Breakout p-21

by Richard Stark

  Dramatically attractive. How old? Midfifties, maybe.

  Brenda turned her head toward June: ‘There’s the boss.’

  June looked at the mirror, and beamed with pleasure. ‘Isn’t she something?’

  ‘She certainly is.’

  Mrs Johnson-Ross, Brenda knew, herself only took individual students, in modern and jazz and ballet, in other smaller rehearsal rooms, leaving the ballroom dancing and aerobics to her staff, though she did occasionally, like now, drop in to see how one of the classes was coming along. Brenda watched her watch the class, then suddenly she realized she was making eye contact.

  Mrs Johnson-Ross did not look away. Expressionless, her blue eyes cold, she looked at Brenda through four beats of the music, as though to memorize her. Then, abruptly, she turned away and, as silently as she’d come in, left the room.

  Jesus, she’s tough, Brenda thought. I wonder what thatwas all about.

  5

  The most exciting part of it, Henry Freedman knew, and the thought frightened him as much as it titillated him, was the knowledge that he could be caught at any second, exposed, ruined, as much a pariah as any biblical outcast in his cave. Even more than the sex, it was the danger that aroused Henry. Maybe not the first or second time they’d been together, but every time since.

  In the car, driving to or from the assignations, or on the phone, spinning out more tortured lies to Muriel, he kept telling himself he had to stop, he had to stop now,the thrill wasn’t worth the risk, he wasn’t that kind of man. He was fifty-two years of age, for God’s sake, he’d never been unfaithful to Muriel in twenty-two years of marriage until the last year and a half. And now he was helpless, he was like a hypnosis subject, it was as though Darlene had a hand inside his trousers and just steadily, inexorably, pulled him toward her.

  He’d met Darlene Johnson-Ross more than five years ago, when she’d moved her dance studio into the Armory, the neighbor of his father Jerome, and for nearly four years she’d merely been the attractive if somewhat over-the-hill person he occasionally saw when he visited his father or met with Harrigan, the Armory manager. Henry was one of the more active principals in Armory Associates, the consortium that had bought the old white elephant from the GSA and given it, and the downtown around it, a whole new life. He’d been proud of his part in it, and he’d never for a second suspected that the Armory would be the source of his ruin.

  Oh, well, he thought, driving yet again toward the Armory, grin and bear it, though in fact he was doing neither. Tortured, obsessed, so deeply mired in his midlife crisis he couldn’t even see it, like a disoriented diver plunging toward the depths while trying desperately to reach the air, Henry drove the Infiniti around the Armory that late afternoon at five-thirty at least he could still take pride in that,the elegance of the conversion to the garage entrance at the rear, where the massive moatlike gates of the army’s time had been removed without a trace.

  The garage, one flight down a reinforced ramp, had held obsolete army vehicles for many years, but didn’t show it now. At the foot of the ramp, arrowed signs led residential tenants through a locked gate straight ahead, dance studio customers to the left, and Freedman Wholesale Jewels employees not customers through an elaborately alarmed gate to the right.

  Henry never parked in the dance studio area. As an Armory Associates partner, he had a right to the electronic box on his visor that opened the simple metal-pole barrier to residents’ parking, which he now used. He left the Infiniti in the visitors’ section, rode the elevator up one flight to the main floor, and emerged into the broad low-ceilinged lobby. No one got up to the residential area without being vetted by the doorman.

  Who Henry knew very well. ‘Evening, George,’ he said, striding across the lobby toward the inner door.

  George, in his navy blue uniform with golden piping, had been standing flat-footed, hands behind his back, cap squared off on his head as he gazed out at the street through the glass of the front door, but now he said, ‘Evening, Mr Freedman,’ and moved briskly to his wall-mounted control panel, where he buzzed the inner door open just before Henry arrived, hand already out.

  Henry was noted for his ‘tours of inspection’ of the Armory, and saw no reason why anyone would think twice about them. He’d been doing the same thing, though not as often, for years before he’d become besotted with Darlene.

