The Outfit Read online

  He went between two garages and came to the rear of Floral Court. By daylight, the pink stucco was crumbling and fading, the rear doors were grimed with age, the little patch of ground between court and garage was weedpocked dirt. By night, the area was a black emptiness.

  No light from number 12 leaked out to the back. Parker had to go by sound; he could hear the faint clicking of the chips. He found the rear door and the rear window; both were locked. But the wood of the doorframe was rotten; Parker leaned his weight against the door and felt it give. If he didn’t have to worry about noise he could go through the door in two seconds.

  He had a pocketknife. He took it out, opened it, and forced the blade between door and frame till he found the lock. Then he pulled on the knob, pulling the door away from the frame, gouging the knife into the soft wood around the lock bolt. The wood made small cracking sounds, but it gave. He forced the blade under it and the bolt was free. Parker pushed gently, and the door opened. He stepped through and pushed the door closed behind him.

  He was in a miniature kitchen. An open door on the right led to the bedroom, which he could barely see. Ahead, a yellow crack outlined a swing door that led to a short hallway. Through the crack, he could see that the hallway was flanked by the bathroom on one side and a second bedroom on the other. The dining room was straight ahead.

  Parker pushed the swing door open slowly, till he could peer through at the dining room. Only one of the players was in sight, the one at the head of the table. He was concentrating his full attention on the cards. Parker slipped through the doorway, getting the .25 into his hand again, and strode quickly to the dining room. He stood in the entrance and said, “Freeze.”

  Six faces spun to gape at him. He let them see the gun, and said, “Face front. Look at your cards. Quick!”

  They did as they were told. One of them, looking down at his cards, said, “You’re making a mistake, fella. You don’t want to knock over this game.”

  Parker said, “Menner, collect the wallets.”

  One of the six looked up. So that was Menner. He stared at Parker, and suddenly recognition struck him and left him ashen-faced. He sat gaping.

  “Fast, Menner,” Parker prodded him.

  One of the others muttered. “How come he knows you, Jake?”

  “Shut up. I’m waiting, Menner.”

  Menner held his hands out in front of his face and shook them, as though clearing away cobwebs. “Stern,” he said. “Stern.”

  “You’ll see him in a few minutes. Collect the wallets. The rest of you, keep your hands on the table, your eyes on the cards. Menner, you reach into their pockets for the wallets. You don’t want to bring out anything but wallets.”

  The man who’d spoken before said, “Do like he says, Jake. We’ll take care of him later. We don’t want any trouble here.”

  Menner obediently got to his feet. He went around the table, reaching into the other players’ pockets, bringing out the wallets. Parker told him, “Put them in your coat pockets. Your own wallet, too. And the bills from the table.”

  “Listen,” said Menner. His voice was shaky. “Listen, you don’t under—”

  “Shut up.”

  Menner had all the wallets in his coat pockets. He looked baggier than before, and forlorn, like a half-deflated balloon. He stood waiting for Parker to tell him what to do next.

  Parker said, “Tell them why I’m here.”

  “Listen, honest to Christ, it ain’t the way —”

  “Tell them why I’m here.”

  The player who did all the talking said, “Do what he says, Jake. I’d like to hear it myself.”

  “They — they sent down this gun from New York, for this guy here, this Parker. They said I was to — I was to finger the job. That’s all it was, I swear to Christ.”

  “The rest of it,” said Parker.

  “That’s all! What else, for Christ’s sake?”

  “You fingered me in the first place. That’s why the gun came down.”

  The player said, “That’s between you and Jake, buddy. Don’t take it out on us.”

  “It’s all the same Outfit. Give me your coat, Menner.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Parker, I —”

  “Give me your coat.”

  Stuttering, Menner took the coat off. Parker reached out for it, waiting for Menner to try flipping it in his face, but Menner was cowed. He handed it over without causing trouble, and stepped back to take his medicine.

