Authors: Richard Stark
Sounding interested, Mackey said, “Not any more?”
Williams shrugged. “Now it would depend on the car,” he said.
Parker said, “So it isn’t city police, it’s a local force.”
“Yeah, but they’re rich,” Williams said. “Those are people spend money on law enforcement.”
“Which means the Honda’s no good to us,” Parker said. “We need a car that’ll make their cops comfortable.”
“Well, I guess that’s me,” Mackey said.
They looked at him, and he said, “Brenda and me, we almost always go by car, but as much as we can, we leave the car out of
it. Like we came here, we took it to the airport, left it in long-term, took a rental back.”
Williams said, “What do you do that for?”
“If something happens to one of us,” Mackey told him, “it doesn’t happen to the car, so we’re that far ahead. Like now; they
got Brenda, but they didn’t get a car. And a car would have another whole set of ID for the cops to play with.”
Parker said, “What is this car?”
“Two-year-old Saab, the little one, red.”
Williams laughed. “You’ll look like a college boy coming home on vacation.”
“Sounds right for that neighborhood,” Mackey said, “doesn’t it?”
Parker said, “So what we have to do, take the Honda to the airport, get this Saab.”
“And once again,” Williams said, “I’m on the floor in back.”
There were two kinds of long-term parking; inside a brick-and-concrete building or, the cheaper way, in an outside lot. Mackey
drove to the outside lot, picked up a check, and found the Saab in its place, small and sleek, gleaming in the high floodlights.
Leaving the Honda, he crouched beside the Saab, and from underneath drew a small metal box with a magnet on one side. Opening
it, he took out the Saab’s key and used it to unlock the car.
Once the metal box was in the glove compartment, the parking check was out of the glove compartment, the Honda was in the
Saab’s old space, and Williams was again on the floor in the narrow rear-passenger area, Mackey steered toward the electric
exit sign, saying, “One thing. If we have to go on from the dance woman to the Fifth Street station, we don’t use this. We
go back to the Honda.”
“It’s your car and it’s your woman,” Parker pointed out.
From the floor in back, Williams said, “When you’re out of the airport, take the left on Tunney Road, I’ll direct you from
there.”
One-twenty-seven Further Lane was a bungalow, a one-story mansarded stucco house with porch, on a winding block of mostly
larger and newer houses. Darlene Johnson-Ross had spent for the best neighborhood she could afford, not the best house.
The Saab drove by, slowly, seeing no lights, not in that house or any other house nearby. The dashboard clock read 5:27, and
this wasn’t a suburb that rose early to deliver the milk. They’d seen one patrolling police car, half a mile or so back, but
no other moving vehicles, no pedestrians.
Most of the houses here had attached garages. The bungalow had a garage beside it, in the same style as the house, but not
attached. Blacktop led up to it, then a concrete walk crossed in front of the modest plantings to the porch stoop. A black
Infiniti stood on the blacktop, nose against the garage door.
As they went by, Parker said, “Go around the block, cut the lights when you’re coming back down here, turn in, stop next to
the other car."”
“And then straight in?”
“Straight in.”
They made the circuit without seeing any people, traffic, or house lights. Mackey slid the Saab up next to the Infiniti, half
on blacktop and half on lawn, then the three moved fast out of the car and over to the front door, which Parker kicked in
with one flat stomp from the bottom of his foot, the heel hitting next to the knob, the wood of the inside jamb splintering
as the lock mechanism tore through.
They didn’t have to search for Johnson-Ross; their entrance had been heard. As they came in, Williams paused to push the door
as closed as it would go, and a light switched on toward the rear of the house, showing that they’d entered a living room,
with a hall leading back from it. Light spilled from the right side of the hall, most of the way back.
They moved toward the hall, and ahead of them a male voice sounded, high and terrified: “Muriel! Oh, my God, it’s Muriel!”
Then a female voice, more angry than frightened: “Henry? What are you
talking
about?”
Just entering the hall, Parker stopped and gestured to the other two. Everybody wait. It would be useful to listen to this.
