The Steel Hit p-2

by Richard Stark

  A young man in khaki pants and an undershirt opened the door, and stood there scratching his head. Stubbs had obviously waked him up. “I’m looking for C.F. Wells,” Stubbs said.

  “Clara? She’s at work.”

  “That’s the C.F. Wells that’s in the phone book?”

  “Yeah, it’s in her name, that’s right.” The young man stopped scratching, and yawned. “You from the phone company?”

  “No,” said Stubbs. “I’m looking for a person.”

  He turned away and went back to the elevator. The young man stood in the doorway, scratching himself here and there, and frowned at the disappearing Stubbs, but he didn’t say anything. Stubbs got into the elevator and went downstairs and back to the car. Both of them were women, so far. Why didn’t they put their whole names in the book?

  He looked at his list. One Charles Wells lived on Central Park West, and the other Charles Wells lived on Fort Washington Avenue. Central Park West was closer, and sounded rich, so he tried that first.

  There was a doorman in this building, but he didn’t stop Stubbs or ask him any questions. Stubbs got the apartment number from the mailbox and took the elevator up.

  A middle-aged woman answered his knock. She looked severe, and when Stubbs asked her if Charles Wells was home she said, “My husband is at work.”

  Stubbs thought about that for a minute, while the woman asked him if he was applying for the chauffeur’s job. “Does this Charles Wells have black hair except grey around the ears and real thick eyebrows?”

  The woman looked surprised. “My husband is bald.”

  “Been bald long?” Stubbs asked.

  “For years. What in the world is this all about?”

  “I’m looking for a Charles Wells. But he isn’t the right one.”

  Fort Washington Avenue was way uptown, up by the George Washington Bridge. Stubbs found a parking space on 181st Street and walked back to the address. It was a walk-up again, and Charles Wells lived on the third floor.

  When Stubbs knocked, the door was opened by a young man in his early twenties. He wore tight black slacks and an orange shirt with the tails tied in a knot over his rib-cage, leaving his midriff bare. His eyes were made up and he had rouge on his cheeks. His hair was far too long, waved, and dyed a rich auburn. He struck a pose in the doorway. “Well, look at you!”

  “I’m looking for Charles Wells,” Stubbs said.

  “Well, you just come right in, dearie.”

  “Are you Charles Wells?”

  The boy made a kissing motion. “Come on in, dearie, and we’ll talk about it.”

  Stubbs frowned. He remembered this kind of boy, there’d been some in the Party. Not many, but some, and Stubbs had never liked them, because he’d thought they’d give the Party a bad name. Not that it mattered in the long run. But he also remembered that there was only one way to get this flighty type to calm down and make sense, so he reached out and thumped the boy gently on the nose.

  The boy’s eyes started to water, and his face squinched up, and he made a sound like a mouse when the trap hits it, only smaller.

  “Are you Charles Wells?”

  “My nose,” said the boy.

  Stubbs held up his fist. “Yes or no.”

  “Yes! Yes! Don’t you dare–-“

  “All right,” Stubbs said.

  He went back downstairs. Four possibilities, and none of them had been the man he wanted, and two and one half of them had been women. He went back to the car and drove to Grand Central Station.

  It was impossible to park anywhere around that area, since it was now five-thirty Friday afternoon and the middle of the week’s worst rush hour. Stubbs pushed the Lincoln around in the traffic for a while until he saw a sign that said, “Park”. He turned in at the garage entrance, and got out of the car. A man came up and asked him how long he’d be and Stubbs said just a little while. When the attendant took the car away, Stubbs walked back to Grand Central.

  There was a whole rack of phone books, alphabetical and classified. There was Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Nassau County and some other suburbs. Stubbs got out his old envelope and ballpoint pen. He ignored the suburbs and just looked in the books for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

  If Charles F. Wells was in New York, he was in New York and not some place nearby.

  When he was done with the three phone books, Stubbs had eleven more possibilities.

