by Ed McBain
Both Francisco Octavio Ortiz and Cesar Villada possessed green cards and were therefore free to come and go as they pleased, taking trips hither and yon in pursuit of their chosen occupation, which was earning—if that was the word—millions of dollars smuggling drugs up from Colombia and selling them to assorted gringos from across the border. On the seventh day of December this year, they had turned over to a pretty redheaded pilot one hundred keys of very high quality cocaine they’d purchased from the Cali cartel, a notorious association of traffickers operating out of Colombia’s third-largest city. She had given them in return $1,700,000 in hundred-dollar bills, which they’d counted to ascertain the proper value and then—generously, they felt—had skimmed ten thousand dollars off the top, to give to her as a gratuity.
They had smiled all around.
Gracias, gracias, muchas gracias.
Now, in this little border town of what they estimated to be fifteen, twenty thousand people, they were looking for a man named Randolph Biggs, who had given the lady the money she’d subsequently passed on to them.
They didn’t mind losing the ten thousand, which, after all, had been offered of their own free will, in gratitude, as an act of South of the Border generosity.
What annoyed them was thatall the money was counterfeit.
7 .
THE RESTAURANT SPECIALIZED in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine. Here, in the virtual shadow of the mosque near the ramp approach to the River Dix Drive, one could feast upon delicious dishes from Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, the United Arab Republic. The restaurant was smoke-filled even at lunch time, when it was packed with men and women—but mostly men—on breaks and longing for the taste and the aroma of the food and drink they had enjoyed in Damascus or Baghdad, Beirut or Teheran. The entertainment, even during the lunch hour, helped to remind them of their homelands, but it was the fare that drew them here, exquisite to the taste and to memories too long submerged in an accursed foreign land.
Mahmoud Gharib looked the most benign of the three men sitting at the little round table near the small stage where a Raqs Sharqui belly dancer gyrated to a recorded mix of electronic instruments and violins. Resembling a chubby cheerful standup comic from the good old days before comedians turned lean, mean, and obscene, he sported a tiny mustache somewhat uptilted at the tips, giving him the appearance of a man who was perpetually smiling. His complexion was the color of bread lightly toasted, his eyes the color of the very dark brown Turkish coffee they brewed here. His comrades knew him as Mahmoud. The dispatcher at the cab company for which he worked called him Moe, which Mahmoud knew was a Jewish name, and therefore a hundredfold more offensive. He looked plump and jolly and content. He was the most dangerous of the three men.
The men were talking about the proper way to prepare a fish dish that was enormously popular throughout the Middle East. Jassim, the smallest of the men, was saying that the secret was in refrigerating the fish for an hour before it was cooked. Akbar, who worked for a sporting goods store on the South Side, told him that refrigeration had nothing to do with it, he had eaten the fish in poor little villages where no one had evenheard of ice. Jassim insisted it was the refrigeration. You had to keep the fish on ice for an hour before placing it in the skillet, skin side down, and cooking it. It was the refrigeration, he said, that caused the skin to crisp so swiftly and effectively. Mahmoud said that was nonsense.
“The fish is inconsequential to the dish,” he said, waving his hand in a manner that defined leadership and dismissed argumentation. The gesture seemed exceptionally grandiose in light of the comic little mustache under his nose. “You can use any kind of white-fleshed fish,” he said. “So long as you wash it clean and season it with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, you can let it stand outside while you make the sauce. I’m not saying forever. It is dangerous to let any fish stand forever. But it’s the sauce and the nuts that give the dish its succulent flavor.”
“The onions,” Akbar agreed.
“The caramelized onions, yes,” Jassim said, nodding.
“But especially the pine nuts,” Mahmoud said, again superseding all discussion. “Swiftly fried in oil, browned to a pale golden perfection, and thenshowered on the fish.”
“On a bed of rice,” Akbar said.
“On a bed of rice,” Mahmoud said, and kissed his fingertips.
It was odd that the men were discussing fish because at the moment they were eating pancakes stuffed with cheese. In Morocco, where they were cooked on one side only and served with only a warm honey-butter sauce, these little semolina-yeast crepes were traditionally served on the feast ofaid el seghir, toward the end of the Islamic month of fasting called Ramadan. Here in this restaurant, the pancakes were prepared in the Lebanese manner, stuffed with ricotta and shreds of mozzarella, broiled on both sides to a succulent crispness, and then drizzled with a syrup made of sugar, lemon juice, orange blossom honey, and orange flower water. The men ate ravenously. Jassim licked his lips. Mahmoud found this disgusting, but he made no comment.
