The Outfit (6 page)

1

A hell of a place to be in November
! he thought, thinking of Las Vegas. He glanced ahead, saw his wife's house and repeated the thought:
A hell of a place to be in November. A hell of a place to be anytime
.

It was a big stone monstrosity of a house facing the park. Twenty-one rooms, tall narrow windows, three stories, four staircases, impossible to heat. Putting in decent wiring and plumbing had cost a fortune. Buying statues to fill the niches and paintings for the walls had cost another fortune. And then rugs. And half the furniture on the Eastern Seaboard. For what? For a house he inhabited not more than three months out of the year unless something unusual came up.

But Willa had wanted it. She was a Buffalo girl, from the cracked-sidewalk section back of Civic Centre, and owning one of these stone piles by the park had been her driving ambition for as long as she could remember. And what Willa wanted, whatever she truly wanted, Arthur Bronson went out and got for her.

He was fifty-six; born in Baltimore seven years before World War I and thirteen years before Prohibition. He'd been driving a rum-runner's truck t fourteen, in charge of collections in the north east area of Washington at twenty, one of the four most powerful men in the Baltimore-Washington area liquor syndicate at twenty-seven when Prohibition ended. He was the most powerful man in that area at thirty-two, member of the national committee from the mid-east states at thirty-nine. He had become chairman of the committee at forty-seven and held that post for the past nine years.

His cover was impeccable He was senior partner in a Buffalo firm of investment counsellors, with a junior partner who handled all the legitimate business. He was a member of the board of three banks, two in Buffalo proper and one in Kenmore, a suburb. He belonged to a country club and a businessmen's fraternal organization; he was a member in good standing of the church three blocks from his Buffalo home, and his income tax returns would never send him to jail. At fifty-six, he was of medium height, about twenty pounds overweight, and his black hair was flecked distinguishedly with grey. His face was broad and somewhat puffy, but he still retained traces of his earlier dark good looks. He gave the impression of being a solid citizen, a hard businessman, possibly a difficult employer, but absolutely respectable.

Willa, too, was respectable. In 1930, when he'd married her, she'd been a mediocre singer with a fair jazz band, but she took to rich respectability as though she'd known no other life. She was now fifty-two, a plump and soft-spoken matron, a doting grandmother who was constantly phoning her married daughter in San Jose, to find out how her two grandsons were getting on. The pile of stones facing the park was her home twelve months out of the year. Her husband might be away for months at a time – New York, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Naples – but this pile of stones was Willa's home, and she stayed in it.

It was not her husband's home, and he avoided it as much as possible. He didn't like the place, it was too big, too solemn, too empty, too draughty, too far removed from life. He preferred hotel suites with terraces overlooking a pool or the sea. He preferred chrome and red leather. When it came to that, he preferred a good, stacked, intelligent, hundred-dollar whore on a white leather sofa to the plump grandmother in the pile of stones in Buffalo, but, at the same time, it was the good whore who got the hundred dollars and the plump grandmother who got the hundred-thousand-dollar house.

The lead Cadillac crawled on past the driveway and stopped. There were four men in the car, and they looked out the windows intently in all directions, watching the traffic and pedestrians. The second Cadillac with the armed coloured chauffeur at the wheel and Bronson alone in the back seat turned in the driveway like a sleek tank. Only after it had gone in past the hedge did the other Cadillac go on down the street and around the corner. To the undiscerning eye, there was no particular connection between the two Cadillacs.

The black-top drive looped past the front of the house, then curved around to the garage at the side. The chauffeur stopped at the front door and hopped out to open the door for Bronson. Bronson climbed out and the chauffeur asked, "You want the car any more today?"

"No." It was said angrily. Where the hell was there to go? He'd just come from the funeral of a local businessman, the owner of a chain of supermarkets. Funerals. Big, dark, stone houses. Cold weather. All because of one madman named Parker. He went up the steps and into the house, and the chauffeur took the Cadillac around to the garage. Another driveway came in from behind the garage, and the second Cadillac came in that way. The two of them were put away and the five men went into the house through one of the back doors.

Bronson, passing through the main hall, found his wife in the small room behind the drawing room watching television. He stood in the doorway, feeling grumpy, but not wanting to take it out on Willa. It wasn't
her
fault. He said, "Hello."

