The sound of the phone confused his mind, which tried to interpolate it into the dream as church bells. But there was no church, the image broke down, and he awoke, dry-mouthed and disoriented, to hear the phone ring a second time. He didn’t need to switch the light on to find the receiver on the bedside table. Lying on his side, hearing the beating of his heart in the ear pressed into the pillow, he held the phone to his other ear and said, “Hello?”
“Calesian?” It was an angry voice, and a voice he recognized, though he couldn’t immediately put a name to it. But he knew it was someone of power; the tone of voice alone was enough to tell him that much.
He said, “Yes? Who is it?”
“This is Dulare, you simple bastard. Wake up.”
Dulare. “I’m awake,” Calesian said, feeling a sudden flutter of nerves in his chest. Lifting his head from the pillow, hiking himself up onto an elbow, he repeated, “I’m awake. What’s the problem?” And blinked in the darkness; though the curtains were open at his bedroom window, no moonlight shone in. It seemed black as a closet out there.
”I’ll tell you the problem,” Dulare said. “Six guys just knocked over the Riviera.”
“Did what?”
“You heard me, goddammit.”
“Robbed—”
“It had to be your friend Parker,” Dulare said. “There’s no way it’s anything else.”
“Good Christ.”
“Christ doesn’t come into this.” Dulare was raging; his words were made out of sharp pieces of metal, shaped and flung. “No two-bit heist artist is going to take me for fifty thousand dollars, Calesian.”
“I don’t—” Calesian rubbed his face with his free hand, trying to think. He was now sitting up completely on the bed, the dream forgotten. “Six of them, you said?”
“He’s brought in friends,” Dulare said. “The son of a bitch is starting a war, Calesian. You’ve mishandled this thing every way you knew how, you and that goddam moron Buenadella.”
“They got away clean?” It was a stupid question to ask and Calesian knew it, but he couldn’t find anything sensible to say and silence would have been even worse.
“I’m going over to Buenadella’s,” Dulare said. It was a bad sign that he was calling Dutch by his last name. “I don’t want any of you damn fools here at my place, not with Parker after your asses. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, and you be there, too.”
“Of course,” Calesian said, but Dulare had already hung up on him.
Calesian cradled the phone, then got out of bed and stood there for a second in the darkness, reluctant to turn the light on, face the reality, start moving.
He should have known. He should have guessed that Parker would pull something like this; it’s why the bastard dropped out of sight. The way he’d applied pressure to Lozini last week, hitting the New York Room and the brewery and that downtown parking garage. Only this time, instead of three small annoying stings, taking useless credit-card papers and checks, he’d done one big punch, hitting for fifty thousand dollars.
One big punch? All at once, with the conviction of a revelation, he knew there were going to be more punches than one. Looking toward the window, Calesian thought, He’s out there somewhere, right now, hitting again. Where in hell are you, Parker?
Still in darkness, he turned his head toward the phone he couldn’t see. Call someone, warn somebody? Who? He had no idea where the hit would come, or even if it would be something his own people, the police, would be able to do anything about. A robbery out at the Riviera would be outside local law jurisdiction anyway, even if they reported it. And if there hadn’t been any injuries or too many civilians upset, they probably wouldn’t report it at all.
Fifty thousand. And it was only the first.
Calesian moved over to the window, looked out at the dark city under the moonless sky. The spotted streetlights, aping the stars, emphasized the darkness rather than cutting it. Calesian sensed Parker out there somewhere, scurrying in the dark with his army.
He looked up at the sky. Why the hell wasn’t there a moon, for Christ’s sake? The air would be hot just the other side of the window glass, but the air-conditioning was on in here, and he shivered slightly from the coolness of it. And the unrelieved darkness. A hell of a night to die, he thought.
Forty-six
Two stretches inside, before he’d smartened up, had bred in Ben Pelzer a taste for orderliness, neatness in everything he did. The third-floor walk-up apartment on East Tenth Street where he was known as Barry Pearlman was always as neat as a pin, and so was his house out in Northglen, where he lived under his own name with his wife and his three-year-old twin daughters, Joanne and Joette.
