Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  “Come on outside with us, Nick. Wave us goodbye.”

  “Listen, fellas,” Nick said, “I don’t have any shoes.”

  “Just for a minute. Come on.” And the guy took his arm and walked him outside.

  It was warmer out there than indoors. Nevertheless Nick felt stupid to be standing around on the sidewalk barefoot, wearing nothing but T-shirt and shorts. The nearest streetlight was half a block away, and there wasn’t any moon tonight, but still he felt exposed and open, as though hundreds of people were watching him.

  Not hundreds. Just three: the two thieves, and their driver in the Pontiac waiting at the curb.

  The guy with the money hurried directly to the Pontiac, sliding into the back seat, pushing the leather bag ahead of himself. The other one pulled the bar door shut and tested the door to be sure it was locked. “Goodnight, Nick,” he said, and Nick watched him cross the sidewalk and slide in front next to the driver. The car pulled immediately away, and Nick turned back to the bar door.

  It was really locked. He rattled the knob, but that wouldn’t do any good. “Shit,” he said to himself, and walked around to the side of the house, where the bright yellow light marked his bedroom window. “Hey, Angela!” he yelled. Then he found some pebbles and threw them up at the window. Then he yelled some more.

  Finally he had to go around front and find a big stone and throw it through the window in the front door and let himself in that way.

  * * *

  They took all the cash; no stocks, no negotiable bearer bonds, nothing but the hidden cash. Leffler watched it all disappearing into two blue plastic laundry bags, and after the first shock he simply waited it out. Lozini and the others couldn’t blame him; after all, he wasn’t a bodyguard or a murderer. He wasn’t a criminal at all, merely a stockbroker, he couldn’t be expected to defend their money against people like this.

  The vault lights were on, since they couldn’t be seen from the street: bright fluorescents reflecting hazily from the brushed-chrome fixtures. The two men in their dark clothing and black hoods had a silence and swiftness and coldness to them that seemed invincible; no one could defend that money against these two.

  How miserable Leffler felt. Maureen stood next to him, her hands closed around his arm just above the elbow, giving him strength with her presence and her touch, and he knew this whole thing was his fault. Endangering her, getting himself in this horrible position. Somehow, a dozen years ago, there must have been some other way to deal with the problem, to help Jim without entangling himself with such people as Adolf Lozini and these two gunmen.

  And now they had the money. Carrying the laundry bags, they moved to the vault entrance, and one of them said, “We’ll leave the lights on. Or do you want them off?”

  The switch was outside. “On,” Leffler said. “Please, on.”

  “Right.” The man hesitated, then said, “You’ll be okay. Somebody’ll get you out in the morning.”

  The compassion in the man’s voice enraged Leffler more than anything else that had happened. “You’re the ones who won’t be all right,” he said, and his voice was trembling with his fury.

  The man shrugged; he and his partner stepped outside, and the heavy vault door was pushed shut. “Thank God,” Maureen said.

  “I’m through,” Leffler said. His throat kept closing when he tried to talk, his words came out half-strangled. “I don’t care, Maureen, I don’t care what happens. I’m finished with Lozini. No more.”

  “It’s all right, dear,” she said, and put her arms around him, cradling his head against her gray-and-black rough-feeling hair. “It’s all right now,” she promised.

  And like a fool, like a child, like some helpless ninny, he found himself weeping.

  * * *

  Ben Pelzer stopped next to his car, the key in his hand. While Jerry Trask and Frank Slade kept an eye up and down the street, he stooped slightly, holding the suitcase full of Frank Schroder’s money as he slipped the key into the lock in the door.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the movement, and looked up with a sudden presentiment. Two men were getting out of the next car back, and even before he saw the guns in their hands he knew it was a hijack.

  Trask and Slade were the defenders. Pelzer had a pistol under his jacket but he never even thought of reaching for it. He turned away instead, his movements fast and jerky as a silent film, leaving the key in the car door as he headed diagonally across the sidewalk, behind Jerry Trask, away from the two guys from the other car.

