The Price of Murder (11 page)

Verney folded his pale, powerful hands. “I am listening.”

Dixon hitched his chair forward and lowered his voice. “Remember the Rovere case? The money? It’s never showed up. It’s still too hot. It will always be too hot. Want to know a little history? You can’t prove any of this no matter what you decide. There’s three hundred and twenty-seven thousand. All of the fifties and all of the twenties. A county cop grabbed it that night, drove three miles with it and pitched it into the brush and recovered it the next morning. He sat on it for nearly a year, scared to spend it, scared to unload it. He sold it for ten thousand he could spend. He sold it so he could sleep nights. A speculator in Cleveland bought it and, after a second thought, was happy to unload it in Detroit to a friend of mine a week later for fifteen. My friend figured to sit on it for a couple of years until the heat went off! and he could risk spreading it around. But the heat has never gone off. He needs some money. It’s on the market. He’ll let it go for eighty.”

“Why come to me?”

“It can’t be sold in the usual channels. Nobody will touch it. Get caught and it’s too hard for people like that to prove they weren’t in on the snatch. We had a talk about it a month or so ago. I had a few ideas. One of them was you.”

“What good would that money do me?”

“You’re clean. So is Catton. But you’re both larcenous types. You can get it out of the country. Hell, either of you can take all the trips you want. Take it out in small chunks. You two can even keep it in a safety deposit box. South America, Central America, Mexico. You can trade it there. Suppose you hit five or six banks in Rio. Convert it and then convert it back. Months later the stuff drifts
back into the Federal Reserve System. By then it’s too late to identify where it came from.”

“So why don’t you do it?”

“Because there is some strange difficulty about getting a passport. And I have no legitimate business reason for a trip. You and Catton have stock in a Panamanian shipping line and in two small South American air lines.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

“Paul, I think that’s the first time I ever heard you say a naughty word. Never mind how I know.”

“The stock is practically worthless.”

“But you’ve got it.”

“Can’t any of your … associates get out of the country?”

“There is a kind of unreasoning, superstitious dread about this money, Paul. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s there. My friend, the guy who wants to sell it, was in France three months ago. He took fifty thousand of it along and lost his nerve and brought it all back and put the whole bundle in what he considers a safer place. I think you’re too hardheaded to be superstitious about it.”

“What do you get out of this?”

“Ten per cent.”

“Why doesn’t he take the whole bundle and leave for good, go some place where he can’t be sent back?”

“He’s a patriot. He likes milk shakes and air conditioning. And he’s got other irons in the fire. Is Luciano happy?”

“I’ll … I’ll have to think.”

“You can’t miss. Can you raise the money?”

“Not now. Not the way things are. Maybe the two of us can, if Catton will go for it.”

“He’ll go for it, if he’s as smart as you are, Paul. It’s what I told my friend a month ago. It’s got to be sold to somebody legitimate. It’s too risky to try to do anything with it here. You might pass three thousand bucks before some smart teller checks the list. Once that starts, you wouldn’t hear about it. They’d just close in on you, using every bill as a signpost, like a paper chase.”

“How do I get in touch with you?”

“I’m registered at the Hancock House. I’ll wait.”

“How can I be sure it’s the money? This would be a fine way to unload counterfeit.”

Dixon grinned merrily. “Why, if you have any doubts, take one of those fifties to the bank and ask about it, pal.”

“But …”

“It’s legitimate. I’ll give you a clipping with those three sets of serial numbers and you can check. It’s the money. You’ll be buying three dollars for … no, four dollars for every one.”

Catton, lying listless and wasted in bed, had been frightened by the idea. It had taken Paul two hours to convince him. By the time he left, Burt Catton was exhausted. And Paul knew just how far they could go. Forty from Burt and twenty-five from him would strip them almost completely. Sixty-five thousand.