A dark-eyed, dark-haired waitress brought them thick black coffee. The belly dancer was wearing a beaded bra and matching belt, a sequined skirt over a body stocking. Her veil work was hardly Egyptian. To Mahmoud, it looked more like the modified strip tease one would find in the so-called American Nightclub style. The girl was wearing finger cymbals, although they had for the most part gone out of style in Egypt. She was more adept at twirling her veil and snapping her hips than she was at playing the cymbals.
“When does the Big Jew arrive?” Akbar asked.
Given the origins and political dispositions of the trio, this could have been a derogatory remark, but it was not meant to be. Svi Cohen was in fact an Israeli Jew, and he was in fact a very big man, standing some six feet, three inches tall and weighing close to two hundred and forty pounds.
“Tomorrow,” Mahmoud said.
“And his performance at Clarendon?” Jassim asked. He was still licking traces of syrup from his lips. His fingernails were grimy with traces of his trade; he worked as an automobile mechanic in a garage at the foot of the Calm’s Point Bridge. Mahmoud found the filthy fingernails disgusting, too.
“On the thirtieth,” he said. “This Saturday night.”
“So where’s the money?” Akbar asked.
It was a good question.
THE SQUADROOM WAS relatively calm on that Wednesday morning two days after Christmas. Today was only the twenty-seventh and the week was lurching steadily forward into another big weekend that would culminate on Sunday with the tolling of the bells and the falling of the ball in the square. But the squadroom was enjoying a comparative period of calm, a respite from the usual hubbub and hullabaloo that accompanied its normal pace.
Carella and Meyer sat poring over the letters Mark Ridley had written to his sister in the months and weeks preceding her death. From references he made to her own letters, it became clear almost at once that she was terribly excited about a job she’d be flying early in December, which would change her circumstances considerably, enabling her to move East, where she’d always wanted to live, be there long before Christmas, in fact. In the letter they’d already read—the one dated November 13—her brother wrote to say that the job sounded good to him, “so long as you won’t be flying anything that might get you in trouble.”
The words still rang meaningfully in the stillness of the squadroom.
On November 16, Cassandra Jean Ridley opened a safe deposit box at Banque Française here in this city and placed in it $50,000 in cash. Apparently, her circumstances had infact changed considerably by then. They were to change even more dramatically. Her calendar for December 7 was marked with the words “End Mexico.” On December 8, she presumably flew East again. Three days later, she placed another $150,000 in the safe deposit box. Twelve days after that, she was dead.
Their computer told them there’d been seventy-four reported incidents of kidnapping in the United States during the fi
rst three weeks of December. Most of these were abductions of children from parents in divorced or separated circumstances. Some of these cases might have attracted the attention of the FBI, in that state lines had been crossed. None of them would have warranted the attention of the Secret Service.
Yet the Treasury Department had braced a small-time burglar named Wilbur Struthers, confiscating bills he’d stolen from Cassandra Jean Ridley’s apartment, checking out the serial numbers against ransom notes used in an alleged kidnapping, and then—remarkably—giving him a clean bill of health and returning the bills to him that very same day.
Something stank in the state of Denmark.
They figured it was time they paid a personal visit to Special Agent David A. Horne.
A WHOLE LOT OF hundred-dollar bills were fanned out on Horne’s desk.
“A hundred and four thousand dollars,” Carella said.
“Some of it recovered in the dead woman’s apartment,” Meyer said.
“The rest from her safe deposit box.”
“All receipted and accounted for,” Meyer said.
“So?” Horne said.
He looked like a used car salesman who’d eaten and drunk too much over the weekend, jowly though not paunchy in a dark blue suit, brown shoes, a white button-down shirt, and a blue tie. The circular seal of the Department of the Treasury hung on the wall behind his desk, its gold shield decorated with a pair of scales representing justice, a key symbolizing official authority, and a blue chevron with thirteen stars for the original thirteen states. A little black plastic placard, with Horne’s name on it in white lettering, sat near his telephone.
“We think the eight thousand we found in her apartment is the money you appropriated from Wilbur Struthers,” Carella said flat out.
“What makes you believe that?”
“Struthers does. Apparently, Miss Ridley located him and went to get her money back. At gun point, incidentally.”
“I’m assuming Struthers told you this as well.”
“Yes.”
“A petty thief,” Horne said, dismissing him.
