But the nature of the business is such that an individual without a criminal record can pass a bill at any time with total impunity. Counterfeit? Gee, officer, I didn’t know it was counterfeit. I mean, somebody must of stuck me with it. I never look too close, I don’t know, maybe I ought to. But officer, I didn’t do anything...
People get caught. The mobs who get nailed good and hard are the hit-and-run mobs that the big boys supply. They run the risks because they’re in town while the phony stuff is turning up.
But the boys remain untouchable. If things ever get hot they stick the plates in a safe deposit box and let a bank watch it for them. Once every few years somebody somewhere gets a tip and catches a big fish or two with a load of schlock in their apartment. But it just doesn’t happen too often.
I finished my drink. The stuff that was going through my mind was old stuff, a basic review of the fundamental principles of counterfeiting. It was fun, but it wasn’t explaining the Sinful Saga of Cindy Sims.
But I was beginning to get a glimmer.
Suppose I’d stolen fifty thousand dollars’ worth of schlock from a nestful of big boys. It was worth stealing, of course. It was worth in the neighborhood of, say, five to ten grand on the not-very-open market. My banker had practically gone into orbit over the quality of this particular schlock, so in this case it was probably worth ten, maybe even more.
If your name is Rockefeller, ten grand is nothing to get sweaty about. But if your name is Sims, or Lindsay for that matter, it is. Ten grand is ten grand, and while it is not fifty grand, it is not hay either. So it was worth stealing.
But what in hell did you do with it once you stole it?
Well, that was easy. You found somebody who was willing to pay ten grand for it, and then you sold it to him, or them, or whoever it was. You sure as hell didn’t try to pass it all yourself. That would quite possibly take you several lifetimes, and before long some cop would grab you, and the ball game would be thoroughly over. Besides, why not get the whole pie at once?
And then the whole thing hit me. It was so goddamned funny I laughed out loud.
Here was Cindy. Sleeping with Reed, or whoever he was, and hating him and hungry for his money. So she bundled fifty grand in schlock into a little black satchel and took off with it.
Now who in the name of God was she going to sell it to?
Not a hit-and-run mob, because she simply didn’t know a hit-and-run mob. Not a rival outfit, because she simply didn’t know a rival outfit. She was a cipher, a little person who just happened to fall amongst thieves — in this case counterfeiters.
And the only people she knew with any use for the dough were the ones she’d stolen it from.
It was funny. It was very funny, and it was certainly worth laughing over. It was also very sad and worth crying over but I somehow didn’t feel like crying. I was having too much fun.
Cindy had the money, all right. And she could sell it to Reed — but Reed would hardly be a willing customer. He probably had an overwhelming desire to twist her pretty neck. She couldn’t walk right up to him and say: Here’s the money, now pay me. If she did he’d do the very natural thing — he’d kill her.
She had to run away from him.
But the further she ran the less her money was worth. Reed was her only customer. He was the man she had to do business with and the man she had to steer clear of, and the end product of a relationship like this could only be frustration.
I saw it all now — anyway, most of it. She grabbed the bundle and ran to New York. Then she saw which end was up and wired Reed or something to let him know approximately where she was. Not precisely where, because she was scared stiff.
Then she waited for him, hoping two things — that he would find her, and that he would not find her.
Uh-huh.
So she waited, scared spitless, until he showed. Then he showed and she took one look at him and got out of town.
Now, by all rules, she was waiting for him to show up again.
It all meshed. Now for the first time my part in the deal was beginning to make sense. She’d managed to blunder into me, probably the way she said — saw me watching her and figured me for one of Reed’s men.
Then she must have decided she could use me.
Two people could do it. One to make contact and the other to hold back with the money. That way there wouldn’t be any killing. I’d handle the changes while she stayed in the shadows, and then we would split.
Except, obviously, we wouldn’t split. If we were going to split she wouldn’t have fed me a story on a silver spoon. She’d have leveled with me and we would have been planning the bit together all along. She must have figured that, while ten grand might have been worth all the aggravation she’d gone through, five grand certainly wasn’t. She wanted the whole pie.
Everything made sense — the lies, the stupidity of her phone calls from the hotel, leaving her a convenient out when Reed showed up. Her cheap apartment and her pinchpenny ways until we’d gotten together. Sure — she was scared stiff to pass any of the dough by herself. So was I, now that I knew what it was. It must have been a break for her when I started spending her dough as if it was real, giving her a chance to live like a human being again.
It all added up. If you thought of it as a carefully planned crime you could look at it forever without getting the picture. That was the whole thing — it had been about as carefully planned as an airplane crash. Her appalling stupidity from the beginning to end was the key to the whole mess.
I wondered how she was going to arrange the deal without filling me in. She probably didn’t know any more than I did. The way I figured it, she was playing it by ear the way she’d played it all up to now, hoping that something would break right for her.
If I hadn’t tumbled we’d probably run from Phoenix to Miami, from Miami to Philly, from Philly to Cleveland. Somewhere along the line we’d be arrested because I’d be passing too many bills at once since I didn’t know there was anything wrong with them.
Or, somewhere along the line Reed would catch up with us.
And kill us.
And on that sobering thought I had another drink.
One thing didn’t add up, and that was Reed’s angle in the gambit. I could see him hating her for crossing him, and I could see him hating her enough to chase her and kill her, but I could not see him dragging a small army of professionals along with him. That I could not see at all. He might be ready and willing to run all over the world for a crack at her, but the rest of them couldn’t. She was good in the hay but not good enough to sleep with all of them, for Christ’s sake.
Reed figured to forget it. Forgetting ten grand sounds like forgetting that white cow again, but when all you have to do is print up a fresh batch it’s not quite so hard to take. Revenge wasn’t enough of a motive and neither was the desire to recoup a relatively minor investment. What could it have cost him in terms of time and paper? Not a hell of a lot. I’ve seen the presses at the Times roll off a few hundred impressions a minute. It’s an impressive sight. Granted, a hand press is slower. But not slow enough.
He was spending more money dragging his forces all over the continent than the fifty grand cost him in the first place.
So why was he wasting his time?
I wanted a close look at the schlock. I wasn’t quite courageous enough to stare at it in the middle of the bar, or even in a booth in the back of the bar, so I retreated to the relative privacy of the men’s room. There were two types of cans — the ones with doors and the ones without. The ones with the doors cost ten cents, and I normally wasn’t buggy enough about privacy to squander a dime.