“I only have cash.”
“We can’t accept a hundred-dollar bill, I’m sorry,” the cashier said.
“Why’s that?”
“Been burned too often. Lots of phonies in circulation.”
“These aren’t phonies,” Struthers said.
“Hard to tell ’em apart nowadays,” the cashier said.
So much easier to stick up the fuckin joint, Struthers was thinking.
“Tell you what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I’m gonna lay a hundred-dollar bill right on the counter here and forget all about the four dollars and change I got coming. You can either pick up the bill and put it in your cash register and tell me ‘Thanks for your business, sir,’ or you can shove it up your ass. Either way, I’m walkin out of here with my purchases. Good day to you, sir.”
The Eighty-seventh Precinct car patrolling Adam Sector picked him up before he’d walked three blocks from the store.
FIRST THING Detective Andy Parker learned about the perp the blues brought in was that he’d walked out of a liquor store with purchases totaling close to a hundred bucks without paying for them— or at least paying for them with a bill the cashier had refused to accept because it might have been counterfeit. Nobody—least of all Parker—as yet knew whether the bill was queer or not. That wasn’t the point. You could not simply walk out of a store without paying for your purchases even if you kept insisting afterward that youhad paid for them—which Struthers was insisting now, over and over again, bending Parker’s ear and breaking his balls.
This was not a court of law here. This was a police station. Parker was a detective and not a judge. He was not being paid to administer justice here, any more than cops in a park during a riot were expected to determine whether a crowd of unruly assholes wereactually sticking their hands up under girls’ skirts. Those cops were being paid to sit on park benches and watch the parade go by. Parker was being paid to sit here and write up a DD form that would follow this man through the criminal justice system—where, by the way, the dude had been before, Parker was just noticing on his computer. This did not bode too well for Mr. Wilbur Struthers here, who seemed to have taken a burglary fall not too long ago and done some fine time upstate. This was enough to put Mr. Struthers in serious trouble here, though certainly Parker did not wish to seem judgmental.
“What you did, it looks like,” he said, “was walk out of a store with close to a hundred bucks in merchandise, without paying for it. Is what you seem to have done, Willie.”
“I paid for the merchandise,” Struthers said.
“Man said you placed a possibly phony …”
“Man had no reason to believe the bill was phony.”
“Says you forced it on him even though he told you it was store policy not to accept …”
“No one forced anything on him. I merely placed the bill politely on the counter top …”
“And told him to shove it up his ass.”
“He could’ve also just put it in the cash register and shut his fuckin mouth.”
“Language, Willie, language.”
“Well, he could’ve avoided a lot of unnecessary trouble here.”
“Which he chose not to do because his boss has been stung with queer C-notes before.”
“This one was not queer.”
“How do you know?”
“The Secret Service told me,” Struthers said.
This was not exactly true.
The Secret Service had told him that $8,000 of the $8,500 he’d stolen from Cassandra Jean Ridley’s apartment was not part of a ransom paid in some mysterious goddamn White House kidnapping, but they had not said the bills weren’t counterfeit. In any case, the lady had reclaimed the eight large and had been eaten by lions for her boldness. The $100 bill Struthers had subsequently passed across the counter of S&L Liquors on Stemmler Avenue was one of the bills first Special Agent David A. Horne and later the redheaded lady herself had overlooked in their zeal to make everything right again. Struthers had no idea whether it was phony or not.
Besides, intent was ninety percent of the law, a jailhouse attorney had once informed him, true or not. He’d had no intention of passing counterfeit money. His only intention was to stock up on alcoholic beverages for New Year’s Eve, which he hoped to perhaps spend with that girl Jasmine he’d tried to introduce to good champagne, if ever he could find her again. He now had $300 left of the money he’d stolen from the Lion Lady, as he thought of her, and if Jasmine would accept that in trade, he would be willing to pay for a woman for the first time in his life. What the hell, a new year was coming. After which, he figured he might have to run out and do another little burglary, provided this asshole detective here in the rumpled suit and the razor cuts all over his face let him go. Struthers didn’t see that anybody had a case here. He’d paid for the goddamn booze!
“Here’s the way I look at it,” Parker said. “If the bill you gave that guy was genuine, then you in fact paid for the merchandise, and we’ve got no beef. If, however, the bill is phony, then not only were you passing bad money, you were also committing Petit Larceny, a class-A misdemeanor as defined in Section 155.30 of the Penal Law, punishable by a term not to exceed a year in the slammer. I’m not paid to be judgmental,” Parker said judgmentally, “but why waste the city’s time and money if in fact the bill is genuine?”
Struthers held his breath.
“Let’s take a walk over to the bank,” Parker said.
“Let’s,” Struthers said confidently.
“Well, well, look who’s here,” Meyer called from the corridor. He swung open the gate in the slatted wooden railing, walked into the squadroom, tossed his hat at the hat rack, and missed. Kneeling to retrieve it, he asked, “What’s it this time, Will?”
“Walkaway,” Parker said.
“Oh dear,” Meyer said.
“Hello, Will,” Carella said, just behind him.
Struthers didn’t like all this fucking cordiality. He wanted to go to the bank, show the bill to whoever understood counterfeits there, and get on with his preparations for New Year’s Eve.
“Also he insisted on passing a C-note may be phony,” Parker said.
“I was paying for my merchandise. Incidentally,” he said, “there’s no law against innocently passing a counterfeit bill if there is no intent to deceive.”
The detectives looked at him.
Parker sighed.
“We were just on our way to the bank,” he said.
“Where’d you get that bill?” Carella asked.
Struthers didn’t answer.
“Will? Where’d you get that C-note?”
Still no answer.
“Was it part of the money you stole from Cass Ridley?”
Struthers didn’t know what he might be getting into here. He figured maybe he just ought to keep still.
“Was it?”