Plunder Squad

Five

Parker slipped the credit card into the narrow opening at the edge of the door and slid it downward until it hit the bolt. He applied pressure slowly, the bottom edge of the card pushing against the curved face of the bolt, the card moving downward a fraction of an inch at a time, and suddenly the door popped inward and was open.

Parker put the credit card away in his shirt pocket. It was the one he’d used in San Francisco, and while it could no longer be safely used anywhere in the country to buy or rent things, it could still open most locked doors that hadn’t been double-bolted. And in the majority of suburban houses, that meant either the kitchen door or the door to the attached garage; people devote their attention to guarding against entry through the front door or through windows, and hardly think at all about the rear entrances to their houses.

In this case it was the door to the garage. Stepping through the dark opening, Parker could see the streetlight through the small windows in the main garage door straight ahead. But in the intervening space between himself and that door, there was no car.

It was almost two in the morning now, and not a light showing in any of the suburban houses on this curving block. Was the woman who lived here merely out late, or had she gone away somewhere on a vacation?

Or was she in fact here, having loaned her car to Uhl?

The word had come to him early this morning, indirectly from Kirwan through Handy McKay. George Uhl was supposed to have set up a thing for himself with a divorcee in one of the bedroom communities outside Pittsburgh. Kirwan had learned the woman’s name and the name of the town; the local phone book had given Parker this address.

It was too bad about the car being gone. Or maybe it wasn’t; he’d know better after he’d been through the house.

There was a door to his left, seen dimly in the streetlight glow through the garage-door windows. He took his revolver from under his left arm and moved that way, turning the door knob slowly, pushing the door open slowly, seeing darkness that separated itself into several lighter masses: refrigerator, stove, cabinets.

There were two steps up from garage level to kitchen level. He went up them quietly, at a slight crouch, listening for sounds from inside the house, shifting his weight slowly to make no creaking-floor sounds of his own. He pushed the door closed again behind himself, and started across the kitchen.

He heard the clicks on linoleum and saw the dark shape hurtling at him just an instant before it hit, slamming into him at chest height and knocking him flat on his back on the floor. Its breath was hot and sour in his face, and then it was going for his throat, and he had no choice but to jam the revolver barrel into its hairy side and pull the trigger.

It gave a convulsive leap, and he shoved it away to the left as he rolled to the right. He hit the wall and got up quickly on one knee, staring, listening, waiting.

Its claws were scrabbling on the linoleum, but it wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t killed it, but he’d de-fused it. He got to his feet and brushed his left sleeve across his face where it had slobbered on him.

The sound of the shot hadn’t been very loud. He had muffled it by pressing the muzzle into its body, so the noise wouldn’t have been heard by anybody on the street; but it might have been heard by somebody in the house, if there was anybody around to hear it.

With the claws scrabbling on the linoleum, he couldn’t hear the rest of the house, so he moved deeper into the kitchen until he saw the streetlight again to his right. A doorway to the living room. He stepped through onto carpet, did some more listening, and heard nothing ahead of himself at all. Nothing but the scratching behind him. The thing still hadn’t made any sound of its own, only that click of claws on linoleum.

It took him ten minutes to search the house, moving slowly, using no light other than that which came in through the windows along the front. It was a ranch-style house, all built on one level, with the garage at one end, living room and kitchen in the middle, bedrooms at the other end. And all completely empty. The closet in the main bedroom was full of clothing, all of it female, suggesting that the woman wasn’t away for an extended period of time. In the bathroom there were three toothbrushes, but no toiletries that could be thought of as exclusively male. It was likelier, in any event, that Uhl had a place of his own and wouldn’t be living here on any kind of long-range basis.

Back in the kitchen, Parker opened the refrigerator door to get enough light to see what he’d killed. The thing had stopped scratching now, and when he put light on it he saw it was dead: a Doberman, lying on its side with its legs stretched out in running posture, its eyes open and covered by a gray film. There hadn’t been a lot of blood, but some was on the floor.

