The plane was mostly full. I had an aisle seat just forward of the wing. My seat partner was a youngish woman with a sharp nose and acne scars. She read a Canadian magazine and ignored me entirely. I fastened my belt and put out my cigarette and told the stewardess that I did not want a magazine, and we left the ground and aimed at Chicago.
The .38 was burning a hole in my pocket. There were any number of ways to get rid of it and none of them looked especially attractive. I could stow it under a seat, set it on top of the luggage rack, even make a stab at dumping it into somebody’s suitcase. Whatever I did, it was an odds-on bet that the gun would turn up within an hour after landing, and probably before then. I took a hike to the john, and that was no help at all. Just the bare essentials. No handy hiding place for a hunk of steel that was hotter than . . . well, hotter than a pistol.
I tried to think it through and couldn’t get anywhere. I kept coming back to the job itself, how smoothly it had gone, how thoroughly it had gone to hell for itself. I was a long time hating a girl named Evelyn Stone. I thought about a hundred different ways to make her dead and couldn’t find one mean enough for her. She had conned me as utterly as a man can be conned. She had not merely made me trust her. She had made me love her, and then she stuck it in and broke it off deep.
A funny thing. I wanted badly to hate her, but I kept losing my grip and easing up on all of that hate. I couldn’t hold onto it. She had not betrayed any love because she had faked and manipulated that crock of love from the beginning. Ever since she first latched onto Doug in Vegas, long before she ever set eyes on me, I was her pigeon. She never owed me a thing. If I had seen her within the first couple of hours after we found Gunderman’s body, I probably would have killed her. The rage was fresh then. Time took the edge off it in a hurry. I couldn’t even summon up any really strong craving for revenge. I might never be a charter member of her fan club, but the real gut-bucket hate was gone.
Evelyn Stone had played our little game according to the rules; it was only sad that she and I had been on opposite sides, and that I had not known this. But there was one person who had broken the rules. Right at the start he forgot the one cardinal injunction. Never, under any circumstances, do you play fast and loose with your partner.
Doug crossed me from the opening whistle. He must have known all along that I had a weakness for women, an irritating habit of going overboard for them. So he didn’t bother telling me that he’d pushed Evvie over on her round little heels. That set everything in motion. Once he established the pattern, she played us off so neatly that we never felt the strings.
He had not meant to mess me up. It was just the way he chose to run his show. It had to be his show all the way—his ego wouldn’t let go of it—and that made him improvise, keeping part of the picture hidden, keeping me just far enough in the dark so that things had a chance to go to hell for themselves.
You don’t do that to your partner. That’s the one thing you don’t do, and he’d done it and set Evvie up so that I wound up doing the same thing. And if I didn’t hate her any more, that didn’t mean I was in love with the whole world and at peace with mankind. Not at all.
The sharp-nosed girl beside me stirred in her seat. Down the aisle, the stewardess began serving the meal, the usual airline fare, as sterile and tasteless as the stewardess herself. I broke off my woolgathering and thought about the gun.
There’s always a way. I let the girl serve me my dinner. I ate about half of it and drank a cup of lukewarm coffee. When she took my tray away, my knife wasn’t on it. It was on my lap.
I reached down between my knees and worked on the front edge of my seat with the knife. It was a steak knife, sharp enough on the edge of the blade but not too keen at the tip, and this made it slow going. Once I broke through the vinyl it got easier. I had to keep stopping; the stewardess was walking back and forth, as busy as a speakeasy on Election Day, and my seatmate had turned restless and was given to looking my way. But before too long I had a good hiding place arranged, with the slit just wide enough to admit the gun but small enough to retain it and to pass unnoticed for a good long time.
I couldn’t think of a clever way to pull the gun out of my hip pocket without attracting attention. Finally I went to the john again and came out with the gun wrapped in a paper towel. I sat down again, and when the opportunity came I slipped the gun out of its paper envelope and wedged it into the seat. Someday someone would find it there and wonder how in hell it got there. But they would have no idea what passenger on what flight put it there, and by then it wouldn’t matter anymore.
We landed five minutes ahead of schedule at O’Hare. The Customs man asked me if I had anything to declare, and I said I hadn’t. He asked me how long I had been in Canada. I told him something. He opened my suitcase but didn’t do more than glance in it before passing me on. I could have had three pounds of heroin and an M-l rifle in there and he never would have noticed it.
I stayed at the terminal long enough to practice Gunderman’s signature, copying it from his driver’s license and a few other cards in his wallet. I’m fair but not perfect with a pen. I would never fool an expert, but I might not have to. I would sign his name once, on the hotel registration card, and that would be all. If I could come fairly close, that would probably be good enough.
I cabbed to the Palmer House. They had a single available and I took it. I signed in, did a fair job with the signature, and went to my room. I had a couple of things to do in Chicago and more than enough time to do them.
I packed eleven thousand dollars in a cigar box and packaged it with tender loving care. At the Railway Express office, I shipped it to Terry Moscato’s address and insured it, appropriately enough, for eleven thousand dollars. I told the clerk the parcel contained jewelry. He could not have cared less.
