One Endless Hour

10

Dick Dahl called me from the airport on Sunday night two hours earlier than I'd expected. He balked at first when I told him I'd meet him behind the first lane of cars in the parking lot. "Don't be so damn lazy," I said. "There's absolutely no point at all in our being seen together in the terminal." He gave in reluctantly.

He was waiting when I parked and walked to the rendezvous point. "Got away sooner'n I thought," he said, his good humor restored. "What about Preacher?"

"He won't be in until after midnight."

"No sense hangin' around," Dahl said. "We might as well go to your motel."

Since this agreed with my own thinking, I led the way to my car. Dahl had the ever-present movie camera slung around his neck. The man really traveled light. The first time I'd seen him he carried a briefcase. This time he had a suitcase, lightweight airplane luggage. From the way he leaned away from it, though, it was heavy.

The airport parking lot was well lighted. As we approached my car, a woman was getting out of another car in the next row. The man with her locked the car doors while the woman walked toward us, her high heels click-clicking on the macadam. She wasn't pretty, but she carried herself well. "Hurry up or we'll miss them," she called over her shoulder. When she passed us, the thin sheath of her dress made it readily apparent that her hips measured twelve inches more than her waist.

Dahl dropped his suitcase with a thump. He bent over it, snapped the catches, grabbed up a powerful-looking light, and clamped it onto his camera. The bright beam of the light shot out, enveloping the undulating tick-tock movement of the woman's haunches while the camera whirred. At the sudden glare of light, the woman looked back at us in surprise.

The man strode toward Dahl and seized him by the arm. "What the hell you think you're doin', Jack?" he growled belligerently. He was two inches shorter than Dahl, but broader. He had an inch-and-a-quarter cigar butt between his teeth and a two-day growth of beard.

Dahl shook off the hand and turned to me, ignoring the man. "The assistant district attorney is at the exit," he said to me.

"Assistant district attor-" The heavyset man paused. "What you talkin' about, mister?"

Dahl turned back to him. "Just tell the truth and everything will be all right." He removed the light from his camera and restored it to the suitcase.

The belligerence had departed from the stocky man's attitude. "Truth?" he said uneasily. "Truth about what?"

"You can call your lawyer later," Dahl said, bending over his suitcase again to snap its catches.

The man spun on his heel and hurried after the woman. He took her by the arm and hustled her along while she protested. They veered from the parking lot exit toward which the woman had been headed and went toward another some distance away. "Works every time," Dahl said to me with a broad grin as we got into my VW. "Sometimes I think everyone in the world has secrets, sexual and otherwise, that he doesn't want to talk to assistant district attorneys about."

"You'll pull that on a bishop someday and wind up in court for invasion of privacy," I said.

"Not a chance. A bishop would have run. You wouldn't believe their sex habits."

"You're an authority on the sex habits of bishops?"

"I'm an authority on sex habits, period," Dahl said calmly. "You got anything to drink at the motel?"

"No."

"Stop somewhere and I'll pick up a bottle of Scotch."

"This is Sunday, remember? In Philadelphia."

"Oh, yeah. Stop at a hotel, then, an' I'll scrounge a jug from a bellboy."

Twenty-five minutes later we arrived at the Carousel, the fifth of Scotch firmly in Dahl's hand. -He splashed two liberal drinks into water tumblers and handed me one. Then he opened his suitcase on the bed-I could see only a spare shirt in it in addition to all his movie equipment- and removed a projector. "Got somethin' to show you, cousin." He sounded pleased with himself. He fitted a small reel of film into the maze of sprockets and gears on the projector, then aimed the lens at the expanse of white wall at the end of the room.

The last thing I wanted to do was view home movies. "We should be going over-"

"Only take a minute," Dahl said smoothly. He flicked a switch, and a blurred image appeared on the wall. Dahl adjusted the focus, and a brilliantly clear color shot showed a girl in a bikini sitting beside a swimming pool. The camera lingered on her until she glanced up and reached self-consciously for a towel to place between herself and the camera.

It was only when the scene cut suddenly to two women unlocking a motel room door that I remembered the movies Dahl had taken at the Marriott during the occasion of our first meeting. Before I could say anything, the scene changed again. Clearly in focus were a group of women in what appeared to be an institutionalized setting I didn't recognize. Backs to the camera, two of the women were in the process of lifting their dresses and slips up around their shoulders, and I realized with a sense of shock that these were the movies that Dahl had taken inside the Washington bank.

