Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  The gun was in Parker’s right hand. He pointed toward Grofield with his left, both to signal Grofield to make his own move and to attract the attention of the man in the office, who was now leaning forward in his chair, feet flat on the floor and arms out at his sides as he gaped open-mouthed at the gun in Parker’s fist.

  For a long moment nothing happened. Grofield had taken out the Beretta and was holding it close to his belt buckle, shielding it from the street as he pointed it in the direction of the man in the office. Parker remained where he was, gun aimed and pointing finger indicating Grofield. And the man inside went on being stunned into immobility, sitting like a drugged ape in the zoo, staring at the black circle of gun barrel.

  Then Grofield tapped on the glass with his own pistol. The man’s head turned, as though some invisible hand had reached down and forced it to swivel on the neck, and when he saw Grofield and the second gun he slowly lifted his arms straight over his head.

  Parker tapped again. The man, arms still up, turned and stared at him. He seemed more dazed than frightened, as though the display of guns had robbed him of the power of thought. With his free hand Parker pointed to the locked door. The man continued to sit there, blinking. Parker pointed again and made a move-along gesture with the pistol, and abruptly the man got to his feet and hurried forward on wobbly legs, moving to the door.

  Parker waited till he’d reached it, hand on knob; then he moved to the left, so that when the door pushed open outward he was in position to step inside and pull the door instantly closed behind him again. “Take it easy,” he said.

  “Okay,” the man said. It was as though Parker had made some insanely controversial remark, but the man was determined to agree with him anyway. “Okay okay,” he said. His arms were still straight up, but he nevertheless patted the air with his palms, as though to pacify an angry opponent.

  “Put your arms down,” Parker told him. “You don’t have heat.”

  “That’s right,” the man said, fervently agreeing with everything. His arms stayed up in the air. “I just work here, that’s all,” he said.

  “Put them down.”

  The man looked startled, then sneaked a look up at his left wrist. It was like a comedy routine, except that the guy was serious. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and snapped his arms down to his sides. “I got, uh—I got flustered.”

  “Today’s receipts,” Parker said. “Go get them and bring them to me.”

  “Well, sure,” the man said. “Naturally.” Backing away, moving at a half-turn, unwilling to look away from Parker and the gun, he kept talking, maniacally cheerful and agreeable. “I fluster easy,” he said. “I’ve always been like that, I get flustered, I— With my wife, like. She’s very volatile, you know, and then I get flustered.”

  He’d reached the filing cabinet. Now he had to turn his attention away from Parker while he searched his pockets for keys, and it was clearly not an easy thing for him to do. He kept reaching in the same pocket, over and over.

  “Relax,” Parker said. “Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

  “Well, yeah,” the man said. “That makes sense. I mean, you’re, uh—you’re here for money, right?” He finally reached into another pocket and found his keys.

  “That’s right,” Parker said. He glanced over at Grofield, who was looking left and right at the street. Their eyes met, and Grofield nodded; everything still all right.

  The garage man was still being flustered. Keys rattled together while he tried to remember which was the right one. Then he got it, couldn’t make it work, nearly dropped the whole chain of ten or so keys on the floor, recovered, and unlocked the filing cabinet. Then he stooped to open the bottom drawer and take out two green-metal money boxes, both about the size and shape of small tool kits. Putting them on the floor, he pushed the file drawer closed again, then picked up both boxes and walked toward Parker, waddling slightly from the awkward weight. An apologetic smile on his face, he said, “I don’t have the keys for these. When Mr. Joseph comes around, he—”

  “That’s okay,” Parker said. “We’re going out of here now.”

  The man looked stunned. “What? I thought you’d take the . . .” He gestured with both money boxes.

  “You’ll carry them to the car,” Parker told him. “We’ll go out of here, you ahead of me, and you’ll walk up the ramp. Don’t look back at me, don’t try to give any sign to the boy in the booth, and don’t talk.”

  “Listen,” the man said. He was concentrating himself to explain something very important, as though Parker were an examiner from Internal Revenue. “I’m not sure I can do it,” he said.