Pelzer’s life was as neatly organized as his homes, and the beginning of his week was Friday, when he would get up in the house in Northglen, pack his bag, and take a plane; sometimes to Baltimore, or Savannah, or New Orleans, or more rarely New York. He never knew ahead of time where it would be, and he didn’t concern himself. He would simply stop at Frank Schroder’s real estate office, pick up the tickets and his instructions and the bag with the money in it, and be on his way.
In that port city, whichever one it turned out to be, he would usually have a phone number to call, though every once in a while there would be an actual physical meet at the airport; New York was mostly done that way. He would turn over the money, receive his stock, and take the next plane back to Tyler. Then he would drive to the house on East Tenth Street, go up to his apartment, and wait for the first knock on the door.
It was never long in coming. Ben Pelzer was the Man’s Man, the wholesaler for all the street dealers in Tyler. Frank Schroder had other wholesalers for other territories, but the nickel-dime action on the street, for the pillbox or paper twist you bought downtown in a doorway or on a park bench, was where Ben Pelzer’s merchandise changed hands.
And the weekend was the rush season. On Friday night and Saturday morning the retailers would come by Barry Pearlman’s place to stock up, and by Saturday night they’d be coming back again to replenish. They couldn’t buy it all at once because this was strictly a cash business, and none of the retailers ever had enough cash on a Friday to buy a full weekend’s supply.
On an average week, Pelzer’s goods brought in about one hundred thousand dollars on the street. Twenty percent of that stayed with the retailers, the rest coming to the Pearlman apartment. Pelzer’s cut was two percent of the weekly cash in hand, averaging about sixteen hundred dollars, which was a very healthy weekly wage indeed. The remaining seventy-five or eighty thousand, Frank Schroder’s share from which additional stock was purchased and the law was paid off and the main partnership received their dividends, was amassed all weekend in a suitcase under Pelzer’s bed.
That was a lot of cash money to have in one place, particularly when people like Ben Pelzer’s customers knew about it, but there’d never been any attempt to steal it. In the first place, everyone who knew about the money also knew whose it was. And in the second place, Pelzer and the cash were never alone in the apartment; two of Frank Schroder’s men always sat in, arriving on Friday no more than half an hour after Ben himself took occupancy, and staying with him and the money all through the weekend. The two regular men, Jerry Trask and Frank Slade, were big and tough-looking, a strong contrast with slender, neat Ben Pelzer, and over the last few years the three of them had filled in the idle hours on the long weekends with an endless game of Monopoly. They loaned one another money, forgave one another rents, invented easy new rules, and did everything possible to keep the game going. They were all paper millionaires by now, using the cash from three Monopoly sets for their liquid assets, with hotels on every property, and wholesale swaps of entire complexes. None of them ever got tired of the game, which was permanently set up on a card table in the middle of the apartment living room.
Pelzer’s work-week—and his time as Barry Pearlman—ended late Monday night. Following the weekend trade, there was always one last spurt o
f buying on Monday, as the retailers stocked up for their daily business, the serious customers as opposed to the weekend joy-poppers. By midnight on Monday that final rush of business would be completed, but Pelzer always kept the shop open until one a.m., just to be on the safe side. Finally, at one o’clock on the dot, he would leave the Monopoly game and lock himself in the bedroom while Trask and Slade washed the dishes and generally tidied up. If anybody rang the doorbell after one o’clock, they were out of luck—nobody would answer.
