“I found him in a bar,” Lori was saying now. “Told him I made it for money. He gave me a twenty.”
“A live one?”
“One of ours.”
The men laughed. “Too much.” Baron said. He was even bigger than I remembered, a mountain of a man with a head like a boulder. “Paying you off in queer. That moves me.”
Reed I’ve mentioned before — medium height, medium build, sandy hair. He looked as though he was the type who poured boiling oil on troubled waters. The guy who rounded out the party looked like the oil itself. A little greaseball with eyes that stared dead ahead.
Baron came up to me. He was smiling and I decided maybe they weren’t such bad guys after all. He held out a hand and I reached to take it.
I missed. And he hit me in the chest.
“Funny man,” he said. “You better talk, funny man. There’s a little bit of fifty grand you got and that we want. There’s a little frail named Cindy who has to be taken apart at the seams. You got talking to do.”
I felt around and found out my ribs were still there. It should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.
“Lindsay?” Reed’s voice. I looked up. “You got two choices, Lindsay. You can let us work on you until you spill or you can spill now and save us the trouble. That way you came out of it with your teeth in your head. Either way you want it, Lindsay. Just tell us.”
Choices, yet. I opened my mouth to tell him what he could go and do to himself, then thought it over for a minute and let my mouth drop shut. I was in a bind, trapped like a rat in a rat trap. And for what? A girl who conned me? Money I wasn’t planning on spending anyway?
Two dumb things to get killed for.
I stood up. Baron moved in, ready to pound my face in. He threw the punch before I could start talking and my head took off and waltzed around the room. I almost went out, but not quite. I went to the floor and stayed there while my head came back to me again.
“What do you say, Lindsay?”
“I’ll talk.” I said. “Hell, the broad conned me to begin with. I was ready to powder and leave her with the dough. I got no reason to hold out.”
Reed didn’t say anything.
I pointed at Baron. “You can tell this bastard a couple things. You can tell him he didn’t have to hit me. Not the first time and not the second time. You can also tell him that one of these days I’m going to kill him.”
Baron laughed.
“Look,” Reed said, “we want a couple things. We want the girl and we want the money. And some information.”
“I can take you to her. Or do you want the information first?”
He thought it over. “That makes more sense. Start talking.”
“Where do I start?”
“With the money,” Reed said. “How much of it is left?”
“There was fifty grand to start with?”
He nodded.
“Maybe a thousand of that is gone. Part of that in New York, the rest here in Phoenix. The rest is still in the little black bag the way it was when I ran into her.”
“Good. How did you meet her?”
I hesitated, then told him. I left out most of it, just giving him the picture of a good-natured slob who got tied up with a frantic frail without knowing entirely what was going on. I saw a few reasons for feeding him the story. For one thing, it happened to be pretty much the truth. For another, the less involved I was, the less chance there would be of them deciding to kill me. And, of course, Cindy had suckered them. This would put us both in the same boat. The boat would be rocky as New England soil, but it just might float.
“You thought the dough was straight?”
“That’s right.”
“How did you tumble?”
I told him that, too. I ran through it, told him how she was acting funny so I ran a check on her story and came out with more questions than answers. He got very interested when I went through the routine at the bank, how I checked the bill and managed to get away with it. I think he seemed impressed.
“For a mark,” he said, “you came out of it okay. You got a head, anyway.”
“And fists,” Baron said. “You did a job on Bunkie. That hasn’t nice.”
I told Baron where he should stick himself. He came on to me and I got ready to take another punch. But Reed motioned the big man away.
“Let’s get back to Cindy,” he said. “She’s got the dough?”
“She and the dough are in the room.”
“So let’s go.”
So we went. Down the stairs and out to the street and into the same damned car that Rhonda — I mean Lori — had used for fun and games. That, I decided, was one thing I would always regret. I hadn’t managed to knock off a piece of Lori. It was one hell of a shame.
In the car I had questions. “How did you find us?” I asked. “I don’t remember leaving a trail.”
“Cindy tipped us. A wire day before yesterday.”
It figured. “Another question,” I said. “You’re going to a hell of a lot of trouble for fifty grand in schlock. You’re spending that much more to get it back. Maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t get it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend the time printing up fresh stuff?”
Reed and Baron looked at each other. I looked at the two of them, then at the greaseball who was doing the driving, then at Lori. Lori was the only one who was any fun to look at.
“Might as well tell him,” Reed said. “Can’t hurt.”
He turned to me. “We were working together,” he said. “Cindy was part of the racket. You know about the paper, don’t you? The process?”
“I know what you do. Not how, but what. You bleach singles and print twenties on them.”
“That’s about it. We had the process, had a set of plates. The plates were good.”
“Very good.”
“But not perfect,” Reed said. “There were a couple errors there, nothing big, but big enough to make the bills obviously counterfeit to an expert with an eye in his head. We weren’t going to run those plates. I had a boy coming who was a hell of a touch with engraver’s tools. Give him a few days with the plates and no one in the world could tell the queer from the straight. You seen our bills?”
I nodded. Seen them? Hell, I’d been spending them.
“Then you know how good they are. The paper is good and the plates are close to perfect. We even have automatic switchers for the serial numbers so they can’t pull the bills by number. But the plates weren’t perfect and we were waiting until the boy could fix that for us.”
I was beginning to bet a glimmer.
“Cindy,” Reed said bitterly. “Big ideas and small brains. Her cut wasn’t enough for her. She had to put the plates on the rotary one night when everybody else was decked out. She was smooth, that girl. Stupid but smooth. She inked and rolled and churned out a quick fifty grand. And lammed before anybody woke up.”
I was beginning to see things. But it still didn’t add up, not all across the board. “Look,” I said, “it’s still only fifty grand. Once your boy makes the scene you can print up better stuff, as much of it as you want. So why chase her down for the fifty? Point of honor or something?”
Reed shook his head, impatient. “Same plates,” he said. “If the schlock she’s carrying turns up phony, some joker can compare it with our stuff and put two and two together. And come up with four.”
“Oh,” I said.
“See? She’s got fifty grand in counterfeit dough. She wants double that for it. It’s a real live one, Lindsay. For the first time ever counterfeit is worth twice as much as straight money. One for the books, huh?”
Now it made sense.
“This isn’t a minor-key operation, Lindsay. This isn’t a hit-and-run game, with one roll off the plates and no more. This is enough to keep a bunch of people for life. Cindy has us strangled.”