Three women were facing the camera, obviously arguing, but in seconds they turned and emulated the first pair, who now had a girdle in one case and panties in the other down to the backs of their knees. Up went more dresses and slips as the first bare-bottomed duo dropped to the floor and stretched out. Another variety of underwear dropped and two more bare behinds popped into view, and then as the camera drew back slightly, three more.

All five plumped out attractively as their owners doubled up awkwardly and joined the first pair on the floor. The camera swept back and forth lingeringly over what appeared to be a field of nude buttocks of all shapes and sizes, the entire homogeneous fleshy expanse broken only by the intrusion of two garter belts and one angry-looking red pimple.

"You'll notice that although there's two good-lookin' young heads in the crowd the best-lookin' ass belongs to that woman on the left, who must be forty-five if she's a nickel," Dahl said. "You'd be surprised how often it turns out that way."

I had been so intent upon the image upon the wall that Dahl's voice irritated me. It was an intrusion upon my concentration. In another instant the picture flickered slightly and then the wall went dark. I forced myself back in my chair, in which I had been crouched forward tensely.

"First time I've seen it myself," Dahl said cheerfully, backing up the reel of film. "Just got it back from the processor. I'm gettin' better at those inside shots. Anyone can shoot an orgy in a woodland glade, cousin, but it takes practice to get those interiors. Let's look at it again."

I sat and watched the reappearance of the bare behinds upon the wall while I tried to analyze the effect the first viewing had had upon me. By nature I'm not the easiest individual to "turn on" sexually. Most men have some one sexual totem pole which invariably accomplishes erection. It had never been that way with me. All my life I was never sure what was going to bring it about. Sometimes at embarrassing moments nothing brought it about.

That was why it had been so great for me with Hazel Andrews. After an initial fiasco, the big woman and I had hit it off in bed together in a manner I'd never experienced before. Over the years I'd become so hesitant making an effort with women for fear of something going wrong that Hazel had been an exhilarating experience.

Dahl was watching me as he disassembled the projector and put it back into his suitcase. "Kind've got you, cousin?" he said shrewdly. "Don't get shook. It gets to most."

I had forgotten my Scotch until Dahl picked up his glass and took a swallow. "These nudie movies," I said after emulating him. "Do they really have such an appeal to-"

"That's not a nudie," he broke in. "What you just saw, I mean. It's never a nudie till you see the broads' snatches. In the trade we call these 'sunsets.' Don't ask me where the name came from. All you show is a few boobs and butts. They're as far as you can go in tight-censorship areas. Then there's the nudies, which I don't bother with — after all, when you've seen a couple dozen bare asses you've seen 'em all-an' finally the ones I make, the exploitation movies."

"Exploitation?"

"Yeah. A movie that tells a story but with a couple of zippy sex scenes in it that can be exploited in the ads. A nudie is just an ol' swimmin' hole background or some-thin' like that, and with a couple of recent Supreme Court decisions the market is openin' up. But hell, anyone can make a nudie." His tone was scornful. "A good exploitation movie is art, though. An' Dick Dahl makes the best."

"Then why do you need to keep on…" I hesitated.

There was nothing shy about the movie maker. "Why do I need to keep takin' banks to get up a fresh bankroll, you mean?" His grin was wry. "Because I get carried away. I've lost money on my films because I couldn't get my best sex scenes past the censors in the big-money markets."

"Then why not tone them down?"

He turned serious. "Listen, cousin, when you make a movie you make it right, don't you?"

"Even if it loses money?"

"Even if it loses money. 'Course, a couple more court decisions like we been gettin' lately an' I figure I can reissue all my back films. They'd go right now if they had a European stamp on 'em. It's a hell of a note when hard-workin' American film makers are discriminated against."

He sounded so injured I almost laughed. It wouldn't have helped our relationship, because he was in deadly earnest. "I don't understand where you get your actors," I said.

"No problem. I've got a notebook full of names. Two notebooks, actually. One with people workin' re'glar who moonlight in films, hopin' to make it big, an' one with volunteers for the blue stuff."

"Volunteers?"

"Sure. You wouldn't believe the exhibitionists in this world. I always got more than I need. An' I can whistle up five eager chicks for every guy on my list. Somethin' about everyone she knows seein' her ballin' it in livin' color really turns on a certain type of tomato." He took another swallow from his glass and changed the subject. "What's the job look like so far?"

"Everything in the Schemer's blueprints has been right on the nose. Around the bank, anyway. In the next couple of days the three of us will check out the homes of the manager and assistant manager for arrival and departure times of the families. Wait a second and I'll get the file. I want you to look over the escape routes."

