The Rare Coin Score p-9

by Richard Stark

  He was up at seven Friday morning, had a quick breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, made his mandatory call to his wife in Chicago, got his coin cases out of the security room, went to his assigned table in the bourse room—number 58, midway along the drape-covered rear wall—and set up his display, stopping from time to time to chat with convention acquaintances who wandered by. There were perhaps two hundred people in the world that he knew fairly well and had never seen anywhere other than at coin conventions; in no other way did they impinge on his private life nor he on theirs.

  The bourse opened at ten, but was slow at first. During the morning there was barely a sprinkling of local hobbyists, window-shopping, renewing acquaintances, looking at what was available, but not doing much buying.

  Atkins went to lunch at one o’clock with two other dealers. He draped a white cloth over his display table before going, secure in the knowledge that the Pinkerton men and the local coin club’s security detail and the dealers at the adjacent tables would among them see to it his table wasn’t rifled while he was gone.

  In the afternoon he could have spent some time looking at the exhibits in the display rooms, or at the cost of a dollar and a half he could have joined a club-sponsored tour of the city to include the Indianapolis Speedway and its Museum, but a coin convention was primarily business to him, so he went back to the bourse and spent the afternoon sitting in a folding chair behind his assigned table.

  Business grew gradually brisker during the afternoon, but there was still plenty of time for small talk with people who mm came wandering by. These included his friend who had the display of military scrip, and also a local coin dealer named Billy Lebatard. Atkins had no use for Lebatard socially, considering him a bore, but he was a somewhat important dealer, having been able on more than one occasion to fill a specific oddball order from one of Atkins’ customers. This time, with no specific business to transact, they chatted together somewhat hesitantly, and Atkins was pleased when they were interrupted by a teenage boy interested in half-cents from the eighteen-thirties.

  Around five, as the local people began getting out of work, business picked up fast, and from then till after nine, Atkins almost always had at least one customer browsing at his table. The bourse was to remain open till ten, but by nine-fifteen Atkins was too hungry to stick around any longer, so he draped the cloth over his table, joined three other dealers, and they went out to a restaurant, followed by another night of bar-hopping.

  The others seemed ready to go all night, but Atkins had had enough by twelve-thirty, and went back to the hotel by himself. He rang for the elevator, but nothing happened for quite a while, so he went up the stairs. There was a Pinkerton man sitting at a card table near the staircase on the mezzanine floor. The ballroom and security room and display room doors were all closed. A second Pinkerton man was walking around the open mezzanine, strolling along, looking over the railing down at the lobby.

  Halfway up the next flight, Atkins came across Billy Lebatard again, this time with a short, thin, older man who carried that inevitable symbol of the tourist, a camera hanging from a thong around his neck. The older man also carried a small sketch pad and a pencil, and had apparently been making some kind of drawing. The two of them hadn’t been going anywhere, just standing in the corner of the landing between the mezzanine and the second floor. When Atkins came into view, Lebatard acted very flustered, but the older man paid no attention to Atkins at all. Atkins said hello to Lebatard and went on upstairs, wondering vaguely at Lebatard’s reaction. He wondered idly if Lebatard might after all be homosexual, and had picked up—or been picked up by—an older man of the same type. Lebatard definitely wasn’t very masculine in his looks or actions. But it was none of Atkins’ business, and by the time he’d reached his room he’d forgotten about it.

  Saturday was much busier than Friday. Atkins took a short fast lunch at two o’clock, but otherwise stayed at his table from ten o’clock opening till the bourse closed at eight o’clock for the banquet.

  The Saturday banquet was an integral part of these conventions, where the social and hobby aspects reached their peak. Awards were given at the banquet for the best exhibits in the display rooms. Speeches were made, and entertainment had to be sat through. The majority of convention-goers attended the banquet, not including Terry Atkins”, who was too business-oriented to take much pleasure in the sight of hobbyists getting together to laugh too much at in-jokes, to give each other prizes, and to eat chicken and peas and ice cream. Atkins and a few like-minded dealer friends went instead to eat steak at a good restaurant and then to sit around a cozy bar and drink happily together. They told each other cheerfully that they were doing business, the stock was moving. It was a good convention. Nothing spectacular, nothing unusual, pretty much the expected sort of thing, but all in all a good convention.

