Plunder Squad (5 page)

Parker said, “But this vehicle of yours leaves tracks, doesn’t it?”

“For the first five miles we’ll be on ranger trails. We can leave the trail almost anyplace and cut off into the woods. A lot of people do that and go in a mile or two, so which set of tracks do the cops follow?”

Walheim said, “What if they bring up a helicopter?”

“We’re under the trees,” Beaghler told him. “It’s really dense in there, man, you could hide an army in that forest, you wouldn’t see a thing from the air.”

Parker said, “All right. I’ll want to look at this place, but for now let’s say it can be done. That still leaves the question of the buyer.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Beaghler said.

Ducasse said, “You want one of us to find the buyer?”

“I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth,” Beaghler said, “I just don’t have that kind of contact. All I’ve ever done is drive.”

Which meant, Parker knew, that he’d driven exclusively small-time operations. A suburban bank, a loan office in a shopping center, places where the take is eleven thousand dollars and if they catch you they’ll put you away for just as long as if you’d been after a million.

Walheim said, “Bob, I know the same people you do.”

Parker said, “You mean it’s up to Ducasse and me.”

“I have the caper,” Beaghler said, “and I have the way to get the thing and get away. But I don’t have anybody to turn it into cash for me.”

“Until you do,” Parker said, “you don’t have anything at all.”

“I know that,” Beaghler said. “Can you help me?”

Ducasse said, doubtfully, “I can ask around.”

“Give us a name for these statues,” Parker said. “Something a buyer will recognize. We’ll see what we can do.”

“I’ll have to ask my cousin. Can you guys stick around till tomorrow?”

Parker and Ducasse looked at one another, and Parker saw his own feelings reflected in the other man’s eyes. There was a sense of this job as being too loosely assembled, not tightly enough controlled or organized; but on the other hand, there was the need to put something together and make some money. Beaghler’s plan had some crazinesses in it, but most workable plans did.

If he’d been flush, Parker would have walked away from it right there. But he said, “I can stay over.”

Ducasse shrugged and said, “So can I. What can we lose?”

The knocking at the motel-room door was soft but persistent. Parker had been asleep, but he came awake all at once, his eyes opening and staring upward in darkness that was almost total.

The faint rapping sounded again. Parker turned his head slowly, and oriented himself by the slit of light outlining the window draperies. He was in a motel room down near Fremont, the other side of Oakland from Beaghler’s suburb, and Ducasse was in the next room to the left. But there was no connecting door, and in any case, the sound came from someone outside, someone at the room entrance, which was down past the foot of the bed and to the right.

Parker waited a few seconds, until he felt sure there was no one in the room with him, and then he slipped quickly out of the bed. He put on clothing and went over to the broad window beside the door. Peering around the edge of the draperies, he saw the dim form of a woman out there, and as he watched she looked to right and to left and then knocked again, a little more loudly and demandingly than before.

Sharon.

Parker grimaced in irritation. The playlet in the woman’s head was so clear and obvious he could practically see it as though on a movie screen: “I had to come thank you for covering
for me today.” “That’s all right.” “No, you were really wonderful. You just don’t know how Bob—” etc. “Come on in.” “Oh, thank you. What a lovely room! Is that bed as comfortable as it looks?”

If a thing is no good, it’s no good. There was no point sticking around until everything went absolutely to hell. Parker moved away from the window toward the door, found the light switch on the wall, and clicked it on. The tapping at the door immediately stopped.

Packing wouldn’t take long. The attaché case was standing in the closet. Parker got his toilet kit from the bathroom and change of clothing out of the dresser drawer. Then he sat down on the bed again, picked up the phone, and asked the motel operator to connect him with the airport. It was while he was waiting for someone to answer that the knocking started at the door again. He also thought he heard her call something, in a voice that tried to be loud and soft at the same time.

His watch said it was two-twenty-five. After a dozen rings the phone was answered by a female voice giving the name of an airline and thanking him for calling. He said, “What’s the next flight non-stop to Newark?”

“Does it matter which airline, sir?”

