Clark Dale
Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938
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- Год печати: 1938
Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938
Money to Burn
by William E. Barrett
A gripping story of Washington, where the cost of living is the highest of any city in the nation, and the cost of dying is often at bargain rates.
Chapter I
All day long the money had been flowing into the old house on Mount Vernon Highway; piles upon piles of greasy currency that passed through Greg Cooper’s hands for counting and dropped like waste paper into boxes. With the money came a mood. Across the room from him, Cooper could see Senator Bradford Weller sitting smugly behind his desk, his pepper-and-salt colored wig looking more false than ever and his narrow, greedy face relaxed.
Greed! That was the thing that came into the house with the money. That was the mood. It was in the senator’s face and it was like something living and tangible in the house itself; driving out all of the things that had existed here before it, even hatred. Cooper mopped the perspiration from his forehead with a limp handkerchief, his young face tense.
He was feeling it himself, the unsettling power of money in large amounts. His fingers fumbled as he checked the currency over. None of the bills felt crisp any longer. They felt greasy, slimy. They repelled him and, at the same time, attracted him. He found himself wanting them and, at the same time, wanting to escape from them.
“What is the total now, Cooper?”
The senator’s voice had the dry quality of rustling paper. Greg Cooper ran the tip of his pencil across the latest entry on the sheet before him.
“One hundred and fifty-four thousand, five hundred and fifteen dollars,” he said huskily.
The senator put his fingertips together, his elbows resting on his carved mahogany desk. The light of late afternoon came through the Venetian blinds and fell across him in bars. It was a kind light to a man of the senator’s years. It softened the pouches under his eyes and the slack lines of his mouth. If the room had not been crowded with currency, he might have looked benevolent. His eyes, however, were hard with money hunger and the light did not soften that.
“There will not be very much more,” he said. “It is not an impressive sum.”
“It is too much to be stacked in an old house.”
Cooper’s voice was sharper than he intended it to be, but he did not qualify the statement. His lean jaw was hard and there was a vast sincerity in the depths of his level gray eyes. He did not have to pussyfoot when he felt strongly about anything. He was one of those strange products of Washington, a senator’s secretary; a young man with legal training and newspaper experience, a sound body and a hard mind — too young to be a senator himself but with more knowledge of the senator’s job than the senator would ever have. Bradford Weller turned slowly in his chair.
“A man’s money is his own, Cooper,” he said, “and he’s foolish only when he lets others tell him what to do with it.”
Cooper shook his head. “That’s rhetoric. Save it for the voters. A man is foolish with his money any time that he takes it to a place where he can’t protect it properly. He’s being foolish with his life, too. People kill for money.”
The senator chuckled. “I have my private joke on you, Cooper. You are going to be surprised. And not you alone.”
His voice choked off into another chuckle. He was holding his chin against his chest and he had turned his chair so that the shadows hid his expression. Cooper shrugged and put his attention once more upon the sheets spread out before him.
The penciled figures