Butcher's Moon

Forty three

It was the night of the new moon: no moon. Earlier in the evening a pencil-line arc of white had denned the lightless moon’s location in the sky, but by eleven-thirty that line had narrowed to nothing. Stars shimmered in the heat haze, surrounded by black sky.

State Highway 219, angling northwest out of the city, was as dark and unseeable as the pine woods through which it cut. A man walking along the road would have had to guide himself by what was under his feet—the hardness of concrete, the rattle of gravel, the yielding texture of dirt—rather than what was in front of his eyes; except when an automobile would come along, following its own headlights through the dark.

At quarter past eleven a recently stolen Mercury Montego drove by, northbound, driven by Mike Carlow, with Stan Devers beside him and Wycza spread out on the back seat. Ten minutes later Nick Dalesia followed, with Hurley and Mackey both next to him in the front seat of their just-stolen Plymouth Fury. Occasional cars passed them southbound, but they overtook no one else going north.

Seven miles north of the Tyler city line, in a blaze of red and yellow neon that kept the night slightly at bay, was a rambling two-story white clapboard farmhouse now operating under different management. The sign out by the road that said

TONY FLORIO’S

R

I

V

I

E

R

A

Dining — Dancing

Appearing Nitely

Paul Patrick

and

The Heat Exchange

might have been airlifted by helicopter directly from the Strip in Las Vegas. The pine trees visible across the road in the sign’s glow looked unreal, a clumsy stage setting, as though the sign had a greater vitality and truth than they, and had overwhelmed them.

Monday was a good night at Tony Florio’s Riviera; in fact, every night was a good night there. The blacktop parking lot out behind the main building was over half full when, at twenty past eleven, the Plymouth drove in and joined the Mercury already parked there.

Inside, Tony Florio himself was on hand to greet his regular guests and to give a smile and a friendly word to any passing transient who recognized him. A one-time light-heavyweight contender, Florio’s body had grown rounder and bulkier since the days when he’d made his living in the ring, but the pockmarked square-jawed face hadn’t changed much at all, and with the steady secret use of hair dye, the mass of tight curly black hair cascading over his forehead was just the same as it had been in the days when it was the trademark used to identify Tony Florio by all the sports-page cartoonists. Florio’s eyes were clear, his handshake strong, his manner expansive and confident, and so far as most of his customers knew, this was Tony Florio’s own place, set up and paid for out of the money he’d earned during his years as a professional boxer. Very few people knew that Florio, like most professional boxers, had been in his heyday nothing but a commodity, pieces of him owned by individuals and groups from all over, every fight purse being sliced up a hundred different ways, and with the federal government the first in line. Whatever had been left in those days Florio had spent himself, at once, in places very like this Riviera.

But what difference did it make who owned the place, so long as it was fun to go? And for the older male patrons, Tony Florio was still a recognizable name, and to shake his hand was a pleasure of a kind not often available in a backwater like Tyler.

When Dalesia and Hurley and Mackey walked in, Florio looked them over from his casual spot near the headwaiter and did a saloonkeeper’s rapid fix on them: They were strangers, new to this place. They didn’t give the impression of being local citizens, so they were more likely to be traveling men, passing through town and wanting an evening’s entertainment. They would have a few hundred on them, but they would neither make nor break the bank. It was possible that a cabdriver in town had steered them out here for a late dinner in the main dining room—called, obscurely, The Spa—but not likely. They were definitely not the type for The Corral, where younger local couples danced to the rock music of The Heat Exchange. Were they for upstairs? If so, they would have a card with them, from one of the six desk clerks, nine bartenders, and seven cabdrivers in town whose judgment Florio trusted.

And when Florio stepped forward to give them a glad hello, it turned out they did have a card, but the source of it was a surprise. Looking at the familiar name in the familiar handwriting on the familiar business card, Florio said, “Ah hah.” He looked up, reassessing these three, saying, “So you know Frankie Faran, do you?”

“From good old union days,” Ed Mackey said, and gave Florio a tight hard grin.

Florio recognized that grin, and that kind of man. It was the sort of expression you found sometimes with professional sparring partners, guys whose goal in life was to prove they could take more without flinching than anybody else in the world. Men like that were dangerous because they almost always wanted to test themselves against somebody or other, but once you knew how to handle them, they were babes in the woods. This one would throw away his last dime upstairs, given the opportunity.

So let’s give him the opportunity. “Well, any friend of Frank’s,” Florio said. “Would you boys care for a drink before dinner?” Then, when he saw them glancing off to their left at the entrance to the bar—called The Salon—he gave them a big smile and said, “Not in there. Private.” He turned and gestured to a waiter who wasn’t a waiter, but whose job it was to escort customers who weren’t going to The Salon or The Spa or The Corral, and when the waiter came briskly over, Florio said, “Show these gents to my office, will you, Angy?” And to the three men he said, “I’ll be along in just a minute.”

