“Cash? Wadda fuck ya mean?” That seemed to be Anhut’s favorite phrase. He was out from behind the desk with the invoice, heading for the door. “Lemme see the fuckin’ unit.”
Ken waited. Outside, Anhut was snapping and nipping at the Charger’s heels like a terrier driving a cow at sunset. He came back shaking his rat-nest head.
“Naw, naw, naw, fuckin’ car’s in terrible shape, I’ll give ya fifty bucks for your trouble an’—”
Ken stepped away from the desk and put his hand in his topcoat pocket. The hand looked larger in there than a hand should look unless fisted around some bulky object. Anhut, caught up short, stared at him, measuring him. Then he shook his cue ball again.
“Nah,” he muttered to himself. He bared his teeth in a death-rictus grin. “My boys come back from lunch, they’ll—”
Ken jerked his hand from his pocket with something in it. Anhut went back an involuntary step. Ken’s hand put on the edge of the scarred wooden desk... a red ripe tomato.
Anhut blanched as if someone had dipped him in boiling water and peeled him like... well, like a ripe tomato. To the mob, a Jersey tomato was dynamite — literally. A juicy red stick of overage, unstable dynamite. The tomato sitting on the edge of his desk was a statement that DKA, though a west coast firm, was connected on the east coast.
Statement or bluff? Well, Ken was heading for the door.
“Wait!”
Anhut cursed and brought out a huge roll of cash money, counted off enough hundreds, threw them on the desk. Ken didn’t ask for a receipt. He rode the cab back to his motel to pack, but there was a message from DKA. According to Ephrem Poteet, a Gyppo woman named Pearso Stokes was working the midtown Manhattan banks out of a silver Eldorado with M.D. plates on it.
Warren paid another night on his room, because Jersey prices beat New York prices, then rented a little red Toyota and headed for Manhattan. He’d just blown off a Jersey City used-car dealer with hardly a word being spoken and no overt physical threats made! It had to be a first. And now he was chasing Gyppos just like the rest of the gang!
Just about when Ken was paying the Holland Tunnel toll-taker on the west bank of the Hudson, Giselle was parking her company car on Teddy White’s hilltop in Tiburon. She had his $75,000 in a plastic suitcase, but left it locked in the car until she could ease Teddy into her revelations about Madame Miseria.
She pushed the bell and Teddy opened the door and the same big tiger-stripe tomcat scooted out between her feet and bounded down the steps. Teddy even started again, “It’s okay, he does it all...” before exclaiming, “Oh! Ms. Marc! Hello.”
“I, ah, wanted to tell... that is, I have something to...”
Teddy looked five years younger, two inches taller, and his face eased of all the lines of pain. He came by her out onto the stoop, leaving the door open.
“Let’s sit out on the steps to talk, this sun is so nice.”
Giselle sat with her feet primly together, smoothing her skirt down over her knees almost nervously.
“I... have something to tell you about Madame Miseria. She knew your name, all about your stepparents and your dead real parents because...” She cleared her throat. “She got it all from her brother. He picked your pocket in that bar—”
“Not possible,” said Teddy. “But please — go on...”
“The bleeding dollar bill — when you went to get the bowl of water, she just substituted one soaked with red dye for the one you’d put on the table.”
“Of course she didn’t,” he said, untouched. “But even if she had, that’s what convinced me my money actually was cursed.”
The big tomcat came up and started to rub against Giselle’s calf and purr. She scratched the back of his head and behind his ears absently. She was fuming.
“The poisoned egg — that was just sleight of hand. She had the devil’s head in her hand when she broke your egg. She just dropped it into the bowl and—”
“Where is all this leading, Ms. Marc?”
“It was all a series of cons,” she said stridently. “I bet she burned up a bunch of money that night too, didn’t she?”
“Yes. Five thousand dollars.”
“Five...” Giselle got control of her voice. She said very precisely, “She didn’t burn up that money, she kept it. She and her brother just burned up a different envelope full of—”
“Paper bag.”
“What?” Her voice was shrill.
“It was a paper bag full of money she burned up. But...” He gave her that goofy grin of perfect peace again. “But even if she kept the money, she would be entitled to it.”
“I... don’t understand. If she conned you and—”
“She cured me. Better than any doctor could have done.”
Giselle sighed. Out between Angel Island and Alcatraz a big oil tanker down to its marks was waddling in with a bellyful of crude for the Standard Oil Refinery at Point Richmond.
“Okay,” she said briskly. “She cured you. But also, two nights ago, she took you out to the graveyard in Tam Valley and there you and she buried a great deal of money in your stepfather’s grave. Seventy-five thousand dollars, to be exact.”
Teddy stood up abruptly. Suddenly there was panic in his eyes. “You didn’t dig it up...”
Giselle started to say yes, then checked herself. She stood also. She put a gentle hand on his arm.
“Ramon Ristik did.”
His reaction was totally unexpected. He started to laugh.
“No he didn’t. You’re mistaken.”
“I saw him dig it up!”
“You couldn’t have,” he said with total conviction, “because I’m still here.”
“You’re still... I don’t understand.”
“That money was put there for the demons. If anyone digs it up, I die. But since I am still alive...” He flapped around awkwardly on the stair like a drunk in a dancing-chicken suit. “And cured...”
Giselle was finally getting it. “So if someone should return seventy-five thousand dollars to you—”
“I wouldn’t take it. Because it wouldn’t be mine. Mine is buried in my stepfather’s grave.” A sudden sly grin. “Besides, if Ramon took the money, how did you get hold of it?”
“I took it first, and substituted another garbage bag full of torn-up paper for it?” It was a question, not a Statement.
“Ramon wouldn’t be satisfied with torn-up paper,” said Teddy delightedly. “So, if you have any money in your car, it isn’t mine. The demon has mine.” He chuckled. “And I’m cured.”
Giselle found herself standing on the steps alone with the cat. It was a nice cat. She scratched it behind the ears. It was a nice day. Teddy was a nice man. Yana was not a nice woman. But then neither was Giselle Marc a particularly nice woman. She remembered a line from a favorite kid’s book of her childhood. A book about a goldfish seeing the world.
“Sunny Sunfish wiggled his tail and wondered.”
Giselle wondered if she was wiggling her tail on the way down the stairs to the car.
Dan Kearny wondered if he’d ended up in that place Peter Pan went back to — Never-Never Land, that was it — instead of the executive offices of the St. Mark Hotel. Lined up across the desk from him like the Three Stooges were the hotel’s General Manager, Corporate Counsel, and Head of Security. All because he’d just thumped their satchel full of money down on the desk.
“There it is, gents, all of it. The seventy-five thousand dollars a man calling himself Angelo Grimaldi extorted—”
“That’s a great deal of money,” said the heavy-set one, Gunnarson, the manager.
The little wizzled-up one, Smathers, the corporate counsel, cleared his throat. “Yes. A great deal of money, Mr...” He looked at the business card in his hand. “Mr. Kearny.” He smiled a toothy smile. “But guests leave their valuables in the safe at the front desk — not here in the manager’s office.”