Dixon hitched his chair forward and lowered his voice. “Remember the Rovere case? The money? It’s never showed up. It’s still too hot. It will always be too hot. Want to know a little history? You can’t prove any of this no matter what you decide. There’s three hundred and twenty-seven thousand. All of the fifties and all of the twenties. A county cop grabbed it that night, drove three miles with it and pitched it into the brush and recovered it the next morning. He sat on it for nearly a year, scared to spend it, scared to unload it. He sold it for ten thousand he could spend. He sold it so he could sleep nights. A speculator in Cleveland bought it and, after a second thought, was happy to unload it in Detroit to a friend of mine a week later for fifteen. My friend figured to sit on it for a couple of years until the heat went off! and he could risk spreading it around. But the heat has never gone off. He needs some money. It’s on the market. He’ll let it go for eighty.”
“Why come to me?”
“It can’t be sold in the usual channels. Nobody will touch it. Get caught and it’s too hard for people like that to prove they weren’t in on the snatch. We had a talk about it a month or so ago. I had a few ideas. One of them was you.”
“What good would that money do me?”
“You’re clean. So is Catton. But you’re both larcenous types. You can get it out of the country. Hell, either of you can take all the trips you want. Take it out in small chunks. You two can even keep it in a safety deposit box. South America, Central America, Mexico. You can trade it there. Suppose you hit five or six banks in Rio. Convert it and then convert it back. Months later the stuff drifts back into the Federal Reserve System. By then it’s too late to identify where it came from.”
“So why don’t you do it?”
“Because there is some strange difficulty about getting a passport. And I have no legitimate business reason for a trip. You and Catton have stock in a Panamanian shipping line and in two small South American air lines.”
“How the hell would you know that?”
“Paul, I think that’s the first time I ever heard you say a naughty word. Never mind how I know.”
“The stock is practically worthless.”
“But you’ve got it.”
“Can’t any of your... associates get out of the country?”
“There is a kind of unreasoning, superstitious dread about this money, Paul. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s there. My friend, the guy who wants to sell it, was in France three months ago. He took fifty thousand of it along and lost his nerve and brought it all back and put the whole bundle in what he considers a safer place. I think you’re too hardheaded to be superstitious about it.”
“What do you get out of this?”
“Ten per cent.”
“Why doesn’t he take the whole bundle and leave for good, go some place where he can’t be sent back?”
“He’s a patriot. He likes milk shakes and air conditioning. And he’s got other irons in the fire. Is Luciano happy?”
“I’ll... I’ll have to think.”
“You can’t miss. Can you raise the money?”
“Not now. Not the way things are. Maybe the two of us can, if Catton will go for it.”
“He’ll go for it, if he’s as smart as you are, Paul. It’s what I told my friend a month ago. It’s got to be sold to somebody legitimate. It’s too risky to try to do anything with it here. You might pass three thousand bucks before some smart teller checks the list. Once that starts, you wouldn’t hear about it. They’d just close in on you, using every bill as a signpost, like a paper chase.”
“How do I get in touch with you?”
“I’m registered at the Hancock House. I’ll wait.”
“How can I be sure it’s the money? This would be a fine way to unload counterfeit.”
Dixon grinned merrily. “Why, if you have any doubts, take one of those fifties to the bank and ask about it, pal.”
“But...”
“It’s legitimate. I’ll give you a clipping with those three sets of serial numbers and you can check. It’s the money. You’ll be buying three dollars for... no, four dollars for every one.”
Catton, lying listless and wasted in bed, had been frightened by the idea. It had taken Paul two hours to convince him. By the time he left, Burt Catton was exhausted. And Paul knew just how far they could go. Forty from Burt and twenty-five from him would strip them almost completely. Sixty-five thousand.
He offered Dixon sixty. Dixon was amused, indignant, enraged. Paul stood firm. Dixon left and made a phone call. He came back and said seventy was rock bottom. Paul offered sixty-five and said it was absolute top. Dixon was gone much longer the second time. He came back and said, “All right. It’s fine. It’s just dandy. I don’t get ten per cent. I get five per cent. Instead of eight grand I get a lousy three and a quarter, so he only nets one and a quarter less than if you took it at seven. The rest of the difference comes out of my hide. Write this down. Ready? Hogan 68681. That’s a Tulsa exchange. Phone any day next week in person, from Tulsa. Ask for Jerry. Have the sixty-five with you in cash. No thousands. When you get Jerry on the line ask him if he knows where you can buy a good used Cad. He’ll take it from there.”
“Tulsa!”
“It’s a city. Like in Oklahoma. You won’t like it. Few people do.”
And as they had parted then, the last time Verney had seen Dixon, Roger had looked at him intently and curiously and said, “It must have really been something.”
“What do you mean?”
“When your toy train went off the tracks. The first major setback in your whole life. It must have really rocked you, Paul. Did you chew up the carpets and run around the walls?”
“I was disappointed.”
“You were more than that, Paul. You were shocked. The whole world was turned upside down. They couldn’t do this to you. Not to the one and only, the unique Paul Verney. Actually. I’m surprised you didn’t kill yourself. Or lose your mind. I had high hopes. I figured you far too brittle to adjust to failure. You see, I can remember the times you got crossed up in little ways. Your reaction was murderous.”
“Your imagination has always been too vivid, Roger.”
Dixon sighed. “I should have known I’d guess bad again. You’ll handle this well. You’ll make a potful. You’ll screw Catton out of his end, and you’ll come out right on schedule or ahead, even. I just have one small hope. I hope I never have to look at you again.”
“You should be able to arrange that, Roger.”
He told no one where he was going. He told his office staff he was going on a fishing trip. Catton, with face like a skull, had managed to totter into the bank and sign for a safety deposit box and carry it into a booth and take out the cash Paul needed. There were no thousand-dollar bills in either reserve fund. It was nearly all in hundreds, with a very few fifties. Verney packed the money in the bottom of his grip, two packets fastened with rubber bands each nearly three inches thick. The night before he left he thought of the money and how all of this might very easily be an intricate confidence game. In the morning he put the money into two cigar boxes and mailed them separately to himself at the Tulsa hotel where he had made a reservation under the name of W. W. Ward, writing on the outside of each package, Hold for Arrival
He reached Tulsa in three days, phoned the hotel, found the packages had arrived and were being held, and he asked they be put in the hotel safe. When he checked in they gave him a receipt for the two packages. He mailed the receipt to himself care of General Delivery at Tulsa. Then, unable to think of any further way to protect himself, he went to a drugstore booth and phoned and asked for Jerry and spoke nonsense about a used car.