Deadly Edge p-14

by Richard Stark

“You are the worst of all, dammit. With the others, at least I knew where they were, I knew what they were facing, and if something happened I knew about it right away. But you, some day you’ll go off and you never will come back and how will I know when to stop waiting?”

  This came over her from time to time, and there was never anything Parker could say to her. He wouldn’t lie to her, and he had no reassuring truths to say. He intended to go on being careful, within his own definition of the word, but it was true that something could always happen, that it might be one time that he wouldn’t get back. Once he’d tried to point out to her that it was no good spoiling the times he did come back by worrying about his not returning sometime in the future, but she’d thought that kind of attitude was unfeeling, so he hadn’t mentioned it any more. Now all he did was wait it out.

  She sat hunched forward a minute longer, smoking, looking angrily at the surface of the coffee table. Then she shook her head and threw the cigarette into the fire and turned her head to say, “I’m sorry. I have to open the valve every once in a while, I guess, and let some of the steam out. Will you tell me about this last time? What kind of place was it? Not another coin convention.”

  “No. A rock-and-roll concert.” She grinned uncertainly. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.” He went on to tell her the whole story, from beginning to end. He left out only two things: the names of the people he was with, because they wouldn’t mean anything to her, and the discovery of Berridge’s dead body in the house afterward. None of them had been able to figure out what Berridge was doing there—he’d known about the place, of course, from the earlier meetings, but there’d been no reason for him to go there the night of the job—nor had they turned up the guy who’d killed him. They’d stayed in the house three days, having removed Berridge to the basement that first night, and the killer hadn’t come back. Keegan had been full of explanations, but none of them had sounded probable, and in the end none of them had mattered, because they’d split the take and waited out the manhunt and left the house to go their separate ways, and the death of Berridge had affected them not at all. Parker left the death out for two reasons: because he knew it would disturb her, and because it raised unanswerable questions that didn’t matter but that he knew would plague her mind.

  At the end, when he was finished describing the routine to her, she said, “So it went just right, didn’t it?”

  “Mostly.”

  “If only they could all be like that. Simple, safe and finished with, and back you come.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  The fourth day he was at the house, he was working on a stash hole in the basement when Claire called down the stairs, “Handy McKay on the phone.”

  He went upstairs, and she was waiting for him. “We don’t need money yet,” she said.

  “Let’s see what he’s got.”

  Parker went into the living room and picked up the phone. He identified himself, and Handy’s voice said, “Did your friend Keegan get in touch with you?” He sounded vaguely worried.

  “No. Should he?”

  “He called last night, said he had to talk to you about that time you were together last week. Said it was important, but he couldn’t say much.” Nor could Handy, not on the phone.

  Parker said, “Why should be call me? Why not you?

  “He said he was moving around, didn’t have a place he could be reached. It was definitely Keegan, from things he said. And moving around, not having a place he could be reached, I figured maybe that meant he really should get in touch with you.” Meaning that to Handy it had sounded as though Keegan might be having trouble with the law, which naturally Parker would have to be told about.

  Parker said, “So you told him where I was?” That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. Handy passed messages on to Parker, didn’t give Parker’s whereabouts to other people.

  Particularly not now, not Claire’s house.

  Sounding more worried, Handy said, “Your phone number. It really sounded strong. I had to make a decision.”

  “I suppose. All right.”

  “But today I thought it over, and I figured I’d better call you and make sure.”

  “Okay. I’ll handle it.”

  “I hope I didn’t louse you up.”

  “Me, too.”

  Parker hung up and went to the kitchen, where Claire was sitting reading a magazine with her lunch. He said, “Handy gave out this number.”

  She looked at him. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know yet. He gave it to one of the people I was on that last job with.”

  “When did he give it to him?”

  “Last night.”

  She closed the magazine. “And he hasn’t called, so that means something’s wrong.”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What do we do about it?”

  “You go to New York. Move into a hotel for a few days.”

  “Move?”

  “Just until I go talk to Keegan. That’s his name.”

  “I don’t want to leave my house,” she said.

  “We don’t know what Keegan wanted it for. Or who he wanted it for. I can’t leave you alone here.”

  She got to her feet, frowning, looking angry and irritable. “I’m not going to go away from my house. I just got this house, I’m not going away from it.” She went over to the sink with her plate and cup, turned the water on, left it on and stood there with her back to him.

  Parker walked around the table and stood beside her. “I can’t wait here for it, not knowing what it is. I have to go see Keegan. I know where he was headed from the job, I’ll go there and see him and find out what’s going on. But what if there’s trouble from ‘somebody else, and they come here while I’m gone?”

  “Leave me a gun.”

  “That isn’t sensible.”

  Both hands gripping tight to the lip of the sink, as though she was prepared to resist being dragged physically out of the house, she turned her head and stared coldly at him and said, “I am not going to leave my house.”

