Parker shook his head. “I don’t want to kill your kid’s mother,” he said. “I want to know what we can do and what we can’t do, what kills the job and what keeps it alive.” He opened the door, and sunlight sliced in. “Let’s go.”
“You scared the crap out of me,” Fusco said. He got to his feet, grinning weakly. “The next thing I thought you’d say, I thought you’d say, okay, we’ll bump the kid, too.”
“I didn’t think you’d go for it,” Parker told him.
5
”Ellen,” said Fusco, “this is Parker. Parker, my ex-wife.”
Ellen Fusco said, “How are you?” Parker nodded. “Good.”
Ellen Fusco was something different from what he’d expected. A short intense bony girl, she would have been good-looking except for the vertical frown lines gouged deep into her forehead and the way she had of looking at the world as though challenging it to a spitting contest. She looked as though she should go through life with her hands always on her hips.
Her home reflected this attitude of belligerence. It was shabby, but clean, as though neither fancy frills nor dirt would ever dare enter here. The furniture was usual enough, from the swaybacked sofa to the table-model television set on its wheeled stand, but the bookcase was maybe a little larger than in the average living-room, and the books it contained were for the most part fairly heavy reading, Sartre and de Beauvoir, the James brothers, Uwe Johnson, Edmund Wilson.
Her clothing showed the same truculent plainness. She was wearing black slacks, a short-sleeved gray pullover sweater, brown loafers, no socks. Her hair was black and long and straight, held together with a rubber band at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup or nail polish, as though the image she was trying to get across lay somewhere between a Greenwich Village bohemian and a Nebraskan farm wife.
Fusco said to her, “Is Stan up yet?”
”He’s in the bathroom.”
Parker looked at his watch. Ten-forty.
Ellen Fusco said, “You want some coffee?”
“Sure thing,” said Fusco. “What about you, Parker?” He was somewhat eager, somewhat nervous, and couldn’t make up his mind whether he should play host or not. He’d been married to this woman, he’d brought Parker here to her house, but there was another man in the bathroom.
“Black,” Parker said, talking directly to Ellen.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” she said, and went through the arched doorway into a small crammed white-and-yellow kitchen. This kitchen opened directly from the living-room, so she could be seen moving around in there, getting the coffee ready.
As Parker sat down in the armchair near the door, Fusco said, looking around, “I guess Pam’s out in the back yard. That’s my kid.”
He looked around at Parker, seemed about to say something more, and then to realize this was neither the time or the place—nor was Parker the man—to ask him if he wanted to go out in the backyard and take a look at a three-year-old girl. Fusco turned away, moved vaguely in the direction of the kitchen, or maybe just toward the back window there, but then abruptly turned back and sat down in the middle of the sofa. They sat in silence then, Fusco fidgeting slightly and looking this way and that, Parker unmoving, waiting.
Ellen’s coming in from the kitchen with the coffee was simultaneous with Devers’ arrival through the other doorway, dressed in fatigue trousers and T-shirt. He was barefoot and looked still half-asleep. He saw the coffee and said, “One of those for me?”
“Get your own,” she said.
Devers stood with a pained smile on his face, trying to find something to say, while she put the two coffees on tables handy to Parker and Fusco. She didn’t look directly at anybody while doing this, and left the living-room right away, going out the door Devers had come in.
Devers beamed his painful smile at Parker and said “Domestic bliss. It’s just a funny game we have.” But when Parker just looked at him without saying anything, Devers shrugged and got rid of the embarrassed smile and went over to sit on the sofa beside Fusco. He picked up Fusco’s coffee cup, drank some, made a face, and said, “You know I like it with sugar.” He put the cup down, looked at Parker, and said, “You want to see the base today, right?”
“That’s right.”
“We’ll take a run out there. You mind if I make myself some breakfast first?”
Parker shrugged. “We’re in no hurry. I want to know some things first anyway.”
“Name it.”
“How long have you been stationed here?”
“Eleven months.”
“Finance office the whole time?”
“Right.”
“You RA or US?”
Devers frowned. “What’s that?”
“Maybe they changed things,” Parker said. “It used to be, RA on your serial number meant you enlisted, US meant you were drafted.”
“Oh. That’s Army. There’s no draftees in the Air Force.”
Fusco said, “You enlisted?” He couldn’t believe it.
Devers grinned at him. “I’m no place getting shot at, am I?”
“What’s your term?” Parker asked him. “Four years.”
“How much to go?”
“Seven months. I did a year in the Aleutians before I came here.”
Parker said, “You want to hold this job up till you get out?”
“That’d be smart. I leave the office, then they get held up. They’d come looking for me.”
Parker nodded. He knew that was true, but he hadn’t known whether Devers would understand it or not. He said, “What about the way it is now? Only seven months to go.”
”There’s two short-timers in the office,” Devers said. “One’s getting out in three weeks, the other one in two months “
“So the law will look at them before they look at you.”
“That’s what I figure.”
Parker said, “But they will look at you.”
Devers nodded. “I figured that, too.”