  The inner lobby was more spacious, with never-used sofas, all in muted tones of gold and avocado. At the left rear, past the second bank of elevators, was an unmarked gold door to which Henry had the credit-card-style key. Now he inserted it, saw the green light, removed the card, and stepped through into Darlene’s private office, all stark silver and white, with accents of an icy blue. But it was empty.

  Usually, Darlene was here when he entered, not one to tease by being late, to keep him waiting. Usually, she was right here, either elegant in her businesswoman mode or hot and perspiring in leotard from a private lesson, when she would be girlish and giggly and out of breath, crying, ‘Oh, I’m all sweaty, let me shower, I’m too sweaty!’ And he’d say, ‘I’ll lick it off. Come here, let me help, don’t wriggle so much.’

  But today she wasn’t here. The office was actually part of a suite, with a small bedroom and bath and kitchenette, but when he went through they were all empty as well.

  He got back to the main office just as she came in from the hall, beyond which were the studios. She looked very different, not her normal self at all. She was still beautiful and desirable, today the businesswoman in a long dark jacket and pantsuit and blue striped blouse, but her manner was troubled, almost angry.

  ‘Henry,’ she said, and her manner was not at all sexy or kittenish, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’

  What an odd thing to say. ‘Darlene,’ he reminded her, ‘we have a date.’

  She blinked at him, as though trying to make him out through some sort of fog. ‘Yes, of course we do,’ she said. ‘But it’s just I’ve come across something, and I don’t like it.’

  Doom! he thought, and his heart contracted like a rubber ball. ‘Come across something? What?’

  ‘There’s a young woman here,’ Darlene told him, and Henry’s heart and body and mind all relaxed. This was just business, that’s all, it wasn’t exposure. Not yet.

  Darlene was saying, ‘She’s in the low-impact class, I wouldn’t have noticed her, except she’s in better shape than most of them when they start in that class; in fact, they start there becausethey need to get in shape’

  ‘Darlene,’ Henry said, ready to be helpful and reassuring, now that it was merely a business problem, ‘just tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘All right,’ Darlene said. ‘Make me a drink.’

  She usually didn’t have her scotch-and-water until after they’d been to bed. He said, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said, in a tone that asked for no argument.

  ‘Fine, fine.’ Lifting his hands in amiable surrender, he went over to the credenza behind her desk where the liquor cabinet and glasses and tiny refrigerator were concealed.

  While he made her a drink pointedly, nothing for himself she said, ‘I wouldn’t have noticed a thing, but Susanna told me you know, the girl now on the front desk.’

  ‘Is that her name?’

  ‘She told me, this new one, Brenda Fawcett, was paying cash because she didn’t want her husband to know she was learning to dance. We get some like that from time to time. I don’t think it usually turns out to be the happy surprise the lady had in mind.’

  Henry brought her her drink: ‘Don’t be cynical.’

  ‘It’s hard not to be.’ She sighed. ‘All right. The first thing I thought, if this Brenda Fawcett is here to learn dancing behind her husband’s back, why is she in the low-impact class? Why isn’t she in ballroom dancing?’

  Henry shrugged. ‘Getting in shape, like you said.’

  ‘She’s inshape.’ Darlene took a healthy swallow of her drink. ‘Then I noticed,’ she said, ‘our Bren
da doesn’t wear a wedding ring.’

  ‘Some people don’t,’ Henry suggested.

  ‘Some mendon’t,’ Darlene told him. ‘Women wear that band.’

  Marriage discussions with Darlene could be a tricky area. ‘Fine,’ Henry said.

  ‘So,’ Darlene went on, leaving marriage behind, ‘I looked at the card Susanna filled out, when Ms. Fawcett first enrolled, and it’s all false.’

  Henry frowned at her. ‘It’s what?’

  ‘The home address,’ Darlene told him, ‘the phone number, all fake. Andshe’s paying in cash, so she doesn’t have to prove her identity. So what’s she up to?’

  Oh, my God, Henry thought, because he knew.Private detectives! That’s what it was, that’s what it hadto be!

