Ask the Parrot p-23

by Richard Stark

  “No, they don’t,” Parker said. “So you’ve been kicking yourself that you didn’t get even. Because you think you could get even. How?”

  “I ran those buildings for years,” Lindahl said. “I’ve still got up-to-date keys for every door out there. I still go out every once in a while, when there isn’t any meet going on, when it’s shut down like a museum, and I just walk around it. Every once in a while, if I find a door with a new key, I borrow a spare from the rack and make a copy for myself.”

  “You can get in and out.”

  “I can not only get in and out,” Lindahl said, “I know where to get in and out. I know where the money goes, and where the money waits, and where the money’s loaded up for the bank, and where the money’s stored till the armored car gets there. I know where everything is and how to get to everything. During a meet, the place is guarded 24/7, but I know how to slide a truck in there, three in the morning, no one the wiser. I know how to get in, and then I know how to carry a heavy weight out.”

  Lindahl had already carried a heavy weight out of that place, but that wasn’t what he meant. Parker said, “So once they cost you your wife and your job, you decided to rip them off, get a new stake, go away and retire in comfort.”

  “That’s right,” Lindahl said. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else for four years.”

  “Why didn’t you do it?”

  “Because I’m a useless spineless coward,” Lindahl said, and finished his beer.

  3

  Or it could be,” Parker said, “you’re just not that dumb.”

  Lindahl frowned at him. “In what way?”

  “You go in there some night,” Parker said, “three in the morning with your truck and your keys and your inside knowledge, and you load the truck up with their cash, and when they find the cash gone next morning, nothing broken into, what’s the first thing they say? They say, ‘Do we have a disgruntled ex-employee around here?’”

  “Oh, I know that,” Lindahl said, and laughed at himself, shaking his head. “That was a part of the whole idea. It wasn’t just the money I wanted, was it? It was revenge. I want them to know I got back at them, and not a goddam thing they can do about it.”

  “You’re just gonna disappear.”

  “It’s happened.”

  “Less than it used to,” Parker told him. “Right now I’m sitting here listening to you instead of getting to some other part of the country because I don’t have any safe ID.”

  “Well, you stirred them up,” Lindahl said. “You robbed their bank.”

  “Robbing their track will stir them up, too.”

  “Let me tell you the idea,” Lindahl said. “The way the track operates, the losers pay the winners, so the track never has to start off with cash. They take in enough from the first race to pay the winners, plus some more, and go from there. The track take is about twenty percent, that’s the piece I’m after. At the end of the day, the cash and the credit card slips are all put in boxes and on carts, and the carts ride down to the basement in the freight elevator. They’re wheeled down the corridor to what they call the safe room, because it’s all concrete block, no windows, and only the one door that’s metal and kept locked. Just past that is the door to the ramp that comes up to ground level at the end of the clubhouse. That door is kept locked, and the gate at the top of the ramp is kept locked. Monday through Friday, the armored car comes an hour after the track closes, backs down the ramp, loads on the day’s take. Saturday and Sunday they don’t come at all, and they don’t show up until eight Monday morning, when they pick up the whole weekend’s take.”

  “So your idea,” Parker said, “is go in there Sunday night.”

  Lindahl shook his head. “Saturday night,” he said. “Those boxes are heavy. Once the pallet is put down there on Saturday, it isn’t touched again till Monday morning. I go in there Saturday night with boxes look just like their boxes, because I know their boxes. I take the full ones, I leave the empty ones. Now I’ve got thirty-six hours before anybody knows anything. How far could I get in thirty-six hours, spending only cash, leaving no trail?”

  Everybody leaves a trail, but there was no point explaining things to Lindahl, since it was all a fantasy, anyway. Parker might be able to make use of Lindahl’s access if things were quieter around here and if he could collect a string of two or three sure guys, but there was no way for Lindahl himself to reach into that particular fire and not get burned.