  He hesitated, then shrugged and turned away. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Keegan was nailed to the wall. His naked body had been cigarette-burned and scratched with a knife-tip, but it was probably the bleeding around the nails in his forearms that had killed him. He looked shriveled and small hanging there, his feet crumpled against the floor beneath him.

  Keegan was a drinker who liked isolation, so there’d been no need to gag him. This Minnesota farmhouse surrounded by dairy grazing land was half a mile from the nearest neighbor. He could be left to either scream or tell the people torturing him what they wanted to know.

  Parker touched the corpse’s chest, and it was cold; they must have started on him very soon after he’d made his call to Handy. Had they been with him then—was it for them he’d phoned Handy?

  It was now shortly after midnight. Parker had driven from Claire’s house to Newark Airport, had taken the first plane to Minneapolis, and had stolen a white Dodge station wagon in the airport parking lot for the forty-five-mile drive to this house. He’d seen the house for the last quarter mile or more, all lit up as though for a night wedding, but when he’d gotten here the light had shone on empty rooms and silence. He’d entered the house cautiously, searched it room by room, and at last he’d found Keegan nailed to an upstairs bedroom wall, long since dead.

  And the house torn apart. Besides what they’d done to Keegan, they’d ripped the house open from top to bottom, looking for something. The fact that no rooms at all were left unstripped suggested they hadn’t found what they were looking for.

  In the kitchen, there’d been dishes in the sink and on the table to show where two men had eaten two meals, a dinner and a breakfast. So they’d been out of here already by the time Handy had called Parker today at noon.

  Parker made a fast surface scan of the house, and the
n left. He’d worn rubber gloves inside, except when he’d stripped one off so he could feel the coldness of Keegan’s chest, and now he stood beside the Dodge and peeled the gloves off, put them in his pocket, and held his hands out in the air a minute, flexing the fingers, letting the skin get dry and cool. He frowned toward the house, thinking. Berridge dead; Keegan tortured and dead, his house searched. Keegan trying to locate Parker, just before the torturing started. Somebody wanted something, and the connecting link was Berridge.

  Why kill Berridge back in the hideout? After killing him, why not stick around?

  Because four men would be showing up, and these were only two. Better to wait till the four split up, and go after them one at a time. Follow one home, start with him, locate the others through him.

  AH three others? Or just Parker? And how were they traveling? Could they be on the East Coast already?

  Parker got into the Dodge and headed back toward Minneapolis. After fifteen miles he saw the light of a phone booth outside a closed gas station in a silent empty dark town. The phone booth, three streetlights, a yellow blinker at the only intersection, that was the extent of the illumination in the town. Parker rolled to a stop beside the phone booth, cut the Dodge’s lights, left the motor running, and got out. He had a pocket full of change, which he took out while walking to the phone booth and put on the metal tray in there. He left the door open, so the interior light stayed off, only the light on top continuing to shine. When the blinker signal at the intersection was on, there was enough light to dial by; when it was off, he paused for a second with his finger waiting in front of the dial.

  An operator came on to tell him how much, and he put the coins in during the phases of yellow light. Then there was a long silence punctuated by clicks, one ring sound, and Claire’s voice: “Hello?”

  “It’s me. How are things?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “No visitors?”

  “Nobody at all. Will you be back soon?”

  “My friend died of a lingering illness. Very painful illness.”

  A little silence, and then a small voice: “Oh.”

  Only so much could be said on a telephone. “You ought to take a day or two off. Go to New York, do some shopping.”

  “I don’t want to leave my house,” she said.

  “This is serious!”

  “So am I. Tomorrow I’ll buy a dog.”

  “I’m talking about tonight.”

  “I’ll be all right. I went out and got a rifle.”

  Parker frowned at the phone. He wanted to tell her a house with all those windows, all those exterior doors, couldn’t be defended, not with a rifle, not with a dog. Not against two men who nail a man to a wall and burn him with cigarettes. But you couldn’t say things to a telephone that you wouldn’t be willing to say to a district attorney, so he tried to get his meaning into his voice instead of his words: “I think you ought to go away.”

  “I know what you think,” she said, and then tried to soften it, saying, “I know you’re worried about me. But you just don’t know what this house means to me. I can’t go away from it, not after I just got into it. I won’t be driven away from it.”

  There was a little silence then while he thought, until she said, “Hello? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  He was thinking about going back, waiting for them to show up. His instinct was against it; when the opposition is coming at you, the best place to be is on their back trail, coming up behind them. But how could he leave Claire in the house alone?

  The decision was hers. He had to handle it the way he knew was right, no matter what. He said, “What you do right now, you pack everything there that’s mine and get it out. Stow it all in one of the empty houses around there. But do it now, don’t wait till morning.”

  “You don’t have that much here.”

  “So it won’t take long. If anybody comes looking for me, you don’t fight them. Understand me? You don’t fight them.”

  “What do I do instead?”