  Trask and Slade had seen them at the same time, and both reached for guns. Stan Devers shot Trask in the shoulder and Trask turned half around and fell to his knees on the pavement. Slade was bringing a pistol out and Dan Wycza waited two seconds after Devers’ shot before putting a bullet in Slade’s forehead.

  Mike Carlow was starting the engine of the Ambassador, hunching slightly over the wheel, watching the play outside, ready to drop along the seat out of sight if one of those other people actually managed to get a gun out.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Trask, on his knees, in profile to Devers and Wycza, went on doggedly tugging at the gun under his jacket.

  “Asshole,” Devers said, and shot him in the ear.

  Ben Pelzer kept running, zigzagging away down the sidewalk, toting the suitcase. If he’d dropped it, he might have been able to get away. Wycza and Devers fired at the same time, and Pelzer splayed out, then somersaulted onto the sidewalk. The suitcase skidded away until it brought up against a fire hydrant.

  Wycza and Devers got back into the Ambassador, and Carlow drove down the block and stopped next to the hydrant. “I’ll get it,” Devers said, acknowledging that he’d been wrong. He got out, picked up the suitcase, put it in back with Wycza, and slid in next to Carlow again.

  Forty-seven

  Parker sat and listened to them tell each other about their scores. They were all up, all of them happy and excited because they’d made out tonight. “It was so easy”: they all said that, at one time or another.

  Wiss and Elkins were the first ones back, bringing with them the biggest score of the night: one hundred forty-six thousand, four hundred eighty-seven dollars, the money from the vault at the stock brokerage. “They were really putting it away for a rainy day,” Elkins said.

  Philly Webb, who had driven Wiss and Elkins here, had immediately gone away again to get Handy McKay and Fred Ducasse from the Vigilant office. Before he got back, Carlow and Wycza and Devers came in, with a scuffed suitcase from the dope dealer containing eighty thousand, eight hundred and twelve dollars. “We should have a night like this once a year,” Wycza said.

  Devers was so pleased he was almost drunk with it. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not once a month?”

  Dalesia and Hurley and Mackey arrived next, with the smallest take of the night: seven thousand, six hundred twenty-five, from the loan-shark operation. That was less than Faran had suggested would be there, but by then nobody much cared. Besides, Mackey was full of funny stories about Nick, the guy who ran the place, and about his wife, who slept through the whole robbery. “He’ll wake her up tomorrow morning,” Mackey said, “and he’ll say, ‘Sweetheart, we got knocked over last night,’ and she’ll say, ‘Schmuck, leave the drinking to the customers.’”

  Parker didn’t do any of the talking. He watched and listened, letting them work out their pleasure and their nervous excitement; it wasn’t even three o’clock yet, plenty of time left to get his own work done.

  Webb came back with Handy and Ducasse, and then everybody was here. The money was brought back out and recounted, and all the totals added up to two hundred seventy-six thousand, two hundred eighty-seven dollars. The money was stacked up on the dining table, and Mackey said, “Son of a blue bitch, boys, that’s a quarter million dollars.”

  “Pencil and paper,” Hurley said. “I want to know what my piece is.”

  It turned out to be an even twenty-five thousand, one hundred seventeen dollars apiece. Nobod
y could believe a big number like that would come out even when divided by eleven, so three of them did the division, but it kept working out. Twenty-five thousand, one hundred seventeen dollars a man.

  Elkins nodded, smiling. “That’s a nice night’s work,” he said.

  Parker said, “Now we do another night’s work.”

  They all looked at him, and he could see that in the pleasure with their success, they’d forgotten about him and what was supposed to happen next. It brought them down off their highs, one at a time. He waited it out, waited till the smiles left the faces, waited till the eyes got the flat look back again, waited till they were ready to go back to work.

  “Right,” he said.

  Forty-eight

  Calesian could feel it slipping away. He’d had it in his hands, he’d held it just long enough to know what it really was, and now it was slipping away.

  That bastard Parker. They’d get him, of course, they’d finish him off, either tonight or tomorrow or sometime later this week, but it was going to be too late for Calesian. The power that had skidded through Buenadella’s hands and into Calesian’s was gone again, running out like sand through the bottom of a sack. And not a damn thing he could do about it.

