The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  “Goddamn!” Icepick Willie said with a shiver. “Let’s get moving and get that money out of that damned well. It’s cold out here.”

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Willie,” Little admonished. “I’ve told you that kind of talk don’t do a man no good at all.”

  “Shit,” Willie said to nobody in particular. He looked off at the horizon, his face drawn up like a sullen child’s. “I hate cold weather.”

  “You got the key?” Little asked me.

  “No,” I replied after feeling around in my pockets.

  “Shit!” Willie blurted once again, wheeling around to glare at me. “If this ain’t turning into a hell of a mess. First the magnet gets stuck, and now we got no key. I don’t see why we didn’t bring a bunch of damned Chinamen along to really clabber things up.”

  “Settle down and don’t pitch a fit, Willie,” Little told him. “Just get the tire iron out of the trunk and we’ll bust the lock open.”

  Willie bumbled around behind the Ford until he finally managed to unfasten the tire iron from the clamp that held it to the jack. Once he’d pulled it from the trunk, he trotted over to the well and slipped its tip under the hasp. Then he put his shoulder under the end of the iron and heaved upward. The screws that held the hasp to the wood gave way with a loud creak and the well was open.

  “See how easy that was?” Little asked.

  “Shit,” Willie announced once again.

  “Why don’t you go fish that sack out?” Little asked me quietly. “His mind is somewhere else, and he’s liable to drop the whole business in the well, magnet and all, and then we really will be in a fix.”

  I held the magnet over the side of the curb and began to uncoil the rope. The well was only about thirty feet deep and it didn’t take long for the magnet to hit the water. It took me a couple of minutes of probing around, picking the magnet up and moving it until at last I came close enough to the steel disc inside the bag. Finally I felt a tug at the rope as the disc and the magnet made contact. Slowly I began drawing up the rope. Finally the bag came up and I dropped it on the ground. By putting my foot on the sack I was able to tug the magnet loose and then unseal the first bag. I pulled out the second bag and threw it over at Little’s feet.

  “Hot damn!” Willie said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Let’s split it up.”

  “Not out here,” Little told him. “We’ll go up to Sweetwater and get a room in a tourist court where it’s nice and warm, and then we’ll count it out and divide it.”

  “I don’t like that idea,” Willie said with a sly grin and slipped his hands into his coat pockets.

  “Well, I like it,” Little said. “And that’s the way we’re going to do it. There’s something else we may as well air out while we’re on the subject. Lum’s momma is going to get his cut, and there ain’t no use arguing about it.”

  “Oh, ho ho,” Willie chuckled. “I got a better plan. How about we do a one-way split? Then we won’t need to do no counting.”

  Little’s face was grim beneath the edge of his fedora. “Now, why don’t it surprise me that you’d come up with a notion like that?” he asked rhetorically.

  Willie glanced at me and winked. I shook my head, and said, “Better back away from it, Willie.”

  “And you better zip it shut, city boy,” he growled as he pulled a .45 automatic smoothly from his overcoat pocket and pointed it at us. His big, blurry face held a happy grin and his swampy eyes danced. “The first time we met, I told you payday was gonna come someday.”

  “I’m sorry it’s come to this, Willie,” Chicken Little said. “I could overlook some of the other stuff you done, much as I hate it. But I got no use for a man that turns on his own partners. There ain’t no place for him in this world. Maybe not in the next one, neither.”

  “Well, who in the hell are you to be so high and mighty, Chicken Little? You ain’t nothing but a damned old Okie moonshiner.”

  “Maybe not, but my word’s good.”

  “It ain’t gonna be for much longer,” Wille said. He pointed the gun at Little and pulled the trigger only to have the hammer fall against the firing pin with a dull click. He looked down at the .45 for a moment as though he’d never seen it before, then quickly jerked the slide back and fed a fresh cartridge into the chamber. Aiming at me this time, he squeezed the trigger a second time with no better results. “You gave me a damn gun that don’t work!” he bellowed.

  “The gun works fine, Willie,” the old man said, and pulled his own old Colt Pocket Auto from his shoulder holster. A silencer appeared in his left hand and he began to screw it carefully onto the Colt’s barrel. “I just took the powder out of them cartridges about a week ago. That’s one of them little things I keep trying to tell you about. You don’t never pay no attention to the little things.”

  Willie crouched there beside the old abandoned house in the falling darkness while he worked the pistol’s action and squeezed the trigger again and again, aiming first at Little and then at me, back and forth, until the gun was empty. He stared at it for a moment with an expression of sick bewilderment on his face, then raised his head to glare at us with eyes that were growing wide with fear. An icy wind had been blowing earlier, but it had lain with the sunset, and now a deathly stillness reigned. In the west a band of fading crimson marked the place where the sun had dropped below the horizon, and beneath it the cold, desolate land was passing quickly into night. For a few moments the whole earth seemed to hang suspended in silence, and then I heard Little’s voice, low and apologetic. “I know it’s a hell of a note, but we ain’t got a shovel.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll just throw the body down the well.”