“Big enough to have captured your attention, though,” Meyer reminded him.
Horne looked at him. “I don’t like unannounced visits,” he said belatedly.
“We’d like to see that list of ransom-note serial numbers,” Carella said.
“As I told you on the phone …”
“We’d like to know just which kidnapping you were investigating,” Meyer said.
“I have no authority to release that information to you. And you have no authority to request it.”
“We’re investigating a murder,” Carella said.
“Top of the food chain,” Meyer reminded Horne.
“I’m sorry,” Horne said, and shook his head.
“We won’t go away, you know,” Carella said.
“Detective,” Horne said, and paused to give the word weight. “Go home, okay? Go arrest some pushers around the schoolyard. Keep your nose out of affairs that don’t concern you.”
“Gee,” Carella said, “all at once I’mreally interested.”
“Me, too,” Meyer said.
Horne looked at them both. He sighed heavily.
“I’m not free to discuss any case currently under investigation,” he said. “I can, however, show you the list of suspect serial numbers for you to make a comparison check. You’ll have to do it here in this office, under my supervision. If that’s satisfactory to you …”
“It’s a start,” Carella said.
THE SERIAL NUMBERS were a random lot.
There were numbers in the A series …
A63842516A, A5315898964A, A06152860A …
… and numbers in the B series …
B35817751D, B40565942E …
… and numbers in the C and F and H and G and E and L and K and D series …
But none of these numbers matched those on the separate caches of hundred-dollar bills they’d seized by court order from Cassandra Jean Ridley’s desk and her safe deposit box.
They thanked Horne for his time and courtesy …
“Always a pleasure,” he said.
… and went back to the squadroom.
It was not yet twelve noon.
DAVID HORNE was trying to convince his boss that the two Keystone Kops had no idea the bills had been switched.
“This is like the old shell game,” he said. “You have to guess which shell the pea is under. But the pea is really in the palm of our hand.”
“I’m not familiar with the shell game,” Parsons said.
His full name was Winslow Parsons III, and he had been recruited into the Secret Service when he was twenty-two and a senior at Harvard. He’d been present in Dallas, walking alongside the presidential limo when Kennedy was assassinated, but he hadn’t been the one to protect the President with his own body—well, no one had, for that matter. Similarly, when John Hinckley, Jr., shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, Parsons had missed his big chance at immortality by not hurling himself in the path of the bullet. At the age of sixty-four, he was still tall and lean and he had all his hair, albeit turning gray, and he thought he looked like Charlton Heston, whom he greatly admired, but he bore no resemblance to him at all. In any case, he didn’t know what a shell game was. In Cambridge, they did not have such things as shell games.
“You palm the pea,” Horne explained. Or tried to explain. “Same way we palmed the bills.”
He was thinking this is four days before New Year’s Eve, and we’re having a big party, and I should be checking my booze, see how much I have to order. Setups, too.
“How did they come across the bills in the first place?” Parsons asked.
“A case they’re investigating.”
“What kind of case?”
“A woman was murdered.”
Parsons looked at him.
“It gets complicated,” Horne said.
“Life gets complicated,” Parsons replied.
“Yes, sir, it does.”
“Lifeiscomplicated.”
“Yes, sir, it most certainly is.”
“How’dweget involved in this, is what I’d like to know,” Parsons said. “If you please.”
“A flagged super showed up on our list, sir. Man who passed it had eight thousand total in similar bills. We yanked them out of circulation. Should have been the end of the story.” Horne shrugged. “Instead, the woman got killed and suddenly it’s Mickey Mouse time.”
“What’s the woman got to do with it?”
“He stole the bills from her.”
“The eight thousand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He admitted that?”
“No, sir. He told me he won them in a crap game.”
“Is that likely?”
“Hardly.”
“And you say you recovered eight thousand supers?”
“Yes, sir, and replaced them with clears. The old shell game, sir,” he said, and smiled.
Parsons did not smile back.
“Why the hell did you do that?” he asked.
“Do what, sir?”
“Give the man good money for bad?”
“In retrospect, I’m glad I did, sir. All this sudden police interest.”
Parsons looked at him skeptically.
“Never mind in retrospect,” he said. “Why did you do it in thefirst place?”
“I thought he might make a fuss, sir, if we simply grabbed eight thousand dollars of his.”
“Has this man got a record?” Parsons asked.
“Yes, sir. Took a burglary fall seven years ago, did three and a third at Castleview.”
“Ex-cons don’t usually make fusses.”