The Seventh

by Richard Stark

  “You wouldn't be selling nothing? Encyclopedias, nothing like that?”

  “Word of honor, I am not selling a thing. You have a television set?”

  “Sure.”

  Sure. Everybody has a television set. Ask a man does he go to the movies, see what happens. But everybody has a television set, even beatniks. It offended Clinger, it made him feel like the butt of a joke to have to play the role of a television pollster, but Parker was right that this was the best way to handle it. In any case, he couldn't think of any better way.

  He said, “I could come in?”

  “Yeah, sure, what the hell.”

  Clinger smiled his thanks and went on in.

  From here on, it should be smooth sailing. The bit was, he would ask about television viewing habits, and in the course of it he'd find out whether the suspect was watching television this Tuesday night when Parker's woman was killed. If the suspect was, then he wasn't a suspect anymore. If he wasn't, a few sly questions might find out what he was doing, or, if the suspect insisted on being vague about his movements Tuesday, then Clinger would so report to Kifka, and someone else would try a different tack.

  In any case, Clinger's part shouldn't take more than five minutes and was safe as houses.

  Except for the two bulky men who got to their feet as he walked into the living room, took their hands from their topcoat pockets, and began to walk toward him. One of them opened his mouth and said something to Clinger about showing his company identification.

  Cops. Real cops.

  The gun in Clinger's pocket had never felt so heavy or so useless or so monstrous, like a boil on the back of the neck. Without the gun, at least it would be possible he could fast-talk himself out of this. Without the gun, at the very worst he could clam up and wait it out and eventually be given an opportunity to jump bail because they really didn't have anything on him.

  But with the gun, he was already breaking a law, concealed weapons; they had him as easy as pie.

  Jail. He remembered it—gray and bleak and boring, impossible to survive in twice. No money, no soft furniture, no blonde.

  He turned and ran, side-stepping the man of the house, bursting through the doorway and into the hall again. Behind him, shouts and imprecations, thudding of heavy feet.

  Running, he fumbled the gun out of his pocket, meaning to get rid of it somehow, somewhere. Down the elevator shaft, in the incinerator, out a window, just anywhere. If they didn't catch him with the gun in his possession, actually in his possession, he still had a chance.

  Behind him, the cops had already seen the gun in his waving hand and had misunderstood his purpose in holding it. They had their own guns out, and when they shouted to him to stop and to drop the gun and he did neither, they opened fire, the shots cracking out in the narrow hallway with a sound like mountains breaking.

  Two bullets buzzed past Clinger's head, and he kept running. The third thudded into his skull, hit him in the bald spot like it was a target, and he ran down.

  The husk of Abe Clinger skidded to a stop along the hall floor.

  5

  Little Bob Negli liked to drive, so he and Arnie bought a car with separately adjustable bucket seats. That way, Little Bob could sit far enough forward for his short legs to reach the controls, and Arnie could sit far enough back to be comfortable. Their life together was a lot of compromises and adjustments like that, and most of the time things ran smoothly.

  Except for other people. If it had been just the two of them, no one else around at all, they'd never have had any trouble; they'd have worked everything out the way they worked out the seating arrangement in the car. But there were other people in the world, and now and again they caused trouble.

  Like women. Sometimes Arnie got a hankering for a woman, and off he went to get one, and Little Bob had nothing to do but sit around and wait for Arnie to come back, with or without a dose. Arnie always chose the sloppiest, scabbiest, rottenest tramps in the world when he wanted a woman, so Little Bob always made Arnie go to a doctor for a checkup before letting him back.

  And like men. Some men just irritated Little Bob, aggravated him like itching powder, and the first thing anybody knew he'd be starting a fight. With somebody like Parker, say, who'd kill you as quick as look at you. Arnie was always after Little Bob to watch his mouth, quit picking fights, quit acting like such a troublemaker.

  So Little Bob was annoyed by the women Arnie picked to sleep with, and Arnie was annoyed by the men Little Bob picked to fight with, but these two gripes were just about the only problems in their life together. It struck them both as a small price to pay.