In the bedroom, Pelzer would put the suitcase on the bed, take the money out, and slowly count it. This week the total was eighty-two thousand, nine hundred twelve dollars. His two percent of that would be sixteen hundred fifty-eight dollars and twenty-four cents, but he was supposed to even that off down to the nearest hundred, so this week he was exactly making his average: sixteen hundred dollars. He took that money in the cleanest bills, mostly in twenties and fifties, and stuffed it away in a money belt he took from the closet, then put on under his shirt. He took another five hundred dollars, in tens and twenties, set it to one side on the bed, and closed the suitcase. Then he unlocked the bedroom door and carried the suitcase and the extra five hundred dollars out to the living room.
The five hundred was his associates’ pay: two-fifty apiece. He had never discussed his own salary with them, so they were unaware of the disparity between his sixteen hundred and their two and a half; being unaware of it, they were not made troubled by it.
From here on, the routine was that they would leave the apartment and drive in Pelzer’s car over to the parking lot behind Frank Schroder’s real estate office, where another car would be waiting for them. Trask and Slade and the suitcase would transfer to the other car, and Pelzer would go home, where his wife would be waiting up for him with a midnight snack. They’d eat together, do the dishes, and go to bed, Pelzer then remaining at home, puttering around his garden and his workbench, until Friday morning and the beginning of another week.
It was an easy schedule, clear-cut and relaxed. It gave him four nights and three full days with his family every week, it offered him interesting travel and introduced him to a wide variety of human types, it paid him handsomely, and there had never been a bit of trouble.
Until tonight.
* * *
Carlow said, “Here they come.”
The routine was, they had Pelzer’s Oldsmobile Cutlass spotted, nearly a block from the apartment, and they were parked behind it—in a different car now, Carlow having traded the Mercury in on an American Motors Ambassador. The air-conditioner worked better on this car, but there still wasn’t room for all three in front, not with one of them Dan Wycza. He sat in back, leaning forward with his forearms on the seat back, and he and Devers and Carlow watched the three men come out of the small tenement-style apartment house a block away and turn in this direction. The smaller man in the middle carried an apparently heavy suitcase, while the bigger men flanking him kept looking left and right as they walked.
“I look at them,” Wycza said, “I look at those people, and I know they aren’t sensible.”
Devers said, “You think they’ll give us a hard time?”
“I think we ought to start right off by shooting them in the head.”
Devers looked troubled. “I don’t know,” he said.
“I do,” Carlow said. Nodding his head toward Wycza, he told Devers, “He’s right. The two big ones are hired to mother the money. They lose the money, they’re dead anyway.”
“I’m a pretty good shot,” Devers said. “Let me just plink one, and then we’ll give them a chance to work it out for themselves.”
Carlow twisted around to look at Wycza, get his opinion. These three men didn’t know one another, had never worked together, had only met today, Wycza and Devers on the plane and Carlow in Parker’s apartment. It was hard for them to know how to deal with one another, in what areas each was reliable, in what areas they would be stepping on sore corns. Carlow and Wycza, looking at one another in the faint illumination of a nearby streetlight, tried silently to come to an opinion about Devers, and at the same time to gauge one another. Wycza finally dropped his eyes and nodded slightly, with a small shrug, as if to say, “What the hell, let him have his try. We can cover if we have to.” Carlow pursed his lips and faced front before answering, moves that clearly said to Wycza, “It’s your decision, then, I’m only the driver, and if it bounces back on us later. I’m not the one that did it.” Aloud, Carlow said to Devers, “If you think so.”
“It’s worth a try,” Devers said. Twisting around, he said to Wycza, “Judge it for yourself. If they’re still gonna cause trouble, you jump right in.” So that Devers, too, was being cautious with a new partnership, and not taking all the responsibility on his own shoulders.
Wycza nodded. Devers would shoot one of them in the shoulder, and then Wycza would shoot all three of them in the head. “Fine,” he said.
* * *
The back room never occurred to stockbroker Andrew Leffler when the robbers broke into his house in the middle of the night. He woke up when the ceiling light flashed on, and sat up astonished to see two men in black clothing, with black hoods over their faces, standing in the bedroom doorway, pointing pistols at him. In those first seconds of wakefulness, he thought of them as merely burglars, come to steal anything of value he might have in the house.
