‘Going Through The Motions’ 
LAWRENCE BLOCK

CRIME: Kidnapper 
PLACE: Maine, USA 
YEAR: 1981

BRIEFING: Kidnapping is another crime to be found in great numbers in the annals of law breaking. The Lindbergh case in March 1932 in which the twenty-month-old baby son of the famous aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh, was snatched from his luxurious home in New Jersey and a $50,000 ransom note left in his place is familiar all over the world. The infant was subsequently found dead in a shallow grave not far from the Lindbergh home, and although an illegal German immigrant, Bruno Hauptman, was arrested and later sent to the electric chair at Trenton State Prison, doubt has always remained whether he was in fact the actual kidnapper. There is, however, no doubt as to the guilt of Edward Hickman, known as ‘The Fox’, who used kidnapping and murder to raise money in Los Angeles in 1928 and was subsequently hanged; nor in the case of Donald Neilson, known as the ‘Black Panther’ because of the black hood he wore over his head, who kidnapped and murdered several victims in Yorkshire and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976.

AUTHOR: Lawrence Block (b. 1938), a former editor in a New York literary agency who wrote paperback originals for some years, is now recognised as one of the most versatile writers in the crime story genre and has recently started to receive the honours his talent so richly deserves, including two Edgars and the 1994 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Apart from the work bearing his own name, Block has written several mysteries under the pseudonyms of Chip Harrison and Paul Kavanagh. He created a trio of memorable series characters: the reluctant spy Evan Tanner whose unique ability to go without sleep makes him a round-the-clock toiler in the world of espionage; Matt Scudder, the humane ex-New York cop who, as a part-time private eye, gets all the dirtiest cases; and the inimitable burglar, Bernie Rhodenbarr. All Block’s stories are notable for the oddball figures who cross the paths of his central characters. The author himself travels a lot to find locations for his books and subscribes to what he describes as ‘a lot of arcane publications’ which provide him with many of the unusual ideas that make his plots so unique. Of his protagonists, Block says, ‘They’re usually windows through whom one sees the world rather than characters who are involved with what’s happening-that’s true of Hammett’s detective and Chandler’s and all of the archetypal characters.’ The following story is an excellent example of the author’s ideas put into words, and when first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in August 1981 it was introduced with this single, loaded sentence: ‘As quietly tense and moving a story as you’ve ever read about one of the most heartbreaking of crimes...’

THE STORY:

On the way home I picked up a sack of burgers and French fries at the fast-food place near the Interstate off-ramp. I popped a beer, but before I got it poured or the meal eaten I checked my phone-answering machine. There was a message from Anson Pollard asking me to call him right away. His voice didn’t sound right, and there was something familiar in what was wrong with it.
I ate a hamburger and drank half a beer, then made the call. He said, ‘Thank God, Lou. Can you come over here?’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Come over and I’ll tell you.’
I went back to the kitchen table, unwrapped a second hamburger, then wrapped it up again. I bagged the food and put it in the fridge, poured the rest of the beer down the sink.
The streetlights came on while I was driving across town to his place. No question, the days were getting longer. Not much left of spring. I switched on my headlights and thought how fast the years were starting to go, and how Anson’s voice hadn’t sounded right.
I parked at the head of his big circular driveway. My engine went on coughing for ten or twenty seconds after I cut the ignition. It’ll do that, and the kid at the garage can’t seem to figure out what to do about it.
I’d had to buy my own car after the last election, and this had been as good as I could afford. Of course it didn’t settle into that coughing routine until I’d owned it a month, and now it wouldn’t quit.
Anson had the door open before I got to it. ‘Lou,’ he said, and gripped me by the shoulders.
He was only a year older than me, which made him forty-two, but he was showing all those years and more. He was balding and carried too much weight, but that wasn’t what did it. His whole face was drawn and desperate, and I put that together with his tone of voice and knew what I’d been reminded of over the phone. He’d sounded the same way three years ago when Paula died.
‘What’s the matter, Anse?’
He shook his head. ‘Come inside,’ he said. I followed him to the room where he kept the liquor. Without asking, he poured us each a full measure of straight bourbon. I didn’t much want a drink but I took it and held on to it while he drank his all the way down. He shuddered, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
‘Beth’s been kidnapped,’ he said.
‘When?’
