Steve came to his feet and shook hands. “Thought you were going to be down in Florida bass fishing this month. You like your work so well you can’t stay away, or is it a matter of trying to impress your chief?”
Larry growled, “Fine thing, fine thing. Secret Service bogs down and they’ve got to call me in to clean up the mess.”
Steve motioned him to a chair and immediately went serious. “Do you know anything about pushing queer, Woolford?”
“That means passing counterfeit money, doesn’t it? All I know is what’s in the Tri-Di crime shows.”
“Oh, great. I can see you’re going to be one hell of a lot of help. Have you gotten anywhere at all on the possibility that the stuff might be coming in from abroad?”
“Nothing positive,” Larry said. “Are you people accomplishing anything?”
“We’re just getting underway. There’s something awfully off-trail about this deal, Woolford. It doesn’t fit into routine.”
Larry said, “I wouldn’t think so if the stuff is so good not even a bank teller can tell the difference.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about now, although that curls our hair too. Let me give you a rundown on standard counterfeiting.” The Secret Service man pushed back in his swivel chair, lit a cigarette and propped his feet onto the edge of a partly open desk drawer. “Briefly, it goes like this. Some smart lad gets himself a set of plates and a platen press and—”
Larry interrupted. “Where does he get the plates?”
“That doesn’t matter for the moment,” Steve said. “Various ways. Maybe he makes them himself, sometimes he buys them from a crooked engraver. But I’m talking about pushing green goods once it’s printed. Anyway, our boy runs off, say, a million dollars worth of fives, face value. But he doesn’t even try to push them himself. He wholesales them around getting, say, fifty thousand dollars. In other words, he sells twenty dollars in counterfeit for one good dollar.”
Larry pursed his lips. “Quite a discount.”
“Ummm. But that’s safest from his angle. The half dozen or so distributors he sold it to don’t try to pass it either. They also are playing it carefully. They peddle it at, say, ten to one, to the next rung down the ladder.”
“And these are the fellows that pass it, eh?”
“Not even then, usually. These small timers take it and pass it on at five to one to the suckers in the trade who take the biggest risks. Most of these are professional pushers of the queer, as the term goes. Some, however, are comparative amateurs. Sailors, for instance, who buy with the idea of passing it in some foreign port where seamen’s money flows fast.”
Larry Woolford shifted in his chair and said, “So what are you building up to?”
Steve Hackett rubbed the end of his pug nose with a forefinger, in quick irritation. “Like I say, that’s standard counterfeiting procedure. We’re all set up to meet it, and do a pretty good job. Where we have our difficulties is with amateurs.”
Woolford scowled at him, lacking comprehension.
Hackett said, “Some guy who makes and passes it himself, for instance. He’s unknown to the stool-pigeons, has no criminal record, does up comparatively small amounts and dribbles his product onto the market over a period of time. We had one old devil up in New York once who actually drew one dollar bills. He was a tremendous artist. It took us years to get him.”
Larry Woolford said, “Well, why go into all this? We’re hardly dealing with amateurs now.”
Steve looked at him. “That’s the trouble. We are.”
“Are you batty? Not even your own experts can tell this product from real money.”
“I didn’t say it was being made by amateurs. It’s being passed by amateurs—or maybe amateur is the better word.”
“How do you know?”
“For one thing, most professionals won’t touch anything bigger than a twenty. Tens are better, fives better still. When you pass a fifty, the person you gave it to is apt to remember where he got it.” Steve Hackett added slowly, “Particularly if you give one as a tip to the maitre d’hotel in a first class restaurant. A maitre d’ holds his job on the strength of his ability to remember faces and names.”
“What else makes you think your pushers are amateurs?”
“Amateur,” Hackett corrected. “Ideally, a pusher is an inconspicuous type, the kind of person whose face you’d never remember. It’s never a teenage girl who’s blowing money at fifty dollars a crack.”
It was time to stare now, and Larry Woolford obliged. “A teenager!”
“We’ve had four descriptions of her, one of them excellent. Fredrick, the maitre d’ over at La Calvados, is the one that counts, but the others jibe. She’s bought perfume and gloves at Michel Swiss, the swankest shop in town; a dress at Chez Marie—she passed three fifties there—and a hat at Paulette’s over on Monroe street.
“That’s another sign of the amateur, by the way. A competent pusher buys a small item and gets change for his counterfeit bill. Our girl’s been buying expensive items, obviously more interested in the product than in her change.”
“This doesn’t seem to make much sense,” Larry Woolford protested. “You have any ideas at all?”
“The question is,” Hackett said, “where did she get it? Is she connected with one of the embassies and acquired the stuff overseas? If so, that puts it in your lap again, possibly—”
The phone rang and Steve flicked the switch and said, “Yeah? Steven Hackett speaking.”
He listened for a moment then banged the phone off and jumped to his feet. “Come on, Larry,” he snapped. “This is it.” He fished down into a desk drawer, came up with a gyro-jet pistol, which he flicked expertly into a shoulder holster rig beneath his left arm.
Larry stood too. “What was that?”
“Fredrick, over at La Calvados. The girl has come in for lunch. Let’s go!”
Larry followed him, saying mildly, “If it’s just a teenage kid, why the shooter?”
Steve looked back at him, over his shoulder. “How do we know this crackpot kid didn’t spend one of her fifties for a nice little pearl handled root-a-toot-tooter? A teenager can put just as big a hole in you as anybody else. Besides, maybe she’s just a front for some guy who is in the background, letting her do the dirty work.”
IV
La Calvados was the swankest French restaurant in Greater Washington, a city not devoid of swank restaurants. It duplicated the decor of Maxim’s in Paris, and was very red carpeted and plush indeed. Only the upper echelons in government circles could afford its tariffs, the clientele was more apt to consist of business mucky-mucks and lobbyists on the make. Larry Woolford had eaten here exactly twice. You could get a reputation spending money far beyond your obvious pay status.
Fredrick, the maitre d’ hotel, however, was able to greet them both by name. “Monsieur Hackett, Monsieur Woolford,” he bowed. He obviously didn’t approve of La Calvados being used as a hangout where counterfeiters were picked up by the authorities.
“Where is she?” Steve said, looking out over the public dining room.
Fredrick said, unprofessionally agitated, “See here, Monsieur Hackett, you didn’t expect to, ah, arrest the young lady here during our luncheon hour?”
Steve looked at him impatiently. “We don’t exactly beat them over the head with blackjacks, slip the bracelets on and drag them screaming to the paddy-wagon.”
“Of course not, Monsieur, but…” Larry Woolford’s chief dined here several times a week and was possibly on the best of terms with Fredrick—whose decisions on tables and whose degree of servility had a good deal of influence on a man’s prestige in Greater Washington. Larry said wearily, “We can wait until she leaves. Where is she?”