Breakout

by Richard Stark

  Parker nodded. Mackey said into the phone, “She wired it to your account last time, didn’t she? So she’ll do it again. You just tell me how much. Fine, tell me then. That’s terrific. Nice to do business with you again, Mr. Li.”

  Mackey broke the connection, put the phone on the table, and said, “ After he laughed, he told me he wasn’t surprised there’d be a link between a friend of Ronald Kasper and a friend of Brenda Fawcett. He says he knows it’s urgent, he’ll go over to the Fifth Street station right now, let Brenda know he’s her legal, he understands I’m probably somewhere he can’t phone me so I should phone him in three hours. By then he’ll know the situation, he’ll tell us how much is the retainer.”

  “In three hours,” Williams said. “Good.”

  Parker said, “We still have to get us into this Fifth Street station.” Standing, he said, “I’m gonna spend the three hours asleep.”

  2

  He wants to meet," Mackey said. He held the phone to his chest while he talked to Parker. The three of them were again at the downstairs conference table.

  Parker said, “You’re the one he wants to meet.”

  Mackey shook his head. “You should be along. We need to know the situation, what we should do.”

  “He doesn’t want me anywhere,” Williams said. “I’ll wait here. You leave the phone with me.”

  Into the phone, Mackey said, “Two of us, but we gotta be careful. You don’t want us in your office.” He listened, then grinned at Parker: “He likes to laugh, this lawyer.” Into the phone again, he said, “Good, that sounds good. Wait, give me the names.”

  There were a notepad and pen on the table, left over from some scheming by Angioni and Kolaski. Williams slid them over and looked alert, and Mackey said, “Fred Burroughs and Martin Hutchinson. Four o’clock. We’ll be there.” Hanging up, he said, “It’s his club, downtown. He wants us to meet at the handball courts. He says it’s loud there, lots of echoes.”

  “Nobody can tape,” Parker said.

  Mackey nodded. “That’s the idea.”

  It wasn’t easy for Parker and Mackey to turn themselves into people who might be accepted as a member’s guests in a club downtown that featured handball courts, not after the twenty-four hours they’d just lived through, but they managed. Washed and shaved, in the clothes they’d planned to wear when they’d quit this town after the job, casual but neat, they left the beer distributor’s at three-thirty and walked half a dozen blocks before they saw a cruising cab and hailed it. It felt strange to Parker to walk along the street in a town where every cop had just last week memorized his face, but the afternoon was November dark and Parker let Mackey walk on the curbside. They saw no law at all, and then they were in the cab.

  The Patroon Club had a doorman, under a canvas marquee mounted from building to curb. He held open the cab door while Mackey paid the fare, then called them sir and walked with them under the marquee to the double entrance doors, where he grasped a long brass handle, pulled the door open, bowed with just his head, and said, “Welcome to the Patroon.”

  “Thanks,” Mackey said.

  Inside was a dark wood vestibule, coat closet with attendant on the left, low broad dark gleaming desk straight ahead, behind which sat an elderly black man in green and white livery. He looked alert, inquisitive, ready to serve: “Help you, gentlemen?”

  “We’re here to meet Jonathan Li,” Mackey told him. “Fred Burroughs. And this is Martin Hutchinson.”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Li left your names.” Opening a folder on his desk, he said, “If you could just sign the register.”

  The register was a sheet of paper with columns to be filled in: name, date, time, company, member to be visited. They both wrote things, and the man behind the desk gestured at the inner door behind himself, saying, “Mr. Li said you’ll find him by the handball courts. That would be straight through, down the stairs, and second on your right.”

  Mackey thanked him again, and he and Parker went through the door into a plush dark interior, just slightly seedy. Downstairs, they found three handball courts in a row like three stage sets, side walls not meeting the ceiling, windowed at the interior end to face bleachers where spectators could sit. Only the nearest court was in use, two players in their forties, both of them very fast and very good. They made noise, but not too much.