  Because it was such a light, untrustworthy gun, Parker pulled the trigger three times. He turned and went out the back way, clearing the back door before Menner hit the carpet or the other five could get out of their chairs.

  THREE

  Parker sat at the writing desk fumbling with pen and paper, frowning. He wasn’t used to writing letters:

  FRANK,

  The Outfit thinks it has a greevance on me. It doesn’t. But it keeps sending its punks around to make trouble. I told their headman I’d give them money trouble if they didn’t quit, and they didn’t quit. You told me one time about a lay you worked out for that gambling place outside Boston, and you’d do me a favour if you knocked it off in the next couple weeks. I’m writing some of the other boys, too, so you can be sure they’ll be too busy to go looking for you special. I don’t want a cut and I can’t come in on the job because I’ll be busy making trouble myself. You can always get in touch with me care of Joe Sheer out in Omaha. Maybe we’ll work together again some day.

  PARKER

  It took three drafts to get it down the way he wanted it. He read the final version through, decided it was all right, and nodded to himself. Only one thing bothered him. He went over to the telephone, dialled the operator, and asked her to spell “grievance” for him, because he wasn’t sure he had it right. She checked with someone else, gave him the correct spelling, and he copied the letter over again.

  He then went on to the other letters. They were easier, because he just copied the first one word for word, except for the particular job he wanted each man to do. In some cases there was no particular job, so he wrote instead: “Maybe you know some Outfit operation that would be an easy lay, and if you do you can do me a favour and knock it off in the next couple weeks.”

  He completed six letters, and then looked out the window and saw it was daytime. The dry fountain looked like a remnant from a lost civilization. It was not quite seven o’clock, and he was back in 12 Floral Court, again. If the other poker players were anxious to get their money and wallets back they might be able to check back through Menner’s friends or other people in the Outfit and find out where Parker was supposed to be staying, so it would be a good idea to stay away from the hotel for a while. But none of them would be in any hurry to come back to Floral Court. There was a body in the bedroom closet.

  Parker had run as far as the back yard; then he had turned to the left and run a distance of three courts. Behind him, he’d heard the poker players emerge. One of them had a flashlight, and all of them boiled out past the garages. He waited, and after a while they came back and went into the apartment. He kept waiting until he heard three cars start up out front on Rampon Boulevard. Then he went back in. The lights were off, the place was empty, and Manner was in the bedroom closet. The poker players would be running around establishing alibis.

  In the sideboard in the dining room he found stationery and envelopes. He pulled the shade down in the living room, sat at the dining-room table, and started writing letters. After six of them, he went over to the window, pulled the shade away, looked out at the decaying fountain, and decided he’d waited long enough.

  He went back to the table and wrote one more letter:

  BETT,

  You took the gun, You want something from me and then you’ll give me the gun back. I don’t have time now to fool with you. I got to take care of the problem that put that Stern on my back. I’ll get in touch with you within a month. If you don’t hear from me, turn the gun over to the law. I guess the
re’s skin scrapings from Stern on it or something to tie me in with what happened to Stern, and it’ll keep.

  PARKER

  He looked at it, then crossed out “Parker”, and wrote in its place “Chuck”. He put the note in an envelope, wrote her name on the outside, and tucked the envelope in his pocket. The other six letters went into the same pocket. He got the .25, stripped the silencer off it, and went to the bedroom closet. He pulled Meaner out on to the bedroom floor, wiped his own prints from the gun, and closed Menner’s hand around it. It might not hold up as suicide — the angle was probably wrong, and Meaner had two too many bullets in him — but it should help to slow the law down. And the gun, if it could be traced at all, couldn’t be traced past Stern to Parker.

  Out back, he threw the silencer into a garbage can. Then he walked around to Rampon Boulevard and caught a cab. “Hotel Maharajah.”

