Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 4, April 1977

Night Drop by Jerry Jacobson

It was the eleventh hour and DuVol’s time was running out. He needed $800 more to get out of town alive, and here was an easy way to pick it off. A piece of cake — or was it?

The young man seated at the counter in. the Mecca Cafeteria, with the grocery bag trapped between his legs, was watching through the back mirror the man in the expensive suit seated at the corner table, eating a hot lunch. Joe Ori was nursing a cup of coffee. He was wearing a faded tee-shirt with an iron-on decal which entreated people not to buy grapes. Over it he wore a bleached military field jacket.

He continued studying the contrasts between himself and the well-dressed man eating his hot meal. Ori had not eaten a hot meal in at least six weeks. These days, all he did, it seemed, was go to meetings and steal fruit in the Public Market and wait for his sign.

The meetings — they never told you in them how exactly the system was to be defeated. They just exhorted you to defeat it, threw some pamphlets at you and kicked you out the door. He found himself hating the dapper man in the expensive suit. Why didn’t they stay uptown where they belonged? This was a people’s cafeteria. They’d do better to mind their own stores; the people would be storming them soon enough.

Quentin DuVol let the third game draw to a tie, playing old man Parkington like a fish. Not so old, perhaps — around fifty. But decidedly a fish.

Parkington had the serve for a match win. DuVol wiped away the excess moisture on his handball gloves against his thighs and tensed. The fish’s serve was a weak lofty thing. The ball floated into the deep left corner where DuVol caught the carom with a deft scoop shot.

Parkington swatted it off the front wall back to mid-court ineffectually. DuVol volleyed it back to nearly the same spot on the floor. They exchanged four or five timid shots. DuVol could see the fish’s legs weakening, see his knees floating on water. Two more shots by each man, and then DuVol lofted a deep lob over Parkington’s right shoulder.

The fish went after it in panting desperation, his gym shoes slapping without coordination on the maple floor. The shot crimped itself where the two walls met, near the floor, and died long before Parkington could reach the spot. He tumbled and rolled into a heap against the wall. Another fish in the net.

DuVol gave him time to compose himself, to catch his breath. The fish had put up a game fight. But men like Parkington never beat a hustler when a hustler was playing his game.

“That’s three out of three, DuVol,” Parkington said when he felt his victim was a bit better. “At... what did we agree? Twenty a game?”

“I believe it was thirty,” DuVol said.

The fish’s cheeks flushed. “Oh, yes. I was thinking of the billiards. That was twenty a game. Well, what is it they say? Don’t touch the dice if you can’t pay the price?” His laughter was lame, false — like lead coins falling onto pavement, “that appears to be ninety dollars for the handball and one hundred dollars for the billiards. Come on, down to the locker room with me and we’ll settle this up, you robber-baron.”

They rode down together in the leather-walled elevator of the Downtown Athletic Club. “Well, I guess you know, DuVol,” Parkington said on the way, “this has been a week for me to end all weeks. First that burglary and now this afternoon of shut-outs to you.”

“Yes, I heard something of that going around. A daylight burglary, wasn’t it?”

“The broadest and boldest,” said Parkington with disgust. “Some amateur riding his luck. Paintings, everything in the safe in my study, jewelry belonging to my wife. It was all insured, of course. It’s just that the sheer gall of a stunt like that has me enraged. I hope I get my hands on the bastard before the city police do, that’s all I have to say on the subject.”

“They’ll get him. These people always make a slip-up sooner or later.”

Parkington nodded and asked DuVol if he wanted to join him for lunch in the club’s dining room. DuVol declined apologetically. He had an early afternoon appointment to see about some land he might take an option on out at Eagle’s Point.

There wasn’t really any land out there to be had, even if DuVol could afford it, which he could not at the present. After a shower and a sauna and collecting from Parkington, he walked six blocks to the Mecca Cafeteria on Third Avenue and took to a corner table a hot roast beef sandwich, a small paper cup filled with potato salad and a glass of milk.

It had been DuVol who had engineered the burglary of Parkington’s home in exclusive Bellehaven. He never participated in these things himself. He was an engineer, not a. common laborer. He knew people for that sort of work.