  Li sat on the third row of bleachers, watching the game, then nodded when he saw Mackey and Parker come in. He patted the cushioned bench beside him, and they came over, Parker to take a seat at Li’s right, Mackey choosing a place on the second row, just to their left, where he could sit sideways and look up at them both.

  Li nodded to Parker and said, “Before we begin, just let me make the situation clear. I assume you did not come here trailing police—”

  “No,” Parker said.

  “No, of course not. But to consider the possibility, however remote, if in fact we are interrupted by an official presence, I will explain that we were meeting to work on the details of your turning yourself in, and you will say the same.”

  “Naturally,” Parker said.

  “Good.” Li turned to Mackey. “Now, to your friend. The police seem unable to learn her true identity.”

  “They never will,” Mackey said.

  “I begin to believe you’re right. She was paying for her hotel room with a credit card under the Brenda Fawcett name. They have now learned from the credit card company that the bills are sent to an accountant in Long Island, who pays with money taken from the account of a client of theirs named Robert Morrison. They have not physically seen Morrison in some years, but send him statements to a maildrop in New York City. They manage a few money market accounts for Morrison, and he occasionally sends them more money—How, if I may ask? The police don’t know, or at least didn’t tell me.”

  “Money orders,” Mackey said. “Every once in a while, top up the tanks with some money orders.”

  “So Ms. Fawcett is not their customer, nor can they directly reach Morrison, who pays her bills.”

  Mackey said, “ Does she give them a story?”

  “The police here?” Li smiled, almost in a proprietary way, as though it were a story he’d made up himself. “She says,” he told them, “she is fleeing an abusive husband. Court orders didn’t help, police protection didn’t help—a little dig there, of which they are not unaware—she is in fear of her life, she will never give anybody at all her correct name for fear this man will find her.” Li shrugged. “The police don’t exactly believe her,” he said, “but it isn’t a story they can do anything about.”

  “Brenda’s good,” Mackey said. “She can do all the emotions: outrage, fear, just a little sex.”

  Parker said, “The point is, to get her out.”

  “Clean, if we can,” Mackey added.

  “When it comes down to that,” Li told them, “as I’ve been pointing out to the ADA assigned to this case, a young woman with little experience and, if I may say so, no feel for the job, there is no crime here. When picked up this morning, at the hotel, Ms. Fawcett had clearly not spent the night crawling through walls and tunnels. Nothing to connect her to the Armory or to Freedman Jewels was found on her person nor in her hotel room—”

  “Suite,” Mackey said.

  “I beg your pardon,” Li said, and laughed. Mackey was right; he liked to laugh. “Her suite,” he corrected himself. “Nothing in that fine suite to suggest its sole occupant was a common burglar. They have on their hands a suspicious situation, in that Ms. Fawcett will not reveal her true identity, nor have they been able to find her true identity on their own. Other than that, they have the testimony of Darlene Johnson-Ross—”

  “The dance studio woman,” Mackey interjected.

  “Yes.” Li nodded. “The source of all Ms. Fawcett’s problems, if it comes to that. She is the one who informed the police that Ms. Fawcett has been operating in this city under a false name and background, and she is the one who claims to have seen Ms. Fawcett in a parke
d car a block from the Armory late last night.”

  Mackey said, “Took a picture?”

  Li shook his head. “Drove by, alone, in a moving automobile, in the middle of the night. Saw, for an instant, not near any streetlight, a blonde at the wheel of an unmoving car. While, of course, she has been obsessing about a blonde she has seen at her dance studio. On the stand, I’d demolish that identification in three minutes.”

  Mackey said, “We don’t want to go on the stand.”

  “Oh, I know,” Li assured him. “We should be getting bail, we really should, since there’s so little to tie Ms. Fawcett to the crime, except for the problem of identity. Still, I could make a strong case in front of a judge, and the police know it, and don’t want to lose control of Ms. Fawcett until they find out who she is.”

  “Which is never,” Mackey said.