"Oh, hello!" She got to her feet, a plump, pleasant-looking woman with timid mannerisms, and went over to turn the television off.

"Let it go," he said. "What's on?"

"It's just a movie. I think there might be a football game on one of the other channels." She wasn't used to having her husband home. She was grateful for his presence, but at the same time she knew he wasn't here of his own free will. What the problem that had forced him home was she didn't know – he never talked about his business with her – but she knew it had to be something serious. Every once in a while during the year he would stop in for a few days, just long enough to put in token appearances at his office downtown and at a few business luncheons or civic meetings, then he would be off again. But this time was different. This time, he was obviously angry and upset, as though it hadn't been his original plan to come at this time. And he had brought all those bodyguards with him, a thing he'd never done before. So she knew he was here against his will and she worried about it, wondering what she could do to make his stay less difficult. "I'll see if I can find that football game."

"No, never mind. You watch your movie."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. I'm sure."

She wilted at the tone, immediately looking sheepish. "I'm sorry, Arthur."

"Oh, for Christ's sake! I'm not mad at
you
."

"I know, Arthur. I-"

One of the bodyguards appeared in the doorway. "Phone, Mr Bronson."

"All right." He was grateful for the interruption. He left the room and hurried upstairs.

Could this be it? Had they run Parker down? Could he now get the hell away from this mausoleum?

At the head of the stairs on the second floor, a hall as wide as many of the rooms stretched away to his left, lawned with Persian and lined with candelabras. He walked down this hall, the carpet muffling his tread, and entered the third room on the right – his office.

The office was dominated by a desk the size of a sports car, carefully wrought of hand-carved Honduras mahogany. Books he had bought – not to read, but because they were in sets with bindings of which the decorator approved – lined the shelves on three walls. Two tall narrow windows faced the tree-lined street and the park beyond.

Bronson sat at the desk and reached out for the telephone, hoping it was the good news he'd been waiting for. He checked the movement at the last second, wanting to prolong the suspense, and made the caller wait while he unwrapped and lit a cigar. The cigar in his left hand, he reached out for the phone again.

But it wasn't good news. It was bad news, very bad news. Someone had just knocked off the Club Cockatoo.

COCKATOO

DANCING

It was a Saturday night, so the parking lot was crowded. Rico walked through the ranks of cars to the line parked facing the side of the building. There was a door on the side, near the rear, and Rico headed for that. The car nearest that side door was a white Ford Thunderbird. Rico tried the door on the driver's seat, found it locked, and shrugged in irritation. Then he tried the next car, a dark green Continental. The door was unlocked. He stood next to it, waiting.

After a minute, a black Buick, two years old and stolen that afternoon, turned into the parking lot. The driver was alone in the Buick. He was tall and slender, about forty, with a pock-marked face. His name was Terry. He nodded when he saw Rico.

Rico looked at the Buick, then got behind the wheel of the Continental. He bent and fiddled under the dashboard for a minute. Then the engine started and he backed the Continental out of its place. He headed it around several lanes towards another parking space. The Buick nosed forward and slid into the vacant spot. Rico fiddled under the dashboard of the Continental again, and the engine stopped. He got out and walked over to the Buick. Terry got out and they both walked around to the front and entered the club. They wore dark suits and ties, and took their hats off as they stepped through the entrance.

This was an Outfit operation, a rambling cream stucco structure two storeys high. It was in a dry county where liquor is illegal, in one of the forty-nine states in which gambling is illegal, and in one of the fifty in which prostitution and narcotics are illegal.

The only legal activity going on in the Club Cockatoo was dancing. On the first floor was the bar, where every drink ever heard of in New York City was available – at a price a little higher than New York City. The waiters and bartenders had decks of marijuana for sale; the stronger drugs had never really caught on in that part of the country. Upstairs were the beds, and the maidens who manned them. And downstairs were the games. It was a good operation, profitable and safe. The local law was well-greased, and there had been no problems. Not until tonight.

No building is safe from robbery, if professional can get his hands on the blueprints. There were a few basic flaws in this particular building – from a robbery-proof viewpoint – that the Outfit had never considered before, but would have an opportunity to consider tonight.

