Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Or maybe they’re not going to release her, Lou.”

“You don’t want to think about that, Anse.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to think about it.”

He started in on the bourbon then, and I was relieved to see him do it. I figured he needed it. To tell the truth, I had a thirst for it myself right about then. The plain fact is that sitting and waiting is the hardest thing I know about, especially when you’re waiting for something that’s not going to happen.

I was about ready to make an excuse and go on home when the doorbell rang. “Maybe that’s her now,” he said. “Maybe they waited until dark.” But there was a hollow tone in his voice, as if to say he didn’t believe it himself.

“I’ll get it,” I told him. “You stay where you are.”

There were two men at the door. They were almost my height, dressed alike in business suits, and holding guns, nasty little black things. First thought I had was they were robbers, and what crossed my mind was how bad Anse’s luck had turned.

Then one of them said, “FBI,” and showed me an ID I didn’t have time to read. “Let’s go inside,” he said, and we did.

Anse had a glass in his hand. His face didn’t look a whole lot different from before. If he was surprised he didn’t much show it.

One of them said, “Mr. Pollard? We kept the drop site under careful observation for three full hours. In that time no one approached the suitcase. The only persons entering the culvert were two boys approximately ten years old, and they never went near the suitcase.”

“Ten years old,” Anse said.

“After three hours Agent Boudreau and I went down into the culvert and examined the suitcase. The only contents were dummy packages like this one.” He showed a banded stack of bills, then riffled it to reveal that only the top and bottom were currency. The rest of the stack consisted of newspaper cut the size of bills.

“I guess your stakeout wasn’t such a much,” I said. “Anse, why didn’t you tell me you decided to call the Bureau after all?”

“Jim McVeigh called them,” he said. “They were there when I went to get the money. I didn’t know anything about it until then.”

“Well, either we beat ’em to the drop site or they don’t know much about staking a place out. You get people who aren’t local and it’s easy for them to make a mistake, I guess. The kidnappers just went and switched suitcases on you. You saw a suitcase still lying in the weeds and you figured nobody’d come by yet, but it looks like you were wrong.” I took a breath and let it out slow. “Maybe they saw you there after they told Anse not to go to the cops. Maybe that’s why Bethie’s not home yet.”

“That’s not why,” one of them said. Boudreau, I guess his name was. “We were there to see you fling that case over the railing. I had it under observation through high-powered field glasses from the moment it landed and I didn’t take my eyes off it until we went and had a look at it.”

Must have been tiring, I thought, staring through binoculars for three full hours.

“Nobody touched the suitcase,” the other one said. “There was a rip in the side from when it landed. It was the same suitcase.”

“That proves a lot, a rip in the side of a suitcase.”

“There was a switch,” Boudreau said. “You made it. You had a second suitcase in the trunk of your car, underneath the blankets and junk you carry around. Mr. Pollard here put the suitcase full of money in your trunk. Then you got the other case out of the trunk and threw it over the side.”

“Her father taught her not to go with strangers,” the other said. I never did get his name. “But you weren’t a stranger, were you? You were a friend of the family. The sheriff, the man who lectured on safety procedures. She got in your car without a second thought, didn’t she?”

“Anse,” I said, “tell them they’re crazy, will you?”

He didn’t say anything.

Boudreau said, “We found the money, Mr. Pollard. That’s what took so long. We wanted to find it before confronting him. He’d taken up some floorboards and stashed the money under them, still in the suitcase it was packed in. We didn’t turn up any evidence of your daughter’s presence. He may never have taken her anywhere near his house.”

“This is all crazy,” I said, but it was as if they didn’t hear me.

“We think he killed her immediately upon picking her up,” Boudreau went on. “He’d have to do that. She knew him, after all. His only chance to get away with it lay in murdering her.”

My mind filled with that picture again. Bethie’s crumpled body lying on the ground in that patch of woods the other side of Little Cross Creek. And a big man turning the damp earth with a spade. I could feel a soreness in my shoulders from the digging.

I should have dug that hole the day before. Having to do it with Bethie lying there, that was a misery. Better by far to have it dug ahead of time and just drop her in and shovel on the lid, but you can’t plan everything right.

Not that I ever had much chance of getting away with it, now that I looked at it straight on. I’d had this picture of myself down in the Florida sun with more money than God’s rich uncle, but I don’t guess I ever really thought it would happen that way. I suppose all I wanted was to take a few things away from Anson Pollard.

I sort of tuned out for a while there. Then one of them — I’m not even sure which one — was reading me my rights. I just stood there, not looking at anybody, least of all at Anse. And not listening too close to what they were saying.

Then they were asking me where the body was, and talking about checking the stores to find out when I’d bought the duplicate suitcase, and asking other questions that would build the case against me. I sort of pulled myself together and said that somebody was evidently trying real hard to frame me and I couldn’t understand why but in the meantime I wasn’t going to answer any questions without a lawyer present.

Not that I expected it would do me much good. But you have to make an effort, you have to play the hand out. What else can you do? You go through the motions, that’s all.

In the morning,Warren Cuttleton left his furnished room on West Eighty-third Street and walked over to Broadway. It was a clear day, cool, but not cold, bright but not dazzling. At the corner, Mr. Cuttleton bought a copy of the Daily Mirror from the blind newsdealer who sold him a paper every morning and who, contrary to established stereotype, recognized him by neither voice nor step. He took his paper to the cafeteria where he always ate breakfast, kept it tucked tidily under his arm while he bought a sweet roll and a cup of coffee, and sat down alone at a small table to eat the roll, drink the coffee, and read the Daily Mirror cover to cover.

When he reached page three, he stopped eating the roll and set the coffee aside. He read a story about a woman who had been killed the evening before in Central Park. The woman, named Margaret Waldek, had worked as a nurse’s aide at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. At midnight her shift had ended. On her way home through the park, someone had thrown her down, assaulted her, and stabbed her far too many times in the chest and abdomen. There was a long and rather colorful story to this effect, coupled with a moderately grisly picture of the late Margaret Waldek. Warren Cuttleton read the story and looked at the grisly picture.

And remembered.

The memory rushed upon him with the speed of a rumor. A walk through the park. The night air. A knife — long, cold — in one hand. The knife’s handle moist with his own urgent perspiration. The waiting, alone in the cold. Footsteps, then coming closer, and his own movement off the path and into the shadows, and the woman in view. And the awful fury of his attack, the fear and pain in the woman’s face, her screams in his ears. And the knife, going up and coming down, rising and descending. The screams peaking and abruptly ending. The blood.