Breakout p-21

by Richard Stark

  ‘Brenda’s good,’ Mackey said. ‘She can do all the emotions: outrage, fear, just a little sex.’

  Parker said, ‘The point is, to get her out.’

  ‘Clean, if we can,’ Mackey added.

  ‘When it comes down to that,’ Li told them, ‘as I’ve been pointing out to the ADA assigned to this case, a young woman with little experience and, if I may say so, no feel for the job, there is no crime here. When picked up this morning, at the hotel, Ms. Fawcett had clearly not spent the night crawling through walls and tunnels. Nothing to connect her to the Armory or to Freedman jewels was found on her person nor in her hotel room’

  ‘Suite,’ Mackey said.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Li said, and laughed. Mackey was right; he liked to laugh. ‘Her suite,’ he corrected himself. ‘Nothing in that fine suite to suggest its sole occupant was a common burglar. They have on their hands a suspicious situation, in that Ms. Fawcett will not reveal her true identity, nor have they been able to find her true identity on their own. Other than that, they have the testimony of Darlene Johnson-Ross’

  ‘The dance studio woman,’ Mackey interjected.

  ‘Yes.’ Li nodded. ‘The source of all Ms. Fawcett’s problems, if it comes to that. She is the one who informed the police that Ms. Fawcett has been operating in this city under a false name and background, and she is the one who claims to have seen Ms. Fawcett in a parked car a block from the Armory late last night.’

  Mackey said, ‘Took a picture?’

  Li shook his head. ‘Drove by, alone, in a moving automobile, in the middle of the night. Saw, for an instant, not near any streetlight, a blonde at the wheel of an unmoving car. While, of course, she has been obsessing about a blonde she has seen at her dance studio. On the stand, I’d demolish that identification in three minutes.’

  Mackey said, ‘We don’t want to go on the stand.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Li assured him. ‘We shouldbe getting bail, we really should, since there’s so little to tie Ms. Fawcett to the crime, except for the problem of identity. Still, I could make a strong case in front of a judge, and the police know it, and don’t want to lose control of Ms. Fawcett until they find out who she is.’

  ‘Which is never,’ Mackey said.

  ‘In the interim,’ Li said, ‘they’ve put up Ms. Johnson-Ross to file a complaint against Ms. Fawcett for false statements on a credit application.’

  Mackey said, ‘What credit application? Brenda paid cash.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Li spread his hands. ‘It’s merely a plot to stall things, delay the release. A false statement on a credit application isa misdemeanor, but the form Ms. Fawcett filled out at the dance studio was nota credit application, since she was paying cash. It’s simply a maneuver to keep her in their grasp.’

  Mackey said, ‘And this Johnson-Ross goes along with it?’

  ‘She will, in the morning,’ Li told him. ‘They weren’t quite ready today, and I was raising a number of objections, including the possibility that Ms. Johnson-Ross might find herself facing a severe lawsuit from Ms. Fawcett once this is all over, which led Ms. Johnson-Ross to say she’d need to consult her own lawyer before agreeing to make out the complaint, so that step has now been scheduled for ten tomorrow morning.’

  Mackey and Parker looked at each other. Catching the look, Li said, calmly, ‘Let me point out, the very worst thing that could happen to Ms. Fawcett’s chances to successfully put this episode behind her would be for some unfortunate accident to occur before ten tomorrow morning to Ms. Johnson-Ross. The police don’t believe in coincidence.’

  Mackey said, ‘So what do you do next?’

  ‘Argue, dispute, disrupt,’ Li told him. ‘I will do my best to quash Ms. Johnson-Ross’s complaint, I will do my best to have bail set, but, from the way it looks at this point, I’m afraid Ms. Fawcett will be facing at least one more night of detention.’

  ‘You’ll do what you can,’ Mackey said.

  Li shrugged. ‘Of course.’ From inside his jacket he drew a long white envelope printed with his firm’s return address. ‘My retainer,’ he murmured.

  Parker took the envelope and put it away. He said, ‘She’ll send you an extra two K. You can give it to Brenda or one of us.’

  Li nodded.. ‘I understand. Walking-around money.’

  ‘Moving-around money,’ Parker said.

  3

  At the beer distributor’s, Williams had drawn maps of the Fifth Street station, exterior and interior, all four floors, the streets of that neighborhood. ‘I don’t say it’s complete,’ he warned them. ‘It’s what I remember.’

