The Outfit: A Parker Novel (Parker Novels) Read online

  After a while he sighed, put the cigar down again, and picked up the telephone. He dialed an area code, then a seven-digit number. He gave his own number to the operator and listened to the ring that followed.

  Keller himself answered. Bronson said, “This is Art.”

  “Art! Say, did Kirk—”

  “You gave out my number, Marty.”

  “What? Oh! Listen, I just thought you'd want to—”

  “You give out my number again, Marty. I retire you. With flowers, Marty.”

  “Well, sure, Art. Jesus, I figured this was a special—”

  “With flowers, Marty.”

  Bronson slammed the phone down. He glared at it a few seconds, then picked it up, and dialed another number. When he got an answer, he asked to speak to Quill. When Quill came on, he said, “Get on a plane. Come to Buffalo. Phone Edgewood 5-6598 when you get in. Ask for Fred.”

  “Right now, Mr. Bronson?”

  “When the hell do you think, Quill? Next year?”

  He broke the connection. The next time he dialed a local number. The voice that came on said, “Circle Rental.”

  “Let me talk to Fred.”

  “Who wants him?”

  “I do. Snap it up.”

  There was a silence, then the phone was slammed down. After a brief wait, a new voice came on. “Yeah?”

  “Bronson. Sometime tonight or tomorrow, a guy named Quill will call you from the airport. Go pick him up and bring him here.”

  “Will do.”

  “Good.”

  Bronson hung up and spent a while sitting motionless at the desk. He finished his cigar, sat a while longer, then make one more phone call, this time to Fairfax in New York. When Fairfax came on the line, Bronson said, “Parker's causing some more trouble.”

  “St. Clair's conscious,” Fairfax said. “They say he'll pull through.”

  “What? Who cares? Two professionals knocked over a gambling setup of ours tonight.”

  “You mean Parker's threat of—”

  “I mean two pros knocked over one of our operations! You got wax in your ears?”

  “All right, Art, all right. Just take it easy.”

  “The hell with take it easy! What have we got, god damn it, do we have an organization or don't we? Do we have twelve thousand employees, coast to coast, or don't we? What the hell is this? One lousy man can goose us any time he wants?”

  “You sure this was connected with Parker, Art?”

  “Who else?”

  “Parker was just in New York two days ago.”

  “For Christ's sake, do you listen or do you just stand there and play with your moustache? This wasn't Parker, this was two of Parker's friends! You know what that means?”

  “Art, did they say so? Now, quit screaming at me for a minute. Did they say it had anything to do with Parker? Maybe it was somebody else altogether—”

  “No. Amateurs try to hit us sometimes, but not pros. Pros leave us alone. Why should two pros suddenly hit us? You like coincidence, maybe?”

  “All right, so it was Parker himself, faking it. Right now he's on a plane to Oregon, maybe, or Maine, or someplace, and tomorrow night he does it again. And you stick pins in a map and say, ‘Look at that, all over the country. It couldn't all be just one man.”’

  “Maybe so.”

  “Sure. Those robbery guys are loners. They don't go help somebody for the hell of it.”

  “Yeah. And what the hell difference does it make?”

  “What?”

  “If Parker's doing it, or somebody else is doing it, what the hell difference does it make? Somebody's doing it! We still got hit for eighty-seven grand last night!”

  “Well, all I was saying was—”

  “Don't give me a lot of talk! I didn't call you so you should give me a lot of theories—who needs them?”

  “All right, Art, it's your dime.”

  “It's a hell of a lot more than a dime, you bastard. Don't get snotty with me.”

  “I'm not Parker, Art. Shout at him if you want, don't shout at me.”

  “All right. Wait. Wait a minute.” Bronson put the phone down and took a deep breath. He rubbed his hand over his face. He lifted the instrument again and said, “All right, I just got upset, that's all.”

  “Sure, Art. What did you want?”

  “Parker. I want Parker. Don't that sound easy? He's one miserable man, and I'm a coast-to-coast organization. Don't it sound easy?”

  “But it isn't easy.”

  “I know that. All right. What about this Parker? What about his background? Where's he from? Where's he live? What kind of family? He's got to have some family someplace.”

  “He had a wife, but she's dead. He killed her himself.”

  “There's got to be somebody. I need a hook in him. I need to be able to grab him. Listen, you put people on it. I want to know who this guy Parker is. I want to know where he's soft.”

  “I don't think he's soft anywhere.”

  “Everybody is. Everybody's soft somewhere. We're an organization, right? Can't we find one man? Find me this bastard Parker. Find what he is, what he does, who he knows.”

  “I'll do my best, Art.”

  “Don't do your best, god damn you! Find him!”

  “All right, Art, calm down. I'll call you back tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Just find him.”

