Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  “Where’d you get him?”

  “A fella named Pete Rudd, that’s reliable.”

  “I don’t think I know any Rudds, but I’ll take your word for it. Does this river rat get a full share?”

  “No.”

  Sternberg smiled. “Does he get anything?”

  Parker shrugged. “Sure, why not. If he does his job, and lets it go at that.”

  4

  All-City Surgical and Homecare Supply occupied an old loft building in the east twenties of Manhattan, among importers, jobbers, restaurant equipment wholesalers, and a button manufacturer. Because there are petty thieves always at work in the city, every one of these buildings was protected at night by heavy metal gates over their street-level entrances and display windows, plus gates locked over every window that faced a fire escape.

  Because none of the businesses on this block did much by way of walk-in trade, they all shut down by five or six in the afternoon, so when Parker and Car-low drove down the block at quarter after six that Wednesday evening nothing was open. One curb was lined with parked cars, but there was very little moving traffic and almost no pedestrians.

  They stopped in front of All-City Surgical and Homecare, and got out of the van they’d lifted earlier today over in New Jersey. On both sides, the van said, TRI*STATE CARTAGE, with a colored painting of a forklift. Carlow stood watching as Parker bent over the padlock holding the gate and tried the half-dozen keys in his palm, one of which would have to work on this kind of lock.

  It was the third. Parker removed the padlock, opened the hasp, and shoved the gate upward. It made a racket, but that didn’t matter. It was full daylight, they were clearly workmen doing a legitimate job, they had a key, they weren’t trying to hide or sneak around, and what would they find to steal, anyway, in a place full of wheelchairs and crutches?

  The fourth of another set of keys opened the entrance door, and as they stepped inside Parker was already taking the small screwdriver from his pocket. Right there was the alarm keypad, just to the left of the door, its red light gleaming in the semi-darkness. While Carlow lowered the gate and shut the door, Parker unscrewed the pad and pulled it from the wall. He had either thirty or forty-five seconds, depending on the model, before the pad would signal the security company’s office; plenty of time. He didn’t know the four-digit code that would disarm the system, but it would work just as well to short it across these two connections back here.

  Done. He put the pad back in the wall, screwed it in place, and Carlow said, “There’s some over here.”

  Wheelchairs.

  It was a deep broad dark shop, with a counter facing forward near the back, and two doors in the wall beyond it leading to what must be storage areas. Here in the front part, there were shelves and bins down both sides, behind lines of wheelchairs, motorized and not, plus scooters for the handicapped and wooden barrels with forests of crutches standing in them.

  Parker found a switch for the overhead fluorescents, turned it on, and they went over to see what was available. A lot of different kinds, it turned out, but what they wanted was a non-motorized wheelchair with handles that extended back so someone could push it. There were different kinds of those, too, so next they were interested in what was under the seat of each kind.

  “Take a look at this,” Carlow said.

  He’d found one with an enclosed black plastic box built in beneath the seat, curved across the front and angled where the sides met the back. There was a chrome handle in the middle of the back, and when Carlow had tugged on it the whole box slid back. It had no top except the seat, against which it made a tight fit, though the seat didn’t move with the box, and the inside was filled almost completely by a white plastic bowl with an arced metal rod attached to it. When stashed, the metal rod lay flat in a grove on top of the bowl, but when the box was pulled out the rod could be lifted into a carrying handle, and the bowl would lift out.

  They looked at this thing. Carlow lifted the bowl out of the box and looked at the blank black space inside it, shaped to fit the bowl. He put the bowl back. Meantime, Parker looked at the seat and saw the cushion was a donut, with a hole in the center, and a round panel in the plastic seat itself could be swiveled out of the way, revealing a hole above the bowl. “It’s so whoever’s in the wheelchair can go to the can,” he said. “There’s probably tubes and such, somewhere around here.”

  “Jesus,” Carlow said. He pushed the box back under the seat, where it clicked into place. “What a life,” he said.

  “You’d get used to it,” Parker told him. “People get used to everything but being dead.”

