On May first, just a few weeks short of a year since Mavis and I had met, we bought another car and left Houston with a stake of sixty-seven thousand dollars. Three thousand of it was the residue from previous scores. The rest was from Hannah.
Mavis sighed with relief as we crossed the city line out of Houston. “We really earned this one,” she said. “I think I’ve aged ten years in the past month.”
“You and me both,” I told her. “Our luck held all along the way. I get goose bumps when I think of how many things could have gone wrong.”
Mavis shivered. “I thought we were goners when that insurance man showed up.”
“We might have been goners if I hadn’t accidentally rolled into the gully,” I said. “It would have looked suspicious as the devil if I’d come through that wreck without even getting my hair mussed. We banked too much on luck. But at least we learned. Next time there won’t be any luck involved.”
“Next time? Why don’t we get out, Sam? We’ve got enough of a stake to start some legitimate business. Let’s not just pitch it away on high living.”
“We’ve got a new business,” I said. “A safe, reliable, steady one.”
“What?” she asked.
“Lonely-hearts,” I said. “There must be thousands of women like Hannah throughout the country. They advertise in dozens of magazines that accept lonely-heart ads. We’ll build up a sucker list from the ads. And next time we start running short of money, we’ll be all set to go. We’ll be able to pick and choose from a whole list of prospects.”
“You mean you plan to marry more women?” Mavis asked on a high note.
“Marry them and bury them. The way I’ve been working it out in my mind during the past month, it’ll be the safest racket in the world. Far safer than bunco dodges like the POW gag. Because the marks won’t be around to report to the police how they’ve been taken.”
Mavis said in a horrified voice, “You want us to go into the full-time business of murder, Sam? I thought it would be just this one time, because it was a special situation. We’ll get caught and be executed, Sam.”
I shook my head. “We won’t even be suspected, the way I plan to run it. Anyway, you don’t have to get excited. We won’t be going back to work for at least a year. Not with the stake we’ve got. How’d you like to make a European tour?”
Chapter IX
Because of a bad run of luck at Monte Carlo, the money didn’t last a year. We were back in the States and at work again in six months.
We had learned a lot from the Houston job. The most important thing we had learned was to lower our sights and never again try for such a big score. The more money people leave when they die, the more speculation there is about their heirs. It was safer to pull small jobs regularly than to try to clean up with only an occasional big one. We concentrated on marks whose passing would leave only the faintest ripple of public comment.
The Houston job also taught us never again to try to operate on the mark’s home ground. In small towns, where we found safest to operate, the death of a newcomer excites not nearly as much interest as the death of a lifelong resident. So we avoided women with deep roots in their own communities. If they weren’t willing to move off with me to some new town after marriage, we by-passed them.
In the beginning we made some mistakes, of course. There was one harrowing experience where a curious brother traced a mark to a cemetery in Bismarck, Indiana, demanded a police investigation and stirred up a lot of newspaper speculation. We were living in another state under new names when the story appeared over the wire services, but reading about it gave us a jolt. We had left Bismarck only twenty-four hours before the brother appeared.
The experience taught us another lesson: to avoid women with close family ties.
As time passed, our procedure smoothed out until it was flawless. Eventually we were regularly pulling three jobs a year without exciting the slightest suspicion from anyone. Through experience and planning, we had entirely eliminated the element of luck from the racket.
In the summer of 1959, five years and three months after our meeting at the Beverly-Wilshire, Mavis and I were working a job in the little town of Tuscola.
The woman this time was a forty-year-old spinster who had been raised on an Iowa farm. Before I uprooted her and took her to Tuscola, she had never been out of the state of Iowa.
Mavis and I were using the same plan which had become our pattern. Ostensibly my wife Hazel and I were negotiating to buy the hardware business of an elderly merchant named Tom Benjamin, who wanted to retire. Mavis, as usual, was living with us as my sister. We had rented a house and were studying the community to see how we’d like to live in it permanently before closing the deal. We had been in town six weeks, and I was supposed to give Benjamin my decision in two more days.
The old hardware merchant had been devoting considerable time to trying to sell me on the town as a nice place to live. He had introduced me to practically every local group. The evening that Hazel had her fatal accident, he had arranged to take me to a school board meeting.
Luckily the sky had been overcast all that day, and it was quite dark by eight o’clock. Too dark for any neighbors to see me carry my burden across the back yard.
Old Tom Benjamin honked his horn out front promptly at eight-thirty. We had the scene all set, the lights off in the front room and only the light from the hall casting a dim glow to the front door. There was just enough light for Benjamin to be able to make out that a woman was waving good-by to me from the doorway without his being able to see who the woman was.
“I ought to be back about ten, Hazel,” I called back to Mavis in the doorway.
From his car old Tom Benjamin shouted, “How are you, Mrs. Henshaw?”
“Fine,” Mavis called back in an excellent imitation of Hazel’s voice. She waved to him, then called to me, “Mavis will be right out, Sam”
Instead of getting into the car, I leaned in the front window and said, “I told my sister we’d drop her at the railroad station on the way to the meeting. Is that all right?”
“Sure,” the old hardware merchant said. “Where’s Miss Henshaw going?”
“Up to Chicago to visit our folks for a few days.”
Then Mavis was coming down the steps wearing a light coat and carrying a small suitcase.
She had switched off the hall light, and now she called back to the completely dark doorway, “See you Friday, Hazel.”
At the railway station, she gave me a sisterly kiss on the cheek and made the same announcement again.
Tom Benjamin’s invitation for me to sit in and observe a school board meeting worked right in with my plans. I couldn’t have asked for a more reliable group of alibi witnesses.
The meeting was over by ten-fifteen, and Benjamin dropped me off in front of the house a quarter-hour later. At that time of night, the streets of Tuscola were deserted, but light still showed in most of the homes.
When I switched on the front room light, I called, “Hazel!” Just as though I expected her to answer.
Mavis would have thrown me a sardonic grin if she had been there to hear. My increasing carefulness over the years had become a source of amusement to her.
I didn’t consider it over-carefulness. While Tom Benjamin had already driven off, and no one else was on the street to see me enter, how did I know but what some snoopy neighbor was peering into my front room from a darkened window at that moment? They couldn’t have heard me call Hazel’s name, of course, but anyone in the house could have. I didn’t want to overlook even the remote chance that some neighbor might have knocked at the back door just as I came up the front walk and, getting no answer, had stepped into the kitchen.