Money, Money, Money

by Ed McBain

  “But he might have, sir.”

  “Any chance we can pop him back in?”

  “Not unless he commits a crime, sir.”

  “How’d this woman get the eight thousand?”

  “I have no idea. But, sir …”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s more.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  “The locals found close to a hundred thousand in her safe deposit box.”

  “Supers?”

  “I didn’t check them, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, they had them in their possession, sir. They were here to look at the list of serial numbers used in a kidnapping …”

  “What kidnapping?” Parsons asked at once. “Has there been a kidnapping?”

  “No, sir, that was just confetti.”

  “But you say they were here with a hundred thousand dollars …”

  “Ninety-six, actually, sir.”

  “… that they found in her safe deposit box?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you didn’t check thebills?”

  His eyes were wide open now.

  “I had no opportunity to do so, sir. Without arousing suspicion.”

  “Suspicion isalready aroused,” Parsons said. “Why the hell do you think they came here? They’realready suspicious!”

  “I don’t think so, sir. They’re a simple pair of flatfoots investigating a murder. Nothing more.”

  “Nothing more,” Parsons said sourly. “Nothing more than a murder.”

  “That’s all, sir.”

  “Ninety-six thousand dollars in cash and you don’t think they’re going to smell something fishy?”

  “Sir, my job was to yank those supers out of circulation. That’s what I did, sir.”

  “Splendid,” Parsons said.

  Horne never knew when he meant it.

  “But how long do you think it’ll be before these nitwits realize there aremore phony hundreds out there?” Parsons asked. “How long will it be before they come back to us?”

  The room went silent.

  “Why was the woman killed, do you know?” Parsons asked.

  “I would suspect to keep her quiet,” Horne said.

  “Do you think this may be Witches and Dragons again?”

  “It could be, sir.”

  Parsons nodded.

  “Find out,” he said. “Give Mother a call.”

  THE SIGN OVER the cash register read:

  WE WILL NOT CASH BILLS LARGER THAN $50. SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE. THANK YOU.

  Wilbur Struthers took umbrage at this.

  Perhaps this was because the only money he had in his wallet was a pair of singles and $400 in hundred-dollar bills. A glance at the cash register total informed him that he had spent $95.95 for two bottles of Simi Chardonnay, two bottles of Gordon’s gin, and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne.

  “I’m afraid I only have hundred-dollar bills,” he told the cashier.

  “We accept American Express, MasterCard, and Visa,” the cashier said.

  “I only have cash.”

  “Take a personal check, too, if you have proper ID,” the cashier said. “Driver’s license, or even a MetTrans card with a photo on it.”

  “I only have cash.”

  “We can’t accept a hundred-dollar bill, I’m sorry,” the cashier said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Been burned too often. Lots of phonies in circulation.”

  “These aren’t phonies,” Struthers said.

  “Hard to tell ’em apart nowadays,” the cashier said.

  So much easier to stick up the fuckin joint, Struthers was thinking.

  “Tell you what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I’m gonna lay a hundred-dollar bill right on the counter here and forget all about the four dollars and change I got coming. You can either pick up the bill and put it in your cash register and tell me ‘Thanks for your business, sir,’ or you can shove it up your ass. Either way, I’m walkin out of here with my purchases. Good day to you, sir.”

  The Eighty-seventh Precinct car patrolling Adam Sector picked him up before he’d walked three blocks from the store.

  FIRST THING Detective Andy Parker learned about the perp the blues brought in was that he’d walked out of a liquor store with purchases totaling close to a hundred bucks without paying for them— or at least paying for them with a bill the cashier had refused to accept because it might have been counterfeit. Nobody—least of all Parker—as yet knew whether the bill was queer or not. That wasn’t the point. You could not simply walk out of a store without paying for your purchases even if you kept insisting afterward that youhad paid for them—which Struthers was insisting now, over and over again, bending Parker’s ear and breaking his balls.

  This was not a court of law here. This was a police station. Parker was a detective and not a judge. He was not being paid to administer justice here, any more than cops in a park during a riot were expected to determine whether a crowd of unruly assholes wereactually sticking their hands up under girls’ skirts. Those cops were being paid to sit on park benches and watch the parade go by. Parker was being paid to sit here and write up a DD form that would follow this man through the criminal justice system—where, by the way, the dude had been before, Parker was just noticing on his computer. This did not bode too well for Mr. Wilbur Struthers here, who seemed to have taken a burglary fall not too long ago and done some fine time upstate. This was enough to put Mr. Struthers in serious trouble here, though certainly Parker did not wish to seem judgmental.

  “What you did, it looks like,” he said, “was walk out of a store with close to a hundred bucks in merchandise, without paying for it. Is what you seem to have done, Willie.”