It hadn’t been much of a stroke, gaining membership in the Downtown Athletic Club. He held dozens of memberships in businessmen’s clubs, all the way from Boston to Los Angeles with plenty of stops in between. DuVol was a gentleman games player, a gentleman gambler. Bridge, chess, backgammon, billiards in all its wondrous forms, handball, squash, poker on occasion.

Mastery at these always gained a man entry into this wealthy, polite world sooner or later, if he were very good at it. He was always “in” investments. A man who indicated his profession was “investments” could nip all this business of background checking in the bud. He dealt in grain futures, bonds, speculative local stock issues, land development.

A business maverick was nearly always respected and feared. It was his unorthodoxy, perhaps, his sixth sense about matters of commerce. Whatever it was, he could dovetail into this world as easily and well as if he were born to its manner and its mystique.

In the Mecca he looked suspiciously out-of-place dressed in his $300 suit (on which he still owed $210) and the black attaché case (on which $12 was still outstanding). But cutting expenses was a vital necessity now. Not much cash had come out of the Parkington burglary and the men with whom DuVol contracted the job were having difficulty selling the paintings and the jewelry.

Paintings! He had told them a hundred times never to take original oils, under no circumstances those by local artists. But DuVol, out of necessity and haste, often had to deal with men who did not listen and could not learn and would not deny their greed.

He sighed at these human vagaries, finished off the remainder of his milk and left the Mecca. One of Stortino’s men was still watching him, he noticed, a bulky, brutal-looking man who pretended to peruse the out-of-town newspapers at a sidewalk stall just outside.

The man had been with Quentin DuVol for over three weeks now. He hadn’t approached DuVol, hadn’t spoken to him, had made no contact with him whatsoever. He was just a messenger — Stortino would push the button when introductions were in order.

DuVol passed the man, pretending ignorance of his presence, and hailed a taxi. The man followed in a second cab out to DuVol’s apartment building on a street lined with palms.

There were girls swimming in the azure, oval pool but DuVol scarcely took note of their lithe, bronzed bodies as he made his way up a stairwell to the second floor, where his unit was located.

He had already shed his suit coat when the knock came. He let the burly man in. Stortini had pressed the button.

“Name’s Kurt. Just... Kurt. Don’t hold it against me personally, Mr. DuVol. I work for wages for Mr. Stortini. I have to buy groceries, spend a buck-twenty to do my laundry. If I don’t do work like this, I don’t do any kind of work except crime.”

“I don’t hold it against you, Kurt,” said DuVol civilly as he moved to a portable bar he had bought when winners came too fast and furiously to count. “Drink?”

“Sure. Mr. Stortini don’t mind booze on the job. He don’t mind much at all as long as the work gets done.”

Quentin DuVol felt the perspiration begin to seep onto his neck and chest. He abhorred people who sweated, unless it came in fencing or at handball or squash. He liked poker players who sweated. Sweating poker players always played into your own hand. In fact he loved them dearly.

“Preference?” He said to Kurt.

“Anything. You got any Southern Comfort? Something smoothe?”

DuVol made himself a short scotch. It was good scotch and there wasn’t much left. It was usually dispensed only in the company of his intended marks. On second thought, he filled his own glass to three-quarters full. It wouldn’t do for Stortini’s man to think he had hit lean days.

“This is very nice, Mr. DuVol,” said Stortini’s man savoring his drink and taking in the furnishings of the living-room. “Nice drink, nice surroundings. Nice. What’s that tall thing over in the corner called?”

“A French armoire, carved in the Pyrenees in the 16th century.”

“The Pyrenees.”

“It’s a range of mountains running between Spain and France,” said DuVol.

“And this chair I’m sitting in.”

“English Regency.”

“And that table off in the dining room there.”

DuVol sighed to himself. “Spanish. Jacobean period.”

“Very sturdy-looking.”

“That was the style of the period. Heavy oak veneers and solids.”