  There was no one he recognized in the lobby. He left the note for Bett at the desk and went up to his room. It was empty. As far as he could tell, no one had been in it. He packed his suitcase, stuffing the six wallets into it, with the identity cards and driver’s licences, but without the seventeen hundred dollars they’d once contained, and went downstairs to check out. This time, he was going to settle things with the Outfit once and for all. This time, he was going straight to Branson.

  FOUR

  Last year, it was, Parker had let his finances run low, and a job that had seemed promising had fallen through in the planning stage, so when this Mal Resnick told him about the island job he decided to take it on. Munitions were being sold by a private group of Americans and Canadians to a lunatic group of South American fidelistas, and a tiny Pacific island had been chosen for the transfer of arms and money. This particular island had been picked because it was uninhabited and because the Seabee-built World War II airfield there was still usable. Mal and Parker and the others decided to take the money away.

  There were six of them in it: a Canadian named Chester, who’d originally found out about the deal; a man named Ryan, who knew how to fly a plane; a methodical, reliable gunman named Sill; Parker’s wife, Lynn; Mal Resnick and Parker. With Lynn waiting in the abandoned house they’d chosen as their California base, the five men had flown to the island, turned the trick with a minimum of fuss, and flown back to the mainland. And that night, in the California house, the double-crossing had started.

  Mal had begun by talking to Ryan, telling him Parker was planning a cross. Then he’d killed Chester in his sleep, and had gone to Ryan to tell him Parker had started, had already done for Chester, and that Sill was siding with Parker. Ryan wasn’t a subtle man; he accepted the story the way Mal fed it to him. Later it was Ryan who finished Sill.

  Then Parker’s wife, Lynn, had been brought into it. Mal had wanted her from the first minute he’d seen her. He now saw a way to get her. He used the threat of death to force her to kill Parker herself, and she did her best. But her first bullet slammed into Parker’s belt buckle and he dropped; and she emptied the gun over his head.

  So far as Mal knew, the operation was still sweet. He put a ton to the house, shot Ryan in the back, and took off with Lynn an the ninety-thousand-dollar haul. He had a purpose for that money Four years before he’d worked in Chicago for the Outfit, but he’d loused up, dumping forty thousand dollars of uncut snow when he mistook the Outfit tail for a plainclothesman. The Outfit had let him live, which had surprised him, but had told him not to come back without the cash to pay for his mistake. Now Mal had the cash.

  He took Lynn with him. She was now a silent block of ice, but he thought he could eventually thaw her out. They went to New York, and he gave the Outfit back every penny — with interest and penalties — a little over fifty thousand. He invested the rest, and sat around waiting for the Outfit to offer him something. He got job, a better one than he’d had before, and settled in New York i live the way he thought he should.

  But Parker wasn’t dead. Badly bruised by the bullet that had slammed his belt buckle into his stomach, he’d managed to craw out of the burning house wearing nothing but a pair of trousers an had wandered, half-delirious, three days before being picked up. He had no identification on him and no money. He refused to tell the law anything, and wound up with a six-month vag stint on prison farm—his one and only fall. It also caused him to lose some of his anonymity — his fingerprints went on file, under the name he’d grudgingly given them: Ronald Kasper. Even when he’d bee in the Army — ‘42 to ‘44, when he got his BCD for blackmarketeering — he’d managed to avoid having his fingerprints recorded by bribing a file clerk to replace them with his own. So now he had one more reason to get hold of Mal.

  Finally, he broke out of the prison farm, bummed his way across the country, and went to New York to look for Mal and Lynn They were separated now, Mal having given up trying to get Lyn to respond to him. Parker found Lynn — and she killed herself He couldn’t have finished her off, but she did it herself. Then he found Mal, and evened the account.

  So Lynn and Mal were both dead, but Parker was still broke Mal had given his share — forty-five thousand — to the Out lit, so Parker went to the Outfit to get it back. They hadn’t wanted to give it to him, so he used pressure, disrupting the New York organization, and threatening to cause them trouble all across the country if he didn’t get his money.