Halfway across the room I remembered something and detoured to the telephone. One reason I had selected the Carousel was because it had direct phones in each room that didn't go through a switchboard. "There's one thing in the Schemer's notes I want more information on," I explained to Dahl as I dialed the Schemer's number in Washington, D.C. "Schemer? Earl Drake. Call me right back at the motel, will you?"

I hung up the phone, took the scale drawings of the bank and the access roads around it from my briefcase, and handed them to Dahl. He pointed to the phone. "What's with this call back business?"

"The Schemer's ultracautious. He never talks business over his own phone. He never meets anyone face to face, either."

"You mean you've never even seen the guy?"

"That's right."

"Then how'n'ell does he get paid?"

"Through the mail."

Dahl whistled. "He sure must wind up waitin' at the gate for the postman. Waitin' in vain, I mean."

"Not as often as you'd think. You only miss with him once. Then he puts you on his blacklist, and he's so well and so favorably known that once on his list you'll have trouble hooking up with the_ right kind of people for your next job."

Dahl still looked dubious. "I say it's no way to run a railroad. He must-"

The telephone rang. I picked it up. "Drake here."

"Why the call?" the Schemer's voice asked.

"One small point," I explained. "Your notes say the manager and assistant manager each has half the vault combination. What happens if either of them doesn't make it to work?"

"I didn't have that in there?" Irritation threaded the clipped syllables. "I'm slipping. If it's the manager, Barton, who doesn't show up, his half of the combo is in the hands of the retired chairman of the board. I don't remember his name, but it's in the list of bank officers. If it's the assistant manager who misses, the bank attorney, who is also a director, has his part of the combination. His name is Carlisle and his office is right across the street from the bank."

"No luck," I said ruefully. "I was hoping someone might have goofed and one man like the board chairman would have both halves. That way we could have bypassed the families."

"I didn't say it was going to be easy," the Schemer said. "Anything else?"

"Nothing. We're getting close."

"Fine. I kept that job on ice for quite a while waiting for the right workman."

The connection was gone. Dahl looked at me quizzically as I replaced the phone. "No shortcuts, huh?"

"It was worth a try. Now we follow the blueprint." I looked at my watch. "Time to pick up Harris. There's no need for you to come. I'll drive you down the road where you can get a room."

Dahl stretched, yawned, and glanced at one of the large double beds. "What's the matter with sackin' out right here, cousin?"

"No," I said. "We're not going to be seen together any more than is absolutely necessary. You'll need to hire a car in the morning anyway."

Dahl grumbled a bit but finally put himself in motion. He carried his suitcase out to my car. It was only a three-minute drive to the other motel. "You sure we're gonna knock this one over next Thursday?" he said when I stopped on the shoulder of the road in front of the motel.

"Unless we get a bad break," I promised. "Goodnight."

" 'Night," he echoed. He walked up the driveway to the motel office, lugging his heavy suitcase. I watched from the car to make sure he got a room. I drove off when I saw the clerk swing the register in Dahl's direction for him to sign. It reminded me that I should have asked him what alias he intended to use.

At the airport I found I had a forty-five-minute wait for the arrival of Preacher Harris's plane. I left word at the airline counter for him to be paged upon arrival and I left a phone number for him to call. The phone was a pay phone at one end of the terminal. When it finally rang, I was sitting five yards away from it. "Harris," the voice at the other end of the line said when I picked up the receiver.

"Drake," I identified myself. "Let's meet behind the first row of cars in the parking lot."

"Be right there," he said.

He was obviously tired when I met him. "Bad flight," he said briefly. "I chucked twice. I need to sack in."

I suspected that at least part of the dark circles under his eyes and the strained expression around his mouth came from more than a bad flight. Long, losing hours at the tables in Las Vegas had evidently preceded the flight. "I'll take Dahl on a dry run in the morning," I said. "You can sleep till noon and we'll look it over together then."

The sound of Dahl's name seemed to rouse him. "Is he just as cocky as ever?"

"No ego shrinkage that I could see." I didn't tell him about Dahl's movie made inside the bank. If I knew Dahl, Harris would be seeing it for himself very soon. I drove to a third motel, this one ten miles from the Carousel, on U.S. 1 near Lima. "What name are you going to use if I want to reach you?"

"Harris James. James is my real first name."

"That's easy to remember."

I remembered an armored truck job years before in which a change of plan had come up at the last moment. The critical interval came and went with one partner hammering on door after door of a motel because he couldn't remember what alias his partner was using.

At the motel I waited again until I was sure that Harris had a room, then drove back to the Carousel.

We would be starting the last lap in the morning.