He knocked on the door and said, “Doug here,” his voice pitched low and tense. I opened the door. He was wearing a hat and he had a cigar in his mouth. He came inside and drew the door shut.
“He’s going to be me,” he said. “Right?”
“That’s the idea.”
“That’s why the cigar and the hat, and why I acted middle-aged for the clerk. Gunderman does smoke cigars, doesn’t he?”
“Not anymore.”
“I guess not. The money was gone?”
“All but the check. That was there. To lead them to us fast, I suppose.”
He shook his head. “I’d love to kill that girl.”
“You’d have to stand in line. Where’s your room?”
It was one flight downstairs. That made it a little easier. We slipped Gunderman out of his pajamas and put a suit of Doug’s on him—dressing a dead man is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds. The shoes and socks were the hardest part. When we were done with him he wouldn’t have stood inspection, but then he probably wouldn’t have to. The hotel was fairly empty at that hour, and most people don’t pay any particular attention to things that don’t involve them.
At least that’s what we told ourselves. It’s not easy to work yourself up to the point where you can cart a corpse around a hotel without losing your air of nonchalance.
Doug checked the corridor. We waited until it was empty, at least on our floor. Then we hoisted him up and each of us draped one of his dead arms over our shoulders. He was supposed to look drunk, or sick, or something, and we were his good friends helping poor Clyde back to his room. This was the script. It wouldn’t win Oscars, but it had to do the job.
He was very damned heavy, even with the load shared between us. We got him out into the hallway. I kicked the door shut, and we headed for the stairs. As we got there I heard an elevator coming. We ducked into the stairwell just as the door opened on our floor. Whoever got off, we weren’t spotted.
The stairs were easy. We got down them in a hurry, and I stood at the landing with Gunderman draped all over me while Doug checked the traffic on the floor. There was a maid en route, her cart of clean linen blocking our way. We waited for her, and she took her time, until finally she busied herself in one of the bathrooms. She couldn’t see the hallway from there. Doug grabbed hold of Gunderman and we took him for another walk. We couldn’t rush, because the whole scene had to look natural if anyone happened to glance our way.
No one did. We made it to the room and closed the damned door and eased our plucked pigeon down onto the floor. I wanted a cigarette. Instead I lit one of Gunderman’s cigars, and so did Doug. We put another one in the pocket of Doug’s suit.
The rest was frosting. We unpacked Doug’s suitcase and put his clothes away in the dresser and in the closet. With the end of my cigar, I burned a pair of holes in Gunderman’s shirt right above the bullet holes. They did not look exactly like .38-caliber powder burns but they were close enough for the time being.
We planted the fake wallet in his pocket, tossed Doug’s hat on his dresser, dropped our cigar butts in the ashtrays. Then for a finale, we tucked Gunderman in the closet and closed the door on him.
If the bitch had only shot him once, we could have staged it as suicide. But nobody shoots himself twice in the chest. It was as well to make it a murder and let them figure out why and by whom. We left him in the closet and went back to Gunderman’s room.
“Don’t get noticed on the way out,” I said.
“Right.”
“I’ll catch you at the office.”
“Right.”
I gave him a few minutes. Then I hefted a bag with W.J.G. properly embossed upon it, lifted the phone, told the desk to get my bill ready. They said they would. I gave the room a last check, left it, went to the elevator and rode down to the lobby. I should have been nervous. I wasn’t, for some odd reason.
Everything was crystal clear now. All I had to do was go by the book. I was Wallace J. Gunderman, and I was checking out of their hotel, and once I was gone they could put me out of their minds forever. They would never fasten my name onto the dead thing a floor away.
I gave the room key to the clerk. He looked up at me brightly. “You had a call about an hour ago, Mr. Gunderman—”
“I know, I was in the shower. Any message?”
“No, he didn’t leave his name.”
“Well, I think I know who it was. No problem.”
He had my bill ready. While I checked it over he asked me if I had enjoyed my stay. I said I had. With phone calls and room service the tab came to a little short of twenty bucks. I put Gunderman’s Diners Club card on the counter, then snatched it back just as the clerk was reaching for it. I wanted to flash it but I didn’t want to risk a phony signature on the hotel books.
“Let me pay cash,” I said. “I don’t want to mix them up with charges in Canadian funds.”