The man’s voice went on, with a broken sound. He was crying. “It’s the detectives, I knew we’d never get away with it, you
couldn’t be alone tonight, not after—How could I have been so
stupid
, she called Jerome, she knows I’m here, all those lies—”
“Henry,
stop
! Muriel doesn’t know anything because Muriel doesn’t
want
to know anything!
What was that crash?”
“Private detectives, I knew she’d—”
“Henry, get up and see what that was!”
Now the three moved again, down the hall and into the bedroom, where the couple, both naked, sat up in the bed, he babbling
and sobbing, she enraged. They both stopped short when Parker and Mackey and Williams walked in and stood like their worst
dream at the foot of the bed.
Parker said, “Henry, do we look like private detectives?”
The woman slumped back against the headboard, color drained from her face. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Henry, not knowing what was going on if this was some nightmare other than the nightmare he’d been expecting, picked fretfully
at the blanket over his knees as though trying to gather lint. “What do you—” he started, and ran out of air, and tried again:
“What do you want?”
Parker looked at the woman. “You recognize us, don’t you?”
“On the news,” she whispered, still staring, still too pale, but recovering. “You”—and her eyes slid toward Williams—“and
you.”
Now Henry caught up: “Oh, you’re
them
,” he cried, and for a second didn’t seem as scared as before. But then he realized he still had reasons to be scared, and
shrank back next to the woman. “What are you going to do?”
This was Mackey’s game; Parker said to him, “Tell Henry what we’re going to do.”
“We’re going to have a conversation,” Mackey told them. “We’re going to talk about poor little innocent Brenda Fawcett, pining
away in a jail cell while you two roll around in your—adulterous, isn’t it?—adulterous bed.”
I
knew
she was part of the gang!” the woman cried, forgetting her own fear as she pointed at Mackey in triumph.
“But she wasn’t,” Mackey said. He was being very gentle, very calm, in a way that told the two on the bed he was holding some
beast down inside himself that they wouldn’t want him to let go.
The woman blinked. “Of course she was,” she said. “She was casing the place.”
“Casing the dance studio?” Mackey grinned at her, in a way that seemed all teeth. “Come on, Darlene,” he said. “You know why
she was there.”
“She’s with you people.”
“She’s with
me
,’” Mackey said. “Not doing anything, not
working
, you see what I mean? Just along for the ride.” He gestured at Henry seated there now with mouth sagging open, like somebody
really caught up in an exciting movie. “Probably like Muriel,” Mackey explained, and Henry’s mouth snapped shut, and Mackey
said to him, “Right, Henry? Muriel’s just along for the ride, not
part
of what you’re doing, am I right? ̶
Henry shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Then you’re just not thinking, Henry,” Mackey told him. In creating this dialogue, rolling it out, taking his time, Parker
knew, Mackey was both easing their fears and keeping the pressure on. They were all in a civilized conversation now, so their
survival seemed to them more likely, so they would gradually find it easier to go along with the program, and eventually to
do what Mackey wanted them to do.
Rolling it out, Mackey said, “You’re part of the bunch fixed up the Armory, right?”
Henry looked frightened again, as though this were a trick question. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said.
“You got your father in there with his jewelry business.”
Henry’s lips curved down. “Yes, you’d know about that,” he said.
Parker said, “We know about everything, Henry.”
“You put Darlene here in the dance studio,” Mackey went on, “and every once in a while you come around and dance. So there
you are, captain of industry, putting together deals, making it happen. Muriel around for much of that, Henry?”
“What do you mean,
around
?”V Henry’s incomprehension was making him desperate. “I’m
married
to her.”
“Sure, but was she at the meetings? When you and the guys were putting together the Armory deal, when you made the deal with
your father, when you made the deal with Darlene here. Muriel in on any of that, Henry?”
“No, of course not,” he said.