‘This afternoon. She left school at the usual time. She never got home. This was in the mailbox when I got home. It didn’t go through the mails. They just stuck it in the box.’
I removed a sheet of paper from the envelope he handed me, unfolded it. Words cut from a newspaper, pasted in place with rubber cement. I brought the paper close to my face and sniffed at it.
He asked me what I was doing. ‘Sometimes you can tell by the smell when the thing was prepared. The solvent evaporates, so if you can still smell it it’s recent.’
‘Does it matter when they prepared the note?’
‘Probably not. Force of habit, I guess.’ I’d been sheriff for three terms before Wallace Hines rode into office on the Governor’s coat-tails. Old habits die hard.
‘I just can’t understand it,’ he was saying. ‘She knew not to get in a stranger’s car. I don’t know how many times I told her.’
‘I used to talk about that at school assemblies, Anse. “Don’t go with strangers. Don’t accept food or candy from people you don’t know. Cross at corners. Don’t ever play with an old icebox.” Lord, all the things you have to tell them.’
‘I can’t understand it.’
‘How old is Bethie?’ I’d almost said was, caught myself in time. That would have crushed him. The idea that she might already be dead was one neither of us would voice. It hung in the room like a silent third party to the conversation.
‘She’s nine. Ten in August. Lou, she’s all I’ve got in the world, all that’s left to me of Paula. Lou, I’ve got to get her back.’
I looked at the note again. ‘Says a quarter of a million dollars,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Have you got it?’
‘I can raise it. I’ll go talk to Jim McVeigh at the bank tomorrow. He doesn’t have to know what I need it for. I’ve borrowed large sums in cash before on a signature loan, for a real estate deal or something like that. He won’t ask too many questions.’
‘Says old bills, out of sequence. Nothing larger than a twenty. He’ll fill an order like that and think it’s for real estate?’
He poured himself another drink. I still hadn’t touched mine. ‘Maybe he’ll figure it out,’ he said. ‘He still won’t ask questions. And he won’t carry tales, either.’
‘Well, you’re a good customer down there. And a major stockholder, aren’t you?’
‘I have some shares, yes.’
I looked at the note, then at him. ‘Says no police and no FBI,’ I said. ‘What do you think about that?’
‘That’s what I was going to ask you.’
‘Well, you might want to call Wally Hines. They tell me he’s the sheriff.’
‘You don’t think much of Hines.’
‘Not a whole lot,’ I admitted, ‘but I’m prejudiced on the subject. He doesn’t run the department the way I did. Well, I didn’t do things the way my predecessor did, either. Old Bill Hurley. He probably didn’t think much of me, old Hurley.’
‘Should I call Hines?’
‘I wouldn’t. It says here they’ll kill her if you do. I don’t know that they’re watching the house, but it wouldn’t be hard for them to know if the Sheriff’s Office came in on the operation.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know what Hines could do, to tell you the truth. You want to pay the ransom?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Hines could maybe set up a stakeout, catch the kidnapper when he picks up the ransom. But they generally don’t release the victim until after they get away clean with the ransom.’ If ever, I thought. ‘Now as far as the FBI is concerned, they know their job. They can look at the note and figure out what newspaper the words came from, where the paper was purchased, the envelope, all of that. They’ll dust for fingerprints and find mine and yours, but I don’t guess the kidnapper’s were on here in the first place. What you might want to do, you might want to call the Bureau as soon as you get Bethie back. They’ve got the machinery and the knowhow to nail those boys afterward.’
‘But you wouldn’t call them until then?’
‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Not that I’m going to tell you what to do or not to do, but I wouldn’t do it myself. Not if it were my little girl.’
We talked about some things. He poured another drink and I finally got around to sipping at the one he’d poured for me when I first walked in. We’d been in that same room three years ago, drinking the same brand of whiskey. He’d managed to hold himself together through Paula’s funeral, and after everybody else cleared out and Bethie was asleep, he and I settled in with a couple of bottles. Tonight I would take it easy on the booze, but that night three years ago I’d matched him drink for drink.
Out of the blue he said, ‘She could have been, you know.’ I missed the connection. ‘Could have been your little girl,’ he explained. ‘Bethie could have. If you’d have married Paula.’
‘If your grandmother had wheels she’d be a tea cart.’
‘But she’d still be your grandmother! Isn’t that what we used to say? You could have married Paula.’
