Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  Kim took an order form out from under the counter and picked up a pen held there with a piece of cord tied around it and thumbtacked to the counter. He wrote “Lynch” on the order form. He said, “You have brochures you want made?”

  “That’s right,” Parker said, and while Kim wrote “brochures” on the order form Parker took a laminated card out of his pocket, plus two small headshot photos, one of himself and the other of Wycza. The laminated card was a legitimate identification card for a New York State trooper. Putting it on the counter for Kim to see, but holding one finger on it, Parker said, “At the end, I need the original back. Undamaged.”

  Kim squinted at the ID, then frowned at Parker. “This is actual,” he said.

  “That’s right. That’s why I got to get it back.”

  This was what Cathman had come up with, out of the state files; a solidly legitimate ID taken from a trooper currently on suspension for charges involving faked evidence against defendants. Whether the trooper was exonerated or not, Cathman needed to be able to put that ID back in the files, and soon.

  Kim pointed at the photo of Parker and then at the ID. “You want this,” he said, and then pointed at the photo of Wycza and again” at the ID, “and this.”

  “Right.”

  Kim wrote some scribbles on the order form, and then, in the right-hand charge column, he wrote, “$500 each.”

  Parker put his hand palm down on the form. When Kim looked at him, waiting, Parker took the pen from him, and with the form upside down, he crossed out “each.” Putting the pen down, reaching for his wallet, he said, “Pete told me your price structure, and said you were fair in your charges.”

  Kim gave a sour look, and a shrug. “No doubt,” he said, as Parker slid five one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet and put them on the counter, “he also told you I do very fast work.”

  “You’re right, he did.”

  “This is complex, this brochure.” Kim thought about it. “Three days.”

  “Thursday. I’ll be here Thursday afternoon.”

  “I close at five.”

  “I’ll be here,” Parker said.

  Kim peeled off one copy of the order form and pushed it across the counter toward Parker, but Parker shook his head, not taking it. “We’ll remember each other,” he said.

  10

  On Assemblyman Morton Kotkind’s letterhead stationery, Lou Sternberg addressed Andrew Hamilton, New York State Gaming Commissioner, and wrote as follows:

  As you know, I have been opposed to the further legalization of gambling in New York State, beyond the lottery and the bingo for tax-exempts already existing. I have been in particular opposition to the installation of a gambling ship on the Hudson River, worldwide symbol of the Empire State, site of the first inland European exploration, by famed Henry Hudson in his ship the Half Moon,of what was to become the United States of America.

  The will of the people’s representatives, at this time, has seen fit to look the other way at the potential for abuse in this introduction of casino gambling into the very heart of our state, where our children can actually stand on the riverbank and see this floating casino, and judge thereby that such activity has the blessing of their elders.

  Other esteemed members of the Assembly have assured me that the operation of this floating casino is utterly reputable, that the potential for corruption has been minimized, and that the anticipated tax revenues and economic benefits to the depressed areas of the Hudson River Valley far outweigh any potential for mischief or malfeasance. I am far from changing my attitude in this matter, but even my most severest critics have always had to acknowledge my open-mindedness. I am prepared to listen and to observe.

  In this regard, I have decided to undertake a factfinding tour of inspection of the floating casino on Friday, May 23, this year, on the eight P.M. sailing from Albany. I wish this mission to be as low-key as possible, with no excess attention paid to me and my two aides who will accompany me. I would ask merely for one escort from the ship’s complement to conduct me on my tour. I will expect, of course, to see every part of the ship.

  At this point, I would take strong exception to this tour of inspection being used for publicity purposes to suggest that my opposition to casino gambling in New York State has altered or diminished in any way. I shall myself make no contact with the press, and I would ask that your office and the operators of the floating casino do not alert the press to this tour of inspection. After the event, if you wish, we may make a joint public announcement.

  My assistant, Dianne Weatherwax, will telephone your office from my constituent office in my district in Brooklyn on Wednesday, May 21, to finalize the details. Any questions you may have should be raised through her, at that office.

  May I say that, although I do not expect to have my opinions on this issue changed, I would welcome convincing evidence that casino gambling is not the scourge I have long believed it to be.

