Plunder Squad

One

Parker stood looking at the painting. It was four feet high and five feet wide, a slightly blurred black-and-white blowup of a news photograph showing a very bad automobile accident, all mashed parts and twisted metal. A body could obscurely be seen trapped inside the car, held there by jagged pieces of metal and glass. Superimposed here and there on the photograph were small comic-book figures in comic-book colors, masked heroes in bright costumes, all in running positions, with raised knees and clenched fists and straining shoulders and set jaws. There were perhaps a dozen of the small figures running this way and that over the surface of the photograph, like tropical birds on a dead bush. The painting was titled “Violence.”

Parker turned his attention to the mimeographed sheet he’d been given at the door. “Violence” had been loaned to the exhibit by Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Shakauer of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, who had purchased it in 1966 for thirty-five thousand dollars.

Parker moved on to the next painting. Hexagonally shaped, three feet in diameter, it was an exact replica of a red-background white-lettering STOP sign, with plastic sculptured noses glued onto it all over. This one was titled “Thanacleon IV.” Parker looked at the mimeographed sheet again: painted by, loaned by, purchased in 1968 for eighteen thousand dollars.

He moved on. There were twenty-one paintings in the exhibit, mounted on the white walls and on a temporary divider down the middle of the room. Adding up the numbers on the mimeographed sheet, a total of three hundred seventy-five thousand dollars had been paid out at one time or another in the last eight years for these paintings.

Parker studied every one of them. He also studied the seven private guards—gray uniforms, revolvers on right hip—standing around the room like seven more exhibits, and the other two armed guards moving back and forth in the hall outside, constantly passing the doorway. The fifteen or twenty other visitors to the exhibit at the moment all seemed to be ordinary citizens, none of them having that aura about them of the plainclothes cop.

When he had seen everything, Parker folded the mimeographed sheet and put it in his suit-coat pocket and left. The exhibit was being housed for this temporary show in a second-floor room in a downtown bank building, and he had his choice of elevator or stairs to the first floor. He went down the stairs and outside, and a municipal police car was parked by the fire hydrant in front of this entrance. It had been there when he’d gone in, and for the second time the two cops inside it gave him a casual once-over. He turned left, went down to the corner, left again, and half a block to the rented car. Sunlight glistened off everything; the time was two-ten.

It took twenty-five minutes to drive out to the motel. Mackey and his woman were the only ones in the pool area when Parker turned in from the highway. Mackey, standing on the diving board in his flower-patterned trunks, waved a big hello. Parker lifted a hand from the steering wheel, put it back, and drove on in past the office, while Mackey dove into the blue water, swam the length of the pool, climbed out, grabbed his towel, and came padding toward his room. His woman stayed at the pool.

Parker was leaning on the front of the rental car when Mackey got there. Mackey said, “You saw it?”

“I saw it.”

Mackey had his towel around his shoulders and his room key in his hand. Opening the door, he said, “It isn’t really warm enough to swim, you know? Not quite warm enough.” He pushed open the door, stepped in, hit the light switch beside the door. Parker followed him in and shut the door behind him.

It was night in here. Heavy draperies with an autumn-leaf design covered the window, and the switch Mackey had touched had turned on two table lamps and a floor lamp, showing a motel room like any other, with gold filigree on the dresser front. The air conditioner was going, high in the rear wall, and the air in the room was as cold and dead as a tile floor.

“Jesus, it’s cold!” Mackey said, but he didn’t touch the air conditioner. Standing in the middle of the room, shivering, he peeled off his wet bathing suit, tossed it through the open bathroom doorway, and started to towel himself dry. He was hairy, stocky, just under average height, and about forty years of age. His hair was a little thin on top. There was a puckered scar on his back, high and to the right, just under the shoulder. He said, “Scotch and ice on the dresser there, help yourself.” He kept patting himself with the towel.

“I didn’t eat lunch yet,” Parker said. When you’re maybe going to work with a man, give him reasons for things, don’t be overly curt. Parker went over and sat down in a somewhat Danish chair near the door.

