Cinderella Sims, page 14
“What do you want?”
“Information,” I said. “Some questions.”
“Go ahead.”
“For a starter,” I said, “where’s the press?”
“Basement.”
“Take us to it.”
He got up and led the way. The basement stairs were rickety and the railing shook a little. I kept the gun pointed at the top of his spine every step of the way. He didn’t try anything.
“This way.”
We followed him to a little room off the main floor. It was pretty impressive. It didn’t look like any quick turnover operation. It was professional.
There was an automatic-feed rotary on a workbench, a stack of bleached paper, a few bills. The bills were nice new twenties hot off the presses. Just a few of them, just enough so that Reed could be sure the boy had done his job properly on the plates before he removed him from the picture.
The plates were also there. Plus a whole case of inks, all the inks necessary to print the bills. It was an amazing setup. The press would ink automatically, feed automatically, dispense bills automatically. All you had to do was hook it up and plug it in and watch it roll.
It was lovely.
The plates had number gadgets hooked up, set to turn over each time a bill was printed. No problem of the same serial number on every bill. No switching it by hand between each impression. It was perfect. All I could do was stare at it.
Then I remembered something.
“The paper,” I said. “You got the formula for bleaching the paper?”
His eyes got crafty.
“The formula,” I said. “Give.”
“If I don’t?”
“Then you die.”
He shrugged. He had a card to play now and he was making the most of it. “I die anyway,” he said, guessing rather accurately. “You killed Bunkie. You’ll kill me. Why should I make it easy for you?”
“Make it easy for yourself.”
“Huh?”
“Think,” I said. “Think what happens to you if you don’t talk. Think about matches up and down the soles of your feet. Think about thumbs popping your eyes out. Think about taking three days to die.”
I hardly recognized my voice. Evidently he did a little thinking, because his face turned a few unpleasant colors and when he spoke his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. “You’d find it anyway,” he croaked. “The drawer.”
I found the drawer he was talking about and opened it. A slip of paper, a batch of fairly complex directions, a few bottles of chemicals. That had to be it. But I had to be sure it would work.
“Cindy,” I said. “You hold the gun. I want to tie him up while I check this out.”
I used his belt on him, then let her hold the gun while I carried out the directions. When the brew was ready I took one of the nice fresh twenties and did what I was supposed to do with it. It didn’t take long. The bill came out white and pure, not a trace of ink on it.
“It works,” I said reverently. Cindy nodded.
I turned to Casper. “More information,” I said. “Reed and Baron. You hear from them?”
He hesitated and I glared at him. “A call,” he said finally. “Last night.”
“What did they say?”
“Not much.”
He shrugged again. “They said expect them tonight. Around ten, maybe later.”
“Nothing about me or Cindy?”
“Nothing. Just that they hadn’t gotten the schlock but that they were going to roll anyway. Reed said he was through chasing wild geese. Something like that.”
That was fine. Cindy and I exchanged glances, pleased with the news. The sooner Reed was coming back, the better for us. We didn’t want to hang around any longer than we had to. Enough is enough. And Reed and Baron wouldn’t be ready for us. They would be fish in a barrel, which was fine with me. It had been hard enough. Plenty hard. Anything that made it easier was fine with both of us.
“I got a favor to ask.”
I looked at him.
“Look,” Casper went on, “you can do me a big favor. Fair enough?”
“Go ahead.”
“Kill me,” he said. “Now. I don’t want to die but I don’t want to wait either. You’re not going to let me live. You as much as said so. Get it over with right away, will you? Waiting makes my skin crawl.”
There was nothing more he could tell us, nothing I didn’t know. He was scum but he deserved that much.
“You sure you want it?”
“I’m sure.”
Cindy’s hand was on my arm. Killing in a fight was one thing, she was saying silently. Killing Reed and Baron was one thing. But killing a trussed-up man was another thing. She didn’t like it a bit. Well, hell, neither did I. But if there was another way open I couldn’t see it. If he lived we were done. There were only three of them now, three who knew the score. Reed and Baron and Casper.
They all had to go.
“How do you want it?”
“A bullet.”
I shook my head, hating myself. “I don’t want to risk the noise.”
“Muffle it with a pillow.”
I thought about that. Then I remembered Musso, and the slug in him. Same gun. Ballistics. A connection between the two killings.
I shook my head.
“Then hit me,” he said. “Knock me out. Then any way you want. Just quick and easy, that’s all.”
“Ted—”
Cindy didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. But I couldn’t help it. Casper had had enough already. At least I could make it quick for him.
“Close your eyes.”
He closed them. I took the gun from Cindy, reversed it, gave him the butt across the front of the skull. It didn’t kill him but it knocked him cold. He slumped in the chair.
“Don’t kill him,” she said. “Not murder. Please, Ted. We can get away anyway. He’s small. He won’t chase us.”
It was a very simple equation and I spelled it out for her. “If I kill him we have a chance,” I said. “If I let him live we die. Any connection is enough to do it. Anything tying us to the rest of them, any witness left alive—that’s all we need. Then we’re dead. Murder one. The gas chamber in California. You want the gas chamber?”