  Carlow went on to look at other wheelchairs, but Parker stayed with the one with the bowl. He studied the way the parts were put together, the wheels and the frame and the seat and the back and the foot supports and the handles.

  After a while, Carlow came over again. “This one, you think?”

  “Is there another one like it?”

  “Yeah, same gray. Over there.”

  “We’ll take them both,” Parker said.

  “What do we need two for?”

  “Because I want the second box. If we walk out of here with two wheelchairs, no signs of entry, nothing fucked up, they’ll think their records are wrong. And if they don’t, the cops will. But if we take just the box and leave the chair, they’ll knowsomebody was in here. I don’t want a lot of cops looking for a hot wheelchair.”

  “Okay.” Carlow gave the wheelchair a critical look. “You sure that’s big enough down there?”

  “We can move the seat up, dick around with it a little. There’ll be room.”

  Carlow was still not sure, although Parker was already walking one of the wheelchairs toward the door. Carlow called after him, “Won’t they pull that handle? Won’t they look in there?”

  “Not twice,” Parker said over his shoulder, and Car-low laughed and went to get the other wheelchair.

  5

  Normally, Parker would stay as far as he could from any civilian that might be involved with a piece of work, and he’d prefer to stay away from Cathman, too, but he couldn’t. The man bothered him, he rang tin somehow. Was he a nutcase all of a sudden, after all those years running in the squirrel cage, liking it? If so, what kind of nutcase was he, and how much trouble could he cause if he flipped out the rest of the way? And if not, if Cathman actually had some sort of idea or plan behind what he was doing, Parker needed to know that, too. No civilian agendas allowed.

  According to Claire, Cathman had owned his home, a single-family house in an Albany suburb called Delmar, for twenty-seven years. Mortgage all paid up, his free and clear. His three daughters grew up there and married and moved out. His wife died there, seven years ago. He was still in the house. It ought to know everything about him by now.

  Parker drove the Subaru down that block at three-thirty in the afternoon. Small two-story clapboard houses dating from the late forties’ building boom lined both sides, each with a neat lawn in front and a neat driveway to one side. They’d started out looking all the same, cookie-cutter tract houses, but owners had altered and adapted and added to them over the years, so that by now they looked like relatives but not clones.

  Cathman’s was number 437, and his additions had been an attached garage at the top of the driveway and the enclosing of the front porch with windows that bounced back the spring sun. Shades were drawn over those windows and over the front windows upstairs.

  Parker took the next left and drove two blocks back out to the main shopping street, where there was a supermarket on the near right corner. He left the Subaru there, put on the dark blue jacket that read Niagara-Mohawk Electricacross the back, picked up the clipboard from the passenger seat, and walked away down the sidewalk, the only pedestrian in miles.

  In front of Cathman’s house, he stopped to consult the clipboard, then walked up the driveway. A narrow concrete path went around the garage, and he followed it to the back yard, which was weedy and shaggy and uncared f
or. Chain-link fence separated it from the better-kept yards to both sides, and a tall wooden fence had been built for privacy by the neighbor at the rear. Some kids were playing with toy trucks in a yard half a block down to the right; they never glanced Parker’s way.

  The lock on the kitchen door was nothing. He went through it without damaging it, and spent the next hour tossing the house, careful but thorough. He moved furniture so he could roll up carpets to look for trapdoors to hiding places. He checked the ceilings and back walls of closets, and removed every drawer from every dresser and table and desk and built-in in the house. He stuck a knife in the coffee and in the flour, he took the backs off both TVs, he took off and then replaced every light switch and outlet plate. At the end, he put everything back the way it had been.

  Nothing was hidden, nothing here changed the idea of Cathman as a solid citizen, predictable and dull. The only thing new Parker learned was that Cathman was looking for a job. He’d written more or less the same letter to about twenty government agencies and large corporations, listing his qualifications and stating his availability. The answers he got and he always got an answer were polite and respectful and not interested.