Next to the entrance to the garage was a door leading to the cellar stairs. Leaving the refrigerator door open, Parker opened this door, switched on the cellar light, and went down for a quick look around. He hadn’t expected to find anything of interest, and he’d been right. Finished, he went back upstairs, took the dog by one leg, dragged it over to the cellar doorway, and pushed it downstairs. Then he switched off the cellar light, cleaned the bloodstains off the linoleum with a dishtowel, and threw that down the stairs after the dog. Shutting the cellar door, he looked around the kitchen to see if any traces remained, found none, and closed the refrigerator again. Then he went into the living room to sit down and wait. There was a picture window facing the street in there, its draperies drawn more than halfway open, and he pulled a chair down to the end of the room so he wouldn’t be visible from out front.

It was ten to four when the headlights suddenly flashed across the living-room wall. Parker got to his feet, and when he heard the garage door lifting, he moved quickly down to the other end of the living room, where the doorway to the kitchen was, and waited for whoever was coming in.

He heard the car drive into the garage, and almost immediately heard the garage door shut again. From the sound of it, it was equipped with an electrically controlled motor.

Car doors slammed, two of them. Parker tensed, the revolver held in his right hand.

The door from garage to kitchen opened, and a woman’s voice called, “Blackie? We’re home, boy!”

High heels took two steps on linoleum, but then stopped again. “Blackie? Where are you, boy?”

A male voice said something indistinct. Parker couldn’t make it out, whether it was Uhl or not. Then the woman said, “I don’t know what’s wrong. He always comes, you know that.”

Fluorescent lights flared in the kitchen. Parker stared diagonally through the doorway, trying to adjust his vision. The part of the kitchen he could see was set up as a dining area, with a small round table and four chairs.

“Blackie?”

The man’s voice said something.

The woman said, “I think you’re right, George.” She sounded worried, but capable.

Damn the dog. Parker stepped around the corner into the kitchen, the gun out in front of him, but the woman was standing in the line between him and the garage doorway. “Down!” he yelled, but she was frozen there, staring in astonished terror at the gun.

He didn’t see Uhl at all, but he heard the movement of the bastard going away. Parker looked to his right, saw a door leading to the back yard, and jumped to it. And the instant he took his attention away from the woman, she started to scream.

The door was locked. A button in the knob had to be turned and released. It all took time, and then he had the door open and caught a glimpse of something running across the yard toward the house facing on the next street.

This was not a neighborhood to do a lot of indiscriminate shooting. An area like this would be well covered by police patrols, and the citizens around here would be likely to reach for the phone at the first sound of trouble. And Uhl was not going to be caught up with on foot.

Angry, Parker stepped back into the house, slammed the door, and headed at a fast stride toward the woman, who was pulling breath for a third scream. She backed away, starting to jabber in a high-pitched voice, and too late turned to run. Parker grabbed her shoulder with his free hand, spun her around, and slapped her face hard. She landed against the wall beside the door and he held her there with a hand cupped against her throat. “Don’t make me do it,” he said.

“What do you—what do you—?” The words were gargled, as though he were strangling her, but he wasn’t.

“I want Uhl,” he said. “I want his address.”

“I don’t—I don’t—”

He pushed the gun barrel against her stomach. “If you won’t tell me, you’re no use to me alive. And you’ve seen my face.”

“I don’t—I can’t—”

He applied pressure to her throat, until she couldn’t talk. Her hands came fluttering upward, but the gun made her afraid to struggle with him, so that her fingers never quite touched the hand with which he was cutting off her air. She looked as though she were doing typing movements, her fingers twitching around his hand.

He eased the pressure again. “His address. I’m in a hurry.”

Now she closed both hands around his wrist, gently, as though in a request for kindness. “Mantle Street,” she said; her voice sounded rusty.

”In Philadelphia?”

“Yes. Two-eighty-three. Apartment seven.”

“Anybody else live there with him?”

“No. No.”

He switched his left-hand grip to her face, thumb on one cheekbone and fingers on the other. He pulled her head forward an inch, then punched it back against the wall. Her eyes glazed, and he used both arms to lower her to the floor. There was no point having her dead, but he didn’t want her raising the alarm for a while either.

There was a length of clothesline in a kitchen drawer. He did a fast job of tying her, then switched off the kitchen light and went out the back door.