  Yours sincerely,

  Morton Kotkind

  Sternberg was proud of this letter. “It sounds like him,” he said. “Some of it is even from his speeches, like the children on the riverbank. And besides that, it’s the way he talks.”

  It had been part of Sternberg’s job to meet Kotkind, study him, get to know him, befriend him. There was a bar near Kotkind’s Brooklyn law offices on Court Street where lawyers went to unwind after their hard days, and it had not been difficult for Sternberg, short and stout and sour-looking, to blend in among them, cull Kotkind from the herd, and share a scotch and soda with the man from time to time.

  And now Sternberg was upstate, at Tooler’s cottages, with the letter. Parker and Wycza and Noelle and Carlow all read it, and all agreed it sounded like a politician/lawyer starting to reposition himself from off that limb he’d climbed out on.

  Giving the letter back, Parker said to Sternberg, “So you’ll meet up with him on Tuesday”

  “We already got an appointment,” Sternberg said. “We’re both gonna be in court that day, him in state civil, me in housing, and we’re gonna meet at the bar at five o’clock, have a drink before we go home to the trouble and strife, share our woes with the judges. That’s when I slip him the mickey.”

  “What I want is him sick,” Parker said. “Through Saturday. Sick enough so he doesn’t go to any office, make any phone calls, put in any appearances anywhere. But not so sick he gets into the newspapers. Assemblyman down with Legionnaires’ disease; I don’t need that.”

  “I’ll put him down,” Sternberg said, grinning, “as gentle as a soft-boiled egg.”

  The letter was dated Monday, May 12th, but wouldn’t actually be mailed, in Brooklyn, until Friday the 16th, so it wouldn’t get to Commissioner Hamilton’s office until Monday the 19th at the earliest, four days before the tour of inspection. The Post Office would be blamed for the delay, and no one would think any more about it.

  Kotkind’s Brooklyn constituent office was a storefront open only on Mondays and Thursdays. Carlow and Sternberg had already invaded it twice without leaving traces, and knew how the office worked. Noelle would go to Brooklyn with them on Wednesday, and from the constituent office she’d phone Commissioner Hamilton to work out the details of Assemblyman Kotkind’s visit, and she’d be happy to stick around a while so they could call her back, if for any reason they had to.

  Parker said to Noelle, “That’s his administrative assistant, for real, Dianne Weatherwax, from Brooklyn, graduated from Columbia University in New York. Can you do her?”

  “Shoe-uh,” said Noelle.

  11

  Throughout America, the states were settled by farmers, who mistrusted cities. State after state, when it came time to choose a spot for the capital, it was put somewhere, anywhere, other than that state’s largest city. From sea to shining sea, with the occasional rare exception like Boston in Massachusetts, the same impulse held good. In California, the capital is in Sacramento. In Pennsylvania, the capital is Harrisburg; in Illinois it’s Springfield; in Texas
it’s Austin. And in New York State, the capital is Albany. State capitals breed buildings, office buildings, bars, hotels and restaurants, but they also breed parking lots. State-owned automobiles, somber gray and black, usually American-made, utterly characterless except for the round gold state seal on their doors, wait in obedient rows on blacktop rectangles all over Albany, each enclosed in a chain-link fence with a locked gate.

  At seven-fifteen on an evening in May, in daylight, under partly cloudy skies with a slight chill in the air, Parker and Wycza stepped up to the chain-link gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the State Labor Department motor pool parking lot on Washington Street. Both wore dark suits, white shirts, narrow black ties. Wycza stood casually watching while Parker quickly tried the keys he held in the palm of his right hand. The third one snapped open the padlock and released the hasp.

  While Wycza stood beside the open gate, Parker walked down the row of Chevrolets, his right hand dropping that first set of keys into his trouser pocket while his left hand brought out another little cluster of keys from his outside suitcoat pocket. Switching these to his right hand, he stopped next to one of the cars, tried the keys, and again it was the third one that did it.