Automatically his right hand fumbled to the night table for his glasses. In the other bed Maureen had also awakened, and he heard the sharp intake of breath that said she, too, had seen the men and the guns. But she didn’t scream, and that reminder of Maureen’s stability and presence of mind helped diminish his own rising panic, brought on by the fumbling his startled fingers were doing with his glasses. Not being able to see properly only made things worse.
“Take it easy.” one of the men said, “and nobody gets hurt.”
Finally getting his glasses on, fitting each wing over his ears, he changed his opinion all at once, and decided these two were kidnappers. Let it be me they want, he thought, and not Maureen.
With his glasses on, he could see them more clearly. They were both thin men, seeming even narrower because of the black clothing. They held their guns steadily, and they had separated, moving so they now flanked the doorway. But also. Leffler noticed, so that neither was in a direct line with the windows.
One of them said, “Get up. Both of you. You can put on robes and slippers, that’s all. You won’t need anything else, it’s nice and warm out.”
Leffler thought. Both of us? “Just take me,” he said. “I’m all you want.”
“Don’t waste time,” the man said. His voice was strangely altered and dehumanized by the black hood. “If we have to carry you out,” he said, “we’ll make you regret it.”
Her voice shaky but her manner amazingly firm, Maureen said, “We’d better do what they say. Art.” And she was the first one to throw back the covers and get out of bed.
Leffler hurried to stay with her. It enraged him that these men were seeing his wife in her nightgown, even though the thick cotton showed nothing, and the gown was so voluminous that even the shape of her figure could only be guessed at. But his sense of personal intrusion, of property violation, began with Maureen in her nightgown. His own voice shaking more with outrage than with fear, he said abruptly, “You two will pay for this, you know.”
They didn’t bother to answer, and somehow that was worse than any possible cutting reply. Hearing his brave but ludicrous cliche echoing over and over in his mind, Leffler became embarrassed, and found himself hurrying into his robe and slippers, as though to get this humiliating experience over with as rapidly as possible.
When they were both ready, one of the gunmen said, “We’ll turn this light off now, but we’ll have a flashlight on you, and we can see pretty good in the dark, so don’t get cute. You just walk on through to the front of the house, open the door, and go on outside.”
Argue with them? Try to talk them out
of their plan, whatever it was? Leffler hesitated, but he knew no argument would do any good, that he would only finish by embarrassing himself again, so he took his wife’s arm, and the two of them walked together down the hall toward the living room.
For the first few steps they had light-spill from the bedroom for illumination. Then that was turned off, and a small uncertain flashlight beam took its place; mostly it was aimed at their backs and threw great misshapen shadows of them out ahead, lighting little but the walls and furniture to either side. They were moving through their own home, along a route they could have walked blindfolded, but somehow this method was worse than being blindfolded; the constantly altering shadows, the flickering flat distorting light, changed the familiar terrain into unknown territory, and when they entered the living room Leffler struck his knee painfully against the corner of the piano stool.
Maureen’s hand grasped his forearm. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said, and though it hurt like fury, he managed to walk without a limp and to restrain himself from bending down to rub it. He would not display weakness in front of these men. Nor, under the circumstances, in front of Maureen. Patting her hand on his forearm, he whispered, “I’m sorry, dear.”
“Don’t be silly.” She squeezed his forearm, and he felt her smiling at him. “This is just an adventure, that’s all,” she said.
An adventure. I am fifty-seven, he told her in his mind, and you are fifty-four. We have no need for adventure.
But he didn’t say anything aloud. And her calm bravery carried him through the house and out the door, the two gunmen following silently in their wake.
And still he hadn’t thought of the back room.
* * *
Nick Rifkin lived upstairs over the bar. The bar was called Nick’s Place, and the whole building was in Nick Rifkin’s name, but he didn’t actually own any of it. As he explained to his friends sometimes, “I just kinda hold it for some guys.”
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