The Girl With the Long Green Heart (19 page)

Doug was making meaningless sounds beside me. I looked back stupidly to make sure that the door was closed. It was. I looked around the room. The gun was not too far from the body. I went over to all that was left of our pigeon and knelt down beside him. I touched the side of his face. His flesh was cool but not cold, and the bits of blood were drying but not yet dry. Someone with a better background than mine could have said with assurance just how long dead he was. It was out of my line. I never had all that much to do with dead men.

“Oh, Johnny—”

I walked over to where the gun lay. A good manly gun. Guns were not my line either, but I knew the make and model of this one. A .38 Smith and Wesson with a three-inch barrel and a safety on the grip. I knew it well.

“Don’t touch it, Johnny.”

I picked up the gun.

“Brilliant,” he was saying. “Oh, brilliant. Now you’ve got your prints all over the damned thing, Johnny.”

I knew better. They were already there. I’d put them there long ago in another town in another country.
Get me one of my cigarettes, John
—and that gun in her purse, waiting to be found, waiting to be gripped. She’d never touched it after that. She let me unload it and put it away myself. She never laid a finger on it—until later, alone, with gloves on, once to load it and once this morning to fire it, twice. I looked down at that dead man and envied him.

Sixteen

“She killed him,” I said. I was a little shaky and my eyes weren’t focusing properly. “This . . . I put my prints on this gun a week ago. It was her gun, she conned me into picking it up and playing with it.”

“Where did you see her?”

“Olean. She—”

“You took a trip a week ago? You didn’t tell me.”

“She was—” the words came slow, “nervous, she said. She thought things were falling in. It turned out to be a false alarm, but in the middle of it she set me up to find the gun for her.”

“You never said a thing.” His tone was flat, hard.

“She didn’t want me to.”

“She
what
?”

“I was hung on the girl,” I said.

“Give me that again.”

I turned on him. “I was in love with the bitch,” I said, “and I was taken. But how the hell did she get here? I talked to her last night. She called me last night, dammit, and she called long-distance. I don’t get any of this.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“What?”

“I thought she was calling Gunderman.”

I grabbed his arm. “Give me that again. From the beginning.”

It was his turn to look worried. “She flew into town yesterday afternoon,” he said. “So she would be here after the job was over.”

“After the job—”

“We were going to fly to Vegas. The two of us.” I did not say anything. “Well, she’s a good piece, damn it. She didn’t want you to know because she said you tried and struck out.”

“I got the same line.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The hell I am. What kind of a damn fool are you, flying her to Toronto? What’s the brilliant point of that?”

“Johnny—”

“I talked to her last night. First an operator, person-to-person, and then—”

He was just shaking his head. “I thought it was Gunderman, Johnny. Oh, Jesus. She said she wanted to call Gunderman and make it seem like a long-distance call. I sat right there in the room with her. I told her how to fake the operator’s voice. She held a handkerchief over the phone and talked very distinctly and a little nasally with the phone about six inches from her mouth. And then took the handkerchief off and got close to the phone when she was playing Evvie again. Oh, she is cute.”

“Yeah.”

“And I sat there in the room and thought she was talking to him.”

She was very cute. I thought back to the conversation, trying to remember. “She asked for me,” I said. “By name. Were you in the room when she played the operator bit?”

“I must have been.”

“Then—”

“No, she wanted a drink. I went into the kitchen. I thought I heard—oh, damn it.”

I’d admired her timing before. The slipped kiss in front of his office building, the sweet way she had of playing things like a true-blooded professional. And I had thought she was only playing one side. She’d played all three of us, and played us off the wall.

She had never mentioned my name. And she had thrown me a conversation that she could as well have thrown to Gunderman. How she missed me, and how she hoped everything would go all right, and how she couldn’t wait to see me again. I remembered now that she had sounded a little less hip than usual. No grifter argot. It wouldn’t have done the necessary double duty. She never missed a trick.

“Johnny, if you had said something—”

“Me?”

“You said she didn’t mean a thing to you. If I knew she did I would have seen her angle. You blew this one, Johnny.”

I forced myself to stay steady. “You’re a pretty one,” I said. “You’re so in love with yourself you can’t see straight. You’re so damned busy being the hottest puff of smoke since the Yellow Kid. You put this on the screw from the beginning.”

“How?”

“You balled her in Vegas, didn’t you?”

He told me so with his eyes.

“You should have said it then. You should have let this thing play straight from the beginning, but you had to be goddamned cute about it. I’d like a chance at you, Rance.”

“Any time.”

I almost swung. I don’t know what stopped me, but I almost swung, and that would have torn it for good. It’s not a good idea to start a fight and draw a crowd, not when you’ve got a corpse on the floor and the murder gun carries your prints.

I looked at him and said, “Later.”

