Then Justin started printing bills from the plates, and they got rich. After that, Justin didn’t have to work so hard, either, because he turned down most jobs that came into the print shop, told them he was behind schedule and couldn’t handle any more. He took just a little work, to keep up a front. And behind the front, he made five and ten dollar bills, and he and Harley got rich.
He got to know other people whom Harley knew. He met Bull Mallon, who handled the distribution end. Bull Mallon was built like a bull, that was why they called him that. He had a face that never smiled or changed expression at all except when he was holding burning matches to the soles of Justin’s bare feet. But that wasn’t then; that was later, when he wanted Justin to tell him where the plates were.
And he got to know Captain John Willys of the Police Department, who was a friend of Harley’s to whom Harley gave quite a bit of the money they made, but that didn’t matter, either, because there was plenty left and they all got rich. He met a friend of Harley’s who was a big star of the stage, and one who owned a big New York newspaper. He got to know other people equally important, but in less respectable ways.
Harley, Justin knew, had a hand in lots of other enterprises besides the little mint on Amsterdam Avenue. Some of these ventures took him out of town, usually over weekends. And the weekend that Harley was murdered, Justin never found out what really happened, except that Harley went away and didn’t come back. Oh, he knew that he was murdered, all right, because the police found his body — with three bullet holes in his chest — in the most expensive suite of the best hotel in Albany. Even for a place to be found dead in, Harley Prentice had chosen the best.
All Justin ever knew about it was that a long distance call came to him at the hotel where he was staying, the night that Harley was murdered — it must have been a matter of minutes, in fact, before the time the newspapers said Harley was killed.
It was Harley’s voice on the phone, and his voice was debonair and unexcited as ever. But he said, “Justin? Get to the shop and get rid of the plates, the paper, everything. Right away. I’ll explain when I see you.” He waited only until Justin said, “Sure. Harley,” and then he said, “Attaboy.”
Justin hurried around to the printing shop and got the plates and the paper and a few thousand dollars worth of counterfeit bills that were on hand. He made the paper and bills into one bundle and the copper plates into another, smaller one, and he left the shop with no evidence that it had ever been a mint in miniature.
He was very careful and very clever in disposing of both bundles. He got rid of the big one first by checking in at a big hotel, not one he or Harley ever stayed at, under a false name, just to have a chance to put the big bundle in the incinerator there. It was paper and it would burn. And he made sure there was a fire in the incinerator before he dropped it down the chute.
The plates were different. They wouldn’t burn, he knew, so he took a trip to Staten Island and back on the ferry, and somewhere out in the middle of the bay, he dropped the bundle over the side into the water.
Then, having done what Harley had told him to do, and having done it well and thoroughly, he went back to the hotel — his own hotel, not the one where he had dumped the paper and the bills — and went to sleep.
In the morning, he read in the newspapers that Harley had been killed, and he was stunned. It didn’t seem possible. He couldn’t believe it; it was a joke someone was playing on him. Harley would come back to him, he knew. And he was right; Harley did, but that was later, in the swamp.
But anyway, Justin had to know, so he took the very next train for Albany. He must have been on the train when the police went to his hotel, and at the hotel they must have learned he’d asked at the desk about trains for Albany, because they were waiting for him when he got off the train there.
They took him to a station and they kept him there a long, long time, days and days, asking him questions. They found out, after a while, that he couldn’t have killed Harley because he’d been in New York City at the time Harley was killed in Albany, but they knew, also, that he and Harley had been operating the little mint, and they thought that might be a lead to who killed Harley, and they were interested in the counterfeiting, too, maybe even more than in the murder.
They asked Justin Dean questions, over and over and over, and he couldn’t answer them, so he didn’t. They kept him awake for days at a time, asking him questions over and over. Most of all they wanted to know where the plates were. He wished he could tell them that the plates were safe where nobody could ever get them again, but he couldn’t tell them that without admitting that he and Harley had been counterfeiting, so he couldn’t tell them.
They located the Amsterdam shop, but they didn’t find any evidence there, and they really had no evidence to hold Justin on at all, but he didn’t know that, and it never occurred to him to get a lawyer.
He kept wanting to see Harley, and they wouldn’t let him; then, when they learned he really didn’t believe Harley could be dead, they made him look at a dead man they said was Harley, and he guessed it was, although Harley looked different dead. He didn’t look magnificent, dead. And Justin believed, then, but still didn’t believe. And after that he just went silent and wouldn’t say a word, even when they kept him awake for days and days with a bright light in his eyes, and kept slapping him to keep him awake. They didn’t use clubs or rubber hoses, but they slapped him a million times and wouldn’t let him sleep. And after a while, he lost track of things and couldn’t have answered their questions even if he’d wanted to.
For a while after that, he was in a bed in a white room, and all he remembers about that are nightmares he had, and calling for Harley and an awful confusion as to whether Harley was dead or not, and then things came back to him gradually and he knew he didn’t want to stay in the white room; he wanted to get out so he could hunt for Harley. And if Harley was dead, he wanted to kill whoever had killed Harley, because Harley would do the same for him.
So he began pretending, and acting, very cleverly, the way the doctors and nurses seemed to want him to act, and after a while they gave him his clothes and let him go.
He was becoming cleverer, now. He thought, What would Harley tell me to do? And he knew they’d try to follow him because they’d think he might lead them to the plates, which they didn’t know were at the bottom of the bay, and he gave them the slip before he left Albany, and he went first to Boston, and from there by boat to New York, instead of going direct.
He went first to the print shop, and went in the back way after watching the alley for a long time to be sure the place wasn’t guarded. It was a mess; they must have searched it very thoroughly for the plates.
Harley wasn’t there, of course. Justin left and from a phone booth in a drug store, he telephoned their hotel and asked for Harley and was told Harley no longer lived there; and to be clever and not let them guess who he was, he asked for Justin Dean, and they said Justin Dean didn’t live there any more either.
Then he moved to a different drug store and from there he decided to call up some friends of Harley’s, and he phoned Bull Mallon first and because Bull was a friend, he told him who he was and asked if he knew where Harley was.
Bull Mallon didn’t pay any attention to that; he sounded excited, a little, and he asked, “Did the cops get the plates, Dean?” and Justin said they didn’t, that he wouldn’t tell them, and he asked again about Harley.
Bull asked, “Are you nuts, or kidding?” And Justin just asked him again, and Bull’s voice changed and he said, “Where are you?” and Justin told him. Bull said, “Harley’s here. He’s staying under cover, but it’s all right if you know, Dean. You wait right there at the drug store, and we’ll come and get you.”