It had been nothing at all five years ago, when Alan Grofield had come upon the place. He’d been flush at the moment, from a casino robbery he’d done with Parker, and he’d bought the place outright, full cash, for the barn and twelve acres and two small farmhouses on the other side of the road. His theater was now in its fifth season, was beginning to get a small reputation in the theater world, and had never made a dime.
Well, that was all right. Summer theaters always lose money, particularly when an actor starts them and performs as producer, but Grofield had never expected the Mead Grove Theater to support him. He supported it, and had known from the beginning that he would.
The point was, acting wasn’t his living, it was his life. His living was elsewhere, with people like Parker. And it had been a long time since he’d done anything about making a living, not since a supermarket robbery last year outside St. Louis, so he moved across the empty county road at a half-trot, hoping this phone call meant a big easy score that would take the minimum time for the maximum return. Fred Allworth could take over his own parts while he was gone, and Jack . . . His mind full of casting changes, Grofield trotted up the stoop and into the house, full as usual of the racket of resident actors. He went into what had at one time been the dining room but was now his and Mary’s bedroom, and sat down on the bed to take the call.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.” Parker’s voice, as usual, had the tonal variety of a lead pencil.
“Sorry I took so long,” Grofield said. “I was in the theater, with a tax man.”
“Mary told me.”
“The tax man,” Grofield repeated. “What I’m saying is, I’m hoping you’re calling with good news.”
“You remember that time we were together in Tyler?”
“I remember,” Grofield said grimly. He remembered; it had been a thing with an armored car, and it had gone to hell. Money gone, time gone, himself loused up for a while. In fact, as a direct result of that job in the Midwest city of Tyler, he’d wound up with some crazy people for a while in northern Canada. “Oh, I remember,” Grofield said.
“We left something behind there,” Parker said.
For a second Grofield couldn’t figure out what Parker was talking about. Then he thought, The money! Parker had hidden it somewhere there. But good Christ, that was two years ago. “You think it’s still there?” he said.
“It should be,” Parker said. “And if it isn’t, we’ll find out who’s got it.”
“That’s a very interesting idea,” Grofield said.
“A friend of mine,” Parker said, “is going to be at the Ohio House there on Wednesday. Maybe you could talk to him about it.”
“Ohio House. In Tyler?”
“His name is Ed Latham.”
That was a name Parker had used before. Grofield couldn’t resist saying, “I think I know him.”
Humor was wasted on Parker. “You might want to talk to him about this,” he said.
“I probably will,” Grofield said. “I probably will.”
Three
A copper plate on a stone monument in front of the State Office Building on River Street explains that John Tyler, tenth President of the United States, delivered a speech on that spot during the presidential campaign of 1840, and that the name of the town was subsequently changed from Collinsport to Tyler in honor of the occasion. The copper plate doesn’t mention that Tyler was running for Vice-President at the time, on a slate headed by William Henry Harrison, nor that Tyler never did run for President himself but simply inherited the job when Harrison died a month after inauguration; but the omission has been more or less corrected by a historic-minded vandal who has written on the stone, just below the copper plate, in orange spray paint: “Remember Tippecanoe.”
By the time Collinsport became Tyler, it was already a prosperous river town on one of the principal waterways connecting the Mississippi with the Great Lakes. Lumber and farm produce were shipped through there, and industry started with a furniture plant and a small company that made farm wagons. At the turn of the century a typewriter factory opened, and a while later the wagon company switched to automobile bodies. The First World War added a paper-box factory, the Second World War added electronics plants, and the boom years of the sixties added computer manufacturing.
Tyler, with a population just under one hundred fifty thousand and a median income comfortably above the national average, was rich and soft and easy in its mind. Encircling the city, there was no wall.
Parker arrived at Tyler National Airport at two in the afternoon. The summer sun was shining, and the flat land all around the airport baked in the dry heat. The cab Parker got into had a sticker on the side window saying it was air-conditioned, but the driver explained the air-conditioning had broken down at the beginning of the summer and the boss was too cheap to get it fixed. “Because we’ll turn this one in anyway in September, you know?”
Parker didn’t answer. He watched the billboards go by, advertising hotels and airlines and cigarettes, and after giving him one quick look in the rear-view mirror, the driver left him alone.
They came into the city through the used-car lots. There was an election going on locally, with posters slapped up on telephone poles and board fences and leaning in barbershop windows; by the time they reached downtown, Parker knew that the two candidates for mayor were named Farrell and Wain. There were three or four times as many Farrell posters as Wain posters, which meant that Farrell had the most money to spend. Which meant Farrell had the support of the people who ran the town. Which probably meant Farrell would win.
Ohio House was a businessmen’s hotel near the railroad station, thirty years past its prime. Sheraton and Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn were all clustered together half a dozen blocks away, in an urban-renewal section by the river. Parker had chosen Ohio House because it was still a salesmen’s hotel, seedy but respectable, and for his purposes, the most anonymous possible place in town. Nowhere else would it be more likely for two male guests, both traveling alone, to know one another and want to get together for drinks before going on their separate ways.