“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Florio,” Nick Dalesia said, and the other two nodded, with slightly belligerent smiles on their faces.

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 Al 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 a 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 doors 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 doubledeck 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.”

Out at Best’s Jewelry, the Vigilant guards touched their visors in salute to the customer, got back into the Polara, and headed home. The driver took it slow and easy now, with the blue light turned off, and chose to head down London Avenue even though it was a block or so out of the way.

It was a quiet night, moonless and dark. London Avenue was deserted except for two guys drooling over the pictures outside one of the dirty-movie houses. “They’re on line kind of early, ain’t they?” one of the guards said, and they all laughed.

“Twelve o’clock,” Elkins said. “But wait for that car to go by.”

At Vigilant headquarters, Philly Webb and Handy McKay were playing draw poker with a pinochle deck. “Royal flush,” Handy said.

Webb, with a little smirk, spread out his hand. “Five aces.”

“Damn it.” Handy tossed his hand in with true annoyance. “The cards are dead,” he said.

From upstairs came a buzzing sound. Looking up, Webb said, “There goes the movie house.”

Upstairs, Ducasse stood frowning at the wall display with its flashing light and droning buzzer. He called to one of the guards in the corner, “How do I turn that off?”

“Fuck you,” said the guard. They were both upset at learning that Ducasse and Handy weren’t crazy men, after all.

Ducasse went over and kicked the guard on the shin. “Don’t talk dirty,” he said. “How do I turn that thing off?”

The guard, wincing with pain, tried to outstare a man with a hood over his face, but when Ducasse drew his foot back again he said, “There’s a switch on that desk. Turn it off and then back on again.”

“Good,” said Ducasse.

Downstairs, Webb and Handy played cards until they heard the garage door lifting. Then they pulled their hoods down over their faces and stood to either side of the dayroom door, their pistols held down at their sides.

The guards came in talking together, taking it easy, and all four were in the room before they saw the strangers. It suddenly got very quiet, and Handy, doing it his way, said, “Okay, gents, just take it easy. We don’t want any guns going off.”

* * *

There were no slot machines. The image they tried for at Tony Florio’s Riviera was discreet class, but not so discreet that the mugs wouldn’t recognize it. James Bond elegance, that was the approach. The mugs, seeing maroon-velvet draperies, assumed it was elegant. The mugs, seeing slot machines and equating slot machines with pinball machines in truck-stop diners, assumed it was cheap. So there were no slot machines.

But there was a lot of maroon velvet. Dalesia and Hurley and Mackey followed the waiter upstairs and through maroon-velvet drapes into the main gaming room, a long low-ceilinged room lined with heavy draperies. All that cloth, plus the thick green carpeting, muffled noises in the room until the place sounded like a stereo system with the bass control up full.

“The cashier to your right, gentlemen,” the waiter said, bowing slightly, smiling and gesturing. “And good luck to you.”

“Good luck to you, too,” Hurley said.

The waiter went away, and the three men took a minute to look over the room. There were six crap tables, only three of them in action. Two roulette wheels, both operating. On the far side of the room, card games at several green-baize tables. The players were about two-thirds men, and most of the women seemed to be married to the men they were with. It looked to be a professional-class crowd, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, managers, with most of the men in jacket and tie. Very few of the customers appeared to be under thirty-five, and those few mostly emulated their elders in dress, deportment, and hair length. The room wasn’t crowded, but it wasn’t empty either; it was probably operating at half capacity.

Dalesia said, “Good mob for a Monday night.”

“Maybe we ought to invest,” Mackey said.

Dalesia grinned. “No, I don’t think so. I think they’re a bad risk.”

The three of them walked over to the cashier’s window. It was an oval hole in the wall, flanked by the ever-present maroon drapes. In the center of the grayish bullet-proof glass, at mouth level, was a microphone, and just above the window a speaker brought out the cashier’s voice. It was like a drive-in window at a bank; they put money in a metal drawer, which the cashier drew back to her side, then pushed out again with the chips in it. They each took a hundred dollars in five-dollar blues, and the cashier’s metallic voice said over their heads, “Good luck to you.”

“And good luck to you, too,” Hurley said.

They wandered the room for a few minutes, looking at the action. The crap tables and roulette wheels were run by men, but all the card games were operated by women, showing a lot of breast and a lot of plastic smile. “That’s what I call poker tits,” Dalesia said. “Harder to read than a poker face.”

Mackey said, “Well, if I’m going to throw it away fast, I can’t do better than roulette. See you.”

Mackey wandered off, and Hurley and Dalesia kibitzed a blackjack game for a few hands. The girl dealing flashed them a couple of smiles while waiting for players to decide whether to hit or stay, and after a minute or two Hurley said, “Think I’ll settle in here till spring,” and took one of the empty chairs at the table.

