Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  Webb was a driver, like Mike Carlow, but he never had anything to do with racing. Robbery was his only profession, partying and gambling was where the money went, and the Buick was his single hobby.

  This was his fifth Buick. He bought one every few years, buying it new and legit, straight out of a dealer’s window. But within a week a new car in his possession had completely lost its original identity and would never find it again. He switched engines so as to switch motor numbers, he altered serial numbers, he changed the paint job, he bought false registration and fake license plates. And after he’d had the car for a few months he would do the same thing all over again, changing things around, re-establishing yet another new identity. By the time he’d owned a car for three years, it would probably have operated under ten or twelve registrations, colors, and sets of license plates.

  In addition to the periodic face lifts done mainly for the hell of it, Webb also completely redid his current Buick immediately after working a score. The blue paint on this car was less than three weeks old, but the car would be some other color within twenty-four hours of his returning to Baltimore. He prided himself on having attained the absolutely untraceable car, but in truth most of the changes he put his cars through were unnecessary, done more as a hobby than for any real reason.

  Short and chunky and olive-complexioned, Webb had the chest and arms of a weight lifter, giving him a vaguely apelike look. He fit behind the wheel of a car with the naturalness of a cabdriver, and always seemed a little awkward when forced to walk. He had last worked with Parker in the air-base robbery with Stan Devers in Upstate New York. He’d come away with forty-two thousand out of that, every dollar of it long since spent, and he was looking forward to working with Parker again.

  Forty

  A murmur of voices woke Faran. He was very uncomfortable and he had a lousy cottony headache, and at first he couldn’t remember where he was or what was going on. Then he tried to shift on the bed, and realized his wrists were tied behind him, and it all came back.

  Parker. The son of a bitch had kidnapped him last night, just as he was closing the club. Standing there in the street, cool and calm and taking his time, he’d tied Faran’s wrists and put some sort of bag over his head and then walked him to a car and drove him here—wherever here was.

  In an apartment building, he knew that much. They had driven for a while, not long enough to be out of the city, and just before the car stopped, it had dipped down some sort of short incline. An apartment building with a basement garage. And an elevator, in which they rode up together, his head still inside the bag, silent Parker’s hand on his elbow. Then along a corridor until Parker stopped him and withdrew his hand for a few seconds. The grate of a key in a lock. He was led into the apartment, the door was closed, and the bag was taken away.

  The apartment was a surprise. He’d expected a grubby room somewhere, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was a pleasant middle-class apartment, sofa and chairs and TV and lamps and tables. Green drapes covering windows in the far wall. Carpeting, with a bit of dark-stained wood flooring showing around the edges of the room.

  Near the entrance door was a dining area: an oval table and four chairs, tucked into the corner. Parker sat Faran down there, produced pen and paper, and started asking questions. At first Faran wouldn’t answer, and he expected to be threatened and maybe punched around, but Parker didn’t do anything like that at all. He just took a small white box out of his pocket and put it on the table where Faran could see the severed finger lying inside it. Then he asked the questions again, and after a short hesitation Faran started answering.

  The questions went on till long after sunup, till Faran was so exhausted he could barely keep his head vertical and his eyes open. But Parker kept pushing, wanting to know more, demanding details, writing it all down on sheet after sheet of paper. Doing sketches and blueprints and insisting that Faran study them, tell him where the details were wrong. What kind of window is this? How many people work in that office? What time does this place open?

  Till at last it was finished. Faran fell asleep at the table while Parker read through his notes once more, to be sure there wasn’t anything else he needed to know. Then Parker had to thump him and shout at him and yank him by the hair to wake him up enough so he could stand and be marched into a bedroom and locked away in a closet. It was wide enough so he could lean his back against one side wall and stretch his feet out to the other, and that was the way he slept, until midafternoon. At any rate, he thought it was probably midafternoon, since there hadn’t been any direct sunlight on the closed drapes in the morning but there was when Parker unlocked the closet door and let him out.

  Parker had obviously slept in the bed, and looked rested and hard. Faran felt cramped, stiff, and logy, and his stomach was acting up again. He couldn’t keep from breaking wind all over the place, even after Parker untied his wrists and let him use the John. For the next hour or so Faran remained untied, but the way Parker looked at him, he knew better than to try anything. The two of them had a silent meal together, made out of cans from the kitchen closet, and then Parker let him sit in the living room for an hour or so. They watched television, and it seemed to Faran that Parker didn’t care what program he watched. It was as though he wasn’t really watching television at all, but was concentrating on things inside his own head and found it restful to fill the time with the flittering shadows and piping voices from the TV set.

  Then the doorbell rang, and at once Parker turned off the TV, tied Faran’s wrists again, and marched him to the bedroom. In the bedroom he pointed at Faran’s face and said, “Those teeth in the front. They caps?”

  “On the top, yeah.”

  Parker nodded toward the window. “If I come back in and that shade is up,” he said, “I’ll take those caps out of your head.”

  Faran just nodded. He didn’t want to open his mouth to say anything.

  Then Parker left him, and he sat on the bed, and gradually the light against the window shade dimmed. From time to time he heard the doorbell ring again, and after a while he could make out several male voices. He was having trouble believing it, but it had to be true: Parker was going to start a war. He was supposed to be a loner, an orphan without true connections, but he was bringing in people from somewhere, and he was honest to God going to start a war against Dutch and Calesian and Ernie Dulare. Especially Ernie Dulare, who was the most vulnerable to the kind of war Parker apparently intended to wage.

  If they found out, if Ernie and Dutch and Calesian ever found out where Parker had gotten his information, Faran knew they would kill him. No question, no bullshit about this being the bloodless new order, they would flat kill him.

  Unless Parker killed them first.

  And after a while he was no longer entirely sure which side he wanted to root for.

  Somewhere in through that space of time, his mind full of muddled thoughts, he had fallen asleep again, curled up awkwardly on the bed with his wrists tied behind him, and now he was awake once more, listening to the sound of voices in the living room, wondering what was going to happen next and what Parker would be doing with him when it was all over.

  Then the bedroom door opened, letting in yellow light that made him squint, and he suddenly realized that the scraping metallic noise of the key in the lock was what had brought him up from a fuzzy, shallow, unsatisfying sleep to a fuzzy, headachy, unsatisfying wakefulness. Sitting up, blinking fast, trying to accustom his eyes quickly to the light, he made out the black silhouette of somebody entering the room, and he thought, He kills me now. I’m not useful to him any more.

  Then the overhead light switched on, and Parker crossed the room to lift him up with a hand clutching his upper arm, saying, “Come on, Faran. Some people for you to see.”

  “What? What?”

  “Walk.”

  “I was asleep, I—” He cleared his throat, coughed, cleared his throat again. He was waking up now, at least a little. He put one foot in front of the
other, urged on by Parker’s hand holding his arm, and walked shakily out of the bedroom and around the short hall to the living room.

  The people there woke him up for good. There must have been a dozen of them, ranging in age from mid-twenties to late forties and in size from small and narrow to huge and heavily muscled, but every one of them had the same tough cold self-sufficient look as Parker. They gave him those flat emotionless stares, classifying him, deciding about him, and he stood there blinking and licking his lips, terrified beyond the call of rational argument, as frightened as a bird in a den of snakes.

  And the pile of pistols on the big table by the front door didn’t help either.

  Parker stayed beside him, and he had to give his order twice before Faran heard it: “Tell them your name.”

  “My n— What? My name.” He hurried to obey. “Frank Faran.”

  “What do you do for a living, Frank?”

  The use of his first name might have been meant to reassure him, but the cold impersonality in the sound of it had just the opposite effect. Striving to be calm, trying to be capable of instant accurate response to any question that might be put him, he said, “I manage the New York Room. It’s a—it’s a local nightspot.” The word “nightspot” echoed in his ears, sounding foolish and limp, and he was horrified to feel himself blushing.

  Parker had more questions. “What else do you do, Frank?”

  ”Well, I’ve still got— I used to be heavily in union management, I’ve still got a few posts, minor, uh—”

  “Local union executive?”

  “Yeah, uh— Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Sweetheart unions?”

  “Well, we, uh, mostly have, uh, good understandings with the employers.”

  “What else are you connected with, Frank?”

  Faran tried to think of anything else, but there wasn’t any more. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “You’re not thinking, Frank.” There was a small threat shimmering in the words. The dozen men sitting on sofa and chairs, standing leaning against walls, continued to watch him. Parker said, “Who do you work for, Frank?”

  “Oh, Mr. Lozini. I mean, I did, but he’s dead. So I guess now it’s, uh, Dutch Buenadella or Ernie Dulare. Or both, maybe.”

  Parker pointed, and Faran saw that on the coffee table in the middle of the living room papers were spread: the blueprints and notes Parker had taken last night during the question-and-answer session. Parker said, “You told me all that, didn’t you, Frank?”

  “Yes,” Faran said. “Right, yes.”

  “And it’s all straight goods, isn’t it, Frank?”

  Faran tried for a joke, a laugh, a bit of human contact. “I’m not going to lie,” he said.

  No change in the faces in front of him, except that one of them said, “How can we be sure of him?”

  “Because,” Parker said, “he knows we don’t let him go until after we’ve checked out everything he told me. And he knows that if he lied to us we’ll kill him. Don’t you, Frank?”

  Faran nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

  There was a little silence. He looked no one directly in the eye, looked only at the spaces between them, but felt them all staring unblinking at him. Trying to decide about him. His throat ached, felt raspy, as though he’d been shouting at the top of his lungs for half an hour.

  Parker said, quietly, “You want to change anything you told me, Frank?”

  Faran shook his head, but at the same time he was trying to think, trying to remember everything he’d said. Could he have made any mistakes? No, it wasn’t possible. Parker had made him go over every detail again and again. “I told you the truth,” he said. “I swear I did.”

  Faran turned to look at Parker, and saw Parker looking at the dozen men, waiting for them to say whether they were satisfied or not. Faran couldn’t face front again, he had to keep blinking at Parker. His left cheek, the one toward the men, prickled, felt pins and needles.

  One of them said, “Okay. You made your point.”

  Parker nodded. “Anybody want to ask Frank anything?”

  None of them did. Faran was grateful for that, and grateful, too, when Parker said, “All right, Frank, let’s go back.”

  The two of them walked back to the bedroom. Faran entered it, and Parker remained in the doorway. Faran turned around and said, “You can trust me, Parker. I won’t cause any trouble.”

  “That’s right, Frank,” Parker said. He switched off the light and shut the bedroom door.

  Forty-one

  Parker put Faran on ice and went back to the living room, where the eleven men had formed themselves into small groups and were talking things over. He let them talk, waiting it out, knowing sooner or later they’d all decide to come in with him.

  One of the groups was Devers and Wycza and Ducasse; they’d never met before, but they’d all flown in on the same plane from New York, Devers and Wycza connecting in New York, the two of them realizing that Ducasse was also a part of this once they’d landed in Tyler. Clustered around the sofa to talk were Wiss and Elkins, who always worked together as a team, plus Nick Dalesia, who’d done the driving on the busted jewelry-store job, and Tom Hurley. Handy McKay was listening to an opinion from Philly Webb, and both Ed Mackey and Mike Carlow were sitting off by themselves, thinking about it.

  Parker had moved one of the chairs from the dining table to the end of the room nearest the door so he could face the entire group. He sat down now, saw by his watch that it wasn’t yet ten p.m., and waited for things to quiet down.

  But they didn’t quiet, not exactly. Instead, Tom Hurley, who finally seemed to have forgotten his grudge against Morse, at least for a while, got to his feet and pointed at the papers scattered on the coffee table and called across the room, “Parker, where are you going to be while we’re running all this other stuff?”

  The others all stopped talking and looked at Parker, who said, “Right here. I hold Faran, I keep this place for everybody to get back to, and I’m the phone drop you’re gonna need.”

  Hurley pointed at the papers again. “So you’ve got these capers here,” he said. “We go do them, we hit all at once, that’s sensible, I like that. Keeps us clean of cops. You’re back here, you keep the coffee and the doughnuts.”

  Quietly, Handy McKay said, “And he set them up. Every score is worked out there.”

  Parker, jabbing a thumb back at the pistols piled on the dining table, said, “And I got you hardware from a gun store last night. All new pieces, with ammunition. I couldn’t test-fire them, but you shouldn’t need to shoot them.”

  “That’s okay,” Hurley said. “That’s all very nice. My question is, what’s your piece?”

  “No cash,” Parker said.

  They all looked at him. Ed Mackey said, “Parker? You don’t want any cut?”

  “There’s eleven of you,” Parker said. “You go out, you pull the action, you come back, you put all the take in one pile and split it eleven ways. So everybody gets the same piece.”

  Hurley, frowning as though looking for the butcher’s thumb, said, “Except you?”

  “That’s right.”

  Fred Ducasse said, “What’s in it for you?”

  “I want you to do a piece of work for me,” Parker said. “Tomorrow, after all this other stuff is done and you’ve all made your money.”

  Hurley, looking satisfied, as though he thought maybe he finally did see that thumb resting on the scale after all, said, “What kind of a piece of work, Parker?”

  Parker got to his feet, took the small white box from his pocket, took the top off it, and put the box on the coffee table amid the papers. Then he stood back and let them study it.

  That wasn’t the butcher’s thumb; Hurley’s lips curled back in distaste and he said, “Who is it, Parker?”

  “A guy named Grofield.”

  Dan Wycza said, “Alan Grofield?”

  “That’s right.”

  Frank Elkins said,
“Yeah, I remember him. He worked with us in Copper Canyon.”

  “That’s right,” Wycza said. “He’s the clown brought the girl out with him. Telephone girl.”

  Nick Dalesia said, “I worked with a guy named Grofield once. An actor.”

  “That’s the one,” Wycza said.

  Ralph Wiss said, “A very humorous type of fella.”

  “Right,” Dalesia said.

  “I don’t know him,” Hurley said. He made it sound belligerent, and his manner was aggressive as he looked around the room at the others. “Do I know this guy?”

  Nobody answered him. Ed Mackey said, “I know him. We got together once on something that didn’t work out. Seemed like a good guy.”

  Wycza said, “Wha’d he ever do with the telephone girl?”

  “Married her,” Parker said. “They run a summer theater together in Indiana.”

  “A love story,” Wycza said, and grinned.

  Handy McKay said, “I know Alan. What happened to him? How’d he lose that finger?”

  “He and I did a job here a couple years ago,” Parker said, and told them the story in a few quick highlights: the money in Fun Island, Lozini, Buenadella, Dulare. When he finished, Tom Hurley said, “I get it. These are mob places we’re hitting.”

  “That’s right.”

  Fred Ducasse said, “We put pressure on them, then you tell them to turn over Grofield and the cash or they’ll get hit again.”

  Ralph Wiss had been sitting there paying no apparent attention to the conversation, seeming to be sunk in his own thoughts. Now he said, “That won’t work.”

  “I know it,” Parker said. “That’s not what I have in mind.”

  Ducasse, turning to Wiss, asked, “Why won’t it work? They’ll want their places left alone, won’t they?”

  “I know this kind of people,” Wiss said. “They’re not used to losing a fight, they don’t know how to go about it. They’ll spend double the money to bring in more talent, guard everything they own, and start hunting for Parker.”