1972 - You're Dead Without Money

by James Hadley Chase

For a long moment, Vin stood staring at Elliot. This was so unexpected, his brain couldn’t cope with it. Controlling his fury, and realizing he would have to give himself time to think, he shrugged.

  ‘Okay, okay, no one’s asking you to trust me. I’ll get the buyer’s name, but you don’t come with me, buster. This is a job for experts and I don’t work with amateurs.’

  ‘Get the name,’ Elliot said quietly, ‘then we’ll talk about the rest of it.’

  Vin looked at Cindy.

  ‘Are you going to tell me the number, baby?’

  Cindy shook her head.

  Vin grinned evilly at her.

  ‘Sure? You’d better be sure. You could be sorry later.’

  She stared at him unflinchingly.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He turned and walked out of the bungalow and down to his car.

  ‘We’d better tell him,’ Joey said fearfully. ‘He could do something to Cindy.’

  ‘We don’t have to tell him,’ Cindy said and opened her bag. ‘I’ve got the stamps.’

  Seven

  There was a long moment of silence as Elliot and Joey watched Cindy take a plastic envelope from her bag and lay it on the table.

  ‘These are the stamps, aren’t they?’

  His heart beating fast, his breathing uneven, Elliot looked at the eight stamps through their plastic cover. He recognized them immediately from the photocopy that Kendrick had shown him.

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was husky. He straightened and looked at Cindy. ‘Why did you take them, you crazy kid? As soon as Larrimore finds they are missing, he’ll call the police. They’ll come here! We wrote to him and he knows this address! What were you thinking of?’

  ‘I don’t think he will call the police,’ Cindy said.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  She sat down abruptly and looked so pale, Joey rushed to the liquor cabinet and began to pour a brandy.

  ‘No, daddy . . . I don’t want it,’ she protested. ‘I’m all right.’

  Joey regarded her, stared at the brandy in the glass and then swallowed it himself.

  ‘Why do you say he won’t tell the police?’ Elliot repeated, sitting at the table and facing her.

  ‘There was a letter in the drawer with the stamps,’ Cindy told him. ‘It was from the Central Intelligence Agency, Washington. It said it was an offence to have these stamps and the owner would be prosecuted if he didn’t notify the C.I.A. if he had them. The letter was dated two months ago. They said the maximum sentence would be three years and a fine of thirty thousand dollars. When I read that I saw Mr. Larrimore couldn’t complain to the police without getting into trouble . . . so I took them.’

  ‘The C.I.A.?’ Elliot’s voice shot up a note.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Suppose you tell us just what happened, Cindy.’

  She drew in a deep breath, then said, ‘I arrived at the house and Mr. Larrimore took me into the stamp room. He was nice and kind. He told me to sit down and he looked through the stamp album. The only stamps that interested him were the ones dad had bought. He said they might be worth three hundred dollars. Then just as I was wondering how I could get the index from him, he took it from his pocket and looked at it. Then he took me over to one of the drawers and showed me other stamps in the same series as the ones in the album. He left the book on his desk. It was so easy. He asked me if I would leave the stamp album with him. I got a little behind him, opened my bag and gave you the signal. Then you phoned. He excused himself and left me in the room. I found the drawer number in the index. I could hear him talking to you so I went to the drawer and found the stamps. Then I saw the letter. He was still talking to you so I read it. It seemed to me that if I took the stamps he couldn’t call the police . . . so I took them.’

  ‘For Pete’s sake!’ Elliot leaned forward and took her hand. ‘That was quick thinking, but he could tell the police.’

  ‘I don’t think he will,’ Cindy said. ‘Anyway, it’s worth the risk. Now, you don’t have to break in.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ Joey said, his voice quavering. ‘You should have left it to Don and Vin.’

  ‘We have them,’ Cindy said.

  ‘We can’t keep them here.’ Elliot paused to think. ‘Joey take them right away to the Chase National Bank. Buy an envelope, write your name on it and put the stamps in it. Rent a safe deposit box. Get going, Joey! If the police come here and find them we’re sunk.’