She didn’t.
Neither did I.
I swung the gun again and smashed Casper’s head for him.
10
Twelve hours to wait for Reed and Baron. Twelve hours to sit on our hands.
We didn’t sit on our hands. We were lucky—there was plenty to do. Packing, for example. We had plenty to take along with us. The press, the plates, the ink, the blank paper, the chemicals.
Before we packed I put the few counterfeit twenties I was still carrying through the chemical bath. I was suddenly sorry I hadn’t brought the whole satchel along—the bills were worth a dollar a piece now. They would have made fine blanks. But it wouldn’t have been worth the risk of getting picked up with the satchel in our possession.
I also tumbled on a stack of singles—money they hadn’t gotten around to bleaching yet. I packed those. I put the twenties already printed up in my wallet. There was a little over three hundred dollars there, enough to take us wherever we were going.
The press had a carrying case of its own and the rest of the stuff fit into an old suitcase someone had thoughtfully left behind. We got everything ready to go. Once Reed and Baron came back anything could happen. There could be gunshots, in which case we would have to leave in a hurry. I didn’t want to have to waste any time, not when time was important.
Cindy was calmer now. The human being is a remarkably adjustable mechanism—it can adjust to murder. She still didn’t like it, but then neither did I. She accepted it, though. If nothing else, there was consolation in the argument that we hadn’t killed anybody remotely worthwhile. Craig and Casper were lice, thieves, murderers.
We too were thieves and murderers. But that was something we didn’t want to dwell on.
“We’ve got to do a job on this house,” I told Cindy. “Sooner or later somebody’s going to come around and find the stiffs. No one’s going to be able to figure out who killed them or why. That’s fine. But we can’t let the world dope out the fact that there was a counterfeiting operation here. We have to cover up all the traces.”
“How do we do it?”
“Room to room,” I said. “Attic to basement. If they left any papers around, get rid of them. If they have anything, anything at all that smells of counterfeiting, dump it. Don’t pass up a thing.”
She nodded, then suddenly looked very worried. I asked her what was the matter.
“Fingerprints,” she whispered. “All over the place. We’ll have to wipe them off.”
I got a mental picture of the two of us trying to wipe our prints off of everything we may or may not have touched. “Hold on,” I said. “Get a grip on yourself. Have you ever been arrested for anything?”
She shook her head.
“Ever hold a government job? Ever get fingerprinted for any reason at all?”
“No.”
“Ever in the WACs? WAVEs? Anything like that?”
“Of course not.”
“Then relax,” I told her. “If your prints aren’t on file there’s no worry there. If they pick us up they can tie us in, but if they pick us up we’re dead anyway. We wouldn’t keep our mouths shut very long.”
“But—”
“Listen to me,” I said. “No one in the world knows about us. No one can tie us in. We hit and we run and we’re clear. All the fingerprints in the world won’t do them any good. They’ll never catch us and they’ll never print us. Forget fingerprints. Just make sure there are no traces behind us. I don’t want anybody looking for counterfeit twenties.”
We started in the attic and we worked our way to the basement. There wasn’t a hell of a lot to clean up but we didn’t miss any bets. Reed was one of those planners, a compulsive note-taker. Most of his stuff was meaningless to anybody but Reed. I burned it anyway.
There were a few impressions of the original plates lying around, bad stuff that would pass but wasn’t perfect. It went in the chemical bath, then in the suitcase. Every room and every closet got careful attention. It did two things—it covered our tracks, most important, and it also gave us something to do. That was important in itself. You can go batty in an empty house waiting for something to happen. This way we kept moving, kept working.
“Ted—”
“What?”
“We’ve got to do something about the bodies.”
She was right. If they were out of the way, there was the chance that somebody could get suspicious, enter the house, and leave without tumbling to the fact that it held four corpses. I didn’t have any tremendous desire to lug dead bodies around but it was necessary. I had to get them out of the way, put them someplace dark and quiet.
Bunkie Craig was heavy. I lugged him up to the attic, found an empty trunk and stuck him in it. I closed the trunk and locked it.
And hoped the smell wouldn’t seep through when he started to rot.
Casper was light, easy. He was in the cellar already and I didn’t particularly want to drag him up all those flights of stairs. He fit in the furnace, snug and cozy. Thank God it was summer. I hoped they would find him before they lit the furnace.
And then there was nothing to do. I broke the gun, checked it, closed it up again. We had too many hours to go and we were nervous. Not frightened, not scared, just tense. Very tense. I wished Reed and Baron would hurry up.
“Ted—”
I looked at her.
“We have the stuff,” she said. “We could leave now. We could just get out and run.”
“And forget about Reed and Baron?”
“Why not, Ted? We could forget them. They’d never find us. They’d be stuck here and we wouldn’t have to take any chances.”
I looked at her. “We could run,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“And run and run and run. For the rest of our lives. Is that what you want, Cindy?” She didn’t say anything.
