“You said you didn’t want it.” A middle-aged man, peevish by nature and just now belligerent.
“I never said anything about it, one way or the other.” A middle- aged woman, waspish by nature and just now incensed.
“I asked you at least five times—”
“Probably ten times. I never said I didn’t want it. I said I wanted to think about it for a while.”
“Well, that’s not saying ‘yes,’ is it?”
“But why couldn’t you have waited till I talked to—”
“No, but listen to me. Did you ever once say, ‘Yes, I want it?’ ”
I moved out of the shadow of the trees and climbed the remaining steps to the deeper shadow of the porch. I could smell recent cooking there, something with oil and herbs, and the voices of the debaters came clearer than ever. The session closed abruptly when I rang the bell.
After a moment the porch light came on and tired eyes inspected me without much curiosity through the window in the door. I squared up my face with the window, making sure my cap was visible from inside, and said, “Delivery” loud enough to be heard by the neighbors. The door swung open.
I hate people who are taller than I am. Especially women. She was the archetypal untamed shrew — self-centered, supercilious, and permanently indignant.
“What is it?”
“Delivery, ma’am. Sign here, please.”
She scowled at the clipboard, reached for the pen I offered her, changed her mind, fumbled in her jacket pocket for glasses. The diamond ring on her finger was old, probably older than she was. I would have given her eight hundred tops for it at the shop. I could have sold it for thirty-five hundred.
While she was putting her glasses on, I moved into the foyer and set the parcel down on the floor. Under cover of the clipboard I slipped an automatic out of my belt so that, by the time she could see it, it was pointed straight at her liver. I shut the front door gently with my foot.
“What is it?” she asked again, stupidly.
“Well, it isn’t a delivery,” I said. Someone just around a corner was stirring coffee, clanking the sides of the cup with the spoon. “Get your husband in here.”
“Tucker!” she called, on a note that a male seal might have found inviting.
“What is it?” came in an impatient rumble from around the corner. My arrival seemed to have drastically curtailed both of their vocabularies.
She smirked at something on the ceiling. “Come and see.”
A chair scraped on ceramic tiles. A big man in his shirtsleeves shuffled in and took it all in a glance. “We don’t have any money in the house,” he announced with finality. He had the poker face of a businessman who had spent his life talking to people just like himself, lying his way into lucrative deals and out of ugly messes.
“That’s not what I heard. Let’s all go into the living room. Keep away from the windows.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the automatic and he couldn’t be bothered to look at it. They stood in the middle of the living room while I drew heavy drapes and turned on a couple of lamps so I could see what they were up to.
“Sit down. Nobody else in the house, is there?”
We sat. The furniture was comfortable, expensive, not new.
“There’s nobody here but us.” Ashloe was talking, examining the palms of his hands. “And we haven’t got anything worth stealing.”
“Not true. I know about the coin collection. I’m here to get it.”
Ashloe didn’t flicker an eyelash but his wife twitched and squirmed as if I’d stepped on her big toe. “There isn’t any coin collection here,” she snapped. “It’s at the bank.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s in a big safe in the next room, and the key is on a chain around your husband’s neck. Make it easy on yourselves. I don’t want to hurt anybody, but I’m not leaving here without the coins. I’ve got all night, and I happen to know you’re not expecting any visits or phone calls.”
“How can you possibly know that?” She’d never needed assertiveness training. She probably wrote the leading textbook in the field. “My sister—”
“You haven’t got a sister.”
“Just shut up, will you, Ruth?” Ashloe shifted in his chair, eyeing me covertly as if he were pondering a deal and sizing up my smarts. “Most of the coins are at the bank, mister. What’s left isn’t worth killing anybody for.”
I was on the point of telling him I had no intention of killing anybody when I realized that that might considerably weaken my position. “Or being killed for, right?”
He conceded the point with a sideways twitch of the head but otherwise sat tight. His wife put her glasses away and fumed silently at him from across the room. I waited.
“You know,” he said finally, “these are gold coins we’re talking about. They won’t work in a cigarette machine.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“And no dealer will touch them unless you can show where you got them.”
“There are dealers, and then there are dealers. If I Can’t unload them as coins, I know somebody who can turn them into ingots.”
After that he suddenly quit talking. Anybody would have thought he was more outraged by the thought of my melting down his coins than by having me steal them from him in the first place.
Without turning my back on them I got the empty box from the foyer and took off the wrapping paper. It was a wooden case I’d had for years. A brand-new typewriter had been packed in it along about 1935. They don’t make them like that any more. I put the case down on the coffee table and lifted off the lid. From inside I took a coil of rope and tossed it across to Mrs. Ashloe.
“Tie his ankles together, and then tie them to the middle leg of the couch. Do it right the first time. There’s two pieces of rope there. The other one is for his, wrists.”
She hesitated at least half a minute before picking up the rope and running it through her fingers. Then something clicked behind those hard eyes and she went to work with a will.
Ashloe snorted, started to say something, but didn’t. She made a workmanlike job of it, square knots and all. Before she started on his wrists he got unsteadily to his feet for a moment, clutched at his throat, and then dropped back onto the couch like a puppet with the strings cut. If he was making a show of being sick, I wasn’t buying it.
When she’d finished, I checked her knots before fishing inside Ashloe’s collar for the chain with the key. It wasn’t there. I tried his pockets. Nothing.
“Come on, folks. This won’t get you anything but maybe some bruises. Where is it?”
She’d sat down again on the far side of the room. I started toward her. Something in my look must have bothered her, because she blurted, “I don’t know where he put it!” with the sincerity of panic.
“I’ll bet he knows, though, doesn’t he?” I put down my automatic on the coffee table, sat down next to it, and got her left hand in both of mine. The antique diamond ring wouldn’t come off over her knuckle.
“I didn’t bargain on this,” I said, to Ashloe rather than to her. “Too bad it’s so hard to get off.” I was reaching for my pocket knife when she suddenly twisted forward and snatched at the automatic.
I don’t hit women — not even gaunt, feisty ones that remind me of a third-grade teacher who hit me plenty of times with a solid brass ruler. But I put myself between her and that automatic so fast that I bounced her back into her seat.
After that I got a bit rattled. I kept the automatic in my right hand and used my left on the ring with a violence augmented by clumsiness and frustration. She whimpered twice and then howled, “Tucker!” in an unmistakable tone of reproach.
Tucker stirred. His color didn’t seem too good. He licked his lips twice — before saying, “Mustard pot. Top shelf.”