Mackey spread his hands: case proved. To Darlene, he said, “You get my point? I’m here, I’m working, my friend’s along. She
isn’t working, she’s just along, like Muriel. She gets bored, she takes a few classes over at your place. She can’t give you
real information about herself, because maybe something might go wrong with what I’m doing here, but she’s paying you in cash,
so it doesn’t matter what she says. But then you decide, ’Hey, this woman is lying to me, I can’t have that, I can’t have
some woman come into my dance studio and lie to me, I’m gonna find out what she’s up to, and if I can make some trouble for
her, I’ll make some trouble for her.’ Just like Muriel might get a little pissed off at you, Darlene, and if she could make
some trouble for you, and I bet she could, what do you think? You think you can run a dance studio and have an alienation
of affection suit going on at the same time, all in public, all over the cheap crap the press has turned itself into? And
no help from Henry, you know, Muriel would be keeping
him
occupied, too.”
“Oh, God,” Henry said, and covered his eyes with one hand, head bowed.
There was a chair against the side wall, with some of Henry’s clothing on it. Saying, “This is gonna take a while, these people
are slow,” Williams walked over to the chair, dumped the clothing off it, and sat on it.
Henry lowered his hand to gape at his clothes on the floor. Darlene said, “Even if—”
Mackey looked at her with polite interest. “Yeah?”
“Even if you’re telling the truth,” Darlene said, “even if she wasn’t a part of it, she was here with you, she’s still an
accomplice.”
Mackey said, “Is Muriel an accomplice? They still have those old blue laws on the books in this state, did you know that?
Who knows how many different felonies you two already committed in that bed there, but the point is, is Muriel your accomplice?”
“That’s absurd,” she said.
“You’re right,” Mackey agreed. “And Brenda’s my accomplice the same way.”
She frowned, trying to find some way around this comparison, then impatiently shrugged and said, “It isn’t up to me, it’s
up to the police. If whatever-her-name-is was
more
than just ’being around,’ they’ll find out.”
“Oh, but that’s the problem, Darlene," Mackey said. "It isn’t the police that make trouble for Brenda, it’s you.”
“It’s up to them now,” she insisted. “If she wasn’t doing anything wrong, they’ll let her go.”
“But they don’t want to let her go, do they, Darlene?” Mackey asked her. “They told you themselves, they don’t have a single
thing to hold her on, but they don’t want to let her go because they’re suspicious of her because they can’t find out who
she is, so that’s why they want you to go back tomorrow morning and sign a complaint against her.”
Henry jerked to a crouch, hands clasped together, staring at Mackey as though he were some kind of evil wizard. “How did you
know that?”
Parker said, “I told you, Henry. We know everything.”
Darlene said, “They asked me to cooperate.”
Mackey said, “To sign a complaint that she made false statements on a credit application.”
“Well, they were false,” she said.
Mackey shook his head. “It wasn’t a credit application.”
She started to snap something, angry and impatient, but then stopped herself, as though she hadn’t realized till that second
what the law had asked her to do. Maybe she hadn’t. She shook her head, rallied: “They were false statements.”
“Not on a credit application. Not a crime.”
Until now, Darlene and Henry had not looked at each other even once, both being too involved with the three men who’d broken
into their room, but now they did turn to gaze at each other, a quick searching look—will you be any help?—and then faced
Mackey again. Her voice lower, less pugnacious, she said, “I already said I’d do it.”
Parker said, “What time you supposed to go in there, in the morning?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“So we got three and a half hours,” he told her, “to figure out what you’re gonna to.”
Mackey said, “Brenda’s never been in jail before. She’s never been fingerprinted before, that’s why the cops can’t get a handle
on who she really is. You put an innocent woman in the lockup.”
Trying for scorn, not quite making it, Darlene said, “An innocent woman!”
“More innocent than you two,” Mackey told her.
“Give them a few minutes,” Parker said.
Mackey turned to him. “You mean, leave them alone awhile, let them get dressed, talk it over?”
“That’s the best way,” Parker said.
Mackey looked around the room. “But what if they decide to use that phone there? “
Parker said, “Then Muriel’s got a problem she can’t ignore,” and the two on the bed gave each other startled looks.
Mackey said, “Yeah, but what if they aren’t as smart as they look?”
“No problem,” Williams said. He stood, went over to the bed—both people in it flinched, which he didn’t seem to notice—and
stooped to unplug the phone. “I’ll take it with me,” he said.