Dalesia roamed some more, considered the lone chemin de fer table with its slender black-haired girl dealer, and went on to one of the crap tables. They used the full Las Vegas layout, and most of the female customers were here, betting the field and the hard way. Dalesia, whose one superstition was that he had a mystical relationship with the number nine, made a sensible bet on the Don’t Pass Line and a dumb bet on the nine to come. He glanced at his watch while the shooter breathed on the red transparent dice, and saw he had twenty minutes in which to lose the hundred dollars.

Over at one of the roulette wheels, Mackey was frowning like a steam engine and writing numbers in a notebook. He was betting on every other spin, and these were alternating between a square bet somewhere in the second twelve and the line bet at the top, the 1, 2, 3, 0 and 00. He was losing practically every time, but his frown of concentration never changed. He looked exactly like yet another chump with a system, and all the employees in the area became aware of him within five minutes. So did several customers, a couple of whom began to follow his betting even though he was losing.

At the blackjack table, while the other players looked at their cards or the dealer’s breasts, Hurley watched her hands. She was good and smooth, but she didn’t seem to be doing anything mechanical. Not that she had to; most of the players here didn’t know how to stand on anything less than a twenty. Hurley hung back with his low teens whenever the dealer’s up card was low, never hit on sixteen or higher no matter what she had showing, and slowly inched ahead of the odds. But it was a slow way to make money.

Mackey went through his hundred dollars in eight minutes. Still frowning, still checking things off in his notebook, he went back to the cashier’s window, absent-mindedly fumbled his wallet out of his pocket, and said, “Better let me have—” He paused, fingered the bills in the wallet, and regretfully drew five twenties. “Just a hundred,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

He seemed to come slowly back to a full awareness of his surroundings. As the girl was sending the drawer back out to him with his twenty chips inside, he said, “Uh, miss.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Is there a manager around?”

“Is something wrong, sir?”

“I want to establish a line of credit.” He seemed on the verge of dropping his wallet into the drawer, and hadn’t yet taken his chips out. “I have identification, I’m fully, uh—” He hesitated, then scooped the chips out and stuffed them distractedly into his jacket pocket.

“Yes, sir,” the girl said. “You’ll want to talk to Mr. Flynn.”

“Thank you,” Mackey said, and a second later did a double-take, when he remembered that Flynn was the name he was using. Thomas Flynn; he and Parker and a couple of other people all had ID in that name. “Flynn, you said?”

“Yes, sir.” Leaning forward so her hair was touching the glass, she looked and pointed down to Mackey’s left, saying, “You’ll find his door along this wall, sir.”

“My name’s Flynn,” Mackey said.

The girl gave him a blank smile. “Well, isn’t that a coincidence,” she said.

“It’s an omen,” Mackey told her. “I have a feeling I’m going to make some money tonight.”

“Well, I hope you do, sir. Should I tell Mr. Flynn you’re coming to see him?”

He seemed to think about it, then to make a solid decision. “Yes,” he said. “I might as well be prepared.”

“Thank you, sir.” She reached for a phone beside her, and Mackey moved away from her window.

Dalesia, winning most of the time on Don’t Pass and losing all of the time on nine, was slowly turning his hundred dollars over to the house. When the dice came around to him, he elected not to shoot but to pass them on to the next player, and while doing so, noticed Mackey walking along the wall toward a brown wooden door.

There was a man in a black suit, black tie, and white shirt standing near the door, watching the action the way a cop on a beat watches cars go by. When Mackey approached he turned and gave him a flat look and said, “Can I help you, sir?”

“I’m supposed to see Mr. Flynn,” Mackey said.

“Yes, sir. And your name was?”

Mackey gave a half-apologetic smile. “Flynn,” he said.

The man’s face wasn’t meant for smiling, but he tried. “Well, that’s a coincidence,” he said.

“I guess it is.”

The man reached for a black wall phone next to the door. “Related, by any chance?”

“You never know, do you? I’ll have to ask.”

“Yes, sir.” Into the phone, he said. “There’s a Mr. Flynn out here to see you. Fine.” Hanging up, he said, “Go right on in.”

“Thanks.” Mackey said as the door began to buzz. He pushed it open, the buzzing stopped, and he entered an ordinary receptionist’s office, ordinary in every way except that it was windowless. Several framed photographs of Tony Florio in his boxing days were on the walls. At a green-metal desk sat an ordinary receptionist, who smiled brightly and said, “Mr. Flynn?”

“That’s right. I guess it’s some coincidence, huh?”

“I guess so,” she said. “Mr. Flynn’s on the phone long-distance just now, but he’ll be with you in a very few minutes.”

“Thank you.”

She extended a large document toward him. “While you’re waiting, would you mind terribly filling this out? It could save you some time.”

The document was a four-page credit questionnaire. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

She pointed to a library table on the side wall. “I think you’d be comfortable there, Mr. Flynn.”

“I’m sure I would.”

The questionnaire wanted to know everything but his attitude about fucking sheep. He filled it out in a tiny crabbed hand, keeping the lies generally realistic, avoiding old gags like having a checking account in the Left Bank of the Mississippi, and when he was finished he gave the questionnaire back to the receptionist, who smiled her gracious thanks and carried it at once inside to her long-distance-telephoning boss.

The magazines available to read were Forbes and Business Week. Mackey read about businessmen for five minutes or so, until a buzzer sounded on the receptionist’s desk. “Mr. Flynn will see you now, Mr. Flynn,” the receptionist said, and got to her feet to open the door for him to the inner office.

Mr. Flynn was a short balding man who had put on some weight but who moved as though he were short and skinny. He wore a tan jacket and a blue-and-red bow tie, and he had come around his desk to give Mackey a firm but friendly handshake. The questionnaire was open on the desk, and Mackey could tell by Flynn’s outgoing manner that he had called the local phone number Mackey had given—as being his company’s “local leased personal premises,” as he had put it on the form—and had been told the story by Parker at the other end. Parker, playing butler-caretaker, would have said that yes, this was General Texachron’s local leased apartment, where company executives could stay when business brought them to Tyler, and that yes, Mr. Thomas Flynn was currently in residence although not at the moment present in the apartment.

But before they got to General Texachron or the other invented particulars of the questionnaire, they had to get past the coincidence of the last name. Mackey was getting heartily sick of the coincidence by now, and was wishing he’d chosen one of his other available identities instead, but eventually the casino’s Mr. Flynn had satisfied himself that the two of them weren’t blood relatives in any directly traceable way, and they could get themselves around to the matter at hand.

* * *

Downstairs, Mike Carlow and Dan Wycza and Stan Devers had all skipped dessert and were having a cup of coffee. Carlow, glancing at his watch, said, “Time for us to make our move.”

Wycza put down his cup. “Right,” he said, touched his napkin to his lips, and got to his feet. While Devers and Carlow stayed at the table, Carlow with his hands out of sight on his lap, Wycza crossed the room to where Tony Florio was standing in his usual spot near the headwaiter. “Mr. Florio?”

Florio turned around, his greeter’s smile on his face, his hand ready to come out for a brisk shake. “Yes, pal? What can I do for you?”

Wycza moved in close to him, turning his shoulder so as to exclude the nearby headwaiter from the conversation. Pointing into the dining room, he said, “You see those two gents there at my table?”

Florio was expecting to be asked for an autograph, which he would give, or to join these out-of-towners in a drink, which he wouldn’t do. “Yes,” he said. “I see them.”

Wycza said, “Well, the fella with his hands under the table is holding a target pistol down there, aimed at your balls.”

Florio stiffened. Wycza’s hand was on his elbow in a confidential way, and quietly Wycza said, “Now, don’t make a fuss, Mr. Florio, because I’ve got to tell you something. That guy is with me, and I know about him, and I know he gets very nervous in moments of stress. You follow me?”

Florio said nothing. It never even occurred to him this might be a gag; he believed it was the truth from the instant he heard it.

Wycza said, “For instance, if you were to make any sudden motions, or if you were to shout, anything like that, that nervous son of a bitch over there is just likely to shoot. I hate to use him, he makes me a nervous wreck myself, but the thing is he’s a marksman. He can shoot a pimple off a fly’s ass at sixty feet, he’s just amazing. If only he was calm like you and me, but he doesn’t have our size, you know? A big man like us can be calm, but a little guy like him gets nervous.”

Florio, in looking now at this soft-spoken baldheaded giant, was invited to notice that although Wycza had spoken of them both as being big men, Wycza was clearly much the bigger and much the stronger of the two of them. Florio, who was used to being the biggest and toughest-looking man in any gathering, wilted a bit more. Half whispering as drops of perspiration appeared on his upper lip, he said, “What do you want?”

“Just come on over to the table,” Wycza said. “We’ll talk a little.” He nudged Florio’s arm, and Florio began to walk.

The two of them moved through the mostly empty tables to the one where Devers and Carlow were waiting. Carlow kept his hands under the table, and Devers kept watching the employees behind Wycza’s back, none of whom were behaving in any way out of the ordinary.

Crossing the room, Wycza staying next to him, Florio said, “I don’t really own this place, you know. I just front it for some people in town.”

“Ernie Dulare,” Wycza said. Pleased by the startled look he got for that name, he added another: “Adolf Lozini.”

“You know those people?”

“Does a baby know its mother’s breast?”

They’d reached the table. Wycza sat Florio across from Carlow, and took the remaining seat to Florio’s right. Florio said, “If you know them, then what the hell is going on?”

“A little heist,” Wycza said. “Nothing to worry about.”