‘She had too much sense for that.’ Though the cards might have played that way, if Anson Pollard hadn’t come along. Now Paula was three years dead, dead of anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, if you can believe it. And the woman I’d married, and a far cry from Paula she was, had left me and gone to California. I heard someone say that the Lord took the United States by the State of Maine and lifted, so that everything loose wound up in Southern California. Well, she was and she did, and now Anse and I were a couple of solitary birds growing long in the tooth. Take away thirty pounds and a few million dollars and a nine-year-old girl with freckles and you’d be hard pressed to tell us apart.
Take away a nine-year-old girl with freckles. Somebody had done just that.
‘You’ll see me through this,’ he said. ‘Won’t you, Lou?’
‘If it’s what you want.’
‘I wish to hell you were still the sheriff. The voters of this county never had any sense.’
‘Maybe it’s better that I’m not. This way I’m just a private citizen, nobody for the kidnappers to get excited about.’
‘I want you to work for me after this is over.’
‘Well, now.’
‘We can work out the details later. By God, I should have hired you the minute the election results came in. I figured we knew each other too well, we’d been through too much together. But you can do better working for me than you’re doing now, and I can use you, I know I can. We’ll talk about it later.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Lou, we’ll get her back, won’t we?’
‘Sure we will, Anse. Of course we will.’

Well, you have to go through the motions. There was no phone call that night. If the victim’s alive they generally make a call and let you hear their voice. On tape, maybe, but reading that day’s newspaper so you can place the recording in time. Any proof they can give you that the person’s alive makes it that much more certain you’ll pay the ransom.
Of course nothing’s hard and fast. Kidnapping’s an amateur crime and every fool who tries it has to make up his own rules. So it didn’t necessarily prove anything that there was no call.
I hung around, waiting it out with him. He hit the bourbon pretty hard but he was always a man who could take on a heavy load without showing it much. Somewhere along the way I went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee.
A little past midnight I said, ‘I don’t guess there’s going to be a call tonight, Anse. I’m going to head for home.’
He wanted me to stay over. He had reasons-in case there was a call in the middle of the night, in case something called for action. I told him he had my number and he could call me at any hour. But we both knew his real reason-he didn’t want to be alone there. I thought about staying with him and decided I didn’t want to. The hours were just taking too long to go by, and I didn’t figure I’d get a good night’s sleep under his roof.
I drove right on home. I kept it under the speed limit because I didn’t want one of Wally Hines’s eager beavers coming up behind me with the siren wailing. They’ll do that now. We hardly ever gave out tickets to local people when I was running the show, just a warning and a soft one at that. We saved the tickets for the leadfoot tourists. Well, another man’s apt to have his own way of doing things.
In my own house I popped a beer and ate my leftover hamburger. It was cold with the grease congealed on it, but I was hungry enough to get it down. I could have had something out of Anse’s refrigerator but I hadn’t been hungry while I was there.
I sat in a chair and put on Johnny Carson but didn’t even try to pay attention. I thought how little Bethie was dead and buried somewhere and nobody would likely ever find her. Because that was the way it read, even if it wasn’t what Anse and I dared to say to each other. I sat there and thought how Paula was dead of a bee sting and my wife was on the other side of the continent and now Bethie. Thoughts swirled around in my head like water going down a bathtub drain.
I was up a long while. The television was still on when they were playing the Star Spangled Banner, and I might as well have been watching programmes in Japanese for all the sense they made to me.
Somewhere down the line I went to bed.

I was eating a sweet roll and drinking a cup of coffee when he called. There’d been a phone call just moments earlier from the kidnapper, he told me, his voice hoarse with the strain of it all.
‘He whispered. I was half asleep, I could barely make out what he was saying. I was afraid to ask him to repeat anything. I was just afraid, Lou.’
‘You get everything?’
‘I think so. I have to buy a special suitcase, I have to pack it a certain way and chuck it in a certain spot at a certain time.’ He mentioned some of the specifics. I was only half listening. Then he said, ‘I asked them to let me talk to Bethie.’
‘And?’
‘It was as if he didn’t even hear me. He just went on telling me things, and I asked him again, and he hung up.’
She was dead and in the ground, I thought.