He offered Dixon sixty. Dixon was amused, indignant, enraged. Paul stood firm. Dixon left and made a phone call. He came back and said seventy was rock bottom. Paul offered sixty-five and said it was absolute top. Dixon was gone much longer the second time. He came back and said, “All right. It’s fine. It’s just dandy. I don’t get ten per cent. I get five per cent. Instead of eight grand I get a lousy three and a quarter, so he only nets one and a quarter less than if you took it at seven. The rest of the difference comes out of my hide. Write this down. Ready? Hogan 68681. That’s a Tulsa exchange. Phone any day next week in person, from Tulsa. Ask for Jerry. Have the sixty-five with you in cash. No thousands. When you get Jerry on the line ask him if he knows where you can buy a good used Cad. He’ll take it from there.”

“Tulsa!”

“It’s a city. Like in Oklahoma. You won’t like it. Few people do.”

And as they had parted then, the last time Verney had seen Dixon, Roger had looked at him intently and curiously and said, “It must have really been something.”

“What do you mean?”

“When your toy train went off the tracks. The first major setback in your whole life. It must have really
rocked you, Paul. Did you chew up the carpets and run around the walls?”

“I was disappointed.”

“You were more than that, Paul. You were shocked. The whole world was turned upside down. They couldn’t do this to you. Not to the one and only, the unique Paul Verney. Actually. I’m surprised you didn’t kill yourself. Or lose your mind. I had high hopes. I figured you far too brittle to adjust to failure. You see, I can remember the times you got crossed up in little ways. Your reaction was murderous.”

“Your imagination has always been too vivid, Roger.”

Dixon sighed. “I should have known I’d guess bad again. You’ll handle this well. You’ll make a potful. You’ll screw Catton out of his end, and you’ll come out right on schedule or ahead, even. I just have one small hope. I hope I never have to look at you again.”

“You should be able to arrange that, Roger.”

He told no one where he was going. He told his office staff he was going on a fishing trip. Catton, with face like a skull, had managed to totter into the bank and sign for a safety deposit box and carry it into a booth and take out the cash Paul needed. There were no thousand-dollar bills in either reserve fund. It was nearly all in hundreds, with a very few fifties. Verney packed the money in the bottom of his grip, two packets fastened with rubber bands each nearly three inches thick. The night before he left he thought of the money and how all of this might very easily be an intricate confidence game. In the morning he put the money into two cigar boxes and mailed them separately to himself at the Tulsa hotel where he had made a reservation under the name of W. W. Ward, writing on the outside of each package,
Hold for Arrival

He reached Tulsa in three days, phoned the hotel, found the packages had arrived and were being held, and he asked they be put in the hotel safe. When he checked in they gave him a receipt for the two packages. He mailed the receipt to himself care of General Delivery at Tulsa. Then, unable to think of any further way to protect
himself, he went to a drugstore booth and phoned and asked for Jerry and spoke nonsense about a used car.

He was picked up that night on a dark corner ten blocks from the hotel. He sat in the back seat of a sedan between two men who had no desire to talk. The driver wore a baseball cap and his ears stuck out, silhouetted against oncoming lights as they left the city and drove very fast for a long time. They stopped and the driver got out and opened a cattle gate and drove in and closed the gate and drove another quarter mile to a house. They shut him in a small bare room with the money. It was tightly packed into a cheap dark blue suitcase with a single wide gray stripe. He checked the serial numbers against the clipping Dixon had given him. The money looked good, looked authentic. He made a halfhearted attempt to count it, and estimated it was all there. He knocked and they let him out and he talked in a dark hallway to a stocky man whose face he never saw.

“Satisfied?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s your end?”

“I can’t get it until after nine tomorrow.”

“You stay here tonight and I’ll send you in and you get it and you’ll be brought back out.”

“No.”

There was an understanding silence. “How do you want to do it?”

“I’ll take this in with me. Your people can stay close to me. I’ll turn over my money.”

“I don’t like that.”

Verney suddenly had a better idea. “Take me back to the city now. I’ll meet you, alone, tomorrow, at ten in the morning, at any busy public place you want to name. We will meet and decide where to make the exchange.”

They met in front of a large department store. Verney recognized the suitcase. The stocky man had a broad impassive face, a slightly Indian look. He said, “If you say where, you can have a setup working. Same with me. So where do we go?”

