Black money Read Free

"Let's see it," he said in a loud unimpressive voice. His eyes were anxious.

    "I never show work in progress."

    I closed the book and put it back in my inside breast pocket. Then I started to turn up the window on his arm. He yanked his arm away and pressed his face against the glass, blurring it momentarily with his breath.

    "I want to see what you wrote about me."

    He took a miniature camera out of his pocket and rapped on the window with it, foolishly and frantically. "What did you write about me?"

    It was the kind of situation I liked to avoid, or terminate quickly. As the century wore on - I could feel it wearing on angry pointless encounters like this one tended more and more to erupt in violence. I got out on the right-hand side and walked around the front of the car toward him.

    As long as I was in my car, he had been yelling at a machine, a Cadillac yelling at a Ford. Now we were both men, and he was shorter and narrower than I was. He stopped yelling. His whole personality changed. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, as if to disclaim the evil spirit that had invaded him and made him yell at me. Self-doubt pulled at his face like a surgically hidden scar.

    "I didn't do anything out of line, did I? You got no call to write down my license number."

    "That remains to be seen," I said in a semi-official tone. "What are you doing here?"

    "Sightseeing. I'm a tourist."

    His pale eyes glanced around at the sparsely inhabited hills as if he had never been out in the country before. "This is a public road, isn't it?"

    "We've had a report of a man who was representing himself as a law officer last night."

    His glance lighted briefly on my face, then jumped away. "It couldn't be me. I never been here before in my life."

    "Let's see your driver's license."

    "Listen," he said, "we can get together on this. I don't have much with me but I got other resources."

    He drew a lonely ten from a worn calfskin billfold and tucked it in the breast pocket of my jacket. "Here. Buy something for the kids. And call me Harry."

    He smiled with conscious charm. But the charm he was conscious of, if it had ever existed, had dried up and blown away. His front teeth glared at me like a pair of chisels. I removed the ten from my pocket, tore it in half, and gave him back the pieces.

    His face fell apart. "That's a ten-dollar bill. You must be a kook to tear up money like that."

    "You can put it together with Scotch tape. Now let me see your license before you commit another felony."

    "Felony?"

    He said it the way a sick man pronounces the name of his disease.

    "Bribery and impersonating an officer are felonies, Harry."

    He looked around at the daylight as if it had betrayed him, again. A little pale moon hung in a corner of the sky, faint as a thumbprint on a windowpane.

    A fiercer light flashed down the canyon above us and almost dazzled me. It seemed to come from the head of a man who was standing with a girl on the terrace of the Bagshaw house. For a second I had the impression that he had great round eyes and that they had emitted the flashing light. Then I realized he was watching us through binoculars.

    The man and the girl with him were as small as figures on a wedding cake. Their height and distance from me gave me a queer feeling, as if they were somehow unattainable, out of reach, out of time.

    Harry Felony scrambled into his car and tried to start the engine. It turned over slowly like a dead man turning over in his grave. I had time to open the far door and get in on the gnawed leather seat.

    "Where are we going, Harry?"

    "Nowhere."

    He turned off the ignition and dropped his hands. "Why don't you leave me alone?"

    "Because you stopped a young man on this road last night and said you were a detective and asked him a lot of questions."

    He was silent while his malleable face went through new adjustments. "I am a detective, in a way."

    "Where's your badge?"

    He reached into his pocket for something,