I got up from my easy chair and stuffed the money back into my briefcase. My head still felt funny, but in a different way. I looked at the phone and decided that the thing to do would be to drive down to DPD and turn the money over to the police in person. That maneuver always seems to impress district attorneys. Jail time reduced from five to three. The results aren’t immediate, but I imagine that when year #3 falls off the calendar, it makes a difference.
I carried the briefcase into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and stood there staring at the fairly empty shelves. I forgot what I had opened the door for. Not a beer certainly. Imagine getting caught driving a taxi with alcohol in my system while hauling a hundred grand in stolen money. What district attorney would cut me a plea then? But I was busy thinking. Not a good thing to do when cold air is spilling out of the fridge. Nevertheless I stood there staring at a bottle of catsup and wondering why Mr. Hollister had stuffed the money down behind the backseat.
Unless …
Unless hiding the money in the rear of a taxi had been part of a scheme to orchestrate a getaway so perfect that not even Sam Peckinpah could have …
I stopped thinking. I closed the door. Then I remembered.
I opened the door and grabbed a soda and shut the door. I went to a kitchen window and lifted the curtain and peeked out.
What if somebody else knew that the money was in my backseat? What if somebody was out there right now, shadowing me in a car and watching my every move? Maybe Mr. Hollister had hidden the money so that a cohort could … say … call a taxi … a specific taxi … and make the pickup without my even knowing that the fare was digging around in the backseat. A perfect crime worthy of … me?
I asked myself how I could have entertained for even one second the idea that I might be able to maneuver my way through a series of illegal obstacles and get away scot-free with the money. This was what made my head feel funny. Prior to this it was the sight, the feel, the smell of the money in my possession that made me feel as if I was buzzed on caffeine. It was the same feeling I got on the day I started writing my first novel, convinced that I would get rich. It was a feeling unalloyed with doubt, and that’s exactly how I had felt when I sat in my easy chair pretending I was going to call the police. I could draw only one conclusion: I was not as innocent as a newborn babe after all. I had never been that innocent, not even as a newborn babe.
I sensed that somewhere inside my body was a corrupt bone.
Oh it was in me all right.
It was there.
And it made me feel funny.
It didn’t matter that I had overcome the temptation. First you have to feel the temptation before you can overcome it. Maybe you reject it right away. But then again … maybe you don’t. But a person who didn’t have any corrupt bones would reject it right off the bat. For instance, if a scalper offered me a primo ticket to a Bronco game, without thinking twice I would walk away. I’m never tempted to participate in spectator sports. When it comes to sitting on a cold bleacher in the winter, my bones are as pure as the driven snow.
On the other hand, if you have to wrestle with a decision whether or not to succumb to temptation, you’re just kidding yourself. You are already corrupt, baby—I’m talking bad-to-the-bone. The source of your wrestling match is nothing more than a fear of getting caught. You’ve already made your decision. You want that thing so much, whatever it is, that you would do anything to get your hands on it—as long as you don’t get caught.
These were the thoughts I had as I peeked through the curtain.
Yep.
I was bad-to-the-bone.
And for some reason I didn’t like it.
A personality flaw like that could get me a nickel in Cañon City. And consider this—what if I had actually needed the hundred thousand? Say for instance the mob had its hooks in me and I needed to pay off a loan shark. Little things like that can tip the balance against you. Think how awful it would be to wake up every day in jail just because you overestimated your ability to tighten a radiator cap.
I let the curtain drop and stood contemplating the fact that I was the only person I knew whom I couldn’t trust.
What if I handed the money over to Ottman and Quigg, and instead of saying, “Hey great, you found the money!” they said, “Well, well, you brought the money back, eh? My, my, isn’t that interesting? But could it possibly be that you felt the noose tightening a little bit? Did that search warrant give you second thoughts, Murph? Maybe you figured you had better make it look like you oh-so-accidentally just happened to find the missing hundred-thousand and thought you could just waltz in here and hand it over to us and brush off your hands and walk away as innocent as a newborn babe, eh? Is that what you were thinking, Mister Murphy?”
I swallowed hard.
I was staring at nothing again. But I wasn’t having a dark night of the soul. It was worse than that. I was thinking about the whimsical nature of innocence. Whose mind wouldn’t be “turned” by the sight of a tenth-of-a-million dollars? Men had been known to ride Conestoga wagons all the way to California just to jump claims at Sutter’s Mill. What—besides my massive ego—made me think I was different from anybody else? Sure, I always suspected that my ego was bigger than the average person’s, but why would I assume that I was otherwise normal?
Jaysus.
The very presence of this money was acting upon my mind the way red kryptonite affects Superman. Green kryptonite of course can kill Superman, but red kryptonite merely has weird effects on him. For instance, in one comic book I read, Superman grew four extra arms after being exposed to red kryptonite. Clark Kent went through nine kinds of hell trying to hide his six arms from Lois Lane.
The point I’m trying to make is that the discovery of the money in my backseat was having an effect on me that I never would have believed. I mean, the most money I ever had in one stack was two thousand dollars, which I had brought home from the army. I didn’t steal it though. They gave it to me. It was my separation pay, plus money I had saved up because I never bought anything. Not owning stuff was a practice I started in the army. If you owned stuff, you had to carry it yourself from one duty station to another. They didn’t provide military butlers or anything. I got shipped to a lot of different duty stations for some reason, so my motto back then was: If it doesn’t fit in my duffel bag, it doesn’t fit in my life.
Suddenly I wanted out.
I wanted to turn the clock back an hour and make all of this not happen. I wanted to not know where the money was. I wanted to not know the secret of my bones. I wanted to be driving west on Colfax Avenue and listening to calls on the radio and not be thinking about spilled sugar or deadbeat drunks or anything other than making my profit for the day, then going home and trying not to think about the fact that it was “her word against mine.”