  “You can do it,” Parker told him. He put the Colt in his jacket pocket, kept his hand in there with the gun, and reached with his other hand for the doorknob.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. Droplets of perspiration edged his hairline all across his forehead. “My legs give out, I can’t always, I don’t know if I can—”

  “Move,” Parker said, and pushed the door open.

  Blinking, trembling, stumbling a bit, the man moved forward past Parker and out the door. Parker followed, letting the spring pull the door closed again behind him.

  Nothing had changed outside: somnolent boy, raucous music, nobody else around. Parker kept a few paces back, and followed the man with the money up the ramp. They walked past the Buick and on up, and at a Volvo one level higher, Parker said, “Stop right there.”

  The man stopped.

  “Put the boxes down. Go over and open the passenger door.”

  The man put the metal boxes down; they made sharp little clangs on the concrete. Parker strode quickly up behind him as he moved to the right side of the Volvo. The man reached for the door handle, and Parker took the Colt from his pocket, reversing it. “It’s locked,” the man said, and Parker clipped him behind the ear.

  It wasn’t enough. The man sagged forward against the car, air puffing out of his mouth as though he were a balloon, but he didn’t fall. Holding him in place with a hand pressed against his back between the shoulder blades, Parker hit him again, and this time he slumped in a boneless way, sliding down the side of the Volvo, Parker easing him to the floor. At this point he didn’t want anybody dead; robberies could be kept basically a simple matter between himself and Lozini, but murder would complicate the situation.

  Carrying the metal cases, Parker walked back down the curving ramp to the Buick, where he found Grofield waiting for him, looking edgy. “Police car went by again,” he said. “I couldn’t stand out there, so I came in.”

  “We’re all right,” Parker told him.

  They got into the Buick, the metal boxes on the floor at Grofield’s feet, and Parker drove back down to the booth, where he gave the boy the parking ticket and a dollar. “Keep the change,” he said, and drove out, having to wait a second to let a slow-moving dark sedan go by. The two men inside glanced at the garage and kept going.

  Ten

  When Lozini walked into the office at nine-fifteen in the morning, the other four were already there. They’d damn well better be.

  Two of them had been his guests night before last: Jack Walters, Lozini’s personal attorney, stout and uncomfortable and phlegmatic, and Frankie Faran. The third man, rusty-haired, well-built, casually dressed, fortyish, wearing squared-off glasses with gold-colored frames, was Ted Shevelly, Lozini’s assistant. And the fourth man, slender and dapper in a dark gray linen suit, was Harold Calesian, a plainclothes detective working out of the Organized Crime Squad downtown and Lozini’s principal liaison with the Police Department.

  They all said hello. Lozini grunted, walked around to sit behind his desk, and stared each man in the face. Wide windows all along the wall to his right let in glaring sunlight and a broad view of richly blue sky. This office was on the seventeenth floor of the Nolan Building, the tallest office structure in the city, in which Lozini and some of his friends had a minority real estate interest. The sign on the corridor door, past the unstaffed receptioni
st’s office, said City Property Holdings, Inc., the corporate entity through which Lozini maintained his holdings in this building and in Fun Island and in several other pieces of real estate around town.

  Lozini’s stare got to Ted Shevelly last, and held there. He said, “All right. Ted. What the fuck happened?”

  “He hit us three times,” Shevelly said. “Bing bing bing. Nobody knew it was coming. He just hit hard, and took off.” Shevelly seemed calm about the whole thing, even a little admiring of the bastard who’d done it all, but that was good. That was what made him so right to be Lozini’s assistant; he was strong and tough, but he still kept an evenness of disposition that put the brakes on Lozini’s own impetuousness. He wasn’t as good as Caliato, who’d had more of Lozini’s aura of power about him, but he was good.

  Lozini said, “Took off where? You don’t know where he is?”

  Shevelly shook his head. “Wherever he is,” he said, “he’s a loner. He has absolutely no local contacts, I’ll guarantee it.”

