Лоуренс Блок - Death Pulls a Doublecross [= Cowards Kiss]

The inside had more things going for it. There was a long and detailed letter typed flawlessly on plain white bond. It bore no date, no return address, no signature. It led off with a simple “Dear Sir” and went on from there.

The instructions were complicated. Two keys were supposed to be in the briefcase. One, according to the letter, would fit a small locker in Central Terminal in Buffalo, New York. There was a strongbox in that locker, and the second key would open the strongbox. The box itself contained still another key, this one fitting a locker located in a station of the Toronto subway system. That locker, finally, held the Wallstein jewels.

The nameless person who wrote the letter apologized very carefully for the complexity of the directions. He was sure, he said, that the reader would appreciate them. By use of two lockers plus a strongbox, a man with keys but without instructions would be lost. So would any outsider who happened to break into the Buffalo locker — he’d find a meaningless key. If somebody was lucky enough to break into the Toronto locker he’d get the jewels, but nobody would know which Toronto locker to open unless he had the instructions in the first place and the key in the second — the key from the Buffalo locker.

I had to read the damned thing three times through before I could figure out which key was which and what the hell it was all about. By the time it made sense I had to admire whoever figured it all out. Nothing was left to chance. And there was another advantage — in the time it took to follow all the directions, the thieves would be out of town. And safe.

It was cute. But for all the good it had done the thieves they could have filled the briefcase with jewels and let it go at that. Bannister had managed to put them all in the river — except for Armin, possibly — and to get his dough back at the same time. Proving, maybe, that the best laid plans of jewel thieves gang aft agley. They’re in the same boat with the mice and the men. And it leaked like a sieve.

So now I had the briefcase. The next step, according to the book, was to turn it over to Peter Armin and collect a quick five thousand dollars for my troubles. Somehow I couldn’t quite see myself doing this. Not just yet. I had told Maddy the truth — my main interest was catching a killer and I didn’t care who Armin was or what he did with the jewels. But the briefcase might be useful to me. Maybe I could catch a murderer with it. Armin could wait a day or two for his briefcase and I could wait a day or two for my money. The killer came first.

I looked at the briefcase with respect. It was a bomb that could go off any minute, a nitro bomb that would behave unpredictably. I decided to dismantle it.

I staggered through the directions again. It was the fourth time around for me and this time I memorized them. There wasn’t all that much to remember. Just a pair of locker numbers. When they were tucked away in my mind I found a sheet of typing paper and hauled out my old portable. I copied the letter word for word, substituting new and meaningless numbers for the original ones. Then I tore the original letter into little strips of paper and flushed them down the toilet. I felt like a character in a bad Mitchum movie.

I found the pair of keys in a pocket in the briefcase. There numbers had been filed off and they looked innocent as vestal virgins. I replaced them with two keys of my own. One of them would open the door to a place in Greenwich Village where I’d lived years ago. Another would open the door to an apartment where a girl I once knew once lived. She was married now, and she didn’t live there any more. So I didn’t need the key.

I filed the sides of both keys, put them in the pocket of the briefcase, zipped it shut. I added the new set of phony instructions and closed the briefcase.

My bomb was a dud now.

I remembered telling Maddy something about bombs, saying they were going to start going off, that I wanted to set off a few of my own. I wondered if you could set off a dead bomb, a dud.

It was worth a try.

The kid with all the pimples was scratching himself. He looked up at me and gave me something that was almost a smile. Then he found my car and turned it over to me.

“I thought you just worked nights.”

“Usually,” he said. “Like today I’m working days. Win a few; lose a few. Today’s a good day for a convertible. You can roll down the top and look at the sunshine.”

“Uh-huh. Want to fill the tank?”

He studied the gauge. “Not worth the sweat,” he said. “She’s almost full now, see? You got to do a lot of driving to empty her, a whole lot. I can fill her when you bring her in.”

“I’ll be doing a lot of driving.”

“Well—”

“Fill the tank,” I said.

He filled the tank but he didn’t have his heart in it. I told him to put it on the tab, pulled out of the garage and left him scratching and mumbling. I felt better with a full tank of gas. It’s one of two prerequisites for a trip to the end of Long Island. The second is courage.

I took Second Avenue south, found the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and left the relative sanity of Manhattan for the hinterlands of Queens. I followed a variety of confusing expressways — which is where the courage came into the picture — until I managed to pass through Queens, rush through Nassau County and wind up in Suffolk County.

If you’ve got enough money, and if you don’t like New York, and if Westchester and Connecticut are either too arty or too Madison Avenue for you, you stand a good chance of winding up in Suffolk County. The towns were smaller there, the buildings lower and further apart. I had the top down and the fresh air was choking me. My lungs weren’t used to it.

I drove through the countryside and tried to pretend that it wasn’t really there. I remembered a line out of Sydney Smith to the effect that the country is sort of a healthy grave. Sydney Smith was right.

Bannister, according to Armin, lived in something called Avalon. I had copied down his address on the back of the snapshot Armin gave me, and when I hit Avalon I pulled over to the curb and fumbled through my wallet until I found it. I looked at it, remembered what Bannister was supposed to look like, then turned the photo over and checked the address. He lived on Emory Hill Road.

There was gas still left in the tank but there was room for more. A gas-pump jockey loaded me up without an argument, polished my windshield, checked my oil and water, and tried to sell me a new fuel pump. He also told me how to get to Emory Hill Road. It ran along the outskirts of Avalon. Living on the outskirts of Avalon is like living in a suburb of New Jersey, or a satellite of the moon. It’s ridiculous.

I followed his directions, found Emory Hill Road. I nosed the Chevy past a batch of estates that would have embarrassed Veblen. They were all the last word on the subject of conspicuous consumption. I passed them all by until I found one which made the rest look like Tobacco Road set to music. It had to belong to Clayton Bannister. Nobody else would want it.

First there was the house itself. The manor house, that is — I’m sure that’s what he called it. It was a cockeyed cross between Christopher Wren and Le Corbusier, a mixed marriage of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries with the assets of neither and the liabilities of both. I had never seen anything like it before; twentieth-century baroque was a brand-new concept. Flying buttresses do not go with picture windows.

The architect must have shot himself.

There were two other small houses. One must have been the guest house. The other was the garage but it looked more like a stable. A futuristic stable, of course, but still a stable. I saw a Rolls Silver Ghost and a Mercedes 300 and tried to imagine Bannister at the wheel riding to hounds, with Ralph and Billy bellowing “Tallyho!” at the tops of their impure lungs. An arresting picture.