  Clearly, he did this stuff at home, in this office upstairs at the back of the house that must originally have been a daughter’s bedroom, because he didn’t want his Rosemary Shields to know he was on a job hunt. That consulting business was just a face-saver, it cost him money instead of making money. He wasn’t strapped yet, but how long could he keep up the fake show? Was that reason enough to turn to the heisters?

  Parker finished with the house at ten to five. There was no beer in Cathman’s refrigerator, but an open jug of Italian white wine was in there, cork stuck partway back in the bottle. Parker poured himself a glass, then sat in the dim living room and thought about the things that needed to be done. Noelle. The wheelchair. An ambulance or some kind of van that could take the wheelchair with a person in it. The limo for Lou. The chauffeur uniform. The guns. And Cathman’s part: ID.

  He heard the garage door motor switch on, and got up to go to the kitchen, where the side door connected with the garage. He refilled his glass, and poured a second, and when Cathman walked in, slope-shouldered and discouraged, Parker was just turning with a glass in each hand. “You look like you could use this,” he said.

  Cathman stared at him, first in astonishment, then in fear, and then, when he understood the glass that was extended toward him, in bewilderment. “What what are you”

  “Take the glass, Cathman.”

  Cathman finally did, but didn’t immediately drink. And now, because of having been startled and scared, he was moving toward anger. “You broke in here? You just come in my house?”

  “We’ll talk in the living room,” Parker told him, and turned away, and Cathman had no choice but to follow.

  The electric company jacket and the clipboard were on the sofa. Parker sat next to them, drank some wine, put the glass on the end table beside him, looked at Cathman standing in the doorway unable to figure out what to do next, and said, “Sit down, Cathman, we got things to talk about.”

  Cathman blinked at him, and looked around the room. Trying to sound aggrieved, but coming off as merely weak, he said, “Did you searchin here?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Naturally? Why? What did you want to find?”

  “You,” Parker said. “You don’t add up, and I want to know why.”

  “I told you who I am.”

  Parker said nothing to that. Cathman looked at the glass in his hand, as though just realizing it was there. He shook his head, walked over to sit in the easy chair to Parker’s right, and drank a small sip from the glass.

  Parker wanted to shake him up, disturb him, see what fell out, but at the same time not to spook him so much he couldn’t be useful any more. So he’d come in here and show himself, but not make a mess. Not sit in the living room in the dimness when he comes home, but stand in the kitchen and offer him a glass of wine. Give a little, then get hard a little. Watch the reactions. Watch him, for instance, just take that tiny sip of wine and put the glass down. So he’s under good control, whatever’s driving him it isn’t panic.

  Cathman put the glass down, and frowned at Parker. “Did you learn anything, coming in here like this?”

  “You aren’t a consultant, you’re a guy out of work.”

  “I’m both, as a matter of fact,” Cathman said. “I know your type, you know. You want to be just a little menacing, so people won’t try to take advantage of you, so they’ll do what you want them to do. But I don’t believe it’s just bluff, or I’d wash my hands of you now. It’s habit, that’s all, probably learned in prison. I’ll do you the favor of ignoring it, and you’ll do me the favor of not being more aggravating than you can help.”

  “Well, you’re pretty cool, aren’t you?” Parker said. “I came in here to read you, so now you’re gonna read me.”

  “I see you disguised yourself as a meter reader or some such thing,” Cathman said. “But I’d rather you didn’t do it again. If something goes wrong and you get arrested, I don’t want to be connected to a criminal named Parker.”

  Ignoring that, Parker said, “What I need is ID, two pieces.”

  Cathman frowned. “What sort of ID?”

  “You tell me. If an assemblyman is out on an official job of some kind, he might ask for bodyguards, right?”

  “Not bodyguards, not exactly,” Cathman said. “Oh, is that what you’re going to do, go on board as assemblyman Kotkind? Is that why I gave you his letterhead stationery?”

  “What do you mean, not exactly bodyguards?”

  “He might ask for a state trooper, to drive him, if it’s official.”

  “In a patrol car?”

