by Michael Mayo
When finally he fell, he landed on his side and knocked the wind out of her, but she didn’t let go. She hung on, gagging at the foul smell until she felt the last breath go out of him and his muscles went slack. Scared that he was trying to trick her, she didn’t let go until her arms cramped, and she finally released him.
Then she had to disentangle herself from the chain. She pushed and pulled, frantic to get away from him, and once she was free, she tore at the lamb’s wool vest and found the pouch around his neck. She tried to yank it off him, but the leather thong wouldn’t snap. She wound up pulling it over his head and then ripping with her teeth at the cord that held the pouch closed. She crawled over toward the fire, where the light was stronger, and emptied it onto the floor. Some kind of animal claw, a smooth pebble, a bullet, something moldy that smelled of tobacco, and three steel keys on a ring.
Her hands shook so hard it took several tries, but the small one fit, and the lock popped open. She collapsed and cried.
At first, she was afraid to go out. She hesitated at the door, then went back and locked the chain around the dead man’s ankle. Better safe.
The night was full of buzzing insects that bumped against the lantern as she made her way up the footpath. The house where the half-breed had lived was dug into the side of the mountain. His car, an old Model A, was parked beside it. The place looked to be older than the pump house. It had two windows and a porch with a rocking chair. Inside, it was a mess, as cluttered as the pump house was spare, and the smell was even worse than the half-breed himself. He’d slept in a small room on a rough pallet that was no better than the one she’d used. In the main room, she found a fireplace and wood-burning stove, a pile of hides, and material for tanning them. Stacked up next to them on shelves were a dozen or so fifty-pound bags of sugar and wooden crates of Mason jars.
There was a cabinet he’d used as a pantry where she found some canned goods and a loaf of stale, moldy bread. She tore away the green part and wolfed it down.
Also on the shelves were old rifles and guns, most of them rusty, pots and pans and dishes, bags of beads, boxes of mineral water, bolts of cloth, canning supplies, kegs of nails. She guessed it was all taken in trade for his ’shine. The two suitcases of money were on a bottom shelf, near the back, with the ledger books and her pistol. As best she could tell, nobody had even opened the suitcases.
When the sun came up, she went through everything to get a better idea of what was in the place and how she was going to get out. She found cans of coffee and a coffee pot, and the memory of the taste overwhelmed her. She hadn’t had a hot drink in months. She had to go back down to the pump house for water. He hadn’t moved. She brought back a full bucket and brewed a pot. She filled a clean cup, took it out to the porch, and sat with full sunlight on her face for the first time since she left the hotel in Glenwood Springs. She put together the first parts of her plan.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What about Benny? The gang of kidnappers?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and I thought she was lying. “I know the half-breed didn’t have the brains to plan and pull off a job like that. The way I see it, he had a partner who came up with the idea, and the two of them took Benny and left the first note. But something went wrong when they brought Benny back to the place in the mountains. Maybe after they got to the hideout, Benny tried to escape or grabbed a gun, I don’t know, but it ended up with him and the first guy dead.
“By then, the crazy half-Breed had decided that he wanted me. By the look of his place, he didn’t care about money. He just wanted his liquor and his squaw. That’s all I can tell you.” I knew there was more to it, but I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t tell it.
As she’d said before when she spun the little story of the kidnapped bootlegger, she knew that it was dangerous for a woman to travel with that much cash. So she used what she could find to disguise it. But first, how was she going to get out?
All she could see around her were steep slopes, trees, and rock. She saw that the path between the house and the pump house went on in the other direction. She followed it through the woods to the still, a fragrant haphazard collection of tanks, coiled tubes, and car radiators. The fire had gone out, so she thought it wouldn’t explode. She went back to the house and walked a quarter of a mile downhill to the shed by the creek. It was an open-sided structure, little more than a lean-to, with a handwritten Gone Fishing sign hanging from a nail. Later that day and the next, she heard cars approach the place. Sometimes they’d stop, wait a while, and leave. She guessed it was nothing unusual for the half-breed to disappear, and his customers understood it.
She found the car she’d driven hidden behind some brush on a side road off the rutted track that led up to the house. The forlorn thing was already overgrown with weeds and wildflowers.
Back at the house, she ate a can of beans and a can of peaches, savoring every bite, and studied the money. If she even thought of getting it back to Jacob, she didn’t mention it to me. Instead, she concentrated on making the money not look like money.
She couldn’t keep it on her or carry it herself. She’d be too nervous. She’d give herself away. No, the best way was to have somebody else transport it. Not the mail. Railway Express was about as reliable as she’d find. All she had to do was get it back to Glenwood Springs. No, not there. Even though it had been so long since she’d been there, she might be recognized. Denver. Take it to the office in Denver. But suppose some guy along the way wasn’t as reliable or honest as he ought to be and got curious. What then? Make the box hard to get open, and seal the stuff up in a good wrapper, and finally, disguise it so that if a box should break open, it wouldn’t look like anything particularly valuable.