Devers kept looking around the room. Carlow said, to Wycza, “There won’t be any trouble, will there?” He didn’t exactly act nervous, he seemed more tense, keyed up, as though at any second the rigid control might let go and he would explode.

Wycza, reassuring him, patted his upper arm and said, “No trouble. Tony’s going to cooperate. What the hell’s a few bucks? This place manufactures money, he’ll make it all back by the end of the week.” He turned to Florio. “Isn’t that right, Tony?”

“There’s no money down here,” Florio said. “I’m not out to cross you people, but it’s God’s own truth, there just isn’t any money down here.”

“I want to talk to you about that, Tony,” Wycza said. “But while we talk, let’s get a phone to this table. Will you do that, Tony?”

“A phone?”

Devers was raising one arm, signaling a waiter. When the man came over, being deferential because the boss was sitting at this table, Devers gestured to him to listen to Florio.

Florio hesitated, not out of a spirit of rebellion but simply out of bewilderment. Then, feeling the silence, he turned abruptly to the waiter and said, “Paul, get us a phone here, will you?”

“Sure, Mr. Florio.”

The waiter went away, and Wycza said, “Now, about the situation upstairs, Tony. We’ve got a man in with your manager up there right now.”

Florio looked at him in open shock. “You what?”

“The manager doesn’t know what’s going on yet,” Wycza said. “When you get the phone now, see, I want you to call his office up there and explain to him how he should do what our man tells him to do.”

“Jesus Christ,” Florio said. This was the first time in the nine years’ existence of Tony Florio’s Riviera that the place had been knocked over, and the reality of it was just beginning to hit him. This was a full-blown, big-scale, professional robbery. “How many of you guys are there?”

Wycza gave him a tight grin. “Enough,” he said, and the waiter came with the phone. They waited silently at the table as he put the phone down and walked off with the long cord to the nearest wall-jack. He plugged it in, came back to the table, picked up the phone and listened to it, replaced the receiver in the cradle, and said, “There you are, Mr. Florio.”

“Thanks, Paul.”

The waiter went away, and Stan Devers said, “It occurs to me the waiter’s name might not be Paul.”

Wycza frowned slightly and said to Florio, “You wouldn’t do anything cute like that, would you?”

“Am I crazy?” Florio spread his hands. “How heavy can you hit me for? A Monday night’s receipts isn’t worth dying for.”

Devers, watching the waiter, said, “He seems okay.”

Speaking softly, Wycza said to Florio, “How about the forty thousand in the safe? Is that worth dying for?”

Florio stared. “Wha—what forty thousand?”

“You keep forty thousand cash in the safe,” Wycza said. “Back-up money, in case anybody hits a streak on you. That’s the money we want, Tony.”

”You can’t walk in off the street and know about that,” Florio said. Pale circles of anger showed on his cheekbones. “Some son of a bitch in my shop is in it with you.”

Grinning, Wycza said, “I got it from Ernie Dulare.” Then, wiping the smile from his face as though it had never existed, he said, “Now, you call your manager upstairs. Our man is in there with him, and he’s calling himself Flynn.”

“Flynn? My manager’s name is Flynn.”

“That’s some coincidence,” Wycza said. “Except your manager’s real name is Flynn. Call him.”

Florio picked up the phone, and hesitated with his finger over the dial. “What do I tell him?”

“Tell him God’s simple truth,” Wycza said. “You’re down here with a gun stuck in your crotch, and your Mr. Flynn should do what our Mr. Flynn tells him to do or you’ll start singing soprano.”

“What if he doesn’t believe me?”

“It’s up to you to be convincing,” Wycza said. “Dial.”

Upstairs, Mackey and Mr. Flynn had gone through the extra support Mackey had in that he’d been recommended to the place by Frank Faran, Mackey telling a couple of stories about himself partying with Frank Faran in Las Vegas, stories that were absolutely true except for the names of the participants. Now they were working their way through the questionnaire Mackey had filled out, and Mackey was beginning to wish he’d kept a carbon copy for himself; it was one thing to fill four pages of stupid questions with on-the-spot lies, and another thing to remember all those lies ten minutes later.

Then the phone rang, at long last, and Mackey relaxed a little. The call was late, and he’d been beginning to wonder if maybe something had gone wrong somewhere, if maybe the casino was onto the whole ploy somehow and maybe this chummy Mr. Flynn here was just stalling him with a lot of credit questions while waiting for the cops to show up. But then the phone did finally ring, and Mackey relaxed and put his hand inside his jacket, closing his fingers around the butt of the pistol there.

“Yes, Mr. Florio.” Flynn nodded and smiled at Mackey, asking him to wait just a second. “Yes, he’s here right now.” A surprised smile toward Mackey: Why, Mr. Florio himself knows about you. Then, a look of bewilderment: “What? What’s that?”

Mackey smiled and took the pistol out. He showed it to Flynn and calmly put it away again.

Flynn was sitting straighter in his chair. “I don’t understand, Mr. Florio.” Listening, blinking, he seemed like a man who didn’t want to understand. “Do you realize what you’re asking me to—”

Mackey couldn’t make out the words, but he could hear the angry buzz of Florio’s voice in Flynn’s ear. Flynn blinked, swallowed, began to nod his head. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Yes, sir, of course, I just wasn’t think— Yes, sir.” His face pale as bread dough, he extended the receiver across the desk to Mackey, saying, “He wants to talk to you.”

“Thanks, cousin.” Mackey took the phone, said into it, “Yeah, I’m here.”

It was Florio’s voice, recognizable and bitter, that said, “One of your friends wants to talk to you.”

Mackey waited, and Dan Wycza came on a few seconds later, saying, “Everything fine?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Mackey said.

“Then we might as well get started,” Wycza said.

“Right. Hold on.” Mackey kept the mouthpiece near his face so Wycza would be able to hear him, and said to Flynn, “I have two friends outside. I want you to bring them in here.”

“You want me to go out and—”

“No no no, Mr. Flynn,” Mackey said. “You call your man on the door out there. Tell him two gents are coming over and he should let them in. And then tell your receptionist to buzz for them.”

“All right,” Flynn said, but there was something in his voice and in his eye that Mackey didn’t like. “Hold it,” he said. Flynn gave him an attentive look.

Mackey said into the phone, “I think this fella here needs a pep talk from Florio. He looks like he’s nerving himself up to something.”

Flynn, all wounded innocence, said, “I wouldn’t—” but Mackey shushed him with a wave of his hand.

Wycza said, “Hold on,” and turned to Florio. He said, “My man Flynn says your man Flynn doesn’t understand the situation. He might have something cute in mind.”

Angrily, Florio said, “Over my—” and stopped.

“That’s right,” Wycza said. Extending the phone toward Florio, he said, “Maybe you ought to tell him that yourself.”

Mackey, hearing Wycza, held his phone out toward Flynn. “Your master’s voice,” he said.

Flynn took the phone doubtfully, held it to his ear as though it might bite him, and said, “Mr. Florio?”

The phone bit him. Looking pained, Flynn tried to break in three or four times with no success, and finally managed to say, “Of course, Mr. Florio. You’re the boss, Mr. Florio, I wouldn’t— No, sir, I won’t.”

Mackey waited, looking around the room. According to Faran’s sketch, that door on the right should lead to the vault room where the money was kept, and the door on the left should lead to the employees’ parlor where the dealers and stickmen took their smoke breaks and where the three armed guards hung out when they weren’t out patrolling the floor. Coming at the joint this way, through Florio and Flynn, they were by-passing all the security devices, the armed guards and the timelocks and the buzzer alarms and all the other protective arrangements that had been set up around here.

It was Parker’s plan, to Faran’s inside information, done without any casing at all, and it was working just beautifully.

Flynn, chastened, finally handed the phone back to Mackey. He was still a trifle mulish, but Mackey didn’t doubt he meant it this time when he said, “I’ll do whatever you want.”

“That’s fine.” Mackey said into the phone, “You there?”

Wycza said, “Right here.”

“Everything’s fine now.”

Flynn said, “I’ll need to use the phone. I can put that call on hold if you want.”

“Good idea.” Into the phone, Mackey said, “You’re going on hold for a minute.”

Flynn took the phone, called his receptionist, and told her. “Call George and tell him there are two men about to come over to the door. He’s to let them in, and then you should let them directly through in here. That’s right. Thank you.” He pressed a button that took Dan Wycza off hold and returned the phone to Mackey. “There.” he said.

Outside, Hurley had quit the blackjack game twenty dollars ahead and was now kibitzing the crap table where Dalesia had so far lost thirty-five dollars. Hurley saw the man on duty at the brown wooden door reach for the wall phone, and tapped Dalesia, saying, “Time to go.”

“Right.” Dalesia left a five-dollar chip riding on the nine, and the two men walked across the room to where the doorman was just hanging up the phone. He said, “You the two gentlemen Mr. Flynn’s expecting?”

They thought he meant Mackey. “That’s right,” Dalesia said, “we’re the ones.”

The door buzzed, and the doorman pushed it open. “Go right on in,” he said.

“Thanks,” Dalesia said.

* * *

Dutch Buenadella owned two more dirty-movie palaces in Tyler besides the Mature Art. One was called the Cine, and the other was the Pussycat. But the Mature Art was the only one of the three with a good burglar-alarm system and a solid reliable safe, so the skim cash from all three theaters was kept there, piling up until once a month it was split into so many pie slices and distributed to the partners.