He couldn’t argue with logic like that. I gave him a twenty, and he gave me change and stamped my bill and handed it to me. I stuck it in Gunderman’s wallet and stuck the wallet in my pocket and picked up my suitcase and headed for the door. Nobody stopped me.
Seventeen
Doug had a few things to do. He had to clear out his apartment, and he had to turn the Barnstable offices into a ghost town. We were on too many official records and we had scattered too much correspondence to strike our sets completely, but Doug could wipe out some of the more obvious traces. This is easy when you have all the time in the world. We had to move fast, and we had to do what we could.
But that was a minor headache. The important thing was something else again. We had two definite facts to contend with—there was a dead man in a closet in the Royal York, and there was a man named Wallace J. Gunderman who had disappeared. If anybody matched the name and the body, then we were in trouble. The longer it took them to put the two together, the better off we were. We had given the body a name and a logical way of dying. Now we had to take the Gunderman identity and find a way to let it trail off and dissolve like smoke.
He had return reservations to Olean for the late afternoon. I called the airport and changed his reservations, asking them for the first plane to Chicago. They had a flight at three-fifteen. I booked a seat on the plane in Gunderman’s name.
Doug was waiting for me at the office. He had called Helen Wyatt to tell her that things had gone sour, and that she should let the other hired hands know as much. They didn’t stand any chance of getting involved—Gunderman alone had seen them, and he wasn’t going to tell anyone—and by the same token they weren’t likely to involve us. It was a courtesy call. When the ship sinks, a good captain at least lets the crew know about it.
“I’m packed and ready,” he said. “Got any cash?”
“A couple of hundred. You?”
“A little more. And there’s a little over twelve thou in the bank, the Barnstable account. If we can get it.”
“No problem there. A day or two from now it might be tight, but nobody’s going to put a freeze on our account for the time being.”
He whistled soundlessly. “We can’t get rich this way. Anyway, it’s a stake. I’m out a few thou but not as much as I expected.”
“You’re forgetting something.”
“What?”
“Terry Moscato.”
His face fell. “That’s ten grand.”
“Plus interest. Eleven thousand. That leaves us with cabfare.”
“We can’t pay him.”
“We damn well have to. You don’t cross the man who bankrolls you. That’s one thing you don’t do. You can lie to your partner—”
“I’m not the only one, Johnny.”
“All right. Put a lid on it. You don’t stiff Moscato, not because it’s a case of honor among thieves but because you’d wind up dead. I mean it. He’s the easiest man to work with as long as you’re good, but if you play him bad you’ve had it. He is hard.”
“Eleven thousand dollars.”
“We’ve got twelve or so in the bank. And I’m holding Gunderman’s check for forty more.”
He’d forgotten about it. This was easy to do. We’d been crossed and skinned and sliced up for bait, and it was hard to regard that cashier’s check as anything more than a prop she’d left for the police to play with. Besides, it was a dead man’s check. A dead man’s check is not negotiable. It’s evidence of a receivable asset, and you can hold it as a claim against the estate of the deceased, but you cannot scrawl your name across the back of it and pass it to a friendly neighborhood teller. It’s locked up tight. Our check was signed by Gunderman, and he was as dead as you can get.
“But nobody knows this,” I said. “It’s going to be a long time before they know he’s dead. We can get rid of the paper long before then.”
“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.
That left the gun. And I didn’t dare dump it anywhere in Canada, because a ballistics check would tie it to the dead man in the closet, and this would not be good at all. I couldn’t know where she bought the gun. It might have come out of Olean originally, and that was the sort of link I did not want to supply. Ideally the gun would be broken down and spread out over a score of sewer systems. In a pinch it would be wiped free of prints inside and out and dropped into a river a thousand miles away from Toronto. But it couldn’t stay in the city, and it couldn’t ride on my person, and it could not nestle in my suitcase.
They called the flight again. I couldn’t miss it or they would start paging Wallace J. Gunderman over the P.A. system. This was not precisely what I had in mind. The Customs inspection wouldn’t come now, at least. It would come when we got to O’Hare. I could sneak the gun onto the plane. But I couldn’t take it off or leave it behind.
Beautiful. I wedged it into a pocket. It looked as inconspicuous as an albino in Harlem. I grabbed my suitcase and ran for the plane.