Plunder Squad (3 page)

“No,” Parker said. “First, there isn’t time. Second, they’ve got Ashby.”

“He wouldn’t talk,” Kirwan said. “He might even be dead.”

“He doesn’t have to talk. He just has to be there, a known heistman with a bullet in him in their city.”

Stokes said, “The first minute there’s trouble, walk away. That’s my golden rule, and that’s why I never yet took a fall in my entire life.” He rapped his knuckles against the tabletop.

“We’ll be in touch,” Parker said.

They shook hands all around. When they left, Kirwan was crumpling the papers together to take them out and burn them.

Parker walked through the house and saw Claire out by the lake, sunning herself. She was wearing a two-piece white bathing suit, and she was lying on a dark blue towel. It was still only June, but she already had a good tan, accented by the white suit.

He slid open the glass door between the dining room and the back porch, crossed the porch, went down the stoop, and walked over the just-trimmed lawn toward where she was lying. She had turned her head at the sound of the door sliding, and now smiled in his direction as he approached. She was wearing sunglasses, large blue ovals with white frames. Through the blue glass, her eyes were level and bright. She said, “You’re back sooner than I thought.”

“It fell through.” He squatted beside her and placed one palm on her stomach, just above the white trunks. Her flesh was warm, almost hot, and covered with a butter-like suntan lotion.

“I’m all oily,” she said. But she smiled, and reached up to touch his other arm.

“You’re hot,” he said. “You don’t want to overdo.” He shifted his hand to her near thigh, cupping his fingers down along the side of her leg, so that his knuckles brushed softly against the skin of her other thigh. The flesh under his palm was hot, but down between her legs it was cooler.

“I’m used to it now,” she said. Then she sat up and said, “I’ll shower. Don’t kiss me, I’ll just make you all slippery.”

He straightened and gave her a hand to help her up. They walked back into the house together and he said, “I have a phone call to make.”

“All right.”

She went away to the bedroom. Parker walked first to the kitchen to wipe the suntan lotion from his hand on a paper towel, and then turned back to the living room, where the phone was. He dialed the number of a diner in Presque Isle, Maine, four states from here, a diner run by a man named Handy McKay. McKay had been a sideman of Parker’s several times in the old days. He was retired now, living on his diner, and he served as a middleman for people in the business who wanted to get in touch with Parker.

Somebody else answered, but Handy came on a minute later and Parker said, “It’s me. I’m home again.”

“Didn’t work out?”

“Remember me telling you about a guy named George Uhl?”

“Couple years ago.”

“He showed up, and caused trouble.”

“Too bad.”

“I’d like to get in touch with him.”

“I don’t know if I’d be any help.”

“Just mentioning it,” Parker said. “And also, I’m available again.”

“No messages since we talked.”

“All right.”

“When you going to come visit?”

“Sometime.”

“Sure. So long, now.”

“So long.”

Parker hung up and went to the bedroom. The two-piece bathing suit was on the floor, and the shower was running in the bathroom. He took off his clothes and went in to join her.

Parker said, “I reserved a car here. The name is Latham, Edward Latham.”

The uniformed girl behind the counter said, “Yes, Mr. Latham, one moment, please.”

It was late afternoon, and San Francisco International Airport was doing fairly heavy business. He’d expected to have to wait on line at the car rental counter, but he was the only one here.

“Yes, Mr. Latham, here it is. A LeMans with air. You made the reservation in New York this morning?”

“That’s right.”

“May I see your driver’s license, sir?”

He handed over his Latham license. It claimed to have been issued by the State of New Jersey, and it had cost him a hundred dollars. He had a number of licenses from different states in different names, depending on what he needed at the moment. The only states he avoided were those, like Massachusetts and California, which put the driver’s photo on the license; he preferred to have no pictures of his face.

“Will this be on a credit card, sir?”

“Yes.”

He handed her the card he’d bought for twenty-five dollars
last night in New York. He’d been guaranteed five days before this card’s number would show up on the credit company’s hot list, and even then it would only be the regional list for the Northeast. It wouldn’t make the hot list out here until some of Parker’s purchases on the West Coast filtered their way through the bureaucracy to the computer.

Still, he watched the girl as she riffled the pages of the hot list, looking for the number. This wouldn’t be the first time a hot card had been sold as cool.

But this one was all right. The girl put the list away and spent a while filling out forms. Then Parker initialed “EJL” to acknowledge he was paying three dollars for the extra collision insurance, and signed Edward Latham at the bottom of the form.

The girl gave him one copy of the form in a brightly colored paper folder, gave him a smile, gave him the thanks of the company for doing business with them, and gave him directions to the terminal exit where he would find his car. He thanked her and walked off, carrying the black attaché case that was the most luggage he ever traveled with.

The car was a bronze Pontiac LeMans with eight thousand miles on it. Eight thousand very heavy miles, from the looseness of the body and tightness of the brakes. It accelerated hard enough from a standing start to want to burn rubber at the slightest tap on the pedal, but the acceleration was mostly wheezed out above fifty. Not that he needed the car to do much for him, just take him to the meeting. If the job wasn’t any good, it would also take him back to the airport for a night flight east. If he’d be sticking around, he’d ditch it somewhere in downtown San Francisco this evening.