  Chapter 5

  IT TOOK all of Saturday and most of Sunday for Stubbs to find out that none of these eleven was the right Charles F. Wells either. He had found a hotel on the west side of Manhattan that looked close enough to the one in Newark to be its twin, and when he got back to his room from the Bronx late Sunday afternoon he didn’t know what he was going to do next. He sat on the bed, because there wasn’t any chair, and smoked cigarette after cigarette and tried to think.

  Charles F. Wells lived in New York. But he wasn’t in any of the New York phone books. Did that mean he wasn’t in New York after all? Or merely that he didn’t have a telephone? Or that he had an unlisted number?

  If he lived in New York that was supposed to mean that he lived in New York. So the thing to do was to figure that he either had no phone at all or a phone with an unlisted number. And since he was a rich man, then he had a phone with an unlisted number.

  Stubbs put out his cigarette and immediately started a new one. All right. This Wells, the one Stubbs wanted, had an unlisted telephone number. That meant Stubbs couldn’t find him in the phone book, which meant that Stubbs would have to find him some other way.

  Thinking, struggling for an answer, Stubbs remembered the old days when sometimes a situation like this would come up. You’d go into a city and there was a man you were looking for and you had to find; he was with you or against you or you needed him one way or another. But then there had been the Party, and the local contacts. Always the local contacts, either Party people or sympathizers, and you could go to them and tell the problem to them. They knew the local situation, they had an in here or an in there, and they could find your man for you. But now there wasn’t any Party any more. And anyway this situation didn’t have anything to do with the Party.

  Stubbs rubbed his head and remembered the days in the Party, the good times when thoughts slid through his head like they were on wheels, when he knew the questions and the answers. He didn’t know now what he thought of the Party, whether he thought what had happened to him had been worth it or not, because he never really thought of the Party at all but only of people. He remembered faces from that time, and frozen moments of import in strikes, like the moment when the deputy had driven his car over the little girl. That had been good because it had solidified the workers and made the strike as hard as steel, until some damn fool had killed a foreman over a personal grudge, and then predictably the workers had become afraid and the strike had fizzled out.

  It was strange, in a way, that now it was only the people he remembered. At the time he had never thought about people at all, but only of issues, of theories and dogmas and the masses, and now that it was all over and half his brain had been lost in the fight he never thought of the issues at all.

  Charles F. Wells. He brought himself back from remembering, angry at himself for losing the straight line again even for just a minute. He had to find Charles F. Wells. Not with the Party, because that was a dead thing now, but by himself.

  Except he didn’t know what to do next.

  Wells was in New York, that much he knew. How did he know it? Because May told him. How did May know it? Because Wells had talked with her and with the doctor and with the two nurses, and Wells had said that after the bandages came off he was going to go live in New York.

  Buy a house in New York.

  Stubbs squinted up his face, and stared at the pattern on the bedspread. Was that what May had said? Charles F. Wells was going to go live in New York, go there and buy a house, and he already had a couple of real-estate agents look
ing around for him. That’s what Charles F. Wells had said, and that’s what May had told Stubbs, and Stubbs had forgotten all of it except the part about New York.

  The two weeks in the darkness at the farmhouse had made him forget a lot of things, and this important thing about buying a house was one that he’d forgotten. He thought now of the apartments he’d been to, apartment buildings all over New York, and all that time wasted. One of the people he’d gone to in Brooklyn had lived in a house, and two of the people in Queens, but none of them had lived in the kind of house a rich man would live in. Where in New York would there be the kind of house a rich man would buy and live in?

  Then he thought of the suburbs. If a rich man was going to buy a house somewhere right near New York, would he say he was going to New York to buy a house? Yes, he would. And if a man wanted to be handy to New York but also wanted privacy the way Charles F. Wells wanted privacy, would he most likely try to live outside the city limits? Yes, he would.