The car he was using was a block away. He took a minute to find Mantle Street on a Philadelphia road map and work out the best route to it, then put the map away and started the car. Uhl had perhaps a ten-minute lead on him, but had left on foot and would have some trouble finding a cab in this sort of neighborhood at four in the morning. If Uhl was heading home, Parker had a fair chance to beat him there or at least catch up with him before he gathered his things and went anywhere else.

Thirty-five minutes later Parker was driving past 283 Mantle Street, a red-brick apartment building that looked to have been built in the twenties or thirties: corners slightly curved rather than square, casement windows, carriage lamps on either side of the arched entrance. There was no light showing in any of the building’s windows, except for a single row up the middle above the entranceway; that would be the staircase. The building was five stories high, with probably four or six apartments on each floor, and no elevator.

Parker drove on, and left the car a block away. He walked back and entered the building, and read on the mailboxes in the foyer that apartment 7 was occupied by a G. Underwood. So Uhl was apparently one of those who liked to keep their initials when using aliases, an idea that was always stupid and sometimes harmful.

The inner door was of the kind that can be opened by a tenant ringing a buzzer up in his apartment. Which meant it couldn’t be double-bolted, which further meant the credit card would open it. Parker went through and up the stairs and found that apartment 7 was on the second-floor rear. This door was double-bolted, and Parker didn’t travel with a lockman’s tools, so he left the door and went on up the stairs to the roof.

There was a fire escape down the back. The windows at the rear were also all dark, and there was no light source other than the stars and a quarter-moon. Parker went down the fire escape to the second floor, turned to the window that should lead in to apartment 7, and peered through it looking for light. He saw none, and went to work on the window.

Like those in the front, it was of casement type. A lever-and-ratchet arrangement inside would open or close it, and it would swing out like a door rather than raising. Parker inserted the credit card at the top corner, then slid it along the top toward the hinged end. This forced the outer corner away from the frame sufficiently for him to get a grip on it with his fingertips. He pried the corner farther open, and slipped a pencil into the space just as the credit card slipped through and fell inside the apartment. Pulling the corner out while simultaneously sliding the pencil along the top toward the hinged end, he made the opening steadily wider, until there was a sudden click-click sound from the bottom of the window as the ratchet slipped two or three notches.

Now the leading edge of the window was open about half an inch. Parker could get a firmer grip now, pull harder, and force the ratchet to give several more grooves, until he could slip his hand inside and turn the lever, opening the window the rest of the way. He stepped into a small dark bedroom, retrieved his pencil and credit card, and searched the apartment as he had earlier searched the house—silently, and in darkness.

It was empty. There was a flashlight in a kitchen drawer, and Band-Aids in the bathroom medicine chest. Parker put Band-Aids over the flashlight glass, leaving just a small open slit, and then used this narrow light to go through the apartment again, looking for something that would tell him where else Uhl might go. But he had apparently rented the place furnished, and had few possessions of his own. There was no address book, there were no letters, there was nothing to say a word about Uhl’s past or future. Some ordinary clothing in the closets and drawers, a few decks of cards, some paperback books; it was like the leavings in a rented summer cottage after the season is over.

Except for the four thousand dollars in the corn-flakes package. Two hundred twenty-dollar bills neatly stacked, filling a box of corn flakes that at first didn’t look as though it had been opened. But Parker lifted it and it was too heavy, and when he looked at the bottom he could see where the box had been steamed open and then resealed. He ripped it open and the bills thudded out, four stacks of fifty bills, each with its own paper band around it.

Uhl, like Parker and most other men in the same profession, kept caches of money in different locations, in case the sudden need for a bribe or a getaway should arise. Parker himself had left several of these behind, at times when it had seemed too dangerous to go back for them; was Uhl smart enough to do the same? Or would the four thousand tempt him to stop by here for just a minute? It was worth waiting awhile here to find out. Until morning.

It was then a little before five. At twenty to six the phone rang. Having an idea who it was, Parker answered, saying, “Hello?”

“George? Get away from there, I had to tell him—he was going to kill me, I had to tell him where you lived. I’m sorry, darling, I had to— George?”

Parker said nothing.

“George? George?”

He hung up. With the four thousand in his pockets, he left the apartment.