  “No, a state car, with the state seal on the doors. Black, usually.”

  “Trooper in uniform?”

  “Probably not,” Cathman said. “He’d be a plain-clothesman from the security detail.”

  “Then that’s the ID I want,” Parker said. “Two of them.”

  “They’d be photo IDs.”

  “Then get me blanks. Get me something I can adapt.”

  Cathman picked up the wine glass, took a sip, brooded at Parker. He said, “When are you going to do it? The robbery.”

  “Pretty soon. So get me the IDs.”

  “No, I mean when.”

  “I know what you mean,” Parker told him. Leaving his wine unfinished, he got to his feet and said, “I’ll call you here, next Monday, in the evening, tell you where to bring them.”

  Cathman also stood. “Are you going to do it next week?”

  Parker shrugged into the jacket, picked up the clipboard. “I’ll call you Monday,” he said, and left.

  6

  “I bet that’s her,” Carlow said.

  Parker looked, and it was. Among the people getting off the Chicago Trailways bus here at the Albany terminal, that was the remembered face and figure of Noelle Braselle. She looked to be about thirty, tall and slender and very together, but she also looked like a college girl, with her narrow-legged blue jeans and bulky orange sweater crossed by the straps of a dark blue backpack, and her straight brown hair pulled back from her oval face to a black barrette and a short ponytail. She saw Parker and Carlow across the street from the terminal and waved, and as the other disembarking passengers crowded around the driver while he pulled their luggage out from the bus’s lower storage area, she came across to them, smiling. Noelle traveled light. “Long time no see,” she said to Parker.

  “You haven’t changed,” he told her.

  “I sure hope not,” she said, and raised a curious eyebrow at Carlow.

  Parker said, “Noelle, this is Mike Carlow. He’s your driver.”

  “Mydriver?”

  “We’re taking different routes, on the night. Come on, I’ll tell you about it.”

  They’d borrowed Wycza’s big Lexus, for comfort, because it was almost an hour drive from here to
Tooler’s cottages, and it was parked now a block from the terminal. As they walked, Noelle said, “You still got that nice lady stashed?”

  “Claire,” Parker agreed. “Yeah, we’re together.”

  “Good. Tommy and I split, you know.”

  “I heard.”

  “Funny,” she said. “I used to think there wasn’t anything would scare him, then all at once everything did, and goodbye, Harry. Is this it? Nicer than a bus.”

  “Very like a bus,” Carlow told her.

  Carlow drove, Noelle beside him, Parker in back. They had to cross the river on one of the big swooping bridges here, and then head south. Parker said, “You remember Lou Sternberg.”

  “From that painting disaster? Angry guy, overweight, drove the big truck.”

  “That’s him. He’s with us on this. And a guy I don’t think you know, Dan Wycza.”

  She turned to grin at Parker in the back seat and say, “I hope this one comes out a little better.”

  “It will,” he said.

  Wycza, in shorts and sneakers, was doing push-ups on the weedy grass in the sun in front of the cottage. Noelle, seeing him as they drove in, laughed and said, “Is this supposed to be my birthday?”

  “Dan Wycza,” Parker told her, and Carlow said, “For the heavy lifting.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “Is Lou Sternberg here?”

  “Not yet. He’s in Brooklyn, watching a guy for later.”

  Wycza got to his feet when he saw the car coming. He offered a small wave and went into the house, while Carlow parked the Lexus. They got out, Noelle carrying her backpack slung over one shoulder, and went into the house, where Wycza stood now in the living room, rubbing his head and neck with a tan towel.

  Parker said, “Noelle Braselle, Dan Wycza.”

  “Hi,” Wycza said, and Noelle frowned at him and said, “I know you. Don’t I know you?”

  Grinning, Wycza said, “I wish you did, honey.”

  “No, I’ve seen you somewhere,” she said. The two wheelchairs were in this room, one still together, the other mostly apart; she hadn’t remarked on them yet, but she did put her backpack on the complete one now as she continued to frown at Wycza, trying to place him.