Meyer sighed. “Games for children. An expensive game for you, my friends.” We walked out and stood by my car. I offered the doctor a ride back to his motel. He got into the front seat. I closed the door and turned and held my hand out to Preston LaFrance.
“Press, I think we’re really in business. I’ll be seeing you in a few days. You draw up the agreement on the Carbee option.”
“Sure, Trav. I’ll sure do that.” His expression was doleful and earnest and anxious, like a dog hoping to be let in out of the rain.
“I hope you get your trouble worked out all right.”
“What? Oh, that terrible business about my nephew.”
“The boy just got too eager, I guess. He knew you and his father were using every legal means to run Bannon out of business. He probably tried a different way of discouraging him.”
“That’s probably it. And he tried to cover up. It was sort of an accident, I’d say. Freddy wouldn’t want to kill anybody. When they find him, I think if he tells exactly what happened, they might agree on letting him plead guilty of manslaughter. Monk has got a lot of leverage in this part of the state. T’rav, how… how soon do you think our deal will go through?”
“A matter of days. Don’t worry about it.”
“I think I’ll go over to the sheriff’s office and see what’s happening.”
He walked away. I walked around the car and got in and drove away. “Pigeon drop, smigeon drop,” said Meyer. “How was I?”
“Like a pro. Great natural talent, Doctor.”
I reached into my breast pocket and took out the intact green claim check and handed it to him. He took the little tin tape dispenser out of his pocket and tore the check in thirds and stuck it back together with the tape.
I made two right turns and parked on the side street behind the hotel. He gave me the claim check and said, “So soon?”
“Why not? While we know Harry is still in the office and we know where ol‘ Press is. Wait right here. Don’t go away, pro.”
I walked around the corner and went in the side door of the hotel and across the old-fashioned lobby to the desk. Harry was alone, sticking mail into the room boxes.
I handed him the check and said, “The winnah!”
“That was a quick one, sir.”
“Wasn’t it, though!”
He brought me the envelope and I said, “Harry, if you want to keep on being friends with Mr. LaFrance, you’d better not mention this little fiasco to him. He was so sure he was right he’s going to be very grumpy about the whole thing.”
“I know what you mean, sir.”
I walked back to the car and drove Meyer to the motel. I gave him the forty thousand, and taped my emergency fund back into its inconspicuous place in the car trunk.
It was just three thirty. When I walked back into the motel unit, Meyer was on the phone talking with his Lauderdale broker. He hung up and looked at the figures he had scribbled down.
“I think the answer is right here, Travis. I don’t think it has to come from Mary Smith. Fletcher Industries moved up one and an eighth today, to sixteen and three eighths on a volume of ninety-four hundred shares. So Janine Bannon has made eleven hundred and twenty-five bucks today.”
“Today?”
“Well, so far. I mean the final returns for the day aren’t in, but it will be pretty close to that. The Dow is off a little over five points. You look astonished. Oh, I see why. This morning before I left I opened her margin account with cash money, pending the power of attorney that you forgot to give me. I put in enough to buy her a thousand shares, and I got them at fifteen and a quarter.”
I gave him the power of attorney. He put it in his dispatch case, and took out all the fake correspondence to My dear Ludweg and the fake reports on plant location data.
“So,” he said, “it was worth the chance and now I reimburse myself out of this money and put the rest into her account to cover the order I placed for the opening tomorrow. Another twenty-five hundred shares. That will commit her account up to maximum. Then I have to go sit and stare at the tape, day after day, ten in the morning to three thirty in the afternoon. Bring me sandwiches.” He waved the sheaf of counterfeit letters and documents. “When these are confetti and flushed away, my heart might slow down some you think?”
He went into the bathroom with them and I placed a credit card call, station to station to the Santo offices, and after a short wait I got Mary Smith.
The approach, to be convincing, had to be that of the male who’d been brushed off.
“McGee here,” I said. “What was Santo’s decision?”
“Oh. Trav. I’ve been so impatient for you to call, darling.”
“I bet. What did he decide.”
“I want to tell you something else first, because I have the hunch that if I tell you first, you’ll hang up.”
“Can you think of any good reason why I shouldn’t?”
“Darling, I can think of a very good reason. My darned telephone was acting up. I knew it was you, but it just kept making a horrid ringing sound in my ear when I picked it up.” Her voice was intimate, cheery, persuasive.
“Nice try, kid.”
“But I’m telling the truth! Really I am. What could make you possibly think I wouldn’t be there? If you want to be such a grouchy old bear, you can call the phone company and ask them if a certain Mary Smith raised absolute hell with them Saturday afternoon. I got the message you left at the office, and I left one for you, hoping you’d call back.”
“At least you make it sound good; Miss Smith.”
“Travis, I know how disappointed and angry you must have been.”
“How come the phone company couldn’t fix the phone?”
“Actually they swore there was nothing wrong with it. They tested and tested, and when I made them come back the second time, they took out the instrument and put in a new one.”
“Which didn’t work either. Which didn’t work on Saturday night.”
“I… wasn’t there.”
“You said you had the weekend open. So why didn’t you hang around? How about four o’clock Sunday morning, kid?”
“I… I was told you’d made other plans, dear.”
“By who?”
“To tell you the truth, I drove up to Lauderdale just to find you. I saw that fantastic boat of yours, dear. It must be a marvelous way of life. A man told me you might be at a party on another boat and I went there, but a very odd-looking girl told me I’d missed you and you might come back. So I waited there. You can ask those people. A lot of them are your friends, I guess. It is quite a… lively group. Then that strange girl came and told me that she found out you had left with another girl, so you probably wouldn’t be back. So… you see, I really tried.”
The persuasive lilt of her tone was dying away, fading back into the monotone of a deadly exhaustion. “So even at four in the morning, you weren’t home yet? I guess you had a good time.”
“Not terribly. But it was pleasant. I… called up an old friend and she invited me over, and it got to be too late to drive back so they put me up for the night, dear.”
“So when did you get home?”
“I think it was about… ten o’clock last night. I spent the day with them. Why, dear? You had a date, didn’t you? There was hardly any point in roaring home and sitting panting by the phone, was there? Listen, dear, I don’t blame you for having a date. After all, it was perfectly reasonable for you to assume I stood you up, and so you said the hell with Mary Smith and her lousy steak. Don’t I get any points for driving all the way up there to find you?”
I said in a marveling tone, “And all it was was a phone out of order. You know, there must be a hex on us.”
“I guess there must be,” she said. She sighed audibly and heavily.
“So expect a man at about nine tonight, honey, Okay?”
“Oh no, darling! I’m sorry.”
“What now?”
“Well… I guess the hex is still working. I… uh… my friends have this little boat at their dock. They live on a canal. And they were going to take me out in the boat, and like a clumsy idiot I tripped somehow and fell headlong, right off the dock into the boat. Honestly I’m an absolute ruin. I was waiting for you to call so that I could get out of here and go home and take a hot bath and go to bed. I’ve been tottering around here today like a little old lady.”