The Lottery Winner

by Mary Higgins Clark

  Clarence was a total contrast to the others. Small, wiry, and soft-spoken, he emitted a chilling aura. With good reason people were instinctively afraid of him. Clarence had been born without a conscience, and a number of unsolved homicides would have been cleared from the books if he had talked in his sleep during his incarceration.

  Sammy had never admitted to Clarence that Tony had been joyriding in the getaway car the night before the Brink’s robbery and had run through a street littered with glass. Tony would not have lived to express his regret that he hadn’t checked the tires.

  One of the lottery winners who’d invested in the horses was whining, “There wasn’t enough money in the world to feed those nags.” His partners nodded vigorously.

  Sammy snorted, “We’re wasting our time with this. Those jerks can’t rub two nickels together.” He reached to turn off the set.

  “Wait a minute,” Clarence snapped.

  Alvirah was speaking. “We weren’t used to money,” she explained. “I mean, we lived a nice life. We had a three-room apartment in Flushing and still keep it in case the state goes broke and tells us to take a flying leap for the rest of our checks. But I was a cleaning woman and Willy a plumber, and we had to be careful.”

  “Plumbers make a fortune,” Donahue protested.

  “Not Willy.” Alvirah smiled. “He spent half his time fixing things free at rectories and convents and for people who were hard up. You know how it is. It’s so expensive to get sinks and toilets and tubs working, and Willy felt that this was his way of making life easier for other people. He still does it.”

  “Well, surely you’ve had some fun with the money?” Donahue asked. “You’re very well dressed.”

  Alvirah remembered to get in a plug for the Cypress Point Spa as she explained that, yes indeed, they had fun. They’d bought an apartment on Central Park South. They traveled a lot. They gave to charity. She wrote articles for the New York Globe and she’d been fortunate enough to solve some crimes along the way. She’d always wanted to be a detective. “Nevertheless,” she concluded firmly, “every year since we’ve been winners we’ve saved more than half of every single check. And that money is all in the bank.”

  Clarence, followed by Sammy and Tony, joined in the vigorous applause of the studio audience. Clarence was smiling now, a thin, mirthless smile. “Two million bucks a year. Let’s say almost half of that for taxes so that means they net a little over a million bucks a year and save half of that. They gotta have two million plus in the bank. That oughta keep us going for a while.”

  “We snatch her?” Tony asked, pointing at the screen.

  Clarence withered him with a glance. “No, you dope. Look at the two of them. He’s hanging on to her like she’s a life preserver. He’d fall apart and go running to the cops. We take him. She’ll take orders and pay to get him back.” He looked around. “I hope Willy enjoys staying with us.”

  Tony frowned. “We gotta keep him blindfolded. I don’t want him picking me out of no lineup.”

  It was Sammy who sighed. “Tony, don’t worry about it. The minute we get the money, Willy Meehan will be looking for leaks in the Hudson River.”

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Alvirah was having her hair done at Louis Vincent, the salon around the corner from the Central Park South apartment. “Since the program was aired, I’m getting so many letters,” she told Louis. “Do you know I even got one from the President? He congratulated us on our wise handling of our finances. He said we were a perfect example of liberal conservatism. I wished he’d invited us to a White House dinner. I’ve always wanted to go to one of those. Well, maybe someday.”

  “Just make sure I do your hair,” Louis admonished as he gave a final touch to Alvirah’s coiffure. “Are you having a manicure?”

  Afterward, Alvirah knew she should have heeded the queer feeling that suggested she get back to the apartment. She would have caught Willy before he rushed into the car with those men.

  As it was, when the doorman saw her half an hour later, he broke into a relieved smile. “Mrs. Meehan, it must have been a mistake. Your husband was so worried.”

  Incredulous, Alvirah listened as José told her that Willy had come running from the elevator in tears. He’d yelled that Alvirah had had a heart attack under the dryer and had been rushed to Roosevelt Hospital.

  “A guy was outside in a black Cadillac,” José said. “He pulled into the driveway when I opened the door. The doctor sent his own car for Mr. Meehan.”

