The Seventh

by Richard Stark

  Parker went over and found the keys. “I'll be back as soon as I can,” he said. “You want to get the hardware out of sight, in case the cops show.”

  Kifka nodded. He said, “All I can see is those two suitcases in the trunk of some car on its way to the Panama Canal.”

  “The guy's hanging around,” Parker said. “He's an amateur, he lives in this town, he's hanging around.”

  Kifka said, “Let's hope he doesn't smarten up.”

  2

  The Vimorama was about as pretty as a wax orange and about as lively. Parker let the Buick roll on by and then pulled to the shoulder of the road a hundred feet farther on and switched off the engine. Then he sat there a minute.

  Behind him, Vimorama hulked beside the road like a pastel flying saucer. It seemed to be made mostly of orange I-beams and shiny chrome and gleaming glass, with VIMORAMA in huge varicolored letters on the roof and equally huge letters on the sign out by the road. There was no sign of activity either from the main building itself or from the little cabins scattered around behind it like a bunch of colored top hats dropped out of a box.

  He was sure he hadn't been followed, but he waited a couple of minutes in the car anyway. When he was positive no one was taking any interest in him he climbed out on the passenger side and walked back down the road to the gravel Vimorama parking lot. He skirted it on the quieter grass and moved swiftly in among the tiny cabins.

  Number four was way in back, at the rear of the Vimorama property. Parker rapped on the door and then stood back to give those on the inside a good look at him.

  This was a bad moment. It didn't figure the cash had been stolen by an insider, but there was always the chance. If it had been stolen by Negli or Feccio or both, it didn't figure they'd be inside that cabin at all, but there was always the chance. If they'd stolen the money and they were in there anyway, it figured they planned on bluffing it out, but there was always the chance. Parker had been shot at last night and he didn't like setting himself up this way no matter how slim the odds were. He stood tensed, ready to jump.

  But all that happened was the door opened and Feccio was standing there in his undershirt and red suspenders. He looked confused. He said, “Parker? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Waiting to come in.”

  “Come, come. Let's not advertise.”

  Parker went in, and Feccio shut the door behind him.

  Unmade twin beds, a metal-cased television set, two metal bureaus, a ceiling light fixture like a serving tray, and linoleum on the floor; the whole thing looked like any cheap motel room or fourth-rate tourist cabin. A little alcove on the right, between the built-in bathroom and the built-in closet, contained shelving holding a twin-burner hot plate and kitchen utensils and cans and boxes of food. A miniature refrigerator nestled under the shelves.

  The place was mostly windows, but all of them were thickly covered with dark cloth, like a wartime blackout, so it was night inside the cabin and the ceiling light was on. This place was supposed to be closed for the season; lights from one of the units at night, or any sign of activity through an unshielded window in the daytime, might attract the attention of a passing state trooper.

  Negli was sitting in the room's one chair, a foam-rubber and wrought-iron affair. He was as dapper as ever, dressed to the nines, busy unwrapping one of his long cigars. He said, “You know better than this, Parker. It isn't time for us to contact each other. What if you brought the law here?”

  “I didn't bring the law.”

  Negli shrugged. “Still,” he said, “this had better be worth it.”

  Parker studied him sourly. Negli had the little man's courage, the knowledge he could get away with things a bigger man would be called on in a minute. It gave him a nasty disposition, and made Parker itch to tromp him.

  Feccio was the other half of the team, the apologizer.

  “Parker knows what he's doing,” he said. “If he's here, he's got a good reason.”

  “Good enough,” Parker said. “I was hijacked. The money's gone.”

  Feccio just stared. Negli looked up from his cigar, and paused, and said, “Stole it from you, Parker?” He said it like he didn't believe it.

  Parker went over and picked him up and threw him into the corner. When Negli rolled over with his hand going inside his coat, Parker put his right hand in his topcoat pocket.

  Feccio said, “Cut it! Bob, don't you move!”

