The Seventh

by Richard Stark

  The only difference he saw at first was she wasn't looking up. Her head was slumped forward as though she'd fallen asleep again. Except the position looked awkward; it looked as though if she were asleep she'd fall over frontward. He looked at her from the hallway, frowning, the picture looking wrong, not understanding why yet, and then he saw the hilt jutting out from between her breasts.

  Somebody had taken one of the crossed swords from the wall and jammed it through her chest and through the padded headboard of the bed and into the plasterboard of the wall. She was stuck there like a scarecrow put away for the winter.

  The guy who did it had a hell of an arm. Either that, or he'd brought a sledge along to hammer it the rest of the way after the first thrust.

  Parker moved deeper into the room, looking around, but there was nobody here now. The guy had been and gone.

  There was practically no blood visible at all. It must have mostly gone out the back and soaked into the headboard padding.

  So what now? He was supposed to stay here two more days. If he left, the others wouldn't know where to get in touch with him, and he didn't know where to get in touch with them, not easily. But he couldn't stick around with that thing on the bed.

  Ten minutes. That was awfully damn fast. The guy must have been watching the place, waiting for Parker to get out of the way. As soon as Parker left, in he came, and right back out again.

  Parker wondered what Ellie had done to somebody to make him that irritated with her. He'd only known her two weeks himself, and neither of them had spent much time on autobiography. This was her apartment, and he'd guessed that she'd inherited it from a man, that she'd originally lived here with somebody. The crossed swords on the wall, the beer mugs on the mantel in the living room, the round table in a corner of the living room that must have been used at one time for poker sessions, all told of a male presence here. Probably either a college boy or somebody who wished he still was a college boy.

  Maybe it was the college boy who'd done it. A football hero, maybe, offensive lineman, with the meaty shoulders and blunt strength needed to wield that damn sword that way.

  But it didn't matter. Parker didn't give a damn who'd killed her, or why. It aggravated him because his plans were loused up now. He had no choice; he had to get out of here.

  He turned and saw Mutt and Jeff standing in the doorway, wearing rumpled police uniforms. Mutt looked surprised, as though somebody had played a dirty trick on him, and Jeff looked frightened. They were both reaching for their pistols with a clumsy haste that would have made their old instructor at the Police Academy break down and cry.

  The public cries for a bigger police force and after a while any damn fool can join up if he's only tall enough.

  Parker said, “That was fast. I just called a minute ago.”

  Mutt stopped where he was, but Jeff kept on tugging and actually got his revolver out in his hand. He pointed it about two feet to Parker's left and said, “Don't move.”

  Mutt told him, “Hold on a minute.” To Parker he said, “You're the one phoned in?”

  “Sure.” Parker put an agreeable smile on his face, but he didn't feel agreeable. So the guy had come in here, killed her, waited till Parker had gone back in, and then called the cops, figuring Parker was his patsy.

  He could figure again. Parker said, “I'm the one called.”

  “How come you wouldn't give your name?” Mutt was frowning all around his nose.

  Parker shrugged. “Why waste the time? I was going to stick around here anyway.”

  Jeff spoke again. “It don't smell right,” he told his partner.

  Mutt said, “We'll see.” He dragged a flat black note-book out of his pocket and flipped it open like he planned to give Parker a ticket. The notebook came with its own pencil, stuck in a little loop at the side. Mutt slid the pencil out, poised it, looked at his watch, wrote down the time, and said to Parker, “Tell me about it.”

  “I went out to get beer and cigarettes. I left it out in the hall there; you probably saw the bag.”

  Mutt nodded, but Jeff made an obvious effort to show a poker face. He wasn't giving anything away, Jeff wasn't.

  Parker said, “When I came back I knocked on the door, and when I didn't get any answer I knew something was wrong.”

  Jeff, the sharpie, said, “How?”