  “That sounds funny,” Alvirah said slowly. “I’ll get over to the hospital right away.”

  “I’ll call a cab,” the doorman told her. His phone rang. With an apologetic smile, he picked it up. “Two-eleven Central Park South.” He listened, then, looking puzzled, said, “It’s for you, Mrs. Meehan.”

  “Me?” Alvirah grabbed the phone and with a sinking heart heard a whispery voice say, “Alvirah, listen carefully. Tell the doorman your husband is fine. It was all a misunderstanding. He’s going to meet you later. Then go upstairs to your apartment and wait for instructions.”

  Willy had been kidnapped. Alvirah knew it. Oh God, she thought. “That’s fine,” she managed to say. “Tell Willy I’ll meet him in an hour.”

  “You’re a very smart woman, Mrs. Meehan,” the voice whispered.

  There was a click in her ear. Alvirah turned to José.

  “Complete mistake, of course. Poor Willy.” She tried to laugh. “Ah . . . ha . . . ha.”

  José beamed. “In Puerto Rico I never once hear about a doctor sending his car.”

  * * *

  The apartment was on the thirty-fourth floor and had a terrace overlooking Central Park. Usually Alvirah smiled the minute she opened the door. The apartment was so pretty, and if she said so herself, she had an eye for furniture. All those years of cleaning other people’s houses had been an education in interior design. They’d bought the apartment furnished—with white upholstery, white carpets, white lamps, white tables, white everything. After two months Alvirah felt like she was living inside a Clorox bottle. She gave everything to Willy’s nephew and went shopping.

  But today she took no comfort in the matching ivory couch and loveseat, Willy’s deep comfortable chair with its own ottoman, the crimson and royal blue Oriental carpet, the black lacquered table and chairs in the dining area, the late afternoon sun that danced across the blanket of autumn leaves in the park.

  What good was any of it if anything happened to Willy? With all her heart, Alvirah fiercely wished they’d never won the lottery and were back in their Flushing apartment over Orazio Romano’s tailor shop. It was at this time she’d be coming home from cleaning Mrs. O’Keefe’s house and joking to Willy that Mrs. O’Keefe had been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. “Willy, she never shuts up. Even shouts over the vacuum. It’s a good thing she isn’t too messy. I’d never get the work done.”

  The phone rang. Alvirah rushed to pick up the extension in the living room, then changed her mind and in stumbling haste ran into the bedroom. The recording machine was there. She pushed the Record button as she picked up the phone.

  It was the same whispery voice. “Alvirah?”

  “Yes. Where’s Willy? Whatever you do, don’t hurt him.” She could hear background sounds like planes taking off. Was Willy at an airport?

  “We won’t hurt him as long as we get the money and as long as you don’t call the cops. You didn’t call them, did you?”

  “No. I want to talk to Willy.”

  “In a minute. How much money have you got in the bank?”

  “Something over two million dollars.”

  “You’re an honest woman, Alvirah. That’s just about what we figured. If you want Willy back you’d better start making some withdrawals.”

  “You can have it all.”

  There was a low chuckle. “I like you, Alvirah. Two million is fine. Take it out in cash. Don’t give a hint that anything is wrong. No marked money, baby. And don’t go to the cops.
We’ll be watching you.”

  The airport sounds became almost deafening. “I can’t hear you,” Alvirah said desperately. “And I’m not giving you one cent until I’m sure that Willy is still alive.”

  “Talk to him.”

  Moments later a sheepish voice said, “Hi, honey.”

  Relief, total and overwhelming, flooded Alvirah. Her ever-resourceful brain, which had been inactive since José had told her about Willy getting in the “doctor’s car,” resumed its normal steel-trap efficiency.

  “Honey,” she yelled so that his abductors could hear, “tell those guys to take good care of you. Otherwise they won’t get a plugged nickel.”

  * * *

  Willy’s hands were handcuffed together. His feet were tied. He watched as the boss, Clarence, put his thumb on the handset of the phone and broke the connection. “That’s quite a woman you have, Willy,” Clarence said. Then Clarence turned off the machine that played simulated airport background sounds.

