Cinderella Sims, page 11
“Let’s go, Nat.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“I do. Come on.”
I came on, out of the bar to the street, down the street to her car. It was a pretty fancy car for a whore but then she was a pretty fancy whore. The car was a big black Mercury. She drove and I sat next to her.
I kept my hands busy. She either liked it or put up a good act, and I decided that I was getting my money’s worth even if we didn’t wind up in bed. I slipped one arm around her and filled up one hand with breast—firm solid flesh, fine flesh. She must have been a prewar model, I remember thinking, because they didn’t try to save material when they put her together.
I put the other hand up her skirt and found out that she didn’t believe in underwear. It was a happy discovery. Happy for both of us, I suppose, because she was having a little trouble with the car. She kept squirming in her seat and tightening her thighs around my hand and a couple of times she damn near lost control of the car.
“Nat,” she breathed. “Oh, we are going to have fun. We are going to have lots of fun.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
At a streetlight she turned and came into my arms for a long kiss. It was a jolly one, believe me. The Phoenix citizenry must have had fun watching us ignore the fact that it was broad daylight out. And we ignored the bejesus out of it.
I did something with one of my hot hands and she let out a little moan. It sounded nice and I did it again and she moaned again.
“You better hurry,” I managed to say. “Or we won’t get to your place. We’ll have our jollies here.”
“Here?”
“In the car,” I said. “In the middle of the street.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Probably illegal, though.”
“But lots of fun—”
I made myself let go of her and told her to drive. She drove, then parked, then got out of the car and told me to come with her. I didn’t need a second invitation.
On the way up the stairs I thought that I shouldn’t be that excited. Hell, she was only a whore. And whores just aren’t all that exciting. Cash on the line is no basis for love.
The hell of it was this—it didn’t seem like a cash deal. It took me half the walk upstairs to figure out why. The reason was simple—this wasn’t a cash thing, it was seduction. One of those seductions where the victim is getting faked out. And Rhonda, or whatever in hell her name might have been, was definitely getting faked out.
We reached the top of the staircase and I reached for her. She turned to me and all of her was next to all of me. My chest was very warm where her breasts were pressed tight against me. My hands were also warm—they cupped her buttocks and held her close. And my mouth was on fire—her tongue was in it and her tongue knew ingenious tricks.
“This it?”
I pointed at a door. She nodded. This, it seemed, was indeed it. And it was a damn good thing. I could not have climbed another flight of stairs. But I wondered why she was just sort of standing there, not getting ready to open the door. Hell, I wanted to get the show on the road. “Nat—”
“C’mon,” I said, running my hands over her body. I touched interesting parts of her and grinned ghoulishly. “C’mon, dammit. I can’t wait much longer.”
“Okay,” she said. “You first.”
And she pointed at the door. I walked to it, wrapped my hand around the door’s knob, which couldn’t compare with hers, and thought about opening the door. Strange that it wasn’t locked. But then a whore wouldn’t keep her door locked. Not unless she was afraid of somebody stealing her basin. Of course, there was always the chance that I would step inside and get hit on the head. But I was willing to take the chance. I opened the door and stepped inside.
I didn’t get hit on the head.
That would have been too easy.
Instead I stared at three men and two guns. I didn’t recognize one man or either gun, but the other two men were fellows I had seen before.
Reed.
And Baron.
“Inside,” Reed was saying. “And shut the door, Lindsay. We don’t want to be disturbed.”
8
“Good going, Lori. You, Lindsay—don’t move. Just stand there. And start talking.”
A bell rang somewhere in the back of my head. Lori? The bell murmured something about a girl named Lori Leigh. Cindy had described her as blonde and busty, which was certainly a pretty accurate description of my girl Rhonda. I’d given up Lori Leigh as a bad dream about the time when Cindy’s story started coming up roses. I had made a mistake.
“I found him in a bar,” Lori was saying now. “Told him I made it for money. He gave me a twenty.”
“A live one?”
“One of ours.”
The men laughed. “Too much.” Baron said. He was even bigger than I remembered, a mountain of a man with a head like a boulder. “Paying you off in queer. That moves me.”
Reed I’ve mentioned before—medium height, medium build, sandy hair. He looked as though he was the type who poured boiling oil on troubled waters. The guy who rounded out the party looked like the oil itself. A little greaseball with eyes that stared dead ahead.
Baron came up to me. He was smiling and I decided maybe they weren’t such bad guys after all. He held out a hand and I reached to take it.
I missed. And he hit me in the chest.
“Funny man,” he said. “You better talk, funny man. There’s a little bit of fifty grand you got and that we want. There’s a little frail named Cindy who has to be taken apart at the seams. You got talking to do.”
I felt around and found out my ribs were still there. It should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.
“Lindsay?” Reed’s voice. I looked up. “You got two choices, Lindsay. You can let us work on you until you spill or you can spill now and save us the trouble. That way you came out of it with your teeth in your head. Either way you want it, Lindsay. Just tell us.”
Choices, yet. I opened my mouth to tell him what he could go and do to himself, then thought it over for a minute and let my mouth drop shut. I was in a bind, trapped like a rat in a rat trap. And for what? A girl who conned me? Money I wasn’t planning on spending anyway?