  The same key started the ignition. Parker drove the black car out of the lot and paused at the curb while Wycza locked the gate and got into the passenger seat, where he scrunched around and pulled his door shut and said, “Couldn’t you find anything bigger?”

  “They’re all the same,” Parker told him, and drove off, headed downtown.

  As they drove, Wycza took the small bomb from his suitcoat pocket, set it for one forty-five a.m., and put it in the glove compartment. There’d be no way to remove all the fingerprints from this car, so the only thing to do was remove the car.

  On State Street, they pulled over to stop in front of a bar with a wood shingle facade. Almost immediately, Lou Sternberg, in a pinstripe dark blue suit and pale blue shirt and red figured tie, came out of the place, briskly crossed the sidewalk and got into the back seat. “I was hoping for a limo,” he said.

  Wycza said, “You’re only an assemblyman.”

  Parker steered back into traffic, heading downtown and downhill, toward the river.

  The Spirit of the Hudsonhad its own parking area, on the landward side of an old converted warehouse, which until the gambling ship arrived had been empty for several years. Now a part of its ground floor had been tricked up with bright paint and plastic partitions and flying streamers and pretty girls in straw hats, and this is where the customers were processed, where they paid for their tickets and signed their waivers to absolve the operators of the ship from any kind of liability for any imaginable eventuality, and received their small shopping bag of giveaways: a pamphlet describing the rules of the games of chance offered aboard, a map of the segment of the Hudson they’d be traveling, pins and baseball caps with the ship’s logo, and a slip of paper warning that chips for the games could only be bought with United States currency; no credit cards.

  Parker and Wycza and Sternberg ignored that normal way in. At the far end of the warehouse, a blacktop road led around toward the pier, where supplies would come aboard. Parker steered around that way, and when he got to the guard’s kiosk he opened his window and said, “Assemblyman Kotkind.”

  “Oh, yes, sir!” The word had gone out, treat this politico well, we may have a convert. Stooping low to smile in at Sternberg in the back seat, the guard said, “Evening, Mister Assemblyman.” Then, to Parker, he said, “Just go on down there and around to the right. There’s a place for you to park right down there where the people get aboard.”

  “Thank you,” Parker said, and drove on.

  A pretty girl with a straw hat and a clipboard saw them coming, and trotted briskly over to meet them, smiling hard. Looking in at Parker, she said, “Is this the assemblyman?”

  “In the back,” Parker told her. “Do I leave the car here?”

  “Oh, yes, fine. No one will disturb it.”

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Parker and Wycza got out on their own, but the girl opened the rear door for Sternberg, who came out scowling and said, “Are you my escort?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” she said. “Someone on the ship will see to you. If you’ll just”

  “I’d rather,” Sternberg said, because it seemed like a good idea to be difficult from the very beginning, “meet the person here, be escorted aboard.”

  “Oh, well, yes, fine,” she said, her smile as strong as ever. Pulling a walkie-talkie from a holster on her right hip, she said, “Just let me phone up to the ship.”

  While she murmured into the walkie-talkie, Parker and Wycza and Sternberg looked over at the stream of passengers coming out of the warehouse and passing along the aisle flanked by red-white-and-blue sawhorses to the short ramp to the ship, that ramp being covered by red-white-and-blue canvas tarp walls and roof. The people seemed happy, cheerful, expectant. It was twenty to eight, and there were already a lot of customers visible moving around on the ship. Friday night; the Spirit of the Hudsonwas going to be full.

  “Look at that poor child in the wheelchair,” Sternberg said. “And gambling.”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” the girl said, determinedly sunny. “She comes every night. It seems to cheer her up. Ms. Cahill will be down in a moment. Oh, I see her coming.”

  They all did, emerging from the tarp-covered ramp, a tall slim woman, attractive but more substantial than the girls in the straw hats, she in low-heeled pumps, dark blue skirt and jacket, white ruffled blouse. When she approached their group, her smile looked metallic, something stamped out of sheet tin. The hand she extended, with its long coral-colored nails, seemed made of plastic, not flesh. “Mister Assemblyman,” she said, as though delighted to meet him. “I’m Susan Cahill, I talked with your Dianne Weatherwax on Wednesday.”

