Dirty Money

6

You folks here for the robbery?”

The place was called Bosky Rounds, and the pictures on the web site had made it look like somewhere that Hansel and Gretel might have stopped off. Deep eaves, creamy stucco walls, broad dark green wooden shutters flanking the old-fashioned multipaned windows, and a sun god knocker on the front door. The Bosky Rounds gimmick, though they wouldn’t have used the word, was that they offered maps of nearby hiking trails through the forest, for those leaf peepers who would like to be surrounded by their subject. It was the most rustic and innocent accommodation Claire could find, and Parker had agreed it was perfect for their purposes.

And the first thing Mrs. Bartlett, the owner, the nice motherly lady in the frilled apron and the faint aroma of apple pie, said to them was, “You folks here for the robbery?”

“Robbery?” Claire managed to look both astonished and worried. “What robbery? You were robbed?”

“Oh, not me, dear,” and Mrs. Bartlett offered a throaty chuckle and said, “It was all over the television. Not five miles from here, last week, a week ago tomorrow, a whole gang attacked the bank’s armored cars with bazookas.”

“Bazookas!” Claire put her hand to her throat, then leaned forward as though she suspected this nice old lady was pulling her leg. “Wouldn’t that burn up all the money?”

“Don’t ask me, dear, I just know they blew up everything, my cousin told me it was like a war movie.”

“Was he there?”

“No, he rushed over as soon as he heard it on his radios.” To Parker she said, “He has all these different kinds of radios, you know.” Back to Claire she said, “You really haven’t heard about it?”

“Oh, us New Yorkers,” Claire said, with a laugh and a shrug. “We really are parochial, you know. If it doesn’t happen in Central Park, we don’t know a thing about it.” Handing over her credit card, she said, “I tell you what. Let us check in and unpack, and then you’ll tell us all about it.”

“I’d be delighted,” said Mrs. Bartlett. “And you’re the Willises,” she said, looking at the credit card.

“Claire and Henry,” Claire said.

Mrs. Bartlett put the card in her apron pocket. “I put you in room three upstairs,” she said. “It really is the nicest room in the house.”

“Lovely.”

“I’ll give you back your card when you come down.” She turned to say to Parker, “And you’ll have tea?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

* * *

It was a large room, with two large bright many-paned windows, frills on every piece of furniture, and a ragged old Oriental carpet. They unpacked into the old tall dresser and the armoire, there being no closet, and Parker went over to look out the window toward the rear of the house. The trees began right there, red and yellow and orange and green. “I’ll have to look on the map,” he said. “See where this is.”

“You mean, from the robbery site,” Claire said, and laughed. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Bartlett will tell you, in detail. Will you mind sitting through that?”

“It’s a good idea,” Parker said, “for me to know what the locals think happened.”

“Fine. But one thing.”

He looked at her. “Yeah?”

“If she gets a part wrong,” Claire said, “don’t correct her.”

* * *

Over tea and butter cookies in the communal parlor downstairs, Mrs. Bartlett gave them an exhaustive and mostly accurate description of what had gone on up in those woods last Friday night. It turned out, she said, that two of the local banks were going to combine, so all of the money from one was going to the other. It was all very hush-hush and top secret and nobody was supposed to know anything about it, but it turned out somebody knew what was going on, because, just at this intersection here— she showed them on the county map— where these two small roads meet, nobody knows how many gangsters suddenly appeared with bazookas, and smashed up all the armored cars— there were four armored cars, with all the bank’s papers and everything in addition to the money— and drove off with the one armored car with the money in it, and when the police found the armored car later all the money was gone.

Parker said, “How did the gangsters know which armored car had the money in it?”

“Well, that,” Mrs. Bartlett told them, leaning close to confide a secret, “that was where the scandal came in. The wife of the bank owner, Mrs. Langen, she was in cahoots with the robbers!”

Claire said, “In cahoots? The banker’s wife? Oh, Mrs. Bartlett.”

“No, it’s true,” Mrs. Bartlett promised them. “It seems she’d taken up with a disgraced ex-guard in her husband’s bank. He went to jail for stealing something or other, and when he came back they started right up again where they left off, and the first thing you know they robbed her own husband’s bank!”

“But the law got them,” Parker suggested.

“Oh, yes, of course, the police immediately captured them,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “They’ll pay for their crimes, don’t you worry. But not the robbers, no, not the people who actually took the money.”

“The people with the bazookas,” Parker said, because the Carl-Gustaf antitank weapons from Sweden had not been bazookas.

“Those people,” Mrs. Bartlett agreed. “And the money, too, of course. There’ve been police and state troopers and FBI men and I don’t know what all around here all week. I even had three state police investigators staying here until Tuesday.”

“I’m sorry we missed them,” Claire murmured.

“Oh, they were just like anybody,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “You wouldn’t know anything to look at them.”

“I suppose,” Claire said, turning to Parker, “we ought to go see where this robbery took place.”

“It’s still traffic jams over there,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “People going, and stopping, and taking pictures, though I have no idea what they think they’re taking pictures of. Just some burned trees, that’s all.”

“It’s the excitement,” Claire suggested. “People want to be around the excitement.”

“Well, if you’re going over there,” Mrs. Bartlett said, “the best time is in the morning. Before nine o’clock.” She leaned forward again for another confidence. “Tourists, generally, are very slugabed,” she told them.

“Well,” Claire said, “they are on vacation.”

Parker said, “So, when we go out to dinner, we shouldn’t go in that direction.”

“Oh, no. There are some lovely places . . . Let me show you.”

There was a specific route Parker wanted, but he needed Mrs. Bartlett to suggest it. He found reasons not to be enthusiastic about her first three dinner suggestions, but the fourth would be on a route that would take them right