THE SERIAL NUMBERS were a random lot.
There were numbers in the A series …
A63842516A, A5315898964A, A06152860A …
… and numbers in the B series …
B35817751D, B40565942E …
… and numbers in the C and F and H and G and E and L and K and D series …
But none of these numbers matched those on the separate caches of hundred-dollar bills they’d seized by court order from Cassandra Jean Ridley’s desk and her safe deposit box.
They thanked Horne for his time and courtesy …
“Always a pleasure,” he said.
… and went back to the squadroom.
It was not yet twelve noon.
DAVID HORNE was trying to convince his boss that the two Keystone Kops had no idea the bills had been switched.
“This is like the old shell game,” he said. “You have to guess which shell the pea is under. But the pea is really in the palm of our hand.”
“I’m not familiar with the shell game,” Parsons said.
His full name was Winslow Parsons III, and he had been recruited into the Secret Service when he was twenty-two and a senior at Harvard. He’d been present in Dallas, walking alongside the presidential limo when Kennedy was assassinated, but he hadn’t been the one to protect the President with his own body—well, no one had, for that matter. Similarly, when John Hinckley, Jr., shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, Parsons had missed his big chance at immortality by not hurling himself in the path of the bullet. At the age of sixty-four, he was still tall and lean and he had all his hair, albeit turning gray, and he thought he looked like Charlton Heston, whom he greatly admired, but he bore no resemblance to him at all. In any case, he didn’t know what a shell game was. In Cambridge, they did not have such things as shell games.
“You palm the pea,” Horne explained. Or tried to explain. “Same way we palmed the bills.”
He was thinking this is four days before New Year’s Eve, and we’re having a big party, and I should be checking my booze, see how much I have to order. Setups, too.
“How did they come across the bills in the first place?” Parsons asked.
“A case they’re investigating.”
“What kind of case?”
“A woman was murdered.”
Parsons looked at him.
“It gets complicated,” Horne said.
“Life gets complicated,” Parsons replied.
“Yes, sir, it does.”
“Lifeiscomplicated.”
“Yes, sir, it most certainly is.”
“How’dweget involved in this, is what I’d like to know,” Parsons said. “If you please.”
“A flagged super showed up on our list, sir. Man who passed it had eight thousand total in similar bills. We yanked them out of circulation. Should have been the end of the story.” Horne shrugged. “Instead, the woman got killed and suddenly it’s Mickey Mouse time.”
“What’s the woman got to do with it?”
“He stole the bills from her.”
“The eight thousand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He admitted that?”
“No, sir. He told me he won them in a crap game.”
“Is that likely?”
“Hardly.”
“And you say you recovered eight thousand supers?”
“Yes, sir, and replaced them with clears. The old shell game, sir,” he said, and smiled.
Parsons did not smile back.
“Why the hell did you do that?” he asked.
“Do what, sir?”
“Give the man good money for bad?”