On the way back I called the Palmer House and asked for myself. They rang my room and told me that I wasn’t there. I thanked them. I went to the hotel and the clerk told me there had been a call for me, and gave me the message I had left. I thanked him and went to the room to pick up the envelopes from the suitcase, a handful of bank drafts to be mailed to different places. I bought stamps from a machine in the lobby and mailed them. I went to a movie house on South Dearborn and sat through most of a double feature. I had dinner across the street from the theater and decided to use Gunderman’s credit card and sign his name a second time. I did an even better job with the signature this time around.
The rest was just putting in time. I hit a couple of bars and sorted things out in my mind. By now Doug was probably in Omaha, waiting for me. I’d get there in time to help him pick up the bank drafts that I was scattering all over the Midwest. I tried to figure out just how much cash I was going to realize on the deal. We’d wind up holding something like forty thou, give or take a little, and Doug would draw ten off the top, the original working capital that he’d contributed. The rest would get cut up straight down the middle. No matter how you counted, that made my end in the neighborhood of fifteen grand.
I had another beer and thought about it. It wasn’t all that bad. Getting anything at all was a fluke—hell, beating the murder rap was a fluke, as far as that went.
Fifteen thousand dollars. It was possible. Bannion could give a certain amount of ground; if I played him right, I could get his place for less than I’d figured, and if I couldn’t find the right pitch to hand that old lush I might as well call it a day. If I arranged the right sort of financing and played it close to the vest for the first two or three years, I just might manage to handle the deal after all. It would be close, but it might work.
Ideally, I should have more money to play with. But dreams rarely come true, and never materialize without losing a certain amount of their glow. The original dream sparkled like diamonds—plenty of money and a girl to make it all worthwhile. If I could just squeeze by I was still coming out with a rosy smell.
I called the hotel again and found another bar to play in. It turned out to be a
long night. Somewhere toward the tail end of it I spent enough time in a joint on North Clark to pick up a semi-pro hooker with oversized breasts and too much makeup. We went to her place and made a brave try, but I couldn’t do anything. This didn’t come as much of a surprise. I may have stopped hating Evvie, but I hadn’t yet lost the taste of her. That would take a while.
Eighteen
I don’t know whether or not they can handle jets at Omaha. The plane I took was a prop job, an old DC-7. It got me there fast enough. I’d stayed two nights and a day at the Palmer House before making reservations from Chicago to Buffalo in Gunderman’s name. He’d never make that flight, but it could let them think he’d headed back toward Olean, or planned on it, before something went haywire. If they traced it that far. It was mostly just a question of going through the motions, setting up a few false trails partly for insurance and partly for practice. I’d made the reservation, and then I went out to O’Hare and caught a plane, not for Buffalo but for Omaha. I left his suitcase and his clothes in the room. I took the wallet with me, because men do not leave their wallets in their hotel rooms. In the can at O’Hare I burned up what cards and papers he had that would burn, dropped them in the bowl and flushed them away. The wallet was anonymous enough to go in the wastebasket. The various credit cards would neither burn nor flush nor disappear. I bought a small packet of razor blades at the newsstand and used one of them to slice the cards into strips. I threw the strips away and threw the blades away and waited for my plane. I had a few things in a canvas flight bag. The rest of my clothes were in Omaha. I was anxious to get to them. Gunderman’s clothes did not fit me, and I’d been wearing one change of clothing for too many days.
The airport was thick with police. A day ago they’d have bothered me. Now I hardly noticed them.
The tension was wearing away. A couple of days ago we had been inches from the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, and my skin had been too tight over my bones and sweat came freely. Then in a few fast minutes the gold faded out and there was nothing but a noose at the end of that rainbow. It got very tight for a while. I stopped remembering the seven years in Q and started seeing ropes and gas pellets and electrodes attached to the shaved spots on the head. I wondered how they did it in Ontario. Different states have different ways. In Utah you can stand in front of a firing squad, if you want. And wave away the blindfold and look them in their eyes—
The best way to relax a muscle is to tighten it all the way and squeeze as hard as you can and then let it unwind completely. This, essentially, is what happened. By the time I’d cleared the cashier’s check through our account I was functioning like a machine, gears meshing precisely, bearings oiled and motor in tune. By the time I was playing Hide-the-Gun on the plane for Chicago I was too preoccupied with doing things properly to worry about what might happen if I blew it. And with Chicago behind me and Omaha coming up I could think about meeting Doug and collecting the bank drafts and cashing them, and how much money we would have and what my end would be and whether or not it would be enough. I could think about these things because I knew we were clear. They were not going to tag us for this one.
Which led right into the part that was there all along, hard to see but never hidden. We were making out on this little deal. Everything had gone wrong, the whole bundle had been snatched away when we were already so close to it that we’d mentally spent it twice over. Even so, we were making out. I was fifteen thousand dollars to the good no matter how you added it up. All of that in a couple of months. Three, four years of the salary they paid me at the Boulder Bowl.
So you figure it. I’d missed the girl and I’d missed more than half of the money. The girl wouldn’t bother me long. I love them fast and hard with all the dreamer’s desperation, but once they’re gone I don’t carry their ghosts around. I’d missed the girl and half of the score, but fifteen thou was fifteen thou regardless.