  Muriel must have found out the way he’d been flaunting himself, for God’s sake, she hadto find out and instead of confronting him, she’d done it this way. Private detectives.

  Yes, that was her style, that’s how she’d handle it. No discussion, no hope for forgiveness. Just get the evidence, sue for divorce, all open and public and forever damning.

  Darlene paced, frowning at the carpet. ‘All I can think is,’ she said, ‘the IRS. Or more likely the state tax people. That’swhy she’s paying cash, trying to trap us, see what we do with unrecorded income.’

  I can’t tell her the truth, Henry realized. I should pack a suitcase, keep it in the trunk of the car. In case

  Whenever

  ‘The little bitch!’Darlene raged. ‘Henry, am I right? What else could it be?’

  ‘You’ll just have to’ Henry began and coughed, and tried again: ‘You’ll just have to keep an eye on her. I believe I’ll I believe I’ll have a drink now, too.’

  ‘No, wait,’ she said, surprising him.

  He paused, halfway to the drinks cabinet. ‘Why not?’

  ‘That class is almost over,’ she told him. ‘Go get your car, bring it around front. We’ll follow her. We’ll seeif she doesn’t wind up in the State Office Building.’

  Or the private detective’s office, Henry thought. Much more likely, the private detective’s office.

  But wouldn’t it be better to know the worst, knowit and be able to decide what to do?

  Looking around the office, eying the open bedroom door, he said, ‘Our lovely afternoon.’

  ‘We’ll still have it, Henry,’ she promised him. ‘We’ll follow her, we’ll find outwhat she’s up to, and then we’ll come right back here. Henry

  ‘

  He looked at her. ‘Yes?’

  He loved that lascivious smile she sometimes showed; not often enough. ‘It’ll be better than ever,’ she whispered.

  On the way back to the Infiniti, he thought, I’ll have to phone Muriel, I’m going to be later than I thought. I’ll have to phone her, I’ll have to tell her

  whatever I tell her.

  6

  When CID Detective Jason Rembek, a big shambling balding man with thick eyeglasses sliding down his lumpy nose, reached his cubicle at Headquarters at 8:34 Saturday morning according to the digital clock on his desk, which was never wrong the overnights were stacked waiting for him, escape-related materials on top, lesser cases underneath, just as he’d instructed.

  The flight of the three hardcases from Stoneveldt Thursday afternoon had kept him on the hop all day yesterday. He hoped things would be quieter today. He had other Opens on his desk, not just these three punks taking a little vacation.

  Detective Rembek had been on the state force fourteen years, with very little experience of prison breaks. None, from Stoneveldt; that trio had made the record books. Nevertheless, it was his own experience and the experience of others he’d talked to or read about, that the boys in prison were mostly there in the first place because they didn’t know how to handle life on the outside, not even when they weren’ton the run. Very very rare was the guy who disappeared forever, or showed up thirty years later a solid citizen, mayor of some small town in Canada.

  Mostly, the escapees ran until they got tired and then just stood there until they were rounded up. Sometimes they’d steal a car or rob a convenience store, but there was no planin their lives, no long-term goal. Three, four days, they’d start to get hungry, they’d start to miss that regular life they had in the cells, and they’d call it quits. Detective Rembek believed it was true almost without exception that once an escapee had thought about escape,he was finished thinking.

  Were these three going to fit the pattern? Why not? On Rembek’s desk were photos and bios of the three, and there was little in them to make him believe they were going to beat the odds. The two local boys, anyway. Given their histories, their family ties, their dependency on this small area of the world, it was only a matter of time before they’d show up somewhere they’d been before, that they just couldn’t stay away from. A relative, a girlfriend, a bar, a fellow heister. And then the net would scoop them up, put them back where they belonged.

  The out-of-towner was the wild card; Ronald Kasper, or whatever his name was. No one had ever escaped from Stoneveldt, but these three had, and neither Marcantoni nor Williams seemed to Rembek the kind of guy to break that cherry. So was Kasper the one who’d made it happen? Was he the one they had to find, the one they had to outthink and outguess, if they were going to collect all three?