  Negli stayed where he was, half up from the floor, right hand still inside the coat.

  Feccio said, “Parker, you know Bob's way. He didn't mean it like it sounded.”

  Parker said, “Let Negli talk.”

  Negli said, “I believe you, Parker. You had the dough and you let somebody glom it from you. I believe it.”

  Feccio walked over in front of Negli and said, “Cut it out, Bob, or I'll take care of you myself.”

  “The hell, Arnie. What does he want, a medal? We put a lot of work in and he comes around and says he lost the money, somebody took it from him.”

  “Let's listen to him, what do you say?”

  Negli got to his feet, and brushed himself off. “I'll listen to anybody,” he said.

  Feccio turned to Parker. “We start all over,” he said. “You just tell the story and we'll listen.”

  Parker told them the story. Feccio listened and Negli stood around trying to look insulting. Parker had control of himself now, and he ignored Negli. The little bastard wasn't worth the sweat.

  When he was done, Feccio said, “I like the outsider. Somebody wanted your girl dead and he found the cash by accident.”

  Negli said, “I haven't said word one to anybody outside the group about what we were doing. Neither has Arnie. What about you, talking to the girl? Or Dan and his bimbo?”

  Parker shook his head. “Neither one of us told our women anything to worry about.”

  “Yours knew you had all that cash, didn't she?”

  “She never left the apartment from the time I brought the suitcases in. She wasn't out of my sight for three days, not until I went out last night.”

  Feccio said, “All right, never mind that now. What do you want from us, that's the question.”

  “If we work together, we can get our cash back.”

  Feccio nodded. “If we work together,” he said, “and if we're lucky. And if the law doesn't get him first.”

  “They'll be looking for me,” Parker said. “They won't think about anybody else when I'm so handy.”

  Negli said, “That makes you a liability, doesn't it, Parker?”

  Before Parker could say anything, Feccio said, “Bob, keep your mouth shut. We don't have time to put up with you now.”

  Parker said, “Do you know where any of the others are holed up?”

  “I know where Shelly is,” Feccio said. “I think he knows where to find Clinger and Rudd.”

  Negli said, “What we ought to do, Arnie, we ought to clear out of here. That dough's gone.”

  Parker said, “Maybe not.”

  Negli shook his head. “You're a dreamer. If I had that cash, I'd be a thousand miles from here by now.”

  “You're a pro. You wouldn't have hung around last night to ambush me.”

  Feccio said, “This is wasting time. Bob and I'll go talk to Shelly. You want us all to meet someplace?”

  “At Dan's. I'll get there as soon as I can.”

  “Fine.”

  Parker went to the door, then looked back at Negli. “You don't have to waste time with the rest of us,” he said. “You want to take off, go ahead. We'll find something to do with your cut.”

  Negli made a crooked grin around his cigar. “Forget it, Parker,” he said. “I own a seventh of that pie. As long as there's one chance left at it, I'll stick around.”

  Parker said, “That's what I thought.”

  3

  BEAUTY SLAIN

  SWORD FATAL WEAPON

  IN BIZARRE SLAYING

  by Robert Hochberg


  In one of the most bizarre slayings in city history, police reported last night the discovery of the nude and brutally murdered body of Miss Ellen Marie Canaday, 22, in the bedroom of her apartment at 106-12 Longmans Avenue. Miss Canaday had been fatally stabbed through the chest with an ornamental sword which had been hanging on her apartment wall (photos, page 7).

  The suspected slayer, still on the scene when police arrived at the murder apartment, made his escape and is still at large.

  Miss Canaday, a model, had lived alone at the Longmans Avenue address about one year. Since the front door had been forced, it is assumed her attacker was not known to her, although police do not discount the possibility of a personal quarrel as a motive in the case.

  Detective Lieutenant Albert Murphy, in charge of the investigation, stated the similarities between this slaying and the so-called Strangler murders in the Boston area were too few and minor to imply any necessary connection with those crimes, though Boston police authorities have expressed interest in the investigation of the Canaday case.

  Murphy also announced expectation of the early recapture of the man believed to be the slayer (description and artist's rendering of suspect on page 7).

  No comparable slaying has occurred in the local area since 1949, when three Norwegian sailors. . . .

  Parker stopped reading at that point, scanned down the rest of the story to be sure there wasn't anything else in it he wanted to know, and then switched over to page seven.

  The artist's drawing was rotten. It looked just a little like the face Parker used to wear, before he'd had plastic surgery done a year ago, but it didn't look anything like the face he had now.

  The written description, in a box beside the bad drawing, was accurate as far as it went, but it didn't go very far. Women and children were obviously eliminated by it, but it still left a hell of a lot of men in the running, all of whom fitted the written description and none of whom—including Parker-—looked like the artist's rendering.

  In addition to the drawing and description, there were three photographs on the page. One showed Ellie's bedroom, with the body removed. One showed a uniformed cop looking blankly at the sprung front door that Parker had kicked in. And one showed a plainclothes cop holding the sword out in front of himself and looking at it as though he wondered what the hell it was and why he was supposed to be holding it.

  Under this last photo was the caption:

  Detective Third Grade William Dougherty studies murder weapon for clues. Sword, taken by slayer from apartment wall, had been wiped clean of all fingerprints.

  The way the world usually worked, Detective Lieutenant Albert Murphy, the one who'd been quoted all over the place in the main story about the killing and who was listed as being in charge of the investigation, wouldn't know a damn thing about the murder or the investigation or anything else. The way the world usually worked, it was Detective Third Grade William Dougherty who would really be running the case and would know what was going on.

  Parker folded the paper and put it down on the table. He was sitting in a luncheonette downtown, not far from where he'd left the truck four days ago. The noon hour rush would be starting in a little while, but right now the place was almost empty. The walls were beige and the booths were green.

  There was an untouched cup of coffee on the table beside the paper. Parker looked at it, shook his head, and left coffee and paper both on the table as he got to his feet and walked to the telephone booths in back.

  The phone books were on a slant-top table beside the booths. Parker looked in the local white pages and found only one William Dougherty listed, with the address 719 Laurel Road and the phone number Lloyd 6-5929. This was probably the right one, but it would be best to check.

  He stepped into the booth and dialed. A woman answered on the third ring, and Parker said, “Detective Dougherty, please.”

  “Oh, he's at work. Call him at headquarters.”

  “Yeah, I'll do that.”

  Parker hung up, left the booth, and up front at the cashier's cage got directions to Laurel Road. He paid for the coffee he hadn't drunk, picked up the Buick from the no-parking zone out front, and headed away from downtown.

  Laurel Road was in a section that should have been a suburb but wasn't. The city government, seeing all those taxable middle-income and upper-income people moving just outside the city limits into an area called Twin Knolls, simply shifted the city limits around a little, and very quietly Twin Knolls became a part of the city and its tax structure. The middle- and upper-income people promptly moved farther out, and lower-middle-income people like plainclothes detectives moved into Twin Knolls in their place.

  Laurel Road was never straight. It curved away from a curving street called Camelia Lane, and kept right on curving, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. It looked like somebody's impression of a barber pole.

  For the first few blocks, the widely spaced houses were large, sprawling affairs, split-level ranches with cantilevered sun decks over the carports. After five or six blocks, as the road meandered between more recent constructions, the houses began to get smaller and less ambitious, showing the result of city status. Shrunken flat-roofed ranches and narrow Cape Cods were clumped on smaller, less-landscaped lots.

  Number 719 was far in, nearly at the end of it all. Two blocks farther on, Parker could see where the finished buildings petered out, and a half-completed house stood at the farther limit like a leafless tree.