  Little Bob now sat in the car parked by a fire hydrant, waiting for Arnie to come back from another interview. Little Bob himself was too chancy a character to be trusted, going around asking questions of strangers. He'd be in a brawl within an hour, and that usually meant bad trouble. Being so small, he figured it wasn't up to him to fight fair. He kept a switchblade knife close to his left hand, and a .25 Beretta automatic close to his right.

  That's why Little Bob was doing just the driving and Arnie the questioning. Again it was a compromise that worked out fine for both of them. Little Bob liked to drive, and Arnie liked to talk with people.

  It was about two in the afternoon. Arnie had questioned four guys last night and five more this morning and had gotten nowhere. Two so far hadn't automatically eliminated themselves with the television gambit, and Arnie had passed their names on for Parker and Shelly to check, but apparently neither of them had been the guy they were after. So now they'd run out of the other names and were working at last on the original list the cop had given Parker. Arnie was in there talking to the first of them now.

  Little Bob wasn't pleased about it. It figured the law was watching this place—waiting for Parker to show up. Little Bob hadn't been able to spot them yet, but they had to be somewhere around. And what if they decided to question Arnie? That would be just one more thing he'd have against Parker.

  Waiting for Arnie, Little Bob took the time to nurse his grudge against Parker. Parker had manhandled him back at Vimorama, but that was nothing. The big gripe was that Parker lost the goods, caused all this trouble. Because of a woman, naturally. Shacked up with some woman he doesn't know anything about, and naturally she's got enemies, and the whole thing follows like the night the day. Why they'd trusted Parker with the nick in the first place he'd never know.

  Looking out the windshield, thinking about Parker, Little Bob suddenly saw Arnie coming out of the apartment house ahead in the hands of the law.

  It had to be law, two stocky types with fat faces and cheap topcoats. They flanked Arnie on either side, and the way his hands were behind his back had to mean they'd put the cuffs on him. The cops had been inside.

  Damn Parker!

  Little Bob shifted into drive, and the car inched forward close to the curb. He knew Arnie would have seen him coming, out of the corner of his eye, and it all depended now on timing.

  There were parked cars up there. Little Bob angled out around them, glided forward, and leaned way over to his right to unlatch the passenger door and then, as he braked at the spot between two parked cars, and as Arnie made his move, Little Bob shoved the passenger door open and reached out to drag Arnie aboard.

  Arnie had moved right, lunging backward at first to throw them off balance, then bumping both and crashing on through and between the parked cars where there was just enough room for him, running like an ice skater about to lose his balance because of the handcuffs holding his hands behind his back, and just as he dove for the open door of the car the booming started, and Arnie's face, as he dove still in midair, turned suddenly gray, and he crash-landed half in and half out of the car, and Little Bob's reaching hand, clawing across Arnie's face, felt the flesh pasty and soft.

  Arnie was sliding backward out of the car, his cheek scraping back across the red upholstery of the bucket seat. The booming went on, and the windshield starred as a bullet went thr
ough, and there was nothing for it but to hit the accelerator and get out of there, leaving Arnie behind dying or dead; nothing else to do, no other way.

  Within eight blocks, twisting and turning, he knew he was clear. He slammed the car into a parking space and got out, leaving it there forever.

  Dead or dying. The whole setup shot now, shot forever. There'd never again be a team like Little Bob Negli and Arnie Feccio.

  And all because of Parker, that stupid bastard, that clod, that mindless bungler. Parker was the one to blame.

  “I'm going to get you, Parker,” he said. He threw the car keys into a garbage can and walked on.

  6

  For a man who hated to talk, being a polltaker wasn't an easy job. Pete Rudd hated to talk.

  Like Abe Clinger, Rudd had come to his profession as a second choice. He'd started as a carpenter and cabinet-maker, and he did slow and careful work with very expensive wood. It was difficult for him to find good materials, but that wasn't enough to drive him out of the business. What drove him out was the lack of good customers.