“All right.”

“We’ve got to dig out from under.”

“Pick up the gun and leave.”

He was full of bright ideas. I told him how far we’d get. We were tied to Gunderman a hundred different ways. There were too many papers in his office with our names on them, too many connections. This had to be staged just as neatly as any blow-off operation. We were blowing off a dead man instead of a live one. That was the only difference. It took just as sure a touch, just as firm a sense of the game.

It took two cigarettes. Then I had it. I said, “There’s a way. You’ll need a suitcase. And a wallet with fake identification.”

“I’ve got both at the apartment.”

“Good. You leave the hotel now. Go out a back entrance, grab a cab, go to your place.” I went over to the window. “I hope your fake ID sets you up in some far-away place.”

“I’ve got papers for California. Los Angeles, I think.”

“Good. Throw a few things in a suitcase. California labels, nothing else. You’re close enough to his size to do it. Then get in another cab and come back to the hotel. Go to the desk and check in under the phony name. Get a room as close to this one as you can. The same side of the building. Tell them you want to face whatever the hell that street is out there. One floor away is fine. One floor away is better than the same floor, actually. You with me?”

“I guess so.”

“Check in, go to your room, and then get back here. I’ll have it set up. We’ve got a few things going for us. He checked in yesterday afternoon. The kid on the desk now never saw him, not yesterday afternoon and not last night. We’ve just about got time. Move.”

“Johnny?”

“What?”

“I can’t figure the cross. He had the money with him. It might still be around—”

“It won’t be. She took it.”

“Even so. She gets seventy thou instead of seventeen-five. She doesn’t figure to kill for the difference, does she?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said.

When he left I shut the door and bolted it after him. I did not want any hyperefficient maid stumbling in on me. Then I walked into the john and washed my hands and dried them on a towel and went back to get things in motion. I found his suitcase on the floor of the closet. I packed his clothes in it. I went through the dresser and the pockets of his clothes and picked off everything that gave a clue as to who he was and where he came from. All of this went into the suitcase. I got his money belt—you don’t see them much anymore, but he’d had one and she would have known about it. I wasn’t surprised to find it empty.

There was a cashier’s check in his wallet, drawn to the order of the Barnstable Corporation and made out in the amount of forty thousand dollars. I tucked this in my own wallet, then thought a moment and switched his wallet for my own. If I was going to be him I might as well do it right.

When I first started to move him, I thought I might be sick. I got past the first rush of nausea and then things settled down. He wasn’t a corpse, he was just a dead weight. I dragged him a few feet away and checked the carpet where he had lain.

It wasn’t bad. Not too much blood, really, and the carpet was nylon and not especially absorbent. I wetted some toilet paper and wiped it so that it looked clean. Spectroscopic analysis would show blood for weeks, but if things broke right nobody would come looking, and if things went wrong they wouldn’t need bloodstains to hang us.

I tried to keep busy that way. As long as I was doing things, moving and staying active, I didn’t have to think so hard about things that were better unexamined. Like the sweet way she’d set it up. Like the reason she worked the cross.

She hadn’t killed him for the simple arithmetical difference between seventeen and seventy thousand dollars. She had killed him for the whole bundle. She wanted everything, everything that belonged to Wallace J. Gunderman.

She’d get it, too. Because the bitch had married him. I lit a cigarette. He’d as much as told me the night before, and I had been too damned stupid to pick it up then and there. All of that coyness—I’d taken it for granted he was acting that way because he thought I was hung on Evvie while he was actually keeping her and using her to keep me on his team. But the words he’d used made more sense now. He had married her.

It made more sense that way.

And other parts made sense. The attitude he’d shown all those times pointed out one thing—since his wife died, he had been the one pushing for marriage and she had been busy putting him off. It added up a million times as sensibly that way. She had waited, and she had finally gone and married him just in time to be his widow.

What was he worth? A few million? And to that you could tack on a whole load of extras, like the hate she had for him and the kick she must have felt when the gun went off. It all tallied out to a lot more than the seventeen and a half thousand dollars that she was supposed to get out of the deal. It added up to many miles more than a roadhouse in Colorado and a broken-down grifter for a husband and “Hearts and Flowers” for a theme song.

We were supposed to get stuck with it. We’d be tied up tight, and she could keep herself in the clear. She had never put anything on paper. We could never drag her into it. We could only tighten the noose around our own necks.

I lit another cigarette and wished to hell Doug would get back. We had a chance, I thought. Getting to his hotel room on time had opened it up for us. And Doug was about his build—that helped. And the timing with the hotel clerks. We did not exactly have the odds on our side, and if we had held those cards in a poker game I would have thrown our hand in and folded. But you can’t ever fold when your whole damned life’s in the pot. You have to play whatever’s dealt.

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.