  FORTY-ONE

  When I came into the house I found Della reading on the living room sofa. She laid her book aside, and when she saw her eyes widened. “What happened?” she asked. “And where on earth have you been? I was worried to death.”

  “Later,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  I went in the kitchen and filled a glass with ice cubes, then poured a generous measure of scotch over them. After I tool a long pull of the drink, I refilled the glass from the bottle, and then went back through the living room on my way to the bedroom. Della followed me, a look of confusion on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing now,” I replied, and began stripping off my clothes. “Everything’s fine now.”

  “Do you need anything?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I’m going to take a quick shower.” I threw the bag on the bed.

  “Okay,” she muttered, an expressions of pure confusion on her face.

  I went into the bathroom and shut the door. It only took me about ten minutes, but hot water had never felt better. Once I’d toweled dry and brushed my teeth, I threw on my bathrobe and drained the last of my drink. Della was in her black robe, and she’d been into the scotch herself.

  “Now I feel much better,” I said with a warm smile as I picked up the bag. “Finish your drink,” I told her.

  She downed the last of the scotch, and then came that delightful little wriggle she always used when she dropped the robe to the floor. I gave her a long, tender kiss and then picked her up and dropped her in the middle of the bed.

  * * *

  Neither of us had eaten since early that morning. Once more Della cooked bacon and eggs and we had a late-night supper on the coffee table in the living room. When I finished the last bite, I stretched out on the sofa. “I guess it’s time to tell you the whole story,” I said.

  “If you want,” she replied. “I’ve never said that you have to.”

  “I do want to,” I said, and then went on to relate how Clifton Robillard, who in 1936 was little more than a deadbeat hanger-on with the American Bankers Association’s delegation to Germany, had been approached by one of Reinhard Heydrich’s agents, and how he’d given this agent a favorable response and then been taken to a private meeting with Heydrich hims
elf two days later.

  “Eventually he became Heydrich’s paymaster for the whole southwestern United States,” I said. “He helped the Nazis transfer and route millions of dollars into this country and into the pockets of German agents. In doing so, he was responsible for the death of a half dozen good men, including one of our own.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was tortured to death by Heydrich’s agents.”

  She grimaced. “Then Robillard was a Nazi,” she said.

  I shook my head. “No, he was just an opportunist. Men like him really don’t have any politics beyond personal profit. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one they had their eyes on, but the Germans had good intelligence in this country, and they’d done their research well. They knew that he’d lost the bulk of his fortune in the Crash of ’29, and that he was willing to do just about anything to get it back.”

  “You must have found out about all this while you were with the OSS,” Della said. “But I’ve read that it only operated abroad.”

  “We were supposed to only operate abroad, but that distinction sometimes got blurred. Heydrich was dead by then, assassinated by Czech partisans who’d been trained and sent in by the British. But his sabotage organization was still very much alive.”

  “I thought that the FBI was responsible for catching spies and all that sort of thing,” she said.

  I laughed softly. “So did they, but we operated domestically, too. Very carefully, you may be sure, but we were active inside the country. We were better at it than they were. At least up until 1944 we were, and by that time Heydrich’s organization was out of business. You see, a counterintelligence outfit needs a good network of informants, and the Bureau has never been strong in that respect. That’s how I came to meet Col. Homer Garrison. Bill Donovan knew him from way back, and he was able to help us quite a bit. He had about fifty Rangers plus two hundred Highway Patrolmen. Many of those men had come from city police departments, and they all had their old informants to fall back on. Plus, about twenty retired Rangers were working as company detectives and security chiefs and what-not for oil companies and chemical firms down on the coast. We got a lot of good information through Garrison’s men.”

  “What did you do with these German agents when you caught them?”

  “We didn’t really catch them because we didn’t have any power to arrest anybody. Most of them we turned them over to the FBI. Ironic, isn’t it? But you need to realize that the Bureau has a lot of good field agents, even if Hoover is an ass. We fingered one gang down in Louisiana for the Secret Service. They were a part of a Nazi scheme to undermine the economy financially by flooding the country with counterfeit money.”

  “But why didn’t the government just prosecute Robillard?” she asked. “The man was a traitor, after all.”

  “Yes, and a very smart one. About the time that Heydrich’s organization collapsed in 1943, Mercantile Bank had a new fireproof storage room built for all its records. Amazingly, they’d just transferred their current notes and mortgages and so forth into this vault when a fire broke out one night in the old record room. All the bank’s records going back to the turn of the century were destroyed, including the information it would have taken to convict Robillard. So from that point on, the government simply didn’t have the evidence necessary to be sure of a conviction, and for political reasons the attorney general felt that they couldn’t risk an acquittal. And there were other considerations. Robillard was a political ally of Governor Stevenson, who was openly opposed to Roosevelt and the New Deal. If the Justice Department had gone after Robillard and the case had fallen apart in court, it would have looked like the president was trying to embarrass a critic, and destroying a man’s reputation to do it. And now I want another drink.”