She went through the stuff on the shelves again. The boxes of mineral water were a convenient size. What if she put the money in bottles of water? No, too hard to reseal. Seal. Wax. Paraffin.
She fired up the stove, tore open the boxes, and put tablets of paraffin into a big pot. They melted quickly and turned a clear milky-white. She didn’t want the wax to seep between the boards of the crates, so she lined the box with a piece of oilcloth and poured in a layer of hot melted wax. She covered it with bills and poured in more wax. When she’d almost filled the box, she added some molasses to the last layer, giving it an ugly, chocolate-brown color.
She filled four boxes before she realized that she’d embedded all the cash and had to pull the last one apart to separate some traveling money. She’d need it to buy some clothes right away.
She packed the few clothes that were wearable, Benny’s ledgers, and some money in a suitcase and loaded the boxes next to her in the Model A. A day after she killed the half-breed, she drove away and made her way to Denver. She got lost often and nearly ran out of gas, but she made it.
Now, this part of her story wasn’t over, but I’ve got to interrupt for a moment. As I said, I wasn’t in that pump house with Anna and the half-breed, so I can’t swear to the truth of everything she said, and I admit that I have filled in some details, maybe more than I should have, so you may be thinking that she made it all up. But, a few years later—the how and the why and the when aren’t important—I found myself in Glenwood Springs in a bar in the Hotel Denver, a smaller joint across the river from the big spa. I struck up a conversation with the proprietor, since we were in the same line of business. In the course of it, I asked if he happened to know of a half-breed Indian who used to operate a still and sold homebrewed liquor someplace close by.
Right away, he drew back and asked why I wanted to know. Was this guy a friend or relative? I replied no, just the opposite. A woman of my acquaintance, a woman I cared about, had some trouble with this customer. Saying it like that was true enough, and I left it at that.
After giving me a long serious look, the guy said, “There was a man like that, a man by the name of Johnson Hat. He worked construction on tall buildings. He was
burned real bad in an accident on one of them when a bucket of hot charcoal and rivets fell on top of him. The way I heard it, he was such a mean son of a bitch that it was other Indians working on the building that did it to him. He was in the hospital for a long time.
“After that, he took a place up north of here. Only guys who’d buy from him were desperate. Bad things happened up there. There were stories of Indian children and women disappearing. I don’t know, you always hear stories. But it doesn’t matter. He died, and not long after that his house and his still and his pump house and his shed burned down. Everybody’s glad that he’s gone, and nobody showed up at the funeral. That answer your question?”
“Yes it does. The next round is on me.”
Chapter Sixteen
By then, I’d eaten all the little crustless green sandwiches and was looking for something else. I made another drink instead.
“OK, it still comes this. Why me? Even though I haven’t seen this money,” I lied, “I believe what you say. But why send all this money to me instead of your dear old grandmother?”
“Because my dear old grandma is more than halfway senile on her best day. It wouldn’t be safe with her.”
She had to be talking about the old lady I’d seen giving me the evil eye outside the Chrysler Building. The same old lady who’d been in the car with Anna a few hours ago. I wondered if she and the baby and the kid were in another room of the suite.
I turned from the booze when I heard scratching at the door followed by the sound of the lock snapping open.
Mercer Weeks stepped through and slipped the lock picks back into his coat pocket. His eyebrows rose in surprise when he saw Anna. She stood up and held herself straight and square-shouldered, looking pretty damn terrific in that red dress. The two of them traded long stares like fighters sizing each other up. Though Weeks probably had eighty pounds on her, they were evenly matched.
“Long time, no see, Signora,” he drawled.
She said, “How the hell did you get in here?”
What followed was one of the strangest conversations I ever heard. I’m not sure there was a single moment when all three of us understood exactly what the other two were talking about. At least, that’s how I saw it.
Weeks sat in one of the classy chairs, took his works out of his breast pocket, and rolled a smoke. “Marie Therese. I called Quinn’s place, and she told me he was here with a woman named Anna. I didn’t expect to find you.”
He struck a match on the sole of his brogan and said, “Where’s Benny? Where’s the money?”
Her voice gave nothing away. “What are you drinking, Mercer? Gin? Jimmy, fix something for the gentleman.” She sat facing him, one arm stretched across the back of the sofa. A corner of her mouth lifted like she was trying not to smile. “You want to know about Benny. Let’s see, what can I tell you that you don’t already know?”
Weeks stared at the ashtray on the table in front of him. Why wouldn’t he look at her? I put his drink down and sat where I could watch both of them.
“Benny is dead. I was just telling Jimmy about it. I’m sure you remember how it went that last night in Colorado. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the ransom, the money, any of it. I was ready to leave. You and Jacob insisted that I deliver it. Do you remember that?”
He didn’t respond. She repeated, louder, “Do you remember that?”
He looked up and nodded, poker-faced.
“I followed a crazy half-breed Indian to a place way the hell up in the mountains. He knocked me out and kept me chained in a cabin for ten months. Ten months!”
“How did you get away?”