  “I paid for the merchandise,” Struthers said.

  “Man said you placed a possibly phony …”

  “Man had no reason to believe the bill was phony.”

  “Says you forced it on him even though he told you it was store policy not to accept …”

  “No one forced anything on him. I merely placed the bill politely on the counter top …”

  “And told him to shove it up his ass.”

  “He could’ve also just put it in the cash register and shut his fuckin mouth.”

  “Language, Willie, language.”

  “Well, he could’ve avoided a lot of unnecessary trouble here.”

  “Which he chose not to do because his boss has been stung with queer C-notes before.”

  “This one was not queer.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The Secret Service told me,” Struthers said.

  This was not exactly true.

  The Secret Service had told him that $8,000 of the $8,500 he’d stolen from Cassandra Jean Ridley’s apartment was not part of a ransom paid in some mysterious goddamn White House kidnapping, but they had not said the bills weren’t counterfeit. In any case, the lady had reclaimed the eight large and had been eaten by lions for her boldness. The $100 bill Struthers had subsequently passed across the counter of S&L Liquors on Stemmler Avenue was one of the bills first Special Agent David A. Horne and later the redheaded lady herself had overlooked in their zeal to make everything right again. Struthers had no idea whether it was phony or not.

  Besides, intent was ninety percent of the law, a jailhouse attorney had once informed him, true or not. He’d had no intention of passing counterfeit money. His only intention was to stock up on alcoholic beverages for New Year’s Eve, which he hoped to perhaps spend with that girl Jasmine he’d tried to introduce to good champagne, if ever he could find her again. He now had $300 left of the money he’d stolen from the Lion Lady, as he thought of her, and if Jasmine would accept that in trade, he would be willing to pay for a woman for the first time in his life. What the hell, a new year was coming. After which, he figured he might have to run out and do another little burglary, provided this asshole detective here in the rumpled suit and the razor cuts all over
his face let him go. Struthers didn’t see that anybody had a case here. He’d paid for the goddamn booze!

  “Here’s the way I look at it,” Parker said. “If the bill you gave that guy was genuine, then you in fact paid for the merchandise, and we’ve got no beef. If, however, the bill is phony, then not only were you passing bad money, you were also committing Petit Larceny, a class-A misdemeanor as defined in Section 155.30 of the Penal Law, punishable by a term not to exceed a year in the slammer. I’m not paid to be judgmental,” Parker said judgmentally, “but why waste the city’s time and money if in fact the bill is genuine?”

  Struthers held his breath.

  “Let’s take a walk over to the bank,” Parker said.

  “Let’s,” Struthers said confidently.

  “Well, well, look who’s here,” Meyer called from the corridor. He swung open the gate in the slatted wooden railing, walked into the squadroom, tossed his hat at the hat rack, and missed. Kneeling to retrieve it, he asked, “What’s it this time, Will?”

  “Walkaway,” Parker said.

  “Oh dear,” Meyer said.

  “Hello, Will,” Carella said, just behind him.

  Struthers didn’t like all this fucking cordiality. He wanted to go to the bank, show the bill to whoever understood counterfeits there, and get on with his preparations for New Year’s Eve.

  “Also he insisted on passing a C-note may be phony,” Parker said.

  “I was paying for my merchandise. Incidentally,” he said, “there’s no law against innocently passing a counterfeit bill if there is no intent to deceive.”

  The detectives looked at him.

  Parker sighed.

  “We were just on our way to the bank,” he said.

  “Where’d you get that bill?” Carella asked.

  Struthers didn’t answer.

  “Will? Where’d you get that C-note?”

  Still no answer.

  “Was it part of the money you stole from Cass Ridley?”

  Struthers didn’t know what he might be getting into here. He figured maybe he just ought to keep still.

  “Was it?”

  No answer.

  “Cause I’ll tell you what,” Carella said. “We’ve got a whole pile ofotherhundred-dollar bills here. Why don’t we all walk over to the bank?”

  IT WAS TEN MINUTES TO THREE when Struthers and the detectives walked through the revolving doors of the First Federal Bank on Van Buren Circle. Not too long ago—well, perhaps longer ago than Carella chose to admit—a criminal alternately known to the squad as “Taubman” or “L. Sordo” or most commonly “The Deaf Man”—had tried to rob this bank,twice. Carella still felt a faint shiver of apprehension at the memory. They had not heard from The Deaf Man in a long, long time—well, perhaps not as long a time as Carella might have wished—and he had no desire to hear from him again anytime soon.