“Running forever. Running and never feeling safe. Always having Reed and Baron somewhere in the background. Always worrying over it, always wondering when they were going to turn up and kill us. That what you want?”
“Ted—”
“Not that way,” I said. “Besides, we couldn’t ever run. How far do you think we’d get without a car?”
“A car?”
“We’re taking their car,” I said. “Reed has a new car by now. Not a stolen one. He wouldn’t take chances like that. It’s an odds-on bet he already bought a car, a properly inconspicuous car. If we’re taking the plates and the press and everything, we need a car.”
“I suppose so.”
“And we have to kill them,” I went on. “We have to kill them or die trying. I’d rather die now, here, than wait for them to find us and kill us.”
“You’re right,” she said.
“Of course I am.”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“You’re nervous,” I said. She wasn’t the only one. There were two of us.
We killed the lights at six o’clock and sat waiting for them. It was dramatic as all hell. I crouched by the window with the shade up about an inch and kept my eye at the opening waiting for something to happen. Every once in a while she would spell me at the window.
Time crawled along and so did my skin. By seven we weren’t talking any more. We weren’t mad at each other or anything like that. It was just that talking only made everything that much harder to take: Silence was better, silence and our own private thoughts.
A few minutes past eight the phone rang. It rang seven times while we sat and panicked. Then it stopped, and a minute later it rang again.
And stopped after five rings.
I prayed Reed wouldn’t be suspicious. Maybe he would figure they were out for a bite, or sleeping, or drunk. The again maybe he could figure it was us. It was farfetched but the guy was by no means stupid.
So I prayed.
Nine o’clock.
Nine-thirty.
Ten.
Ten-thirty.
A quarter-to-eleven a car pulled into the driveway. At firs I thought it was somebody else turning around but the car went straight into the garage. It was an Olds, two or three years old, black.
Two men inside. I saw their faces as they went by. Reed and Baron.
I lowered the shade the rest of the way and Cindy and I headed for the side door. Then I remembered there was a back door and ran to the window. That’s where they were heading. We went to meet them.
I took out the gun, held it so tightly I was afraid the metal would melt in my hand. We stood behind the door and waited. I could hear Cindy breathing and I wanted to tell her to stop. It was that type of scene.
Then I heard them talking.
“Punks. Probably stoned out of their heads, too blind to answer the phone. You tie up with punks and you got to expect that.”
That was Baron. Then Reed: “I don’t know. I don’t like it. Craig’s a lush half the time but I expect better from Casper.”
“A punk.”
“I still don’t like it. There’s something in the air. I can damn near smell it.”
I didn’t like it either. Why didn’t the son of a bitch open the door already?
Baron’s voice: “C’mon, we don’t have all night. Open the damn door already.”
A key scratched its way into the keyhole, turned the lock. The door opened halfway and I stood behind it, unable to breathe. They came in slowly, moved past me. I wanted to shoot but I didn’t dare. Not with the door open.
I swung the gun.
It caught Reed on top of the head and sent him to the floor. Baron turned and I had the gun on him. “Don’t move,” I said. “Or you’re dead.”
“Lindsay!”
“Don’t move,” I croaked. “Stand where you are.”
He looked at the gun and ignored it. He came at me like a bull and gave me a shove. Somehow I held onto the gun—but I went halfway across the room.
I pointed the gun at him, aimed it at his chest. The son of a bitch didn’t give a damn. He charged right at me, head down, arms out.
I wanted to shoot and I couldn’t. It was all over now, I thought. All over but the dying.
He was almost on me. I sidestepped just in time, brought the gun down as hard as I could on top of that thick skull of his. I got lucky. I connected.
It didn’t knock him out. That would have been too much to hope for. But it stunned him and that, as it turned out, was enough.
He was on hands and knees, steadying himself for another move. I looked at him and I hated him. Craig and Casper had been necessary but this was a pleasure. I hated Baron, hated him for the beatings and the threats, hated him for the miserable bastard he was. I didn’t even have time to reverse the gun in my hand. I had to hit him with the muzzle, and I hit him and hit him and hit him. His skull was like rock but the gun barrel was harder. I beat him across the top of his fat head until he was dead.
Reed.
I had forgotten him and I looked up expecting to get shot any minute. I saw Reed then. There was a gun in his hand. There was also a knife in his back.
“He was going to shoot you, Ted. I couldn’t give him a chance. I—”
She was in my arms, soft and warm and crying. I held her and stroked her and told her everything was going to be all right now. She calmed down, finally.
“I love you,” I told her.
She forced a smile. “I’m all right now,” she said. “It’s just that I never killed a man before. That’s all.”
First I washed the knife and put it in a drawer in the kitchen. Then I found a closet for Reed and stuck him in it. There was very little blood on the floor—she had gotten lucky and stuck the thing in the spine, killing him at once. I mopped up what blood there was and put the bloody rag in the closet with Reed.
Baron weighed a ton and I felt like leaving him there. It was a good thing the house was lousy with closets. Cindy gave me a hand with him and we put him away for a while.