Parker’s room was on the third floor front, with a good view of London Avenue, the town’s main street. Off to the right, Farrell had a banner proclaiming his candidacy spread across the street, hanging from light poles. Oh, yes, that was a winner.
There was a black-and-white television set on the dresser, covered with Scotch-taped handwritten notices from the management. On it, Parker watched reruns and game shows and local news programs until dinnertime. He ate in the hotel dining room with half a dozen other men, each of them alone at a separate table, most reading newspapers, one studying the contents of a display folder. Parker looked less like a salesman than the rest of them, but it wasn’t an impossible idea. He might have sold Army surplus equipment, or burglar alarms, or special materials to nightclubs.
After dinner Parker went back to the room again, but didn’t turn on the TV set. He sat in the dark in the one armchair and looked toward the windows, watching the reflected light from the traffic down below. It was a week night, so the noise level never got very loud.
At eight-thirty there was a knock at the door. Parker switched on the light and opened the door, and Grofield came in, grinning, saying, “A charming establishment. The chamber pot in my room is autographed A. Lincoln. Do you suppose it’s authentic?”
“Hello, Grofield,” Parker said. “Let’s go out to the park.”
Four
Grofield fired three times, and three escaping convicts in black-and-white-striped pants and shirts flopped over on their backs. He shifted position, sighted down the short rifle barrel, and plugged five speeding getaway cars in a row. Finishing off with a bomb-toting anarchist and a rolling barrel of bootleg whiskey, he put the rifle back on the counter and nodded in satisfaction at the targets at the rear of the shooting gallery. All around him were the flat reports of other rifles, mixed with the bings and dings of targets being hit, the cons
tant shuffle of feet going past behind him, the combined noises of several different kinds of music being played in other sections of the park, and hundreds of people talking all at once.
The shooting-gallery operator, a short man in an open black cardigan sweater, with a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth, eased over in front of Grofield and gave him a cool and noncommittal look, as between men of the world. “Nice shooting,” he said. The cigarette bobbed when he talked, giving the illusion of a Humphrey Bogart twitch.
Grofield fell into the role as naturally as breathing out. “Pays to keep in practice,” he said.
“For the perfect score, you get another ten shots free.”
Grofield looked around, and a couple of nearby boys about twelve years old were gaping at the targets, watching every shot in fascination. “Hey, kids,” he said.
“Huh?”
“You each get five shots here,” Grofield told them. “Compliments of the masked man.”
The kids moved closer. One of them said, “What masked man?”
“Me,” Grofield said.
“You don’t have any mask.”
In fact, he did: horn-rim glasses, bushy mustache, a bit of makeup to widen the nose and give him bags under the eyes. But he said, “You get five shots each anyway.” To the guy behind the counter he said, “Treat these kids good. They’re particular friends of mine.” Then, having segued somehow from a Humphrey Bogart movie into a western, he sauntered off, visualizing them watching him go, visualizing himself becoming lost in the crowd.
And he pretty well was lost. Fun Island Amusement Park was fairly big as such places go, and it seemed even bigger at night. The idea of the park was that it was an island, remote from civilization, far from the cares of the workaday world. Built in the shape of a large square, it was completely enclosed by a tall board fence, on the inside of which had been painted a continuous mural of ocean scenes, with ships and birds and far-off islands. Just inside the fence, a shallow moat ten feet wide made the park technically a true island, completely surrounded by water.
The space inside the moat was divided into eight pie-shape sections, each with rides and games and displays tied to a different island theme. Grofield had found a certain morbid fascination in hanging around the Alcatraz Island section, but it was now ten-fifteen, time to meet up with Parker again over in the part called Desert Island. So he’d best figure out which direction to drift in, and start drifting.
Down to the left was the fountain at the center of the park, spraying in high arches, lit with amber and red and green. Grofield walked down that way, not hurrying, letting the movement of the crowd take him, and when he reached the fountain he turned right, following an easy semicircle past the entrances to Treasure Island, New York Island, and Voodoo Island before reaching the one he wanted.
MAROONED! said great shivery neon red letters across the sky; inside that building, Grofield knew, was a black-light ride on the general desert-island theme. Half an hour ago he himself had taken the ride, without Parker, to familiarize himself somewhat with the terrain. Parker had been here before, of course, but this was Grofield’s introduction to Fun Island.
The Marooned! ride was accomplished in fake rubber rafts made of gray plastic, each holding eight passengers. The raft was pulled on a concealed chain through a shallow waterway that snaked through the dark interior of the building past the lit-up displays. There was a series of the oldest and best-known desert-island jokes; a triggering mechanism in the bottom of the raft caused the displays to light up on either side, with mechanized dolls making small movements in conjunction with the recorded gag lines. Between the displays, in the darkness, fluorescent mock-ups of various kinds of ships swooped down from the ceiling as though to collide with the raft, but always swung back up out of the way again, just in time, usually with a great gnashing noise of ratchets and gears.