  “Yes, she mentioned you,” Sternberg said, grumpily, accepting her hand as though it was only the likelihood that she was a voter that made him do it. “This is my escort, Mr. Helsing and Mr. Renfield.” Parker had not given Kim Toe Kwai any specific names to use on the IDs he’d made up, and he’d apparently been watching a Dracula movie recently.

  Susan Cahill turned to offer a lesser smile to these lesser beings, and Parker said, “My identification,” showing her Kim’s first-rate handiwork in its own leather ID case, explaining, “Mr. Renfield and I are both carrying firearms. One handgun each. I’m required to tell you that before we embark, and to explain, the law forbids us to give up the weapons when we’re on duty.”

  She blanched a bit, but said, “Of course, I understand completely. If I may?”

  He held the ID case open so she could read. She was brisk about it, then nodded and said, “Thank you for informing me.”

  “We’ll have to inform the captain, too.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” she assured him.

  Wycza had his own ID case out. “This is mine,” he said, but as he extended it she said, “No, I’m sure everything’s fine. Mister Assemblyman, would you and your escort follow me?”

  “Before we go,” Sternberg said, “I want to make one thing perfectly clear. This is not an official visit. I am on a factfinding mission only. I shall not be gambling, and I shall not want any special treatment, merely a conducted tour of the ship.”

  “And that’s what you’ll get, Mister Kotkind,” Susan Cahill assured him. “Gentlemen?”

  They cut the line of boarding passengers, but no one minded. People could tell they were important.

  THREE

  1

  Ray Becker waited an hour after they’d left, the man called Parker and the big one, both in dark suits and ties, the girl in her wheelchair that she didn’t need, driven in the Windstar van by the guy in the chauffeur suit, all of them off and away on a Friday night, a big night in the world of casinos, all dressed up to put on a show. Tonight’s the night. It’s over at last.

  Five after six they’d driven away in the two vehicles, the Subaru and the
van. The big man could be seen complaining, as they went by, about being crammed into the little Subaru; they’d left his big Lexus behind. So they’ll be coming back, without the Subaru. Over the water?

  Becker’s observation post was the parking lot of an Agway, a co-op farm and garden place, a hundred yards up the road from the turnoff to the Tooler cabins. He’d rented a red pickup truck two weeks ago, over in Kingston, the other side of the river, and during his observation hours he wore a yellow Caterpillar hat low over his eyes and sat lazily hunched in the passenger seat of the pickup, as though he was just the hired man and the boss was inside the Agway buying feed or tools or fencing or whatever. If he squinted a little, he could just barely see that dirt road turnoff down there.

  So he could always see them come out. Sometimes they’d turn south, away from him, and then he’d scoot over behind the wheel, start the engine, and race after them. Other times, they’d head north, and he’d have leisure to eyeball them as they drove by, before setting off in pursuit.

  But not today. No pursuit today. Today he knew where they were going, and what they planned to do, and where they planned to come afterward with the money. And Ray Becker would be there when they arrived.

  Just in case, just to make absolutely sure none of them was coming back for any reason, he waited a full hour in the pickup in the Agway parking lot before at last he roused himself and slid over behind the wheel of the pickup and started the engine. Five after seven. The Agway closed on Fridays at seven, to catch the weekend gardeners and do-it-yourselfers, so the chain-link gate was half-shut; Becker steered around it, waved a happy goodbye to the kid in his Agway shirt and cap standing there waiting to shut the gate the rest of the way after the last customer finally drove on out, and the kid nodded back with employee dignity. Then Becker turned left and drove on down to the dirt road, and in.

  This was the first he’d driven this road, though he’d walked down it one night last week to spy on them, being damn careful not to make any noise, attract their attention. He’d found four cottages at the end of the road that night, but only one lit. He’d looked in windows long enough to get an idea of what their life was like in there, and he’d been surprised to see that the girl apparently slept alone. Two of the three men used the other two bedrooms, and the fake chauffeur bedded down on the sofa in the living room. There were guns visible in there, and maps, everything to confirm him in what he already knew: Howell had been right.