It had been three weeks since the last distribution, and the safe upstairs in the manager’s office at the Mature Art held nine thousand two hundred dollars in skim cash from the three theaters. In addition, there was eight hundred fifty dollars cash maintained as a sort of floating fund to help grease the ways should any unexpected problems come up, or to bribe a fire inspector, or pay a fine if it should come to that. And there was also an envelope, sealed and wrapped with two rubber bands, marked Personal in Dutch Buenadella’s handwriting and underlined, containing four hundred dollars; one of Buenadella’s private caches in case it ever turned out to be necessary to leave town in a hurry when the banks were closed, such as at four o’clock in the morning.

Ralph Wiss had breathed on the lobby door and it had opened. Elkins had looked in the cashier’s drawer and found it empty, and then the two of them had gone on upstairs, following Elkins’ pencil flashlight. The manager’s office was next to the men’s room, from which came a muted but rancid odor that it seemed impossible to get used to.

Because the manager’s office had a window that overlooked the street, they couldn’t switch the overhead fluorescent light on, but with the Venetian blinds closed over the window, they could operate by the light of Elkins’ flash. The office was a small cluttered room with a sloppy desk piled high with papers, an incredible number of notes and messages taped to the walls, a bulking water cooler next to a scratched metal filing cabinet, and a stack of metal film-carrying cans piled messily in one corner.

In another corner stood the safe, a dark green metal cube twenty inches on a side, with an L-shaped chrome handle and a large combination dial. Elkins gave Wiss the flashlight, and Wiss studied the front and top and sides of the safe, running his fingers over the metal, squinting at the line where the door joined the edge. He made a kind of whistling S sound between his tongue and his upper teeth as he studied the safe, a noise that Elkins had at one time found annoying—it sounded like a tire going flat—but over the years had grown used to, so that ho no longer really heard it.

“Drill,” Wiss decided.

Elkins nodded. “Sure.”

Wiss brought an empty film can over, set the flashlight on it so that it shone on the face of the safe, and sat on the floor directly in front of the safe with his black-leather bag at his side. As he opened the bag, Elkins said, “I’ll go on downstairs.”

Wiss was involved in his own head. “Uh huh,” he said, taking things out of the bag, and didn’t look around when Elkins left the room.

Elkins made his way downstairs in the dark, entered the cashier’s booth, and sat on the stool there with his elbows on the counter. He could look out diagonally through the cashier’s window and the glass doors at the street, where absolutely nothing at all was happening.

After a minute he heard the faint whirring of an electric drill from upstairs.

* * *

At Vigilant, the four guards and one of the ready-room men were tied and gagged and locked in one of the smaller rooms downstairs. Handy McKay and Fred Ducasse and Philly Webb were upstairs, playing pinochle. The other ready-room man was tied to a chair and blindfolded, so that the three men wouldn’t have to wear their hoods. They needed the ready man present in case the phone should ring. As Handy had told him, “If it rings, you’ll do the talking. If you say the right things, there won’t be any problem. But if you say something that brings trouble here—guess who’ll be the first one in the line of fire?”

“I’m not crazy,” the man said. He had gotten over being annoyed that Handy and Ducasse weren’t crazy either.

“That’s fine,” Handy told him, and then made a phone call himself to Parker. “Everything’s fine here,” he said.

“Good.”

Handy gave him the phone number at Vigilant and said, “See you later.”

“So long,” said Parker.

* * *

Flynn stood in the vault doorway, lips pursed in disapproval, watching Dalesia and Hurley stuff wads of bills into two flat black dispatch cases they had been carrying beneath their shirts. When both soft leather cases were bulging with bills, the two men brought out money belts from around their waists and began packing the compartments of those as well.

Next door, Mackey sat at Flynn’s desk, the phone to his ear, occasionally exchanging a word with Wycza. Mackey had his feet up on the desk and was smoking a cigar from Flynn’s humidor. He had considered putting Wycza on hold long enough to call Brenda, waiting for him at the Holiday Inn, but decided he shouldn’t fool around like that. Besides, she was probably asleep by now.

Downstairs, Wycza and Florio talked health food. Wycza, like most professionals, believed in keeping the civilians as calm as possible, since nervous people tend to insist on getting themselves shot, so he had tried several conversational openings with Florio, talking about the boxing world and the nightclub world and the gambling world, until he got around to physical exercise, care of the body, and health food. That turned out to be Florio’s subject; the floodgates opened, and out it came. “Now, Adelle Davis—”

“Carlton Fredericks—”

“Natural sea salt,” Wycza insisted, “is a fake. That’s one case where it doesn’t matter, salt is salt.”

“The processing plants.” Florio, forgetting Mike Carlow’s gun, forgetting the robbery going on upstairs, leaned over the table, gesturing, talking emphatically and learnedly.

Wycza, too, was a health nut, and had almost himself forgotten the reason they were all here. He rode his hobby-horse just as hard as Florio did, the two men finding broad areas of agreement and occasional bumps of deep disagreement of a depth that was almost religious.

