“Out West Central, six blocks from the square. I’d guess it would take them about three minutes.”
“We’ll have to time it exactly,” I said. “Do you happen to know where there’s an alarm box six blocks from the station in some other direction than the square?”
He thought about it, finally shook his head. “I never went in for false alarms like the other kids when I was younger. I don’t know where any of them are.”
“I’ll drive around and check tomorrow,” I told him. “Meanwhile, we may as well work out the other details. Can you drive?”
“Sure.”
“Then here’s the plan. I’ll handle the inside work, and you’ll do the getaway driving. The car will be parked on the lot behind that supermarket on the east side of the square. It’s a gray Plymouth sedan with New York plates. After you pull the alarm, walk without hurry over to the lot, get the engine started, and face the car toward the exit onto East Central. When I come along with the money bag and jump in, head up East Central at a normal rate of speed.”
“I’ll need the keys,” he said. “How do I get them?”
After a moment’s thought, I said, “I’ll drive onto the lot at four-thirty. You be there. I’ll toss you the keys and head for the tavern. You head for the southwest corner of the square. Okay?”
“All right,” he agreed. “What happens after we take off?”
“Nobody will know you were involved in the heist, so I think you ought to follow my original suggestion and stay right in town. I’ll divide the loot as we’re driving up East Central, you can pull over and get out with your cut, a few blocks from the scene. I’ll slip over in the driver’s seat and keep going.”
The plan seemed to please him, for he smiled. “That sounds smooth.”
“That’s all for now,” I told him. “I’ll phone you again tomorrow at the usual time.”
After he was gone, I considered means of taking off with the whole take. As I would have a gun and he wouldn’t, it would be simple merely to force him out of the car empty-handed when he stopped on East Central.
I finally decided against this, though. It probably would make him sore enough to phone the sheriff an anonymous tip describing my car and giving the license number. It seemed better just to short-change him. As I would be doing the splitting and his attention would be on driving, it would be easy to count most of the big bills into my stack and drive off with two-thirds of the loot. As he wouldn’t know exactly what the bag contained, he could never be sure he’d been short-changed, no matter what he suspected when he counted his cut.
Tuesday I reconnoitered the area immediately around the fire station. Aside from the one at the square, there were no alarm boxes exactly six blocks from it. I found some at four-block distance and at eight-block distance, but I wanted exact timing.
Finally it occurred to me how to get it without needing an alarm box.
That evening when I phoned Carr, I set up another meeting. When he arrived at the usual time, I explained how we would make the test.
“There are no alarm boxes at the right distance from the station,” I said. “But you can phone in an alarm as easily as you can pull a hook. At exactly five minutes to five tomorrow, I want you to phone the fire station and report a fire at West Central and Clark. That’s exactly the same distance as the square, but in the opposite direction. How good a watch do you have?”
“Pretty good. It loses about a minute a month.”
“That’s only two seconds a day,” I said. “Mine gains about the same, so I’ll set it four seconds slower than yours. Let’s coordinate watches.”
After we had adjusted our watches, there was nothing to do until the next day.
At ten of five on Wednesday I parked at the corner of Clark and Woodrow, which was a block north of West Central and gave me a good view of the intersection of West Central and Clark.
At four minutes of five I heard a siren begin to sound from the direction of the firehouse, which meant it had taken just one minute after the alarm for the first engine to get rolling. A minute and forty seconds later a pump truck pulled up at the intersection with its siren tapering off to a moan.
Andy’s guess of three minutes had been within twenty seconds.
We wanted the first engine to arrive at the square at one minute to five on Friday. An earlier arrival might cause Fat Sam to run to see what the excitement was, along with the customers, before he took the money from the safe. A later one would allow him to get out of the tavern while it was still full of customers. As a few seconds one way or the other wouldn’t matter, however, I decided that if Andy pulled the hook at four minutes to five, the timing would be just about right.
There was no point in holding another meeting just for that. When I phoned Andy at the usual time, I said, “All set. I’ll give you the exact time when I see you at the parking lot Friday.”
“Okay,” he said. “Until four-thirty Friday, then.”
I stayed away from the tavern the next day. At four-thirty p.m. on Friday I pulled onto the supermarket parking lot and backed into a slot. Andy Carr strolled over from the alley as I got out of the car.
I locked the car before tossing him the keys. He would have plenty of time to unlock it, and I didn’t want to chance some teen-ager lousing us up by deciding to take a joy ride at the crucial moment.
“Did you take care of that glass last night?” I asked.
“There wasn’t any. It’s a new type of box that just has a little door you lift. When shall I pull it?”
“Exactly at four minutes to five. Let’s check watches again.”
They were together to the second.
Minutes later I was seated at a table in Fat Sam’s with a beer before me. It wasn’t until then that it occurred to me that, while Andy and I had coordinated time, we hadn’t checked to see if we agreed with the tavern clock. Hurriedly I glanced at my watch, then at the clock over the bar.
I relaxed when I saw that they were within seconds of each other.