  They stood at the conference table, looking at the half dozen rough pencil drawings on the backs of old order forms. Parker and Mackey hadn’t had much to say to each other in the cab back to this neighborhood, nor the three-block walk through deepening dusk from where they’d left the cab, but now Parker said, ‘It’s breaking out again.’

  ‘I know,’ Williams said. ‘All we do is break outa things. And now break this woman Brenda out.’

  Mackey said, ‘I don’t want to do it that way.’

  Williams looked at him. ‘What other way is there? They got her in there. She’s locked down.’

  ‘I don’t know what the other way is,’ Mackey said. ‘She’s never been fingerprinted before. She’s got no record, no historywith the law. If we go in there and break her out, now she’s got a history and now they’ve got her prints and now she can’t live her life the same way she always did. There’s got to be another way.’

  Parker said, ‘Li’s right, the big problem is the dance studio woman.’

  ‘Yeah, she is,’ Mackey said. ‘But Li’s also right that we can’t touch her. It would make things worse for Brenda because, first of all, it would prove we’re connected to her. If Ms. Johnson-Ross gets a cold sore tonight, Brenda’s behind bars the rest of her life.’

  Parker said, ‘Well, we’ve only got two choices, unless we just walk away, and I know you don’t want to do that.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Mackey said, almost as though he wanted an argument.

  Parker nodded at Williams’ drawings. ‘We can either go into this Fifth Street station tonight and bring Brenda out, and she lives the way you say, the way you and I live, the way Williams lives, or we go see this dance studio woman, see what kind of handle we can put on her back.’

  Williams said, ‘What if you can’t put any handle at all?’

  ‘Then we remove her,’ Parker said, ‘and go pull Brenda out anyway. She won’t be clean, but she’ll be out.’

  ‘If that’s what we gotta do,’ Mackey said, ‘then that’s what we gotta do.’

  Parker shrugged. ‘Nothing’s gonna happen right away. If we take it easy now, find out where this woman lives’

  ‘She’ll be in the phone book,’ Mackey said. ‘Everybody’s in the phone book.’

  Williams grinned and said, ‘Probably Brenda is, somewhere, under some name.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to keep,’ Mackey told him.

  Parker said, ‘We get up at three, three-thirty, go to this woman’s place, see what we can do. Get her maybe to phone the cops in the morning, say she changed her mind, doesn’t want to make any complaints, isn’t even sure that was Brenda in the car.’

  Williams said, ‘They’ll send somebody over to argue with her.’

  Mackey said, ‘I just thought. What if she lives above the shop? What if her place is one of the apartments in the Armory building?’

  Williams laughed. ‘Well, we do know thatplace,’ he said.

  Mackey said, ‘Parker? We go in thereagain?’

  ‘That isn’t where she lives,’ Parker said. ‘She had a little apartment in the studio, remember? For when she wants to stay over. Not her full-time place, not used much. So her full-time place is not in the same building.’

  ‘I hope not,’ Williams said.

  ‘We’ll see how it plays,’ Parker said, ‘and if it isn’t gonnaplay, we’ll go over to Fif
th Street, still early in the morning, and pull Brenda out of there.’ He looked at Mackey. ‘Okay?’

  Mackey nodded. ‘First we try it easy,’ he said.

  Parker said, ‘Then we don’t.’

  4

  There was only one Johnson-Ross in the phone book: JOHNSON-ROSS D B 127 Further R’town.

  ‘She’s doing good for herself,’ Williams commented.

  It was twenty to four in the morning, and they were seated again at the conference table. The phone book left behind by the beer distributor was three years out of date, but this was surely Johnson-Ross’s current address. Parker said, ‘You know this place?’

  ‘Rosetown,’ Williams told him. ‘North of the city. Pretty rich up there. Until a few years ago, if I was to drive through Rosetown, I’d get stopped sure. DWB.’

  Sounding interested, Mackey said, ‘Not any more?’

  Williams shrugged. ‘Now it would depend on the car,’ he said.

  Parker said, ‘So it isn’t city police, it’s a local force.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re rich,’ Williams said. ‘Those are people spend money on law enforcement.’

  ‘Which means the Honda’s no good to us,’ Parker said. ‘We need a car that’ll make their cops comfortable.’