  Stubbs was relieved. He’d thought it out by himself, he’d made his brain go to work after all and remember important things and make important decisions. He put out his latest cigarette and got off the bed, smiling, and left the hotel and walked across town to Grand Central again.

  There was a phone book for Nassau County, and the map in the front of the phone book showed that Nassau County was on Long Island, just beyond Brooklyn and Queens. And in the W section there was a listing for “Wells, Chas. F.” Stubbs knew it was the man. He knew without a doubt that this time he’d found the right man. He copied the address and phone number down, and closed the phone book.

  Walking across the terminal, he looked ahead and saw Parker. He stopped in his tracks, not believing it, and then other people got in the way and he wasn’t really sure it had been Parker he’d seen. Maybe his brain was playing tricks on him. Nevertheless, he turned around and went off in another direction.

  Chapter 6

  AT HUNTINGTON, twenty miles from the city line, Stubbs stopped and asked directions again. He asked in a bar, because there’d be more people there to work out the right answer among them, and they all co-operated, the way he’d expected, contradicting each other and suggesting alternate routes and finally hammering out a course for him to follow. He thanked them and finished the beer he’d bought just as a token, and went back out to the car.

  He followed the directions.

  He stayed on 25A through Huntington and out the other side and kept going till he saw the Huntington Crescent Golf Course. After that, he made the left where they’d told him, and two turns later he was on Reardon Road, near the Sound, though he couldn’t see any water. He stayed on Reardon Road, a winding blacktop road with trees surrounding it on either side and occasional breaks where a narrower winding blacktop road went off to one side or the other. At each break he slowed down, till at last he saw what he wanted. There was a rural delivery mailbox on a wooden post by the road, with stone gate-pillars behind it and the usual narrow winding blacktop road going in among the trees. This time on the mailbox it said, “Charles F. Wells”.

  Stubbs turned the Lincoln slowly and drove through the stone gateposts. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and reached out and removed the automatic from the glove compartment. He put in on the seat, where he could reach it fast.

  The blacktop road was barely two car-widths, and it wandered and curved back and forth amid the trees. They were thin-trunked trees, young, with the branches starting high up and with not too much underbrush between them. Stubbs rolled along in the Lincoln at a bare ten miles an hour, peering ahead around the curves to see the house, and when he saw it he hit the brake and stopped.

  It was stone, and old. Stubbs could just barely see it ahead and to the right, through the tree trunks. He backed up just a little, till the house was out of sight, and then he turned the engine off. There was no place to pull off the road, so he just left the car where it was and climbed out.

  It was nearly evening, seven-thirty or so, and the space between the trees were getting dimmer. Stubbs moved away from the car and the road, going in among the trees, moving at an angle towards the house. Soon he could see it again, and then he crouched and moved more slowly.

  The house was big, two storeys high and rambling. There was a screen-enclosed wooden porch around the first floor and the rest was stone. To the right of the house, the blacktop road ended at a three-car garage, stone like the house and with white doors.

  A slate walk joined a small side door in the garage and the side of the house, with an arched roof over the walk, supported by rough unpainted wooden posts. The garage had a second storey, with windows in it, but they were dark, without curtains or shades. In the house, two windows on the ground floor showed light, and so did one window upstairs.

  Stubbs crept forward forwards the house until he came to the edge of the trees, where the blacktop widened in front of the house before coming to a stop at the garage. He could try to cross the bare blacktopped area here, or he could go to the right through the trees and around the garage, to come at the house from the back. That would probably be better.

  He remembered how easily Parker and the other one had turned the tables on him, and he didn’t want it to happen again. If Wells wasn’t the one and it was Courtney, it wouldn’t be too bad; but if Wells was the one and he turned the tables on Stubbs it would be the end.

  He made his decision, and started to the right. He’d taken two steps when a voice behind him said, “That’s far enough.” He stopped. In that second, he cursed himself, cursed the brain that had gone rotten and prevented him from doing what he had to do, that made him such a feeble hunter and such easy prey.