  Outside every large city in the country there is a highway flanked by shopping centers and discount stores, like a row of roofed-over city dumps. In these places, in plastic or cheap wood, shoddily assembled, barren of design, can be found the sort of product Pete Rudd was making slowly and carefully in a drafty workshop with concrete floor. Rudd's work cost five times what the competition was charging, and would last ten times as long. He came close, a few times, to starving to death.

  He made a trunk for a customer one time, a special sort of trunk with a hidden inner compartment. The customer offered him extra money to keep the secret of the trunk a secret, and Rudd refused it; it was ridiculous to pay Rudd to be silent. When the customer came back with an illegal proposition for Rudd two months later, Rudd looked into his empty cash register, leafed through his unpaid bills, and joined the mob that took the Regal Electronics payroll in Mobile. His job in that one was to dummy up the interior of a truck with a fake partition behind which five men could hide.

  For a while after that, the occasional robberies helped to keep his woodworking business solvent, but gradually he was doing less and less woodworking, because while the robberies solved his lack of money, they didn't solve his lack of customers. By now the woodworking was down to a hobby and an easy cover of respectability; Rudd's main profession was heisting.

  The nice thing about the job, for him, was that it practically never required talking. Other people, people like Parker, did all the planning and explaining. They told Rudd what they wanted him to do, and he did his part not caring about how it fit into the general scheme, and when the job was over he took his split and went home.

  Sometimes things went wrong, jobs turned sour. When that happened, he went home without any money, but he still went home. He'd never been touched by the law, and he saw no reason why he ever would be.

  Which was one of the reasons he didn't like hanging around here in this city this time. There was law all over the place. The take, his share of it, was only around twenty thousand dollars anyway. He could get that somewhere else before the year was up.

  But the others were all in it, so he had to be in it too. So here he was, carrying a clipboard, walking around asking dumb questions, checking back with Kifka every once in a while to tell him how he'd done so far and to get another trio of names, and then off again.

  This one was a walk-up, a furnished room. Rudd doggedly climbed the stairs and knocked on the door, and after a minute it was opened by a tall, broad-shouldered young man with a deep tan. He looked like a halfback on a college football team. His expression was suspicious as he said, “What is it? What do you want?”

  Rudd knew immediately the television gambit would be no good here; in a furnished room like this, this guy wouldn't have a television set. So he said, “Radio.”

  The guy frowned. “What? What's that?”

  “Radio,” said Rudd. “I'm from Associated Polls, we want to know when you listen to the radio.”

  “Radio? I don't listen to the radio, I just moved in here.”

  “We want to know,” Rudd said, pushing it, “what programs you listened to on Tuesday night. Did you listen to the special—”

  “Tuesday night? What about Tuesday night?”

  “We want to know—”

  “Come on in here. Come on.”

  Rudd went in and the guy shut the door. It was a small square box of a room, badly furnished.

  The guy turned around from the door and hit Rudd with his closed fist on the side of the head. Rudd stumbled and fell over a chair, and the guy came after him and kicked him in the small of the back. “Who sent you?” he said. “Who sent you here?”

  After a while, Rudd told him.

  7

  Ray Shelly was an easygoing sort. Only once in his life had he hit anyone in anger, and that was a major in the United States Army. Shelly at the time was a private in the United States Army, and in the major's private bed, and very close to the major's wife. The major, returning unexpectedly and finding his wife and Shelly in bed together, had taken one look at the size of Shelly and had then started to beat up on his wife instead. He got to hit her twice before Shelly flattened him. Shelly got six months stockade and a bad conduct discharge out of that, the major got a transfer to a base where his presence wouldn't cause so many snickers, and his wife got a change-of-life baby.

  Sitting on the sofa in the living room of a guy named Fred Burrows now, Shelly thought about that time and wondered how the major was treating his kid. The kid would be eight years old now. Nine. No, eight.