  They drank to it.

  Two

  LEMPKE STOOD in the kitchen of Billy Lebatard’s house and watched the water not boiling. What he really wanted was Jim Beam on the rocks, straight, in a tall glass, with the bottle and some more ice cubes handy, but he’d learned years ago—decades ago—that you don’t drink the same night you go out to pull a job, not if you want to stay outside and healthy. Afterwards he could drink all he wanted, could and would, but right now he’d have to make do with tea. If the water would just boil.

  Billy Lebatard stuck his head in the doorway and said, “Parker wants to know where you are.”

  “One minute,” Lempke said. It was late Saturday night, the clock on the kitchen wall reading eleven thirty-seven, and it was past time for the meeting to begin. But Lempke’s stomach was knotting up and he was going to have to put something inside there before he could go into the dining room and sit down at that table and take part the way he was supposed to, so he said, “Tell him just one minute. I’ll be right there.” And glared impatiently at the pot of water on the stove.

  Billy said reluctantly, “Okay, I’ll tell him,” but he didn’t go anywhere. Instead, he leaned farther into the kitchen and whispered, “You won’t say anything, will you?”

  “I told you I won’t,” Lempke said.

  “I don’t want …” Billy looked troubled, and made vague gestures.

  “I know what you want,” Lempke said sharply.

  Billy looked startled, and then hurt. Wordlessly, he turned and went away. Lempke was already sorry at having lost his temper with the poor boy, but there was nothing to do about it now. Besides, the water was finally boiling. He poured it into the cup, where the teabag was already waiting, and then waited again, this time for the tea to steep, which shouldn’t take more than a minute.

  The thing about Billy, he shouldn’t act like that. Not so upset, the way he got at the hotel last night when a dealer he knew came up the stairs, or the way he was now, asking Lempke over and over not to tell Parker how he’d gotten rattled at the hotel. For himself, Lempke thought, there was some excuse; he was an old man, he’d taken a fall, his wind and nerves and everything else were starting to go. But for Billy, young and smart, there was no excuse at all. Lempke had taken to the boy from their first meeting, and hated to have to admit to himself that Billy Lebatard was simply a coward. He was almost like a father saddled with a disappointing son.

  August Lempke had no children of his own, though he’d been married twice. The first marriage had taken place when he was twenty-three, seven years after his first big-time heist. He had a house in Atlantic City in those days, he played the swell along the boardwalk, and that was where he met Marge. They fell in love, they married, and seven months later he made the mistake of telling her how he made his living. She went straight to the law, and he got clear by a whisker. She didn’t waste any time about divorces, but got herself an annulment instead, and for the next twenty-two years he lived the bachelor’s life, until twelve years ago he’d married Cathy Russell, widow of Cam Russell, one of the best of the old-time juggers, a man who’d known more about bank vaults than most bankers but wh
o’d been shot down by a rookie cop on a job in Wilmington Delaware that had gone sour all the way. Lempke and Cathy had had six good years together before he took his fall, in Rhode Island, but she’d died—heart trouble—while he was inside, and when he’d come out at last a few months back there was nobody to greet him in the sunshine, no address written on a slip of paper in his pocket. He knew nothing except the life of the heister, knew no one except other pros in the business. He was broke and alone and for both those reasons he needed a score. And because he was old and had been out of circulation he knew A the score would have to originate with him; no one else would be going out of their way to include him on any string.

  He started looking around among the people he knew, and a general heavy named Bainum sent him to Billy Lebatard. Bainum had knocked over a coin dealer fingered by Lebatard once, and though there hadn’t been much profit in it, a similar sort of job might at least set Lempke up with a new stake. So Lempke had looked Billy up, had found him to be a grown-up orphan, a man living alone in his dead folks’ house, a little boy still behind the adult facade, and Lempke had been ripe to play a paternal role.