I said, ‘He probably made the call from a pay phone. Most likely they’re keeping her at a farmhouse somewhere and he wouldn’t want to chance a trace on the call. He wouldn’t have her along to let her talk, he wouldn’t want to take the chance. And he’d speed up the conversation to keep it from being traced at all.’
‘I thought of that, Lou. I just wished I could have heard her voice.’
He’d never hear her voice again, I thought. My mind filled with an image of a child’s broken body on a patch of ground, and a big man a few yards from her, holding a shovel, digging. I blinked my eyes, trying to chase the image, but it just went and hovered there on the edge of thought.
‘You’ll hear it soon enough,’ I said. ‘You’ll have her back soon.’
‘Can you come over, Lou?’
‘Hell, I’m on my way.’
I poured what was left of my coffee down the sink. I took the sweet roll with me, ate it on the way to the car. The sun was up but there was no warmth in it yet.
In the picture I’d had, with the child’s corpse and the man digging, a light rain had been falling. But there’d been no rain yesterday and it didn’t look likely today. A man’s mind’ll do tricky things, fill in details on its own. A scene like that, gloomy and all, it seems like there ought to be rain. So the mind just sketches it in.

On the way to the bank he said, ‘Lou, I want to hire you.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I guess we can talk about it after Bethie’s back and all this is over, but I’m not even sure I want to stay around town, Anse. I’ve been talking with some people down in Florida and there might be something for me down there.’
‘I can do better for you than some strangers down in Florida,’ he said gruffly. ‘But I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about now. I want to hire you to help me get Bethie back.’
I shook my head. ‘You can’t pay me for that, Anson.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘Because I won’t take the money. Did you even think I would?’
‘No. I guess I just wish you would. I’m going to have to lean on you some, Lou. It seems a lot to ask as a favour.’
‘It’s not such a much,’ I said. ‘All I’ll be doing is standing alongside you and backing you up.’ Going through the motions with you, I thought.

I waited in the car while he went into the bank. I might have played the radio but he’d taken the car keys with him. Force of habit, I guess. I just sat and waited.
He didn’t have the money when he came out. ‘Jim has to make a call or two to get that much cash together,’ he explained. ‘It’ll be ready by two this afternoon.’
‘Did he want to know what it was for?’
‘I told him I had a chance to purchase an Impressionist painting from a collector who’d had financial reverses. The painting’s provenance was clear but the sale had to be a secret and the payment had to be in cash for tax purposes.’
‘That’s a better story than a real estate deal.’
He managed a smile. ‘It seemed more imaginative. He didn’t question it. We’d better buy that suitcase.’
We parked in front of a luggage and leather goods store on Grandview Avenue. I remembered they’d had a holdup there while I was sheriff. The proprietor had been shot in the shoulder but had recovered well enough. I went in with him and Anson bought a plaid canvas suitcase. The whisperer had described the bag very precisely.
‘He’s a fussy son of a gun,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s got an outfit he wants it to match.’
Anse paid cash for the bag. On the drive back to his house I said, ‘What you were saying yesterday, Anse, that Bethie could have been mine. She’s the spit and image of you. You’d hardly guess she was Paula’s child.’
‘She has her mother’s softness, though.’
A child’s crumpled body, a man turning shovels of earth, a light rain falling. I kept putting the rain into that picture. A mind’s a damn stubborn thing.
‘Maybe she does,’ I said. ‘But one look at her and you know she’s her father’s daughter.’
His hands tightened on the steering-wheel. I pictured Paula in my mind, and then Bethie. Then my own wife, for some reason, but it was a little harder to bring her image into focus.

Until it was time to go to the bank we sat around waiting for the phone to ring. The whisperer had told Anse there wouldn’t be any more calls, but what guarantee was that?
He mostly talked about Paula, maybe to keep from talking about Bethie. It bothered me some, the turn the conversation was taking, but I don’t think I let it show.
When the phone finally did ring it was McVeigh at the bank, saying the money was ready. Anse took the new plaid suitcase and got in his car, and I followed him down there in my own car. He parked in the bank’s lot. I found a spot on the street. It was a little close to a fireplug, but I was behind the wheel with the motor running and didn’t figure I had much to worry about from Wally’s boys in blue.
He was in the bank a long time. I kept looking at my watch and every few hours another minute would pass. Then he came out of the bank’s front door and the suitcase looked heavier than when he’d gone in there. He came straight to my car and went around to the back. I’d left the trunk unlocked and he tossed the suitcase inside and slammed the lid shut.