  It wasn’t Parker’s job to tell an amateur he was an amateur, to remind him of things like a driver’s license, license plates, fingerprints, or the suspicions created by spending cash in a credit card economy. So he said, “You gonna take the parrot with you?”

  Lindahl was surprised at the abrupt change of subject, and then surprised again when he saw it wasn’t a change of subject, after all. “I never thought about that,” he said, and laughed at himself again. “Be on the lookout for a man and a parrot.” Turning to look at the parrot as though he’d never noticed it before, he said, “That’s who I am these last few years, isn’t it? Who else is gonna get a parrot that doesn’t talk?”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not a word.”

  Lindahl studied the parrot an instant longer, while the bird cocked his head to study Lindahl right back, then gave that up to start rooting under its feathers with its beak, eyes wide and blank as the buttons on a first Communion coat.

  Turning back to Parker, Lindahl said, “That’s how little I’m interested in talk, the last few years. I better not take him, but that’s no hardship. I’ll do fine on my own. I won’t start any conversations. Is that one of yours?”

  Lindahl had nodded at the television set. Parker leaned forward to look to his right at the screen, and filling it was some old mug shot of Nick Dalesia, who had been one of his partners until just now. Nicholas Leonard Dalesia it said across the bottom of the screen.

  So they had Nick. That changed everything.

  “You want the sound on?”

  “We know what they’re saying,” Parker said.

  Lindahl nodded. “I guess we do.”

  A perp walk showed. Dalesia, wrists cuffed, head bowed, looking roughed up, moved in jerky quick steps from a state trooper car across a broad concrete sidewalk to the side entrance of a brick building in some county seat where this was the courthouse up front and the jail around on the side. New York State Police, so Nick, too, hadn’t gotten very far. As many uniformed state troopers as could do it squeezed into the picture to hustle Nick along from the car to the building.

  Parker leaned back, not looking at the set. Three of them had pulled the job and stowed the cash away rather than try to get it through the roadblocks. It was a given that if one of them got nabbed, that one would turn up the cash as a way to make his legal troubles a little easier. You might give up your partners, too, if you knew enough about them. Give the law anything you could if you were the first grabbed. Otherwise, don’t get grabbed at all, because there was nothing left to trade.

  So the money was gone. It had been a rich haul, but now it was gone, except for the four thousand in Parker’s pocket, and he still had to work his way out of this minefield. He said, “You say the meet’s going on now, at this track of yours?”

  “Two more weeks,” Lindahl said, “then shut down until late April.”

  “So there’s three Saturdays left, today and two more.”

  “We couldn’t do it tonight,” Lindahl said, looking startled.

  “We can go there tonight,” Parker told him. “A dry run, see if it’s possible.”

  Lindahl looked both eager and alarmed. “You mean, you’d work with me on this?”

  “We’ll look at it,” Parker said.

  4

  Parker stood and crossed to the door, then raised the blind covering the window next to it. The boarded-up house standing between here and the road was a two-and-a-half-story wood-framed structure, probably one hundred years old, its original color long since time-ble
ached down to gray. Every door and window, except one small round window in the attic, was covered by large sheets of plywood, themselves also gray with age. Parker said, “Tell me about that place.”

  Lindahl got up to come over and stand beside him, saying, “A woman named Grothe lived there, forever. She was retired from somewhere in state government, lived there by herself, she was in her nineties when she finally died.”

  “Why’s it boarded up?”

  “Some cousins inherited the place, had nothing to do with this part of the world, gave it to a real estate agent to sell, years ago. But nobody’s buying anything around here, so after a while the town took it over for taxes, boarded it up to keep the bums out.”

  “Ever been inside it?”

  “Can’t. It’s sealed up. And who’d want to? Nothing in there but dust and dry rot.”

  “Who do you rent this place from?”

  “The town. It’s goddam cheap, and it oughta be. Who’s this?”