He took the Bayshore Freeway north to the city, following the directions Ducasse had given him. It was just after five when he left the airport, and he met the flow of outbound rush-hour traffic coming the other way. But traveling toward the city was easier, and he could make good time, coming into town in under half an hour, and then riding the Bay Bridge over toward Oakland. The address he was heading for was 1377 Mount Diablo
Street in Concord, a small suburb in the East Bay, east of Oakland.

Just after the bridge, Parker cut off onto Interstate 580, then switched to another freeway, California 24, to go the rest of the way into Concord. He was moving with the heaviest traffic now, traveling away from San Francisco, but the worst of the rush hour was already over.

The address was in the middle of a poorish neighborhood in the process of being torn down. Across the street from the house he wanted there was a great open gouge out of the earth, where the houses had been stripped away and a deep pit dug in the ground. A sign half a block earlier had said this was something to do with the installation of a Bay Area Rapid Transit line. Down in the crater were stacks of steel reinforcing rod, coils of hose, stakes with yellow tags on them, and rows of parked trucks and bulldozers and earthmovers.

The construction site was neater and cleaner than the house Parker stopped the LeMans in front of. A small L-shaped white plaster house, it was one story high with an asphalt shingle roof. The pale pink numbers 1-3-7-7 were set in descending order down one of the four-by-four porch posts. In the front yard, knee-deep in weeds, were two big recently rained-on cardboard boxes of trash. Untended shrubs and bushes grew wild across the front and down the side of the house toward an unattached garage.

There was one car parked in the driveway up near this garage, and two more at the curb in front of the house. The one in the driveway was a dusty red Oldsmobile compact convertible with a white top. The lead car in front was a black Chevy Nova with overly wide tires and the look of being owned by somebody who cared more about function than beauty, and the other car was a dark green Plymouth Fury sedan that had about it—as did Parker’s—the look of a rented car.

Parker left the LeMans behind the Plymouth, got out, and stood a minute looking up and down the street. This wasn’t a house taken just for a week or two so a meeting could be held here, the way Kirwan had done it. This was a lived-in house, the
regular residence of the guy structuring this job. Beaghler, his name was. Ducasse had said of him, on the phone, “Beaghler’s never done anything but drive. But he’s worked with a lot of good people up and down the coast. Into Mexico, too.”

“This is the first job he’s come up with himself?”

“Yes. But he’s a pro, and I think it’s worth a look.”

Parker too had thought it was worth a look. The Kirwan thing had fallen through. The armored-car thing he’d done before that had loused up and he’d had to stash the money; some day he’d go back for it, but not until that town had forgotten him completely. In the meantime, his operational funds were running low and pretty soon he’d have to go dig up one of his emergency stashes of money. He needed a job, so the Beaghler thing was worth a look.

But the first look wasn’t encouraging. Beaghler might have done a lot of driving, but it either hadn’t made him much or he ran through it fast. This wasn’t a rich neighborhood. Beyond that, if he was having the meeting in his own home, he was operating practically on the cuff.

There was also the red convertible. The black Nova would be Beaghler’s car, and a good sign, but the red convertible suggested trouble. Was it somebody else living in the house? A wife or a girl friend, maybe. The personality suggested by the car wasn’t the kind Parker liked around when things were serious.

But he was here, and it was still worth a look.

Parker stepped through the weedy lawn and went up on the porch. Broken toys were scattered over the porch floor. He rang the bell, and a minute later the door was opened by a short stocky guy in black trousers and too-tight T-shirt. He was a little overdeveloped in the chest and upper arms for the rest of his body, as though he worked out with weights from time to time. He had deep sideburns and long wavy black hair, was about thirty-five, and hadn’t changed his style an inch since high school. He’d been a hot-rodder then, and he was a hot-rodder now.

“I’m Parker.”

The tough aggrieved-looking face broke into a sudden smile.
“Parker, yeah, Fred Ducasse told me about you. Come on in.” He stuck his hand out. “I’m Bob Beaghler.”

As they shook hands, Parker looked past him at a living room cluttered with discarded baby clothes, a new couch, and what looked like a new television set. There was also a new round felt-topped table in the center of the room, flanked by half a dozen functional wood-and-canvas chairs, as though ready for a poker game.

There were also two more people, one sitting at the round table and the other sprawled on the sofa. The one at the round table was male, very tall and thin, dressed in a suit and white shirt and narrow tie that all looked too big for him, and completely bald. He wore glasses and had a steady quiet competence in his face. He would be the driver of the other rental car.

And the one sprawled on the sofa would be the owner of the red convertible. Parker took one look at her and almost turned around and walked away from it right then. It was only that he was overdue for a job that he decided to stick around and see what the relationships were and how effectively Beaghler had her under control.