  He hung up and sat a while longer at the desk, brooding. Then he got to his feet and left the office. He was remembering how abrupt he'd been with Willa, and he wanted to make it up to her. She was somewhere in one of these drafty rooms, maybe still down at the television set. He'd find her and they could go for a drive. Maybe up to the Falls. And stop someplace for dinner. And leave the damn bodyguards behind for once.

  He stopped, halfway down the stairs, and thought it over. There was no sense going overboard. Just keep the bodyguards in the other Cad, like this morning. It would be almost the same. Willa would hardly even know they were there.

  4

  Three days after the Cockatoo Club raid, and twelve hundred miles away—

  All the money came to the Novelty Amusement Corporation. It started as small change, here and there throughout the city, and it all funneled into one central office, all the money bet every day on the numbers.

  Take one dime. A lady goes into a magazine store and tells the man at the counter she wants to put ten cents on 734. If 734 hits she wins sixty dollars. The odds are 999 to one, but the pay-off is 600 to one. The magazine store owner writes 734 and 10¢ under it on two slips of paper. He gives the women one slip; he puts the other in a cigar box under the counter. He puts the dime into the cash register, but he rings No Sale. At three o'clock, his wife takes over at the counter while he takes the cigar box in back and adds up the amounts on all the slips. The amount is $18.60. He puts all the slips in an envelope and goes out to the cash register and from it he takes a ten dollar bill, a five, three ones, two quarters, and the dime. He puts this cash in the envelope with the slips. He places the envelope inside a science fiction magazine—on Wednesdays, it's a science fiction magazine—and puts the magazine under the counter.

  At three-thirty, the collector comes. The collector is a plump young man with a smiling face, a struggling writer making a few dollars while waiting to be discovered by Darryl Zanuck or Bennett Cerf. He drives up in a seven-year-old Plymouth that belongs to the local numbers organization and which he is allowed to drive only while making collections. He parks in front of the magazine store, goes inside, and asks for a copy of a particular science fiction magazine. The owner gives him the magazine and tells him that will be $1.86. No science fiction magazine in the world costs $1.86, but that's what the young man hands over with no protest.

  The young man then carries the magazine out to the car. He sits behind the wheel, takes the envelope from the magazine, puts it in a briefcase which is on the seat beside him. He tosses the magazine onto the back seat with seven other discarded magazines and taking a
small notebook from his breast pocket, he writes in it after several other entries: “MPL 1.86.” Then he puts the notebook and pencil away and drives on to his next stop.

  All in all, he buys fifteen magazines, then drives on to the Kenilworth Building and leaves the car in the lot next door. He carries the briefcase up to the seventh floor and enters the offices of the Novelty Amusement Corporation. He smiles at the receptionist, who never gives him a tumble, and goes into the second door on the right, where a sallow man with a cigarette dangling from his lips nods bleakly. The young man puts briefcase and notebook on the desk, and sits down to wait.

  The sallow man has an adding machine on his desk. He opens the notebook and adds the figures for the day, coming up with $32.31, which should be ten percent of the day's take. He then adds up the prices on the policy slips, and gets $323.10, which checks out. He finally adds together the actual money from all the envelopes, once again arrives at $323.10, and is satisfied. Out of this money, he gives the young man $32.31, which is what the young man paid for the magazines. In addition, he gives him $16.15, which is onehalf percent of the day's take from his area—his cut for making the collections. He averages $15 a day, for an hour's work a day. Well pleased, the young man goes home to his cold typewriter.

  The sallow man now takes out a ledger and enters in it the amount of, and the number of, each bet according to the exact location where each bet was made. He adds his figures again to check his work and gets the correct total. By then, another collector has come in. The sallow man is one of six men at Novelty Amusement who each take in the receipts from five collectors. They work at this approximately from four until six o'clock. Each of them clears about $1,500 a day—resulting in a grand total of about $9,000 a day for the entire operation.

  Ten-and-a-half percent of this money has already been paid out. The receivers each get one percent. Additional office salaries, rent, utilities, and so on eat up about 3½ percent more. When the sallow man stuffs the day's proceeds into a canvas sack and carries it back to the room marked “Bookkeeping,” there's about 85 percent of it left. On an average day, this leaves about $7,700. Ten percent more is deducted almost immediately and put into envelopes which are delivered to law officers and other local authorities. Twenty-five percent is retained by the local organization and split among its chief personnel; the remaining 50 percent is shipped weekly to Chicago—the national organization's piece of the pie. In an average six-day week, this half of the pie comes to better than $25,000. Each day's cut is put in the safe in the bookkeeping room, and, on Saturday nights, two armed men carry the cash in a briefcase to Chicago by plane. For security, one of the armed men is from the local organization and one is from the national organization.

  On this Saturday, there was $27,549, earmarked for Chicago, in the safe. In addition there was the $20,000 kept as a cash reserve—on the unlikely chance that, someday, there might be a run on a winning number, or for additional greasing when and if necessary, or for whatever unforeseeable emergency might arise. And further, there was $13,774.50, in the safe, which represents the week's 25 percent cut for the local organization to be split on Monday. The total in the safe was $61,323.50. Including the dime.