  A black Taurus had turned in from the road, was driving past the boarded-up house, headed this way. Lindahl gave Parker a quick look: “Are you here?”

  When there’s no place to hide, stand where you are. Parker said, “I’m Ed Smith, I used to work with you years ago at the track, I moved to Chicago, I’m back for a visit.”

  “Smith?”

  “There are people named Smith,” Parker said as a heavyset man in a maroon windbreaker got out of the car. “Who’s he?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lindahl said as the man shut the car door, glanced at Lindahl’s Ford parked beside him, and started forward. “What the hell is his name? Fred, Fred something.”

  Fred saw them both in the window and waved. Under a red billed cap, his face was broad and thick, dominated by a ridge of bone horizontally above his eyes.

  “Rod and Gun Club,” Lindahl said, and opened the door. “Fred! Jesus, it’s been years.”

  “You’re still on the rolls,” Fred said, and gave a quick nod and grin at Parker.

  “Come in, come in,” Lindahl said, stepping back from the doorway. “This is Ed Smith, he’s visiting. You aren’t after me for dues, are you?”

  Fred gave that a dutiful laugh and stuck his hand out to Parker, saying, “Fred Thiemann. You a hunter, Ed?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I can offer you a beer,” Lindahl said, sounding doubtful.

  “No, no, no drinking,” Fred said, “not at a time like this. You know about those bank robbers come over from Massachusetts.”

  Parker could sense the strain in Lindahl’s neck muscles as he didn’t turn to look at Parker, but instead said, “They caught one of them, didn’t they?”

  “Not that far from here. The state police figure the other two are holed up in this area someplace, so they sent out a request, American Legion and VFW posts, outfits like ours, just take a walk around any woods or empty spaces we’ve got, see do we turn up anything. It’s the weekend, so we’re getting a big turnout.” He shrugged, grinning with both delight and embarrassment. “Like a bunch of kids, playing cops and robbers.”

  “Like a posse,” Lindahl said.

  “Exactly,” Fred said. “Except, no horses. Anyway, a bunch of us are meeting at St. Stanislas, we’ll look around the Hickory Hill area. Nobody expects to find anything, but we might help keep those guys on the run.”

  Parker said, “How’d they catch the first one?”

  “He tried spending the bank’s money,” Fred said. “Turns out most of that was new cash, they had the serial numbers.”

  The four thousand dollars in Parker’s pocket was new money. He said, “That guy was careless.”

  “Let’s hope the other two are just as careless,” Fred said. “We didn’t have a phone number for you, Tom, so I said I’d come over on the way, see do you want to come along. You, too, Ed.”

  Lindahl looked at Parker. “Would you want to do that?”

  “Sure,” Parker said. “The safest place around is gonna be with the posse.”

  5

  Tom,” Parker said, “you’ll have to loan me a rifle. I didn’t bring one.”

  Lindahl gave him a startled look, but then said, “Sure. Come on in and pick one.”

  Fred Thiemann said, “Want me to wait for you boys?”

  “No, you go on ahead,” Lindahl told him. “It’ll take me a couple minutes to get ready. I’ll see you at St. Stanislas.”

  “Fine. Good to meet you, Ed.”

  “You, too.”

  Thiemann left, pulling the door shut behind himself, as Lindahl turned toward the bedroom. Parker followed, and when he stepped through the doorway, Lindahl was glaring at him, face suddenly blotched purple.

  “You get out of here!” It was a hoarse whisper, almost a choked scream. “As soon as Fred drives off, you clear out!”

  “No,” Parker said.

  “What?” Lindahl couldn’t believe it. “You can’t stay here, you’re a fugitive!”

  “We’ve got our agreement,” Parker told him. “We’ll stick to it.”

  “We will not! Not for another second.”

  Parker looked from the bedroom doorway out through the front window. “Fred just drove off,” he said. “What are you going to do, holler? At that empty house up there? Are you going to try to take down one rifle and not two?”

