“No, ma’am, but …”
“What did you do with my money?”
“Thisisyour money.”
“It isnot my money! What’d you do with my money?”
“Lady, I’m telling you for the last time, thisis your money. Inyour envelope. They even gave me a receipt with the serial numbers on it. I had to sign it to …”
“What do you mean? Who?”
“To get the money back. I had to sign the receipt.”
“Get itback? Where was it?”
“At the Department.”
“What department? What are youtalking about?”
“The Treasury Department. A Secret Service agent took the money to check the serial numbers.”
Oh Jesus, she thought. Those Mexicans tipped me with hot money. Slowly, trying not to lose control, reminding herself that she had been in worse situations than this—she had once flown a Chinook helicopter over a desert blooming with black shrapnel, she had flown through horrific firestorms from below and had not lost it, she was not going to lose it now—slowly, carefully, she asked, “Why did they want to check the serial numbers?”
“Don’t worry, they didn’t match,” he said.
“But why did they want to check them?”
“They thought they were ransom bills.”
Calm, she thought. Stay calm. Just hear him out. Just try to get to the bottom of this.
“What ransom?” she asked calmly.
“There was a kidnapping,” he said. “The ransom was paid in hundred-dollar bills. They thought these might be the bills.”
“What made them think that?” she asked evenly, calmly.
“Because the serial numbers on a bill I cashed …”
“You cashedmy money?”
“Just that one bill. I didn’t spend any more than that. And the serial numbers on itdid match.”
Don’t shoot him, she thought. Just remain extremely calm.
“Did matchwhat?” she asked.
“Did match the numbers on one of the ransom bills.”
“A bill the Secret Service was looking for.”
“Yes.”
“Why the Secret Service?”
“I don’t know.”
“And you say they took therest of the money …”
“Yes. To check the serial numbers. Which didnot match. So they brought all of it back.”
“Brought backthis money here on the table.”
“Yes. Your money. In your very envelope. Right there on the table.”
She stood there nodding, looking down at the money, trying to make some sense of everything he’d told her. Then she said, “This is not my money.”
Will wished she would stop repeating the same words over and over again when her goddamn money was sitting right there on the kitchen table, in plain view for the entire world to see. Why wouldn’t she just let himcount it, for Christ’s sake, and then get out of here with her goddamn furs and her gun?
“Ma’am,” he said, “I am telling you for the last time that this is your money that the Treasury Department returned to me. I gave them a signed receipt with all the serial numbers on it, stating that the money was all here because I counted it last night and there was indeed eight thousand dollars here. Now if you’ll let me count it for you now, ma’am, I’m sure it will come to eight thousand dollars all over again because nobody has touched a cent of it since Mr. David A. Horne, with an ‘e,’ left here.”
“I’ll let you count it for me,” she said. “But it isn’t my money.”
Goddamn broken record, he thought, and began counting all over again. She kept watching the bills as he passed them from one hand to the other, counting, “twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three …” shaking her head as if trying to dope out the great mystery of what had happened here, when it was all so simple a caterpillar could grasp it, “thirty-four, thirty-five” and on and on, money, money, money, “fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty,” if he had to count these damn bills one more time, “seventy-one, seventy-two …” and at last he counted the eightieth and last bill, and looked up at her and said, “Satisfied?”
She did not answer him. She rubber-banded the bills again, and dropped the wad into her tote, leaving the white envelope on the table. Then she took off the red fox, put on the sable, draped the fox and the mink over her arm …
“Would you like something to carry those in?” he asked.
She looked at him.
“Little bulky that way,” he said. “Let me see if I’ve got anything.”
Not trusting him for a minute, she followed him into a bedroom with an unmade bed and what looked like a week’s laundry strewn all over the floor. He opened a closet door, rummaged around inside there, and came up with a duffel that looked like the one she’d carried in the Army, except her name and rank weren’t stenciled in black on the side.
“Thanks,” she said, and folded her furs into the bag, first the fox jacket and then the mink stole. Pulling the drawstrings tight through the grommets, she wondered if she should offer to pay for the duffel, and then asked herself if she was losing her mind, the man here was a thief who’d caused her a great deal of unnecessary trouble. She slung the duffel over her shoulder, backed toward the front door with the gun still in her hand, and without saying another word, walked out.
Will still considered himself lucky.
She’d forgotten to ask for the four hundred dollars and change he still had left over from the five he’d borrowed yesterday.
SHE STOPPED AT A BANK ostensibly to change three of the hundreds into twenties, tens, and fives, but actually to test the bills. She was still wondering why a Secret Service agent had exchanged her own world-weary hundreds for these obviously used but relatively fresh ones, and she was relieved when the teller held them up to the light to check the security strip, and then changed them without raising either an eyebrow or a fuss. It was close to three when she came out of the bank but yesterday had been the shortest day of the year, and with the heavy clouds overhead, the afternoon seemed already succumbing to dusk. The day was still piercingly cold. She was grateful for the sable, luxuriating in its long silken swirl, feeling like a Russian empress all at once, $8,000 in cash in her handbag, the city all aglitter for Christmas, what more could a person wish for?
How about caviar and champagne? she thought.
THE TWO MEN WERE SITTING in their overcoats, one on either side of the Christmas tree in her living room. They popped out of the dusky gloom the moment she turned on the lights. The larger of the two men had a gun in his hand and it was pointing up at Cass’s head.
“Buenas noches,”he said and smiled. “We are here for dee money.”
She thought at once that it was really shitty of Wilbur Struthers to recruit two Latino goons to reclaim the money he’d stolen from her in the first place, the son of a bitch. But here they were, both of them smiling now, somewhat apologetically it seemed to her, but perhaps she was mistaken. She put down the brown paper bag with the caviar she’d bought at Hildy’s Market and the Dom Perignon she’d bought in the liquor store on Twenty-sixth Street.