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client when to cash it. Let me worry about that." Ray said sullenly, "I've got a dollar and some cents in the account, just enough to hold it open. All right. But I've got to get my wallet out of my hip pocket to get a check." Irby nodded, and he took out his wallet and took from it one of several blank checks he kept folded in one of the compartments. Irby offered him a pen, but he shook his head and took his own from his inside coat pocket, and wrote the check. "Don't put the pen away," Irby told him. "One more step." He read the check carefully and put it into his own wallet. Then he took from his coat pocket a folded sheet of blank paper. He unfolded it and put it in front of Ray Fleck. "Now a confession. Put the date down and I'll dictate the rest." "Confession! My God, you've got the check. Why do you want a confession too?" "Think, Fleck. We might have to prove what that check was given for. Maybe you haven't thought of this yet, but you will: if I let you walk out of here free Page 59 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html what's to prevent you from ditching the stolen property down the nearest sewer right away--and then, first thing tomorrow morning, stopping payment on the check? And if she tried to make trouble your story--you'd think of it--would be you'd given her the check on a drunken generous impulse and had reconsidered, especially when you sobered up and realized you didn't have money in the bank to cover it. Be embarrassing for you to have to tell a story like that, but how could Dolly disprove it?" Ray Fleck understood and nodded miserably; his mind had been playing around with some such idea, although he hadn't worked out the details yet. He wrote down the date. And what Irby dictated to him after that. It wasn't long, but it sewed him up completely and left no loopholes. It even accounted for the fact that restitution was being made by check instead of return of the jewelry by stating that he had already disposed of several items of the stolen property. It didn't incriminate Dolly in any way by implying that he had ever been intimate with her. He signed it and pushed it across. Irby folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He said, "Okay, you can have this back when my client has cashed the check." Ray Fleck stared miserably down into his glass, not wanting to look at his tormentor. It was going to take him months, he was thinking, to get himself out of this, even if Ruth came through and took him off the hook on his gambling debt. He heard Irby slide out the booth. And then, standing outside, Irby bent over the end of the booth table. "By the way, Fleck," he said, "you owe Joe Amico some money too. That's only a gambling debt and this is a larceny rap. This comes first. Understand?" Startled, Ray looked up, into those light blue marble-like eyes. He said, "Good God, man, I've got only till tomorrow evening on that. I can't possibly raise a thousand in a day. It'll take me weeks." "It better not," Irby said. "This comes ahead of a gambling debt, and I'm not kidding. If you're paying off Amico tomorrow evening, you're paying this off sooner. Tomorrow's Friday, and it's not going to wait over the weekend. Your bank closes at three tomorrow, and Miss Mason will be there just before then with the check. If it's 'insufficient funds' the confession and the check both go to the police." "God, Irby, I can't possibly--" "You better, and I don't care how. See a loan shark, sell your house, your car or your wife, anything. Rob a bank for all I care. But this check will be presented for cashing at your bank at three tomorrow." He turned and walked away, as casually as though he hadn't left a desperate man behind him. Ray Fleck reached for his drink. His hand shook badly but there was so little left in the glass that he didn't spill any. He drank it at a gulp. He wanted to get out, away from everybody, to walk the night alone and try to think, to think. But he wanted Irby to have time to get clear first. He strode to the front of the tavern and stood looking out of the window. He saw Irby get into a car parked across the street and drive away. Then he himself left, and walked. Not even a car to drive in tonight, he thought, feeling sorry for himself, and as though thinking about that one little trouble would help him forget his real troubles. But he didn't dare try to forget them, he realized; he had to find an answer. If there was an answer. He saw an open sewer grating at the first corner and for a moment he was tempted to push the damned jewelry, handkerchief and all, through it. But the thought came to him that that would be a useless gesture now. With the written confession in Irby's hands, soon in Dolly's, having the stuff on him was no additional danger to him now. Besides, it was worth something. If a fence had considered giving him fifty for the ring, probably a hock shop Page 60 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html proprietor would give him at least that and maybe more tomorrow. And since the police didn't have a list for checking there'd be no danger selling the ring openly now. No use throwing fifty bucks or more down the sewer. Maybe Uncle would give him a few bucks, say five for all of it, for the costume stuff. He thought again of the ring in connection with the poker game. The game would be starting by now. But--oh, hell it was hopeless. He needed fifteen hundred now, fourteen hundred and eighty to be exact, and he'd never seen money like that change hands in the game. A few hundred, never more than five or six, was as much as he'd ever seen anybody win or lose, and not that much very often. It would have been a miracle if he'd have got in the game and won enough to pay off Amico. His only chance, his only chance, now was Ruth and her insur-ance policy. (What if she'd get killed by a car on the way home from work tonight? He'd have the whole ten thousand coming, as her beneficiary, and his troubles would be gone. Eight and a half thousand left after paying off one and a half thousand. But things like that never happened, not when you desperately needed to have them happen.) But what remotely credible story could he make up when he'd needed only five hundred late this afternoon? Not that he'd lost another thousand gambling--if she did believe that, it would make her so mad she'd be more likely to walk out on him than meekly agree to borrow that much on the policy for him. And she probably wouldn't believe him to begin with, and he couldn't blame her; he'd never gambled for stakes like that before, a grand in one evening. The four-eighty to Amico had been lost in his bad-luck run over several weeks. But there had to be some way out. There had to be. He'd walked two blocks before he decided that walking wasn't doing him any good. His mind was going in circles, getting nowhere. He could think better sitting down. And besides, the shock of Mack Irby had knocked off his slight edge, had knocked all the alcohol out of him. And he could think better with a slight edge, just a slight one, than cold sober. He needed a drink and needed it badly. The Palace Bar was coming up. It was a place he ordinarily didn't like and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |