Flynn, chastened, finally handed the phone back to Mackey. He was still a trifle mulish, but Mackey didn’t doubt he meant it this time when he said, “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“That’s fine.” Mackey said into the phone, “You there?”
Wycza said, “Right here.”
“Everything’s fine now.”
Flynn said, “I’ll need to use the phone. I can put that call on hold if you want.”
“Good idea.” Into the phone, Mackey said, “You’re going on hold for a minute.”
Flynn took the phone, called his receptionist, and told her. “Call George and tell him there are two men about to come over to the door. He’s to let them in, and then you should let them directly through in here. That’s right. Thank you.” He pressed a button that took Dan Wycza off hold and returned the phone to Mackey. “There.” he said.
Outside, Hurley had quit the blackjack game twenty dollars ahead and was now kibitzing the crap table where Dalesia had so far lost thirty-five dollars. Hurley saw the man on duty at the brown wooden door reach for the wall phone, and tapped Dalesia, saying, “Time to go.”
“Right.” Dalesia left a five-dollar chip riding on the nine, and the two men walked across the room to where the doorman was just hanging up the phone. He said, “You the two gentlemen Mr. Flynn’s expecting?”
They thought he meant Mackey. “That’s right,” Dalesia said, “we’re the ones.”
The door buzzed, and the doorman pushed it open. “Go right on in,” he said.
“Thanks,” Dalesia said.
* * *
Dutch Buenadella owned two more dirty-movie palaces in Tyler besides the Mature Art. One was called the Cine, and the other was the Pussycat. But the Mature Art was the only one of the three with a good burglar-alarm system and a solid reliable safe, so the skim cash from all three theaters was kept there, piling up until once a month it was split into so many pie slices and distributed to the partners.
It had been three weeks since the last distribution, and the safe upstairs in the manager’s office at the Mature Art held nine thousand two hundred dollars in skim cash from the three theaters. In addition, there was eight hundred fifty dollars cash maintained as a sort of floating fund to help grease the ways should any unexpected problems come up, or to bribe a fire inspector, or pay a fine if it should come to that. And there was also an envelope, sealed and wrapped with two rubber bands, marked Personal in Dutch Buenadella’s handwriting and underlined, containing four hundred dollars; one of Buenadella’s private caches in case it ever turned out to be necessary to leave town in a hurry when the banks were closed, such as at four o’clock in the morning.
Ralph Wiss had breathed on the lobby door and it had opened. Elkins had looked in the cashier’s drawer and found it empty, and then the two of them had gone on upstairs, following Elkins’ pencil flashlight. The manager’s office was next to the men’s room, from which came a muted but rancid odor that it seemed impossible to get used to.
Because the manager’s office had a window that overlooked the street, they couldn’t switch the overhead fluorescent light on, but with the Venetian blinds closed over the window, they could operate by the light of Elkins’ flash. The office was a small cluttered room with a sloppy desk piled high with papers, an incredible number of notes and messages taped to the walls, a bulking water cooler next to a scratched metal filing cabinet, and a stack of metal film-carrying cans piled messily in one corner.
In another corner stood the safe, a dark green metal cube twenty inches on a side, with an L-shaped chrome handle and a large combination dial. Elkins gave Wiss the flashlight, and Wiss studied the front and top and sides of the safe, running his fingers over the metal, squinting at the line where the door joined the edge. He made a kind of whistling S sound between his tongue and his upper teeth as he studied the safe, a noise that Elkins had at one time found annoying—it sounded like a tire going flat—but over the years had grown used to, so that ho no longer really heard it.
“Drill,” Wiss decided.
Elkins nodded. “Sure.”
Wiss brought an empty film can over, set the flashlight on it so that it shone on the face of the safe, and sat on the floor directly in front of the safe with his black-leather bag at his side. As he opened the bag, Elkins said, “I’ll go on downstairs.”
Wiss was involved in his own head. “Uh huh,” he said, taking things out of the bag, and didn’t look around when Elkins left the room.
Elkins made his way downstairs in the dark, entered the cashier’s booth, and sat on the stool there with his elbows on the counter. He could look out diagonally through the cashier’s window and the glass doors at the street, where absolutely nothing at all was happening.
After a minute he heard the faint whirring of an electric drill from upstairs.
* * *
At Vigilant, the four guards and one of the ready-room men were tied and gagged and locked in one of the smaller rooms downstairs. Handy McKay and Fred Ducasse and Philly Webb were upstairs, playing pinochle. The other ready-room man was tied to a chair and blindfolded, so that the three men wouldn’t have to wear their hoods. They needed the ready man present in case the phone should ring. As Handy had told him, “If it rings, you’ll do the talking. If you say the right things, there won’t be any problem. But if you say something that brings trouble here—guess who’ll be the first one in the line of fire?”
“I’m not crazy,” the man said. He had gotten over being annoyed that Handy and Ducasse weren’t crazy either.
“That’s fine,” Handy told him, and then made a phone call himself to Parker. “Everything’s fine here,” he said.
“Good.”
Handy gave him the phone number at Vigilant and said, “See you later.”
“So long,” said Parker.
* * *
Flynn stood in the vault doorway, lips pursed in disapproval, watching Dalesia and Hurley stuff wads of bills into two flat black dispatch cases they had been carrying beneath their shirts. When both soft leather cases were bulging with bills, the two men brought out money belts from around their waists and began packing the compartments of those as well.
Next door, Mackey sat at Flynn’s desk, the phone to his ear, occasionally exchanging a word with Wycza. Mackey had his feet up on the desk and was smoking a cigar from Flynn’s humidor. He had considered putting Wycza on hold long enough to call Brenda, waiting for him at the Holiday Inn, but decided he shouldn’t fool around like that. Besides, she was probably asleep by now.
Downstairs, Wycza and Florio talked health food. Wycza, like most professionals, believed in keeping the civilians as calm as possible, since nervous people tend to insist on getting themselves shot, so he had tried several conversational openings with Florio, talking about the boxing world and the nightclub world and the gambling world, until he got around to physical exercise, care of the body, and health food. That turned out to be Florio’s subject; the floodgates opened, and out it came. “Now, Adelle Davis—”
“Carlton Fredericks—”
“Natural sea salt,” Wycza insisted, “is a fake. That’s one case where it doesn’t matter, salt is salt.”
“The processing plants.” Florio, forgetting Mike Carlow’s gun, forgetting the robbery going on upstairs, leaned over the table, gesturing, talking emphatically and learnedly.
Wycza, too, was a health nut, and had almost himself forgotten the reason they were all here. He rode his hobby-horse just as hard as Florio did, the two men finding broad areas of agreement and occasional bumps of deep disagreement of a depth that was almost religious.
Carlow stayed out of the conversation completely. His own hobby-horse was racing cars, which had nothing to do with health or with proper care of the human body. He simply sat where he was, right hand under the table, watched the action around the room, and let the words wash unheeded over him.
Stan Devers did get into it from time to time. He himself was in good physical shape
and always had been, but had never worried about it or adjusted his eating habits or life style to suit some physical ideal, and his belief was that Florio and Wycza were both crazy. He kept this opinion to himself most of the time, but every once in a while he would hear them agree on some piece of raving lunacy and he would just have to jump in and tell them he thought they were wrong. Then they’d team up on him, Wycza reeling off statistics, Florio telling horror stories about boxers and wrestlers and other great physical specimens who had ruined themselves with smoking or carbohydrates or improper sleeping habits, and Devers would retire again, overwhelmed but unconvinced.
It was turning into a grand social evening for everybody.
* * *
At twenty minutes to one Ralph Wiss drilled his sixth hole in the front of the safe, heard the snap of the mechanism inside, turned the handle down, and the safe door slowly opened. “Good,” he said to himself, packed his tools away in his leather bag, and got to his feet. He was stiff all over, but particularly in the knees and the back, and his mouth was incredibly dry. His mouth always became dry when he was working on a safe, but it was the result of his unconscious S whistling and not of any nervousness.
There were paper cups with the water cooler. He drank two cups of water, crumpled the cup and threw it away, and went out by the men’s room to call down the stairs, “Frank.”
“Coming.”
Wiss held the flashlight so Elkins could see to come up the stairs. Elkins had been half dozing in the cashier’s booth, and he came up yawning and stretching and scratching the back of his neck. At the top of the stairs, he said, “You got it?”
“Sure.”
They went back into the office and took the money out of the safe, and it totaled ten thousand, four hundred fifty dollars. About half of it went in their pockets and the rest into Wiss’ leather bag with his tools. Then they took out handkerchiefs and gave a brisk rubdown to the few surfaces they’d touched, and went downstairs and out of the theater and walked to the car.
* * *
The phone said to Wycza, “We’re all set, now. Coming down.”
“Huh? Oh, right.”
He and Florio had been talking about polyunsaturates. Wycza, feeling a slight embarrassment, as though he were an insurance salesman pretending to be on a social call, hung up the telephone and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Florio, but it’s back to business.”
Florio looked startled for just a second. Then he glanced at Devers and Carlow, looked back at Wycza, and gave a sour grin. “You had me going there for a while,” he said.
“I wasn’t conning you, Mr. Florio,” Wycza said. “I wish we could keep talking.”
Florio studied him skeptically, then grinned again, not quite as sourly. “Yeah, I guess you do,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, pal. You didn’t pick yourself a job that’s too good for your health.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Wycza said. “But anyway, you’ll have to walk us outside now.”
Florio nodded. “I figured that much. Do I get hit on the head later? I’m worried about concussions.”
“We’ll work something out,” Wycza promised.
”Thanks.”
“Now,” Wycza said, and got to his feet.
Upstairs, Mackey was having a little more trouble with Flynn. “If I go out with you people,” Flynn was saying, “how do I know I won’t get shot down in the parking lot?”
“Because we’re not crazy people,” Mackey told him.
Dalesia said, “Why should we get ourselves wanted for murder?”
But it was Hurley who put in the clincher. “If we were going to shoot you, you asshole,” he said, “we’d do it right here, in the privacy of your office. So shut up and walk.”
Flynn shut up and walked. He and Mackey and Hurley and Dalesia walked out to the main gaming area, Mackey and Flynn side by side in front, Hurley and Dalesia carrying the dispatch cases behind them. George, the man on duty at the door, looked startled when they came out, but Flynn did his job well, talking to the man just the way Mackey had explained it. “Keep an eye on things, George,” Flynn said. “We have to go downstairs for a few minutes.”
George, plainly surprised and curious, said, “Okay, Mr. Flynn.”
“If anything comes up before we get back, I’ll be with Mr. Florio.”
“Yes, sir.”
They went downstairs, and found Florio and the other three standing in a tight conversational grouping near the front door. The two groups combined, and all eight men went outside and walked around to the parking lot, which now had about half the cars that had been there an hour earlier; Monday was an early night.
The parking lot was illuminated by floodlights mounted on high poles. As they all walked along, Wycza said to the others, half apologetically, “I promised Mr. Florio nobody’d get hit on the head. Why don’t we just take them a mile down the road or something? That’ll still give us the time we need.”
There was no objection. Shrugging, Mackey said, “Fine with me. Okay with you, Mr. Flynn?”
Flynn had nothing to say. Florio said to Wycza, quietly, “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Wycza said.
Forty-four
There wasn’t anything on local television after one o’clock, so Parker put Faran away again in the closet, found a deck of cards, and spent the time with some solitaire.