“How long’ve you been working your dodge in the office?”
“What dodge?”
“The dodge you bought the Pontiac with.”
Devers grinned and shook his head. “I saved my money while I was in the Aleutians.”
“You got bank records to prove it?”
“Do I need them?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t keep it in the bank.”
“Where did you keep it?”
Devers was getting irritated despite himself, the smile was slipping slowly from his face. “What’s the point?” he said. “We’re talking about robbery, not embezzlement.”
“The law,” Parker told him. “They’ll check out everybody in your office. They’ll say, ‘There’s a kid with charge accounts in New York, expensive clothes, expensive car. How’d he do all that on Air Force pay?’ Then they look very closely at you, just to see what happens.”
Devers bit a knuckle, frowning, thinking. Finally he said, more as though it were a question than a statement, “I had my grandmother hold it?”
“Your grandmother? Why?”
“I always got along with her best,” Devers said. “My mother and father split up, I wouldn’t trust my mother with the prize from a Cracker Jack box. So I gave my money to my grandmother, and when I got back to the ZI she gave it back to me.”
Fusco said, “Back to the what?”
“The States,” Devers told him. “ZI. Zone of Interior.”
“Christ,” said Fusco.
Parker said, “Your grandmother’s going to cover for you?”
Devers grinned. “Guaranteed. She died in April.”
Parker said, “What if they check with your mother?”
“What my mother says is her business. She’d say something different from me just out of spite.”
“Would she?”
Devers hesitated. “Who am I talking to now? Parker or the law?”
“Does it matter?”
“No. No, you’re right. I’ve
told you the straight story.”
Parker said, “You got a checking account?”
“Sure.”
“Let me see the checkbook.”
“Oh.” Devers nodded. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
Fusco said, “What’s the problem?”
“My deposits,” Devers said. “Like, I put in a hundred thirty last week, so where did it come from?”
Parker said, “Where did it come from?”
“Give me a minute,” Devers said.
Parker waited, but when Devers kept on concentrating he said, “You’re a sitting duck, Devers. You aren’t covered at all. They could land on you any time.”
“They’ve never had any reason to look me over.”
Parker said, “What if somebody else in the office tries something, and he’s clumsy? So they find out there’s something wrong, they start looking around, and you stick out like the Empire State Building.”
“God damn it.” Devers gnawed his cheek. “There’s got to be some way to cover.”
“Not the old lucky at cards routine,” Parker told him. “That way, you’ve got to get half a dozen other people to say yeah, they played cards with you, they lost to you. That’s too many people.”
“I know. I wouldn’t try that one anyway. Let me think about it while I make some breakfast.”
Parker finished his coffee. “All right, we’ll be back at twelve.”
“Fine.”
Parker got to his feet, and Fusco bounced up after him. They went out to the sunlight and got into Devers’ Pontiac. Fusco said, “Which way?”
“Gas station. We want gas and a roadmap.”
“Right.”
As they drove, Fusco said, “You were right about him. I mean, hitting the company.”
“The question is,” said Parker, “can he work out a cover.”
“He’s a smart boy, Parker.”
“Maybe.”
They came to a gas station and Fusco pulled to a stop beside the pumps. While the attendant pumped gas, Fusco went into the office and got a map. He brought it out and handed it to Parker, already folded to the area around Monequois.
They were in an out-of-the-way northern corner of New York State, close to the Canadian border, about fifteen miles west of Malone, north of Route 11. The nearest city of any size was called Massena, farther west, large enough to have a commercial airport. The border was about twelve miles to the north. Dannemora, the New York State penitentiary, was about forty miles to the east.
Fusco paid for the gas while Parker looked at the map. They drove out of the station and Parker said, “Let’s go north, toward the border.”
Fusco looked at him in surprise. “We won’t want to go crossing any borders, Parker.”
“I know that. But they’ll figure us to try, so let’s see what the road looks like.”
Fusco shrugged and went back to driving.
Monequois was a small town, overbalanced by the Air Force base just outside the town limits. There were more people on the base than in the town, so the influence showed up everywhere, in the names of bars and diners and motels, in the heavy preponderance of blue uniforms on the downtown streets, in the number of bars and movie houses. If the majority of people at the base had been permanent rather than transient, the effect on the town would have been even greater, but as it was the place was unmistakably a camp town.
They had to go through town and out past the air base to Route 95. It was scrub country out here, hilly but not mountainous, heavily forested. Very little of the base could be seen from the road, only a few drab slant-roofed buildings glimpsed through the trees and then the sudden complex busy structure of the main gate, like a stage set in the sunlight, with a dark blue billboard on one side giving, in gold letters, the names of the military organizations here, all done in incomprehensible abbreviations.
Fusco turned north on 95, went up to Bombay and took the unnumbered road up to Fort Covington. This was a smaller and less traveled road than to continue on to Massena or to take the bridge across the St Lawrence from Rooseveltown to Cornwall on the Canadian side.
They went through Fort Covington, but stopped on the other side before reaching the border. Parker said, “All right, let’s go back.”