  ‘Well, I guess that’s me,’ Mackey said.

  They looked at him, and he said, ‘Brenda and me, we almost always go by car, but as much as we can, we leave the car out of it. Like we came here, we took it to the airport, left it in long-term, took a rental back.’

  Williams said, ‘What do you do that for?’

  ‘If something happens to one of us,’ Mackey told him, ‘it doesn’t happen to the car, so we’re that far ahead. Like now; they got Brenda, but they didn’t get a car. And a car would have another whole set of ID for the cops to play with.’

  Parker said, ‘What is this car?’

  ‘Two-year-old Saab, the little one, red.’

  Williams laughed. ‘You’ll look like a college boy coming home on vacation.’

  ‘Sounds right for that neighborhood,’ Mackey said, ‘doesn’t it?’

  Parker said, ‘So what we have to do, take the Honda to the airport, get this Saab.’

  ‘And once again,’ Williams said, ‘I’m on the floor in back.’

  There were two kinds of long-term parking; inside a brick-and-concrete building or, the cheaper way, in an outside lot. Mackey drove to the outside lot, picked up a check, and found the Saab in its place, small and sleek, gleaming in the high floodlights. Leaving the Honda, he crouched beside the Saab, and from underneath drew a small metal box with a magnet on one side. Opening it, he took out the Saab’s key and used it to unlock the car.

  Once the metal box was in the glove compartment, the parking check was out of the glove compartment, the Honda was in the Saab’s old space, and Williams was again on the floor in the narrow rear-passenger area, Mackey steered toward the electric exit sign, saying, ‘One thing. If we have to go on from the dance woman to the Fifth Street station, we don’t use this. We go back to the Honda.’

  ‘It’s your car and it’s your woman,’ Parker pointed out.

  From the floor in back, Williams said, ‘When you’re out of the airport, take the left on Tunney Road, I’ll direct you from there.’

  One-twenty-seven Further Lane was a bungalow, a one-story mansarded stucco house with porch, on a winding block of mostly larger and newer houses. Darlene Johnson-Ross had spent for the best neighborhood she could afford, not the best house.

  The Saab drove by, slowly, seeing no lights, not in that house or any other house nearby. The dashboard clock read 5:27, and this wasn’t a suburb that rose early to deliver the milk. They’d seen one patrolling police car, half a mile or so back, but no other moving vehicles, no pedestrians.

  Most of the houses here had attached garages. The bungalow had a garage beside it, in the same style as the house, but not attached. Blacktop led up to it, then a concrete walk crossed in front of the modest plantings to the porch stoop. A black Infiniti stood on the blacktop, nose against the garage door.

  As they went by, Parker said, ‘Go around the block, cut the lights when you’re coming back down here, turn in, stop next to the other car.’

  ‘And then straight in?’

  ‘Straight in.’

  They made the circuit without seeing any people, traffic, or house lights. Mackey slid the Saab up next to the Infiniti, half on blacktop and half on lawn, then the three moved fast out of the car and over to the front door, which Parker kicked in with one flat stomp from the bottom of his foot, the heel hitting next to the knob, the wood of the inside jamb splintering as the lock mechanism tore through.

  They didn’t have to search for Johnson-Ross; their entrance had been heard. As they came in, Williams paused to push the door as closed as it would go, and a light switched on toward the rear of the house, showing that they’d entered a living room, with a hall leading back from it. Light spilled from the right side of the hall, most of the way back.

  They moved toward the hall, and ahead of them a male voice sounded, high and terrified: ‘Muriel! Oh, my God, it’s Muriel!’

  Then a female voice, more angry than frightened: ‘Henry? What are you talkingabout?’

  Just entering the hall, Parker stopped and gestured to the other two. Everybody wait. It would be useful to listen to this.

  The man’s voice went on, with a broken sound. He was crying. ‘It’s the detectives, I knew we’d never get away with it, you couldn’t be alone tonight, not after How could I have been so stupid,she called Jerome, she knowsI’m here, all those lies’

  ‘Henry, stop!Muriel doesn’t know anything because Muriel doesn’t wantto know anything! What was that crash?’

  ‘Private detectives, I knew she’d’

  ‘Henry, get up and see what that was!’

  Now the three moved again, down the hall and into the bedroom, where the couple, both naked, sat up in the bed, he babbling and sobbing, she enraged. They both stopped short when Parker and Mackey and Williams walked in and stood like their worst dream at the foot of the bed.