He got in beside me and I drove. ‘I feel like a bank robber,’ he said. ‘I come out with the money and you’ve got the motor running.’
My car picked that moment to backfire. ‘Some getaway car,’ I said.
I kept an eye on the rearview mirror. I’d suggested taking my car just in case anybody was watching him. McVeigh might have acted on suspicions, I’d told him, and might say something to law-enforcement people without saying anything to us. It wouldn’t do to be tailed to the overpass where the exchange was supposed to take place. If the kidnappers spotted a tail they might panic and kill Bethie.
Of course I didn’t believe for a moment she was still alive. But you play these things by the book. What else can you do?
No one was following us. I cut the engine when we got to the designated place. It was an overpass, and a good spot for a drop. A person could be waiting below, hidden from view, and he could pick up the suitcase and get out of there on foot and nobody up above could do anything about it.
The engine coughed and sputtered and finally cut out. Anse told me I ought to get it fixed. I didn’t bother saying that nobody seemed to be able to fix it. ‘Just sit here,’ I told him. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
I got out of the car, went around to the trunk. He was watching as I carried the plaid suitcase and sent it sailing over the rail. I heard the car door open, and then he was standing beside me, trying to see where it had landed. I pointed to the spot but he couldn’t see it, and I’m not sure there was anything to see.
‘I can’t look down from heights,’ he said.
‘Nothing to look at anyway.’
We got back in the car. I dropped him off at the bank, and on the way there he asked if the kidnappers would keep their end of the bargain. ‘They said she’d be delivered to the house within the next four hours,’ he said. ‘But would they take the chance of delivering her to the house?’
‘Probably not,’ I told him. ‘Easiest thing would be to drive her into the middle of one town or another and just let her out of the car. Somebody’ll find her and call you right off. Bethie knows her phone number, doesn’t she?’
‘Of course she does.’
‘Best thing is for you to be at home and wait for a call.’
‘You’ll come over, Lou, won’t you?’
I said I would. He went to get his car from the lot and I drove to my house to check the mail. It didn’t take me too long to get to his place, and we sat around waiting for a call I knew would never come.
Because it was pretty clear somebody local had taken her. An out-of-towner wouldn’t have known what a perfect spot that overpass was for dropping a suitcase of ransom money. An out-of-towner wouldn’t have sent Anse to a specific luggage shop to buy a specific suitcase. An out-of-towner probably wouldn’t have known how to identify Bethie Pollard in the first place.
And a local person wouldn’t dare leave her alive, because she was old enough and bright enough to tell people who had taken her. It stood to reason that she’d been killed right away, as soon as she’d been snatched, and that her corpse had been covered with fresh earth before the ransom note had been delivered to Anson’s mailbox.
After I don’t know how long he said, ‘I don’t like it, Lou. We should have heard something by now.’
‘Could be they’re playing it cagey.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Could be they’re watching that dropped suitcase, waiting to make sure it’s not staked out.’
He started. ‘Staked out?’
‘Well, say you’d gone and alerted the Bureau. What they might have done is staked out the area of the drop and just watched and waited to see who picked up the suitcase. Now a kidnapper might decide to play it just as cagey his own self. Maybe they’ll wait twenty-four hours before they make their move.’
‘God.’
‘Or maybe they picked it up before it so much as bounced, say, but they want to hold on to Bethie long enough to be sure the bills aren’t in sequence and there’s no electric bug in the suitcase.’
‘Or maybe they’re not going to release her, Lou.’
‘You don’t want to think about that, Anse.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to think about it.’
He started in on the bourbon then, and I was relieved to see him do it. I figured he needed it. To tell the truth, I had a thirst for it myself right about then. Plain flat sitting and waiting is the hardest thing I know about, especially when you’re waiting for something that’s not going to happen.
I was about ready to make an excuse and go on home when the doorbell rang. ‘Maybe that’s her now,’ he said. ‘Maybe they waited until dark.’ But there was a hollow tone in his voice, as if to say he didn’t believe it himself.
‘I’ll get it,’ I told him. ‘You stay where you are.’
There were two men at the door. They were almost my height, dressed alike in business suits and holding guns, nasty little black things. First thought I had was they were robbers, and what crossed my mind was how bad Anse’s luck had turned.