“Yes, very classy stuff, Mr. DuVol. Where I grew up, in South Philly, we didn’t have nothing like this in our home. We had Goodwill separates. Early American Miscellaneous. If my old man couldn’t steal it, he got it through the welfare office.”

DuVol touched his necktie and smiled civilly.

Stortini’s man set his drink down on the coffee table. “Mr. Stortini assigned me to you. I guess you know that. About three weeks ago.”

“As a direct result of the loan I secured from him five months ago.”

“Six.”

“Six months ago.”

Stortini’s man stifled a cough and withdrew a small black notebook from an inside pocket. “You been paying the interest on the principal right along, what it says here. Clockwork.”

DuVol shifted in his seat.

“Up to about a month ago. Then you hit quite a streak of bad luck. At the race track, playing poker at that athletic club, in a couple of flyers you took on — what was it — oh yeh, soy bean futures they was going to sell to the Russians.”

“Gambling is a cyclical business,” DuVol said.

Stortini’s man was fishing for some reference for the word.

“It runs in cycles,” said DuVol, helping him out. “The swings are entirely mathematical. The swings in fortune and misfortune.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that, Mr. DuVol. All I know is Mr. Stortini is very mathematical. He keeps very impeccable records on these matters. When you deal in the lending of capital, you have to be impeccable.”

“Of course,” said DuVol.

“And mathematical figures have their own way of telling a story, Mr. DuVol. I mean, they can be read like a book almost.” Very carefully the man set down his glass. DuVol felt something shift in his chest, felt a squirming in his stomach. “Mr. DuVol, what I’m here to tell you is Mr. Stortini is calling in your notes. With penalties and interests, the amount is nine thousand five hundred eighty-three. Mr. Stortini would like full restitution by ten p.m. this evening.”

DuVol tried to fashion on his face a look of calm disdain. “That will be impossible. You’ll just have to tell Mr. Stortini that is totally beyond the realm of possibility.”

“Mr. DuVol, this is an arbitrary decision. I’m sorry.” The man flipped backward in his notebook to some fresh data. “There is this other matter due to come up soon,” he went on. “This business at Hollywood Park about two weeks ago. Mr. Stortini, if you will recall, went out on quite a long and slender limb for you in that matter. You had the drug, Mr. Stortini had the trainer.”

“The double.”

“The daily-double, yes.”

“And you will recall,” said DuVol, “I made Mr. Stortini over nine hundred in those two races. Without an inquiry.”

“You explained to Mr. Stortini that the drug was not traceable.”

“Reserpine, yes,” said DuVol. “I had it on good authority.”

“Apparently not good enough. The usual routine tests given all horses seemed negative. But some sharp-eyed chemist, an assistant to the commission veterinarian, thinks otherwise. It seems he’s isolated the drug reserpine and one of its tranquilizer-agents, pentazocine, found to have been present in the systems of the two favored horses on those races. Tomorrow, he is going to introduce reserpine into the systems of two test horses and compare the results of blood and urine samples.

“Our trainer has been moved out of state successfully, but that won’t prevent the racing commission from developing a network of suspects. So Mr. Stortini’s hands are esentially tied. He wants his money by ten p.m. this evening and he wants you out of the state by morning — and permanently.”

“And if I can’t comply with those two stipulations?” asked DuVol.

Stortini’s man lowered his eyes. “I don’t really have to answer that do I, Mr. DuVol? Before these repercussions at the race track, you were only a delinquent account. You’ve now graduated to the category of a criminal liability. I think you know the answer to your own question, Mr. DuVol.”

“I can leave the state immediately,” said DuVol, “but the nine thousand — he has to give me some time on that.”

“Mr. DuVol. It’s the continued contact with you Mr. Stortini is trying to eliminate. Letters, phone calls, meetings for payments — these create unwanted risk. Call in your debts, Mr. DuVol. These furnishings. Good-looking stuff. Sell it. All of it. Mr. Stortini doesn’t care how you do it, as long as it gets done. Don’t get up, Mr. DuVol. I’ll let myself out.”

DuVol sat quietly alone for several minutes. He began to feel much smaller than the volume of space his body occupied. It was now 1:15 p.m. He had a little over eight hours to save his life.

He picked up the telephone and dialed a Glendale number, let it ring twice and then broke the connection. His own telephone rang almost immediately.

“Was that you?” said the caller.

“It was,” said DuVol, grateful that Sonny Gorst could at least remember his instructions concerning names mentioned over a telephone. “I’m calling in regards to the art work you have on consignment. I’m not pleased with any of the work submitted and I’d like it destroyed.”

Sonny Gorst spent a moment considering the implications of the remark DuVol had just made. Then he said, “All of it, sir?”

“All of it,” said DuVol. “I have some new works. I feel my outlook deepening. Can you drop by for a look at some canvases? Say around four o’clock this afternoon?”

“Y-yes, I can do that,” said Sonny Gorst. “At your studio? Is it in the same place?”

“The same place,” said DuVol and hung up.

At two o’clock a representative of Jaid Galleries came to Quentin DuVol’s apartment. He wore a pinched black suit and ugly, wide-oval, Elton John spectacles.

“You wish to sell some pieces, Mr. DuVol?”

“Yes. Everything. I have discovered some opportunities out of state. I can’t afford the time a move would take.”

“I understand, Mr. DuVol.”

The man from Jaid Galleries began wandering the rooms of DuVol’s apartment, an appraiser’s guide open on his chest and a dainty, gold ballpoint pen at the ready. He disappeared and then reappeared, like a fast-shifting fog uncertain of its existence.

He spent fifteen minutes at it and then returned to a seated position on a couch of no particular distinction.

“You have many fine pieces, Mr. DuVol,” he began, sifting back over his notes. “You must understand, however, that the Jaid Galleries deals essentially in estate collections.”

“Of course,” said DuVol, sensing some distance being created between them. “You have separates. Elegant separates, to be sure. But separates. We prefer groupings, thematic groupings.”

“I will accept any reasonable price,” DuVol hedged. “I must sacrifice at a loss.”

The small, reserved eyes widened at that remark. The man plunged back into his notes again. When he came up again, his face was lit with a promising smile. “I find several of your pieces to be exquisite, Mr. DuVol. The armoire, for instance, is of a fine French period. And the Spanish trestle table and sideboard and chairs. Fine crushed gold upholstery, very fine. And the English Regency chairs here and the cherry Chippendale tea table, with the Ethan Allen chairs. Georgian Court collection. Very, very fine pieces.”

DuVol held his breath.

“Yes — the gold crushed velvet on the Spanish dining table chairs,” the little man hummed. “Very difficult to come by. For the pieces I have mentioned, Mr. DuVol, I can offer two thousand — if that figure meets with your approval.”

If it met with his approval! The man was talking less like a respected appraiser and more like a common fence. But DuVol could not presently argue the worth of his life; it simply had to be bought back at any price.

“Yes,” DuVol said, hiding his embarrassment and indignation, “that figure is acceptable to me.”

The man hastily made out a check. He rose abruptly, and snapped his appraiser’s guide closed with a loud slap to indicate symbolically a sale finalized. “May our men pick up this afternoon, sir?”

“Before six p.m., yes. I have evening appointments.”

“Very good, Mr. DuVol. And don’t worry. We’ll find just the environment for your pieces, rest assured.”

At four o’clock Sonny Gorst showed up while two burly movers were busy muscling the pieces of furniture DuVol had sold. DuVol took him into the bedroom and closed the door behind them.

“What’s all this with the moving?” he said to DuVol, his little otter’s face quivering with the scent of trouble.

“A development has — developed,” DuVol told him. “Have you sold the jewelry from the Parkington heist?”

“I’m dickering with three fences, Mr. DuVol. I mean, we got some good stuff in that haul. Two diamond pendants, the platinum ensemble of the wife, the bars of silver we found in the safe. The pendants, they’re the key. I could get maybe two thousand apiece for them if I find the right fence with an immediate market.”

“I want the lot sold to Driscoll, down on Mission Street. This afternoon.”

“Driscoll? He’d take any reasonable offer for his own mother! He has backlog, he says. He says.”

“Sell it all,” said DuVol, sharply. “Accept the first offer Driscoll makes. Then cash this check. I want you back here within the hour.”

“Sure, Mr. DuVol.” Sonny Gorst looked at DuVol with the eyes of a spaniel whose mother had just been struck down by a passing car, a tragedy witnessed by the son. “Does this mean we’re terminating the operation, Mr. DuVol? I mean, I’d hate to see that. You and me and Hunk been working out good, you steering us to the marks and me and Hunk cleaning them out.”

“Let us just say we are taking a vacation. Keep your same residences. I’ll be contacting both of you soon.”

The movers left at four-fifteen and Sonny Gorst returned at five.

“The best deal I could get for the Parkington stuff was $3,000 cash. The good thing about Driscoll, he’s a cutthroat but he don’t ask questions and he don’t keep records.”

“You owe me $300 for the car,” DuVol told Sonny Gorst. “I’ll take two thousand. You can split the other thousand up with Hunk and we’ll call it square. That is the way it cuts.”

Ex-convicts on parole lived on nickels and dimes and borrowed time. Like Driscoll the available fence, they too did not ask questions. Mildly terrified by what he did not know and what might put him back in prison, Sonny Gorst left then, with a quick handshake and without a backward glance.

Alone in a nearly denuded apartment Quentin DuVol counted the tribute that would keep him alive. He still had the $190 he’d won from old man Parkington at the athletic club. Two thousand for the furniture, two thousand for the jewelry. That toted $4,190. He was nearly halfway out of his grave.

He took his $975 sedan to a used car dealer whose lot was not strung with bunting and balloons; to a lot, in fact, that was located directly across the street from the new-car agency where his sedan was originally purchased.

“I’ll need your payment booklet and title to establish your equity, Mr. DuVol,” said the polite young man in a coco-brown suit and dark brown tie, without peacocks or wild flowers.

The young man had to cross the street to establish equity. DuVol waited alone in a lonely lot, degradation feeding on his dignity like sharp-toothed piranha. When the young men returned, it was with a check for $500. DuVol signed over the sedan’s title, shook his hand without grip or sensation and left the lot without speaking a word. He suddenly felt like a man who was being stripped and stoned by every human with whom he came in contact.

He took the check to an industrial bank nearby. A sweet-faced female teller turned it into cash in the swift, flawless, automatic way of someone who took no risks and did not dream. Risks and dreams; a man or a woman without them was more dead than alive, an empty recepticle waiting for a time and a place to lie down in an endless sleep. Some people never saw or found the light in the depths of their darkness.

DuVol saw light in his own darkness when he examined the fresh figure of his worth in dollars and cents: $4,690. He’d crossed that invisible mid-point barrier. He’d make the $9,000. Somehow, and in a variety of ways, he’d make it.

He divested himself of his gold wristwatch, a ruby ring, a matched set of good golf clubs, his stereo setup including tapes and records. Beau Jack LaBeau usually gave DuVol the best price on merchandise that could not be traced.

“I can give you a thousand for the lot, Quentin,” Beau Jack was saying apologetically to DuVol an hour later in his nice appointed shop in Pasadena.

“The stuff is not hot, Beau Jack,” said DuVol, containing his indignance. “It’s mine. It belongs to me.”

“I’m not buying it, Quentin. I’m loaning you capital on it. You don’t read neon signs when you walk into shops? You want to sell the stuff, Quentin, take out an ad in the Herald-Examiner.”

“I need two thousand for it, Beau Jack.”

“I give you twelve hundred fifty and go have my head examined in the morning.”

“I’m in trouble, Beau Jack. Some big trouble and maybe it is the kind of trouble I won’t be able to handle. I need the full two thousand. Call the rest of it a loan. You know I’m good for it. You’ll get it back. And I don’t think you’ve ever known me to break a promise.”

“Only animal on the face of this earth guaranteed not to tell a lie is maybe a lie detector. But I give you the two thousand. I’m an old man. Okay, so maybe I see the son, in you I never had, maybe the fool I’m buying off with tribute. Here. Don’t count it. I don’t lie. Me and lie detectors. Only two of us left in this thieving world with any ethics. Now go away, Quentin.”