  “He has a guy working with him,” Faran said. His voice sounded muffled; his brow was furrowed as though he were pouting. His skin looked bad, and he kept shifting around in his chair.

  “Not anybody local,” Shevelly said. “The two of them came in together, and nobody in town knows them.”

  Lozini said, “You’re sure.”

  “We did a lot of leaning the last twelve hours,” Shevelly said. “We shook this town pretty good last night, and nothing fell out. They’re on their own.”

  Lozini turned to Jack Walters. “What’s the damage?”

  Walters grunted as he struggled an envelope out of his suitcoat pocket. He was a fat man who’d never figured out how to be graceful in the role; his pockets were always too hard to get at, chairs were always positioned wrong, doorknobs were a constant problem. It was impossible to imagine him dressing himself.

  Lozini waited, impatient, while Walters fumbled at the envelope, finally opening it and taking out a sheet of notepaper that had to be unfolded twice. Then, panting a bit, Walters said, “At the New York Room they took nine hundred in cash, and approximately three thousand in credit-card slips. At the brewery, between seven and nine thousand dollars in checks, and approximately four hundred in cash. And at the parking garage, three hundred seventy-four dollars in cash.”

  Lozini added it up as Walters talked. “Almost fourteen thousand he cost us,” he said.

  “Not exactly,” Walters said. “The cash is gone, obviously, and so are the credit-card slips. Most of the checks stolen from the brewery can be replaced, though, once previous payments by the customers have been aligned with the current record of deliveries. There’ll be some inevitable loss there, but we should make about an eighty-percent recovery.”

  “Losing about a thousand,” Lozini said. “And costing how much to do the paperwork to get the rest back?”

  “I haven’t attempted to work that out,” Walters said.

  “Don’t,” Lozini told him. “What’s the situation with employees?”

  “The only employees at the nightclub,” Walters said, “to become aware of the robbery when it was in progress were Frankie here and a waitress named Angela Dawson. Frankie assures me Miss Dawson will be no trouble.”

  Lozini looked at Faran. “That right?”

  “She’s a friend of mine,” Faran said. He still looked green and pasty, and when he talked he sounded as though somebody was slowly strangling him. “It’s okay, Mr. Lozini, I talked to her and she’s taken care of.”

  Lozini nodded, and turned back to Walters. “What about the rest?”

  “At the brewery,” Walters said, consulting his sheet of paper again, “the only employee inconvenienced was the night watchman, Donald Snyder. He was locked in a bathroom and—”

  Lozini, frowning, said, “What was that name?”

  “Donald Snyder.”

  “Why do I know that?”

  Deadpan, phlegmatic, Walters said, “He was also the night watchman at Fun Island when there was that trouble two years ago.”

  Lozini permitted himself a thin smile. “He’s running a streak,” he said. “What happened to him?”

  “He’s the one who reported the robbery,” Walters said, “after he got himself out of the bathroom. His description of the general build of the one thief he saw up close suggests it wasn’t the one called Parker but the other one. There was apparently, by the way, an attempt made to send a message through Snyder to you.””A message?”

  “As he did with Frankie,” Walters said.

  Lozini frowned at Faran. “What message?”

  Faran licked his lips and adjusted himself again in the chair. “He said to tell you what he was taking was interest on the debt, and didn’t count against the principal.”

  “He did, huh.” Grunting, Lozini looked again at Walters. “Same with the night watchman?”

  “He didn’t get to give the message,” Walters said, “since Snyder had apparently never heard of you. He can’t remember the name of the thief used, except that he’s sure it began L-o.”

  Ted Shevelly and Harold Calesian both grinned slightly. “Anonymity,” Shevelly said. “What do you think of that?”

  “It’s about time,” Lozini said. Anonymity was what he wanted, though he’d had damn little of it the last ten years or so. There was always something or other in the newspapers, all hedged around with words like “alleged” and “putative” so a lawsuit could never be launched to put a stop to it, and it was hell on the family. Newspaper people had no sense of decency. Fortunately, Lozini’s six children were all daughters, all now grown and married and with other last names, but there was still his wife, and other relatives scattered around the state.