  Buenadella’s house was a goddam fortress by now. There had to be at least forty armed men in here, plus Dutch himself and Ernie Dulare. Also a guy named Quittner that had been sent over by Frank Schroder. Quittner was a cold bastard, tall and skinny and pallid and silent as death. He wasn’t a part of anybody’s action, wasn’t a regular at all. He belonged to Frank Schroder, the way a horse belongs to a mounted policeman. Most of the time Quittner didn’t even seem to exist; just every once in a while Frank Schroder wanted a representative somewhere, on something he considered very important, and here came Quittner, empowered to act on his own, to make Schroder’s decisions for him, and then to fade out of the picture again.

  So now the power lay between Quittner and Ernie Dulare And when the crisis was over and Quittner disappeared once more, that would leave Dulare the man in control.

  It was strange about power. Al Lozini had held it in his hands a long, long time, unquestioned and unchallenged, but Dutch Buenadella could bleed it out of him slowly over three years without Lozini ever even feeling it: getting the money, getting the right men, inching the reins into his own hands.

  If the guns hadn’t come out, the shift in control would have been seamless and simple and straight, as automatic as the movement of a teeter-totter. But once Parker and Green had come to town and the balance had gone, once violence had become the only way to make things right, Buenadella had lost the rhythm, had ceased to function, and it became inevitable that the reins would fall from his grasp again.

  But not back to Lozini. Once a man was drained of his power, he seemed to lose the assurance that had won it for him in the first place. Lozini with his mastery intact would never have gone after Calesian himself with a gun, just as Calesian would never have dared to shoot a Lozini who was still in charge; so in a way it was the knowledge of his powerlessness that had killed Lozini more than anything else.

  Something like that was also happening to Buenadella. For a while Calesian had seen himself as the silent partner, the power behind the throne, with Dutch Buenadella nominally in charge. But then Parker had brought in an army from some goddam place, he’d attacked in a way that hurt too many people and that neither Buenadella nor Calesian could deal with on their own, and Buenadella’s loss of control became apparent to the wrong men: to Frank Schroder and Ernie Dulare.

  So that’s where the power was now, in the hands of Ernie Dulare and of Frank Schroder’s man Quittner, sitting together at the desk in Buenadella’s den, making their phone calls, making their decisions without consulting Buenadella, picking up the reins in every way. Tomorrow, when Quittner stepped out once more, Ernie Dulare would be the man holding Al Lozini’s power in his hands, with Schroder as his ally and Buenadella as his satellite.

  And Calesian? Dulare had made it plain when he got here tonight, in a few harsh cutting remarks, that he felt this mess was more Calesian’s fault than anybody else’s. He’d made his peace with Buenadella, and he’d apparently chosen to turn Calesian into the goat, the one whose bad judgment had brought this trouble down on everybody’s head.

  Which just wasn’t fair. It was Buenadella who had started the power play in the first place, and it was Buenadella who had taken Parker and Green’s money, and it was Buenadella who had ordered Mike Abadandi to go kill them. But all of that was being forgotten now. The only things being remembered were that Calesian had killed Al Lozini and that Calesian had fired on Parker and Green after Buenadella had worked out an agreement with them. Nobody was making a big point of blaming Calesian, nobody was arguing with him and giving him a chance to defend himself, but the feeling was obvious in the air. Calesian was out. Not yet, but soon; Farrell would be elected mayor, and would appoint his own police commissioner, and it was only natural to expect the new commissioner to do some reshuffling of assignments. Calesian would lose his slot with the Organized Crime Squad, would be shifted to Public Relations or the Red Squad or some other meaningless backwater, and that would be the end of him. His last state would be worse than his first; less power than before, after having for just one day tasted more power than he’d ever dreamed of.

  Was there a way back? Not yet, not that he could see, but still he couldn’t just give up. He had to hang around, watching and waiting, hoping for some break somewhere; sitting in Buenadella’s den, obscure and ignored in a corner, he watched Dulare and Quittner over at the desk, like two military commanders in a field headquarters setting up for a major battle. Watched and listened and hoped for some new hole to open, some other route back to the trough of power.

