Cinderella Sims, page 9




I sipped my drink and thought about her. There were so many points to her story that didn’t ring true. According to her, Cinderella Sims was her real name, wished on her by highly imaginative parents. But she had picked another name to work under in Tahoe, Lucille Kraft or something like that.
This made no sense at all. If her name had been, say, Hepzibah Klunk, I could see why she would change it on the job. But why alter something simple like Cindy Sims, something a hell of a lot more euphonious than Lucille Kraft?
It didn’t jibe.
Nor did the innocent pose fit with the wish that I had killed Bunkie Craig. Nor did the careful pose fit with the sloppiness of calling the terminal from the hotel room. There were too many inconsistencies and they were sticking out all over the place.
They bothered me. Bothered me a hell of a lot. I wanted to quit thinking about them but I couldn’t.
I could check on her, up to a point anyhow. I could get in touch with Tahoe and run both her names through the hotel, could find out if that much of her story was true. But there was no rush. She wasn’t going to do anything to me, not now, and she wasn’t going to take the money and ditch me. I was fairly sure of that.
I tried to decide whether or not it made sense to stick the dough in the hotel safe for the time being. That would keep her from taking off with it, but it would also let on that I felt something was a bit smelly in the state of Denmark. That phrase, by the way, has always been a source of consternation to me. There’s very little that is rotten in the state of Denmark. Denmark has always been one of my favorite countries, and if there was something rotten it was in the state of Arizona.
I mused on that point, drank a little more of the Jack Daniels, then took the elevator to the lobby to see what, if anything, was happening at the local newsstand. They didn’t have Editor & Publisher. The newsie told me I could get it across the street, that he only carried a small line for people who wanted something to kill time with. I decided that walking all the way across the street took more effort than I felt like dispensing so I went back to the room and waited for Cindy.
She came back looking very beautiful in a sexy black blouse and a pair of white slacks. I don’t imagine the white slacks were very practical—one wearing and they’d look as though they’d been slept in—but on her they looked so good that it didn’t matter. I talked to her about nothing very important, gave her a quick kiss and went out, hoping that both she and the money would be there when I got back.
I bought a lightweight gray suit, a batch of shirts and some underwear, leaving my clothes for the department store to donate to charity or something. Probably to burn, because they certainly weren’t good for much else anymore. Then I picked up a copy of E & P, breezed through the listings while I downed a cup of coffee and a toasted English, checked a few ads that looked like better-than-average possibilities and headed back to the hotel.
She was there and so was the money. She told me how good I looked and I told her again how good she looked and we necked for awhile, stopping before we got too caught up in what we were doing to take time out for dinner.
Dinner was a pair of blood-rare steaks in the best restaurant in town, juicy red meat with baked potatoes and a drink before and Irish coffee after. Dinner made a big difference—I felt so completely at peace with the world that I didn’t care whether or not the money was there when we got back to the room.
It was. We looked at it, smiled, shoved it under the bed and got undressed. There was something strange about making tender love on top of fifty thousand in nice green twenty dollar bills, but we got used to it. It wasn’t too hard.
In fact, after not too long we forgot all about those nice green twenty dollar bills. We got sort of carried away with what we were doing, and the room turned upside down, and the lights went out and on and out and on again, and my heart started punching holes in my chest, and…well, you get the general idea.
Afterwards I put my face between her warm breasts and inhaled the fragrance of her until sleep came. It’s a pleasant way to go to sleep.
Very pleasant.
Which was a fortunate thing, because the next day was not.
After breakfast the next morning I made what I thought was an eminently reasonable suggestion. I told her I was going to take the money and deposit it in a Phoenix bank. It made good sense. That way there was no chance of it getting lost or stolen. We didn’t have to watch it like hawks.
Moreover, it gave us an aura of respectability that cash would not give us. Money in the bank is a lot more solid in appearance than money in a wallet or a black leather satchel. It would give us a foothold on the problem of establishing credit. Imagine walking into a newspaper broker with a bagful of twenties, for Christ’s sake. That would be one for the books.
And, of course, there was another unspoken point involved. If the dough was in a joint account, neither of us could steal it from the other. I didn’t mention this and neither did she, but naturally we both thought of it instantly.
She wouldn’t hear of it.
“We have to have it in cash,” she said.
I asked why.
“Suppose we have to run. Suppose they get onto us and we have to leave town.”
“How?”
“It could happen.”
I didn’t know how in the world it could but I let it pass. I told her that you didn’t have to be in town to keep an account open, that checks on the account would clear in any bank in the country, that Reed and his rover boys could hardly take the dough away from us if we kept it in the bank.
She still wouldn’t hear of it.
A bell rang somewhere in my head and I let it drop. I pretended to agree with her, told her we might need it in a hurry and that she was one hundred percent right. I hoped she’d believe me, that she wouldn’t think I was suspicious.
I was very suspicious.
