“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?”
“No more worries about who’ll stand up. Down side, we’d have nobody to work with, either.”
“Why work?” George grinned. “You and me’d be splitting two million, six fifty.”
“Less Mike’s share,” Alan pointed out.
“Right,” George said.
They were planning it, working it out together, because it was not going to be easy to get the drop on Eddie, who was pretty shrewd and probably a little suspicious at this stage. And, while they were figuring it all out, Louis Creamer got in touch to tell them he’d just killed Eddie O’Day.
“He came by my house,” Louis said, “and he was acting weird, you know? He said you guys were going to pull a fast one and rat us out to the cops, but how could you do that? And he had this scheme for taking you both out and getting the money, and him and me’d split it. And I could see where he was going. He wanted me for about as long as it would take to take you both down, and then it would be my turn to go. The son of a bitch.”
“So what did you do?”
“I just punched him out,” Louis said, “and then I took hold of him and broke his fucking neck. Now I got him lying in a heap in my living room, and I don’t know what to do with him.”
“We’ll help,” said George.
They went to Louis’s house, and there was Eddie in a heap on the floor. “Look at this,” George said, holding up a gun. “He was packing.”
“Yeah, well, he was out cold before he could get it out of his pocket.”
“You did good, Louis,” George said, pressing the gun into Eddie’s dead hand and carefully fitting his index finger around the trigger. “Real good,” he said, and pointed the gun at Louis, and put three shots in his chest.
“Amazing,” Alan said. “They really did kill each other. Well, you said it would be convenient.”
“One of them would have cut a deal. In fact Eddie did try to cut a deal, with Louis.”
“But Louis stood up.”
“For how long?”
“That was nice, taking him out with Eddie’s gun. They’ll find nitrate particles in his hand and know he fired the shot. But how’d he get killed?”