  Dulare was on the phone now, talking to Farrell. Until a day or so ago direct communication between Farrell and anybody at all on this side of the fence would have been unthinkable; but now they were in a crisis situation, and security was going by the boards. Besides, with the election tomorrow it was too late for anybody to get political mileage out of Farrell’s connections; and after the man was elected, what was anybody going to do about it?

  Dulare was saying, “George, you just sit tight. You’ve got good security around you there, and . . . I know they did. That’s why your security’s so much better now. You stay there, stay out of it, stay above it. Do your early morning voting booth number, then fade away again and let it all happen. We’ll take care of things on the outside . . . They also serve, George, who only stand and wait . . . I know it. If I’d been in this earlier it wouldn’t have happened . . . That’s right, George, that’s just what’s going to happen . . . I definitely will, I’ll let you know first thing . . . That’s right. Goodbye, George.”

  Dulare hung up, made a face, said to Quittner, “The man’s a bigger asshole than Wain ever was.”

  “He’ll do,” Quittner said. He had a soft voice, with no strength in it; he was frequently hard to hear. “He’s just frightened, that’s all.”

  Dulare grunted, and looked at the sheet of paper he’d been doodling on. “I keep thinking,” he said, “there must be other places for them to hit. The Riviera. Nick Rifkin’s Place. Your man Pelzer.”

  “They know a lot,” Quittner said. “They know more than I do. Nick Rifkin, I knew nothing about.”

  “A little loan operation.” Dulare shrugged, turning that conversation aside. “The question is, what else can they hit?”

  “What else is there for them to know about?”

  “It’s that goddam Faran,” Dulare said. “He’s a hail-fellow-well met, let’s get together have a couple drinks. You sit with him, you trade stories, pretty soon he knows everything you do.”

  “He’s too expensive,” Quittner said.

  “Frank’s got a lot of friends,” Dulare said. “A lot of buddies. They’ll all want to forget it, let him go, not make a big deal.”

  “He’s too expensive.” Quittner had a cold,
soft, unemphatic way of repeating himself that was much more impressive than a lot of shouting or a whole array of different arguments.

  Dulare shrugged. “Let’s see if we get him back alive,” he said. “Then we can talk it over.”

  There was a silence. Calesian watched Quittner turning it over in his mind, watched him decide not to repeat his comment again but to let it go for now, and knew that Quittner was determined that Frank Faran should die. There seemed to Calesian no question but that Frank Faran was soon going to be dead.

  What did Quittner want? While he and Dulare went on talking about other potential places for Parker to hit, Calesian studied Quittner, trying to understand the man. Would he be taking over when Frank Schroder died or retired? Schroder was in his sixties now, so that was a possibility, and Quittner had the look of someone patient enough to wait things out. But did he want any more? It was hard to see Quittner, for instance, in Al Lozini’s role; the man in charge had to have the potential for some sort of human contact with the people under him, and Quittner seemed just too cold and withdrawn, he seemed to live too completely inside himself. It was impossible to think of Quittner hosting one of those gourmet dinners that Al Lozini used to do once or twice a week.

  All at once Calesian felt an almost physical pain of nostalgia for the way things used to be. Way back, four or five years ago, back when Lozini was still completely in charge, before Dutch had made his move, before anything had happened. How easy and good that all seemed now.

  No. With a sensation like an iris being slowly forced shut. Calesian put away that weakness. He had been thinking about Quittner, wondering what kind of man he was, wondering if there was any way that Quittner could be useful in Calesian’s rehabilitation. There had to be some way to keep from being bounced out of things by all this—was Quittner the way?

  Dulare was on the phone again, talking to Artie Pulsone over at Three Brothers Trucking. They had twelve radio-equipped delivery trucks over there, and Dulare had arranged for them all to be out on patrol, driving around the city, looking for trouble. They were in steady touch with Artie at the office, and Artie would occasionally check in by phone with Dulare.