Highbinders

by Ross Thomas

  “Ten percent?”

  She nodded.

  “So if they made around eight or nine hundred thousand pounds net after expenses out of a three-million-pound deal, he would get ten percent of their profit. About eighty or ninety thousand pounds.”

  “And we owe that much,” she said.

  “He would,” I said. “So he decided to go for the whole pot.”

  “We decided.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You both decided. He’d have to have you in on it or he couldn’t have used old Jack Brooks and he needed an expert thief to steal the thing, didn’t he? Eddie’s no thief.”

  She sighed. “I didn’t give poor old Jack much choice really. I told him we’d have to sack him unless he helped us. It was like telling your grandfather to get out, but Jack didn’t need much persuasion.”

  “Then the killing started,” I said.

  “Eddie had nothing to do with that.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Who did?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Remember when I called Eddie early that morning and told him I had to go to Highgate? That’s all I told him. That I had to have the one hundred thousand pounds and a ride to Highgate. But when old Tom picked me up, he knew that we had to go to the Swain’s Lane entrance. Eddie must have told him. So if Eddie knew that he also knew that the dead man was already tucked up underneath the piano lid out there. You should watch that superannuated help of yours. Their minds wander. They talk too much.”

  “We had to use what help we could get, and the cheaper the better.”

  “Such as Tick-Tock Tamil?”

  “Yes, we used Tick-Tock to get the name of his man Curnutt. Then we used Curnutt’s son to dope your drink.”

  “I still don’t understand that,” I said.

  She sighed and turned toward the window once more. “We needed the time. Or Curnutt did. It was taking him more time to make the duplicate sword than he had thought. You were already here so it was merely a slight delaying tactic.”

  “You handled Curnutt, didn’t you?”

  “What do you mean handled him?”

  “I mean that you talked him into it. Persuaded him to make the duplicate sword.”

  She nodded, her back still to me. “Yes, I persuaded him. I even convinced him that I was going to make certain that the real sword got back to its rightful owner. We even had a code worked out. A torn playing card. He was rather a romantic little man.”

  “So is Robin Styles,” I said. “He believes you, too.”

  “Another of my assignments,” she said. “Robin. Keep Robin happy, I was told. I must say I tried.”

  “Now you’ve got another assignment,” I said. “Me.”

  She turned. “Neither Eddie nor I had anything to do with those men being killed.”

  “And you don’t know who did.”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Crap,” I said. “Eddie had it all set. Curnutt would make the duplicate sword and Curnutt’s son would return it for the one-hundred-thousand-pound ransom. That was to be their cut and it would also take care of Tick-Tock, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, that was the way it was to have been, originally.”

  “Then when I brought back the fake sword, Eddie had that old man all bribed up to swear that it was real. Everybody would be happy then, until your father and uncle tried to sell the sword and learned that it was fake. You and Eddie would express a lot of horror and commiseration. But Eddie would have the real sword stashed away someplace and then, maybe a year from now, maybe less, he would make his own deal for the entire amount and split with no one—not Robin Styles, not your uncle or father, no one. The French would never tell who they’d bought it from. That was the way it was supposed to work, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. That was the way it was supposed to work.”

  “And I would even get paid in full for what I did. Your father and uncle would be satisfied that the real sword was delivered to them, the genuine article. They would have old Doc Christenberry’s sworn word for it. I would be back in New York spending my money before they ever found out that the sword was a fake. And if they started suspecting me, then that would be just too damned bad as far as you and Eddie were concerned.”

  “You are rather clever, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not clever,” I said. “I just kept stumbling over dead bodies. They always make me think. Or worry. That’s what Eddie should have done. Worried a little. Thought a little. He should have thought that a three-million-pound sword might cause people to go around killing other people, especially the people he knows. Where is he now?”

  “He’s out looking for Tick-Tock.”

  “Does he know where to look?”

  “He thinks so.”

  “He also thinks that Tick-Tock has the real sword?”

  “And that Tick-Tock killed Curnutt and his son?”

  “Who else could have?”

  “Robin Styles, for one,” I said.

  Her face changed without her knowing it. Up until then, she had been making it do what she ordered it to: express quiet sorrow, faint irony, weary resignation. Now it expressed surprise and even shock and she almost had to struggle to get it back under control.

  “He couldn’t have.”

  I smiled at her. “You really were going to doublecross Eddie, weren’t you? You called Curnutt romantic, yet from what I’ve learned about him, he was about as romantic as a doorknob. But he was religious and I can imagine the cock-and-bull story you fed him about how he should pass the real sword over only to the upright Christian who would come calling for it with the other torn half of the jack of spades. Then what? Then you and Robin Styles were going to ride off into the sunset with a three-million-pound sword that you could peddle as well as your father and uncle could because you knew all their tricks. That was about it, wasn’t it?”

  She put her glass down and turned back toward the window. “That was it,” she said, “but that’s not it now. I’m stuck with Eddie. I’m in as deep as he is now.”

  “And Eddie still trusts you, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes. He trusts me.”

  “That’s more than I do.”

