You went to bed with somebody who you had to pay, she put on her clothes directly afterward, said, “Thanks, I had a nice time,” and went home. He guessed. But with a woman like Antonia Belandres, you sat here on a Saturday morning, drinking orange juice and coffee, and eating the chocolate croissants he’d gone down to the bakery to get, and it was … well … intimate. You could have sex with a hooker, but he didn’t guess you could get intimate with one.
Antonia was wearing nothing but a little silky peignoir she’d taken from her bedroom closet. Will was wearing the slacks and shirt he’d put on when he went downstairs for the croissants. It was a little past ten-thirty. The snow had stopped and the sun was shining. In the street outside, everything looked clean and white and sparkling. He told Antonia that maybe they should go for a walk later on, if she thought she might like that. She told him she might like that a lot. He smiled and nodded. She smiled and nodded back.
He didn’t tell her his plan until they were in her bed together again, and then only after they’d made love yet another time. She was cuddled in his arms, the blanket pulled up over their shoulders, frost still limning the window across the room, sunlight striking the glass.
“I know how we can both become millionaires,” he said.
“Yes, how?” she said.
Black hair fanned out on the pillow. Brown eyes opened wide. Wearing no makeup. Her face looking as expectant as a child’s on Christmas Day.
“We use the bills.”
“What bills?” she asked.
“The super-bills.”
“Use them?” she asked. “How do you mean?”
“You said you send any suspect bills to the Federal Reserve.”
“Yes?”
“That’s what you told the detectives.”
“That’s right. That’s what we do.”
“Somebody brings in a bill that looks phony …”
“Right, we send it to the Fed.”
“You confiscate the bill, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you give the person a genuine bill in exchange?”
Which was just what the Treasury Department had done with the eight grand they’d taken from him. But he didn’t know that.
“Of course not,” she said. “That would be the same as condoning counterfeiting.”
“Do you give the person a receipt for the bill?”
“Not if we know for certain it’s counterfeit,” she said. “In that case, we simply take the bill out of circulation.”
“Even if the person didn’t know it was counterfeit?”
“Too bad for him.”
“How about if you’re notsure it’s counterfeit? If it’s one of those terrific bills you have to send to the Fed?”
“Then we give the customer a receipt for it, yes.”
“And if the Fed decides it’s phony?”
“It never comes back to us. They take it out of circulation, and notify us. We in turn notify the customer, and that’s that.”
“What if they say it’s real?”
“They return it to us, we notify the customer, and he comes to pick it up. No harm done all around.”
“Okay, what if youdon’t send a suspect bill to the Fed? What if you just take it from the customer, give him a receipt for it … and keep it.”
“Keep it?”
“Yes. And then two weeks later … or however long it usually takes the Fed to get back to you …”
“It varies.”
“Two weeks, three weeks, whatever, you call the customer and tell him Sorry, your bill was phony and the Fed has confiscated it. Goodbye, sir, and good luck.”
Antonia looked at him.
“That would be stealing,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be stealingreal money.”
Antonia was still looking at him.
“It would be stealingcounterfeit money,” he said.
“What’s the difference?” she said. “I fail to see the difference.”
“That’s exactly my point. If nobody cantell the difference, we can use tons of fake money just as if it’s real money. We can use fake money to pay for anything we buy.”
Which was just what Jerry Hoskins had tried to do with the Mexicans. But Will didn’t know this, either.
“It still seems like stealing to me,” Antonia said.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with stealing,” Will said, and kissed her again.
“Do you like violin music?” she asked.
FAT OLLIE was eating.
He was also listening.
For him, he was eating lightly. That is to say, he was eating a baloney sandwich on rye with butter and mustard, and a sour pickle, and a potato knish, and a banana, and he was drinking coffee while he and Carella listened to the tape they’d retrieved from the recorder Tigo Gomez was wearing when the unidentified blonde—now in the hospital, andstill unidentified—shot and killed him. Carella was eating a tuna and tomato sandwich on white, and drinking a glass of milk. The two detectives were in the interrogation room at the Eight-Seven, where Ollie seemed to be spending a lot of time lately, now that he was responsible for Carella’s life two times over. Carella devoutly wished he would not save his life a third time, otherwise he might become a permanent fixture up here.
Ollie much preferred eating to listening to tapes.
The trouble with police tapes was that they were very rarely interesting. If you went to see a movie or watched a television show, or even if you were desperate and decided to read a book, there was usually a story you could follow. Listening to a tape was the same as hearing people talking, except that when you were in a room with people and they were babbling away, you didn’t always recognize how boring it was. Listening to a tape, you were always aware of the fact that you were hoping these people wouldsay something you could use against them. Usually, there was one person wearing the wire and the other person or persons present were totally unaware that they were being recorded. So they rambled on about anything under the sun, while you sat there with your thumb up your ass waiting for some kind of plot development. Even though Ollie did not much enjoy reading books, he knew all about plot development now that he’d started writing his thriller, which to tell the truth he’d found much easier than learning the first three bars of “Night and Day.” In fact, he couldn’t understand why the guys who wrote such shit got paid so much money for it.
The interesting thing about the tape Gomez had recorded was that Wiggins hadn’t shot him at once. Because anyone listening to it—as Ollie and Carella were listening to it now—had to recognize from minute one that Tigo was on a fishing expedition and that what he was fishing for was an admission of murder. But Wiggins had something else on his mind, and as the detectives listened and ate—Ollie’s banana was particularly tasty with a baloney sandwich smothered in mustard—they began to become more and more interested in what Wiggins was saying than in Gomez’s inept attempts to wring a confession from him.