Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

“How’s Mike gonna take it?”

“Maybe it’ll look like an accident.”

“He’s no dummy. She has an accident, he’ll have a pretty good idea who gave it to her.”

“Well, that’s another thing,” George Walker said. “Take out Alfie’s wife and her sister and there’s nobody with a story to tell. But I can see the cops finding the connection between Mike and this Alice no matter what, because who knows who she told?”

“He’s a good man, Mike.”

“Damn good man.”

“Kind of a loner, though.”

“Looks out for himself.” The brothers glanced significantly at each other, and drank their whiskey.

The sixth death recorded in connection with the robbery was that of Alfie’s wife. Mike Dunn went to her home, found her alone, and accepted her offer of a cup of coffee. She thought he was coming on to her, and had heard from her sister what a good lover he was, and the idea of having a quickie with her sister’s boyfriend was not unappealing. She invited him upstairs, and he didn’t know what to do. He knew he couldn’t afford to leave physical evidence in her bed or on her body. And could he have sex with a woman and then kill her? The thought sickened him, and, not surprisingly, turned him on a little too. He went upstairs with her. She was wearing a robe, and as they ascended the staircase he ran a hand up under the robe and found she was wearing nothing under it. He was wildly excited, and desperate to avoid acting on his excitement, and when they reached the top of the stairs he took her in his arms. She waited for him to kiss her, and instead he got his hands on her neck and throttled her, his hands tightening convulsively around her throat until the light went out of her eyes. Then he pitched her body down the stairs, walked down them himself, stepped over her corpse and got out of the house.

He was shaking. He wanted to tell somebody but he didn’t know whom to tell. He got in his car and drove home, and there was George Walker with a duffle bag.

“I did it,” Mike blurted out. “She thought I wanted to fuck her, and you want to hear something sick? I wanted to.”

“But you took care of it?”

“She fell down the stairs,” Mike said. “Broke her neck.”

“Accidents happen,” George said, and tapped the duffle bag. “Your share.”

“I thought we weren’t gonna divvy it for a while.”

“That was the plan, yeah.”

“Because they might come calling, and if anybody has a lot of money at hand...”

“Right.”

“Besides, any of us starts spending, it draws attention. Not that I would, but I’d worry about Eddie.”

“If he starts throwing money around...”

“Could draw attention.”

“Right.”

“Thing is,” George explained, “we were thinking maybe you ought to get out of town for a while, Mike. Alfie’s dead and his wife’s dead, but who knows how far back the cops can trace things? This girlfriend of yours—”

“Jesus, don’t remind me. I just killed her sister.”

“Well, somebody can take care of that.” Mike Dunn’s eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything.

“If you’re out of town for a while,” George said, “maybe it’s not a bad thing.” Not a bad thing at all, Mike thought. Not if somebody was going to take care of Alice Fuhrmann, because the next thing that might occur to them was taking care of Mike Dunn, and he didn’t want to be around when that happened. He packed a bag, and George walked him to his car, and took a gun from his pocket and shot him behind the ear just as he was getting behind the wheel.

Within hours Mike Dunn was buried at the bottom of an old well at an abandoned farmhouse six miles north of the city, and his car was part of a fleet of stolen cars on their way to the coast, where they’d be loaded aboard a freighter for shipment overseas. By then Alan Walker had decoyed Alice Fuhrmann to a supermarket parking lot, where he killed her with a homemade garrote and stuffed her into the trunk of her car.

“Mike did the right thing,” George told Eddie O’Day and Louis Creamer. “He took out Alfie’s widow and his own girlfriend, but he figured it might still come back to him, so I gave him his share and he took off. Half a mill, he can stay gone for a good long time.”

“More’n that,” Eddie O’Day said. “Five hundred thirty, wasn’t it?”

“Well, round numbers.”

“Speaking of numbers,” Eddie said, “when are we gonna cut up the pie? Because I could use some of mine.”

“Soon,” George told him.

Five-thirty each for Louis Creamer and Eddie O’Day, $795,000 apiece for the Walkers, George thought, because Louis and Eddie didn’t know that Mike Dunn had not gone willingly (though he’d been willing enough to do so) and had not taken his share with him. (George had brought the duffle bag home with him, and stashed it behind the furnace.) So why should Eddie and Louis get a split of Mike’s share?

For that matter, George thought, he hadn’t yet told his brother what had become of Mike Dunn. He’d never intended to give Mike his share, but he’d filled the duffle bag at the storage facility in case he’d had to change his plans on the spot, and he’d held the money out afterward in case the four of them wound up going to the storage bin together to make the split. As far as Alan knew, Mike and his share had vanished, and why burden the lad with the whole story? Why should Alan have a friend’s death on his conscience?

No, George’s conscience could carry the weight. And, along with the guilt, shouldn’t he have Mike’s share for himself? Because he couldn’t split it with Alan without telling him where it came from.

Which changed the numbers slightly. $530,000 apiece for Alan, Louis, and Eddie. $1,060,000 for George.

Of course we knew who’d pulled off the robbery. Alfie’s wife had indeed suffered a broken neck in the fall, but the medical examination quickly revealed she’d been strangled first. Her sister had disappeared, and soon turned up in the trunk of her car, a loop of wire tightened around her neck. Someone was able to connect the sister to Mike Dunn, and we established that he and his clothes and his car had gone missing. Present or not, Mike Dunn automatically led to Creamer and O’Day and the Walkers — but we’d have been looking at them anyway. Just a matter of rounding up the usual suspects, really.

“Eddie called me,” Alan said. “They were talking to him.”

“And you, and me,” George said. “And Louis. They can suspect all they want, long as they can’t prove anything.”

“He wants his cut.”

“Eddie?”

Alan nodded. “I asked him was he planning on running, and he said no. Just that he’ll feel better when he’s got his share. Mike got his cut, he said, and why’s he different?”

“Mike’s case was special.”

“Just what I told him. He says he owes money he’s got to pay, plus there’s some things he wants to buy.”

“The cops are talking to him, and what he wants to do is pay some debts and spend some money.”

“That’s about it.”

“And if the answer’s no? Then what?”

“He didn’t say, but next thing I knew he was mentioning how the cops had been talking to him.”

“Subtle bastard. You know, when the cops talk to him a few more times—”

“I don’t know how he’ll stand up. He’s always been a stand-up guy before, but the stakes are a lot higher.”

“And you can sort of sense him getting ready to spill it. He’s working up a resentment about not getting paid. Other hand, if he does get paid...”

“He throws money around.”

They fell silent. Finally George said, “We haven’t even talked about Louis.”

“No.”

“Be convenient if the two of them killed each other, wouldn’t it?”