  The manager back then had been named Somebody Alton, Carella no longer remembered the first name, if ever he’d known it. The new manager was a woman named Antonia Belandres, a stately plump brunette in her forties, wearing no makeup and a dark gray suit. She looked up at the clock the moment they approached her desk.

  “Little late for business, gentlemen,” she said.

  Carella showed his shield.

  “Detective Carella,” he said. “Eighty-seventh Squad.”

  “This is the Eighty-sixthPrecinct,” she said.

  Carella didn’t know what that had to do with anything. The bank was on the Circle, directly across Tenth, the wide avenue that slivered the two precincts roughly in half, north to south. First Federal was most convenient to the station house, and besides it was a federal bank. If anybody should know anything about counterfeit money, it was the Feds.

  “We’re just across the avenue,” Parker explained helpfully.

  “We’re investigating a homicide,” Carella said.

  She looked at the clock again.

  “We need some suspect bills checked,” Meyer said.

  “We’re kind of in a hurry here,” Struthers added.

  Antonia turned to look at him. Something flashed in her dark eyes. Perhaps she was wondering if he was in charge of this little band of Homicide detectives. He certainly looked intelligent enough. Perhaps she liked the long rugged cowboy look of him. Whatever it was, she addressed her next question to him. With a smile.

  “May I see the bills, please?” she said.

  They spread the bills on her desk.

  $96,000 in hundreds from Cass Ridley’s safe deposit box …

  $8,000 in hundreds from the desk drawer in her apartment …

  And next the solitary hundred-dollar bill Struthers had placed on the counter at S&L Liquors in payment for his various alcohol purchases.

  “You have to understand,” Antonia said, as she delicately leafed through the money, “that for every man, woman, and child in the United States, there are six or seven hundred-dollar bills in circulation. That means for every person in the work force, there are more than adozen hundred-dollar bills out there. That comes to something like a billion and a half dollars.”

  It had begun snowing again. The snow was fierce. Tiny little needle-like crystals blown by a bitter wind. The snow and the wind lashed the long windows of the bank where they sat around Antonia’s desk covered with hundred-dollar bills.

  “Now who do you think is in possession ofmost of those bills?” she asked, and smiled at Struthers.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Vicious criminals, drug dealers, and tax cheats,” Antonia said.

  “I’m not any one of those,” Struthers explained to the detectives.

  They did not appear impressed.

  “The Secret Service gave me a clean bill of health,” he explained to Antonia. She seemed more impressed than the detectives. She raised her eyebrows appreciatively, gave him an approving little nod.

  “You may not know,” she said, “that the United States Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department.”

  “Yes, Idid know that, in fact,” Struthers said. “It was explained to me.”

  “They don’t merely protect the life of the President of the United States. Actually, themajor part of their job is the detection and prevention of currency counterfeiting. Not many people know that,” she said.

  “ThatI didn’t know till this very minute,” Struthers said—kissing ass, Parker thought.

  “I’m happy you came to me today,” Antonia said. “I’ve had occasion to work with the Secret Service before, you see, on cases regarding counterfeit United States currency.” She was carefully turning over the stack of hundreds on her desk, bill by bill, checking for whatever. “Though at first glance, I must say these bills do not strike me as being super-bills. Or super-dollars, whichever terminology you gentlemen prefer. Or even super-notes. Whichdo you prefer, Lieutenant?”

  Struthers realized she was addressing him.

  “I never heard any of those terms in my life,” he said.

  “The Arabic writing on the face of some of these bills is suspect, of course,” Antonia said, “but not all bills passing through the Middle East are fake. In fact, sixty percent ofall United States currency is in circulation abroad. You probably didn’t know that, either.”

  “I certainly didn’t,” Struthers said.

  “In fact, the hundred-dollar bill is the most widely held paper currency in the world. Which is what makes it such an attractive target for counterfeiters,” Antonia said. “What I’m trying to tell you, however, is that the signature of a money-changer—on this bill, for example, the handwriting means ‘Son of Ahmad’—in itself does not indicate a fake bill. As a matter of pride, a money-changer will sign or put some other personal mark on a stack of bills. It’s like an author signing his book at Barnes & Noble.”

  Struthers thought a money-changer was some guy who cashed checks on Lambert Av, up in Diamondback. And he didn’t know any authors who signed books.

  “In the Arab world,” Antonia said, “mon
ey-changers are financial middlemen. They’ve been around since well before Jesus. You need to buy commodities in the West? Simple. You just take your cash to a second-story office in the old quarter of Damascus. The money-changer will arrange for the transfer. I’ve seen these money-changers’ signatures many times before,” she said, exhibiting another of the bills. “They don’t necessarily indicate a bill is counterfeit. We see entirefamilies of counterfeit bills …”