DuVol went away. He went in search of a minor miracle and he’d found it in Beau Jack LaBeau. He was just $2,300 short of buying back his life. He looked around for Stortini’s man as he came from Beau Jack’s pawn shop, the man who called himself Kurt. He couldn’t spot him anywhere, but DuVol knew his every move was being watched.

He went directly back to his apartment building and dropped in on Mr. Damoran, the building’s business agent and manager. “I’ve just been notified of an important business opportunity in Europe,” DuVol told Damoran, “and it requires my presence there immediately.”

Damoran nodded knowingly. “Yes, I thought something of an important nature was developing when I saw the movers take out a few of your pieces this afternoon.”

“I wonder,” said DuVol, “are you authorized to buy furnishings and the like on behalf of the owners? Television sets, bedroom groupings, liquors, condiments, canned goods and the like?”

“Yes, we do that every so often. What price did you have in mind for the remainder of your furnishings and the like, Mr. DuVol?”

“Anything reasonable will be agreeable to me.”

“Well, let’s go upstairs and have a look.”

DuVol didn’t quibble over the $1,500 check Damoran made out for the rest of his things and his damage deposit. Dignified acceptances were a rule-of-thumb with DuVol. He would argue over the quality of filet de boeuf, sauce Bearnais but never over its price.

The clock had reached six p.m. by the time DuVol was standing in a barren apartment. That men like Stortini were capable of doing a thing like this to another human being still heated DuVol with the fire of revenge. But he was presently a running man and running men could not put, up much of an offense. For the moment he would pay his debt, meekly sequester himself in another state until this embarrassing matter of the drugged race horses had run its course. Then he would see about the arrangement, of Stortini’s death.

He was just $800 short of this chain of events. DuVol sat down on the floor and snapped open a steel telephone register. He found the number he sought and dialed.

“Downtown Olympic Hotel.” “Mr. Carlisle’s suite, please.”

A moment lapsed.

“Hello?”

“Jonathan? Quentin DuVol. I find a need tonight for some prestidigital recreation in the company of honorable gentlemen.”

The Downtown Olympic was the city’s newest high-rise midtown hotel. DuVol occasionally employed Jonathan Carlisle, the hotel’s maître d’, to locate high-stakes poker games for a percentage of his winnings.

“Call you back in a half-hour,” he told DuVol and hung up.

He called DuVol back at six-thirty on the dot.

“Tomorrow night, eight p.m., Suite thirteen thirty-three. Three furriers from Kansas City. I told them you’re in beef cattle. What’s good for the hide is good for the hindquarters.”

“Tonight,” DuVol told him. “The game has to be played tonight.”

“Nothing tonight, Mr. DuVol. I checked the whole building.”

DuVol could feel the perspiration building in his pores, a cold sweat of fear. He couldn’t risk a stop at the athletic club; he couldn’t wait for a poker game to develop, foster the beginnings of one, cajole three or four businessmen into one. That was dead-time to him. If he failed, he would be caught $800 short, without even having had a good run at making that amount.

“Jonathan, I need $800,” he said into the phone.

Carlisle’s tone was as hapless as rain in a dead man’s face. “You need eight hundred and I need Ann-Margret. How are we going to get together on that?”

“There are people after me, Carlisle.”

“And you don’t think there aren’t people after me? I pay alimony and support to Carla, you know that. I see so little of my check after she gets her cut, it could just as well shoot itself right from the hotel’s business office to her. Sorry, Quentin. I can’t help you out.”

The phone went dead in his ear and in his hand. Numbly DuVol put it up. He expected this end, in a way. The network of his life, it had been woven of threads too short and too few. His distrust of street people precluded the making of friends — and the distance he kept from his marks lent him no friends among these either.

He neither borrowed money nor lent it, his current beggings aside. He had chalked up no credit beyond the credits from loan sharks and ephemeral backers. He now stood alone, painted into a tight corner by his own hand.