  “I’ve worked my particular line for eighteen years,” he told them. “In that time, I’ve worked with about a hundred different men. Among them, they’ve worked with just about every pro in the business. There’s you people with your organization, and there’s us. We don’t have any organization, but we’re professionals. We know each other. We stick with each other. And we don’t hit the syndicate. We don’t hit casinos, or lay-off bookies, or narcotic caches. You’re sitting there wide open, you can’t squeal to the law, but we don’t hit you.

  “If you don’t give me my money I write letters, to those hundred men I told you about. I tell them: ‘the syndicate hit me for forty-five G. Do me a favour and hit them back once, when you’ve got the chance.’

  “Maybe half of them will say the hell with it. The other half are like me — they’ve got a job all cased. A lot of us are like that. You organized people are so wide open. We walk into a syndicate place and we look around, and just automatically we think it over, we think about it like a job. We don’t do anything about it, because you people are on the same side as us, but we think about it. I’ve walked around for years with three syndicate grabs all mapped out in my head, but I’ve never done anything about it. The same with a lot of the people I know. So all of a sudden they’ve got the green light, they’ve got an excuse. They’ll grab for it.”

  They weren’t sure whether it was bluff or not, but they agreed to pay. Parker was causing them too much trouble anyway. He’d killed Carter, one of the two men in charge of the New York area, and then managed to get a gun on the surviving boss, Fairfax. With Parker standing over him, Fairfax telephoned Bronson, head of the national organization, and Bronson came to terms. He put the forty-five thousand in a trap, and Parker walked through the trap and came out on the other side with the money. Knowing that the Outfit — and Bronson personally — would now try to hunt him down and kill him, Parker had gone to a plastic surgeon who worked outside the law, and came out with a new face.

  But now the Outfit knew about the new face. And they also knew about his cover name, Willis.

  It was time to bring it to an end, time to write the letters, and time to talk to Bronson. He was somewhere in the country. Parker would find him, and make an end to it.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  The woman with orange hair sat on the porch and watched Parker come walking down the rutted road towards the house. This was in the middle of the Georgia scrub country, west of Cordele, about thirty miles north of Albany. The land was brown and dry; the ruts in the road rock-hard. The house was grey frame, two storeys high, a narrow, tall, rectangular box in the middle of a dead land, with
blind uncurtained windows and an afterthought of a porch stuck askew on the front. A barn stood back of the house to one side; there was a long garage on the other side. Rusting automobile parts were scattered on the baked clay between house and garage. A lone dead tree stood grey and naked in front of the house with a rusty pulley arrangement fixed to a thick lower branch. Except for the woman with orange hair, the place looked deserted.

  Yesterday, after checking out of the hotel, Parker had taken a plane to Atlanta, and then doubled back, taking a bus south to Macon, and another bus farther south to Cordele. A bus headed for Columbus had taken him west of Cordele along an empty blacktop road to the twin-rut turnoff, and carrying his suitcase, he’d walked the three miles in to the house.

  It was November, but the land was still dry and the air was hot. After three miles, the suitcase got heavy. The rutted road made walking difficult. It would have been easier if he’d left the suitcase in Cordele, but he didn’t want to go through there again.

  As he walked past the dead tree with the pulley on it, a lean mongrel rose up on the porch next to the chair the woman was sitting in. The hound stretched and yawned, then looked up at the woman and looked out at Parker. He watched Parker and waited, not barking or moving or doing anything.

  Parker stopped where he was and dropped the suitcase on to the ground. He said, “Chemy around?”

  The woman asked, “Who wants him?”

  “Parker.”

  “Parker, you say?”

  “Parker.”

  She lifted her head and called, “Elly!”

  A boy of about fourteen, as lean and silent as the dog, came out of the house and stood there. The woman said to him, “Go on over to the garage see if Chemy ain’t there. Fella name of Parker lookin’ for him.”