Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  For Dutch Buenadella, this potentiality of lying had an additional advantage. He wasn’t alone in this operation, he had partners. The entire local organization was an interlocking board of directors, so that a piece of Buenadella’s skim eventually wound up in Al Lozini’s pocket, and another piece in Ernie Dulare’s pocket, and another piece in Frank Schroder’s pocket. These partners of his knew he was lying to the tax people and the union people and the distributor, so he couldn’t very well tell them he’d only had eighty-seven customers tonight. But he could say he’d had one hundred eleven. He could keep not two but three sets of books, and on top of the normal skim, take an extra thirty-five dollars directly for himself. Every night of the year. Which meant something like thirteen thousand tax-free dollars a year for himself, personally.

  Frank Faran hadn’t known about the extra skim, which Buenadella took home in his pocket every night and put away in a wall safe in his den, but he did know about the regular skim and what happened to it, so now Wiss and Elkins knew about it too. And Wiss, looking to his left toward the nearest glass door while continuing to face the movie posters, murmured, “All we got to do is breathe on that door.”

  “Not before twelve o’clock,” Elkins said. Glancing at his watch, he said, “Two minutes from now.”

  * * *

  The cables, sheathed in heavy iron pipe, ran through the sewer system, crisscrossing beneath the downtown area, London Avenue, and all the business side streets. Feeder cables branched out from the main lines, burrowing through dirt under sidewalks and into basements, culminating at metal boxes that looked as though they might contain fuses, and from which wires led up to all the doors and windows of the participating business establishments. Every evening at closing time the proprietor would turn on a switch discreetly tucked away on the rear wall, and from then until the following morning the opening of any door or window would cause an electric impulse to travel through the wires to the box in the basement, through the feeder cable to the main cable in the sewer, and along the main cable to the offices of Vigilant Protective Service, Inc., where it would cause a buzzer to sound and a light to flash on a large complex wall display in the ready room. And whenever that happened, one of the men on duty would immediately phone the police station nearest the business establishment, and would also dispatch a car of Vigilant’s own, containing four armed uniformed men.

  Vigilant’s offices were in a small two-story brick building on a corner a block from London Avenue. The ready room was upstairs in the back, the billing office, executive offices, and files were upstairs in the front, the downstairs front was the visitors’ waiting room and the salesmen’s cubicles, and the downstairs back was divided into rooms for the on-duty men—a dayroom with tables and easy chairs and a television set, plus two smaller rooms containing cots—and an interior garage holding two radio cars.

  Monday was usually a very slow night at Vigilant, but for some reason this Monday was a night of minor annoyances. At six-fifteen, some kid—apparently it was a kid, there wasn’t anybody there when the cops and the Vigilant guards showed up—tried to get in through a back window into a local toy store. Then at ten-thirty somebody who also got away jimmied open the front door of an appliance repair shop, and not five minutes later in another part of town it was a gas station that was broken into, and yet again the perpetrator got away before anybody showed up. It wasn’t bad the way Halloween is bad, but it was a lot worse than the usual Monday night.

  Particularly considering the size of the crew on duty. There were two men in the ready room, and only one crew of four men on duty downstairs. When the gas station was broken into, the ready-room man had had to radio the car at the repair shop to go on over there. Only on weekends were there two groups of on-duty men, because usually only on weekends were they needed. Besides, the police were supposed to be the first line of defense; Vigilant’s primary job was to inform the police that a felony was in progress, and what they were doing. Three break-ins so far tonight, and not a single loss to a subscriber. Damages to doors would be paid for by insurance, and in no case had there been damage to the stock or interior of the store, nor any removal of items.