She was almost a parody of a suburban slut. Slender to the point of skinniness except for oversized breasts, she had the small narrow foxlike face of a tenement upbringing. Her hair was a well-tended gleaming brown, her face was carefully made up, and she had painted the nails of both fingers and toes. She was in the uniform of the type: halter and shorts.

The only good thing about her was that she didn’t seem to be in active agitation. There was no aura of tension from the man sitting at the table, as there would have been if he’d found himself unexpectedly in some kind of sexual arena, and when the woman met Parker’s eye, there was no invitation in her glance, nothing but a bored and muted curiosity. The machinery was all there, but it wasn’t turned on; which probably meant she’d married a man stronger than herself. Away from him, things might be different, but there’d be no reason for Parker or the others in the string to ever have to find that out.

Beaghler made the introductions, and in introducing the
man at the table first he gave further demonstration of the relationship he’d established with his wife. “Parker, this is George Walheim. And that’s my wife, Sharon.”

Parker and Sharon nodded at one another, and Parker turned his attention to Walheim, who was getting to his feet to shake hands, saying, “Good to know you. You’re from the East, aren’t you?”

“Mostly. You do locks?”

Walheim grinned. “I can’t get away from it, people can always tell.”

“You look the part, George,” Beaghler said. “You look like nothing on God’s green earth but a lockman. Just like I look like a grease monkey.” And he did a simian pose, arms hanging curved at his sides. With his chest and upper arm development, he did look something like an ape. Then he straightened and said to Parker, “Beer?”

“No, thanks.”

“Coke, then.”

Apparently Beaghler felt the need to behave like a host. “Fine,” Parker said.

Beaghler turned to call to his wife, “Sharon, a Coke for Mr. Parker.”

A very small trace of resentment showed in the woman’s eyes and in the lines at the corners of her mouth, but there was no hesitation; she got to her feet and left the living room.

Beaghler gestured to the round table. “Come on and sit down. You have a good flight?”

The next twenty minutes were filled with small-talk. Beaghler was sensible not to outline his story until everybody was present, but Parker had never been any good at small-talk, preferring silence when there wasn’t anything meaningful to say. Still, half of the success or failure of any job lay in the personalities of the people involved, and in this one Ducasse was the only other guy in the string that he knew at all, so it was good to get a chance to watch these two and listen to them while they were relaxed and easy.

The impression he built up was mostly good. George Walheim
looked to be as steady and calm as a rock beside the road. At work, he would be smooth and methodical, he would get his job done, he wouldn’t let the tension of the situation work on his nerves. Bob Beaghler was less controlled, but he had a fighting-cock kind of approach to the world, tough but with good humor; he looked to be the kind of guy who was in love with his own virility. Very often, good drivers had this style, it made them both skillful and competitive. He would be faster and tougher than Walheim, but not quite as steady and reliable.

The woman, Sharon, was a disaster area with a lid on it. She was the kind of woman a Bob Beaghler would be attracted to, simply so he could prove himself capable of domesticating her; like the kind of man who seeks work breaking horses. And he had obviously succeeded, at least while she was under his eye. The slight mulishness she showed whenever he gave her an order hinted at undercover revolution when his back was turned, but she’d obviously learned not to cross him directly.

In the course of the talk, it came out that the Beaghlers had three children; the baby was now asleep, and the two older ones were having dinner at a friend’s house. And Bob Beaghler was an auto customizer and drag racer: “That’s where my money goes,” he said, at one point. “Smeared against the wall out at Altamont.”

At a break in the conversation, Parker asked if either of them had ever heard of George Uhl, but they hadn’t. He didn’t bother to explain, and they didn’t ask anything. In the two weeks since Uhl had loused up the Mother’s Day robbery, Parker had dropped a few lines into the stream, hoping to get word of his potential whereabouts, but so far nothing had happened. Once before he’d tracked Uhl down, but that trail was dead now, and in any case he had neither the patience nor the resources right now to try it again. The first thing was to put a job together and get the finances back where they belonged; after that he could spend some time looking for Uhl if he wanted.

When the doorbell finally sounded again, Beaghler said, “That’ll be Ducasse,” and got to his feet.

Parker turned to Walheim, saying, “He’s the last one?”

“I guess so. Bob said it was a four-man job.”

“Good.” The smaller the string, the better.

It was Ducasse. He came in, looking pleased, and Beaghler introduced him to Walheim and Sharon. Then they all sat down at the round table again, and Ducasse said to Parker, “I checked back a few days ago. Ashby died.”

“That’s tough,” Parker said.

Beaghler gave them both a bright look: “Something?”

“Nothing important,” Parker said. “We all here now?”

“Right.” Beaghler grinned, looking over at Walheim as though to say you’ll-appreciate-this, and said, “Have you all heard of San Simeon?”

Walheim had, and seemed puzzled by the reference. Parker knew the name slightly, but couldn’t remember what it signified. Ducasse said, “Wasn’t that Hearst’s place?”

“Right. A big mansion he built for himself down the coast. About halfway to L.A. Filled it full of art goods, millions of dollars’ worth of art goods.”