  Joey nodded. Picking up the plastic envelope he put it in his pocket.

  ‘What shall I do with the key?’

  ‘Bring it back here. We’ll hide it some place.’

  When Joey had gone, Elliot regarded Cindy.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it, Cindy.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘I just couldn’t bear the thought of you going with Vin into that house. Vin’s dangerous. Once he got the stamps, he might have done something to you.’

  ‘But why is the CIA. interested?’ Elliot said. ‘Was it a personal letter to Larrimore?’

  ‘It was a circular letter addressed to philatelists.’

  ‘And it said it was an offence to hold the stamps?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Elliot didn’t like this.

  ‘I don’t understand it, but it looks as if the temptation to keep such rare stamps was too much for Larrimore.’ He thought, then nodded. ‘Yes, I think you’re right. He would be asking for trouble if he complained to the police.’ He stared uneasily at Cindy. ‘But why the C.I.A.?’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better not try to sell them,’ Cindy said.

  ‘They’re safe for the moment. Let’s find out who the buyer is before we make up our minds. And not a word about this to Vin.’ Elliot got up and coining around the table, he put his

  arms around her. ‘You’ve done a marvellous job, Cindy.’

  She put her head against his shoulder and clung to him.

  * * *

  Barney had been talking now non-stop, apart from eating and drinking, for the past two hours. The time was after 23.00 and the Neptune bar was now lined with fishermen, noisy in their demands for beer and Sam, the barman, was being kept busy.

  Barney paused to regard the backs of the men as they leaned on the bar and his fat face wore an expression of disapproval.

  ‘Fishermen!’ he said scornfully. ‘No good riff-raff. You take my word for it, Mr. Campbell. They spend all their nights drinking when they should be home keeping their wives and children company.’

  I asked him if he was married.

  ‘I know better, mister,’ he said. ‘The thing I object to about marriage is a guy never gets a chance to talk and if there’s one thing I like - excluding beer - it’s talking.’

  I said I could understand that

  ‘Yeah.’ He paused to wave his empty glass in Sam’s direction. ‘You take these men over there. All they think about is money, women and drinking. I’ve never been mercenary. If you offered me a million dollars I wouldn’t take it. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. What the hell does a man want with a million dollars?’

  I could have told him, but I got the impression he wouldn’t be interested. He paused while Sam rushed a beer to his table, then went on, ‘But this Vin Pinna I’m telling you about had the itch to get his hands on this million Judy Larrimore had told him about. He had the itch the same way as a dog gets the itch for a lady dog every now and again if you’ll excuse the comparison. Now Vin had been brought up in a tough world. I don’t say he didn’t know better, but knowing better and doing better are two different things . . . right, Mr. Campbell?’

  I said that was indisputable.

  ‘Well, when he realized that Elliot wasn’t going to give him the number of the drawer and also had said he would go to the buyer himself, Vin decided Elliot had to be got rid of. He had driven to the cliff head and was sitting in the Jaguar and he gave his mind to the problem. He decided after getting his brain to work - and th
is was a slow process because up to now Vin seldom used his brain - that the only way he could get his hands on all this money was first to find out from Judy who the buyer was, then get rid of Elliot, then scare Cindy into telling him the number of the drawer.

  ‘For perhaps five or six minutes, Vin hesitated about getting rid of Elliot. Up to now he had kept clear of murder. Once or twice, when he had been disturbed by a householder while he was robbing a safe, he had been tempted, but he found by threatening the householder with a gun, murder hadn’t been necessary. But, thinking about the past, he did see that if the householder had turned awkward he would have pulled the trigger.

  ‘Turning all this over in his sluggish mind, Vin came to the conclusion that for a million dollars he would commit not one murder but several if anyone tried to outsmart him. For that sum of money, he would take murder in his stride.

  ‘Having got that little problem solved, he turned his mind to Judy. It was no good knocking Elliot off without first knowing who the buyer was. Judy was a tricky chick. She had already told him that she wasn’t giving him the name of the buyer until he got the stamps and even when he had them she was doing the deal with the buyer. This meant he would be lucky if she didn’t gyp him out of the two hundred and fifty thousand she had promised him. This was pretty frustrating to Vin because he had no intention of taking that kind of money when he could get a million if he worked at it.’