  “In the interim,” Li said, “they’ve put up Ms. Johnson-Ross to file a complaint against Ms. Fawcett for false statements on a credit application.”

  Mackey said, “What credit application? Brenda paid cash.”

  “Exactly.” Li spread his hands. “It’s merely a plot to stall things, delay the release. A false statement on a credit application is a misdemeanor, but the form Ms. Fawcett filled out at the dance studio was not a credit application, since she was paying cash. It’s simply a maneuver to keep her in their grasp.”

  Mackey said, “And this Johnson-Ross goes along with it?”

  “She will, in the morning,” Li told him. “They weren’t quite ready today, and I was raising a number of objections, including the possibility that Ms. Johnson-Ross might find herself facing a severe lawsuit from Ms. Fawcett once this is all over, which led Ms. Johnson-Ross to say she’d need to consult her own lawyer before agreeing to make out the complaint, so that step has now been scheduled for ten tomorrow morning.”

  Mackey and Parker looked at each other. Catching the look, Li said, calmly, “Let me point out, the very worst thing that could happen to Ms. Fawcett’s chances to successfully put this episode behind her would be for some unfortunate accident to occur before ten tomorrow morning to Ms. Johnson-Ross. The police don’t believe in coincidence.”

  Mackey said, “So what do you do next?”

  “Argue, dispute, disrupt,” Li told him. “I will do my best to quash Ms. Johnson-Ross’s complaint, I will do my best to have bail set, but, from the way it looks at this point, I’m afraid Ms. Fawcett will be facing at least one more night of detention.”

  “You’ll do what you can,” Mackey said.

  Li shrugged. “Of course.” From inside his jacket he drew a long white envelope printed with his firm’s return address. “My retainer,” he murmured.

  Parker took the envelope and put it away. He said, “She’ll send you an extra two K. You can give it to Brenda or one of us.”

  Li nodded. “I understand. Walking-around money.”

  “Moving-around money,” Parker said.

  3

  At the beer distributor’s, Williams had drawn maps of the Fifth Street station, exterior and interior, all four floors, the streets of that neighborhood. “I don’t say it’s complete,” he warned them. “It’s what I remember.”

  They stood at the conference table, looking at the half dozen rough pencil drawings on the backs of old order forms. Parker and Mackey hadn’t had much to say to each other in the cab back to this neighborhood, nor the three-block walk through deepening dusk from where they’d left the cab, but now Parker said, “It’s breaking out again.”

  “I know,” Williams said. “All we do is break outa things. And now break this woman Brenda out.”

  Mackey said, “I don’t want to do it that way.”

  Williams looked at him. “What other way is there? They got her in there. She’s locked down.”

  “I don’t know what the other way is,” Mackey said.

  “She’s never been fingerprinted before. She’s got no record, no history with the law If we go in there and break her out, now she’s got a history and now they’ve got her prints and now she can’t live her life the same way she always did. There’s got to be another way.”

  Parker said, “Li’s right, the big problem is the dance studio woman.”

  “Yeah, she is,” Mackey said. “But Li’s also right that we can’t touch her. It would make things worse for Brenda because, first of all, it would prove we’re connected to her. If Ms. Johnson-Ross gets a cold sore tonight, Brenda’s behind bars the rest of her life.”

  Parker said, “Well, we’ve only got two choices, unless we just walk away, and I know you don’t want to do that.”

  “No, I don’t,” Mackey said, almost as though he wanted an argument.

  Parker nodded at Williams’ drawings. “We can either go into this Fifth Street station tonight and bring Brenda out, and she lives the way you say, the way you and I live, the way Williams lives, or we go see this dance studio woman, see what kind of handle we can put on her back.”

  Williams said, “What if you can’t put any handle at all?”

  “Then we remove her,” Parker said, “and go pull Brenda out anyway. She won’t be clean, but she’ll be out.”

  “If that’s what we gotta do,” Mackey said, “then that’s what we gotta do.”

