Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  To deal with nosy neighbors, he’d be better off in an apartment than in a private house. The clear spaces around houses made secrecy difficult, and people who lived in houses tended to know their neighbors better than people in apartment buildings.

  The one section in Tyler that Parker knew of with large anonymous apartment buildings was Calesian’s neighborhood, so that was where he headed. He was still driving the Mercedes, having left the Impala behind at Lozini’s house; he knew he’d have to change soon to a less-identifiable car, but the pressure to have a home base was more urgent and at the moment nobody was actively looking for him, so he could wait until dark to make another switch of automobile.

  There shouldn’t be any danger in using Calesian’s neighborhood, but it would be too risky to use the actual building he lived in. Parker drove by it, nine stories of windows winking orange at him from the setting sun, and kept on, looking for another building approximately the same size—big and anonymous.

  He found it two blocks farther on, seven stories high, wider than Calesian’s building, red brick, with its identical rows of windows and with tenant parking in the basement. This time Parker drove around the block, to the rear of the building where it hulked over a row of small two-family houses across the street. The small houses looked diminished by their huge neighbor, like plants that have shriveled for lack of sun.

  Parker walked back around to the front of the building. As with Calesian’s place, this one had a locked front door but an open basement-garage entrance. He went in that way, took the elevator up to the lobby, and strolled over to look at the mailboxes: two facing brass ranks in a tile alcove. The building was laid out with four apartments on the first floor and twelve on each of the higher floors, which meant seventy-six mailboxes. Eleven of these had mail inside, showing through the narrow slits in the doors.

  In a building like this, tenants going away for a week or so would arrange with the superintendent to pick up their mail for them, to keep it from accumulating too much in the small boxes. But the super wouldn’t be working on Sunday, so these particular eleven tenants had apparently not been around since at least yesterday. Parker made notes of the apartment numbers.

  The closer to ground level the better. None of the eleven apartments were on either the first or second floors, so he took the elevator up to three to check out the four potentials there.

  3C. The doors were standardized, with a normal double-action lock. The third key that Parker tried opened this door, and would probably open every other door in the building. He stepped inside to darkness and a musty smell. When he shut the door behind himself, the only light came through narrow slits in the closed Venetian blinds at the far end of the living room. Patting the wall to his left, he found the light switch, turned it on, and saw at least a week’s accumulation of mail piled up on the coffee table in the middle of the room. More than a week; two copies of Time were there, one near the top of the pile and one near the bottom. Parker switched off the light again, left the apartment, and used the key to double-lock the door.

  3F. The key worked with a little more difficulty. Parker entered a room lit with a weird blue-purple glow. The light came from a fluorescent fixture over a large potted plant; the plant was nearly six feet high, with long bladelike green leaves. A glass-topped table near the front door contained a pile of mail plus a long chatty typewritten note of instructions to the superintendent. In with the directions to Herman concerning plants, birds and mail, there was included the date that Caroline would return: today.

  3K. Parker, pausing at the door, heard a television set going inside. He turned away and took the stairs to the fourth floor.

  4A. The key worked smoothly, but Parker entered a cool room dominated by the hum of an air-conditioner. This was someone who had gone away only for the weekend.

  4J. Again no trouble with the key. The apartment smelled somewhat of rotting garbage. Parker switched on the light and saw disorder and dirt in a living room furnished in odd pieces probably bought secondhand. No pile of mail. A door on the left led to a small sour bedroom in which a fat man wearing only a gray T-shirt slept moistly. His legs were pocked with scabs from hard things he had walked into, and several empty bottles were on the floor around the bed. Parker withdrew, making a note of the place; if nothing else worked out, the fat man could be kept in a closet for a couple of days.