  Willy felt like a jerk. If Alvirah had really had a heart attack, Louis would have called him from the salon. He should have known that. What a dope he was. He looked around. This was some crummy dump. When he got in the car, the guy who was hiding in the backseat put a gun in his neck. “Try to make trouble and I blow you away.” The gun was jostling against his ribs when they hustled him through the lobby and up in the rickety elevator of this crummy joint. It was only a couple of blocks from the Lincoln Tunnel. The windows were closed tight, but even so, the exhaust fumes from the buses and trucks and cars were overwhelming. You could practically see them.

  Willy had sized up Tony and Sammy fast. Not too much upstairs. He might be able to give them the slip somehow. But when Clarence came in, announcing that he’d warned Alvirah to let the doorman think everything was hunky-dory, Willy felt his first real fear. Clarence reminded him of Nutsy, a guy he’d known as a kid. Nutsy used to shoot his BB gun into birds’ nests.

  It was obvious Clarence was the boss. He called Alvirah and talked to her about the ransom. He made the decision to put Willy on the phone. “Now,” Clarence said, “put him back in the closet.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Willy protested. “I’m starving.”

  “We’re gonna order hamburgers and french fries,” Sammy told him as he slipped a gag over Willy’s mouth. “We’ll letcha eat.”

  Sammy trussed Willy’s feet and legs in a spiral sequence of cord and knots and shoved him into the narrow closet. The door did not seal against the frame, and Willy could hear the low-toned conversation. “Two million bucks means she has to go to twenty banks. She’s too smart to leave more than a hundred thou in any of them. That’s how much is insured. Figuring the forms she has to fill out and the bank taking its own good time in counting the money, give her three, four days to get it.”

  “She’ll need four,” Clarence said. “We get the money by Friday night. We tell her we’re gonna count it and then she can pick up Willy.” He laughed. “Then we send her a map with an X mark to show where to start dredging.”

  * * *

  Alvirah sat for hours in Willy’s chair, staring unseeingly as the late afternoon sun sent slanting shadows over Central Park. The last lingering rays disappeared. She reached to turn on the lamp and got up slowly. It was no use thinking of all the good times she and Willy had had these forty years or that just this morning they were going through brochures to decide on whether to take a camel trip through India or a balloon safari in western Africa.

  I’m going to get him back, she decided, her jaw jutting out a little more aggressively. The first thing she had to do was to make a cup of tea. The next was to get out all the bankbooks and lay a plan for going from one bank to another and withdrawing cash.

  The banks were scattered all over Manhattan and Queens. One hundred thousand dollars deposited in each of them and, of course, accumulated interest, which they took out at the end of the year and used to start a new account. “No double-your-money schemes for us,” they’d agreed. In the bank. Insured. Period. When someone had tried to talk them into buying zero-coupon bonds that paid off in ten or fifteen years, Alvirah had said, “At our age we don’t buy things that pay off in ten years.”

  She smiled, remembering that Willy had chimed in, “And we don’t buy green bananas, either.”

  Alvirah swallowed a giant lump in her throat as she sipped the tea and decided that tomorrow morning she’d start on Fifty-seventh Street at Chase Manhattan, go across the street to Chemical, work her way along Park Avenue starting at Citibank and then hit Wall Street.

  It was a long night lying awake wondering if Willy was okay. I’m going to make them let me talk to him every night until I get all the money, she promised herself. That way they won’t hurt him till I figure something out.

  At dawn she was becoming tempted to call the police. By the time she got up, at seven, she’d decided against it. These people might have a spy in the building who would report if there was a lot of activity in the apartment. She couldn’t take a chance.

  * * *

  Willy spent the night in the closet. They loosened the ropes enough for him to stretch out a little. But they didn’t give him a blanket or pillow, and his head was resting on someone’s shoe. There was no way to push it aside. There was too much junk in the closet. He dozed off occasionally. He dreamed his neck was embedded in the side of Mount Rushmore, directly below the sculpture of Teddy Roosevelt’s face.

