He was back in a minute.
“You got one hell of a fine eye,” he told me.
“Counterfeit?”
“It sure is. Wouldn’t have spotted it myself, to tell you the truth. See here around the seal?”
I looked where he was pointing.
“Little different than it’s supposed to be. You got another twenty on you for comparison?”
I told him no. I did, but it was just as phony as the one in his hand. Just as phony as the whole fifty thousand bucks’ worth.
“Don’t suppose it matters. It is a wrong one, though. And a real pretty job.”
I thanked him very thoroughly and got up to go. It was about that time that I realized he still had my twenty. That was all I needed. I had to get it back.
I was nonchalant.
“Say,” I said, “you wouldn’t mind if I took that bill for a souvenir, would you? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t try to pass it or anything. I’d sort of like to keep it as a reminder of how I got stuck for twenty bucks.”
He hesitated. I kept my mouth shut. If I sold him too hard he might tumble.
He sighed. “We’re supposed to report any counterfeit to the police,” he said, and my heart sank. That was all I needed. “Then they send the bill to Washington, check you out to make sure you’re okay just as a matter of form, and I don’t know what all. I suspect they have a special ceremonial burning of the bill in the Justice Department.”
He laughed. I tried to chuckle along with him.
“You say you picked this up in Detroit?”
I nodded weakly.
He thought some more, then shrugged. “Tell you the truth, I’m damned if I can see what good it’ll do to bother the police. Just waste their time, and yours and mine as well. Why don’t you just take this along with you and forget you ever showed it to me?”
I could have kissed him. I thanked him again, returned the bill to my wallet and strolled out of the bank. My knees were knocking together and I thought I was going to fall apart at the seams. I needed a drink badly, and that wasn’t all I needed.
I needed an explanation.
7
There was a ten, a five and two singles in my wallet along with the nest of phony twenties. It was a good thing — otherwise I would have gone thirsty. Until then I’d been passing the stuff all over town like a drunken sailor, but now that I knew what it was it wasn’t the same at all. The money was burning a hole in my pocket, all right, but it was different. Now I just wanted to be rid of it.
I found a back booth in a dark bar on a side street and settled myself down to a double bourbon with water on the side. I swallowed the bourbon and looked at the water. It looked back at me.
Things were moving too fast, much too fast. I looked for the little lever in my head that would let me turn my mind back and start over.
I found it.
A girl whose name was undoubtedly neither Lucille Kraft nor Cinderella Sims had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit twenties that didn’t belong to her. The people who had originally owned them were chasing her. And she was running, but where?
The thing to do, I told myself, was to examine the situation through Cindy’s mind. This was easier said than done. I just couldn’t manage to think the way she probably thought. For a while I sat around feeling sorry over this little incapacity of mine. Then I felt glad about it. My projection may have been limited, but perhaps it was better to be able to think rationally than to be able to think like Cindy Sims.
So I did something else. I tried putting myself in her place. What would I have done?
Putting myself in her place wasn’t that easy itself. I just didn’t know too much about her, didn’t know who she was or what she had done. Most of what I did know was negative information — she hadn’t worked with a con mob, hadn’t held a cashier’s job at a club in Tahoe, didn’t have fifty grand all of a sudden, and, of course, did not make it a practice to tell the truth come hell or high water.
The positive information told me that she had stolen a pile from a gang of counterfeiters. But what in hell she was trying to do with it was, for the moment, beyond me.
Why steal it in the first place?
Well, it had to be worth something. If not, counterfeiters wouldn’t take the trouble to print it up. I tried to remember what we’d run into in Louisville that might fit into things; I couldn’t come up with too much, but I got a few little glimmers.
A counterfeiting ring, as well as I remembered, was a model for an extremely loose organization that worked with extreme efficiency. At the very top there was a small group of men who were the financial kingpins. Either they included an engraver and printer in their number or they managed to contract for the production through their own private sources.
The men at the top were completely autonomous. They didn’t hire anybody. They handled two facets only — production and distribution. They never passed anything themselves. Instead they sold their product to roving mobs of bill-passers who went from one big town to the next, changing as much of the dough as they could.
The mobs themselves were organized in similar fashion, with a small combine arranging for the original purchase and selling small quantities to smaller men. At the very bottom there was the tiny small-time crook who bought a hundred dollars’ worth of queer at a time for ten to twenty dollars and worked it into circulation by himself, making purchases as small as he dared and keeping the change.
It was like any operation where the illegal aspect consisted of a product. Like the narcotics trade, for example, or like bootlegging. But there was an important difference.
There were risks in dope pushing. And in bootlegging.
In counterfeiting the risks were almost nonexistent.
I sipped more water, waggled a finger at the waiter and downed the refill in a hurry. It was beginning to come back to me. The picture was soaking in.
Where was I? Yes — the risks, and how there weren’t any. You see, in both dope and alcohol the product itself presented some overwhelming problems. If you wanted to supply dope on a large scale you had to product it from the raw opium, which in this country is quite impossible, or bring it in from overseas. Your agents can get arrested going through customs. Your shipments can be seized in huge quantities and destroyed. And simple possession of any quantity whatsoever of the stuff is enough to land you in jail.
Bootlegging is similar. Here you have to produce the stuff, have to distill it, and a distillation operation has to leave some clues lying around. You have to buy supplies in quantity. You have to have a good-sized plant in order to make a good-sized amount of the stuff. As a result, you automatically leave yourself open for possible arrest.
But counterfeiting is something else entirely.
Production presents no problems. Your “factory” consists of a set of plates, a little flat-bed or rotary press weighing maybe fifteen pounds at most, and a quantity of plain white paper to print on. Everything you need fits into a suitcase.
The distribution picture is even more attractive. It’s not against the law for a citizen to possess a counterfeit bill if he doesn’t know it’s counterfeit. Otherwise a guy like me could have been arrested in the Merchants’ Bank of Phoenix. The law has to prove knowledge on the criminal’s part. And this isn’t easy to do.
Possession of a quantity of identical counterfeit bills, is, of course, grounds for conviction. Possession of a counterfeit bill by a man already arrested for counterfeiting is also grounds for conviction, often enough.