“Discount it and sell it?”
“I think it’s easier to cash it. Just shove it the hell through the Barnstable account.”
“And when that check works its way back to his bank?”
“That’s days from now. And who’s going to look at it, anyway?” I crushed a cigarette in the ashtray. “There’s a big unknown here. I’m not sure how she’s going to play it. Right now she’s sure we’re going to get picked up for this one by nightfall. She left a deep wide trail and it leads straight to us and she’ll be expecting a call sometime this evening telling her that her husband is dead.”
“That’s the part I can’t believe.”
“That he married her?”
“Yeah.”
I made him believe it. Then I carried it further. She’d be waiting for that call, and by early evening she’d be starting to sweat. Cool or not, the act of killing was going to get to her sooner or later. And when she had time to think about it, she couldn’t miss seeing that it would be tough for her to keep her fingers clean once they picked us up and we talked.
Because we would have to talk, and we would have to sing out her name loud and clear. We might not be able to prove it. If we did, we were still up to our ears in it; as parties to the con game felony we were legally parties to the murder, like it or not. So we were in trouble, but she was going to have some of it rub off on her. She might not do a bit for murder, might not serve any time at all, but she would have it much easier if we escaped free and clear, and she couldn’t help figuring that out in time.
All of this left her a handy out. She could sit on her hands for a while, saying that Gunderman had gone off on a business trip and she didn’t know when he would be back. Finally she could report him missing, but by this time she could have all the Barnstable correspondence cleared from his files. If our cashier’s check cleared his bank, she could head it off and get rid of it.
They might make the murder connection after a while, but we’d be light years away by then and she wouldn’t steer them toward us. They might not pin the Gunderman label on the Royal York corpse at all. We were trailing Gunderman to Chicago and losing him there. And good hotels don’t publicize men who get murdered on the premises. It’s bad for business. The Royal York would keep the newspaper publicity to a minimum on their dead man. Gunderman might wind up permanently missing. Evvie would have enough control of his money to live it up for the seven years it would take to declare him legally dead. Then she could take the whole bundle.
She might not like it that way, but she could drift into the pattern very easily. As the wife of a missing man, she could live as lush a life as ever. She didn’t have to stay in Olean. And once the seven years played themselves out she was home free.
The bitch didn’t have it so bad. She’d spend seven years waiting for an Enoch Arden decree, and they’d go a lot faster and pass a lot more pleasantly than the seven years I had done in Q. When they ran out, she’d pick up the pot of gold. All I’d landed was a brass check and a night-man slot at a bowling alley.
When I ran out of words we stood there smoking and listening to the silence. He broke it first. “We can come out clean,” he said, and his voice turned it into a prayer.
“Maybe. And probably not. If I had to lay odds I’d guess that they’ll tag us for murder inside of a month and spend three months trying to find us before they write us off. Our prints are on file, but that doesn’t matter if we never get mugged and printed. We’ll be across a national border. We’ll have different names and different haircuts. I think we ought to make it, but we won’t come up smelling of roses.”
He thought it over. I thought about that warm woman and how well I’d been had. I had never felt so much like a mooch. The depths of her eyes, the little sounds of liquid desperation she made in bed. It was hard to believe that all of these things could have been counterfeit.
Forget it. It was every mark’s story, in technicolor on a wide wide screen with a cast of thousands. He was such a nice man, Mommy. I can’t believe such a nice man would steal my candy. He seemed so sincere, Mommy—
Forget it.
I went to our bank and deposited Gunderman’s check to our account. I let the same teller handle a withdrawal for me, and I took an even twenty thousand dollars in cash. This didn’t throw her. The cashier’s check was as good as gold, and I could have tried to get the full amount in cash if I had wanted to. I didn’t. I took the twenty thou from the one girl, and I had another girl certify a check for thirty-one thousand dollars payable to P. T. Parker in U.S. funds. I went to my other bank where I had the Parker account, deposited this check and bought five bank drafts payable to cash for varying amounts ranging from five to ten thousand dollars each.
In a third bank, I used the Canadian cash to buy a few more bank drafts and a handful of traveler’s cheques. I held out eleven thousand in U.S. dollars. In the main post office, I packed away the bank drafts in individual envelopes and mailed them off. I shipped a few of them to Robert W. Pattison at the Hotel Mark Twain in Omaha. I scattered the rest around the Midwest, mostly in Kansas and Iowa, sending them to various names at various general delivery offices. I mailed a little less than half of them from the Toronto Post Office and kept the rest aside.
There was just enough time for a telephone call before my plane was ready to go. It took a few tries to reach Terry Moscato. I finally got him.
I said, “I think you know me. Can you talk now?”
“I know you, and I can talk, but no names or details. Go ahead.”
“It’s done. It went to hell, but it’s done. I have the goods you want and I’d like to deliver.”
“I’d be glad to have you make delivery. Are you sure you’ve got the right size?”
“Size eleven,” I said.
“That’s fine. Can you come to town for delivery?”
“Not very easily.”
“If I arranged a pick-up,” he said carefully, “there would be an additional handling charge.”
I didn’t want him to send a boy, handling charge or no. “I was thinking about the mails,” I said.
“I don’t like that.”
“Not from this port. A standard interstate shipment, registered and insured.”
The line was silent while he thought this over. There is nothing safer than registered and insured mail. But he still didn’t like it.
“Railway Express,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“Definitely. The same drop.” And he rang off. I wondered what he had against the mails.
They were already calling my flight when I remembered two things. The gun and the money. I had the murder gun and a pair of bloody pajamas in my suitcase, and I had eleven thousand dollars of Moscato’s money keeping them company.
On an ordinary flight this wouldn’t have mattered. It’s against some silly law to carry a gun on a plane, but no one normally paws through your baggage or frisks you as you enter the plane. This was not an entirely normal flight. This was a flight from one country to another, and that meant going through Customs.
You lose sight of this when the two countries are the States and Canada. Customs inspections are cursory at best — every fifth car going over a bridge, a quick peek in suitcases on a plane ride. If your contraband is something as innocuous as a fifth of undeclared Scotch, you don’t break out in a rash worrying about getting tagged. When you’re packing eleven thousand dollars that you can’t explain along with a gun that’s just been used in a murder, it gets a little sticky.
There was no place to stash the gun, no handy way to conceal the dough. I ducked into the men’s room and got the suitcase open. I ripped the pajamas apart, flushed the singed and bloody pieces down the toilet along with the Olean label and tucked the rest in the trashcan. I parceled up the stack of hundred-dollar bills. There were a hundred and ten of them, and by balancing them off in various pockets and lodging a healthy sheaf of them in my wallet, I managed to spread them over my person without bulging anywhere.