I opened the door and stepped out onto the fire escape. I closed the door, which locked shut with a snap. I looked around the neighborhood wondering if someone was sitting on the front seat of a parked car along 13th Avenue watching my every move.
“Watch this, pal,” I said out loud.
I was three stories up so it was unlikely that anyone heard me except maybe the tenant directly below my apartment, but he was probably at work. A woman once lived in that apartment. She used to sunbathe topless on the second-floor landing of the fire escape, but let’s move on.
I climbed down the metal staircase and crossed the parking lot to my cab. Without even pretending to be doing something other than what I was actually doing, which is rare for me, I opened the right-rear door and climbed in and sat down and opened my briefcase. I reached in and pulled out the four stacks and began stuffing them down behind the seat as I imagined Mr. Hollister had done on the short trip from the bank. I didn’t know why Mr. Hollister had done it, but I sure as hell knew why I was doing it.
I climbed out of the cab and looked at the seat. Not a sign of tampering. As far as my backseat was concerned, it might as well have been one hour ago instead of now. I closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side without bothering to see whether anyone was watching me. Again, this was rare. Whenever I drive to, for instance, the laundromat I glance surreptitiously around before I get into my Chevy. If anyone happens to be watching me on those occasions, they just might get the impression that I am doing something important, which is exactly the way I want it. People who do laundry rarely get the opportunity to feel “special.”
I started 123, backed around, and drove out to 13th. I turned right at the corner and drove down to 14th and headed toward Colorado Boulevard. I kept the Rocky radio off. As far as I was concerned, I was putting Time itself on hold. I crossed Colorado, then made the circuit around the block and onto Colfax Avenue. I aimed the hood ornament west.
Everything was back to the way it had been before I had experienced that “eerie” feeling. I even drove past a telephone pole that I had been passing when the “eerie” feeling came over me. I knew that pole. I knew it well. Local bands used the pole to advertise gigs at nightclubs. It was right next to a bus stop. It was a good place to advertise. The telephone pole was plastered with tattered, weather-worn flyers. It looked cool, and sort of European. You don’t see very much cool stuff in Denver.
I glanced at my wristwatch. Yes. Exactly one hour had passed since the advent of the “eerie” feeling. By “exactly” I mean “more-or-less.” I reached down and turned on the Rocky radio. In doing so, I turned Time itself on again. The past hour had never happened. It was three-thirty now and not two-thirty but that couldn’t be helped. Admittedly it was the kind of tiny detail that normally would have irritated me like a sticker burr in a sock, but I dealt with it by simply pretending that I had gone on Daylight Savings Time. I pretended that I had, in effect, moved America back one hour.
Or was it forward one hour?
This was late March, and the Mountain Time Zone had already switched, but I couldn’t remember whether it was “spring forward and fall back,” or “fall forward and spring back.” Fall forward sounded right because of the repetition of the letter “F.” On the other hand, I seemed to remember being irritated by the fact that there was no repetition of the letter “F” in that old saying, which was supposed to help people remember how to set their clocks. But most Coloradans rely on disk jockeys to set their clocks twice a year. It’s hell living under socialism.
I drove west on Colfax, pleased with what I had done, and only slightly irritated by the fact that I wasn’t precisely certain what I was supposed to be pretending, beyond the fact that I had moved somewhere in time by one hour. As far as I was concerned though, I was totally oblivious to the money stuffed down behind the backseat of my cab. Completely unaware of its existence. Utterly clueless. I was just an ordinary Joe trying to earn his daily bread before signing out at seven p.m.
I had already grossed eighty-five dollars, which put me a whole five dollars up for the day, but this didn’t worry me. I had three-and-a-half hours left to gross forty-five bucks, and there was one thing I knew for certain: any cab driver who couldn’t earn forty-five bucks in three-and-a-half hours needed some kind of goddamn therapy.
As I drove along oblivious to the money in my backseat I began to think about what might happen if my cab broke down and had to go into the shop for major repairs. At some point the mechanics might be required to remove the backseat, and one of them would find the stacks of money. His hat would probably bounce off the ceiling, especially if he was alone. If he was with somebody, both their hats would bounce off the ceiling. But after the hats were back on their heads, what would happen? Would they take the money to the foreman and say, “Look what we found”? Or would they glance at each other with the “knowing” look of co-conspirators and subsequently embark upon a journey that would lead to corruption, greed, and madness? I mean, if one-hundred thousand dollars made me feel funny, imagine what it would do to a mechanic.
But maybe they would take the money to Hogan. Maybe Hogan would put two-and-two together and realize that it was the money from the Glendale heist that had never been solved. By that time I might not be working at Rocky Cab anymore. Maybe I would be living in a bungalow in Southern California in the general vicinity of Beverly Hills, writing the screenplay version of my latest novel and sipping daiquiris by the swimming pool while young aspiring actresses did multiple laps in the water and then climbed out and swung their wet heads freely so that the excess moisture in their blonde hair would be whipped free from each delicate golden follicle. That could happen. Hogan would subsequently realize that the cloud of suspicion under which I had left had been lifted. He would call Ottman and Quigg and tell them the money had been found behind the backseat, and they would all have a good laugh.
But … what if Ottman and Quigg and Hogan and the mechanics realized that nobody else knew about the money? Imagine what an amount of money like that could do to the heads of two underpaid cops, a taxi supervisor, and two auto mechanics. It could end up like a remade low-budget cable-TV version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
I suddenly realized that by simply leaving the money under the backseat and doing absolutely nothing at all, I could destroy the lives of five good men.