“I killed the son of a bitch. I strangled him. He was crazy, Mercer. If he’d been around normal people, they’d have been measuring him for a straitjacket. But he was up in the mountains. Like I told Jimmy, he must have had a partner, somebody to plan it out for him. Did you find anybody to fit that description while you were out there?”
“No,” he said, sounding more confident. “And I did look for you. All of us did. Right after you disappeared, Jacob brought in more of the guys. We drove so many miles and asked so many questions the cops got suspicious. We even hired the Pinkertons to look for the car. Then it snowed and we really couldn’t do anything. Jacob had to come back here to tend to business. I went back in the spring and searched again.”
“Since you were part of the Denver Mint job, you knew something about that part of the world.”
Weeks stubbed out his smoke. “Not enough. You and Benny and the money just disappeared.”
They stared hard at each other, and I realized that there was something else going on behind the words. They were testing each other.
Weeks said, “You’re sure Benny is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Then where is the money?”
“I don’t know,” she said, which was, I guess, true enough.
“Two people told Jacob that Quinn has it,” Weeks said. They both turned and looked at me. It pissed me off that they knew something I didn’t, something important.
“A lot of people have been saying things and doing things,” I said. “Planting bombs and killing other people. Mercer came to my assistance this afternoon when I was waylaid by a pack of Krauts. Later on I saw this kid jump a guy in a bus station and run out in the middle of the street.” Anna narrowed her eyes at me. “It’s all getting complicated because I don’t even know who these guys are. Actually, I do know one name. My friend Detective Ellis found out that a guy who broke into my room this morning is Saenger, Justice Saenger. Does that mean anything to either of you?”
Weeks didn’t react. Anna gasped and said, “Where is he?”
“Cops put him in Bellevue. If he’s still alive. He didn’t look good the last time I saw him.”
“Good. One less to worry about,” she said.
“One less what to worry about?”
Weeks said, “Wait a minute. Is Quinn in this with you?”
I ignored him and focused on Anna. “One less what?” I repeated.
She glared at me and Weeks. Finally, she muttered, “My family. My goddamn family.”
Without mentioning the money, Anna said that she drove to the Denver train station. The next eastbound train was going to Chicago. She took it. She was tired, spooked, and dirty for the entire trip. By the time she reached Chicago, she couldn’t stand herself. She went directly from the station to the Palmer House. That’s where she had a long hot bath and slept in a real bed.
“I tried to stay out of sight,” she said. “There are people in Chicago I’d rather not associate with. One of them found me. The Saengers are cousins on my father’s side. They’re Reds—dyed-in-the-wool ‘Death to the Capitalist’ oppressor types.”
“And they found out that you’ve got—”
She shook her head a little, not wanting Weeks to see.
I said, “He knows. Hell, half the population of New York thinks that I’m holding a fortune.”
“Are you?” said Anna.
“Yeah, are you?” Weeks wanted to know, too. I let ’em wait.
“Let’s go back to what we were talking about before Mercer joined the conversation. Why did you send the money here?”
Anna folded her arms across her chest and shot me an icy look. Mercer was intrigued.
I said, “Working with what you’ve told me and what I’ve seen, I figure that when you first set your sights on Jacob at Saratoga Springs, you had a kid. You brought your crazy grandmother along to take care of the kid. Jacob told me that while you and him were together, you were up to something, something you admitted to him without spilling any details. That was the kid and the grandmother who, I’m guessing, you had stashed somewhere in an apartment that was close but not too close. Am I right?”
She narrowed her eyes and didn’t need to say anything.
I continued, “And that’s why the money is here and not in Paris or Brazil or wherever the hell it is that people run away to. The whole time the half-breed had you chained up, you were going crazy worrying about how the kid and grandma were getting by. Or had Jacob been so generous that they were well set up?”
Anna said, “Nana and her landlady get along. I knew she wouldn’t kick them out onto the street, but I wired money the first chance I got.”
“That was in Denver?”
“No, I wanted out of Colorado as fast as I could. I waited until Chicago. That was my mistake. The first thing the crazy old bitch did was tell my family I was alive.”
Even though she had registered under a false name, the Saengers found her. As she explained it, she was the only girl who survived past infancy in her generation. She had two brothers, and the whole family shared a house with the Saengers. Of her six Saenger cousins, only one of them was worth a damn. That was the youngest, Edification, known as Eddy, the kid I’d seen a couple of times. The others hated her, and she hated them right back. They were Justice; Knowledge, known as No-No; Fortitude; Deliverance; and Harmonious. At one time, Justice had been tight with the Wobblies and other Reds, but sometime while Anna was out of the picture, he took up with the local branch of the Free Society of Teutonia. He was so taken with Hitler and the Nazis that he really did want to donate Anna’s money to the party and move back to Germany, where the Saengers and Gunderwalds were from.
I chewed that over and said, “Do any of them have any experience with explosives?”
“Yes, No-No. The cops tried to pin a bomb that was set during a miners’ strike in Montana on him, but they couldn’t make it stick.”