There was a room waiting for me at the Mark Twain. My name was Robert W. Pattison, and they had some letters for me at the desk. I took them upstairs with me. They were one of the batches of bank drafts, all there and all in order, plus a note from Doug telling me where I could find him. He’d left my suitcase with the manager, and I called the desk and asked about it. They apologized and sent a kid upstairs with it and he went back downstairs half a dollar richer. I spent a long time under the shower tap, shaved close and clean, and put on fresh clothes. I picked the one suit I liked, a gray sharkskin with a double vent and patch pockets and just one button in the front. A suit John Hayden never wore in Olean.
I called Doug. He said he’d come around for me. “I bought a car across the line in Kansas,” he said. “I had to take a test and get a license and everything all over again. I thought it would come in handy.”
“The car or the license?”
“Both of them.”
I waited out front for him. The car was a Pontiac, two years old, long and low, a very dark green. It was the kind of car a very square businessman buys when he’s feeling a little racy. I got in it and he drove while I talked. He seemed to know the city fairly well. It’s bigger than it looks. He drove all over it while I talked.
He said, “You come out of this pretty good, don’t you?”
“Do I?”
“Fifteen grand, isn’t it? You didn’t have a pot or a window a few months ago. Setting pins for a dime a line in East Jesus, Colorado.”
“Boulder,” I said. “I didn’t set pins. We had AMF automatic pin-spotters. I was the night man.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you can just come out and say it, fellow.”
He turned to face me and almost sideswiped a parked Ford. He cursed and I said something about him being lucky to pass the Kansas road test. You could feel it building up inside the car, like steam in a teakettle before it starts to whistle.
“I got a big hate on, Johnny.”
“You’ve got company.”
“You come off pretty. You can buy that shithouse in the mountains. Your end comes close enough to covering it. You were figuring loose and you know it. You come out fine.”
“You’ve got the same fifteen I’ve got,” I said easily. “On top of all you had to start with.”
“But we missed the score, Johnny. And had to sweat at the end.”
“Sweat never hurt.”
“You let it go sour, Johnny.”
“It started out sour. You crapped in the milk the first day out and now you wonder why it curdled. You got company with that hate, brother.”
“Any time at all, Johnny.”
“The money first.”
It took us a couple of days. I had spread those bank drafts over four states, and we had to drive around and pick them up. It was nothing but mechanical but it had to be done. There was no rush to cash them. They were good any time, and in any place, and they had all been bought with cash. You could trace them to Canada, but you could not trace them to Parker or Whittlief or Rance or Hayden or Barnstable or Gunderman. They were all of them as good as government paper.
We drove around getting them from the post offices and hotels where I had sent them. We did not talk much. At night we took separate motel rooms and drank ourselves to sleep out of separate bottles. When we did talk, we generally got on each other’s nerves. I was itching for him and he for me, but it had to wait and we were both of us good at waiting.
Then early one afternoon we picked up the last draft at a post office in a very little Iowa town. He asked me if that was the last one, and I told him it was.
He stopped the car and we sliced the pie. We had cashed one of the drafts so that we could even things out properly. He took his expense money out, and the rest divided up into two even piles. My end was a little better than the estimated fifteen. About eight hundred better, plus assorted nickels and dimes.
And he said, “I’m ready when you are, Johnny.”
“Now’s a good time.”
There was a motel coming up on the right. He nodded toward i
t. “Right here?”
“Cabins would be better.”
“Uh-huh.”
Three miles down the road there was one big shack and eighteen smaller ones. A sign advertised cabins for rent, three dollars for a double. There was one car in front of the office, another parked beside one of the cabins. Evidently they got the motel’s overflow and the hot pillow trade and nothing more. Doug pulled off the road and I went into the office and rang for the manager.
He had the too-blue eyes of the alcoholic with a complementary sunburst of broken blood vessels at the bridge of his nose. I told him I wanted a cabin, the farthest one up on the north. He nodded and licked his thin lips.
I gave him three bucks. “We won’t want to be disturbed,” I said. “You hear any party noises from our cabin, anything at all, you just forget you heard a thing.”
He winked at me. I let him dream his own dreams. Maybe he thought I had a fourteen year old girl in the car, maybe he figured I planned a spirited afternoon of rape. He did not mind.
I left the office and went back to the car. We drove over to the far cabin and parked. I opened the cabin door while Doug locked the car up tight. I nicked a light on. The cabin was stale and cheap. There was a bed, a bureau, and a chair. No rug on the floor. The mirror on the wall had a crack in it. I thought of a man or a woman waking up in a room like that one with a taste of whiskey and stale sex for morning company. A person could commit suicide in a cabin like that one.
Doug came in, closed the door, bolted it.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he said, and I hit him in the face. The punch didn’t do much. He was backing up when I threw it and my fist glanced off the side of his face. He missed with a left and threw a right hand into my chest over the heart. I suddenly could not breathe. I ducked away from him and got hit a few times. I got my breath back, ducked under a punch and hit him in the pit of the stomach, hard. He doubled up and almost fell.