Ed Mcbain - Money, Money, Money

“Is it the President?” Will asked.

“Is what the President?”

“Who got kidnapped?”

“I have to warn you not to say anything that might prove incriminating,” Horne said.

Oh, Jesus, it’s the President, Will thought. Because if itwasn’t the President, then what was the Secret Service doing in this? It was theFBIwho investigated kidnappings, wasn’t it? All the Secret Service did was protect the President of the United States. And his family. So it had to be somebody in the White House who’d got kidnapped.

Horne was moving over to the closet now, where the bills sat in a shoe box on the shelf over the hanging sable coat and mink stole, both of which Will had also stolen. I can run right this minute, he thought, go visit my cousin Earl living in Fort Worth with a girl used to be Miss Texas in the Miss America contest, came within a curly blond crotch hair of winning it. Spend a few weeks down there till this whole kidnapping thing blew over, which he hadn’t done anyway,damn it! All he’d done was burglarize a fucking apartment!

“Well, well, what have we here?” Horne said.

He was looking in at the sable coat and the mink stole.

“Your search warrant says you’re supposed to look for money,” Will said.

“These are in plain view,” Horne said.

“In plain view” was an expression the police used when they appropriated something without benefit of a search warrant.

“They’re my girlfriend’s,” Will said.

“What’s her name?”

“Jasmine. Who you talked to.”

“She told us you only just met,” Horne said.

“Well, that’s true.”

“And she left her furs here?”

“She trusts me.”

Horne gave him a look. But he didn’t pursue the matter of the furs any further, perhaps because his mind was on the President’s kidnapping, who it had to be, or else someone in his family, otherwise why the Secret Service? I ought to run for it right this minute, Will thought. Horne was reaching for a shoe box on the shelf. Run for it or not? Will thought. Horne took down the box. Which? Horne took the lid off the box and looked into it. He reached in for a white envelope with a rubber band around it. He took the rubber band off the envelope. He opened the envelope.

“Well, well,” he said again.

“That’s not plain view,” Will said.

“Now it is,” Horne said, and fanned the bills. “Where’d you getthese little mothers?”

“Same crap game,” Will said.

Horne began counting.

“This is a lot of money here,” he said.

“Yeah, it was a big crap game.”

“Looks like five, six thousand dollars here.”

“More like eight,” Will said.

“You won eight thousand dollars in a crap game?”

“I got lucky.”

“Who was in this game?”

“Bunch of guys I never saw in my life.”

“So let me get this straight, Will,” Horne said. “You’re asking me to believe that one or more of the men in this crap game of yourscould have been the kidnappers to whom these bills were paid as ransom, is that it?”

“I guess that’s it,” Will said.

He knew he was already in the toilet. He knew Horne would yank out a gun and a pair of handcuffs in the next minute. He’d be spending Christmas Day in jail for a goddamn kidnapping he didn’t do.

“Listen,” he said, “you really do have the wrong person here.”

“Maybe so,” Horne said, and gave him a long, hard look.

Will’s hands were shaking. He put them in his pockets so Horne wouldn’t see. He hated himself for being so goddamn scared here, but he couldn’t help it. A kidnapping was serious stuff.

“Tell you what,” Horne said.

Will waited.

“What I think I should do is confiscate this money here,” Horne said. “Give you a receipt for it, check the serial numbers downtown, get back to you later today.”

Sure, Will thought.

Secret Service or not, every cop in the world was identical to every other cop, and they were all fuckin crooks. Next thing you knew, eight thousand bucks would find its way into a fund for the widows of Secret Service men who had died in the line of duty. Only thing he didn’t understand was why Horne was granting a possible kidnapper the opportunity to flee. He watched as the man meticulously copied the serial numbers on all the bills, signed the sheet of paper with the numbers on it, and handed it to Will. He looked for his parka, found it where he’d draped it over one of the chairs, and put it on.

“I don’t have to warn you not to leave the city,” he said.

“Not while you’ve got all my money,” Will said.

“See you later,” Horne said, and put on the hat with the ear flaps, and walked out of the apartment.

It was twenty minutes to five.

So what do I do now? Will wondered.

Hell, I’m an innocent man here!

Except for the burglary.

But Horne hadn’t been interested in any burglary, Horne didn’t even know any burglary hadhappened. Horne had been interested only in the hundred-dollar bills that had maybe or maybe not been paid as ransom in a kidnapping case he was investigating—but how come the Secret Service? Anyway, that was the entire scope of Special Agent David A. Horne’s interest. The money. Check the serial numbers. If they match, come fetch old Wilbur here.

But let’s say the serial numbers donot match. I mean, out of all the millions of apartments in New York City, what are the odds on my breaking into the only one that happens to be the apartment of a redhead who’d done a kidnapping and stashed the ransom money there? What are the odds on that kind of thing happening? I mean,really. A thousand to one? A million to one? I’ll take odds like that on a horse any day of the week.

So the odds have got to be in my favor, right? The serial numbers will not match, Horne will come back with my money, I’ll sign off on the receipt, and he’ll apologize for having taken so much of my time.

I hope, he thought.

AT FIVE MINUTES TO SIX that Thursday evening, Cass walked into Eyewear Fashions, Inc. on Stemmler Avenue and Twenty-second Street. The evening was clear and cold. Pinprick points of stars dotted a black sky, and the streets and sidewalks glistened with fresh snow, but Cass did not have a white Christmas on her mind. All she wanted to do was find the man who’d taken her money and her mink stole and her long sable coat, which should have been keeping her toasty warm on this frighteningly cold day. She’d been a cold puppy all her life, and the first thing she’d purchased from the money she’d earned on the Mexico job was the sable. Hell with people who went around in the nude protesting the wearing of furs. Anyone ever tried to spray paint on her furs was somebody who’d better already own a funeral plot.

Instead of the stolen sable, she was wearing the short red fox jacket over blue jeans and a green turtleneck sweater, freezing her ass off nonetheless. One of the reasons she’d left Fall River, Massachusetts, was that it had been so damn cold up there. That and her father shouting hell and damnation at her day and night. Her mother was a mathematics teacher. Cass guessed she thought it made sense to marry a Presbyterian minister and then present him with two daughters, one of whom grew up to be a holy person like Papa. The second and youngest, Cassandra Jean Ridley herself, fed up to here, ran away from home instead. Went to live on a commune in New Hampshire, which was even colder than it was here on this street corner in Isola. Left there when the group’s youth advisor came into her room naked one midnight clear, determined to read to her out loud a short story fromHustler magazine. Cass clobbered him with a frying pan.

“Hi,” she said to the man behind the counter, “my name is Harriet Daniels,” which was the name of the woman who’d run the rooming house she’d lived in down in Eagle Branch, Texas. “I found an eyeglass case with your store name on it, and I was wondering if you could help me locate the owner of the glasses.”