  Parker said, ‘Henry, do we look like private detectives?’

  The woman slumped back against the headboard, color drained from her face. ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered.

  Henry, not knowing what was going on if this was some nightmare other than the nightmare he’d been expecting, picked fretfully at the blanket over his knees as though trying to gather lint. ‘What do you’ he started, and ran out of air, and tried again: ‘What do you want?’

  Parker looked at the woman. ‘You recognize us, don’t you?’

  ‘On the news,’ she whispered, still staring, still too pale, but recovering. ‘You’ and her eyes slid toward Williams ‘and you.’

  Now Henry caught up: ‘Oh, you’re them,’he cried, and for a second didn’t seem as scared as before. But then he realized he still had reasons to be scared, and shrank back next to the woman. ‘What are you going to do?’

  This was Mackey’s game; Parker said to him, ‘Tell Henry what we’re going to do.’

  ‘We’re going to have a conversation,’ Mackey told them. ‘We’re going to talk about poor little innocent Brenda Fawcett, pining away in a jail cell while you two roll around in your adulterous, isn’t it? adulterous bed.’

  5

  ‘I knewshe was part of the gang!’ the woman cried, forgetting her own fear as she pointed at Mackey in triumph.

  ‘But she wasn’t,’ Mackey said. He was being very gentle, very calm, in a way that told the two on the bed he was holding some beast down inside himself that they wouldn’t want him to let go.

  The woman blinked. ‘Of course she was,’ she said. ‘She was casing the place.’

  ‘Casing the dance studio?’ Mackey grinned at her, in a way that seemed all teeth. ‘Come on, Darlene,’ he said. ‘You know why she was there.’

  ‘She’s with you people.’

  ‘She’s with me,’ Mackey said. �
��Not doing anything, not working,you see what I mean? Just along for the ride.’ He gestured at Henry seated there now with mouth sagging open, like somebody really caught up in an exciting movie. ‘Probably like Muriel,’ Mackey explained, and Henry’s mouth snapped shut, and Mackey said to him, ‘Right, Henry? Muriel’s just along for the ride, not partof what you’re doing, am I right?’

  Henry shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Then you’re just not thinking, Henry,’ Mackey told him. In creating this dialogue, rolling it out, taking his time, Parker knew, Mackey was both easing their fears and keeping the pressure on. They were all in a civilized conversation now, so their survival seemed to them more likely, so they would gradually find it easier to go along with the program, and eventually to do what Mackey wanted them to do.

  Rolling it out, Mackey said, ‘You’re part of the bunch fixed up the Armory, right?’

  Henry looked frightened again, as though this were a trick question. ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he said.

  ‘You got your father in there with his jewelry business.’

  Henry’s lips curved down. ‘Yes, you’d know about that,’ he said.

  Parker said, ‘We know about everything, Henry.’

  ‘You put Darlene here in the dance studio,’ Mackey went on, ‘and every once in a while you come around and dance. So there you are, captain of industry, putting together deals, making it happen. Muriel around for much of that, Henry?’

  ‘What do you mean, around?’ Henry’s incomprehension was making him desperate. ‘I’m married to her.’

  ‘Sure, but was she at the meetings? When you and the guys were putting together the Armory deal, when you made the deal with your father, when you made the deal with Darlene here. Muriel in on any of that, Henry?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he said.

  Mackey spread his hands: case proved. To Darlene, he said, ‘You get my point? I’m here, I’m working, my friend’s along. She isn’t working, she’s just along, like Muriel. She gets bored, she takes a few classes over at your place. She can’t give you real information about herself, because maybe something might go wrong with what I’m doing here, but she’s paying you in cash, so it doesn’t matter what she says. But then you decide, “Hey, this woman is lying to me, I can’t have that, I can’t have some woman come into my dance studio and lie to me, I’m gonna find out what she’s up to, and if I can make some trouble for her, I’ll make some trouble for her.” Just like Muriel might get a little pissed off at you, Darlene, and if she could make some trouble for you, and I bet she could, what do you think? You think you can run a dance studio and have an alienation of affection suit going on at the same time, all in public, all over the cheap crap the press has turned itself into? And no help from Henry, you know, Muriel would be keeping himoccupied, too.’