Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

“I’ve got papers for California. Los Angeles, I think.”

“Good. Throw a few things in a suitcase. California labels, nothing else. You’re close enough to his size to do it. Then get in another cab and come back to the hotel. Go to the desk and check in under the phony name. Get a room as close to this one as you can. The same side of the building. Tell them you want to face whatever the hell that street is out there. One floor away is fine. One floor away is better than the same floor, actually. You with me?”

“I guess so.”

“Check in, go to your room, and then get back here. I’ll have it set up. We’ve got a few things going for us. He checked in yesterday afternoon. The kid on the desk now never saw him, not yesterday afternoon and not last night. We’ve just about got time. Move.”

“Johnny?”

“What?”

“I can’t figure the cross. He had the money with him. It might still be around—”

“It won’t be. She took it.”

“Even so. She gets seventy thou instead of seventeen-five. She doesn’t figure to kill for the difference, does she?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said.

When he left I shut the door and bolted it after him. I did not want any hyperefficient maid stumbling in on me. Then I walked into the john and washed my hands and dried them on a towel and went back to get things in motion. I found his suitcase on the floor of the closet. I packed his clothes in it. I went through the dresser and the pockets of his clothes and picked off everything that gave a clue as to who he was and where he came from. All of this went into the suitcase. I got his money belt — you don’t see them much anymore, but he’d had one and she would have known about it. I wasn’t surprised to find it empty.

There was a cashier’s check in his wallet, drawn to the order of the Barnstable Corporation and made out in the amount of forty thousand dollars. I tucked this in my own wallet, then thought a moment and switched his wallet for my own. If I was going to be him I might as well do it right.

When I first started to move him, I thought I might be sick. I got past the first rush of nausea and then things settled down. He wasn’t a corpse, he was just a dead weight. I dragged him a few feet away and checked the carpet where he had lain.

It wasn’t bad. Not too much blood, really, and the carpet was nylon and not especially absorbent. I wetted some toilet paper and wiped it so that it looked clean. Spectroscopic analysis would show blood for weeks, but if things broke right nobody would come looking, and if things went wrong they wouldn’t need bloodstains to hang us.

I tried to keep busy that way. As long as I was doing things, moving and staying active, I didn’t have to think so hard about things that were better unexamined. Like the sweet way she’d set it up. Like the reason she worked the cross.

She hadn’t killed him for the simple arithmetical difference between seventeen and seventy thousand dollars. She had killed him for the whole bundle. She wanted everything, everything that belonged to Wallace J. Gunderman.

She’d get it, too. Because the bitch had married him.

I lit a cigarette. He’d as much as told me the night before, and I had been too damned stupid to pick it up then and there. All of that coyness — I’d taken it for granted he was acting that way because he thought I was hung on Evvie while he was actually keeping her and using her to keep me on his team. But the words he’d used made more sense now. He had married her.

It made more sense that way.

And other parts made sense. The attitude he’d shown all those times pointed out one thing — since his wife died, he had been the one pushing for marriage and she had been busy putting him off. It added up a million times as sensibly that way. She had waited, and she had finally gone and married him just in time to be his widow.

What was he worth? A few million? And to that you could tack on a whole load of extras, like the hate she had for him and the kick she must have felt when the gun went off. It all tallied out to a lot more than the seventeen and a half thousand dollars that she was supposed to get out of the deal. It added up to many miles more than a roadhouse in Colorado and a broken-down grifter for a husband and “Hearts and Flowers” for a theme song.

We were supposed to get stuck with it. We’d be tied up tight, and she could keep herself in the clear. She had never put anything on paper. We could never drag her into it. We could only tighten the noose around our own necks.

I lit another cigarette and wished to hell Doug would get back. We had a chance, I thought. Getting to his hotel room on time had opened it up for us. And Doug was about his build — that helped. And the timing with the hotel clerks. We did not exactly have the odds on our side, and if we had held those cards in a poker game I would have thrown our hand in and folded. But you can’t ever fold when your whole damned life’s in the pot. You have to play whatever’s dealt.

He knocked on the door and said, “Doug here,” his voice pitched low and tense. I opened the door. He was wearing a hat and he had a cigar in his mouth. He came inside and drew the door shut.

“He’s going to be me,” he said. “Right?”

“That’s the idea.”

“That’s why the cigar and the hat, and why I acted middle-aged for the clerk. Gunderman does smoke cigars, doesn’t he?”

“Not anymore.”

“I guess not. The money was gone?”

“All but the check. That was there. To lead them to us fast, I suppose.”

He shook his head. “I’d love to kill that girl.”

“You’d have to stand in line. Where’s your room?”

It was one flight downstairs. That made it a little easier. We slipped Gunderman out of his pajamas and put a suit of Doug’s on him — dressing a dead man is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds. The shoes and socks were the hardest part. When we were done with him he wouldn’t have stood inspection, but then he probably wouldn’t have to. The hotel was fairly empty at that hour, and most people don’t pay any particular attention to things that don’t involve them.

At least that’s what we told ourselves. It’s not easy to work yourself up to the point where you can cart a corpse around a hotel without losing your air of nonchalance.

Doug checked the corridor. We waited until it was empty, at least on our floor. Then we hoisted him up and each of us draped one of his dead arms over our shoulders. He was supposed to look drunk, or sick, or something, and we were his good friends helping poor Clyde back to his room. This was the script. It wouldn’t win Oscars, but it had to do the job.

He was very damned heavy, even with the load shared between us. We got him out into the hallway. I kicked the door shut, and we headed for the stairs. As we got there I heard an elevator coming. We ducked into the stairwell just as the door opened on our floor. Whoever got off, we weren’t spotted.

The stairs were easy. We got down them in a hurry, and I stood at the landing with Gunderman draped all over me while Doug checked the traffic on the floor. There was a maid en route, her cart of clean linen blocking our way. We waited for her, and she took her time, until finally she busied herself in one of the bathrooms. She couldn’t see the hallway from there. Doug grabbed hold of Gunderman and we took him for another walk. We couldn’t rush, because the whole scene had to look natural if anyone happened to glance our way.

No one did. We made it to the room and closed the damned door and eased our plucked pigeon down onto the floor. I wanted a cigarette. Instead I lit one of Gunderman’s cigars, and so did Doug. We put another one in the pocket of Doug’s suit.