into the bank. I might have played the radio but he’d taken the keys with him. Force of habit, I guess. I just sat and waited.

He didn’t have the money when he came out. “Jim has to make a call or two to get that much cash together,” he explained. “It’ll be ready by two this afternoon.”

“Did he want to know what it was for?”

“I told him I had a chance to purchase an Impressionist painting from a collector who’d had financial reverses. The painting’s provenance was clear but the sale had to be a secret and the payment had to be in cash for tax purposes.”

“That’s a better story than a real estate deal.”

He managed a smile. “It seemed more imaginative. He didn’t question it. We’d better buy that suitcase.”

We parked in front of a luggage and leather goods store on Grandview Avenue. I remembered they’d had a holdup there while I was sheriff. The proprietor had been shot in the shoulder but had recovered well enough. I went in with him and Anson bought a plaid canvas suitcase. The whisperer had described the bag very precisely.

“He’s a fussy son of a bitch,” I said. “Maybe he’s got an outfit he wants it to match.”

Anse paid cash for the bag. On the drive back to his house I said, “What you were saying yesterday, Anse, that Bethie could have been mine. She’s spit and image of you. You’d hardly guess she was Paula’s child.”

“She has her mother’s softness, though.”

A child’s crumpled body, a man turning shovelfuls of earth, a light rain falling. I kept putting the rain into that picture. A mind’s a damn stubborn thing.

“Maybe she does,” I said. “But one look at her and you know she’s her father’s daughter.”

His hands tightened on the steering wheel. I pictured Paula in my mind, and then Bethie. Then my own wife, for some reason, but it was a little harder to bring her image into focus.

Until it wastime to go to the bank we sat around waiting for the phone to ring. The whisperer had told Anse there wouldn’t be any more calls, but what guarantee was that?

He mostly talked about Paula, maybe to keep from talking about Bethie. It bothered me some, the turn the conversation was taking, but I don’t guess I let it show.

When the phone finally did ring it was McVeigh at the bank, saying the money was ready. Anse took the new plaid suitcase and got in his car, and I followed him down there in my own car. He parked in the bank’s lot. I found a spot on the street. It was a little close to a fireplug, but I was behind the wheel with the motor running and didn’t figure I had much to worry about from Wally’s boys in blue.

He was in the bank a long time. I kept looking at my watch and every few hours another minute would pass. Then he came out of the bank’s front door and the suitcase looked heavier than when he’d gone in there. He came straight to the car and went around to the back. I’d left the trunk unlocked and he tossed the suitcase inside and slammed it shut.

He got in beside me and I drove. “I feel like a bank robber,” he said. “I come out with the money and you’ve got the motor running.”

My car picked that moment to backfire. “Some getaway car,” I said.

I kept an eye on the rearview mirror. I’d suggested taking my car just in case anybody was watching him. McVeigh might have acted on suspicions, I’d told Anse, and might say something to law enforcement people without saying anything to us. It wouldn’t do to be tailed to the overpass where the exchange was supposed to take place. If the kidnappers spotted a tail they might panic and kill Bethie.

Of course I didn’t believe for a moment she was still alive. But you play these things by the book. What else can you do?

No one was following us. I cut the engine when we got to the designated spot. It was an overpass, and a good spot for a drop. A person could be waiting below, hidden from view, and he could pick up the suitcase and get out of there on foot and nobody up above could do anything about it.

The engine coughed and coughed and sputtered and finally cut out. Anse told me I ought to get it fixed. I didn’t bother saying that nobody seemed to be able to fix it. “Just sit here,” I told him. “I’ll take care of it.”

I got out of the car, went around to the trunk. He was watching as I carried the plaid suitcase and sent it sailing over the rail. I heard the car door open, and then he was standing beside me, trying to see where it had landed. I pointed to the spot but he couldn’t see it, and I’m not sure there was anything to see.

“I can’t look down from heights,” he said.

“Nothing to look at anyway.”

We got back in the car. I dropped him at the bank, and on the way there he asked if the kidnappers would keep their end of the bargain. “They said she’d be delivered to the house within the next four hours,” he said. “But would they take the chance of delivering her to the house?”

“Probably not,” I told him. “Easiest thing would be to drive her into the middle of one town or another and just let her out of the car. Somebody’ll find her and call you right off. Bethie knows her phone number, doesn’t she?”

“Of course she does.”

“Best thing is for you to be at home and wait for a call.”

“You’ll come over, Lou, won’t you?”

I said I would. He went to get his car from the lot and I drove to my house to check the mail. It didn’t take me too long to get to his place, and we sat around waiting for a call I knew would never come.

Because it was pretty clear somebody local had taken her. An out-of-towner wouldn’t have known what a perfect spot that overpass was for dropping a suitcase of ransom money. An out-of-towner wouldn’t have sent Anse to a specific luggage shop to buy a specific suitcase. An out-of-towner probably wouldn’t have known how to spot Bethie Pollard in the first place.

And a local person wouldn’t dare leave her alive, because she was old enough and bright enough to tell people who had taken her. It stood to reason that she’d been killed right away, as soon as she’d been snatched, and that her corpse had been covered with fresh earth before the ransom note had been delivered to Anson’s mailbox.

After I don’t know how long he said, “I don’t like it, Lou. We should have heard something by now.”

“Could be they’re playing it cagey.”

“What do you mean?”

“Could be they’re watching that dropped suitcase, waiting to make sure it’s not staked out.”

He started. “Staked out?”

“Well, say you’d gone and alerted the Bureau. What they might have done is staked out the area of the drop and just watched and waited to see who picked up the suitcase. Now a kidnapper might decide to play it just as cagey his own self. Maybe they’ll wait twenty-four hours before they make their move.”

“God.”

“Or maybe they picked it up before it so much as bounced, say, but they want to hold onto Bethie long enough to be sure the bills aren’t in sequence and there’s no electronic bug in the suitcase.”