“No.”

“Does it have to be Newark? There’s a flight leaving for Kennedy—”

“It has to be Newark.” That was where he’d left his car, when he’d driven down from Claire’s house.

“Yes, sir. One moment, please.”

While he waited, there was a sudden commotion outside. First a shriek of brakes, then a woman squealing, then different kinds of shouting and contention, and finally a loud angry hammering at the door.

The female voice came back to say that the next non-stop to Newark wasn’t until seven-ten. Nearly five hours away. “Thank you,” he said, and hung up, his expression disgusted.

Outside, Beaghler’s voice suddenly shouted out his name: Parker, not Latham. Parker looked over at the door. He got to
his feet, walked over there, opened the door, and Beaghler came bursting in, his mouth full of words. Sharon was quivering in the background, rump against the hood of Parker’s rental car, eyes glittering in the light-spill from the open door.

Beaghler was still yelling. Parker shut the door, closed his hand into a fist, turned around, and hit Beaghler in the face. Beaghler went windmilling, his eyes wide open, and tripped over a corner of the bed to land on his butt on the floor. “Now shut up,” Parker said, and went over to the bed.

Sitting there on the floor, Beaghler looked too surprised to think. The fist had caught him on the left cheekbone, and his left eye was already beginning to blink and water.

Parker went to one knee beside the bed, and reached underneath. First he pulled out the revolver he had under there, a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson, a stubby defense gun similar to Kirwan’s, the one that hadn’t shot George Uhl. Parker switched this gun to his left hand and reached under the bed again, when Beaghler suddenly yelled, “Jesus Christ!” and threw himself face down on the floor, covering his head with his hands.

Parker ignored him. Working by feel, he released the spring-clip holster from under the bed, and then got to his feet again. He put the revolver in the holster, and both in the attaché case still open on the bed.

By this time it had occurred to Beaghler he wasn’t being killed. He moved his hands away from his head, lifted his face, and blinked open-mouthed up at Parker. He watched Parker shut the attaché case and snap the two catches. Then he said, “What are you doing?” All anger was out of him now, he was just baffled and curious.

Parker picked up the attaché case, and paused to look down at Beaghler, who was shifting position again. He waited till Beaghler was sitting up on the floor the same as earlier, and then said, “I’m going home. I’m not interested in you or your heist. And if you ever shout my name out in a public place again, I’ll take your jaw off.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Beaghler was scrambling to his feet. “What are you going away for?”

Parker turned toward the door.

Beaghler called, “Will you wait? Listen, I made a mistake, that’s all. I thought there was something—”

Parker looked back at him. “You didn’t think anything,” he said. “You don’t think at all. You’re married to a whore, Beaghler, get used to it. Either put her on the street to bring home some money, or get rid of her. But stop trying to turn her into the little woman, it won’t work.”

“But—” Beaghler stalled, as though somebody had turned his engine off. He just stood there, his expression strained, one hand out in an explanatory gesture.

Parker turned away and went to the door. When he opened it, Sharon was still in the same artful pose of terror against the hood of his car. He stepped out, leaving the door open, and said to her, “Move it over there.”

“You aren’t going away?” The little-girl voice was so artificial that she gave the impression of being run by a ventriloquist.

The next unit’s door opened and Ducasse came out, fully dressed. He said, keeping his voice down, “What the hell’s going on?”

“Marital problems,” Parker said. He took Sharon by the elbow and moved her away from his car.

“God damn it,” Ducasse said. “I really need the money.”

Parker said, “So do I. You want a lift to the airport?”

Ducasse had come close enough so he could look through the open doorway at Bob Beaghler, who was now standing in there with his hands on his hips, looking both embarrassed and defiant. Ducasse glanced at Sharon, who was biting her under lip and trying to decide whether or not to get angry. Then he sighed and looked at Parker and shook his head. “I guess I’ll hang in here a little longer,” he said. “I’m living on my case money as it is. Maybe they’ll calm down now, after this.”

“Maybe,” Parker said. “See you around.”

