He sat in the deep chair and listened to them talk and plan. He looked at the Ace’s thick neck, and the bald spot that gleamed in the lights. The plan sounded all right. Now it was time to begin to integrate his own plan with theirs. Ace was the primary assignment. But nothing could be done about the Ace until after the box was open. The old man might drop dead of a heart attack and be unable to give the combination.
It might work right there in the stone house. Ace and Mullin, quickly, after the box was open. But the girl would be outside, in the car, and that was a complication. Not in the stone house. Get the money into the car. Get rolling. But once the money was in the car, both Mullin and the Ace would be more on guard. That was the time when accidents happened too often, between the take and the cut. Mullin might even be planning a little accident for the two of them. He had nothing to lose. Any fracas as they were getting into the car would cut down on the getaway time.
It had to happen in the stone house, or before they set out for the stone house. If it happened in the stone house, it might make sense to take the whole lot of them, the whole seven, the five men and the two women. He might get the blonde in the house on some pretext. Then close the big gates and drive away. Load the car and drive away.
The thought of taking the whole seven of them made him feel excited. It made his hands wet. It was good to think about, but it didn’t make sense. It would make the whole thing too heavy. The whole damn country would be hunting for him.
Then he knew what he would have to do. He would have to take a chance on their not needing the Ace. Once the time was set, Mullin would want to go through with it, even if there was just the two of them. Mullin would have to go through with it. There wasn’t anything else he could do. And no one else he could get to help him.
Ronnie became intensely aware of the Ace. It was always that way. A heightening of curiosity. He could see the Ace more vividly. To Ronnie, the Ace had a death-marked look. How many more beats in that heavy heart? How many more gestures of the thick hands? Ronnie felt the god-power in himself. The power to glaze those eyes and still the breath and turn the man into nothing. Into damp clay.
“You following this?” Mullin asked him sharply.
“I’ve got it all straight.”
The woman in the kitchen could hear their low voices. She sat at the table looking down at the magazine, but she did not see the words on the cheap paper. She was thinking of the strange road she had traveled, the road that had brought Sally Leon at last to this particular Wednesday night, to this Florida town, to this time of waiting and listening to the men in the other room.
She wondered what Barney Shuseck would think of her now if he could see her. She wondered if he would feel anger, or contempt. It had always been difficult to guess what Barney would think, to guess what he would do. Maybe that had been part of the attraction.
In the beginning was the Dream. The Dream of a small solemn blonde girl, fifth daughter of a factory worker in Dearborn. She was no good in school. The Dream was the only important thing. It always had the same ending—the black limousine pulling up to the marquee, the police holding the crowd back, searchlight beams cutting across the dark blue velvet of the California sky. “Hey, it’s Sally Leon!” they would yell and the police would strain to hold them back.
It’s Sally Leon! Regal in sables, smiling brilliantly and nodding to her fans, walking between the packed throngs into the movie, sitting there with people who adored her, to watch the first showing of the film that would win the Oscar.
She was poor in her schoolwork. She had little interest in boys. Her only interest in money was to have enough to go to every movie that showed in the area and buy every fan magazine that came out. She spent hours before her mirror. She imitated the stars. Her family was amused and exasperated by her. So intense was her dream world that she found it difficult to follow the simplest household directions. In that house there was neither time nor energy to concentrate on the emotional problems of one daughter—particularly one who made no trouble, who moved dimly through life, engrossed in the Dream.
When she was fifteen she left and went to Hollywood. She registered with Central Casting. She was fired from two car hop jobs because she could not remember orders. She attended premieres, crowding close as she could get, staring wide-eyed at the stars, perfectly confident that she would be one some day. She was fired from a department store job in Los Angeles. The supervisor for the floor told her she was too absent-minded. She kept the next job, as waitress in a tavern, for quite a long time.
The first man came along when she was seventeen. He knew the language of the studios. He said he was an assistant producer. He said he could get her a screen test. He lived in one of a string of attached bungalows which encircled a court with a small fountain that didn’t work. She moved in with him. He made it quite clear that this was the way you got into the movies. He stalled on the screen test for nearly two months, and then a woman in one of the other bungalows told her the man was a studio electrician. She was not hurt or angry. She was impatient at the delay. She moved out, got her job back, and began haunting Central Casting again.
The next man was more plausible. He said he was an agent, and in a sense he was, though he kept his office in his jacket pocket. He got her three days’ work. It was a college picture. She had to sit in the stands with a lot of other girls and smile and yell and wave a banner. She received twenty dollars a day. When the picture came out five months later she found that she was not in it. That scene had been cut. She sat through three showings and made absolutely certain that she was not in it. It was disappointing as she had sent a card to her family telling them she was in the picture. She was ashamed of that, and so she never contacted them again in any way. It was the third and last postcard she ever sent them.