  A massively built man, wearing a dirty sweatshirt and oil stained white ducks, knots of black hair on his arms, shoulders and chest, came into the bar. He was around twenty-five years of age, his ugly face good-natured and he was hailed by the other men standing up at the bar with a warmth that told me he was a bar favourite.

  He spotted Barney and waved to him.

  ‘Hi, Fat-guts!’ he bellowed in a voice that made my eardrums quiver, ‘having a ball?’

  Barney didn’t deign to look his way.

  ‘He will come to no good, Mr. Campbell,’ he said as soon as the massive man had been absorbed in the crowd. ‘No respect for his elders or his betters . . . just a low fisherman. Fat-guts! Wait till he’s my age. Like I said . . . no respect’

  I said that was the trouble with the younger generation.

  ‘You’re right, Mr. Campbell.’ Barney sipped his beer. ‘Well, getting back to Vin . . . he sat in the car and wondered how he was going to handle Judy. The more he thought about her the more irritated he got. Now when a thug like Vin gets irritated, he becomes like a vicious dog. Sooner or later the dog will snap and then bite and Vin was built on the same lines. He decided he would force Judy to give him the name of this stamp buyer. He would scare her into opening her mouth even if he had to rough her up. Once he had made this decision, he considered how he was going to do it.’

  * * *

  He had no illusions about Judy. She was tricky and he was sure she was tough. Even if he roughed her up so she parted with the buyer’s name, as soon as he let her go, she would squeal to the cops. Once the cops moved in, it was goodbye to all that money. Vin thought about this for over half an hour, then he came to the logical solution. If he was going to knock Elliot off, what was the matter with knocking Judy off too?

  Once rid of her, once rid of Elliot all he had to do was to make Cindy talk and if she got tricky why not knock her off as well? If he had to knock her off, then to make a nice clean job of it, he would also knock off Joey.

  Vin now realized that it was one thing to think about knocking off four people but quite another thing to do it successfully. By successfully, he naturally meant having no trouble with the cops. What was the use of getting a million dollars if you had the cops breathing down your neck?

  He would have four bodies to get rid of . . . one was tricky enough . . . but four!

  Then he remembered the deserted cove Judy had taken him to the first time they had met. Burying bodies in sand wasn’t hard work. Hard work never had appealed to Vin. But he couldn’t believe no one ever went to the cove and sooner or later some kid would dig or the sea would wash up and then there would be trouble.

  He thought some more and finally decided that the cove was too dangerous. Then he remembered seeing a bulldozer at work on swampland a few miles outside the City. He remembered hearing a barman talking about a big reclaiming scheme and another luxury hotel going up there. This might be a hiding place for bodies.

  So Vin drove out to the swamp right away. He found three bulldozers working, tearing up mangrove trees and leveling the ground and a twenty-foot high cement mixer grinding out cement which was being used to cover the masses of rubble trucks were unloading.

  Vin sat in the car and watched the cement mixer at work. He noted there was a perpendicular steel ladder going to the top. After a while, he convinced himself that he could carry a body up there and tip it into the mouth of the machine. What better method of getting rid of a body?

  Once Vin convinced himself that he could get rid of the bodies without trace, he drove away from the swamp feeling pretty pleased with himself. The first move would be to get Judy to part with the buyer’s name. He would fix that when he met her this evening. He wondered now how he could kill her quickly, silently and without mess. This was important if he was going to knock her off at the Blue Heaven motel.

  As he drove through the shade of the palm trees that lined the highway, he considered the various methods he had heard about while in jail and while fraternizing with various criminals in New York. A gun or a knife were out: there must be no blood. He considered a crushing blow at the back of the head, but that still might produce blood. He had read somewhere that there was an artery in the neck which, if pressed hard enough, would produce the required effect, but as he had no idea where the artery was located he passed that one over.