The time was getting later — minutes short of seven o’clock. He went to his window and saw the city beginning to light and sign with the sounds of night. He had no sons, no daughters, no living relatives who might come to his aid with the haste required. A man so dependent upon himself could turn to no one for help, to no one for blame. That had been the cardinal mistake of his life. Not crime, not deceit, only that.

Below his patio he could see the sedan that was unfamiliar to his neighborhood. Through the windshield, beneath the car’s steering wheel he could see a pair of male legs, an occasional hand and arm as the man behind the wheel reached forward to flick ashes into an ashtray on the dashboard.

Time seemed to have ground to a halt, a thing suspended and completely without properties of motion. Stortini was waiting, Kurt was waiting — and now, with no clear options left open to him, DuVol was waiting.

How long his eyes had swept up and down that block he did not know. The apartment houses, the Paramount Gleaners, Shoenfeld Realty, more apartment houses, the waste of the alley, the Pasadena Trust Bank on the corner. Then, back up the block again, in reverse: the bank, the alley, the apartments, the real estate office, the cleaners, more apartments. To DuVol it was like watching a dull motion picture over and over again to keep out of the rain.

But something here was trying desperately to impress itself upon his mind. Each time his eyes swept the opposite side of Colorado Boulevard, an aspect tugged at his brain, a key dangled before the locked door to his quandry. Ah, the bank! Something to do with the bank. On Thursday.

DuVol strained his mind to its conniving limits. What happened there nearly every Thursday evening without fail? At eight p.m. No, a bit later, nearer to eight-fifteen. What? Yes! The night deposit chute!

Every Thursday evening — sometimes a man, sometimes a woman — would appear from around the corner on. Los Robles Street, stroll unhurriedly down the length of the block to the bank, take a bank-deposit bag from a plain brown grocery bag, drop it into the night deposit chute and then return to the store or firm from which he or she had come.

There was his messenger out of Mr. Stortini’s debt and off his list of people to be dispatched quickly and quietly into non-status. There must be at least the $800 he needed in that deposit bag. Not even a pistol would be needed, just two fingers thrust into the small of a back or the back of a head. Business people were always instructed never to resist robbery. Yes, it would do nicely.

The key was timing of course. If the figure of the messenger should unexpectedly appear around the corner from Los Robles Street with DuVol still housed in his apartment, he could never reach the street in time to prevent those receipts from slipping down the mouth of the deposit chute. Likewise he knew he could not be found loitering near the bank. One look at him there as the messenger came around the corner spelled instantaneous defeat.

If he kept up a surveillance from the entry way of his apartment building, could he move across the street to intercept the messenger before his attention was attracted? No way. The bank did have a recessed doorway adjacent to the deposit chute. But it would take only a single passing patrol car to uncover his intentions. The doorway it would have to be. DuVol looked at his watch. The time had moved to 7:18. He had to allow for an early or late arrival by the messenger. That meant he had to be stationed in that doorway no later than eight o’clock, perhaps even a bit sooner.

For fifteen minutes he would be standing there in a static state. This was it, then — his life crystalized to a few minutes of the kind of crime he abhorred.

The young man standing before the night-deposit chute of the Pasadena Trust Bank went rigid when he felt the pistol barrel jab into his lower spine. The man took the grocery bag out of his arms and told Ori to lie down on the pavement of the entry way. There was a second man watching him from a parked automobile with another pistol; if Joe Ori moved so much as a muscle in the next five minutes, he would be shot and killed.

There wasn’t much Joe Ori could do but comply with the instructions. He crooked his left arm so that one eye could view the dial of his wristwatch, as he heard the man who had taken his grocery bag run off.

That was just the thing about those damn meetings, Ori reflected as he lay waiting for the five minutes to pass. They extolled the beauty of revolution, they paid fiery homage to the great revolutionaries of the past, they filled your arms with those damn pamphlets and they they shoved you out onto the street with the vague instructions to hit the establishment where the establishment was most vulnerable.

So you spent the day wandering around with the damn thing tucked under your arm, looking for the establishment’s vulnerability so you could make your statement, create a symbol. And then, when you found it, some punk with a pistol and a two-bit plan heisted the damn one-minute time-activated bomb right out your hands...