Parker16 Butcher's Moon (30 page)

In the dining room, Mike Carlow and Stan Devers and Dan Wycza were eating a late supper of omelette or steak tartare. Carlow was seated so he could see the main entrance, where the exchange between Florio and the other three had taken place, and now he said, "Well, they're in." Neither of the others said anything or looked around from their food, and after the one comment Carlow, too, went back to eating.

Wiss and Elkins left the Pontiac—their own car—on a side street, and walked down London Avenue past the darkened windows of the closed shops toward the Mature Art Theater, a block and a half away. It was twenty to twelve; London Avenue was deserted. The last show at the Mature Art had let out fifteen minutes ago, a couple of dozen hunch-shouldered men who had wandered off in separate directions, none of them looking as though they'd had much of a good time. Now the sidewalks were empty of pedestrians, the street empty of traffic. Night lights shone in the interiors of stores, the sodium arc streetlights spread their bright pink glow on silence and inactivity, and the sky was as black as the velvet in a jeweler's window display.

Wiss carried a small black leather bag with a brass catch, like the bags doctors carried in the days when they made house calls. Elkins strolled with his hands in his pockets, looking constantly left and right, far ahead, back over his shoulder. They moved along like a pair of workers off a night shift somewhere, and when they reached the Mature Art Theater they stopped and looked at the posters.

A double feature was playing currently at the Mature Art: Man
Hungry
and
Passion Doll.
The posters featured black-and- white photos of slightly overweight girls in their underwear kneeling on beds or pulling one another's hair or kissing one another or cowering with arms raised self-protectively in overlit corners of bare rooms.

There were four glass doors leading to the theater lobby, but three of them featured red arrows pointing toward the fourth. Just inside that fourth door a chrome railing led the customer past the cashier's window, where money was paid but no ticket was given. By eliminating tickets, the management—Dutch Buenadella—found it possible to lie to everyone about the number of paying customers who had seen the show.

There were strong advantages in being able to lie about the size of the audience. Tonight, for instance, a typical Monday night—a slow night generally for dirty movies—one hundred eighteen people had paid five dollars apiece to see the show. Of each five dollars, not quite one dollar was due the city and the state in sales and other taxes, a dollar-sixty was to be turned over to the distributor of the movies for their rental, and another fraction was to be paid the projectionists' and ushers' unions for their pension funds; leaving about two-forty out of each five dollars for the owner of the theater, before overhead. But the books for tonight would show that eighty-seven people had paid to see the double feature, meaning that thirty-one people, paying one hundred fifty-five dollars, had not been counted. Which meant that eighty dollars and sixty cents would not be paid the city, the state, the distributor, and the pension funds, and that next March the remaining seventy-seven dollars and fifty cents would not be declared as part of the corporation's income for tax purposes.

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 A1 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 ft 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 d6ors 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 double- deck 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."