Carlow stayed out of the conversation completely. His own hobby-horse was racing cars, which had nothing to do with health or with proper care of the human body. He simply sat where he was, right hand under the table, watched the action around the room, and let the words wash unheeded over him.

Stan Devers did get into it from time to time. He himself was in good physical shape and always had been, but had never worried about it or adjusted his eating habits or life style to suit some physical ideal, and his belief was that Florio and Wycza were both crazy. He kept this opinion to himself most of the time, but every once in a while he would hear them agree on some piece of raving lunacy and he would just have to jump in and tell them he thought they were wrong. Then they’d team up on him, Wycza reeling off statistics, Florio telling horror stories about boxers and wrestlers and other great physical specimens who had ruined themselves with smoking or carbohydrates or improper sleeping habits, and Devers would retire again, overwhelmed but unconvinced.

It was turning into a grand social evening for everybody.

* * *

At twenty minutes to one Ralph Wiss drilled his sixth hole in the front of the safe, heard the snap of the mechanism inside, turned the handle down, and the safe door slowly opened. “Good,” he said to himself, packed his tools away in his leather bag, and got to his feet. He was stiff all over, but particularly in the knees and the back, and his mouth was incredibly dry. His mouth always became dry when he was working on a safe, but it was the result of his unconscious S whistling and not of any nervousness.

There were paper cups with the water cooler. He drank two cups of water, crumpled the cup and threw it away, and went out by the men’s room to call down the stairs, “Frank.”

“Coming.”

Wiss held the flashlight so Elkins could see to come up the stairs. Elkins had been half dozing in the cashier’s booth, and he came up yawning and stretching and scratching the back of his neck. At the top of the stairs, he said, “You got it?”

“Sure.”

They went back into the office and took the money out of the safe, and it totaled ten thousand, four hundred fifty dollars. About half of it went in their pockets and the rest into Wiss’ leather bag with his tools. Then they took out handkerchiefs and gave a brisk rubdown to the few surfaces they’d touched, and went downstairs and out of the theater and walked to the car.

* * *

The phone said to Wycza, “We’re all set, now. Coming down.”

“Huh? Oh, right.”

He and Florio had been talking about polyunsaturates. Wycza, feeling a slight embarrassment, as though he were an insurance salesman pretending to be on a social call, hung up the telephone and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Florio, but it’s back to business.”

Florio looked startled for just a second. Then he glanced at Devers and Carlow, looked back at Wycza, and gave a sour grin. “You had me going there for a while,” he said.

“I wasn’t conning you, Mr. Florio,” Wycza said. “I wish we could keep talking.”

Florio studied him skeptically, then grinned again, not quite as sourly. “Yeah, I guess you do,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, pal. You didn’t pick yourself a job that’s too good for your health.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” Wycza said. “But anyway, you’ll have to walk us outside now.”

Florio nodded. “I figured that much. Do I get hit on the head later? I’m worried about concussions.”

“We’ll work something out,” Wycza promised.

”Thanks.”

“Now,” Wycza said, and got to his feet.

Upstairs, Mackey was having a little more trouble with Flynn. “If I go out with you people,” Flynn was saying, “how do I know I won’t get shot down in the parking lot?”

“Because we’re not crazy people,” Mackey told him.

Dalesia said, “Why should we get ourselves wanted for murder?”

But it was Hurley who put in the clincher. “If we were going to shoot you, you asshole,” he said, “we’d do it right here, in the privacy of your office. So shut up and walk.”

Flynn shut up and walked. He and Mackey and Hurley and Dalesia walked out to the main gaming area, Mackey and Flynn side by side in front, Hurley and Dalesia carrying the dispatch cases behind them. George, the man on duty at the door, looked startled when they came out, but Flynn did his job well, talking to the man just the way Mackey had explained it. “Keep an eye on things, George,” Flynn said. “We have to go downstairs for a few minutes.”

George, plainly surprised and curious, said, “Okay, Mr. Flynn.”

“If anything comes up before we get back, I’ll be with Mr. Florio.”

“Yes, sir.”

They went downstairs, and found Florio and the other three standing in a tight conversational grouping near the front door. The two groups combined, and all eight men went outside and walked around to the parking lot, which now had about half the cars that had been there an hour earlier; Monday was an early night.

The parking lot was illuminated by floodlights mounted on high poles. As they all walked along, Wycza said to the others, half apologetically, “I promised Mr. Florio nobody’d get hit on the head. Why don’t we just take them a mile down the road or something? That’ll still give us the time we need.”

There was no objection. Shrugging, Mackey said, “Fine with me. Okay with you, Mr. Flynn?”

Flynn had nothing to say. Florio said to Wycza, quietly, “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“It’s the least I can do,” Wycza said.