  Parker was doing the talking for both of them, so Shelly didn't have to waste any time listening. He and Parker had already gone through this routine four other times, and it hadn't come to anything yet, and he didn't really expect it would come to anything this time. This Fred Burrows looked about as dangerous as a ladybug, soft and plump and scaredy-cat. He blinked a lot.

  What they were supposed to be, him and Parker, they were supposed to be law. Parker always had these identification cards, driver's licenses, discharge photostats, credit cards, all these bits and pieces of paper he kept assembling with other people's names on them, and when it was necessary for him and Shelly to ape law, out he came with a couple of identification cards that said POLICE all over them. They weren't for this city, but nobody reads a cop's card that close.

  This was their fifth call. Whenever Feccio or Clinger or Rudd ran into somebody they couldn't fix with the television questions, they passed the word on to Dan Kifka back at Vimorama, and Kifka passed the word on to Parker and Shelly, and Parker and Shelly went visiting in law face. The dodge was, they were investigating the murder of Ellen Canaday, and they wanted to know where this particular gismo was on Tuesday night. After they got the answer they checked it if necessary, and wound up scratching another name off the list.

  Like this boy Fred Burrows. Shelly didn't have to listen to the questions or the answers; he already knew you could scratch Fred off the list. But Parker was going through it all anyway, just like it mattered. Parker was thorough, and Shelly recognized that was a good way to be. Not for himself, though; he was too easygoing to be thorough.

  Parker at last gave the high-sign they were finished, and Shelly got to his feet, stretching his back and twirling his hat like any harness bull anywhere. Parker told Fred Burrows, “We'll be in touch. Don't leave town.” Shelly scratched his nose to hide a grin, and they went on out of there, leaving Fred Burrows smiling painfully in the doorway.

  Out on the street, Parker said, “He's out.”

  “I knew that all the time.”

  Parker shrugged, looking around. “We'll go back to Vimorama,” he said.

  “Sure thing.”

  They walked down to Shelly's car, a seven-year-old Pontiac with a five-year-old Mercury powerplant and Ford pickup transmission. It looked like hell, and it sounded like hell, but it also went like hell.

  Driving out to Vi
morama, Parker said, “I don't like the smell of it. It's going to be one of the cop's nine.”

  “We'll know pretty soon.”

  “I don't like going near those nine. What if the law grabs anybody that comes along, doesn't just wait for me?”

  Shelly shrugged and said, “If it was me, I'd give myself up peaceful as could be and say I was doing it for a joke. They might have me on some kind of misdemeanor, gaining entry under false pretenses or something like that, but that couldn't hurt me none. I'd just wait them out.”

  Parker shook his head. “I just don't like it,” he said.

  Out at Vimorama, they took the car around on the gravel driveway to the rear of the property, where it couldn't be seen from the highway. They got out and started crunching back across the gravel to Unit One, where Kifka was. Shelly walked on the right, Parker on the left.

  Shelly, glancing to his right, saw Little Bob Negli suddenly pop out from behind one of the cabins over there. He had a gun in his hand, a little gun, shrimp-size like himself.

  Negli shouted, “Shelly, move over!”

  Shelly had been starting to grin. Now he started to frown instead. “Bob, what the hell are you—”

  “Move out of the way!”

  Then, beyond Negli, Shelly saw someone else, a young guy, heavyset like a football player, loping forward between the cabins. Everybody had a gun in his hand all of a sudden; the young guy's hand bulged with a .45 automatic.

  Shelly shouted and dragged his own pistol out from under his coat. But Negli must have misunderstood. He shot Shelly three times.

  8

  After the man named Pete Rudd told him everything he wanted to know, he knocked Rudd out with his fist and got ready to leave here.

  It had been pleasurable, forcing Rudd to talk. The last time he'd felt that way, free and exalted and as strong as a redwood tree, was back in college in football season. Hitting a man was like hitting a line; exulting in your own strength and the chance to bruise and push and bull your way through.