“Let’s get a cab.”

“No cab stands. The first cruiser. It better come quick. This is making me sweat.”

A taxi came by moments later. Verney hailed it and it swung in to the curb. Verney said to the driver, “Where did you take your last fare?”

“Way out on Fernandez. What’s the scoop?”

“What’s the last public place, big place, you took a fare to?”

“What kinda gag is this? Lessee … railroad station.”

Verney looked at the stocky man and he nodded. “Take us there, please.”

They went to the men’s room, rented dim stalls. Verney sat with the suitcase across his knees and opened it. He dug down to be certain it wasn’t a thin layer of money. He snapped it shut and walked out, and the voice from the neighboring stall said sharply, “Watch it! Stay right there where I can watch your feet.” Verney heard the rustle of paper. He waited a full five minutes, cold sweat trickling out of his armpits. The door opened and the stocky man came out, the two cigar boxes under his arm, clamped tightly against him. Verney expected some comment. The man gave a single abrupt nod and left. Verney followed him quickly, but stayed fifty feet behind. When he saw the man shut himself into a phone booth on the far side of the station, he walked quickly out and found a cab and directed him to take him to the hotel garage. He locked the suitcase in the back of the Dodge and drove the car around and parked it in the front. Ten minutes later he was on his way out of town. He was unable to take a really deep breath until he was through Bartlesville on Route 75 north. He felt as though he had handled himself very well indeed. There was three hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars in the trunk of the car. Catton, despite the fact he had put up forty of the sixty-five, had agreed to an even split.

They took the calculated risk of putting the money in safety deposit boxes. Once again Catton was driven down to the Hancock Bank and Trust. They shut themselves into one of the larger cubicles and made a careful count of the money. Catton wanted an even division, each man holding onto his share.

“You had better let me hold it all, Burt.”

“No thank you.”

“Use your head, will you? You are coming along fine. But you have had a coronary. It’s possible you could have another. Then the court opens your boxes. Where will that leave me?”

“If we do it your way and if I should … have bad luck, Paul, it will be your good luck, won’t it?”

“That is an unkind thing to say.”

“We’ll do it my way, Paul. That will give you a good reason to move as fast as you can on this matter.”

And Verney was not able to change his mind. It was agreed that Paul would take an extended trip in November and December, taking fifty thousand from each share and handling the conversion and reconversion of funds in five South American countries. The monies so obtained would be used as partial payments on the tax indebtedness in January. Paul would set up a dummy transfer of real estate holdings to account for the cash in hand. By that time Catton would be able to travel, and would convert an equal amount. The following summer Paul would convert the balance. By fall all tax claims would be satisfied and there would be a small but comfortable surplus for each of them. Too careful an investigation of the dummy real estate transfers would cause embarrassing questions about where the funds had come from, but it was a chance they felt worth taking. With Paul hitting South America, then Catton hitting Central America, then Paul disposing of the balance on the continent, it was likely that they would stay a long jump ahead of any investigation once the identity of the money was discovered. With both boldness and careful planning, it could be done.

Verney parked his car in the shed garage behind the Center Club, went in the back way, and took the front elevator up to the third floor to his room. All the way back from the camp he had been disturbed because he could not think with the clarity and purpose and method that was so much a part of his nature. He knew that apprehension had given an emotional coloring to his mental
processes. Bronson’s tough, knowing face kept intruding.

He prepared himself for thought, for the cold evaluations he depended upon. He put on a worn flannel smoking jacket and sat in the deep leather chair half turned toward the double window. The sky over the city was overcast; the light that came into the room was gray.

The loose mouth of a sick man. The unfortunate choice the sick man’s wife had made in a partner in her sexual adventures. The career and reputation of Bronson. Catton’s precarious health. Seven years Bronson owed the state. The written report that was Bronson’s insurance. These were factors. He examined each one, holding each factor up in turn to examine its texture and its curious shape. There would be a way one would fit against another, and a way to slide a third in place. And in the end there would be a picture, one that he could accept.