Two dumb things to get killed for.
I stood up. Baron moved in, ready to pound my face in. He threw the punch before I could start talking and my head took off and waltzed around the room. I almost went out, but not quite. I went to the floor and stayed there while my head came back to me again.
“What do you say, Lindsay?”
“I’ll talk.” I said. “Hell, the broad conned me to begin with. I was ready to powder and leave her with the dough. I got no reason to hold out.”
Reed didn’t say anything.
I pointed at Baron. “You can tell this bastard a couple things. You can tell him he didn’t have to hit me. Not the first time and not the second time. You can also tell him that one of these days I’m going to kill him.”
Baron laughed.
“Look,” Reed said, “we want a couple things. We want the girl and we want the money. And some information.”
“I can take you to her. Or do you want the information first?”
He thought it over. “That makes more sense. Start talking.”
“Where do I start?”
“With the money,” Reed said. “How much of it is left?”
“There was fifty grand to start with?”
He nodded.
“Maybe a thousand of that is gone. Part of that in New York, the rest here in Phoenix. The rest is still in the little black bag the way it was when I ran into her.”
“Good. How did you meet her?”
I hesitated, then told him. I left out most of it, just giving him the picture of a good-natured slob who got tied up with a frantic frail without knowing entirely what was going on. I saw a few reasons for feeding him the story. For one thing, it happened to be pretty much the truth. For another, the less involved I was, the less chance there would be of them deciding to kill me. And, of course, Cindy had suckered them. This would put us both in the same boat. The boat would be rocky as New England soil, but it just might float.
“You thought the dough was straight?”
“That’s right.”
“How did you tumble?”
I told him that, too. I ran through it, told him how she was acting funny so I ran a check on her story and came out with more questions than answers. He got very interested when I went through the routine at the bank, how I checked the bill and managed to get away with it. I think he seemed impressed.
“For a mark,” he said, “you came out of it okay. You got a head, anyway.”
“And fists,” Baron said. “You did a job on Bunkie. That hasn’t nice.”
I told Baron where he should stick himself. He came on to me and I got ready to take another punch. But Reed motioned the big man away.
“Let’s get back to Cindy,” he said. “She’s got the dough?”
“She and the dough are in the room.”
“So let’s go.”
So we went. Down the stairs and out to the street and into the same damned car that Rhonda—I mean Lori—had used for fun and games. That, I decided, was one thing I would always regret. I hadn’t managed to knock off a piece of Lori. It was one hell of a shame.
In the car I had questions. “How did you find us?” I asked. “I don’t remember leaving a trail.”
“Cindy tipped us. A wire day before yesterday.”
It figured. “Another question,” I said. “You’re going to a hell of a lot of trouble for fifty grand in schlock. You’re spending that much more to get it back. Maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t get it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend the time printing up fresh stuff?”
Reed and Baron looked at each other. I looked at the two of them, then at the greaseball who was doing the driving, then at Lori. Lori was the only one who was any fun to look at.
“Might as well tell him,” Reed said. “Can’t hurt.”
He turned to me. “We were working together,” he said. “Cindy was part of the racket. You know about the paper, don’t you? The process?”
“I know what you do. Not how, but what. You bleach singles and print twenties on them.”
“That’s about it. We had the process, had a set of plates. The plates were good.”
“Very good.”
“But not perfect,” Reed said. “There were a couple errors there, nothing big, but big enough to make the bills obviously counterfeit to an expert with an eye in his head. We weren’t going to run those plates. I had a boy coming who was a hell of a touch with engraver’s tools. Give him a few days with the plates and no one in the world could tell the queer from the straight. You seen our bills?”
I nodded. Seen them? Hell, I’d been spending them.
“Then you know how good they are. The paper is good and the plates are close to perfect. We even have automatic switchers for the serial numbers so they can’t pull the bills by number. But the plates weren’t perfect and we were waiting until the boy could fix that for us.”
I was beginning to bet a glimmer.
“Cindy,” Reed said bitterly. “Big ideas and small brains. Her cut wasn’t enough for her. She had to put the plates on the rotary one night when everybody else was decked out. She was smooth, that girl. Stupid but smooth. She inked and rolled and churned out a quick fifty grand. And lammed before anybody woke up.”
I was beginning to see things. But it still didn’t add up, not all across the board. “Look,” I said, “it’s still only fifty grand. Once your boy makes the scene you can print up better stuff, as much of it as you want. So why chase her down for the fifty? Point of honor or something?”
Reed shook his head, impatient. “Same plates,” he said. “If the schlock she’s carrying turns up phony, some joker can compare it with our stuff and put two and two together. And come up with four.”
“Oh,” I said.
“See? She’s got fifty grand in counterfeit dough. She wants double that for it. It’s a real live one, Lindsay. For the first time ever counterfeit is worth twice as much as straight money. One for the books, huh?”
Now it made sense.
“This isn’t a minor-key operation, Lindsay. This isn’t a hit-and-run game, with one roll off the plates and no more. This is enough to keep a bunch of people for life. Cindy has us strangled.”