She lived with Wally for seven months. He had a violent temper. He could not seem to get her into any other pictures. In the beginning he financed voice lessons for her, but later he did not want to continue the expense. When he got tired of her, he passed her along to a younger friend, a man who was trying to write scripts. When the younger man left to go to New York, she kept the room they had lived in and got a job as a waitress and kept trying to get into the movies. She had learned to carry herself a little better, and modulate her speaking voice, and sing in a small clear alto. She tried dancing lessons, but found she had no aptitude. It was hard for her to move quickly enough.
A girl she worked with told her she had enough looks so that maybe she could get a job in a club, and told her how to go about it. She went to the club in the early afternoon. It was the afternoon of her nineteenth birthday. After he had talked to her for about five minutes, the man locked the door of his small office. She accepted him without struggle, the way she had learned to accept. It had seemed important with the first man, but now it no longer seemed important. It was a mechanical thing. Sometimes it was pleasurable, and sometimes it was not. It was a means to an end, and thus must be endured. This was one of the more unpleasant times, but that evening she became a part of the show, a part of the finale. She wore a soiled girdle of feathers around her hips. Her breasts were bare. She had to stand absolutely still, bathed in a strange green light, while a girl whose costume was fresher and whose breasts were covered did a contortionist act. Three other girls stood as Sally stood while the act went on. Sally was pleased to note that they were all older than she was, and not nearly as pretty.
It was a man who came to the Blue Onyx Club who finally got her into the movies. He was a thin bald nervous man with a loose mouth and a deep Pacific tan. He took her at three in the morning, after the last show, to a barren rundown building in a shabby part of Los Angeles. Two other cars were parked behind the building. The man parked his convertible beside them and they went into the the building. There was a cameraman, an electrician, another man of the same breed as the man who brought her, and a muscular young man with a dull sleepy expression.
There were no introductions. The cameram
an looked at Sally carefully. “This is better stuff than those last pigs. You sure you want to do this, kid?”
Then she was told what she would have to do. She did not want to do it. But they all acted so matter-of-fact about it. And Mr. Binder, the man who brought her, told her the makeup would be pretty heavy, and she could fix her hair a little different. She was still reluctant and Mr. Binder said he would make it a hundred and a half instead of a hundred. She had never done anything like it before. She was scared and awkward. Finally they felt they had enough, and the sun was out when Binder drove her home.
She made seven pictures. The instructions were easy to follow. The pictures were nearly all the same. Binder finally let her see one. She paid no attention to what she was doing in the short sound picture. She was only interested in how she looked, how her voice sounded, how she walked and held herself. She knew at once that she was looking at a stranger, not at the creature in the Dream. She looked at a girl with a ripe heavy body and a blank face and a thin squeaky voice and dull eyes. The Dream died there.
Binder came to the Blue Onyx once more.
“We got to fold for a while, kid. They staked the place out and they were ready to pick us up, but we got a tip. We’ll be back in business in a couple of months. I’ll look you up.”
“I guess I don’t want to do that any more.”
Binder gave her a weary look. “You might as well. I was in legitimate movies for eighteen years. I know the score, kid. For this kind of stuff, you’ve got it. You’ve got all you need. For the legitimate stuff, you haven’t got it. You don’t project. You move around like a zombie. You’re built real good, though, and that’s just about all we need. So you might as well stick with this. The money doesn’t hurt you any, does it?”
“I guess I don’t want to do it any more.”
“There’s plenty who will,” he said.
She wanted to get away from the Dream. She went to Chicago. By then she had contacts, and she got a job doing a slow strip in a cellar club. She lived with the horn player in the band. She felt half dead. Once in a while they’d let her do a vocal. She added bumps and grinds to her thin voice and put the songs over after a fashion. She met Barney Shuseck in that cellar club. He was different. By then there had been a lot of men. Violent men, petty men, discouraged men, selfish men. Barney was not like the others. She could talk to Barney. He listened to her. He understood her.
“Sure, I get it. You couldn’t make it—so you couldn’t make it. We’ll have us a movie, kid. I’m a killer and a thief and a two-time loser, and you’re my girl. Like in the movies. See?”
And that is what he was. A thief and a killer and a two-time loser. She was with him for three years, until she was twenty-four. His money bought expensive clothes. They lived well. They saw a lot of the country. He could be unexpectedly tender, and unexpectedly brutal. He broke her arm and bought her an emerald on the same day. He bought the emerald from a fence.
He was working with Danny Riverio—not with him but for him—when he was shot and killed by a rookie patrolman. Riverio felt a certain degree of responsibility for her after she endured a full week of questioning without telling the authorities anything. He put her in the club of a friend of his in Detroit. He saw that she was set up in a fairly good apartment. Once in a while he would send friends to her to be entertained. Then he had sent her up to the lake to entertain Harry Mullin. Mullin wanted to keep her for a while. Riverio didn’t care. So she had come along. She could have avoided coming along, but it didn’t seem to make much difference one way or the other.
Mullin was a type with which she was familiar. Silent, sour, nervous, domineering. There was no tenderness in him. She accepted him, as she had accepted the others. Once the Dream died, it didn’t make much difference. Now Mullin, the Ace and Ronnie were on a job. She knew she would be frightened while it was going on. She knew she would be glad when it was over. She had no idea what would become of her when it was over. She would go out of the country with Harry, if they made a big score. That might be nice. She had never been out of the country. She wondered what it was like.