Then one of them said, ‘FBI,’ and showed me an ID I didn’t have time to read. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said, and we did.
Anse had a glass in his hand. His face didn’t look a whole lot different from before. If he was surprised he didn’t show it.
One of them said, ‘Mr Pollard? We kept the drop site under careful observation for three full hours. In that time no one approached the suitcase. The only persons who showed up were two boys approximately ten years old, and they never went near the suitcase.’
‘Ten years old,’ Anse said.
‘After three hours Agent Boudreau and I went down and examined the suitcase. The only contents were dummy packages like this one.’ He showed a banded stack of bills, then riffled it to reveal that only the top and bottom bills were currency. The rest of the stack consisted of newspaper cut the size of bills.
‘I guess your stakeout wasn’t such a much,’ I said. ‘Anse, why didn’t you tell me you decided to call the Bureau after all?’
‘Jim McVeigh called them,’ he said. ‘They were there when I went to get the money. I didn’t know anything about it until then.’
‘Well, either we beat ‘em to the drop site or they don’t know much about staking a place out. You get people who aren’t local and it’s easy for them to make a mistake, I guess. The kidnappers just went and switched suitcases on you. You saw a suitcase still lying in the weeds and you figured nobody’d come by yet, but it looks like you were wrong.’ I took a breath and let it out slow. ‘Maybe they saw you there after they told Anse not to go to the cops. Maybe that’s why Bethie’s not home yet.’
‘That’s not why,’ one of them said. Boudreau, I guess his name was. ‘We were there to see you fling that case over the railing. I had it under observation through high-powered field glasses from the moment it landed and I didn’t take my eyes off it until we went and had a look at it.’
Must have been tiring, I thought, staring through binoculars for three full hours.
‘Nobody touched the suitcase,’ the other one said. ‘There was a rip in the side from when it landed. It was the same suitcase.’
‘That proves a lot, a rip in the side of a suitcase.’
‘There was a switch,’ Boudreau said. ‘You made it. You had a second suitcase in the trunk of your car, underneath the blankets and junk you carry around. Mr Pollard here put the suitcase full of money in your trunk. Then you got the other case out of the trunk and threw it over the railing.’
‘Her father taught her not to go with strangers,’ the other one said. I never did get his name. ‘But you weren’t a stranger, were you? You were a friend of the family. The sheriff, the man who lectured on safety procedures. She got in your car without a second thought, didn’t she?’
‘Anse,’ I said, ‘tell them they’re crazy, will you?’
He didn’t say anything.
Boudreau said, ‘We found the money, Mr Pollard. That’s what took so long. We wanted to find it before confronting him. He’d taken up some floorboards and stashed the money under them, still in the suitcase it was packed in. We didn’t turn up any evidence of your daughter’s presence. He may never have taken her anywhere near his house.’
‘This is all crazy,’ I said, but it was as if they didn’t hear me.
‘We think he killed her immediately on picking her up,’ Boudreau went on. ‘He’d have to do that. She knew him, after all. His only chance to get away with it lay in murdering her.’
My mind filled with that picture again. Bethie’s crumpled body lying on the ground in that patch of woods the other side of Little Cross Creek. And a big man turning the damp earth with a shovel. I could feel a soreness in my shoulders from the digging.
I should have dug that hole the day before. Having to do it with Bethie lying there, that was a misery. Better by far to have it dug ahead of time and just drop her in and shovel over her, but you can’t plan everything right.
Not that I ever had much chance of getting away with it, now that I looked at it straight on. I’d had this picture of myself down in the Florida sun with more money than God’s rich uncle, but I don’t guess I ever really thought it would happen that way. I suppose all I wanted was to take a few things away from Anson Pollard.
I sort of tuned out for a while there. Then one of them-I’m not even sure which one-was reading me my rights. I just stood there, not looking at anybody, least of all at Anse. And not listening too close to what they were saying.
Then they were asking me where the body was, and talking about checking the stores to find out when I’d bought the duplicate suitcase, and asking other questions that would build the case against me. I sort of pulled myself together and said that somebody was evidently trying real hard to frame me and I couldn’t understand why, but in the meantime I wasn’t going to answer any questions without a lawyer being present.
Not that I expected it would do me much good. But you have to make an effort, you have to play the hand out. What else can you do? You go through the motions, that’s all.