  Parker looked at him. “Because she was in here and all right when I left, and I was gone ten minutes, and there wasn't any reason for her not to be in here and all right when I got back. If she didn't hear me knock on the door, that meant there was something wrong.”

  Jeff waggled the gun in a gesture that was supposed to be airy. “Go on,” he said.

  Parker said, “I knocked twice, and then I kicked the door in. I came in here and saw her like that and phoned for you guys. Then I waited.”

  Mutt looked at his partner. “It sounds okay,” he said.

  Jeff wasn't so sure anymore. He said to Parker, “You search the place?”

  “Not the living room. I only got as far as here.”

  “Watch him,” Jeff told his partner, and took his gun away to go search the living room.

  While Jeff was gone, Mutt apologized for him, saying to Parker, “Don't mind him. He's new on the force.”

  “Sure.”

  Parker was distracted, trying to figure a graceful way out of here. He could only sweet-talk these cops for so long, and then it didn't matter if they were stupid or not. Anybody in the vicinity of a crime, innocent or guilty, is going to be asked questions, routine questions about name and residence and occupation and what are you doing here now, and there wasn't a question those cops could ask that Parker would be able to answer.

  He had to ditch them. He had to get his goods and clear out of here.

  Jeff came back and shook his head at his partner. He actually thought he was Humphrey Bogart.

  Mutt said, “We better phone in.”

  Jeff said, “What about the closet?”

  “I looked in there,” Parker told him. “It's empty.”

  “You never can tell,” Jeff said. “Sometimes a man can hide in among the clothing; you won't even see him there.”

  Parker shook his head. “There's nobody in there.”

  “I'll take a look.”

  Parker watched him, cursing him. He'd open the door to the closet, and he'd see the guns and the suitcases full of money, and that would be the end of it. Parker backed up to the dresser.

  Jeff opened the door and looked in and said, “What the hell is this? Machine guns!”

  Parker picked the wooden jewelry box off the dresser and threw it at the back of Jeffs head. Before it landed, Parker had taken a quick step and drop-kicked Mutt into the wall. Mutt bounced back, holding his stomach, and Parker clubbed him across the jaw with a hard right and turned to see how Jeff was doing.

  Jeff was being comical, without trying. The jewelry box had hit him in the back of the head and driven him into the closet, where his head and arms had got mixed up with the clothing hanging there and his feet had got tangled up with shoes and guns. He was backing out of it all now, shouting something that was muffled by the clothing all around his head. He'd dropped his own gun when he'd been hit, and it was down on the floor now with the others.

  Parker went over there fast, pulled him the rest of the way out of the closet, turned him around, and hit him twice. Jeff fell back into the closet and crumpled.

  Everything was a mess. Parker grabbed Jeff's feet and dragged him out of the closet so he could get at his goods. The two machine guns and four pistols were all rattling around together on the closet floor.

  Parker cleared everything out of the way, and looked around inside the closet, and the suitcases full of money weren't there any more.

  All right. So it wasn't somebody after Ellie, it was somebody after the money, and killing Ellie was just incidental. It was a double-cross from somebody else in on the heist, it had to be; nobody else could have known about the money. One of the other
s wanted the whole pie for himself, and figured to put Parker in a sling at the same time.

  Not hardly. Parker filled his pockets with pistols, and left the apartment.

  2

  Parker walked across the blacktop past the gas pumps on their little concrete island. The pumps were bathed in light, spilling on Parker as he went by with his arms swinging from his shoulders like lethal weights. He was big and shaggy in the white light, with flat square shoulders and long muscle-roped arms. His hands looked like they'd been molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. He wore no hat; his dry brown hair fluttered on his skull, blown about by a cold November wind. He wore a dark gray suit and a black topcoat. His hands held pistols in the topcoat pockets.

  The gas-station office was lit up just as much as the pumps. Inside, a chubby guy in a blue jumper was asleep at a metal desk. Parker walked on by the office and down into the darker area, down to the long shedlike building that took up the rest of the block. The entrance was a small door inset in a large corrugated sliding garage door; Parker pushed it open and stepped over the strip across the bottom.