  She turned. “What about my proposal? Will you give us our twenty-four hours to patch things over?”

  “No.”

  She stood there looking at me. This time she had slipped on a thoughtful expression. “If you do find the sword, I know where and how we could sell it.”

  “For three million pounds.”

  “Yes,” she said. “For at least three million pounds.”

  “Just you and I.”

  “The two of us.”

  “There’s only one thing wrong with that, honey.”

  “What?”

  “For some reason I don’t think I’d live long enough to spend mine.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  HAMMERSMITH ISN’T ALL THAT hard to find. You just start heading west and run right into it. But Robin Styles didn’t seem to be too sure where it was, so I had to get out a small map and start giving him rights and lefts.

  “Don’t you ever get out of Mayfair?” I said.

  “Certainly, but I don’t come here very often. No occasion to, really.”

  He had picked me up in the Volkswagen promptly at midnight, but because of our wanderings through West Kensington, we didn’t pull up in the alley behind 14 Beauclerc Street until nearly one. We coasted up to the back door of the locksmith’s shop with our lights and engine off.

  I reached into the back seat for my sack of impromptu burglar tools and suddenly remembered one I had forgotten. “Shit,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I forgot to buy a flashlight.”

  “Here,” Styles said, “I have a pocket torch. One of these disposable things that you throw away when it burns out.”

  “You always carry it?”

  “No, I bought it late this afternoon. I noticed t
hat you didn’t buy one at the ironmonger’s, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

  “Thank you. I’m very sensitive.”

  “Not at all.”

  Holding my sack of tools in one hand and the small flashlight in the other, I got out of the Volkswagen and went around it to the back door of the locksmith’s shop. I was worrying about what tools I should use to pry open the door, especially since it was a locksmith’s door. I was also worrying about the murder squad from Scotland Yard and whether they had sealed the door. Homicide does that in New York sometimes. Seals the door. I ran the flashlight up and down the locksmith’s door. It wasn’t sealed. At least not from the outside.

  “What’re you doing?” Styles whispered.

  “Trying to decide what I should use.”

  “Mind if I have a look?” he said. “I’ve locked myself out a few times.”

  I could see that he was going to be a great help. He took the flashlight and ran it up and down the door, inspected the hinges, and then shined it on the locks. There were three of them. “Hmm,” he said and gave the doorknob a tentative sort of try. It turned easily and the door opened.

  Robin Styles stood there as if expecting to be congratulated, or maybe even knighted, so I handed him his prize, the monkey wrench.

  “I say,” he whispered, “what’s this?”

  “A blunt instrument,” I whispered back. “The door’s open. That means somebody has gone inside and is, or is not, still there. If the somebody is still there, you may wish to bash him with a blunt instrument.”

  “I’ve never done anything like this.”

  “You virgins are all alike. Here. You can carry the tools, too.”

  “What do you have?”

  I showed him the huge screwdriver, the nearest thing to a legitimate jimmy that the ironmonger had.

  “You seem to know the way,” he said. “I think you’d better go first.”

  Well, why not, I thought. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test that I had once taken on a female psychologist’s dare showed that I had definite leadership potential. Most people who rate high on the schizophrenic scale do, and she’d said that I was right up there with the best of them, Huey Long, Pancho Villa, George Custer. People like that. The real crazies. But I’d rated very low on paranoia. “That’s your trouble,” she’d said. “You not only believe that there’s nobody out to get you, but you wouldn’t give much of a shit if they were.”

  St. Ives, the born leader, stepped into the workshop of the dead locksmith and shined the light around. Nobody shot at me so I let my breath out and took one in, the first in a long while, it seemed. From the little light that the small torch made, the place looked much the same except for the floor near the anvil. There was no dead body slumped against it at an odd angle, but a thick white chalk mark outlined where it had once lain.

  I crossed the shop and this time looked carefully behind the thick tan curtain that separated the work area from where the customers were served. There was nobody there.

  “Up the stairs,” I whispered to Styles and we went up them slowly, I with my screwdriver, he with his monkey wrench, both of us poised to run like hell if there had been the slightest noise. There wasn’t and we came out into the kitchen which, from what I could see, was still as neat and tidy as ever.

  I led Robin Styles through the small dining room into the sitting room. I found myself holding my breath again, but when the light from my flash picked out the Christmas tree, I let it out. It was still there.

  “A Christmas tree?” Styles whispered, putting a lot of exclamation into it.

  “That’s right.”

  “But it’s May.”

  “Maybe it was always Christmas in his heart,” I said and ran the light around the base of the tree. The packages still lay there, but they looked different, and I saw that they had all been unwrapped and then rewrapped by somebody who didn’t know too much about wrapping packages. The police, I assumed, looking for clues. I hoped they had found one.

  I located a small table and put the flash on it so that its light shined on the tree. “Give me that sack of tools,” I said to Robin Styles and he handed them over.

  I took out the long-nosed pliers and the saw and squatted down by the tree. I put the pliers down and started sawing away at the tree’s lowest branches. When I thought I had sawed enough of them off, I turned my head toward Robin Styles and said, “This thing rests in a big bucket. You hold onto the bucket while I pull.”