  Then at eleven-fifteen the fourth alarm of the night went off in the ready room, this one indicating that something had just happened at Best’s Jewelry Store, quite a ways out River Street. One of the ready-room men immediately phoned the River Street police station while the other one called downstairs to where the guards were playing a long-standing game of doubledeck pinochle. They were told the name and address of the store, and they at once dropped their cards, climbed into their Dodge Polara, and the driver pressed the button on the dashboard that electronically raised the overhead garage door. They drove out onto the dark side street, their headlights flaring as they bounced down the steep driveway and then up toward the middle of the street. They turned right, the driver pushed the button to shut the garage door behind them again, and they headed at high speed for River Street, unaware of the two men dressed in black who had been crouched to either side of the garage entrance and who had rolled into the building under the descending door.

  Handy McKay and Fred Ducasse got to their feet, took their pistols from their pockets, and moved cautiously toward the open door to the dayroom. There hadn’t been much time or opportunity to case this outfit, so they weren’t sure exactly where things were inside the building, or just how many men were in here. Parker had come in the front way this morning to apply for a job, but hadn’t managed to see much. He’d also done the toy-store break-in at six-fifteen, just before meeting with everybody at the apartment, had seen the Vigilant car arrive with its Minute Man decal on the doors, had followed it back here, and had seen the electrically controlled garage door in the side of the building.

  Philly Webb and Fred Ducasse had done the appliance-shop and gas-station break-ins, while Handy had watched the Vigilant headquarters. Now it seemed there was only one car’s worth of guards on duty, but how many more might be working inside the building it was impossible to say, so Handy and Ducasse moved silently and cautiously forward until they had assured themselves that the dayroom and the two rooms with cots and the salesmen’s cubicles and everything else on the first floor was empty. Then they headed for the stairs.

  The Polara with the four guards in it raced out River Street, a blue light flashing on the roof. They passed a blue Buick traveling sedately in the other direction, and paid it no attention. Philly Webb glanced at the receding blue light in his rear-view mirror, grinned to himself, and stepped it up a little.

  The two men in the ready room were talking about which actresses on their favorite television shows they would like to go to bed with when the door from the stairs opened and two men dressed in black, with black hoods over their faces, came in pointing pistols, moving fast, slamming the door back against the wall, one of them thumping his pistol butt on a desk top while the other one shouted, “Freeze! Freeze, dammit, one move and I blow your ass off!”

  The ready-room men were both in the gray Vigilant uniform with sidearms, but the holster flaps were snapped shut, there hadn’t been any warning, and the two intruders were making a lot of distracting noise. The one who had shouted was trotting around behind them, along the wall, while the other one kept banging things: hitting the pistol butt against this and that, kicking a metal wastebasket, knocking over a chair.

  The one running around behind them kept shouting too: “Goddamnit, one move out of you, one sound out of you, you dirty bastards, just give me a chance to drill you down, give me a chance, goddamnit, just make one fatal fucking move and I’ll smear you around this room like strawberry jam!”

  They weren’t moving. Startled, stunned, terrified, they sat open-mouthed, paralyzed by the sudden barrage out of nowhere.

  “Up!” shouted the runner. He was behind them now, and the other one in front, and they couldn’t watch both at once. “Up, you bastards, hands on your heads, get your dead asses out of those chairs, get up on your goddam feet
, move—or you’re fucking dead men!”

  They did it. They did everything they were told, surrounded by threats and racket, the other one still making a noisy mess of things, throwing phone books and ashtrays around and still always keeping his pistol pointed in the general direction of the two men standing there with their hands atop their heads.

  The other one, mouthing threats, sounding enraged with some sort of insane personal grievance, came moving in behind them, took their automatics away, got handcuffs out of a desk drawer and cuffed their wrists behind them, forced them with shouts and prodding and threats to stumble over into a corner of the room and sit on the floor there, back to back, trembling, expecting the rage and craziness to spill over any second into bloodshed, half convinced there was no way out of this, they were dead already.

  Then all at once things quieted down, and the one who had been doing all the throwing of things, all the pounding and kicking and thumping, stood in the middle of the room with his pistol held casually down at his side and started to laugh. Not crazy laughter or mean laughter, but casual amused laughter. The two ready-room men stared up at him, bewildered, and heard him say through his laughter, “Fred, that’s just beautiful.”