  5B. The key didn’t work. A different key finally worked, reluctantly. Parker entered a living room with one lamp burning in the far corner, giving a low yellow light. The room was neat, furnished in the style of a decorating magazine, and it contained no pile of mail. There were two bedrooms, one for adults and one for two male children who used bunk beds. The closets seemed full and there were pieces of luggage on the shelves, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other. But the refrigerator in the small neat kitchen contained an open bottle of milk, half a homemade chocolate cake, and leftover casserole in an orange oval pot with lid. The people in this apartment were too neat to leave things like that in the refrigerator if they planned to be gone for a week or so; they would be back tonight.

  5D. The first key worked. The living room was dark, dry, and hot. Parker switched the light on, looked around, and saw no pile of mail. Green drapes were drawn across the window at the far end of the room. The furnishings were ordinary: a sofa and two chairs all arranged so that they faced the television set, and with the appropriate tables and lamps. One bedroom, dominated by a king-size bed and apparently occupied by a couple. No luggage on the closet shelves, and visible spaces amid the clothing, particularly on the woman’s side. No razor or toothbrushes in the bathroom. An almost completely cleaned-out refrigerator.

  This one looked good. Parker went back to the living room, where a secretary stood against the wall near the front door. Opening the desk part of the secretary, he found papers in pigeonholes, and went through them looking for an indication of this couple’s travel plans.

  Brochures describing the Caribbean. A pencil-written list of woman’s clothing and accessories, each item checked off. And a telephone bill inside its opened envelope; the cancellation date on the envelope was three days ago, Thursday. Since the payment card and return envelope were both gone, the bill had been paid, no earlier than Friday.

  All right. Parker had left his and Grofield’s luggage—one small bag each—in a locker down at the railroad station, and he’d go down there tonight to get them back. At the same time he would switch cars. Before then, though, he had other things to do.

  The phone was in the living room, next to the sofa. Parker switched on the air-conditioner mounted in the wall under the windows, sat on the sofa, and called Handy McKay collect, using a name that Handy would know: Tom Lynch. Handy, sounding surprised and confused, accepted the charges, and when Parker came on, Handy said, “How come collect?”

  “I don’t want your number to show up on this phone bill.”

  “Ah.”

  “You still looking for something to do?”

  “I still eat.”

  “I have something. It’s a little different from regular.”

  “Will it pay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where and when?”

  “Tyler. The address is 220 Elm Way, apartment 5D. Get here between noon and sundown tomorrow. Arrive quiet.”

  “On tiptoe,” Handy said, meaning that he understood he shouldn’t merely take a cab direct from the airport or railroad station to 220 Elm Way.

  “See you,” Parker said, and broke the connection and made another collect call.

  He phoned a total of twenty-five men. Some of them took two or three calls to locate. By the time he was finished, full night had descended on Tyler and eleven of the twenty-five had said they were in.

  Thirty-six

  Sunday was early closing; local ordinances prohibited liquor sales after midnight. Not that Faran or any of the other local saloonkeepers really minded, since Sunday was a dead night anyway. They were mostl
y glad of the excuse to close up, throw the few regulars out, and go home.

  Angie came into Faran’s office a few minutes after midnight, bringing him a final drink. “Everybody’s set outside,” she said.

  He was totaling the figures. “Fine.”

  “I’m taking off now.”

  He kept his eyes and his mind on his paperwork. “Okay.” She hesitated. “Will I see you later?”

  He looked up. “I’m not sure, Angie. I’m feeling a little shaky.”

  “Is it me, Frank? Did I do something?”

  “Hey, no,” he said. Getting to his feet, surprising himself with the sudden rush of tenderness he felt toward the girl, he went around the desk and took her upper arms in his hands. “Nothing wrong with you at all, Angie. It’s just all this trouble we’ve been having. Give me a couple days, let things calm down, then everything will be just fine again.”

  “Okay,” she said, and gave him a tentative smile. “You had me a little worried.”

  “Don’t worry, Angie. Don’t worry about a thing.” He kissed her briefly and released her. “I’m just nervous these days, that’s all.”

  ”Okay, Frank. Good night.”

