Manhattan Is My Beat (Rune 1)

"And what does 'Doris' mean?"

"Anyway," she said, ignoring him, "I think Mr. Kelly and I were a lot alike. Sort of like you and me."

She let that sit between them for a minute, and when he didn't respond she wondered, And what's your mystery, Francois Jean-Paul Vladmir Richard?

After a moment he said, "I'm awake. I'm listening."

Rune continued. "What Mr. Kelly did was decide he was going to find the money."

"What money?"

"The money the cop took! That was never recovered."

"The million dollars? Come on, Rune, the robbery was when, fifty years ago?"

"Sure, maybe somebody found it. Maybe it got burned up.... You can always find excuses to give up on your quest before you start. Besides, quests aren't just about finding money or grails or jewels. They're about adventures! Mr. Kelly'd been alone for years. No family, not many friends, living by himself. This was his chance for an adventure. What was his life? Just sitting by the window all day and watching pigeons and cars. Here was a chance for a treasure hunt." She started bouncing up and down, remembering something. "He told me, listen to this, listen, when he took me out to lunch, he told me when his ship came in, he was going to do something nice for me. Well, what was the ship? It was a million dollars."

Richard said, "I'm tired. I have to work tomorrow."

"On your novel?"

He hesitated for a minute. And she didn't

think he was being completely honest when he said, "That's right."

First date. Too early to push. She asked, "Are you going to put me in it? In your novel?"

"Maybe I will."

"Will you make me a little taller and grow my hair out?"

"No. I like you just the way you are."

As he rolled over on his side she reread the old newspaper clipping.

"Now, remember, in the movie, what the cop did with the money?"

The groggy answer: "He snuck outside the bank and gave it to a shoeshine boy, who took it home. The cop broke into the kid's house and stole it. I was awake for that part."

"And there was that totally melodramatic struggle, all that loud music, and the boy's mother fell down a flight of stairs," Rune pointed out. "That was big in old-time movies. Old ladies falling down flights of stairs. That, and angelic kids getting the dread unnamed disease guaranteed to make them waste away slowly." She thought back to the film. "Okay, in the newspaper stories there was a shoeshine boy. The cop--his real name was Samuel Davies, not Roy--gave the kid the money and said take it home or, basically, I'll beat the crap out of you. That was the last anybody every heard of the money in real life. But in the movie the cop gets it back from the kid and buries it in a cemetery someplace. Who came up with that idea? Hiding the money in a graveyard?"

"The writer, who else? He made it up." Richard's eyes were closed.

The writer ... Interesting ...

Then her attention returned to the TV. She turned the VCR on again and fast-forwarded it to the scene where Dana Mitchell, playing the dark-haired, square-jawed cop, buries the suitcase in a city cemetery.

She hit the freeze-frame button on the VCR and advanced the tape one frame at a time.

As the images shuffled slowly past, Rune said, out loud but mostly to herself, "The answer's here. It's here someplace. He watched it eighteen times, eighteen, eighteen, eighteen...." Chanting the word. "Mr. Kelly gets a clue, he finds out something. And then he figures out where the money is. Or, okay, maybe ... he can't get it himself, he's getting old. He had arthritis, a limp. He can't go digging around in cemeteries alone. He needs help. He tells somebody. A friend, an acquaintance. Somebody younger--who can help him. Mr. Kelly tells this guy everything and then, what's he do? He gets the money and kills Mr. Kelly. Maybe he was the guy in the green car...."

"What green car?"

She hesitated. Another good social rule: On a first date don't tell the guy that a killer just tried to run you over at a murder scene.

"The police mentioned the killer was driving a green car."

Richard pointed out, "In which case it's gone. The killer left town with his million dollars. So what can you do?"