I made up some story that I can’t remember, something about going out to see a newspaper broker to see what was available that wasn’t listed in E & P. Once I got away from her my hands started to shake. Something was wrong, very wrong. I didn’t know what it was and I sure as hell wanted to find out.
There were two possibilities and either or both of them could be the answer. One was that she was planning on ditching me as soon as she felt secure, that she wanted the cash around so she could take it along. But I couldn’t quite swallow it—she was as secure as she would ever be right now. She had had plenty of chances to ditch me while I was buying my suit the day before.
There was another possibility. Something could be funny about the money. It could be hot, with the serial numbers listed. In that case it could be spent a little at a time but not in quantity. If we stuck the lot of it in a bank we were through.
Or it could be counterfeit.
That seemed impossible. I took a twenty from my wallet and looked it over. It looked just like every other twenty I’d ever seen in my life, but of course I was no judge of twenties. If it was a phony it was one hell of a good one. I could even see the red and blue threads in the paper, the ones that counterfeiters aren’t supposed to be able to duplicate.
I wondered.
If it was counterfeit, it sure as hell figured that she wouldn’t want me depositing a load of it in a bank. We’d be in the jug in a minute. But if it was counterfeit that knocked the props out from under her whole story. No mark could unload fifty grand worth of schlock on a con ring. No mark would have access to counterfeit dough.
Counterfeit. Queer, schlock, funny money.
Was it possible?
And if it was, how in hell could I check it without getting nailed for trying to pass it?
The first thing to do was run the Tahoe story through the mill. If that checked I could forget the rest and save myself some headaches. If it didn’t, I could worry about it later.
I put in a person-to-person call to the manager of West of the Lake in Tahoe, knowing that I’d get straight dope from him. I’d never heard of that particular club but it was a dollars-to-doughnuts cinch that it, like every other club in Nevada, was syndicate property. And syndicate people in legit business are the best damned businessmen in the world. You’ll never find a crooked roulette wheel in a Nevada house, or a fast-fingered stickman, or a slippery dealer. They play things straight as can be. The house percentage is enough.
The manager was a man named Rogers. He was very obliging and most willing to check on the two prospective employees who had given his name as a reference. If they had ever worked there he would let me know about it.
No, he said, he had never employed a Lucille Kraft. No, he also said, he had never employed a Cinderella Sims either.
As a matter of fact, he added, he used only men as cashiers. Hadn’t had a girl in a cashier’s cage in, well, five years at the very least.
I managed to thank him before I dropped the receiver on the hook and sat down, my head spinning and my mind going around in very strange circles.
Next I had to check the dough.
It was a gamble but I had to take it. I found the best way to do it, the simple approach. I walked into the first bank I came to, found the assistant manager and told him I’d picked up a twenty in Detroit and I wanted to know whether it was good or not. “Something funny-looking about it,” I told him. “I wouldn’t want to pass it off to anybody and have them get stuck with it.”
It sounded like just the sort of thing a solid citizen might say.
He took it, studied it and snapped it a couple times. “You wait right here, Mr. Cannon,” he told me. “I want to have a look at it under the glass. It looks okay but you never know for sure unless you look real close.”
He disappeared with it and I wanted to turn and run. I’d given him a phony name and a phony story, and if he was calling the cops I was through for sure. But if I ran now I was dead no matter what happened. I forced myself to wait, lit a cigarette and pretended to be calm.
He was back in a minute.
“You got one hell of a fine eye,” he told me.
“Counterfeit?”
“It sure is. Wouldn’t have spotted it myself, to tell you the truth. See here around the seal?”
I looked where he was pointing.
“Little different than it’s supposed to be. You got another twenty on you for comparison?”
I told him no. I did, but it was just as phony as the one in his hand. Just as phony as the whole fifty thousand bucks’ worth.
“Don’t suppose it matters. It is a wrong one, though. And a real pretty job.”
I thanked him very thoroughly and got up to go. It was about that time that I realized he still had my twenty. That was all I needed. I had to get it back.
I was nonchalant.
“Say,” I said, “you wouldn’t mind if I took that bill for a souvenir, would you? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t try to pass it or anything. I’d sort of like to keep it as a reminder of how I got stuck for twenty bucks.”
He hesitated. I kept my mouth shut. If I sold him too hard he might tumble.
He sighed. “We’re supposed to report any counterfeit to the police,” he said, and my heart sank. That was all I needed. “Then they send the bill to Washington, check you out to make sure you’re okay just as a matter of form, and I don’t know what all. I suspect they have a special ceremonial burning of the bill in the Justice Department.”
He laughed. I tried to chuckle along with him.
“You say you picked this up in Detroit?”
I nodded weakly.
He thought some more, then shrugged. “Tell you the truth, I’m damned if I can see what good it’ll do to bother the police. Just waste their time, and yours and mine as well. Why don’t you just take this along with you and forget you ever showed it to me?”
I could have kissed him. I thanked him again, returned the bill to my wallet and strolled out of the bank. My knees were knocking together and I thought I was going to fall apart at the seams. I needed a drink badly, and that wasn’t all I needed.