  He watched her walk toward the door, skinny and tight, and felt the old ripples in his loins. “Maybe—” he said. She turned to look back at him.

  He grinned and bobbed his head. “Maybe I’ll stop over later on.”

  “Any time, Frank.”

  “I’m not sure. Just maybe.”

  “If I’m asleep,” she said, “just wake me.” She gave him a lazy grin and said, “You know how.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He watched her leave, but the instant she was out of sight his mind veered away again. Al Lozini’s death, the replacement of Farrell for Wain, Dutch Buenadella taking over, Hal Calesian suddenly some kind of major power, that guy Parker still prowling around—it was enough to give a man nightmares. Even if he could get to sleep in the first place.

  Faran had another ten minutes’ work. The numbers distracted him, soothed his mind, and the drink Angie had brought also helped. He was feeling a little better when he left the office, made his way through the empty club, turned the lights off at the main box by the front door, and went outside.

  He was locking the door when he felt the gun in his back. His knees weakened, and he leaned against the door. “Jesus God,” he whispered.

  It was Parker; Parker’s voice, saying, “Come on, Frank. Let’s take a walk.”

  Thirty-seven

  When the doctor left he switched off the light, leaving the room in total darkness. A window was open to let in the warm night air, but no illumination entered with it. The sky was black, dotted with high thin stars that showed nothing but themselves. The room remained black and silent, undefined except by the vaguely lighter rectangle of the window and the hair-thin line of yellow light under the door.

  After two hours the sliver of moon appeared in the left edge of the window. Tomorrow night it would finish its monthly wink, closing down completely, but tonight it was still visible, though heavy-lidded. It gave very little more light than the stars, an almost unnoticeable pallor that wouldn’t be able to make its presence known if there was any other light source at all.

  But in the bedroom there wasn’t. The gray light crept at an angle across the room, picking up a dresser against the wall and a corner of the foot of the bed. As the moon eased across the sky, more of the bed came into existence, until the light touched on a bandaged hand. Dr. Beiny, being as considerate as possible, had taken the last finger of the left hand.

  The moon’s angle reached Grofield’s face, the skin as pale and bloodless as the light that defined it. His breathing was very slow and very shallow, and his eyes did no moving at all behind the closed lids. At times his brain fluttered weakly with incoherent dreams that he wouldn’t remember if he ever woke up, but mostly he was quiescent.

  The bullet had gone through his body, entering between two ribs and taking a small chip from one of them, passing near the heart, tearing tissue and lung, and exiting through a much larger hole in the back. Dr. Beiny had filled this body with medicines meant to promote healing and guard against infection, had closed and bandaged both holes, had added blood to the depleted store, and was feeding Grofield intravenously with a liquid composed mostly of protein and sugar. The apparatus in the room, chrome and glass, glinting dimly in the moonlight, gave the place the air of a hospital or a medical station near a battlefield: inverted bottle suspended from a chrome armature, syringes, beakers, full and empty squat medicine bottles with cork stoppers through which the hypodermic needle would be thrust.

  By midnight the moon was halfway across the window space. A small sound occurred in Grofield’s throat, his eyes twitched inside the lids, the remaining fingers of his left hand contracted slightly. His heart beat slowly but erratically, and then it stopped. The fingers opened out a bit again, losing their tension. The eyes became still. The heart thudded again, blundered forward like a blind man in a dense woods. A long, slow, almost silent sigh emerged through Grofield’s slightly parted lips; not quite the soul leaving the body.

  The shred of moon moved on, showing other parts of the room, gradually leaving the bed in darkness. Toward morning Grofield died again, this time for three seconds, in silence and total darkness; then lived again, tenuous, clutching.

  Thirty-eight

  There are three planes a day from La Guardia Airport in New York City to Tyler National Airport in Tyler, the second one leaving just before noon. Stan Devers, having spent the night before with a girl he knew in Manhattan, took a cab at eleven in the morning and reached the airport with plenty of time to spare.