  “Drop the gun,” said the voice, “and turn slowly around.”

  There was nothing else to do. He hoped it was Courtney, and that Wells was in the clear. He dropped the gun and turned around, and saw Wells standing at the edge of the blacktop. The man had been in among the trees even before Stubbs had got there, and had followed him when he left the car. It was still getting darker, but not dark enough to prevent a good shot, and in the hand not holding the gun Wells carried a flashlight.

  Wells looked at him, frowning, and then smiled. “The chauffeur,” he said. “I’d forgotten about you.”

  Stubbs licked his lips, wanting to ask the question but afraid it had already been answered.

  “You shouldn’t have phoned,” Wells went on. “That put me on my guard, you know.”

  Stubbs shook his head, and was about to say he hadn’t phoned, but just then Wells shot him. Something heavy, feeling much larger than a bullet, hit him in the chest, knocking him backwards. His mouth was still open. He still wanted to tell Wells that a mistake had been made, that he hadn’t phoned, but he couldn’t manage to exhale. No air came out, he couldn’t make a sound.

  He felt himself falling. It was getting darker much more rapidly all of a sudden. Then he saw Wells’s face, and Wells was looking past him, at something behind him. There was on Wells’s face an expression of astonishment and terror. Stubbs, falling forward towards the blacktop and the spreading blackness, wondered dully why Wells looked so astonished and so terrified.

  But he never found out.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 1

  PARKER got back into the Ford, and drove away from the farmhouse. He turned the car towards New Brunswick, northwestward. First things first.

  Stubbs was gone. Parker had to find him again before he got himself killed and gave the cook back in Nebraska a reason to blow the whistle, but first things came first. Riding in the Ford with Parker was thirty thousand dollars in green paper, and until he’d found a safe place for that boodle he couldn’t afford to do anything else.

  He had to follow the plan, with or without Stubbs.

  But as he drove along he was nagged by a feeling of incompletion. There was a spiel worked out in his head that he’d been planning to give to Stubbs: “You come with me on this one side trip. It’ll take a couple of days. Then
we take a plane to Nebraska and square things with the cook, and after that I’ll give you some help finding the man you want.”

  The last part was the only lie, but it was a necessary lie because it would give Stubbs a reason for going along with no fuss. The whole spiel was good and simple and direct, and it would have gone down with no trouble at all.

  Except that Stubbs was gone, and the spiel would never be delivered. He didn’t like sloppiness, loose ends that unravelled, complications of things that ought to be simple. Stubbs was a complication in what should have been a simple job, and now he was complicating the complication. So Parker did what he always tried to do — keep it simple, keep close to the plan, don’t let yourself get knocked off balance.

  First things first. The boodle had to be unloaded, that came first. The cook in Nebraska would wait two more weeks before blowing the whistle, and it might take Stubbs a while to find the other two men he was looking for. So first things first.

  At New Brunswick, he picked up route 1, and that took him southward again. The afternoon sun lowered to his right. At Trenton he switched to 206, and got on the Jersey Turnpike at Mansfield Square. He hadn’t seen a single roadblock, and that made sense. The robbery was more than three hours old when he’d left the farmhouse, and the law would have to figure that the thieves were either out of the area by then or holed up somewhere in it. Parker had used the principle of the delayed getaway before, but never quite this way — getting out of the area fast and%then going back into the area and coming out again.

  He took the most direct route south, sometimes on 1 and sometimes on quicker roads. He bypassed Washington the same way as when he’d come north with the truck, and when he passed through Richmond it was ten o’clock at night. He stopped in a motel on the other side of town, and brought both his suitcases into the room, the one with his clothes and the one with the money.

  He picked a stack of twenties, all used bills, stuffed fifty of them back into the suitcase with the rest of the money and the other fifty into his wallet. The wallet was so thick then it didn’t want to fold. Then he went to the motel office and got a cardboard box and some string and wrapping paper.