“So you have to get the money back.”
“Right,” he said. “She isn’t working a deal. She’s blackmailing us. She’s got us over a barrel but she’s over a barrel herself. Three times now she’s tried to make the connection with us. We get on the scene and she changes her mind, runs like a rabbit. We can’t roll our own stuff until we get hers back.”
“There’s already a thousand in circulation.”
“Peanuts,” Baron said. “It’s good schlock. Half of it won’t ever turn up. And without her holding it, nobody can connect it with us. So we’re clear.”
I had a pretty good idea what they were going to do to Cindy. She wasn’t going to stay alive, not for long. I was starting to feel sorry for her. Hell, she’d pulled some pretty switches on me. But I could see her point. She was desperate and I was handy. What else could she do?
That wasn’t all. She’d been good to me. She could have powdered, could have been less fun in bed—there were plenty of ways I could have wound up on the short end of the stick. She wasn’t being honest with me but that was her privilege. I didn’t want Baron working her over, killing her.
They were going to kill her, that was certain. And, I realized, they were probably going to do as much for me. That’s why it wouldn’t hurt to tell me all this.
My knees felt very weak.
“This the hotel?”
I nodded. The greaseball pulled the big car over to the curb and we got out of it. I walked first, with Reed right behind me. I wondered what chances I had of making a break for it. There was no gun showing but I knew there was one held on me. And they wouldn’t mind shooting.
“Don’t try it,” Reed said, reading my mind. “Walk straight into the lobby and into the elevator. Then go right into her room. Or you’re dead.”
I’m stupid, but only up to a certain point. I didn’t want a bullet in the back, not just then. I walked into the lobby and over to the elevator, trying to look suspicious. For once I wanted all the cops in the world to notice me. If the cops came, Reed wouldn’t shoot. He would be caught, and I would be caught, and being caught was greatly to be preferred to being dead.
But, of course, no cops came.
The elevator took us to our floor. We walked to the room and I stood in front of the door waiting for something nice to happen to me. Nothing nice happened.
“Knock,” Reed suggested.
I knocked, hoping that she wouldn’t answer the door. Maybe she would sleep nice and soundly, and not answer the door, and we could go away and let her live.
She didn’t answer the door. I turned to Reed, shrugged mightily, and he wasn’t amused. “You got a key,” he snapped. “Use it.”
I had a key and used it. I half hoped the key wouldn’t work, but the key did work, and I opened the door, and Cinderella Sims was nowhere to be seen.
“Not here,” Baron said. It was, for Baron, a pretty brilliant observation.
“Probably out shopping,” I suggested. “She goes shopping a lot.”
“Spending our money?”
“Generally.”
“We’ll wait,” Reed said. He made himself comfortable on top of the bed. I remember thinking that he was not the first person to be comfortable on that particular bed. Two others had been so—Ted Lindsay and Cinderella Sims. That made me very sad, thinking about what was going to happen to Cindy. And, for that matter, to me. There had to be something I could do, but whatever it was, I wasn’t aware of it.
Then I thought of something else. Reed was sitting approximately eighteen inches above the fifty grand he was so hot to get his pretty little hands on. That gave me something to think about. All he had to do was look under the bed and he didn’t need me around anymore. Reed or Baron would put me out of the way. Then they could wait for Cindy and kill her. We lost either way, but the longer I kept him from finding the money, the longer I stayed alive. And who was to say what could happen in the meanwhile? Maybe the police would break the door down. Maybe the Marines would land. Maybe Reed and Baron and Lori and Greaseball would tumble over with heart attacks. Maybe—
“Lindsay?”
I looked at him.
“The money,” he said. “The schlock: The little black bag. Get it now. Then we can all wait for the girl.”
“I don’t know where she put it.”
“Get it Lindsay.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t—”
Baron hit me and the rest of my sentence was forever lost. I came up mad and went at him. He clubbed me again and this time I stayed on the floor for quite a while.
“The money, Lindsay.”
I got up shakily, then pointed under the bed. “That’s where she keeps it. You want it so bad you can get it yourselves.”
Which is what they decided to do. Baron and Greaseball each took an end of the bed while Reed stood up and kept a gun trained on me. They picked up the bed, carried it out of the way, set it down again. I didn’t even watch. I was waiting for them to go into orbit when they saw the money.
They went into orbit, all right. They went into orbit when they didn’t see the money.
So did I.
My little Sunflower had taken it on the lam. Dough and all, sweet little Cindy Sims had run out on me. I didn’t feel too good all of a sudden.
“I’ll beat it out of him,” Baron was saying. “He’ll talk. He’ll talk through broken teeth, but he’ll talk.”
Baron wasn’t kidding. But he was wrong. He would beat me, and I would not talk at all. I wouldn’t have a thing in the world to talk about.
Which wouldn’t bother Baron. He’d just keep knocking the crap out of me, and he would keep on going until I was dead, then they’d go out hunting for Cindy, chasing the golden fleece of the fifty grand in queer that could put them away for the rest of their lives.