It didn’t look good. No place had shown itself readily as a hideout. The forest was thick between the little towns, but it wasn’t empty. Most of the woods were posted against hunters, and the rest would be full of them. It didn’t look likely for them to come up here after the job and cool out somewhere short of the border.
Of course, he couldn’t be sure yet, and anyway this was doing it backwards. If Devers couldn’t cover his embezzlements there wouldn’t be a job anyway. And even if he could, there was still the base to be looked at. The whole thing might be impossible because of some element long before the getaway or hideout.
On the way back, Fusco said, “What if he can’t do it?”
“Like you said before,” Parker told him. “If Devers isn’t solid, the job’s off.”
Fusco frowned. Parker could feel him pushing for Devers to come up with something.
6
Ellen opened the door again, gave them a sour look. “You two.” She stepped out of the way.
Parker and Fusco went inside. As Ellen was shutting the door, Parker said to her, “What’s the problem?”
Not looking at him, turning away, being busy about something else, she said, “Problem? No problem at all.” She walked away across the living room.
Devers, sitting at the kitchen table with the remains of a pancake breakfast in front of him, waved his fork and called, “Be right with you.”
Parker ignored him, saying after Ellen, “Is it just Devers? What’s on your mind?”
She kept moving away, and Fusco, in the manner of somebody embarrassed and trying to avoid a scene, said quickly, “Parker, let it go.”
“No.” Parker pointed at Ellen and said, “Stop right there. I want to know what’s stuck in your craw.”
Ellen turned around, at the far end of the room, moved her chin in a contemptuous nod toward Fusco, and said, “Let him tell you.” But she didn’t leave the room.
Parker looked at Fusco, who shrugged and said, “She’s just a little bugged, Parker, that’s all. It don’t mean a thing, it’s just the way she gets.”
“About the job?”
Fusco looked scared. “Parker, I swear to God she’s no problem. She always takes the dim view, that’s all it is.”
“She was this way before?”
“That’s why she left me,” Fusco said, “the time I took the fall. Because that time she was right.”
Ellen’s lip curled, but she didn’t say anything.
Devers had walked in from the kitchen, carrying a coffee cup in his hand. “And now she’s sore,” he said, “because this time her ex-husband’s got me involved in it. Gonna get me in trouble.” Standing there, he drank coffee, with Ellen glaring at him.
Parker said, “What will she do about it?”
Ellen answered him. “Nothing,” she said, biting the word off. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“That’s straight, Parker,” Fusco said.
Parker looked at them, Fusco scared, Devers confident, Ellen angry. He considered, and finally shrugged, letting it go. For now he’d take their word for it, and just keep his eyes open. Over the years he’d come to accept the fact that the people involved in every heist were never as solid as you wanted them. They always had hang-ups one way or another, always had personal problems or quirks from their private lives that they couldn’t keep from intruding into the job they were supposed to be doing. The only way to handle it was to watch them, know what the problems were, be ready for them to start screwing up. If he sat around and waited for the perfect string, cold and solid and professional, he’d never get anything done.
“All right,” he said. “She’s your woman.”
Grinning, Devers said, “Which of us you talking to?”
/> Shocked, Fusco said, “Stan!”
Ellen said to Parker, “You finished with me now? Can I get back to what I was doing?”
“I’m finished,” Parker told her. “Thanks.”
She left the room, and Parker turned to Devers. “What about that checking account?”
The way Devers was smiling, he’d thought of something. He said, “You know the song about the little tin box?”
“No. What’s the idea?”
“I didn’t want to put all my cash in the bank,” Devers said. “All I’d do was put in enough money to cover my checks and keep a small steady balance. But most of my money keep in in a box in the closet in the bedroom here.”
Parker said, “Why?”
Devers grinned and shrugged his shoulders, being boyish and innocent. “I don’t know, it’s just the way I’ve always done it. I guess I’m like King Midas or something. I like to have my money where I can look at it. You have to have a checking account these days, you can’t send bills through the mail and money orders are too much trouble, so what the heck I’ve got an account. But the money isn’t real to me if it’s in the bank. I like to be able to open my box and see the money there.”
Fusco was frowning at Devers as though he couldn’t understand what the boy was up to, but Parker could see it. It was the kind of offbeat approach to money a kid might have. If Devers could pull it off.
Parker said, “Let’s see this little tin box.”
Devers held up a hand. “Give me time,” he said. “I’ll have it when it’s needed.”
“You going to go buy a new box?”
“Hell, no. I’m going to have the little old box I’ve carried with me ever since high school, the battered old box that went with me to Texas, to New Mexico, to the Aleutians, and now here. Don’t you worry, Mr Parker, that box is going to look right.”
“Not overdone.”
“You mean, decals from the different places?” Devers laughed. “I can be subtle, Mr Parker,” he said.
Parker said, “How much you got left in this little box?”
Devers frowned. “I’m not sure. Not much, after all the stuff I bought. It depends when we do it. If it’s the next Payroll, that’s next Tuesday—”
“Too soon.”
The Green Eagle Score p-10 Page 3