  I started to rise from the sofa, but she stopped me. “I’ll get us both one.”

  She was soon back with two large glasses of scotch and soda. She set both drinks on the coffee table and resumed her place on the floor. “This is an awful lot to digest,” she said.

  “I know. But you can see why we couldn’t let a man like him get away scot-free. Originally we’d intended to have him taken hostage instead of me when the poker game was robbed, and then Little was going to kill him and leave him in that building where the robbery car was found. But when Colonel Garrison called me and told me about the embezzlement I got the idea of having the bank burgled and framing him for it instead. I found the idea of him rotting away in federal prison for the rest of his life considerably more appealing than a quick bullet in the brain, to tell you the truth.”

  “But if he would have gone to prison for the embezzlement anyway, then why bother?…” she began.

  “On state embezzlement charges he could have proven that he’d made restitution and been out in seven years. In fact, he might have even gotten probation, considering that he’d once been a state senator.”

  “But if it was a state chartered bank I don’t see how the federal government can—”

  “Don’t you read the papers?” I asked with a grin.

  “The papers? What have the newspapers got to do with it?”

  “They’ve carried several stories in the last few months about Mercantile Bank applying to join Federal Deposit Insurance System. Federal insurance went into effect back on the fifteenth of November, making robbery of the bank a federal offense. Which is why I had to wait so long to pull this off. And it’s also why Robillard was cash poor back when I won that big bet from him at the cockfight. He was using his oil royalties to replace the money he’d pilfered, and he was trying to get it all shoveled back in before the bank fell under federal scrutiny.”

  “But why did he join the federal system if he’d been embezzling?” she asked.

  “Robillard doesn’t own the bank, Della. He’s just the largest stockholder. And the board overrode his objections and voted to join.”

  “But I still don’t see how he can be convicted of bank robbery,” she said.

  “It’s simple. Perkins and Needam will testify that he tried to engage them to rob the bank just a couple of months before the bank was actually robbed. It’s a logical assumption that he went to somebody else when they turned him down.”

  “It may be logical,” she objected, “but proving it in court is another matter.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at her indulgently. “Della, all the time you hear people talk about proving stuff in court, but you really don’t have to prove anything. All you have to do is convince a jury.”

  She opened her mouth as if to say something, then snapped it shut and we were silent for a couple of minutes. Finally she asked, “Was this a government operation?”

  I sighed and shrugged. “Sometimes there aren’t any clear yes-and-no answers to a question like that. It started out as a scheme dreamed up by me and a couple of guys I worked with during the war, one of them a friend from college I’d later served with in the navy. It was financed with government money, and nobody in the government who knew about it objected to what we were doing, so I really don’t know the answer to your question.”

  “You must feel very satisfied that it all came off so well,” she said.

  “What makes me feel most satisfied is that he really had paid the money back to the bank. But like Ollie Marne said, the embezzlement gives him the strongest motive in the world for the robbery. Add that to the discrepancy between what the books showed as cash-on-hand and what was actually recovered…” I stopped and smiled at her. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “But why did he embezzle the money in the first place? After all, he really is a wealthy man.”

  “Yes, but he was heavily in debt when the Coby Smith well came in, and his lines of credit were about tapped out. So when Van Horn offered to let him go in on some oil deals, he just swiped the money he needed to invest from his own bank with every intention of paying it back as soon as he could. The burglars actually got almost three hundred thousand that night, but—”

&
nbsp; “But everybody assumed,” she said, finishing my thought for me, “that the ninety-four thousand found up at Sweetwater was the whole haul from the robbery.”

  “Right.”

  “But didn’t it seem a little careless for the robbers to be going off to breakfast and leaving the money in the cabin?”

  “Maybe, but criminals do dumb things like that all the time,” I replied. “That’s why the prisons are full. Besides, the anonymous call to the police said they were drunk and arguing, and who knows what drunks will do?”

  “Neat,” she said.

  “And in addition to all Robillard’s other legal problems, Ollie Marne told me yesterday that the IRS is looking into his finances.”

  We finished our drinks and set our glasses on the coffee table. I stretched back out on the sofa, and she lay down beside me, her head on my chest.

  “Della?” I asked after we’d lain there a few minutes.

  “Hmmmm?” she said without looking up.

  “I love you.”

  She raised her head and propped her chin on my breast bone, then regarded me thoughtfully. “It’s about time you told me,” she said softly, and lay back down on my chest.

  FORTY-TWO

  On the morning of Christmas Eve I found myself in a typically male predicament: I hadn’t yet shopped for Della. I was afraid I would have to make a daylong trip to Dallas, but I found what I wanted only a block from the Weilbach. The next morning we unwrapped our gifts. She had bought me several things—too much in fact, while I had only bought her one gift. It was what she wanted but would never have mentioned. Three carats, pure white, surrounded by smaller stones and set in gold. “Which finger do I wear it on?” she asked.