  It was past midnight by now, so the interior was more than half full of cabs gleaming yellow and red under the bare bulbs spaced along the ceilings. In the daytime this place would be as empty as an airplane hangar.

  Over to the right a wooden shed with glass windows all around had been built into a corner. A guy in a mackinaw lay stretched out asleep on a bench outside this shed, and inside, through the windows, Parker could see two guys working at desks. They wore white shirts, but they'd loosened their ties and unbuttoned their shirt collars.

  Parker walked across the concrete floor and pushed the shed door open and went in. One of the white-collar workers looked up and said, “Not here, buddy. You want to go outside and around to the front. The gas-station office is over there.”

  Parker kept his hands out of his topcoat pockets. He said, “I don't want the gas-station office.”

  The worker shook his head. “You don't want us either, pal. You got a problem, talk to the day workers.”

  “I'm looking for one of your drivers.”

  The other worker looked up, interested. The first one said, “Which one?”

  “Dan Kifka.”

  The worker frowned, and looked at his partner. “Kifka? You know any Kifka?”

  The other one nodded. “Yeah. He works part-time, night-shift. He ain't been around for a month or more.”

  Parker said, “He's supposed to be working tonight.”

  The second worker shrugged and said, “I'll check it for you, but I'm pretty sure he ain't around.” He got to his feet and went over to a table with small filing cabinets on it.

  Parker waited, frowning. Kifka should be working tonight. And he should have been working last night and the night before. That was the cover, that kept him clean so he could stay out in the open.

  If he wasn't working tonight, maybe it was because he was busy someplace else. Busy with swords, maybe.

  The worker shut the file drawer and shook his head. “No, he ain't on tonight. It's been a month since he's been around here. Over a month.”

  “That's bad news,” Parker said. He turned and went out.

  There were no cabs running in this part of town—no reason for them. All the cabs here were parked inside garages. Parker started walking toward downtown.

  He went two blocks, and then behind him a ways a voice called out, “Hey!” It had that odd strained sound a voice has when somebody tries to shout quietly.

  Parker turned and saw a bulky man coming down the sidewalk toward him. He moved past a streetlight as Parker watched, and it was the guy in the mackinaw, the one that had been asleep on the bench back in the cab garage. Parker put his right hand in his topcoat pocket, and stepped back into darker shadow in the lee of a tenement stoop.

  They had this block to themselves. The windows of all the tenements on both sides were marked with the white X of urban renewal; they stood nearly empty, waiting for the wreckers. Within them the cockroaches crawled and the rats chittered, but the humans were away, infesting some other neighborhood. Outside, the street was empty of cars, either moving or parked. Except for the man in the mackinaw, nothing living moved on the sidewalk.

  The man in the mackinaw hurried the last half block separating them, and then abruptly slowed and came forward more warily, head craned forward like a periscope, turning slowly from side to side. In a shrill whisper he called, “Where are you? Where'd you get to?”

  “Here.”

  He stopped. “What are you doing? Come on out of there.”

  Parker said, “You want to talk, talk.”

  “You was asking about Dan Kifka.”

  “So?”

  He hesitated, didn't seem to know how to go on. “Why don't you come out where I can see you?” He sounded plaintive.

  Parker told him, “Say what you've got to say.”

  “You a friend of Kifka's?”

  “In a way.”

  “He was supposed to be in tonight. Three nights in a row he was supposed to be in and he didn't show up.”

  “So I heard.”

  “They didn't tell you everything, back to the office. He keeps calling in sick. Every day he calls in sick and says be sure and leave him a slot for tomorrow, he'll be in for sure.”

  That didn't make any sense yet. Parker ignored it, and said, “What's your interest?”

  “He owes me thirty-seven dollars for over a year now.” The aggrieved tone wasn't faked; Parker relaxed a little.

