She came back looking very beautiful in a sexy black blouse and a pair of white slacks. I don’t imagine the white slacks were very practical — one wearing and they’d look as though they’d been slept in — but on her they looked so good that it didn’t matter. I talked to her about nothing very important, gave her a quick kiss and went out, hoping that both she and the money would be there when I got back.
I bought a lightweight gray suit, a batch of shirts and some underwear, leaving my clothes for the department store to donate to charity or something. Probably to burn, because they certainly weren’t good for much else anymore. Then I picked up a copy of E & P, breezed through the listings while I downed a cup of coffee and a toasted English, checked a few ads that looked like better-than-average possibilities and headed back to the hotel.
She was there and so was the money. She told me how good I looked and I told her again how good she looked and we necked for awhile, stopping before we got too caught up in what we were doing to take time out for dinner.
Dinner was a pair of blood-rare steaks in the best restaurant in town, juicy red meat with baked potatoes and a drink before and Irish coffee after. Dinner made a big difference — I felt so completely at peace with the world that I didn’t care whether or not the money was there when we got back to the room.
It was. We looked at it, smiled, shoved it under the bed and got undressed. There was something strange about making tender love on top of fifty thousand in nice green twenty dollar bills, but we got used to it. It wasn’t too hard.
In fact, after not too long we forgot all about those nice green twenty dollar bills. We got sort of carried away with what we were doing, and the room turned upside down, and the lights went out and on and out and on again, and my heart started punching holes in my chest, and... well, you get the general idea.
Afterwards I put my face between her warm breasts and inhaled the fragrance of her until sleep came. It’s a pleasant way to go to sleep.
Very pleasant.
Which was a fortunate thing, because the next day was not.
After breakfast the next morning I made what I thought was an eminently reasonable suggestion. I told her I was going to take the money and deposit it in a Phoenix bank. It made good sense. That way there was no chance of it getting lost or stolen. We didn’t have to watch it like hawks.
Moreover, it gave us an aura of respectability that cash would not give us. Money in the bank is a lot more solid in appearance than money in a wallet or a black leather satchel. It would give us a foothold on the problem of establishing credit. Imagine walking into a newspaper broker with a bagful of twenties, for Christ’s sake. That would be one for the books.
And, of course, there was another unspoken point involved. If the dough was in a joint account, neither of us could steal it from the other. I didn’t mention this and neither did she, but naturally we both thought of it instantly.
She wouldn’t hear of it.
“We have to have it in cash,” she said.
I asked why.
“Suppose we have to run. Suppose they get onto us and we have to leave town.”
“How?”
“It could happen.”
I didn’t know how in the world it could but I let it pass. I told her that you didn’t have to be in town to keep an account open, that checks on the account would clear in any bank in the country, that Reed and his rover boys could hardly take the dough away from us if we kept it in the bank.
She still wouldn’t hear of it.
A bell rang somewhere in my head and I let it drop. I pretended to agree with her, told her we might need it in a hurry and that she was one hundred percent right. I hoped she’d believe me, that she wouldn’t think I was suspicious.
I was very suspicious.
I made up some story that I can’t remember, something about going out to see a newspaper broker to see what was available that wasn’t listed in E & P. Once I got away from her my hands started to shake. Something was wrong, very wrong. I didn’t know what it was and I sure as hell wanted to find out.
There were two possibilities and either or both of them could be the answer. One was that she was planning on ditching me as soon as she felt secure, that she wanted the cash around so she could take it along. But I couldn’t quite swallow it — she was as secure as she would ever be right now. She had had plenty of chances to ditch me while I was buying my suit the day before.
There was another possibility. Something could be funny about the money. It could be hot, with the serial numbers listed. In that case it could be spent a little at a time but not in quantity. If we stuck the lot of it in a bank we were through.
Or it could be counterfeit.
That seemed impossible. I took a twenty from my wallet and looked it over. It looked just like every other twenty I’d ever seen in my life, but of course I was no judge of twenties. If it was a phony it was one hell of a good one. I could even see the red and blue threads in the paper, the ones that counterfeiters aren’t supposed to be able to duplicate.
I wondered.
If it was counterfeit, it sure as hell figured that she wouldn’t want me depositing a load of it in a bank. We’d be in the jug in a minute. But if it was counterfeit that knocked the props out from under her whole story. No mark could unload fifty grand worth of schlock on a con ring. No mark would have access to counterfeit dough.
Counterfeit. Queer, schlock, funny money.
Was it possible?
And if it was, how in hell could I check it without getting nailed for trying to pass it?
The first thing to do was run the Tahoe story through the mill. If that checked I could forget the rest and save myself some headaches. If it didn’t, I could worry about it later.
I put in a person-to-person call to the manager of West of the Lake in Tahoe, knowing that I’d get straight dope from him. I’d never heard of that particular club but it was a dollars-to-doughnuts cinch that it, like every other club in Nevada, was syndicate property. And syndicate people in legit business are the best damned businessmen in the world. You’ll never find a crooked roulette wheel in a Nevada house, or a fast-fingered stickman, or a slippery dealer. They play things straight as can be. The house percentage is enough.
The manager was a man named Rogers. He was very obliging and most willing to check on the two prospective employees who had given his name as a reference. If they had ever worked there he would let me know about it.
No, he said, he had never employed a Lucille Kraft. No, he also said, he had never employed a Cinderella Sims either.
As a matter of fact, he added, he used only men as cashiers. Hadn’t had a girl in a cashier’s cage in, well, five years at the very least.
I managed to thank him before I dropped the receiver on the hook and sat down, my head spinning and my mind going around in very strange circles.
Next I had to check the dough.
It was a gamble but I had to take it. I found the best way to do it, the simple approach. I walked into the first bank I came to, found the assistant manager and told him I’d picked up a twenty in Detroit and I wanted to know whether it was good or not. “Something funny-looking about it,” I told him. “I wouldn’t want to pass it off to anybody and have them get stuck with it.”
It sounded like just the sort of thing a solid citizen might say.
He took it, studied it and snapped it a couple times. “You wait right here, Mr. Cannon,” he told me. “I want to have a look at it under the glass. It looks okay but you never know for sure unless you look real close.”
He disappeared with it and I wanted to turn and run. I’d given him a phony name and a phony story, and if he was calling the cops I was through for sure. But if I ran now I was dead no matter what happened. I forced myself to wait, lit a cigarette and pretended to be calm.