At a quarter of five the fat proprietor came from behind the bar carrying a stack of bills, which I assumed represented the day’s receipts so far. When he entered the small office, for an instant I thought he was going to jump the gun and spoil all our plans. But as time passed without the door reopening, I realized he was probably counting money and making up a deposit slip.
At four minutes to five my heart began to pump, as it always does just before a job. Andy would be pulling the hook right now, I thought. And now he’s walking toward the parking lot.
At three minutes to five there was the growl of a siren some blocks away. Conversation ceased, and customers cocked their heads to listen. As the siren neared, one or two began to drift toward the door.
At a minute and twenty seconds to five the scream of the siren rose to a crescendo, then died off as the first engine entered the square. Customers scrambled toward the door in a body.
My partner would be in the car by now, I thought, and would probably already have the engine going.
Because the patrons could crowd through the door no more than two at a time, it took a little longer than I anticipated for the room to empty. But it worked out just right. The door swung closed behind the last one exactly at five.
The bartender moved from behind the bar and started to walk toward the door at the same moment the office door opened and Fat Sam stepped out carrying a canvas money bag.
Standing up, I drew my gun and said, “Freeze, both of you!”
Both stared at me with their mouths open. The barkeep slowly raised his hands.
“Drop the bag, Sam,” I said, aiming the gun at the fat man.
The sack hit the floor with a plop, and his hands shot overhead.
“Into the office, both of you,” I ordered, gesturing with my gun.
They d
idn’t give me any trouble. Both scurried into the room, eager to please.
Standing in the doorway, I glanced around the room. The only window was identical to those in the barroom, high and barred.
I said to Sam, “Get up the key to this door. And do it fast.”
He dropped his right hand, still leaving the left raised, and felt in his pants pocket. Producing an old-fashioned key, he tossed it to me.
Backing out, I locked them in and dropped the key into my pocket.
When I hit the street, carrying the canvas sack, no one at all was on this side of the square. The opposite side was jammed, though.
Unhurriedly I walked up the alley. The car was parked exactly where I had left it.
But Andy Carr wasn’t in the driver’s seat, and the car was still locked.
I turned cold. Even if I had been able to get into the car, I had nothing with which to make an ignition bridge. Rapidly I strode back down the alley and gazed at the crowd across the square. What the devil had happened to the idiot?
Returning to the car, I stood next to it in frustrated indecision for a couple of minutes. When Andy still failed to appear, I started checking cars parked nearby. All of them were locked.
Too much time was passing for it to be safe to linger any longer. At any moment the first customers would be drifting back into Fat Sam’s.
In desperation I headed on foot up East Central, hoping that I could flag down a ride and take over the car at gunpoint.
There was a lot of traffic on East Central, but it was all heading for the square. I had plodded six blocks before a shiny black sedan going in my direction came along. When I signaled with my thumb, it pulled over to the curb.
Too late I saw the small round sheriff’s department insigne on the front door. Before I could reach for my gun, I was covered by the deputy seated next to the driver.
I let the sack fall and raised my hands.
On the way back to the sheriff’s office, I asked bitterly, “What went wrong?”
“A couple of things,” the deputy who had handcuffed me said. “For one, while it was smart of you to lock Sam and his bartender in the office, you neglected to notice the phone on his desk. He was phoning us about you as you walked out the door.”
After glumly considering this, I said, “What was the other thing I did wrong?”
“Your choice of a partner. Andy Carr is locally known as the gutless wonder. The minute we realized the false alarm had been turned in to clear the tavern, we knew Andy had to be your accomplice. It took us roughly two minutes to break him down and get the whole story.”
“But how did you catch up with him?” I inquired.
The deputy laughed. “We didn’t have to. He waited for us. We’ve had so much trouble with false alarms around here, the fire department just installed a new type of alarm box. When you pull the hook, a manacle automatically closes around your wrist and holds you there until the battalion chief arrives with a key.”
ERRAND BOY
Originally published in The Saint Mystery Magazine, March 1965.
“Do you have to go out again tonight?” Phyllis Stroud asked petulantly.
Barney Stroud tilted up her chin to give her an apologetic kiss on the nose. “Do you think I like leaving you alone, baby? You know I’m nuts about you.”
This wasn’t just husbandly flattery. Even after two years of marriage Barney was still astonished at having managed to snare a wife such as Phyllis. She was not only the most beautiful woman he had ever known, with a lovely, sensitive face surrounded by a halo of honey blonde hair, and possessing a figure which popped men’s eyes, but she had class. Though her parents were now broke because of some unwise investments by her father, Phyllis was a Caldwell, and in St. Vincent the name Caldwell was equivalent to Cabot or Lodge in Boston.
Phyllis was a Vassar graduate. Barney had grown up in the slums of St. Vincent and had quit school at sixteen. He not only loved his wife, he was deeply awed by her background.
A lot of people were. If they hadn’t been, Phyllis could hardly have lifted her racketeer husband into her own elite social set, but instead would have been summarily dropped from the social register for marrying so far beneath her. But in St. Vincent a Caldwell could do no wrong. Barney was quite aware that he was tolerated by St. Vincent high society solely because he was Phyllis’ husband.