I needed an explanation.
7
There was a ten, a five and two singles in my wallet along with the nest of phony twenties. It was a good thing—otherwise I would have gone thirsty. Until then I’d been passing the stuff all over town like a drunken sailor, but now that I knew what it was it wasn’t the same at all. The money was burning a hole in my pocket, all right, but it was different. Now I just wanted to be rid of it.
I found a back booth in a dark bar on a side street and settled myself down to a double bourbon with water on the side. I swallowed the bourbon and looked at the water. It looked back at me.
Things were moving too fast, much too fast. I looked for the little lever in my head that would let me turn my mind back and start over.
I found it.
A girl whose name was undoubtedly neither Lucille Kraft nor Cinderella Sims had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit twenties that didn’t belong to her. The people who had originally owned them were chasing her. And she was running, but where?
The thing to do, I told myself, was to examine the situation through Cindy’s mind. This was easier said than done. I just couldn’t manage to think the way she probably thought. For a while I sat around feeling sorry over this little incapacity of mine. Then I felt glad about it. My projection may have been limited, but perhaps it was better to be able to think rationally than to be able to think like Cindy Sims.
So I did something else. I tried putting myself in her place. What would I have done?
Putting myself in her place wasn’t that easy itself. I just didn’t know too much about her, didn’t know who she was or what she had done. Most of what I did know was negative information—she hadn’t worked with a con mob, hadn’t held a cashier’s job at a club in Tahoe, didn’t have fifty grand all of a sudden, and, of course, did not make it a practice to tell the truth come hell or high water.
The positive information told me that she had stolen a pile from a gang of counterfeiters. But what in hell she was trying to do with it was, for the moment, beyond me.
Why steal it in the first place?
Well, it had to be worth something. If not, counterfeiters wouldn’t take the trouble to print it up. I tried to remember what we’d run into in Louisville that might fit into things; I couldn’t come up with too much, but I got a few little glimmers.
A counterfeiting ring, as well as I remembered, was a model for an extremely loose organization that worked with extreme efficiency. At the very top there was a small group of men who were the financial kingpins. Either they included an engraver and printer in their number or they managed to contract for the production through their own private sources.
The men at the top were completely autonomous. They didn’t hire anybody. They handled two facets only—production and distribution. They never passed anything themselves. Instead they sold their product to roving mobs of bill-passers who went from one big town to the next, changing as much of the dough as they could.
The mobs themselves were organized in similar fashion, with a small combine arranging for the original purchase and selling small quantities to smaller men. At the very bottom there was the tiny small-time crook who bought a hundred dollars’ worth of queer at a time for ten to twenty dollars and worked it into circulation by himself, making purchases as small as he dared and keeping the change.
It was like any operation where the illegal aspect consisted of a product. Like the narcotics trade, for example, or like bootlegging. But there was an important difference.
There were risks in dope pushing. And in bootlegging.
In counterfeiting the risks were almost nonexistent.
I sipped more water, waggled a finger at the waiter and downed the refill in a hurry. It was beginning to come back to me. The picture was soaking in.
Where was I? Yes—the risks, and how there weren’t any. You see, in both dope and alcohol the product itself presented some overwhelming problems. If you wanted to supply dope on a large scale you had to product it from the raw opium, which in this country is quite impossible, or bring it in from overseas. Your agents can get arrested going through customs. Your shipments can be seized in huge quantities and destroyed. And simple possession of any quantity whatsoever of the stuff is enough to land you in jail.
Bootlegging is similar. Here you have to produce the stuff, have to distill it, and a distillation operation has to leave some clues lying around. You have to buy supplies in quantity. You have to have a good-sized plant in order to make a good-sized amount of the stuff. As a result, you automatically leave yourself open for possible arrest.
But counterfeiting is something else entirely.
Production presents no problems. Your “factory” consists of a set of plates, a little flat-bed or rotary press weighing maybe fifteen pounds at most, and a quantity of plain white paper to print on. Everything you need fits into a suitcase.
The distribution picture is even more attractive. It’s not against the law for a citizen to possess a counterfeit bill if he doesn’t know it’s counterfeit. Otherwise a guy like me could have been arrested in the Merchants’ Bank of Phoenix. The law has to prove knowledge on the criminal’s part. And this isn’t easy to do.
Possession of a quantity of identical counterfeit bills, is, of course, grounds for conviction. Possession of a counterfeit bill by a man already arrested for counterfeiting is also grounds for conviction, often enough.
But the nature of the business is such that an individual without a criminal record can pass a bill at any time with total impunity. Counterfeit? Gee, officer, I didn’t know it was counterfeit. I mean, somebody must of stuck me with it. I never look too close, I don’t know, maybe I ought to. But officer, I didn’t do anything….
People get caught. The mobs who get nailed good and hard are the hit-and-run mobs that the big boys supply. They run the risks because they’re in town while the phony stuff is turning up.