“So long,” Ducasse said. He looked wistful as he watched Parker get into his car.

The last Parker saw of them in the rear-view mirror, Sharon was running for her red Olds convertible and Ducasse was on his way through the lighted doorway to talk to Bob Beaghler.

Parker slipped the credit card into the narrow opening at the edge of the door and slid it downward until it hit the bolt. He applied pressure slowly, the bottom edge of the card pushing against the curved face of the bolt, the card moving downward a fraction of an inch at a time, and suddenly the door popped inward and was open.

Parker put the credit card away in his shirt pocket. It was the one he’d used in San Francisco, and while it could no longer be safely used anywhere in the country to buy or rent things, it could still open most locked doors that hadn’t been double-bolted. And in the majority of suburban houses, that meant either the kitchen door or the door to the attached garage; people devote their attention to guarding against entry through the front door or through windows, and hardly think at all about the rear entrances to their houses.

In this case it was the door to the garage. Stepping through the dark opening, Parker could see the streetlight through the small windows in the main garage door straight ahead. But in the intervening space between himself and that door, there was no car.

It was almost two in the morning now, and not a light showing in any of the suburban houses on this curving block. Was the
woman who lived here merely out late, or had she gone away somewhere on a vacation?

Or was she in fact here, having loaned her car to Uhl?

The word had come to him early this morning, indirectly from Kirwan through Handy McKay. George Uhl was supposed to have set up a thing for himself with a divorcée in one of the bedroom communities outside Pittsburgh. Kirwan had learned the woman’s name and the name of the town; the local phone book had given Parker this address.

It was too bad about the car being gone. Or maybe it wasn’t; he’d know better after he’d been through the house.

There was a door to his left, seen dimly in the streetlight glow through the garage-door windows. He took his revolver from under his left arm and moved that way, turning the doorknob slowly, pushing the door open slowly, seeing darkness that separated itself into several lighter masses: refrigerator, stove, cabinets.

There were two steps up from garage level to kitchen level. He went up them quietly, at a slight crouch, listening for sounds from inside the house, shifting his weight slowly to make no creaking-floor sounds of his own. He pushed the door closed again behind himself, and started across the kitchen.

He heard the clicks on linoleum and saw the dark shape hurtling at him just an instant before it hit, slamming into him at chest height and knocking him flat on his back on the floor. Its breath was hot and sour in his face, and then it was going for his throat, and he had no choice but to jam the revolver barrel into its hairy side and pull the trigger.

It gave a convulsive leap, and he shoved it away to the left as he rolled to the right. He hit the wall and got up quickly on one knee, staring, listening, waiting.

Its claws were scrabbling on the linoleum, but it wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t killed it, but he’d de-fused it. He got to his feet and brushed his left sleeve across his face where it had slobbered on him.

The sound of the shot hadn’t been very loud. He had muffled it by pressing the muzzle into its body, so the noise wouldn’t
have been heard by anybody on the street; but it might have been heard by somebody in the house, if there was anybody around to hear it.

With the claws scrabbling on the linoleum, he couldn’t hear the rest of the house, so he moved deeper into the kitchen until he saw the streetlight again to his right. A doorway to the living room. He stepped through onto carpet, did some more listening, and heard nothing ahead of himself at all. Nothing but the scratching behind him. The thing still hadn’t made any sound of its own, only that click of claws on linoleum.

It took him ten minutes to search the house, moving slowly, using no light other than that which came in through the windows along the front. It was a ranch-style house, all built on one level, with the garage at one end, living room and kitchen in the middle, bedrooms at the other end. And all completely empty. The closet in the main bedroom was full of clothing, all of it female, suggesting that the woman wasn’t away for an extended period of time. In the bathroom there were three toothbrushes, but no toiletries that could be thought of as exclusively male. It was likelier, in any event, that Uhl had a place of his own and wouldn’t be living here on any kind of long-range basis.

