We saw no more cops. LuEllen dropped me next to the Continental in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and less than an hour after we had pulled into Chenille Dessusdelit’s garage, we were gone, out of town, up the highway to Memphis. We dumped the take at the Fanny just after midnight. The cars we left in a hotel parking ramp, keys under the front seats. Neither of us had taken off our driving gloves, so they’d be clean.

Back at the boat we counted the cash from Hill’s safe. Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, with bills that went back more than ten years. Ballem’s coins made the total take much higher. There were sixty-five of them, sealed individually and certified by a numismatic rating service. She called a friend in Las Vegas and got a price: another two hundred thousand, and that might be low.

She was most interested in the stamps.

“Stamps are money if they’re not too rare. You don’t want a one-of-a-kind, where everybody in the world would notice the sale. But if you get stamps that are worth a few thousand dollars each - investor kind of stamps, like those coins are investor kind of coins - they’re just like money. They’re money everywhere. Fuckin’ Bolivia, Bangkok, Saudi Arabia - there’s always somebody who’ll buy. Especially these - British issues.”

“What if these are one of a kind?” I asked, paging through the book. “What if they’re worth too much?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” she said. “We throw them away, I guess.”

She didn’t know any stamp freaks but was hot to peg the values. I called Bobby.

Need number of philatelic data base

Hold.

Three minutes later he came back. He knew only one that was on-line twenty-four hours. He gave me numbers, code names, and patched me into an anonymous telephone line out of Memphis. The first stamp was worth thirty-five hundred dollars if it was perfect. To me it looked perfect. The second stamp was worth forty-two hundred dollars if it was perfect. It looked perfect, too. They all looked perfect.

“A hundred and forty stamps. Say, thirty-five hundred to four thousand each

“

“Another half million,” I said.

“All right,” she said, satisfied. “And I’ve got a friend who can handle it all.”

“What about the diamonds?”

“Another friend. He can sell them, but it’ll take a while. We’ll get fifty percent of face.”

“I wonder about Dessusdelit. I don’t think we touched her.”

“Maybe we’ll get another chance.”

“Maybe.”

LuEllen was examining the Cassatt lithograph, a sweet child from another age. “I don’t know about the art.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “There’s a worldwide registry of stolen art, out in New York.”

“Dump them?”

“I won’t do that,” I said, shaking my head. “Let me think about it. I’ll stick them in a safe-deposit box for now.”