  Stan Devers was in his late twenties, muscular and smiling and self-confident, with a clean strong jawline and curly blond hair. He had an easy long-strided walk and a manner of open honesty that was maybe just a little too good to be true. For as long as he could remember he’d been a swimmer upstream, a rebel for the sake of rebellion, opposed to everything that plain stolid ordinary society stood for. He’d been thrown out of two high schools and one college—having already, in the college, been thrown out of ROTC—he’d been fired from most of the jobs he’d ever held, but he’d survived nearly three and a half years of enlisted service in the Air Force before making the move that had thrust him out of square society forever.

  He had been a finance clerk in the Air Force, on a base where the payroll had still been in cash, a thing that didn’t happen anywhere at all now. He’d worked out a way to take a month’s payroll and had involved himself with some professional thieves to pull the job, including Parker. They’d succeeded in getting the money, but then things had gone wrong and Devers’ connection with the robbery had become known by the authorities. He’d had to take off, and Parker had sent him to Handy McKay in Presque Isle, who had finished the job of turning him into a professional thief. He’d worked six robberies in the last five years, with varying success, including one with Parker last year, a hijacking of paintings that had gone very badly, with no profit for anybody. He’d had a minor score since then with some other people, but not enough to make him really easy in his mind about his money cushion. Which was why he’d been happy to hear from Parker again, even with Parker’s cryptic warning that this wasn’t an ordinary job.

  The girl at the airline counter seemed mildly surprised that Devers was buying a one-way ticket. He hadn’t bought one round-trip ticket in the last five years, and doubted that he ever would again. In a way, it symbolized the kind of life he lived, the theme of it that he enjoyed: never go back to anything, never move anywhere but forward.

  A noon plane on a summer Monday to a third-level city in the hinterlands; there weren’t many passengers. The tourists had done their traveling on the weekend, the businessmen had taken the earlier morning plane, and all that was left was oddities like Stan Devers. Checking in at the gate, he saw no more than a dozen other passengers in the plastic seats there, all gazing moodily out t
he big windows at the white plane waiting to take them aboard. Of course, it was still fifteen minutes before takeoff time, but he doubted the plane would be very full when it left.

  He carried a black attache case and a black raincoat. Between them, they contained everything he needed to travel with. Getting his ticket back from the check-in clerk, he walked over to the side wall of the waiting area and sat in a chair that gave him equal views of the windows and the check-in desk. Five minutes later he saw a huge bald man arrive and hand over his ticket, and he grinned to himself. Now why would a man mountain like that be going to Tyler this fine morning, unless he was another member of Parker’s team?

  * * *

  Dan Wycza accepted his ticket back, muttered a thank you, and moved into the waiting area, looking around for a seat away from the other passengers. He saw a kid sort of grinning at him from over by the side wall, ignored him, and sat down in the front row, right near the plate-glass view of the airplane. Putting his old brown-leather bag on the floor at his feet, he took out the health magazine he’d been reading and went on with the article about the skin-drying effects and other disadvantages of sunlight.

  Wycza hadn’t seen Parker in almost ten years, not since the time a bunch of them had knocked over a whole town together —banks and jewelry stores and everything. Copper Canyon, North Dakota. What a mess they’d made of that place, even more than they’d intended. Since then Wycza had done a number of jobs, none of them as big or as gaudy as that Copper Canyon business, but they’d kept him in wheat germ and yogurt. Whenever things had gotten slow he’d gone back to his other trade, wrestling, but given his choice, he preferred armed robbery. It was always better to be paid in thousands than in hundreds.

  He felt eyes on him. He was sensitive to that kind of thing, being a big man and completely bald, sensitive to being stared at, and he didn’t like it. He glanced around, irritated, and it was the young guy over by the wall. Grinning at him, as though he knew something about something. And not shifting his eyes away when Wycza glowered at him. In the end, it was Wycza himself who looked away, facing front again and trying unsuccessfully to go on reading the article in the magazine.