  Parker shrugged. “Nothing’s gonna happen right away. If we take it easy now, find out where this woman lives—”

  “She’ll be in the phone book,” Mackey said. “Everybody’s in the phone book.”

  Williams grinned and said, “Probably Brenda is, somewhere, under some name.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to keep,” Mackey told him.

  Parker said, “We get up at three, three-thirty, go to this woman’s place, see what we can do. Get her maybe to phone the cops in the morning, say she changed her mind, doesn’t want to make any complaints, isn’t even sure that was Brenda in the car.”

  Williams said, “They’ll send somebody over to argue with her.”

  Mackey said, “I just thought. What if she lives above the shop? What if her place is one of the apartments in the Armory building?”

  Williams laughed. “Well, we do know that place,” he said.

  Mackey said, “Parker? We go in there again?”

  “That isn’t where she lives,” Parker said. “She had a little apartment in the studio, remember? For when she wants to stay over. Not her full-time place, not used much. So her full-time place is not in the same building.”

  “I hope not,” Williams said.

  “We’ll see how it plays,” Parker said, “and if it isn’t gonna play, we’ll go over to Fifth Street, still early in the morning, and pull Brenda out of there.” He looked at Mackey. “Okay?”

  Mackey nodded. “First we try it easy,” he said.

  Parker said, “Then we don’t.”

  4

  There was only one Johnson-Ross in the phone book: JOHNSON-ROSS D B 127 Further R’town

  “She’s doing good for herself,” Williams commented.

  It was twenty to four in the morning, and they were seated again at the conference table. The phone book left behind by the beer distributor was three years out of date, but this was surely Johnson-Ross’s current address. Parker said, “You know this place?”

  “Rosetown,” Williams told him. “North of the city. Pretty rich up there. Until a few years ago, if I was to drive through Rosetown, I’d get stopped sure. DWB.”

  Sounding interested, Mackey said, “Not any more?”

  Williams shrugged. “Now it would depend on the car,” he said.

  Parker said, “So it isn’t city police, it’s a local force.”

  “Yeah, but they’re rich,” Williams said. “Those are people spend money on law enforcement.”

  “Which means the Honda’s no good to us,” Parker said. “We need a car that’ll make their cops comfortable.”

  “Well, I guess that’s me,” Mackey said.

  They looked at him, and he said, “Brenda and me, we almost al
ways go by car, but as much as we can, we leave the car out of it. Like we came here, we took it to the airport, left it in long-term, took a rental back.”

  Williams said, “What do you do that for?”

  “If something happens to one of us,” Mackey told him, “it doesn’t happen to the car, so we’re that far ahead. Like now; they got Brenda, but they didn’t get a car. And a car would have another whole set of ID for the cops to play with.”

  Parker said, “What is this car?”

  “Two-year-old Saab, the little one, red.”

  Williams laughed. “You’ll look like a college boy coming home on vacation.”

  “Sounds right for that neighborhood,” Mackey said, “doesn’t it?”

  Parker said, “So what we have to do, take the Honda to the airport, get this Saab.”

  “And once again,” Williams said, “I’m on the floor in back.”

  There were two kinds of long-term parking; inside a brick-and-concrete building or, the cheaper way, in an outside lot. Mackey drove to the outside lot, picked up a check, and found the Saab in its place, small and sleek, gleaming in the high floodlights. Leaving the Honda, he crouched beside the Saab, and from underneath drew a small metal box with a magnet on one side. Opening it, he took out the Saab’s key and used it to unlock the car.

  Once the metal box was in the glove compartment, the parking check was out of the glove compartment, the Honda was in the Saab’s old space, and Williams was again on the floor in the narrow rear-passenger area, Mackey steered toward the electric exit sign, saying, “One thing. If we have to go on from the dance woman to the Fifth Street station, we don’t use this. We go back to the Honda.”

  “It’s your car and it’s your woman,” Parker pointed out.

  From the floor in back, Williams said, “When you’re out of the airport, take the left on Tunney Road, I’ll direct you from there.”