Джеймс Чейз - You're Dead Without Money

‘Why do you say he won’t tell the police?’ Elliot repeated, sitting at the table and facing her.

‘There was a letter in the drawer with the stamps,’ Cindy told him. ‘It was from the Central Intelligence Agency, Washington. It said it was an offence to have these stamps and the owner would be prosecuted if he didn’t notify the C.I.A. if he had them. The letter was dated two months ago. They said the maximum sentence would be three years and a fine of thirty thousand dollars. When I read that I saw Mr. Larrimore couldn’t complain to the police without getting into trouble... so I took them.’

‘The C.I.A.?’ Elliot’s voice shot up a note.

‘Yes.’

‘Suppose you tell us just what happened, Cindy.’

She drew in a deep breath, then said, ‘I arrived at the house and Mr. Larrimore took me into the stamp room. He was nice and kind. He told me to sit down and he looked through the stamp album. The only stamps that interested him were the ones dad had bought. He said they might be worth three hundred dollars. Then just as I was wondering how I could get the index from him, he took it from his pocket and looked at it. Then he took me over to one of the drawers and showed me other stamps in the same series as the ones in the album. He left the book on his desk. It was so easy. He asked me if I would leave the stamp album with him. I got a little behind him, opened my bag and gave you the signal. Then you phoned. He excused himself and left me in the room. I found the drawer number in the index. I could hear him talking to you so I went to the drawer and found the stamps. Then I saw the letter. He was still talking to you so I read it. It seemed to me that if I took the stamps he couldn’t call the police... so I took them.’

‘For Pete’s sake!’ Elliot leaned forward and took her hand. ‘That was quick thinking, but he could tell the police.’

‘I don’t think he will,’ Cindy said. ‘Anyway, it’s worth the risk. Now, you don’t have to break in.’

‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ Joey said, his voice quavering. ‘You should have left it to Don and Vin.’

‘We have them,’ Cindy said.

‘We can’t keep them here.’ Elliot paused to think. ‘Joey take them right away to the Chase National Bank. Buy an envelope, write your name on it and put the stamps in it. Rent a safe deposit box. Get going, Joey! If the police come here and find them we’re sunk.’

Joey nodded. Picking up the plastic envelope he put it in his pocket.

‘What shall I do with the key?’

‘Bring it back here. We’ll hide it some place.’

When Joey had gone, Elliot regarded Cindy.

‘You shouldn’t have done it, Cindy.’

She smiled at him.

‘I just couldn’t bear the thought of you going with Vin into that house. Vin’s dangerous. Once he got the stamps, he might have done something to you.’

‘But why is the CIA. interested?’ Elliot said. ‘Was it a personal letter to Larrimore?’

‘It was a circular letter addressed to philatelists.’

‘And it said it was an offence to hold the stamps?’

‘Yes.’

Elliot didn’t like this.

‘I don’t understand it, but it looks as if the temptation to keep such rare stamps was too much for Larrimore.’ He thought, then nodded. ‘Yes, I think you’re right. He would be asking for trouble if he complained to the police.’ He stared uneasily at Cindy. ‘But why the C.I.A.?’

‘Perhaps we’d better not try to sell them,’ Cindy said.

‘They’re safe for the moment. Let’s find out who the buyer is before we make up our minds. And not a word about this to Vin.’ Elliot got up and coining around the table, he put his arms around her. ‘You’ve done a marvellous job, Cindy.’

She put her head against his shoulder and clung to him.

Barney had been talking now non-stop, apart from eating and drinking, for the past two hours. The time was after 23.00 and the Neptune bar was now lined with fishermen, noisy in their demands for beer and Sam, the barman, was being kept busy.

Barney paused to regard the backs of the men as they leaned on the bar and his fat face wore an expression of disapproval.

‘Fishermen!’ he said scornfully. ‘No good riff-raff. You take my word for it, Mr. Campbell. They spend all their nights drinking when they should be home keeping their wives and children company.’

I asked him if he was married.

‘I know better, mister,’ he said. ‘The thing I object to about marriage is a guy never gets a chance to talk and if there’s one thing I like — excluding beer — it’s talking.’

I said I could understand that.

‘Yeah.’ He paused to wave his empty glass in Sam’s direction. ‘You take these men over there. All they think about is money, women and drinking. I’ve never been mercenary. If you offered me a million dollars I wouldn’t take it. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. What the hell does a man want with a million dollars?’

I could have told him, but I got the impression he wouldn’t be interested. He paused while Sam rushed a beer to his table, then went on, ‘But this Vin Pinna I’m telling you about had the itch to get his hands on this million Judy Larrimore had told him about. He had the itch the same way as a dog gets the itch for a lady dog every now and again if you’ll excuse the comparison. Now Vin had been brought up in a tough world. I don’t say he didn’t know better, but knowing better and doing better are two different things... right, Mr. Campbell?’

I said that was indisputable.

‘Well, when he realized that Elliot wasn’t going to give him the number of the drawer and also had said he would go to the buyer himself, Vin decided Elliot had to be got rid of. He had driven to the cliff head and was sitting in the Jaguar and he gave his mind to the problem. He decided after getting his brain to work — and this was a slow process because up to now Vin seldom used his brain — that the only way he could get his hands on all this money was first to find out from Judy who the buyer was, then get rid of Elliot, then scare Cindy into telling him the number of the drawer.

‘For perhaps five or six minutes, Vin hesitated about getting rid of Elliot. Up to now he had kept clear of murder. Once or twice, when he had been disturbed by a householder while he was robbing a safe, he had been tempted, but he found by threatening the householder with a gun, murder hadn’t been necessary. But, thinking about the past, he did see that if the householder had turned awkward he would have pulled the trigger.

‘Turning all this over in his sluggish mind, Vin came to the conclusion that for a million dollars he would commit not one murder but several if anyone tried to outsmart him. For that sum of money, he would take murder in his stride.

‘Having got that little problem solved, he turned his mind to Judy. It was no good knocking Elliot off without first knowing who the buyer was. Judy was a tricky chick. She had already told him that she wasn’t giving him the name of the buyer until he got the stamps and even when he had them she was doing the deal with the buyer. This meant he would be lucky if she didn’t gyp him out of the two hundred and fifty thousand she had promised him.

‘This was pretty frustrating to Vin because he had no intention of taking that kind of money when he could get a million if he worked at it.’

A massively built man, wearing a dirty sweatshirt and oil stained white ducks, knots of black hair on his arms, shoulders and chest, came into the bar. He was around twenty-five years of age, his ugly face good-natured and he was hailed by the other men standing up at the bar with a warmth that told me he was a bar favourite.

He spotted Barney and waved to him.