  Now the other one chuckled too. All his rage was gone as though it had never been. “It is kind of nice, isn’t it?” he said.

  “I’ve never tried anything that way,” the first one said. “I always do it gentle, you know? Reassure everybody they’re not gonna get hurt, take it easy, don’t worry about anything, we’re professionals, we’re not out to spill any blood, all that stuff. Get their first names, talk to them easy and calm.”

  “Sure,” the second one said. “I’ve done it that way too. But sometimes this is nice. Come in mean and loud and half-crazy. Then all they want to do is reassure you.”

  The two men laughed, and the men sitting with their backs together on the floor looked over their shoulders at one another in anger and humiliation and rue.

  Out at Best’s Jewelry, it turned out someone had thrown a brick through the plate-glass window, but didn’t seem to have taken anything. Two police radio cars had arrived by the time the Vigilant car got there. The store’s owner had been informed and was on his way over. The Vigilant guards, according to company policy, waited for his arrival, to demonstrate to him that they were on the job.

  Philly Webb parked the anonymous Buick a block from the Vigilant building, walked the block, and knocked on the garage door in the side wall. It slid upward, and Handy McKay, hood off, grinned at him and motioned him to come in. “Only two guys,” he said. “Fred’s upstairs with them.”

  “I do kind of like this,” Webb said. “Parker does come up with them, doesn’t he?” He and Handy had worked together in the past, ten or more years ago, but this was the first time they’d both been together on the same score with Parker.

  “I was saving my comeback for him,” Handy said. “There’s some cards in the next room.”

  Out at Best’s Jewelry, the Vigilant guards touched their visors in salute to the customer, got back into the Polara, and headed home. The driver took it slow and easy now, with the blue light turned off, and chose to head down London Avenue even though it was a block or so out of the way.

  It was a quiet night, moonless and dark. London Avenue was deserted except for two guys drooling over the pictures outside one of the dirty-movie houses. “They’re on line kind of early, ain’t they?” one of the guards said, and they all laughed.

  “Twelve o’clock,” Elkins said. “But wait for that car to go by.”

  At Vigilant headquarters, Philly Webb and Handy McKay were playing draw poker with a pinochle deck. “Royal flush,” Handy said.

  Webb, with a little smirk, spread out his hand. “Five aces.”

  “Damn it.” Handy tossed his hand in with true annoyance. “The cards are dead,” he said.

  From upstairs came a buzzing sound. Looking up, Webb said, “There goes the movie house.”

  Upstairs, Ducasse stood frowning at the wall display with its flashing light and droning buzzer. He called to one of the guards in the corner, “How do I turn that off?”

  “Fuck you,” said the guard. They were both upset at learning that Ducasse and Handy weren’t crazy men, after all.

  Ducasse went over and kicked the guard on the shin. “Don’t talk dirty,” he said. “How do I turn that thing off?”

  The guard, wincing with pain, tried to outstare a man with a hood over his face, but when Ducasse drew his foot back again he said, “There’s a switch on that desk. Turn it off and then back on again.”

  “Good,” said Ducasse.

  Downstairs, Webb and Handy played cards until they heard the garage door lifting. Then they pulled their hoods down over their faces and stood to either side of the dayroom door, their pistols held down at their sides.

  The guards came in talking together, taking it easy, and all four were in the room before they saw the strangers. It suddenly got very quiet, and Handy, doing it his way, said, “Okay, gents, just take it easy. We don’t want any guns going off.”

  * * *

  There were no slot machines. The image they tried for at Tony Florio’s Riviera was discreet class, but not so discreet that the mugs wouldn’t recognize it. James Bond elegance, that was the approach. The mugs, seeing maroon-velvet draperies, assumed it was elegant. The mugs, seeing slot machines and equating slot machines with pinball machines in truck-stop diners, assumed it was cheap. So there were no slot machines.