  At six-fifteen, on this Saturday, a late mailman with a bulging bag walked into the Kenilworth Building, chatted with the elevator operator about special-delivery packages, and rode up to the ninth floor. He then took the fire stairs down to the seventh floor. A couple of minutes after he entered the building, two well-dressed men with briefcases, looking like insurance salesmen, walked into the building and rode up to the sixth floor. The elevator operator was a bit puzzled—it was Saturday and after six o'clock—that there was so much activity going on, but he brought the elevator back to the first floor, he found two bearded young men with trombone cases waiting for him. One of them said, “Hey, Pops. What floor's Associated Talent?”

  “Tenth floor, but I think they all went home.”

  “They better not had, man. They called us over special. Weekend gig, man.”

  The elevator operator carried them up to the tenth floor.

  On the seventh floor, down the hall from Novelty Amusement, the mailman was talking to the two apparent insurance agents about people who address their mail incorrectly. A few minutes later, the two trombone players emerged from the stairwell onto the seventh floor, joined the other three men, and the mailman looked at his watch. “We've got fifteen minutes,” he said.

  They all reached into the mailbag and came up with white handkerchiefs, which they tied over their faces like bandits. Then, from the sack, they pulled two stubby shotguns with barrels sawed off back nearly to the stocks. The trombone players opened their trombone cases and produced partially assembled Schmeissers—burp guns with folding stocks. They put these together rapidly and snapped in clips.

  The mailman said, “All right. Give me one minute.”

  He opened the door to Novelty Amusement and went inside. The other four men waited outside, one of the trombone players studying his watch intently. All the other offices on that floor were closed by that time. The collectors had all been and gone at Novelty Amusement, and the couriers weren't due for half an hour yet, so it was unlikely that the party would be interrupted.

  The mailman walked into Novelty Amusement looking mild and baffled. He had a thick moustache, black edged with gray, and very thick glasses. He went over to the receptionist's desk. “I'm sorry, Miss, but I can't find this company. Do you know where Associated Removals is?”

  The receptionist shook her head. “I never heard of it.”

  “Well, maybe that isn't it. The writing on the package label is terrible. Here, you take a look at it—” He came wandering around the desk. “—maybe it says something else and I'm reading it wrong.”

  The receptionist knew that no one was supposed to come behind the desk. If anyone tried to without permission, she was to push the button on the floor under her desk. But this time, she didn't even think of the button. She reached, instead, for the package. Suddenly, the mailman grabbed her wrist, yanked her from the chair, and hurled her into a corner. She landed heavily on her side, knocking her head against the wall. When she looked up dazed, the mailman had an automatic trained on her. “Can you scream louder than this gun?” he said in a low voice.

  She stared at the gun. She couldn't have screamed if she'd wanted to. She couldn't even breathe.

  The outer door opened and the four men came in, two carrying shotguns, and two machine guns. The girl couldn't believe it—it was like something in the movies. Gangsters carried machine guns back in 1930. There was no such thing as a machine gun in real life. Machine guns and Walt Disney mice—all make-believe.

  The mailman put his gun away under his coat, and removed the mailbag from his shoulder. He took cord from the mail sack and tied the receptionist's hands and feet. She gaped at him unbelievingly as he tightened the knots. They were in the wrong office, she thought. It must be a television show shooting scenes on location—they must have wanted the office next door and these men had come into the wrong place. It must be a mistake.

  The mailman gagged her with a spare handkerchief as one of the other men brought the two musical instrument cases and two briefcases in from the outside hall. The mailman took the briefcases. The men with the machine guns led the way. They all walked down the inner hall and stopped at the door next to the bookkeeping room. The mailman opened the door, and all five of them boiled into the room.

  This was the room where the alarm buzzer would have rung if the receptionist had remembered to ring. Four men in brown uniforms wearing pistols and Sam Browne belts were sitting at a table playing poker. They jumped up when the door burst open—then they all froze. They believed in machine guns.

  The mailman told them to lie on the floor, faces down, and they did so immediately. He used their ties to bind their hands, their belts to bind their feet. He tore strips from their shirts to gag them. Then the five men went back to the hall. One of the trom
bone players walked back to the receptionist's office and sat down at the desk, cradling the machine gun in his lap and guarding the door. The other trombone player stood at the far end of the hall, watching the closed doors that lined it. The phoney mailman and the insurance salesmen with their shotguns walked into the bookkeeping room.

  There was only one man there, the chief accountant. He was standing by the window, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the couriers. He turned when the door opened, saw the three men coming in, and the cigarette dropped from his fingers. He raised his hands over his head. He was a C.P.A., a husband and father, forty-seven, medium height, somewhat paunchy, and not prepared to argue with sawed-off shotguns.

  The mailman said, “Open the safe.”