Ronnie pushed the swinging door open and came out into the kitchen. She glanced at him and then looked back at the magazine. She heard him go behind her and get a can of beer out of the refrigerator. She heard the hiss as he punched holes in the top of the can.
She stiffened as he put his fingers on the nape of her neck under her hair and caressed her.
“You shouldn’t ought to do that,” she said.
He didn’t stop. “I do lots of things I shouldn’t ought to.”
“It will make trouble.”
“Everybody’s got trouble.”
“Don’t. Please.”
He laughed softly and then he stopped. He said, “Aren’t you maybe too much woman for that burned-out Mullin?”
She didn’t answer and he was moving toward the door when Mullin came out into the kitchen, his mouth ugly. “How long does it take you to get yourself a beer, kid?”
“I was talking to Sal here,” Ronnie said easily.
“Don’t talk to her.”
Ronnie shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He walked on into the other room and the door swung shut.
“He make a pass?”
“No, Harry. No pass, honest.”
“Tell me if he does. And if Ace does either.”
“I’ll tell you, Harry.”
“Make some sandwiches.”
She got up quickly and went to the breadbox. She imagined she could still feel the touch of Ronnie’s fingers on the nape of her neck. It gave her an odd feeling. He was a strange man. He wasn’t like all the others. There was something very different about him. Almost creepy. Maybe it was something about his eyes.
CHAPTER NINE
When Ben Piersall arrived at his downtown office in the Flamingo Bank and Trust Company Building at eight-thirty on Thursday morning, he noticed Dr. Tomlin’s shiny old black Packard in a parking place near the bank, with Arnold Addams in his chauffeur hat standing near it.
He thought little of it and was astonished when he found Dr. Tomlin seated in the small ante-room. Lorraine Bibbs, Ben’s middle-aged secretary, gave him a nervous smile and greeting. She was one of the local people thoroughly terrified of the austere Dr. Tomlin.
Dr. Tomlin got up as Ben came in. They greeted each other and Dr. Tomlin said, “Please forgive me for not making an appointment, Ben.”
“It isn’t necessary for you to do that at any time.”
“I like to use common courtesy. This won’t take very long. I used to impose on your father, too.”
“I don’t think he ever minded, either. Come on in, Doctor.”
They went into his private office and Ben closed the door. Dr. Tomlin seated himself across the desk, took a document from an inside pocket and handed it to Ben. “I guess you’ve never seen this. It’s my will. Your father drew it up. I asked him not to keep a copy here. Mind reading it over?”
“Not at all.” It did not take long to scan the will. It was not complicated. It established a trust fund for Dillon and Lenora Parks and it left them the house. After taxes were paid, and after a cash bequest to Arnold Addams, the remainder of the estate was to be divided equally among the medical research foundations listed.
“I assume you wish to change it.”
“I want to include Laurie Preston, Mrs. Joseph Preston. I want a trust fund to be set up for her to take effect upon my death. It should provide a life income of five hundred dollars a month. She’s the girl who is staying with me. Laurie and her husband. They’re remote relatives.”
“That can be done easily.”
“And I’d like to increase the cash bequest to Arnold.”
“In that case, Doctor, rather than adding a codicil, I think we should rewrite the whole document.”
“Can it be done quickly?”
“I can have it ready today, if you wish.”
“I would appreciate it, Ben. I … I don’t expect to di
e today or tomorrow or next week. As a doctor, I know I’m in better shape than I deserve. But I’ve had a feeling of impending catastrophe. Like some superstitious old lady. I’ll feel better when the new document is signed and legal.”
Ben had been observing the old man carefully. There was the inescapable feebleness of age, but the eyes, and the brain behind them, seemed as sharp as ever.
“Can I speak frankly, Doctor Tomlin?”
“Your father always did. Certainly.”
“You are an old man. A lot of the people around here consider you to be a very eccentric old man. Just to be perfectly safe about this, I’d like to make two appointments for you. I’d like to have you go to two doctors today and have them examine you and have them make a written report on you. On your sanity.”
Tomlin’s face darkened and his voice grew thick. “Absolute nonsense!” he shouted.
“Now wait a minute. You want this will to stand up.”
“Of course!”
“If anybody should want to try to break it after your death they would try to prove that you were mentally incompetent at the time you revised your will.”
Dr. Tomlin relaxed visibly. “That would be typical of the reasoning of my grand niece, Lenora.”
“I’m not naming any names. I’d feel better if those two dated medical reports were on file with the original of the will. I think you will feel better also, Doctor.”
Tomlin smiled faintly and said, “I’m sorry. For a moment my attitude wasn’t exactly professional. I’ll do what you suggest, of course.”
Ben Piersall shifted his desk chair uneasily. “There’s something else I want to ask you about, Doctor. Please understand that I’m bringing this up because I’m trying to protect your interests.”
“I understand that.”
“Last evening I had a phone call from Bud Hedges. You know him pretty well.”
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