All through the ride Grofield had sat brooding over the contrast between the business this tacky thrillorama was doing and the near-emptiness of his own serious theater back in Indiana. Civilization was in a decline right enough, there wasn’t any question of that.
It was the last tableau that Parker had told him to take a special interest in. It was bigger than any of the others; almost life-size, it showed a large desert island with a hill in the middle. On first coming around the corner in the raft, one saw another mechanical doll, a male castaway dressed in tattered rags, who was bobbing his head in joy over a chest of gold he’d just accidentally dug up. On floating past him and around to the far side of the island, hidden from the castaway by the hill, one saw a longboat full of pirates that had just landed; armed with picks and shovels, they were obviously here to reclaim their gold.
So were Grofield and Parker. Grofield had studied the desert island and the longboat and all the figures as the raft had slid by, and then had gone on to entertain himself in other sections of the park, and now was back to Marooned! again, drifting along, taking his time. All around, the noise and lights both were fading as the park prepared itself to close for the night. The crowd, which up to now had ebbed and flowed in all directions at once, now tended in two specific currents, one toward the fountain at the center of the park and the other toward the exit, down between the Desert Island and Island Earth.
The rear of the Marooned! building was away from any regular path, a black patch amid the brightness. Grofield turned down that way, walking along next to the featureless green-gray side of the building, and back here he became more aware of the quality of the night itself. The light and noise and movement elsewhere created an artificial daytime, but off in this corner the darkness pressed in, close and pervasive. Grofield looked up at a cloudless sky full of cold tiny stars and a thin crescent of moon, too narrow to give much light. The air was warm, but the sky looked cold and thin and very dark.
Parker was already waiting, by the back door. He was merely a darker shape in the general darkness, and Grofield took his identity on faith, whispering, “How we doing?”
“I’ve got it open. Come on.”
They stepped through into total blackness, and Grofield pulled the door closed behind him without letting it latch. They were now in a narrow corridor formed on one side by the outer shell of the building and on the other by a continuous black drape. From beyond the drape came the echoing noises of the desert-island displays, the recorded gag lines and music and sound effects.
“I deplore this place,” Grofield whispered.
Parker didn’t answer, but Grofield hadn’t really expected him to. They moved away from the door together, traveling to the right between drapery and wall, Parker leading the way and Grofield following, guided by the faint rustling sounds of Parker’s sleeve against the drape.
Parker stopped, and Grofield bumped into him. They stood in silence, listening to the tinny recordings. Then Grofield sensed Parker moving again, and a vertical strip of reddish light appeared just to his right; Parker had opened a separation in the drapery, and they could look through to the main floor of the Marooned! ride.
They were just behind that final island tableau, with its lone castaway on the one side and the longboat full of pirates on the other. Looking through the narrow slit in the drapes, reminding himself of himself checking the house before a performance back home in Mead Grove, Grofield could see past the island to a raft full of customers going by. Goggle-eyed and gape-mouthed, the people in the raft looked unhuman and feeble-minded in the red and yellow lights, being drawn along through the darkness as though they too were part of the display. They looked no less waxy and unreal than the pirates in and around the longboat.
The longboat. That was where Parker had left the money, in a suitcase stuffed down in the bottom, with one of the pirate mannequins placed on top of it. And seventy-three thousand dollars from the armored car inside it.
Another raft went by, with its red-faced humanoids. Hard to believe they were actual people, they reminded him so much of the moving targets at the shooting gallery. Poc
k pock pock he went, in his mind, and imagined the heads popping back on hinges, while the torsos remained upright and unmoving. In a little while the same raft would go by again with the same figures in it, their heads back in place.
A space; no raft coming. The island lighting switched off, and they stood in almost total darkness. Music, speeches, sound effects echoing all around them, muffled slightly by the draperies. Bits of isolated light here and there in the black building interior, like Indian campfires on a distant range of hills.
The island lighting snapped back on, triggered by another approaching raft. It went by, and the lights went off. The music and sound effects sounded thinner than before; there were fewer campfires.
Twice more the island appeared in its banks of red and yellow lights, and after the second time there were no more campfires at all, and only one thin wheedle of music. Then that too died, and a more anonymous general sound could be heard; the crowd, outside this building, shuffling away.
“All right,” Parker said.
Grofield already had the pencil flashlight in his hand, and now he switched it on. He held it along his palm so that he could adjust how much light he would permit to escape between his first and second fingers: ranging from all the light to none. He laid down a vague ribbon of white aimed toward the longboat, and Parker walked along it, his feet making muffled echoing noises against the platform with its fake sand.
Grofield followed close behind, keeping the light aimed ahead of the two of them. His ears were alert for other human occupancy of the building, but he heard nothing. He remained a pace back when they reached the longboat, aiming the light into the interior of the boat while he looked all around in the darkness for other lights to appear.
Parker shoved a mannequin out of the way and reached into the boat. He pushed a second mannequin, felt around, and said, “Give me more light.”
Grofield stepped closer to the boat, aiming the light directly into it, spreading his fingers more so that the full beam shone out. There was no suitcase in the bottom of the boat.
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