  Then he remembered a Mafia button man he had once met who was a garrote artist. His garrote had been a dog lead so if the cops ever searched him and found it, he had an explanation ready. The lead whipped over the head, the hands crossed, a knee driven into the back did the trick in a few seconds.

  ‘Why not?’ Vin said aloud.

  On his way back to the bungalow he stopped at a pet store and bought a leather dog lead.

  The pansy assistant asked him if he would like the name of his dog stamped on the lead.

  ‘You may not believe it,’ the assistant said, regarding Vin with serious eyes, ‘but doggies do know and they do care. It won’t take a tiny moment and it will be only three dollars extra.’

  Vin told him to get stuffed.

  In the meantime, Joey got back to, the bungalow. As soon as he came into the back garden, Elliot saw he was worried. He and Cindy had been waiting for Joey’s return and as he joined them, Elliot said a little anxiously, ‘All okay, Joey?’

  ‘Yes.’ Joey sat down. ‘I rented a safe and here’s the key.’

  He handed Elliot a safe deposit key. ‘But we’re being tailed, Don. I didn’t spot the tailers, but I get a feeling and it’s never wrong. I was picked up as soon as I left here. As soon as I got the feeling, I shook the tailer off . . . I lost him. It was tricky. He was good, but I lost him.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Elliot was puzzled. ‘That’s the second time you think you were followed.’ Then he remembered that the C.I.A. were interested in the stamps. Could the C.I.A. be following Joey? He decided he wouldn’t start a scare without more information so he said nothing. ‘You’re sure you lost them?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Joey said.

  Elliot got to his feet.

  ‘Suppose we hide the key that’s an idea?’

  Joey agreed.

  They went together into the gardening toolshed and hid the key under a can of weed killer.

  ‘Now if anything happens we know where it is,’ Elliot said.

  Joey looked sharply at him.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Elliot grinned.

  ‘Probably nothing. Tell Cindy where it’s hidden.’

  Later, Vin returned to the bungalow. Joey and Ci
ndy had gone for a walk and Vin found Elliot on his own in the garden.

  ‘Give me a thousand bucks,’ Vin said, ‘and I’ll get the buyer’s name tonight.’

  Elliot studied him.

  ‘Okay . . . you are sure she will tell you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She could be conning you.’

  Vin moved impatiently.

  ‘We’ve gone over all that jazz. She shows me the letter her old man had from the buyer.’

  ‘And you will show it to me?’

  ‘Sure . . . if she’ll part with it.’

  ‘Look, Vin, no offence, but I don’t trust you. I have to be sure the name of the man you give me is the buyer. Get me his name and I’ll call him. If he says he’ll buy, I’ll give you the number of the drawer, but not before.’

  Vin restrained his temper with an effort.

  ‘Get me the money and stop acting like a goddamn movie star.’

  ‘Just so long as you know,’ Elliot said and went into the bungalow.

  Vin stared after him, his eyes vicious.

  * * *

  Orson was alerted by Nisson around 21.00 that Pinna in the Jaguar was heading his way. He immediately alerted the six men Lessing had stationed around Larrimore’s house: three of them in the garden, two in a parked car and one patrolling the road.

  ‘This could be it,’ he said. ‘Pinna’s on his way. Let him get into the house, then grab him as he comes out. Watch it! He could be armed!’

  His mind totally occupied in how he was going to force Judy to tell him the name of the buyer, Vin completely forgot Elliot’s warning to watch out that he wasn’t being tailed. He was oblivious that Ross was driving ahead of him and Nisson behind him. When he reached Larrimore’s house, he pulled up, lit a cigarette and waited for Judy to show.

  He would have to be careful not to arouse her suspicions, he told himself. He would take her to the Low-Life Club, give her dinner, then take her to the Blue Heaven motel. Once in the cabin, he would ask her for the buyer’s name, then if she didn’t come across, he would knock her cold, gag and bind her and see what a few lighted cigarettes applied to her legs would do to get her talking. When she had parted with the name, he would call this guy and ask him if he were interested in buying the stamps. If he was and agreed the price, then Judy would cease to exist.