  The idea of knocking over the whole convention had come from Billy, or maybe from Claire, whom Lempke had been wary of from the beginning. When the idea came along Lempke had got hold of Jack French and Parker, and all at once the job had been taken over by Parker, a man who put the stamp of his own cold style on every heist he worked. Parker was cold and solid, and Lempke knew it was only that coldness that was keeping the rest of them together. Billy wanted to fall apart under the pressure, he wanted that the way a torture victim wants to die. Lempke himself felt the weakness of age and worry lapping at the edges of his mind. Otto Mainzer, a crazy man, a destroyer, was being held in check by the authority of Parker.

  All he had to do, Lempke told himself, was hold on. Parker was running things, and doing a good job of it, and all Lempke had to do was obey orders, act the way his own training and experience told him to act, and everything would come out fine.

  “Lempke.”

  He looked around, startled. Parker was in the doorway, looking at him. “Oh!” Lempke said, “I’m coming now.”

  Parker turned away, and Lempke hurriedly took the teabag out of the cup, threw it away, and carried the cup into the dining room.

  The rest of them were sitting around the table there, Parker at one end and Billy at the other, Otto Mainzer and Mike Carlow on one side, Claire and the empty chair for Lempke on the other. Lempke slid into his chair, putting his teacup down, and Parker said, “Lempke, you looked it over last night. Tell us about it.”

  “Right,” Lempke said, and sipped at his tea, but it was still too hot. He put the cup down again and said, “The setup’s no problem.”

  “We made sure of everything,” Billy said, looking around for a gold star.

  Lempke said, “Shut up, Billy.” He knew how to do this sort of thing, his professionalism was still of use to him here, and so right now he had no patience with Billy. To the table at large he said, “There’s five Pinkertons on duty after the ballroom closes. One in the ballroom itself and one in the security room, both of them with,the doors closed and locked. One in the main display room, also closed and locked. One on plant at a table near the elevators and stairs, and one roaming. The roamer checks the three locked in the rooms every hour on the hour. The night men go to work at ten, when the ballroom closes, and their relief comes on at six. But that could be different tonight, because the ballroom closes at eight.”

  Parker said, “How do they work the hour check?”

  “The roamer knocks on the door, the man inside opens it, they say a few words back and forth. It didn’t look like they had passwords or signals or anything, but we couldn’t get close enough to be sure. At the two-o’clock check, the roamer brought the inside men sandwiches and coffee. They were delivered from an all-night place across the street from the hotel.”

  Lempke reached over and got a manila envelope from where Billy had put it down in front of himself. “I got some pictures,” he said. “And some sketches. So you can see how it works.”

  The pictures and sketches were passed around, and then Parker said, “This one from the lobby, shooting up, showing the ballroom doors. Where were you when you took that?”

  “Green sofa near the florist stand.”

  “From there you can see the roamer make his check?”

  “Right.”

  “What about contact between security room and ballroom?”

  “We used binoculars from sidewalk level across the street,” Lempke said. “The angle was bad, but I’m almost positive that door was open. Anyway, it would make sense, the two men on duty there get to talk to one another.”

  “We’ll assume it’s open,” Parker said. “And the best time to hit is two o’clock, when they get the sandwiches and coffee. They’ll both be in the same room, eating together. Lempke, when you’re in that green sofa, can you be seen from the street?”

  “Sure. Through the main lobby doors.”

  “Good. Claire, you start sitting in that lobby at quarter to two. As soon as both those guards get their food, you give the signal.”

  Claire said, “How?”

  “You sit with your legs crossed. The signal is, you switch the legs.”

  Claire smiled and nodded. “That’s easy,” she said.

  “You stick around another ten minutes or so,” Parker told her, “and then you come up with the rest of us.”

  “All right.”