  Walters was saying, “Snyder seems none the worse for his experience. After the last time, when some of our own people roughed him up a bit, he was given the job at the brewery.”

  There was a comic-opera touch here that Lozini didn’t like. He wanted to get past it, get on to other things. “What do we do for him this time?” he said.

  Walters shrugged. “A few weeks off with pay. He hasn’t the slightest idea what’s going on, or even that anything is going on. He’s your true innocent bystander.”

  “We oughta put a plaque on him,” Lozini said. “Anybody else?”

  “One man at the garage,” Walters said. “He got hit on the head, apparently by Parker. His name is Anthony Scoppo, and he was released from the hospital this morning.”

  “He one of ours?”

  Walters pursed his lips. “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. He kept himself as ignorant as possible of the actual work Lozini’s people did.

  Lozini looked over at Shevelly. “Anthony Scoppo. Ours?”

  “I think I remember the name,” Shevelly said. “He drove a car for us a couple of times, but he gets too nervous. We haven’t used him for anything for a while.”

  To Walters again, Lozini said, “Another message to me?”

  “No, Parker didn’t mention you at all. Apparently he assumed you’d understand without his saying anything, since that was the third operation of the night.”

  Lozini gave Harold Calesian a glum stare. “Where do you suppose the cops were?” he asked.

  Calesian grinned sympathetically, undisturbed by Lozini’s implied accusation. He had the easy assurance and humorous arrogance of the long-time cop, combined with the calmness and quietness that comes from being on the inside, one of the masters. He always spoke quietly, with small expressive hand gestures, and nothing ever ruffled him. “The cops were on the street, Al,” he said. “By three o’clock this morning we were saturating the streets.”

  “That goddam garage,” Lozini said, “is on London Avenue, the brightest street in the city.”

  “We had a car in the area,” Calesian said. “You had two cars there yourself, Al, there was almost trouble between them and the patrolmen. What happened to your people?”

  “They’re not trained cops.”

&
nbsp; “Then why put them on patrol?”

  Lozini waved it away like a buzzing fly. “That isn’t the point,” he said. “The point is this son of a bitch Parker. Where is he, and how do we stop him?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Calesian said, “any more than Ted does. Remember, Al, we came in this late. If you’d talked to me yesterday, or even the night before when he called you, I might have been able to do something by now.”

  “Who knew he was going to move like that?”

  Calesian shrugged. “We’ve been on it for six hours,” he said.

  “Do you have a make on him yet? Who is he, where’s he from?”

  “We don’t have any helpful identification, no fingerprints, just the name Parker. We’ve queried Washington, and we’ll see what happens.”

  Lozini peered at him. “You don’t think much will.”

  With a small smile, Calesian said, “No, I don’t.”

  Ted Shevelly said, “What do we do about tonight?”

  But Lozini was thinking about something else. “There may be a way I can find out who he is. Something about him, anyway.”

  Shevelly said, “How’s that?”

  “I’ll get in touch with you people later,” Lozini said. “I have to make a phone call.”

  Shevelly said, “What about tonight?”

  “I’ll call you this afternoon,” Lozini told him. To Faran, he said, “Frankie, you keep yourself available. You gonna be at the club or home?”

  “Home,” Faran said. “I feel crappy, to tell you the truth. I’m gonna try to sleep a little.”

  “Just stay available.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  Walters said, “Anything special for me to do?”

  Lozini gave him an irritable look. “About what?”

  Walters gestured with the sheet of paper. “These losses.”

  “Unexplained robberies,” Lozini told him. “Deal with them straight. Give that driver from the garage a little something for his trouble.”

  “Scoppo,” Walters said, and nodded.

  Getting to his feet, Calesian said, “Let me know, Al, if you want any change in what we’re doing. Right now, we’re full out looking for them.”