  “When you said—when you said, give me a rifle—Jesus, I came to my senses, right then and there. You could kill people I know.”

  “If I’m the only man there without a rifle,” Parker said, “how does that look? What am I there for?”

  Lindahl dropped backward to sit on the bed, hands limp between his knees. “I was out of my mind,” he said, talking at the floor. “Brooding about that goddam track for so many years, then thinking about you, and by God if you don’t show up, and I was just running a fantasy. A fantasy.” Glaring at Parker, trying to look stern, he said, “I’m not giving any fantasy a rifle. You just take off. I got you this far, you’re on your own. I won’t say a word about you.”

  “Doesn’t work,” Parker told him. “You’re accessory after the fact. You took me off that hill, you drove me home, you introduced me as somebody visiting with you. You show up at this saint place without me, what do you say to Fred? And what if I am caught, and Fred sees my picture on the television? What do you tell the cops?”

  “I was crazy,” Lindahl whispered, as though to himself. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Revenge. I’m not going to shoot your friends, now that you’ve suddenly got all of them. I’ll carry a rifle because that’s what everybody’s doing.”

  Lindahl looked at him. “What if we find the other guy? What if you’re trying to help him get away?”

  “I wouldn’t try to help him get away,” Parker said.

  Lindahl frowned at him, trying to understand what he meant, and then his entire body slumped. “You mean, you’d kill him.”

  Parker would, to protect himself, but he didn’t want Lindahl thinking about that. “I’ll keep away from him,” he said. “And he’ll keep away from me. He’s probably long gone from here, anyway.”

  Lindahl seemed unable to move forward. He continued to sit on the bed, staring at nothing at all, slowly shaking his head, as Parker went to study the four rifles in their locked racks on the wall.

  The top two were nearly identical, Remington Model 1100, single barrel shotguns, the top one a 20-gauge, the other the slightly longer and heavier 16-gauge. The other two were both lever-action rifles, one a Marlin 336Y, firing a .30-30 Winchester cartridge, the other a Ruger 96, firing the .44 Magnum. All four weapons were old but well cared for, and might have been bought used.

  Parker turned back to Lindahl, still slumped unmoving on the bed. “Lindahl,” he said.

  Lindahl looked up. There was very little emotion in his eyes, so he was scheming down inside himself somewhere.

  Parker said, “You and me, we’ll go with this posse crowd. We’ll take the two lever actions, no round in the chamber, that way neith
er of us can get off a snap shot. We’ll stay with those people as long as they’re out there, then we’ll eat something and come back here.”

  “I don’t want you here,” Lindahl said, dull but stolid.

  “Listen to me. We’re talking a few hours out there. What you wanted—what you thought you wanted—was revenge. You’ll have those hours to think about it. When we get back here, you tell me, either you still want to take down that track or you don’t. If you do, we’ll go look at it. If you don’t, I’ll leave in the morning.”

  “I don’t want you here.”

  “You’ve got me. You brought me here, and you’ve got me. If it wasn’t for your friend Fred, I could lock you in your utility room and not worry about you. But if we don’t show up at this saint place, Fred’s going to start wondering this and that. So we’ve got to do it. Let’s go.”

  Lindahl shook his head in a slow dumbfounded way. “How did this happen?” he wanted to know.

  “You made your choice when you saw me come up the hill,” Parker told him. “Back then, you could have shot me, or held me there for the dogs, figuring there’s got to be a reward. But you looked at me and said, ‘This guy can help me.’ Maybe I can. Or maybe you’ll change your mind. We’ll know when we get back. Do you have a spare coat? Something right for the woods?”

  Lindahl blinked at him, confused. “A coat? I have a couple coats.”

  “And boots, if you’ve got them. These shoes aren’t much use outdoors. Do you have extra boots?”

  Lindahl didn’t want to be dragged away into this other conversation. “I have boots, I have boots,” he muttered, shaking his head. “But no. Take my car. Just drive away.”