  He knelt down and awkwardly grasped the lips of the big pail or bucket. I could think of no graceful way that he could have done it. I grasped the tree by its trunk and pulled. Nothing happened. I pulled again and metal scraped against the sides of the pail and the base of the tree moved up about six inches. I gave another mighty pull and it was free.

  The branches had scratched my face and hands and were making them itch. I lowered the tree until it lay on its side. I picked up the flashlight and shined it on the base of the tree, the part that had been resting in the pail. Billy Curnutt, locksmith, had been a proper craftsman. A section of iron pipe about an inch and a half in diameter looked as if it had been run horizontally through the trunk of the tree. When wedged down into the pail, the pipe would have braced the tree firmly.

  I ran the light up the trunk of the tree. Although almost invisible, a thin gray wire was wrapped tightly around the trunk. The wire was almost the same color as the bark of the tree, if a Scotch pine, which is coniferous, has bark, and I suppose it does.

  I took the long-nosed pliers and started snipping the wire. Once I had it started it unwrapped easily. Then I held out my hand.

  “What do you want?” Styles said.

  “The monkey wrench.”

  I took the wrench and tightened its jaws around the iron pipe that stuck out from the tree. I gave the pipe a tug with the wrench and felt it beginning to unscrew. After a few more tugs with the wrench I could unscrew it with my hand. When it came loose I slipped it off and in the light of the torch the ruby seemed to wink at us.

  “It’s the bloody sword!” Styles said, forgetting to whisper.

  “What did you think I was looking for, the candy canes?”

  “It’s inside the tree.”

  “I know it’s inside the tree. It just fits. Now you can help get it out.”

  Styles held the tree’s trunk up while I pried off the cap that Curnutt had fashioned to cover the pommel of the sword. He had sawed off a thick section of the tree from the base to form the cap. Then he had sawed off another section, hollowed it out until it was large enough to conceal the sword’s hilt. He had then split the tree very carefully far enough up to sheath the entire blade. He had then wrapped the wire tightly enough around the split trunk so that no crack was visible. The two sections of iron pipe, of course, had concealed the sword’s crosspiece and had also served as a stout brace to hold the tree upright in the pail. Curnutt had even been so meticulous as to countersink the finishing nails that held the cap onto the base of the tree. He had covered the countersunk holes with plastic wood that had been dyed or colored the same as that of sawed pine.

  Although the hilt and the crosspiece were now free, the blade was still inserted in the split trunk. I took the trunk from Styles’s hands and said, “You’ve got a pure heart, pull it out.”

  He pulled and it slid out easily, as if he were drawing it from its scabbard. He held it up wonderingly and stared at it. “How did you know?” he said.

  “You might keep a Christmas tree up through March or even April. But not through May, not unless you want a nine-foot-tall tinderbox in your living room. Curnutt was too careful and too neat for that. He had to be using it for something else and who would ever look inside a Christmas tree?”

  “You would,” Styles said and there was nothing but admiration in his voice. I can take a compliment as well as anyone. I didn’t quite blush. Instead, I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Here,” he said, handing me the sword tha
t some people thought was worth three million pounds. “You take it. I’ll gather up the tools.”

  “We should have worn gloves,” I said. “I should have thought of a flashlight and I should have thought of gloves. I can see I’ve got a great future as a second-story man.”

  “I didn’t touch anything except the tree and the pail, did you?”

  I tried to think. “The outside doorknob. I think we touched that:”

  “We can wipe it off on the way out.”

  Styles led the way to the stairs, carrying the bag of tools and the flashlight. I followed with the sword. At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped, turned, and held the flashlight so that I could see the steps.

  I started down the steps and his flashlight wavered. It wavered because a voice said, “Hold it right there, mate.” The voice sounded as though it belonged to a gun. It also sounded as though it belonged to Tick-Tock Tamil.

  I stopped on the second step from the top. Tick-Tock stepped into the light that came from Styles’s torch. Tick-Tock was all dressed up in a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks and black sneakers, looking every inch the well-dressed cat burglar. He also carried a very large flashlight, about two feet long, and a very large pistol, a revolver with a long barrel so that it would shoot straight.

  The gun I saw was jammed into Styles’s kidney. “All right,” Tick-Tock said to Styles. “Move over against the wall there, nice and easy now.” Styles moved over until his back was against the wall.

  Tick-Tock switched on his giant flashlight and shined the light up at me. It almost blinded me. “Okay, St. Ives,” he said. “Now just walk down the stairs, one step at a time, nice and slow.”

  I didn’t argue. I started down the stairs, one at a time, holding the sword at something like port arms. The light still blinded me. I felt for the next step with my left foot, found it, or at least thought I did, and started to move my right foot. But my left foot had lied to me and it slipped off the riser. I started to fall and the only thing I thought of was to get rid of the sword so that I could use my hands to catch myself. I flung it away, but I kept on falling. There was a scream—a long loud scream and then I was at the bottom of the stairs, sitting on the bottom one really, looking down at the face of Tick-Tock Tamil who looked up at me.