  Rembek studied the few pictures he had of Kasper. A hard face, bony, like outcroppings of stone. Hard eyes; if they were the windows of the soul, the shades were drawn.

  Rembek didn’t pick up any of the pictures, but leaned closer and closer over them, his nose almost touching the surface of the desk. Had this bird gone through plastic surgery some time in the past? Did he have other histories, beyond the broken burglary at the warehouse and the escape from Stoneveldt? Rembek craved the opportunity to interrogate that face, see what was behind those eyes.

  Well. There were other ways to come at them. The three escapees now on his desk had three contact points, being the people who had visited them during their time inside; one each. Ronald Kasper had been visited several times by his brother-in-law, named Ed Mackey. Thomas Marcantoni had been visited twice by his brother, Angelo. And Brandon Williams had been visited three times by his youngest sister, Maryenne.

  The first of these was the most interesting. After Kasper broke out, police naturally went to the motel where Mackey was living, only to learn he’d checked out that morning, no forwarding address, no useful ID. Detective Rembek doubted very much it was a coincidence that Mackey checked out of his motel in the morning on the same day that Kasper checked out of prison in the afternoon.

  The top report on Detective Rembek’s desk told him that no progress had been made in either finding Mackey or learning who he actually was. The next two folders were mostly the results of the wiretaps on Angelo Marcantoni and Maryenne Williams, wiretaps that had been granted by the judge at nine P.M. on Thursday, less than four hours after the escape, and had been in operation ever since. No police officer actually sat next to the recording machine twenty-four hours a day; it was a voice-activated tape, picked up at eight every morning, and four in the afternoon, and midnight.

  Angelo Marcantoni, according to the transcript, did very little on the telephone, and then it seemed to be mostly about bowling; if that were a code, as far as Detective Rembek was concerned, Marcantoni was welcome to it. In any event, he appeared to be the law-abiding brother, married, three children, with absolutely no criminal record of any kind and an unblemished work record with a supermarket chain. Detective Rembek thought it unlikely he would risk all that to help a brother who’d been in increasingly serious trouble since he was ten.

  As for Maryenne Williams, she appeared to be a young mother who spent all her waking hours on the phone with other young mothers, discussing their babies, discussing their babies’ (mostly absent) fathers, and discussing boys they thought of as ‘cute’; as though they didn’t have trouble enough already. That’s what the MW transcripts had been up till now, and that’s what they
looked like for last night, too, boring and tedious to read but necessary.

  And then:

  11:19 P.M.

  MW: Hello?

  C: Hi, it’s me.

  MW: (audible gasp) Are you okay?

  Detective Rembek sat straighter, holding in both hands the paper he was reading.

  C: Yeah, I’m fine.

  MW: What are you gonna do?

  C: I think I gotta go away.

  MW: Oh, yeah, you do. You need money?

  C: I’m gonna get money in a couple days, I’m okay. I got a good place to stay, and next week I’ll take off.

  MW: Listen, uh

  Almost said his name there, Detective Rembek thought.

  MW: you remember Goody?

  C: Yeah, that one.

  MW: Well, he come around, he said, any way he can help, buy you tickets or stuff, whatever, you should call him, because it wouldn’t be good for me to do anything.

  C: No, no, you shouldn’t do anything. I’m just calling I wanted to tell you I’m okay, and I’ll be going away, next week.

  MW: That’s the best thing. If you need help

  C: Goody.

  I wish I could hear how he said that name, Detective Rembek thought. Does he think Goody will help him, or does he think Goody isn’t any use? He won’t tell his sister, because she thinks this Goody is all right.

  MW: I’m glad you called.

  C: Well, yeah, I had to. Listen, kiss Vernon for me.

  MW: I will, (crying) Bye, now.

  C: Bye, now.

  The call had been traced, after the event, to a payphone on Russell Street, a nondescript working-class neighborhood. Two police officers were at this moment searching the area, with no realistic expectation of finding anything.