  Still, he said, “Why follow me?”

  “I figured maybe you know where he is, maybe he owes you money, too, or something like that, and we can go see him together.”

  “You don't know where he lives?”

  He hesitated again, and scuffed his feet on the sidewalk, and finally said, “No, I don't.” This time he was obviously lying. The truth probably was he was afraid of Kifka, wouldn't dare brace Kifka alone in Kifka's apartment. That's why he'd been hanging around in the garage where there'd be other people there to help him in case Kifka got mad. And now he figured to ride along on Parker's coat-tails, but he was making a mistake.

  Parker stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Forget it,” he said.

  “We can go see him together.” He was pleading now. “Two heads are better than one,” he said.

  “Not always.” Parker turned away and walked on. Ahead, far down the street, the world was more brightly lit. There he could find a cab to take him to Kifka's place.

  The clown in the mackinaw wouldn't give up. He came padding along saying, “You're going to see him anyway, what difference does it make to you? I won't get in your way; I just want to get my thirty-seven bucks.”

  Parker stopped and turned around and said, “Walk someplace else.”

  “You don't have to be so goddam tough about it.” He spoke with the whine of the natural loser, but he wouldn't give ground. He just stood there, unable to force himself on Parker and unwilling to go away and forget it.

  Parker had no patience for this kind of clown. He took his hands out of his topcoat pockets, empty, and balled them into fists. He took a step toward the clown, but he skittered away like an underfed mongrel. Parker said, “Don't follow me.”

  The clown said, “It's a free country. I can walk where I want.” He was at least forty years old, but he talked like a kid in a schoolyard.

  Parker felt the pistols weighing heavy in his pockets, but that was no good. That answer was always too simple, too easy, and left the worst kind of trail. It was a temptation to be resisted.

  Instead, he said to the clown, “I don't want you around.” He let it go at that, and turned away, and walked on toward downtown.

  The clown kept trailing along about a block behind.

  Another three blocks and Parker was beginning to come into a more active section. He saw a cruising cab with its dome light lit, and stepped off the sidewalk to motion at it. The cab made a U-turn
and stopped in front of him. He got into the back seat and gave Kifka's home address. The cabby pushed flag and accelerator down at the same time.

  Looking out the rear window, Parker saw the clown standing there two blocks back, standing on the curb with his hands in his mackinaw pockets, his shoulders hunched as he gazed after the cab. He just stood there.

  3

  The blonde that opened the door had put on the first piece of clothing she'd come across, a gray sweatshirt with a picture of Bach on it. With one hand she was pulling it down in front, which meant she probably wasn't wearing pants either; it was obvious she wasn't wearing a bra.

  Parker told her, “I want to see Dan.”

  “He's taking a nap,” she said. She was about nineteen or twenty, looked like a college girl. Cheerleader type. Except she looked like a cheerleader who'd been on a binge, hair tousled, face puffy, eyes heavy-lidded, expression lethargic and sated.

  Parker pushed the door the rest of the way open and went on into the apartment. “He'll want to see me,” he said. “When he knows I'm here he'll want to wake up.”

  She couldn't give him her full attention, both because she was still half asleep and because she was having trouble keeping the sweatshirt on as much of her as she wanted. What with her breasts pushing outward and her hand pulling downward, Bach didn't look much like his old self at all.

  She said, “You shouldn't push your way into places like that. I told you, Dan's taking a nap. He needs his rest.”

  “I'm sure he does.”

  “That isn't what I meant,” she said. “I mean he's sick. He's got a virus.”

  “Fine.” Parker had been here only once before, and then only in this living room, never deeper in the apartment. Now he looked around, saw two doors either of which could lead to the bedroom, and pointed at them, saying, 'Which one?”

  “I don't want you to wake him,” she said, trying to sound like a private nurse. It might have come off better if she hadn't been out of uniform.