Another favorite hiding place was inside the bottom rail of a Venetian blind, which was weighted, and which had caps on either end of it. You could remove these end caps and slide wristwatches or folded bills into the hollow rail. This worked very nicely, except that every thief in the world knew about it. They also knew that people hid jewelry or money inside the bag on a vacuum cleaner, or at the bottom of a toilet tank, or inside the globe of a ceiling light fixture from which the bulbs had been removed so if anybody threw the switch you wouldn't see the outline of a necklace up there under the glass.
Meyer and Kling tried all of these favorite hiding places.
And found nothing.
So they looked under the mattress.
There was nothing there, either.
The envelope looked as if it had been through the Crimean War. Perhaps Georgie and Tony shouldn't have opened the envelope, but then again they had been entrusted with the key to locker number 136 at the Wendell Road Bus Terminal, and if Priscill hadn't wanted them to examine whatever they found in that locker, she should have specifically said so. Besides, the envelope hadn't been sealed. It was just a thick yellowing envelope with the word written across the front of it, a bulging envelope with rubber band around it, holding the flap closed. There was money in the envelope. Hundred-dollar bills. Exactly a thousand of them.
Georgie and Tony knew because they took the envelope into the men's room to count the bills.
A thousand hundred-dollar bills.
Which on their block came to a hundred dollars in cold hard cash.
There was also a letter in the envelope.
This didn't interest them as much as the money did, but they read it, anyway, though not in the men's room.
It was Richard the Third who found the bag. "Bingo!" he yelled.
Where he found the bag was under black Richard's mattress, the dope.
Did he think they were so dumb they wouldn't look under the mattress, where for Christ's sake everybody in the entire world hid things? What he must have done, they figured, was slide it in between the mattress and the bedsprings while they were ripping off the sheets to wrap her in.
Nobody had yet touched the bag.
Richard the Third was still standing beside the bed with his parka on because it was freezing cold in this part of the city unless you turned on a kerosene heater or a coal stove, grinning from ear to freckle-faced ear, holding up the corner of the mattress to reveal the red patent-leather bag nestled there all shiny and flat.
Richard the Second took a pair of gloves from the pocket of his parka and pulled them on with all the aplomb a surgeon to perform surgery.
Gingerly, he lifted the bag from where it rested on the bedsprings. He unsnapped the flap, opened the bag, and reached into it.
There was nineteen hundred dollars in cash in the bag.
Plus the ten jumbo vials black Richard had paid the girl for his piece of the action.
Plus nine hundred dollars in traveler's checks respectively signed by Richard Hopper, Richard Weinstock, and Richard O'Connor. They each had separately pocketed the checks at once, and then debated whether or not to leave all the money and crack in the bag, or to take some of it for all the trouble they'd gone through. It was Richard the First who suggested that a good way to extricate themselves entirely was to link the dead girl to the two dead men. If they left her handbag in the bathroom, the presence of such a large amount of cash, not to mention the sizable stash of crack, would lend credibility to the police theory that the hooker had been killed in a robbery. Or what he hoped would be the police theory.
All three of them went into the bathroom.
Jamal, whose name they didn't yet know, was still lying on his back on the floor with his throat slit. He had stopped bleeding. Black Richard was lying on the bottom of the tub. Richard the Second suggested that they leave the bag open on the floor, with a lot of hundred-dollar bills and a few jumbo vials spread on the tiles, as if the two of them had been fighting over it before they killed each other.
Richard the Third looked puzzled. "What is it?" Richard the First asked. "What's the scenario here?"
"Scenario?"
"Yes, how did this happen?"
"I see his point," Richard the Second said.
"What point? They were fighting over the bag. They killed each other."
"How can a person stab another person while that person is drowning him?"
"That's not how it happened."
"Then how did it happen?"
Richard the First thought this over for a moment. "They were fighting over the bag," he said again. The other two waited.
"Richard stabbed him, whoever he is."
They still waited.
"Then he got in the tub so he could wash off the blood."
"With his clothes on?"
"He was drunk," Richard the First said. "That's why he got in the tub with all his clothes on. In fact, that's how he drowned. He was trying to wash himself, but he fell in the tub. He was drunk!"
