That stopped her—for a moment. She made the drinks, including a double shot for herself, and as we headed back to the living room Grace whispered, “Well, she'll want a husband soon and no woman could do better than getting you.”
“Now you know I've been waiting for Jake to fall into a mailbox so we two can get together.”
“Barney, I'm serious. She looks like a fine, young...”
“You don't know how young, how much of a kid she is. I'm serious too—Grace honey, take the shotgun out of my back.”
When I sat down again, Ruthie told me, “Daddy, Betsy has a sewing machine and knows all about making dresses. She's going to make me a peppermint-stick skirt, and let me run the machine!”
“Now, Ruthie, don't bother Mrs. Turner,” I said, trying to give the kid the eye to shut up.
“It's no bother, really, I love to sew,” Betsy said, and Ruthie gave me a I-told-you-so look.
The boys had turned on the set again and we sat around and tried to talk and watch the screen, and Grace brought out some sort of pastry that tasted like Shredded Wheat filled with nuts and dipped in honey, and after a while I said we'd better go and Ruthie said it was Saturday night and I said, “Come on, it's nearly ten, and take us time to get home.”
I stood up and Grace told Betsy she must come out again, in the afternoon, to see her flowers, openly hinting I should bring her out. The boys came over and asked if I'd seen some 3-D private-eye movie, sort of recommending it to me as an instruction book—I think.
Jake said, “I'll drive to the drugstore, buy something for the baby. That kid, what a memory—Grace must have been frightened by an elephant.”
“Oh, stop bragging,” Grace said.
Ruthie and Mrs. Turner got into my car and we followed Jake to a drugstore. I got out and said I'd get the kid something and Jake said nonsense, it was his idea, and we got into one of those silly arguments. As I held Jake's money hand and bought a glass plane filled with candy, Betsy joined us, asked, “Is it all right if I buy Ruthie an ice-cream cone? I suggested it and she wants one.”
“Sure.”
While we waited for her, Jake said, “So you're on a murder job.”
“Two of them.”
“A double header,” Jake said, awe in his voice.
“Fellow named Franklin Andersun and Mr. Turner were ...”
“Remember reading about that. I was interested. Turner was a cop, a ...” He turned and blinked at Betsy. “Gee, excuse me, Mrs. Turner. It was stupid not to realize you were... I'm sorry.”
Betsy half smiled to show him it was okay. Jake added, “Reason I read about it, was this Andersun. Had a fellow on my route with the same name. Franklin Andersun, even spelled it with a «. But it wasn't him, of course.”
I stared at Jake's moonface. “There was a Franklin Andersun on your mail route?” I repeated, that odd tingling feeling you get when you've finally found the break in a case welling up inside me.
“I even bought two morning papers to see the guy's picture. Didn't look anything like the one on my route. My Andersun had bright red hair. Odd way he spelled his name, maybe a relation to the dead one. See, when I was making out a registered receipt for him, I made a point of asking if the spelling was right. Nasty guy, too. Thought the mails ran just for him.”
“A registered letter?”
“Passport, they always come registered. So damn impatient to get it. Kept asking, in this twangy voice of his, if the letter had come. I'd tell him...”
Grabbing his shoulders, I lifted him onto a fountain stool, said in a choked voice, “Sit down, Jake. Let's you and me chatter.”
MARTIN SAT up in bed, drinking his third cup of black coffee. Lund was sitting at a table, holding his head and nibbling on a thin loaf of bread. He asked, “Okay, so I can probably sell my car—so what?”
“Sam, it was your crack about selling our passports that gave me the idea—came to me clear and cold through my drunken haze. Your car brings fifteen hundred dollars. Between Therese's savings and my cameras I can come up with a thousand,” Martin said, talking fast, the hang-over punishing his head. “We return to the States, hang around for six months— maybe less if we play our angles right. Hardly any calculated risk, the way I see it.”
Lund gave him a bloodshot stare. “Marty, one thing at a time. About selling our passports, I don't like...”
“We're not selling ours. Too risky. Only mean ten thousand and we'd probably be thrown out of France anyway. Might get more if we sold them in Germany, but then we'd be stuck in Germany or sent straight back to the States. No, Sam, we're going to return here with a dozen other passports and sell them for sixty thousand bucks!”
“Aw Marty, we both have big heads this morning, or is it afternoon? How are we going to steal all those passports?”
“Steal? No, we'll get them all kind of legal-by applying for them! That's the idea that hit me. What do you do when you want a passport in the States?”
“How much do you want me to bet on this question?”
“Stop clowning, Sam. Know how one goes about getting a passport? You either write or visit an office of the State Department, with your birth certificate, two crummy pictures, a friend who will sign that he has known you to be a good citizen for several years—and ten dollars. In a few weeks your passport arrives by registered mail. Now, how do you get a birth certificate in a big town, like New York City?”
“Beats the slop out of me,” Sam said brightly. “Wonder if quiz shows would go over big on the Paris radio?”
“Hard for me to talk with this head, so damnit, quit clowning! About a birth certificate—in New York City all you do is write to the Board of Health, give 'em the date of your birth, address where born, name of your parents and mother's maiden name. For a dollar you receive a birth certificate by return mail. Like the idea?”
“Marty, what the hell are you gassing about?”
“About the perfect swindle,” Martin said, finishing his coffee, “except we're not hurting anybody, so there won't be any complaints.” He got out of bed, wearing only shorts and socks, and his body was lean and hard as he sat down beside Sam, broke off a piece of bread. “Hope Therese comes back with the charcuterie, I'm starved. And stop giving me that blank look— Sam, the best rackets are always the simple ones.
Listen: you and me—under false names—go into any bar or poolroom in a poor section of New York, Chicago, Boston—any large city. We each pick out a guy. Take a few beers, maybe a night or two, to make small talk about the neighborhood, pretend we're boyhood chums with the guy. Point is, we each learn where our guy was born, when, and the name of his folks. That doesn't sound difficult, does it?”
“Sounds stupid. What do we do with all this great info?”
“Sam, you're really in a fog. Suppose the fellow you talk to is named Mark James and my guy is Edward Spero.... You rent a room in another part of the city as Mark James and I rent one under the name of Edward Spero—then we send away for their birth certificates. We take passport pictures of each other, hop down to the nearest passport office and make applications, as James and Spero, each being a witness for the other. In a few weeks we receive 'our' passports, as James and ' Spero, and move on. No possible traces left. Like it?”
“Think it will work?”
“Why won't it? Then we find a bar in another part of the town, say Brooklyn, start over again, only this time we go to a different passport office with our applications. Be easy to touch up the pictures and change our features with make-up. We work New York, Newark, Hartford, then go to Chicago, maybe even out to L.A. Within a few months, six at the most, we have a dozen passports, return to Paris on our own passports, sell the others. Show me a flaw?”