  “Tell them you just run a message service, you only see me two or three times a year, when I give you some money for taking care of my messages. What you tell them, any time a message comes for me you call the Wilmington Hotel in New York and leave it for me in the name of Edward Latham. You got that?”

  “Yes. But what—?”

  “Give me the names back.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Yes. Those are the names to use.”

  “Wilmington Hotel. Edward— I’m sorry.”

  “Latham. Edward Latham.”

  She repeated the name. “Is that all?”

  “Don’t antagonize them. They’re very mean people.”

  “I know how to be a little mouse,” she said.

  “That’s good. I’ll get back there as soon as I can.”

  “I know you will.”

  “Clean my stuff out of there right away.”

  “I will.”

  He broke the connection, put in a dime, dialed 2125551212, got the Wilmington Hotel’s phone number from New York City Information, dialed it, pumped more change in the box, and got the desk clerk.

  “I want to make a reservation for three days starting Thursday.”

  “Name, sir?”

  “Latham. Edward Latham.”

  “Home address?”

  “Newcastle Business Machines, Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

  “That’s a single, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “For three nights.”

  “Yes.”

  “We will hold the reservation until three p.m. on Thursday.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Thank you for calling the Wilmington, sir.”

  Parker broke the connection again and dialed a number in Chicago. It rang six times, and then a heavy male voice came on, saying, “I hope to hell this isn’t a wrong number. You know what time it is?”

  “I’m looking for a fellow named Briley. He and I just did some musical work together.”

  “You the guy called the day before yesterday?”

  “No. That was Keegan.”

  “He called at a better time of day, my friend, but I’ll tell you just what I told him. Our friend is partying in Detroit. No fixed abode.”

  “No contact? You’re supposed to be his contact.” As Handy was Parker’s.

  “I know what I’m supposed to be. You know a girl in Detroit named Evelyn?”

  “No.”

  “Evelyn Keane. You’ll find her.” There was a click.

  Parker hung up, and a tractor trailer roared by, down-shifting as it went through the little town. It was the only traffic that had passed here since Parker had stopped the car. He stood in the phone-booth doorway now, and watched the truck taillights recede, the red lights outlining the trailer body. He frowned at the departing lights, thinking.

  He had no way to get to Morris. No matter what means of transportation Keegan’s killers were using, it made sense for them to work in a straight line, which would mean Detroit before the East Coast, starting from Minnesota. So there should be safe time for Claire in that. Maybe.

  Parker went over and got into the Dodge and drove it back to the slot he’d stolen it from in the Minneapolis airport parking lot.

  There were no girls in the booths at this time of day, and no customers at the bar. When Parker walked in, the only person present was the bartender, writing on a sheet of paper beside the open cash register. Parker went over and sat down on a stool, and the bartender looked sideways at him and said, “I can’t serve you a drink this early. Against the law.”

  “I don’t want a drink. I want a girl named Evelyn Keane.”

  “Mrs. Keane? She isn’t one of the girls here.”

  “I don’t want her for that. I want her because she knows how I can get in touch with a friend of mine.”

  The bartender tapped the eraser of his pencil against his front teeth. “I don’t know her personally,” he said th
oughtfully. “I think I may have heard the name. I could ask around.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll just make a couple phone calls. I can sell you a soda.”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “Up to you. It just makes me nervous to have a John at the bar with no glass, in front of him. I’ll be right . back.”

  Parker read the bottle labels on the back bar for three minutes, and then the bartender came back with a folded piece of paper. “I was told this was the place you ought to go.”

  . “Thanks.” Parker reached for his wallet.

  “On the house,” the bartender said. “Come back when you can buy me a drink.”

  “Right.”

  Parker went out and got a cab and took it to the address he’d been given, a brick apartment building constructed between the wars in a neighborhood that hadn’t gotten better. There was no name in the slot next to the button for 5-F. Parker pushed it, waited to identify himself, and didn’t have to; the buzzer sounded right away, unlocking the door.

  There was no elevator, and 5-F was on the top floor. He went up, hearing nothing from the top of the stairwell, and walked along the carpeted corridor to the apartment door. Light bulbs imitating candle flames were in wall sconces imitating candles, but only three of them were lit, leaving the hall in semi-darkness.

  Parker rang the bell, and the man who opened the door had a gun in his hand. “Come in,” he said.

  Parker held his hands out from his body, and went in.

  There were four of them in the living room, but only one counted: the middle-aged fat man sitting on the sofa, rolling a cigar in his fingers. The other three, including the one who’d opened the door, were just hoods, extensions of the fat man’s will.

  The fat man said, “Search him.”

  Parker said, “I have an automatic under my left arm and a knife under my collar in back.”

  The fat man frowned at him, and said nothing, while one of the hoods frisked him. He came up with the automatic and the knife, and put them on the console television set. Then he shook his head at the fat man, and stepped back out of the way.

  The fat man said, “What you got a knife down your back for?”

  “In case somebody tells me to put my hands up.”