Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

I called the hotel again and found another bar to play in. It turned out to be a long night. Somewhere toward the tail end of it I spent enough time in a joint on North Clark to pick up a semi-pro hooker with oversized breasts and too much makeup. We went to her place and made a brave try, but I couldn’t do anything. This didn’t come as much of a surprise. I may have stopped hating Evvie, but I hadn’t yet lost the taste of her. That would take a while.

I don’t know whether or not they can handle jets at Omaha. The plane I took was a prop job, an old DC-7. It got me there fast enough. I’d stayed two nights and a day at the Palmer House before making reservations from Chicago to Buffalo in Gunderman’s name. He’d never make that flight, but it could let them think he’d headed back toward Olean, or planned on it, before something went haywire. If they traced it that far. It was mostly just a question of going through the motions, setting up a few false trails partly for insurance and partly for practice. I’d made the reservation, and then I went out to O’Hare and caught a plane, not for Buffalo but for Omaha. I left his suitcase and his clothes in the room. I took the wallet with me, because men do not leave their wallets in their hotel rooms. In the can at O’Hare I burned up what cards and papers he had that would burn, dropped them in the bowl and flushed them away. The wallet was anonymous enough to go in the wastebasket. The various credit cards would neither burn nor flush nor disappear. I bought a small packet of razor blades at the newsstand and used one of them to slice the cards into strips. I threw the strips away and threw the blades away and waited for my plane. I had a few things in a canvas flight bag. The rest of my clothes were in Omaha. I was anxious to get to them. Gunderman’s clothes did not fit me, and I’d been wearing one change of clothing for too many days.

The airport was thick with police. A day ago they’d have bothered me. Now I hardly noticed them.

The tension was wearing away. A couple of days ago we had been inches from the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, and my skin had been too tight over my bones and sweat came freely. Then in a few fast minutes the gold faded out and there was nothing but a noose at the end of that rainbow. It got very tight for a while. I stopped remembering the seven years in Q and started seeing ropes and gas pellets and electrodes attached to the shaved spots on the head. I wondered how they did it in Ontario. Different states have different ways. In Utah you can stand in front of a firing squad, if you want. And wave away the blindfold and look them in their eyes—

The best way to relax a muscle is to tighten it all the way and squeeze as hard as you can and then let it unwind completely. This, essentially, is what happened. By the time I’d cleared the cashier’s check through our account I was functioning like a machine, gears meshing precisely, bearings oiled and motor in tune. By the time I was playing Hide-the-Gun on the plane for Chicago I was too preoccupied with doing things properly to worry about what might happen if I blew it. And with Chicago behind me and Omaha coming up I could think about meeting Doug and collecting the bank drafts and cashing them, and how much money we would have and what my end would be and whether or not it would be enough. I could think about these things because I knew we were clear. They were not going to tag us for this one.

Which led right into the part that was there all along, hard to see but never hidden. We were making out on this little deal. Everything had gone wrong, the whole bundle had been snatched away when we were already so close to it that we’d mentally spent it twice over. Even so, we were making out. I was fifteen thousand dollars to the good no matter how you added it up. All of that in a couple of months. Three, four years of the salary they paid me at the Boulder Bowl.

So you figure it. I’d missed the girl and I’d missed more than half of the money. The girl wouldn’t bother me long. I love them fast and hard with all the dreamer’s desperation, but once they’re gone I don’t carry their ghosts around. I’d missed the girl and half of the score, but fifteen thou was fifteen thou regardless.

There was a room waiting for me at the Mark Twain. My name was Robert W. Pattison, and they had some letters for me at the desk. I took them upstairs with me. They were one of the batches of bank drafts, all there and all in order, plus a note from Doug telling me where I could find him. He’d left my suitcase with the manager, and I called the desk and asked about it. They apologized and sent a kid upstairs with it and he went back downstairs half a dollar richer. I spent a long time under the shower tap, shaved close and clean, and put on fresh clothes. I picked the one suit I liked, a gray sharkskin with a double vent and patch pockets and just one button in the front. A suit John Hayden never wore in Olean.

I called Doug. He said he’d come around for me.

“I bought a car across the line in Kansas,” he said. “I had to take a test and get a license and everything all over again. I thought it would come in handy.”

“The car or the license?”

“Both of them.”

I waited out front for him. The car was a Pontiac, two years old, long and low, a very dark green. It was the kind of car a very square businessman buys when he’s feeling a little racy. I got in it and he drove while I talked. He seemed to know the city fairly well. It’s bigger than it looks. He drove all over it while I talked.

He said, “You come out of this pretty good, don’t you?”

“Do I?”

“Fifteen grand, isn’t it? You didn’t have a pot or a window a few months ago. Setting pins for a dime a line in East Jesus, Colorado.”

“Boulder,” I said. “I didn’t set pins. We had AMF automatic pin-spotters. I was the night man.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you can just come out and say it, fellow.”

He turned to face me and almost sideswiped a parked Ford. He cursed and I said something about him being lucky to pass the Kansas road test. You could feel it building up inside the car, like steam in a teakettle before it starts to whistle.

“I got a big hate on, Johnny.”

“You’ve got company.”

“You come off pretty. You can buy that craphouse in the mountains. Your end comes close enough to covering it. You were figuring loose and you know it. You come out fine.”

“You’ve got the same fifteen I’ve got,” I said easily. “On top of all you had to start with.”

“But we missed the score, Johnny. And had to sweat at the end.”

“Sweat never hurt.”

“You let it go sour, Johnny.”

“It started out sour. You crapped in the milk the first day out and now you wonder why it curdled. You got company with that hate, brother.”

“Any time at all, Johnny.”

“The money first.”

It took us a couple of days. I had spread those bank drafts over four states, and we had to drive around and pick them up. It was nothing but mechanical but it had to be done. There was no rush to cash them. They were good any time, and in any place, and they had all been bought with cash. You could trace them to Canada, but you could not trace them to Parker or Whittlief or Rance or Hayden or Barnstable or Gunderman. They were all of them as good as government paper.

We drove around getting them from the post offices and hotels where I had sent them. We did not talk much. At night we took separate motel rooms and drank ourselves to sleep out of separate bottles. When we did talk, we generally got on each other’s nerves. I was itching for him and he for me, but it had to wait and we were both of us good at waiting.