Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

The .38 was burning a hole in my pocket. There were any number of ways to get rid of it and none of them looked especially attractive. I could stow it under a seat, set it on top of the luggage rack, even make a stab at dumping it into somebody’s suitcase. Whatever I did, it was an odds-on bet that the gun would turn up within an hour after landing, and probably before then. I took a hike to the john, and that was no help at all. Just the bare essentials. No handy hiding place for a hunk of steel that was hotter than... well, hotter than a pistol.

I tried to think it through and couldn’t get anywhere. I kept coming back to the job itself, how smoothly it had gone, how thoroughly it had gone to hell for itself. I was a long time hating a girl named Evelyn Stone. I thought about a hundred different ways to make her dead and couldn’t find one mean enough for her. She had conned me as utterly as a man can be conned. She had not merely made me trust her. She had made me love her, and then she stuck it in and broke it off deep.

A funny thing. I wanted badly to hate her, but I kept losing my grip and easing up on all of that hate. I couldn’t hold onto it. She had not betrayed any love because she had faked and manipulated that crock of love from the beginning. Ever since she first latched onto Doug in Vegas, long before she ever set eyes on me, I was her pigeon. She never owed me a thing. If I had seen her within the first couple of hours after we found Gunderman’s body, I probably would have killed her. The rage was fresh then. Time took the edge off it in a hurry. I couldn’t even summon up any really strong craving for revenge. I might never be a charter member of her fan club, but the real gut-bucket hate was gone.

Evelyn Stone had played our little game according to the rules; it was only sad that she and I had been on opposite sides, and that I had not known this. But there was one person who had broken the rules. Right at the start he forgot the one cardinal injunction. Never, under any circumstances, do you play fast and loose with your partner.

Doug crossed me from the opening whistle. He must have known all along that I had a weakness for women, an irritating habit of going overboard for them. So he didn’t bother telling me that he’d pushed Evvie over on her round little heels. That set everything in motion. Once he established the pattern, she played us off so neatly that we never felt the strings. He had not meant to mess me up. It was just the way he chose to run his show. It had to be his show all the way — his ego wouldn’t let go of it — and that made him improvise, keeping part of the picture hidden, keeping me just far enough in the dark so that things had a chance to go to hell for themselves.

You don’t do that to your partner. That’s the one thing you don’t do, and he’d done it and set Evvie up so that I wound up doing the same thing. And if I didn’t hate her any more, that didn’t mean I was in love with the whole world and at peace with mankind. Not at all.

The sharp-nosed girl beside me stirred in her seat. Down the aisle, the stewardess began serving the meal, the usual airline fare, as sterile and tasteless as the stewardess herself. I broke off my woolgathering and thought about the gun.

There’s always a way. I let the girl serve me my dinner. I ate about half of it and drank a cup of lukewarm coffee. When she took my tray away, my knife wasn’t on it. It was on my lap.

I reached down between my knees and worked on the front edge of my seat with the knife. It was a steak knife, sharp enough on the edge of the blade but not too keen at the tip, and this made it slow going. Once I broke through the vinyl it got easier. I had to keep stopping; the stewardess was walking back and forth, as busy as a speakeasy on Election Day, and my seatmate had turned restless and was given to looking my way. But before too long I had a good hiding place arranged, with the slit just wide enough to admit the gun but small enough to retain it and to pass unnoticed for a good long time.

I couldn’t think of a clever way to pull the gun out of my hip pocket without attracting attention. Finally I went to the john again and came out with the gun wrapped in a paper towel. I sat down again, and when the opportunity came I slipped the gun out of its paper envelope and wedged it into the seat. Someday someone would find it there and wonder how in hell it got there. But they would have no idea what passenger on what flight put it there, and by then it wouldn’t matter anymore.

We landed five minutes ahead of schedule at O’Hare. The Customs man asked me if I had anything to declare, and I said I hadn’t. He asked me how long I had been in Canada. I told him something. He opened my suitcase but didn’t do more than glance in it before passing me on. I could have had three pounds of heroin and an M-l rifle in there and he never would have noticed it.

I stayed at the terminal long enough to practice Gunderman’s signature, copying it from his driver’s license and a few other cards in his wallet. I’m fair but not perfect with a pen. I would never fool an expert, but I might not have to. I would sign his name once, on the hotel registration card, and that would be all. If I could come fairly close, that would probably be good enough.

I cabbed to the Palmer House. They had a single available and I took it. I signed in, did a fair job with the signature, and went to my room. I had a couple of things to do in Chicago and more than enough time to do them.

I packed eleven thousand dollars in a cigar box and packaged it with tender loving care. At the Railway Express office, I shipped it to Terry Moscato’s address and insured it, appropriately enough, for eleven thousand dollars. I told the clerk the parcel contained jewelry. He could not have cared less.

On the way back I called the Palmer House and asked for myself. They rang my room and told me that I wasn’t there. I thanked them. I went to the hotel and the clerk told me there had been a call for me, and gave me the message I had left. I thanked him and went to the room to pick up the envelopes from the suitcase, a handful of bank drafts to be mailed to different places. I bought stamps from a machine in the lobby and mailed them. I went to a movie house on South Dearborn and sat through most of a double feature. I had dinner across the street from the theater and decided to use Gunderman’s credit card and sign his name a second time. I did an even better job with the signature this time around.

The rest was just putting in time. I hit a couple of bars and sorted things out in my mind. By now Doug was probably in Omaha, waiting for me. I’d get there in time to help him pick up the bank drafts that I was scattering all over the Midwest. I tried to figure out just how much cash I was going to realize on the deal. We’d wind up holding something like forty thou, give or take a little, and Doug would draw ten off the top, the original working capital that he’d contributed. The rest would get cut up straight down the middle. No matter how you counted, that made my end in the neighborhood of fifteen grand.

I had another beer and thought about it. It wasn’t all that bad. Getting anything at all was a fluke — hell, beating the murder rap was a fluke, as far as that went.

Fifteen thousand dollars. It was possible. Bannion could give a certain amount of ground; if I played him right, I could get his place for less than I’d figured, and if I couldn’t find the right pitch to hand that old lush I might as well call it a day. If I arranged the right sort of financing and played it close to the vest for the first two or three years, I just might manage to handle the deal after all. It would be close, but it might work.

Ideally, I should have more money to play with. But dreams rarely come true, and never materialize without losing a certain amount of their glow. The original dream sparkled like diamonds — plenty of money and a girl to make it all worthwhile. If I could just squeeze by I was still coming out with a rosy smell.