The only thorn in his Garden of Eden was that he didn’t know how to handle his wife when she became condescending. Before he met and married Phyllis, Barney had always practiced the role of the dominant male. If one of his old flames from the south side had ever spoken to him half as belittlingly as Phyllis often did, he would have slapped her silly. But you can’t treat a goddess the same way you treat a tramp. Even when his wife sometimes informed him that the only reason she had married an unschooled racketeer was because he had money, it only made him miserable instead of angry. He wasn’t about to do anything which might cause Phyllis to walk out on him.
“What is it tonight?” she asked with a touch of ice. “More errand running for Johnny Nash?”
Barney had given up trying to explain to Phyllis that as third man from top in the Drennan-Nash combine he was considerably more than an errand boy. Because she disliked Johnny Nash, she seemed to have the peculiarly fixed idea that the man deliberately cut in on Barney’s evenings by dreaming up unnecessary chores for him to perform.
Oddly, she never made similar objections when he was called out at night by Nash’s partner, Mark Drennan. She seemed to like Drennan, or at least to accept him socially.
Of course Drennan had a veneer of breeding which put him at ease in Phyllis’ social set, while Johnny Nash looked and talked like what he was: a successful gangster. Furthermore Mark Drennan, who was a bachelor, never showed up at Phyllis’ social affairs with a feminine partner who didn’t fit in, whereas Johnny Nash always did on the rare occasions he was invited. He couldn’t avoid it, because his feminine partner was always his wife, a beautiful but ungrammatical woman who gave away her ex-stripper background every time she opened her mouth.
As one of her husband’s bosses, Johnny Nash and his wife had to be invited to at least some of Phyllis’ parties, but she hated to have either one in the house.
Barney said pacifically, “Johnny’s not even in town. I have to drop some tally sheets by Mark’s place.”
“Oh,” she said, mollified. “Will you be long?”
“Not more than an hour,” he assured her.
As he drove away from the house, Barney thought aggrievedly that he wasn’t as bad a catch as Phyllis liked to make out. Maybe he didn’t have the education and social grace of her friends, but he was more of a bargain physically than any of them. He stood six feet two, without an ounce of fat on him, and the girls on the south side had considered him about the handsomest guy around. Anyway, under Phyllis’ tutelage, he had managed to develop enough surface polish and to straighten out his grammar enough so that her friends seldom, any more, looked down their noses at him.
And he certainly had more money than most of her friends. Phyllis had a hundred-thousand-dollar home in which to entertain, she drove her own Lincoln convertible, wore Paris fashioned clothes, owned a couple of minks and nearly as much jewelry as Tiffany’s. Which wasn’t bad progress for a young man of twenty-six who had owned only one pair of pants ten years before.
Of course, as Phyllis liked to point out, he had come to a dead end. The only move upward left to make would be to take over top spot from the Drennan Nash partnership, and neither partner was likely to retire voluntarily for at least another twenty-five years.
At sixteen Barney Stroud had started running numbers for the Drennan-Nash combine, which at that time was just beginning to organize the city’s divergent rackets into a single centrally-controlled organization. Mark Drennan and Johnny Nash, respect
ively only twenty-four and twenty-five themselves, had moved in on existing rackets with a combination of brashness, muscle and organizing knowhow which left the combine in undisputed control of local rackets by the time Barney could vote.
He had moved right along with it, rising from runner to muscle man, then to district manager and, finally, to “thumb man” in charge of all collections and payoffs.
Barney was already third man from top when he met and married Phyllis. He had been pretty proud of that position until she began belittling him as an “errand boy.” But now he did considerable dreaming about eventually moving into top spot. His dreams weren’t inspired by ruthless ambition, for actually he was quite content with his lot. It was just that he envisioned commanding his wife’s respect if he was in a position to give orders instead of taking them.
It was only idle dreaming, though. Mark Drennan was now only thirty-four and Johnny Nash thirty-five. By the time either decided to retire, Barney would be in his mid-fifties himself.
Of course premature retirement could be effected with a gun, but this was impractical.
The dream had become persistent enough to make Barney think of resolving his problem with a gun, but he had discarded the idea almost as soon as he thought of it. This wasn’t the roaring twenties, when an ambitious young hood could blast his way to the top. Modern rackets were conducted as businesses, with a minimum of headline-making violence. The general public no longer stoically accepted gang killings, and the politicians, without whose protection rackets couldn’t exist, were leery of aroused public opinion. The local officials who accepted the combine’s payoff to prevent the police from interfering with its activities would never stand still for anything even remotely resembling old-fashioned gang warfare.
Barney knew that even if he managed to beat the raps legally, he couldn’t win by using his gun on Drennan and Nash. The finger would point straight at him, and the local administration wouldn’t require legal evidence to dump him. As nobody, regardless of the guns behind him, could take over without political backing, anything as crude as murder would bounce Barney right out of the picture altogether.
The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK® Page 30