  * * *

  The banks didn’t open till nine. By eight-thirty, Alvirah, in a burst of pressure-cooker energy, had cleaned the already clean apartment. Her bankbooks were in her voluminous shoulder bag. She had dug from the closet a frankfurter-shaped plastic carryall, the one remnant on Central Park South of the days when she and Willy spent their vacations taking Greyhound tours to the Catskills.

  The October morning was crisp, and Alvirah was wearing a light green suit that she’d bought when she was on one of her diets. The waistband wouldn’t close, but a large safety pin solved that problem. Automatically she fastened her sunburst pin with the concealed recorder on the lapel.

  It was still too early to leave. Trying to keep up the positive thinking, that everything would be hunky-dory as soon as the money was paid, Alvirah reheated the kettle and turned on the radio to CBS Morning News.

  For once the headlines were fairly mundane. There was no big-shot Mafia guy on trial. No fatalattraction homicide. Nobody had been arrested for inside trading.

  Alvirah sipped her tea and was about to hit the Off button when the newscaster announced that as of today, New Yorkers could use the device that recorded the phone numbers from which incoming calls were made within the 212 area code.

  It took a minute for her to realize what that meant. Then Alvirah jumped up and ran to the utility closet. Among the electronic devices that she and Willy delighted in taking home from Hammacher Schlemmer was the recording machine that listed numbers on incoming phone calls. They’d bought it not realizing it was useless in New York.

  Dear Lord and his Blessed Mother, she prayed as she ripped the box open, pulled out the recorder and with trembling fingers substituted it for the answering machine in the bedroom. Let them be keeping Willy in New York. Let them call from wherever they’re hiding him.

  She remembered to record an announcement. “You have reached the home of Alvirah and Willy Meehan. At the beep please leave a message. We’ll get back to you real soon.” She played it back. Her voice sounded unnatural, worried, full of stress.

  She forced herself to remember that she had won the drama medal in the sixth-grade play at St. Francis Xavier School in the Bronx. Be an actress, she told herself firmly. She took a deep breath and began again: “Hell-lo. You have reached the home . . . ”

  That’s more like it, she decided when she listened to the new version. Then, clutching her shoulder bag, Alvirah headed for Chase Manhattan to begin to put together Willy’s ransom money.

  * * *

  I’m gonna go nuts, Willy thought as h
e tried to flex arms that somehow managed to be both numb and aching. His legs were still firmly trussed together. He’d given up on them. At eight-thirty he heard a faint rapping sound and then a door opening. Probably what passed for room service in this dump. They brought up lousy food on paper plates. At least that was the way hamburgers had been delivered last night. Even so, the thought of a cup of coffee and a piece of toast set Willy’s mouth to watering.

  A moment later the closet door opened. Sammy and Tony were staring down at him. Sammy held the gun while Tony loosened Willy’s gag. “Didja have a good night’s sleep?” Tony’s unlovely smile revealed a broken eyetooth. Willy longed to have his hands free for just two minutes. They itched to give Tony a matching set of eyeteeth. “Slept like a baby,” he lied. He nodded in the direction of the bathroom. “How about it?”

  “What?” Tony blinked, his rubbery face drooping into puzzlement.

  “He needs to go to the head,” Clarence said. He crossed the narrow room and bent over Willy. “See that gun?” He pointed to it. “It has a silencer. You try anything funny and it’s all over. Sammy has a very nervous trigger finger. Then we’ll all be mad because you gave us so much trouble. And we’ll have to take it out on your wife. Get it?”

  Willy was absolutely certain that Clarence meant it. Tony might be dopey, Sammy might have an itchy trigger finger, but they wouldn’t do anything without getting the okay from Clarence. And Clarence was a killer. Willy tried to sound calm. “I get it.”

  Somehow he managed to hobble to the bathroom. After he’d finished, Tony let him splash some water in his face. Willy looked around in disgust. The tile was broken, and the room looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in years. Flecks of rust-corroded enamel covered the tub and sink. Worst of all was the constant dripping from the water tank, faucets and shower head. “Sounds like Niagara Falls in here,” Willy commented to Tony, who was standing at the door.