  He drove on by 719, glancing casually at it on the way by. It was a Cape Cod, with an A roof slanting front and back. A playpen was on the scraggly lawn, and the garage doors gaped open, exposing an empty interior. The curtains in the dormer window upstairs showed that the attic had been finished off into a room or rooms, which implied more than one child for Detective Dougherty.

  Parker drove down to the end, where no work was being done on the half-completed house. He made a U-turn there, parked the Buick, and got out to walk over and look at what was done of the house.

  There was no one working here today at all. Some clapboard siding had been put on, but mostly the exterior and interior walls of the house rose only as widely spaced studs of clean, new wood. This would be a Cape Cod when it was done; at the moment a ladder led to the upper floor in place of the staircase that hadn't yet been built.

  Parker climbed up the ladder and looked around. This would be the attic. No internal partitions had been erected at all, but a full plywood flooring had been put down.

  Sitting on a sawhorse over by the edge of the building, Parker could look down along the two blocks intervening and see Detective Dougherty's house and garage and driveway.

  Parker lit a cigarette and waited.

  4

  It was a DeSoto, six or seven years old, that finally made the turn into the driveway of 719 Laurel Road. It rolled on into the garage, and Parker got to his feet and stretched.

  It had been a longer wait than he'd figured. If Dougherty was running the murder investigation, he'd been on duty since at least midnight last night, but here it was almost four o'clock in the afternoon before he got home.

  Driving a DeSoto. In a year or two, if he kept saving his pennies, he could trade up to an Edsel. And after that a Studebaker.

  The sun was turning red off to Parker's right. Shadows were long, and yards and walks were deserted. Half an hour ago there'd been a flurry of homecoming schoolchildren, and in about an hour there'd be another flurry of homecoming fathers, but for now Laurel Road was empty.

  Parker climbed back down out of the half-house and across the planks and dirt to the street. He left the Buick where it was and walked down the two curving blocks to 719. He went up the walk and rang the front doorbell. The lawn here was in bad shape, and the aluminium storm door had an aluminum D in the middle of it.

  Detective Dougherty's wife opened the front door. Parker knew it was the wife because Dougherty surely couldn't afford a maid. She looked at him, faintly worried, faintly apologetic, faintly
distracted, faintly present: the manner of the little housewife to the stranger at the door.

  Parker said, “I want to talk to Detective Dougherty.”

  Now she was more worried, more apologetic. “I don't think—”

  He knew she wanted to get across the facts that her husband was sitting down to warmed-over roast and planned to go straight to bed after that, but she didn't know how to say it all in the blank polite bloodless phrases to which the circumstances had her limited. He broke in while she was hunting around for more words, and told her, “It's about the case he's on, the Ellen Canaday case. You tell him that.”

  Now she had something specific to do, she was obviously relieved. She said, “Wait here, please,” and shut the storm door. But she was afraid of offending him somehow, so she left the inner door open, and Parker could look directly into a small living room bulging with sofa and littered with copies of The Saturday Evening Post.

  He waited a couple of minutes, and then Detective Dougherty himself came to the door. He was no more than thirty, but he had all the style of fifty; dressed in his undershirt and trousers and a pair of brown slippers, carrying a rolled napkin in his left hand, walking with the male approximation of a woman in late pregnancy. He wasn't stout at all, but he gave an impression of soft overweight. His round face was gray with lack of sleep and the need of a shave, and his dry brown hair had already receded from his forehead.

  But it was all crap. His eyes were slate gray, and all they did was watch. The way he held his right hand, his revolver was still on his hip somewhere.

  Parker stood loose, hands at his sides with the palms showing. When Dougherty pushed open the storm door, Parker said, “I'm glad I caught you home.”

  Dougherty said, “That's your car up the street, isn't it? The Buick?”

  Parker shrugged. “It's mine.”

  “Come around to the side door.” Dougherty pointed with the hand that held the napkin. “Around to the right there. It's okay to cut across the lawn.”