  Lempke sipped at his tea, which was now at just the right temperature. The tea was warming in his stomach, and the stolid impersonality of Parker was the best kind of reassurance. Lempke felt the pre-heist jitters fading away, felt the old calmness and confidence coming back at last, out of mothballs, out of the past. He hadn’t felt sure of himself since the walls of that Rhode Island prison had closed around him, and it was like meeting an old friend after years of separation to feel this stronger self coming back into his body, taking over the controls again after such a long time.

  Lempke smiled to himself. He was going to be all right after all.

  Parker was saying to Carlow, “You get the truck there by ten to two. You and Otto set up where I showed you, and then you get where you can see Claire through the lobby doors. I’ll be at the tour office window. When she gives you the sign, you light a cigarette and walk back to the truck. Otto, as soon as things are set up by the truck you come upstairs with the rest of us. I’ll have the door rigged.”

  Grinning, Mainzer said, “I’ll be there.”

  “We’ll give ourselves fifty minutes,” Parker said. “What we don’t get within that time we leave. Billy, you got that chart for us?”

  “Oh, sure,” Billy said, jumping to his feet. “I had it, I had—Lempke’s got it, in the envelope.”

  “Relax, Billy,” Lempke said, and handed over the chart. It was done with ruled ink lines on a plain sheet of white paper.

  Billy explained the chart at great length, but Lempke didn’t bother to listen, partly because Billy had already explained it to him earlier and partly because the chart was self-explanatory. It was a drawing of the ballroom, showing all the display tables, numbered. Some of the numbers were circled in red, and these were the tables to be concentrated on. Of the hundred and three tables in the ballroom, thirty-seven were marked with red.

  When Billy was finally done, Parker looked around at them all and said, “We can do this with fewer men, it’ll just mean we get less of the available goods. Lebatard’s the only indispensable man. Anybody else want out?”

  There was silence at the table, until Lempke felt Parker’s eyes on him. He had been feeling so good for the last few minutes that it hadn’t occurred to him at first that Parker, in offering this last out, had been talking mostly to him, but now that it did he smiled broadly and shook his head, saying, “Not me, Parker. I heard the gun and I’m in the race.”

  Parker kept looking at him, and Lempke met h
is eyes. He knew he was all right, so it didn’t matter.

  And Parker saw it, too, Lempke knew it, when Parker’s expression changed, became easier, and he said, “Hello, Lempke.”

  Three

  THE NIGHTS were always the dullest.

  Fred Hoffman, fifty-four years of age, had been a Pinkerton employee since the end of the Second World War, when he’d been honorably discharged from the Army, where he’d served in the Military Police, and in all the years of his employ he had never fired his pistol anywhere except on the practice range, and in fact had never so much as heard a pistol fired anywhere but on the range. Not that he minded, most of the time. He wasn’t all that anxious to get involved in shoot-outs. He considered his presence in the blue Pinkerton uniform to be in the nature of a deterrent rather than a challenge. If there was a disturbance, any sort of disturbance, he had already failed in his function, and then he would have to fall back on his secondary function of peacemaker. Up till now, he had never failed in the primary function, and had experienced over twenty years of peacefulness.

  Which was all well and good, and what he was paid for, but sometimes—and particularly on the night shifts—he found himself with a real hankering for action, for an end to peace, for something to happen.

  Well, nothing ever did. And nothing would tonight, either. Hoffman walked up and down the cloth-shrouded aisles, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of coins, maybe millions of dollars’ worth, and nothing happened, except that every now and then George Dolnick came in from the security room next door and they threw the bull a little, and every hour Pat Schuyler came knocking on the door and Hoffman opened it and they exchanged the code words that meant everything was—invariably—all right.

  Hoffman also liked to look out the window and watch the traffic go by, but as the night grew later the traffic grew lighter, and by the time of Pat Schuyler’s one-o’clock check there was practically nothing happening out in the street. Still, it was sometimes more pleasant to look out at the empty street than in at the rows of tables all covered with white cloths, like long lumpy rows of slabs in a futuristic morgue.