Back in the kitchen, Parker opened the refrigerator door to get enough light to see what he’d killed. The thing had stopped scratching now, and when he put light on it he saw it was dead: a Doberman, lying on its side with its legs stretched out in running posture, its eyes open and covered by a gray film. There hadn’t been a lot of blood, but some was on the floor.

Next to the entrance to the garage was a door leading to the cellar stairs. Leaving the refrigerator door open, Parker opened this door, switched on the cellar light, and went down for a quick look around. He hadn’t expected to find anything of interest, and he’d been right. Finished, he went back upstairs, took the dog by one leg, dragged it over to the cellar doorway, and pushed it downstairs. Then he switched off the cellar light, cleaned the bloodstains off the linoleum with a dishtowel, and threw that down the stairs after the dog. Shutting the cellar door, he looked around the kitchen to see if any traces remained,
found none, and closed the refrigerator again. Then he went into the living room to sit down and wait. There was a picture window facing the street in there, its draperies drawn more than halfway open, and he pulled a chair down to the end of the room so he wouldn’t be visible from out front.

It was ten to four when the headlights suddenly flashed across the living-room wall. Parker got to his feet, and when he heard the garage door lifting, he moved quickly down to the other end of the living room, where the doorway to the kitchen was, and waited for whoever was coming in.

He heard the car drive into the garage, and almost immediately heard the garage door shut again. From the sound of it, it was equipped with an electrically controlled motor.

Car doors slammed, two of them. Parker tensed, the revolver held in his right hand.

The door from garage to kitchen opened, and a woman’s voice called, “Blackie? We’re home, boy!”

High heels took two steps on linoleum, but then stopped again. “Blackie? Where are you, boy?”

A male voice said something indistinct. Parker couldn’t make it out, whether it was Uhl or not. Then the woman said, “I don’t know what’s wrong. He always comes, you know that.”

Fluorescent lights flared in the kitchen. Parker stared diagonally through the doorway, trying to adjust his vision. The part of the kitchen he could see was set up as a dining area, with a small round table and four chairs.

“Blackie?”

The man’s voice said something.

The woman said, “I think you’re right, George.” She sounded worried, but capable.

Damn the dog. Parker stepped around the corner into the kitchen, the gun out in front of him, but the woman was standing in the line between him and the garage doorway. “Down!” he yelled, but she was frozen there, staring in astonished terror at the gun.

He didn’t see Uhl at all, but he heard the movement of the bastard going away. Parker looked to his right, saw a door leading
to the back yard, and jumped to it. And the instant he took his attention away from the woman, she started to scream.

The door was locked. A button in the knob had to be turned and released. It all took time, and then he had the door open and caught a glimpse of something running across the yard toward the house facing on the next street.

This was not a neighborhood to do a lot of indiscriminate shooting. An area like this would be well covered by police patrols, and the citizens around here would be likely to reach for the phone at the first sound of trouble. And Uhl was not going to be caught up with on foot.

Angry, Parker stepped back into the house, slammed the door, and headed at a fast stride toward the woman, who was pulling breath for a third scream. She backed away, starting to jabber in a high-pitched voice, and too late turned to run. Parker grabbed her shoulder with his free hand, spun her around, and slapped her face hard. She landed against the wall beside the door and he held her there with a hand cupped against her throat. “Don’t make me do it,” he said.

“What do you—what do you—?” The words were gargled, as though he were strangling her, but he wasn’t.

“I want Uhl,” he said. “I want his address.”

“I don’t—I don’t—”

He pushed the gun barrel against her stomach. “If you won’t tell me, you’re no use to me alive. And you’ve seen my face.”

“I don’t—I can’t—”

He applied pressure to her throat, until she couldn’t talk. Her hands came fluttering upward, but the gun made her afraid to struggle with him, so that her fingers never quite touched the hand with which he was cutting off her air. She looked as though she were doing typing movements, her fingers twitching around his hand.

He eased the pressure again. “His address. I’m in a hurry.”

Now she closed both hands around his wrist, gently, as though in a request for kindness. “Mantle Street,” she said; her voice sounded rusty.

“In Philadelphia?”

