Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

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.