When he’d first taken over this apartment he’d gone through all the drawers in the place and found a spare set of keys for both the front door downstairs and the apartment door in a night table in the bedroom. He’d had four more sets made up, and had given them out to Elkins and Mackey and Devers and McKay, so the different groups could move in and out without ringing apartment bells in the middle of the night. Elkins used his key now as he and Wiss came in, Wiss carrying his black-leather bag and both of them looking moderately pleased with themselves.
Parker had been playing cards at the dining table by the front door. He stood up, leaving the incomplete hand spread out, and said, “Any problems?”
“Simplicity,” Wiss said. Walking deeper into the room, he put his bag on the sofa, and then he and Elkins emptied money from the bag and their pockets onto the coffee table. “All very nice,” Wiss said.
Parker looked at the stacks of bills. “Did you count it?”
Elkins said, “Ten thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars.”
“A little more than we figured.”
Elkins grinned. “I thought maybe I’d palm a couple hundred, who’d know? But it isn’t worth it.”
“You’ll all do good tonight,” Parker told him. “You won’t need to nickel-dime.”
Wiss said, “You hear from anybody else?”
“Everything’s okay at the burglary-alarm place. The manager out at the Riviera called a while ago, checking on Mr. Flynn’s credit.”
“Lovely,” Wiss said. He poked around in his bag for stray bills, found none, and closed the bag. “So we’ll be off,” he said.
“I’ll call Webb.”
They walked to the door. Elkins said, “See you later.”
Parker nodded. They left, and he called Philly Webb, the driver at Vigilant. “Wiss and Elkins are on the way,” he said, and went back to finish the game.
Ten minutes later Mackey and Hurley and Dalesia came in. carrying the full dispatch cases. Mackey was grinning his hard aggressive grin, and he said, “Parker, you should of been there.”
Parker left the cards again. “No trouble?”
“Piece of cake,” Mackey said. “Goddam piece of cake.”
Hurley said, “That big baldheaded monster, what’s his name?”
“Wycza,” Parker said.
“Yeah, Wycza. Him and Florio got to be buddies. You never saw anything like it.”
Dalesia said, “What do we do with the money?”
Parker swept the solitaire hand off to a corner of the table. “Put it here. You count it yet?”
“We’ll do that n
ow,” Mackey said. Rubbing his hands together, grinning his hard grin at everybody, he said, “I just love to count money. Other people’s money.”
“Our money now,” Hurley said.
The dispatch cases were zipped open, the money belts were taken off, and the cash was piled up like a green mountain on the table. The four men began counting, each of them making stacks, and when they were finished they added their four totals together. Dalesia did it, with pencil and paper. “Forty-seven thousand, six hundred,” he said.
Mackey said, “That’s really nice.”
Looking over at the smaller stack of money on the coffee table. Hurley said, “That’s from the movie house?”
Parker nodded. “Ten thousand, four hundred and fifty.”
Dalesia said, “So far, that’s fifty-nine thousand and fifty dollars.”
Mackey, laughing, said, “And fifty dollars?”
Hurley gestured at the living room. “We’ll leave it for the householders,” he said. “As a tip.”
Parker said, “Wycza and the others already off on their next one?”
“Right,” Dalesia said. Looking at his watch, he said, “We better, too. See you later, Parker.”
The three of them trooped out of the apartment. Parker went into the bedroom, glanced at the locked closet door, and went over to check dresser drawers. The top one was nearly empty; he put the remaining few clothes on top of the dresser, carried the drawer into the living room, and lined it with the cash from the two robberies. He brought the full drawer back to the bedroom, put it away in the dresser, and returned to the living room to deal out a fresh hand of solitaire.
It wasn’t yet two o’clock in the morning.
Forty-five
Calesian dreamed of white skis on a black mountainside. He couldn’t see the skier, only the black-clad legs, the white skis, the glistening black slope, the featureless gray-white sky. The skier raced at a downward angle, moving very fast, the wind whistling with his passage, rushing on and on and yet never seeming to get anywhere, sailing across a slope like some gigantic pool ball, empty and alone.
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