And the satchel was much too heavy. I had the eerie feeling that anyone looking at it could tell at a glance that it was loaded with money that didn’t belong to us. I wanted to put it in my pocket or something. It really worried me.
They called our flight and we were the first passengers on it. We found seats up front and I let her have the one by the window. I set the satchel in my lap and tried to cover it up with my hands. It didn’t work.
The plane filled up. The stewardess welcomed us aboard and said some other silly things, we put out our cigarettes and fastened our safety belts, the flight took off. It was a smooth takeoff and smooth flying all the way. The ham and eggs stayed in my stomach.
The three of us landed at Phoenix — me, Cindy and the fifty grand. The three of us got out of the plane and into a cab. Cindy and I looked like wilted flowers. The money was fresh as a field of daisies.
I checked us in at the De Milo Arms, a slightly better-than-average hotel off Schwerner Square in the middle of downtown Phoenix. Now we were Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Harris. The Ronald Stones had disappeared for good.
The bellboy tried to take the satchel from me but I didn’t let him. He led us to our room and I tipped him and he disappeared. When he was gone I locked the door and put the chain on. I pulled down the window shade, then sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the satchel.
The money, miraculously, was still there.
“Look at it,” she said. “Just look at it.”
She scared me. She sounded like a knight gazing upon the Holy Grail. I wondered just how much she would do for fifty thousand dollars, just how much she had already done. There was something phony about her story of the con game operation, something that didn’t quite ring true. I’d been thinking about it on the plane ride but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was fairly certain she’d lied somehow about her own part in the proceedings but I wasn’t sure how or why.
And I didn’t want to think about it.
What did it matter? We were free, clear, safe. We were in Phoenix and no one knew it. We had fifty thousand dollars and the world belonged to us.
She echoed my thoughts. “We’re safe, Ted. We’re out of New York and no one knows it. We’re safe.”
I was too exhausted emotionally to say a damn thing.
She stood up. “I’m taking some money and going shopping,” she said. “You stay here until I come back. Then you can go out and see about a car, pick up some clothes for yourself, things like that. Okay?”
It was okay with me.
I waited until she was out of the building. I watched through the window and saw her head down the street toward the section where the stores seemed to be.
It was only four-thirty. We’d gotten a break — the time in the plane had been largely offset by the time belts we had crossed on the way. There was still time for her to get some shopping done, maybe even time for me to see about a car after she got back.
Meanwhile I had things to do.
I picked up the phone, called Room Service. I told them to send up a fifth of Jack Daniels and some ice. I signed for the tab, slipped the bellboy a buck and smiled while he thanked me.
The Jack Daniels was silky smooth and I needed it desperately. I made myself a tall cool one and relaxed in an easy chair with it, sipping it slowly and tasting it all the way down.
I had a lot of thinking to do.
With the liquor clearing my head and with Cindy’s pleasantly disturbing body out of my way I could concentrate on all the things that were hard to concentrate upon otherwise. The con game was too elaborate to be a lie and her story was a little too rough to be entirely true. I could have ignored it all but something made me go back to it, run it through my mind for a quick check. I knew a little about the standard bunco routines from my police beat days, and I couldn’t quite see how an innocent doll like Cindy could have come home with fifty thousand dollars that belonged by all rules to the smoothies who’d conned it out of McGuire in the first place. Con men don’t work that way. True, there’s a maxim that every con man is by definition a sucker. The big boys in the business don’t hold onto much of the money they pick from the marks. But there are several ways of being a sucker, and the idea of Cindy Sims walking off with their take struck me as a little on the silly side.
I told myself to relax and forget it. Suppose she was lying. What earthly difference did it make? I had the money and the girl and that ought to be enough. The money made it fun to be awake and the girl made it fun to go to sleep. To hell with reality.
But something nagged at me. Maybe it was the combination of the liquor that cleared my head and the fact that she wasn’t there to muddle me up again. I don’t think I could have looked at her and thought about how she must be lying to me. But with her out of the room it was easy.
Did it make a difference? If we split up now it didn’t. If I took my twenty-five thou and she took hers it didn’t matter at all. I’m not the type to get conscience traumas. For twenty-five grand I can forget a hell of a lot of things, such as the moral aspects of almost anything.
But we weren’t going to split, and with the two of us together as man and wife, her role in the episode became very relevant. I knew next to nothing about her, just the superficial trivia that she had seen fit to tell me. The dream I’d been dreaming called for full knowledge of her, full knowledge and full understanding and full love. And my knowledge of her was far from full.
I sipped my drink and thought about her. There were so many points to her story that didn’t ring true. According to her, Cinderella Sims was her real name, wished on her by highly imaginative parents. But she had picked another name to work under in Tahoe, Lucille Kraft or something like that.
This made no sense at all. If her name had been, say, Hepzibah Klunk, I could see why she would change it on the job. But why alter something simple like Cindy Sims, something a hell of a lot more euphonious than Lucille Kraft?
It didn’t jibe.
Nor did the innocent pose fit with the wish that I had killed Bunkie Craig. Nor did the careful pose fit with the sloppiness of calling the terminal from the hotel room. There were too many inconsistencies and they were sticking out all over the place.
They bothered me. Bothered me a hell of a lot. I wanted to quit thinking about them but I couldn’t.
I could check on her, up to a point anyhow. I could get in touch with Tahoe and run both her names through the hotel, could find out if that much of her story was true. But there was no rush. She wasn’t going to do anything to me, not now, and she wasn’t going to take the money and ditch me. I was fairly sure of that.
I tried to decide whether or not it made sense to stick the dough in the hotel safe for the time being. That would keep her from taking off with it, but it would also let on that I felt something was a bit smelly in the state of Denmark. That phrase, by the way, has always been a source of consternation to me. There’s very little that is rotten in the state of Denmark. Denmark has always been one of my favorite countries, and if there was something rotten it was in the state of Arizona.
I mused on that point, drank a little more of the Jack Daniels, then took the elevator to the lobby to see what, if anything, was happening at the local newsstand. They didn’t have Editor & Publisher. The newsie told me I could get it across the street, that he only carried a small line for people who wanted something to kill time with. I decided that walking all the way across the street took more effort than I felt like dispensing so I went back to the room and waited for Cindy.