“Yes. Two-eighty-three. Apartment seven.”

“Anybody else live there with him?”

“No. No.”

He switched his left-hand grip to her face, thumb on one cheekbone and fingers on the other. He pulled her head forward an inch, then punched it back against the wall. Her eyes glazed, and he used both arms to lower her to the floor. There was no point having her dead, but he didn’t want her raising the alarm for a while either.

There was a length of clothesline in a kitchen drawer. He did a fast job of tying her, then switched off the kitchen light and went out the back door.

The car he was using was a block away. He took a minute to find Mantle Street on a Philadelphia road map and work out the best route to it, then put the map away and started the car. Uhl had perhaps a ten-minute lead on him, but had left on foot and would have some trouble finding a cab in this sort of neighborhood at four in the morning. If Uhl was heading home, Parker had a fair chance to beat him there or at least catch up with him before he gathered his things and went anywhere else.

Thirty-five minutes later Parker was driving past 283 Mantle Street, a red-brick apartment building that looked to have been built in the twenties or thirties: corners slightly curved rather than square, casement windows, carriage lamps on either side of the arched entrance. There was no light showing in any of the building’s windows, except for a single row up the middle above the entranceway; that would be the staircase. The building was five stories high, with probably four or six apartments on each floor, and no elevator.

Parker drove on, and left the car a block away. He walked back and entered the building, and read on the mailboxes in the foyer that apartment 7 was occupied by a G. Underwood. So Uhl was apparently one of those who liked to keep their initials when using aliases, an idea that was always stupid and sometimes harmful.

The inner door was of the kind that can be opened by a tenant
ringing a buzzer up in his apartment. Which meant it couldn’t be double-bolted, which further meant the credit card would open it. Parker went through and up the stairs and found that apartment 7 was on the second-floor rear. This door was double-bolted, and Parker didn’t travel with a lockman’s tools, so he left the door and went on up the stairs to the roof.

There was a fire escape down the back. The windows at the rear were also all dark, and there was no light source other than the stars and a quarter-moon. Parker went down the fire escape to the second floor, turned to the window that should lead in to apartment 7, and peered through it looking for light. He saw none, and went to work on the window.

Like those in the front, it was of casement type. A lever-and ratchet arrangement inside would open or close it, and it would swing out like a door rather than raising. Parker inserted the credit card at the top corner, then slid it along the top toward the hinged end. This forced the outer corner away from the frame sufficiently for him to get a grip on it with his fingertips. He pried the corner farther open, and slipped a pencil into the space just as the credit card slipped through and fell inside the apartment. Pulling the corner out while simultaneously sliding the pencil along the top toward the hinged end, he made the opening steadily wider, until there was a sudden click-click sound from the bottom of the window as the ratchet slipped two or three notches.

Now the leading edge of the window was open about half an inch. Parker could get a firmer grip now, pull harder, and force the ratchet to give several more grooves, until he could slip his hand inside and turn the lever, opening the window the rest of the way. He stepped into a small dark bedroom, retrieved his pencil and credit card, and searched the apartment as he had earlier searched the house—silently, and in darkness.

It was empty. There was a flashlight in a kitchen drawer, and Band-Aids in the bathroom medicine chest. Parker put Band-Aids over the flashlight glass, leaving just a small open slit, and then used this narrow light to go through the apartment again, looking for something that would tell him where else Uhl
might go. But he had apparently rented the place furnished, and had few possessions of his own. There was no address book, there were no letters, there was nothing to say a word about Uhl’s past or future. Some ordinary clothing in the closets and drawers, a few decks of cards, some paperback books; it was like the leavings in a rented summer cottage after the season is over.

Except for the four thousand dollars in the corn-flakes package. Two hundred twenty-dollar bills neatly stacked, filling a box of corn flakes that at first didn’t look as though it had been opened. But Parker lifted it and it was too heavy, and when he looked at the bottom he could see where the box had been steamed open and then resealed. He ripped it open and the bills thudded out, four stacks of fifty bills, each with its own paper band around it.