“Yeah? Neither did I, I’ll join you.”

“All right.”

“We’ll leave Brenda here. She never eats lunch anyway. Keeps herself down to fighting weight, you know?”

Parker nodded.

Mackey wadded up the towel, threw it into the bathroom after his bathing suit, and went over to the dresser. He opened the top drawer, pulled out some clothing, and started to dress. “What do you think?” he said.

”You won’t do it where it is now.”

“Don’t I know it?” Mackey grinned, balancing on one foot to put on a sock. “Brenda says this is good for my belly,” he said. “Put on my socks standing up. One of these days I’ll fall over, ram my head through a wall. But I’ll have a great belly. Nobody’s talking about doing it where it is. The whole point is, it’s a road show.”

“There were nine private guards in sight,” Parker said. “Two city cops in a radio car out front. That’s how they protect it when it’s standing still. How do they protect it when it’s in motion?”

“I know what you mean.” In his underwear, Mackey went over to the doorless closet. He took a white shirt off a hanger, put it on, started buttoning it. “But when you come right down to it,” he said, “what we’re talking about here is a simple hijack.”

“Simple?”

Mackey reached for a pair of slacks. “You know what I mean. It’s maybe a tough hijack, but a hijack is all it is.” He stopped, the slacks in his hands, and looked at Parker. “Think about it. Twenty-one paintings in one truck, out on the road.”

It was the San Simeon thing all over again, except that nobody would be taking a truck full of paintings over any roadless mountains. Not even Bob Beaghler. “It won’t be that easy,” Parker said.

“But worth it,” Mackey said.

Parker said, “Three hundred fifty-seven thousand.”

Mackey frowned at him. “Where’d you get a number like that?”

Parker took the mimeographed sheet from his pocket, opened it up. “In here they tell you how much the owners paid.”

“Oh, yeah? But that was a couple years ago, right?”

“Mostly. Why?”

“Griffith told me it’s half a million.” Mackey shrugged, and started putting on his slacks. “Paintings get worth more all the time,” he said, as though it were a field he knew a lot about. “Like stock, you know?”

“How much is ours?”

“A hundred thirty grand, split among however many of us there are.”

Parker frowned. “Where’d you get that number?”

Mackey, his trousers on, reached for a tie and grinned. “Griffith started at a hundred grand, I started at two hundred, and we dickered.”

“Griffith won.”

Mackey’s grin widened. “Yeah, I know.” He carried the tie over to where he could see himself in the mirror over the dresser. “But that’s his business, you know? I steal for a living, he dickers for a living.” He shrugged, watching his hands move with the tie. “You don’t think I worked for that thirty grand?”

“I suppose you did,” Parker said.

Mackey finished with the tie, and turned away from the mirror. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “We spent twenty minutes talking price, and I kept thinking, I got to get this guy up to one-fifty because that’s the middle between where we started. But after a while I began to think, What if there’s five of us do this thing? Then only one dollar out of five that I’m fighting for is mine. We’re up to one-thirty, and I’m sick of all this talk back and forth, all this stuff that he does because he likes to do it, and I hate it. So what am I trying to get out of him? Another twenty grand. But how much of that is for me? Four grand, if there’s five of us doing it. Do I want all this hassle for four grand? So I said okay, one-thirty, the hell with it.” He spread his hands, grinning, and then turned away and went back over to the closet for his sports jacket.

Parker said, “I’ll have to meet him.”

Mackey frowned, shrugging into his jacket. “He wouldn’t like that, Parker,” he said. “He told me he didn’t want a lot of contact back and forth, he was just telling me about the caper and that was it. If I pulled it off, I should bring him the stuff and he’d pay for it.”

Parker said, “If I’m in, I’ll have to meet him.”

Mackey considered. “I’ll call him,” he said. “I’ll call him at his home tonight, I’ll explain the situation.”

“Good,” Parker said. He got to his feet. “You ready?”

Mackey was stuffing things from the dresser top into his pockets: wallet, cigarettes, matches, keys. “Ready.”