  But there was a lot of maroon velvet. Dalesia and Hurley and Mackey followed the waiter upstairs and through maroon-velvet drapes into the main gaming room, a long low-ceilinged room lined with heavy draperies. All that cloth, plus the thick green carpeting, muffled noises in the room until the place sounded like a stereo system with the bass control up full.

  “The cashier to your right, gentlemen,” the waiter said, bowing slightly, smiling and gesturing. “And good luck to you.”

  “Good luck to you, too,” Hurley said.

  The waiter went away, and the three men took a minute to look over the room. There were six crap tables, only three of them in action. Two roulette wheels, both operating. On the far side of the room, card games at several green-baize tables. The players were about two-thirds men, and most of the women seemed to be married to the men they were with. It looked to be a professional-class crowd, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, managers, with most of the men in jacket and tie. Very few of the customers appeared to be under thirty-five, and those few mostly emulated their elders in dress, deportment, and hair length. The room wasn’t crowded, but it wasn’t empty either; it was probably operating at half capacity.

  Dalesia said, “Good mob for a Monday night.”

  “Maybe we ought to invest,” Mackey said.

  Dalesia grinned. “No, I don’t think so. I think they’re a bad risk.”

  The three of them walked over to the cashier’s window. It was an oval hole in the wall, flanked by the ever-present maroon drapes. In the center of the grayish bullet-proof glass, at mouth level, was a microphone, and just above the window a speaker brought out the cashier’s voice. It was like a drive-in window at a bank; they put money in a metal drawer, which the cashier drew back to her side, then pushed out again with the chips in it. They each took a hundred dollars in five-dollar blues, and the cashier’s metallic voice said over their heads, “Good luck to you.”

  “And good luck to you, too,” Hurley said.

  They wandered the room for a few minutes, looking at the action. The crap tables and roulette wheels were run by men, but all the card games were operated by women, showing a lot of breast and a lot of plastic smile. “That’s what I call poker tits,” Dalesia said. “Harder to read than a poker face.”

  Mackey said, “Well, if I’m going to throw it away fast, I can’t do better than roulette. See you.”

  Mackey wandered off, and Hurley and Dalesia kibitzed a blackjack game for a few hands. The girl dealing flashed
them a couple of smiles while waiting for players to decide whether to hit or stay, and after a minute or two Hurley said, “Think I’ll settle in here till spring,” and took one of the empty chairs at the table.

  Dalesia roamed some more, considered the lone chemin de fer table with its slender black-haired girl dealer, and went on to one of the crap tables. They used the full Las Vegas layout, and most of the female customers were here, betting the field and the hard way. Dalesia, whose one superstition was that he had a mystical relationship with the number nine, made a sensible bet on the Don’t Pass Line and a dumb bet on the nine to come. He glanced at his watch while the shooter breathed on the red transparent dice, and saw he had twenty minutes in which to lose the hundred dollars.

  Over at one of the roulette wheels, Mackey was frowning like a steam engine and writing numbers in a notebook. He was betting on every other spin, and these were alternating between a square bet somewhere in the second twelve and the line bet at the top, the 1, 2, 3, 0 and 00. He was losing practically every time, but his frown of concentration never changed. He looked exactly like yet another chump with a system, and all the employees in the area became aware of him within five minutes. So did several customers, a couple of whom began to follow his betting even though he was losing.

  At the blackjack table, while the other players looked at their cards or the dealer’s breasts, Hurley watched her hands. She was good and smooth, but she didn’t seem to be doing anything mechanical. Not that she had to; most of the players here didn’t know how to stand on anything less than a twenty. Hurley hung back with his low teens whenever the dealer’s up card was low, never hit on sixteen or higher no matter what she had showing, and slowly inched ahead of the odds. But it was a slow way to make money.