The side door. It led to a short hallway, which, in turn, led to the bar. This hallway also opened on to a flight of stairs which led down to the gambling room. A man going down these stairs would find himself in another hallway with a barred window on his left and the main gambling room to his right. Directly across the hall, he would see the doors to the rest rooms. Turning to the right and entering the main room, he would see that it was filled with tables of various kinds, and that along one wall there was a wire wicket, like a teller's cage in a bank, except that the wire enclosure extended to the ceiling. Behind this were the cashiers, with drawers full of money and chips. And behind the cashiers was a wall with a door in it. Turning around and going back to the hallway and thence to the men's room he would discover that the men's room and the cashiers' space shared a wall, and that the door he had already noticed led into the men's room. This door was kept locked; it could be unlocked from either side only by a key. Each cashier had a key which he was required to turn in when going off duty. The arrangement had been designed as a convenience to the cashiers, who worked long hours and were permitted an occasional beer.

And the office. It was behind the cashiers' wicket, to the left of the men's room. The door to the office was about eight feet to the left of the private door to the men's room. This door was not kept locked, because the cashiers used it fairly often, clearing checks, bringing money in or taking money out, coming on or going off duty. The office was windowless, having an air-conditioner high on the outside wall, and the door to the cashiers' space was its only entrance. The three men who worked in the office were armed.

Rico and Terry entered the club and stopped at the bar long enough for a bottle of beer, then they went downstairs to the gambling room. They entered the men's room. Each went quickly into a stall and closed the door, and then they both put on rubber masks which covered their faces completely. The masks had two oval eyeholes and two round nostril holes, and for the rest were flesh-coloured rubber, loosely fitted to the contours of their faces. They put their hats on over the masks and waited. Patrons came and went.

They waited forty minutes before they heard the sound of a cashier's key. They heard a door open and close, they heard footsteps on the floor. They came out of the stalls.

They each had guns now – stubby English .32's. The cashier was a small, bald man with spectacles which reflected the light. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his forearms were thin and pale and almost hairless.

There was one other customer in the room, washing his hands at one of the sinks. Terry, the pock-marked man, pointed a gun at him. "Come over here."

Rico went over to the cashier. "Turn around. Put your palms against the wall." Then he patted pockets till he found the key.

They marched the cashier and the customer into adjoining stalls and made them kneel down. The cashier was silent, but the customer kept babbling they could have his wallet without killing him. Rico and Terry sapped them and lowered them gently to the tile floor. If there were no killings and no injuries needing hospital care, there would probably be no official squawk from this job. The club wouldn't be making any reports to the law if it could avoid it. And the customer would probably be paid off if he raised a stink on his own. If the job was clean and quiet, the law would never hear about it at all.

They closed the stall doors and went to the private door. Rico unlocked it and led the way through. They had the guns in their pockets now, their right hands tucked into the same pockets.

To the right was a long table. Felt-lined boxes full of chips were stacked up on the table, and empty ones were under the table. To the left was another table which held adding machines, telephones, and a few single-drawer filing cabinets for three-by-five cards. Beyond that table was the door to the office. In front stretched the counter and the wire cage. All but one of the cashiers had their backs to them. This one sat at the table to the left, running an adding machine. He looked over when Rico and Terry came through the doorway, and his eyes widened. He was the only one who could see the masks; the other cashiers were facing away and the customers and stickmen beyond the wire mesh were too far away to see what was happening. Anyone looking through the wicket towards the dim area by the back wall wouldn't realize that those pale expressionless faces weren't faces at all.

Speaking softly, Rico said to the man at the adding machine, "Come here. Be nice and quiet." There was a steady flow of noise from beyond the wire, the rustle of conversation and the clatter of chips. None of the other cashiers heard Rico's voice.

The man at the adding machine slowly got to his feet. He understood now, and he was terrified. He was blinking rapidly behind his glasses, and his hands gripped each other at his waist. He came over slowly.

Rico said, "Stand in front of me." Rico pulled out the gun and showed it to him. "My partner has one, too."

The man nodded convulsively.

"What's your name?" That was part of his pattern. Rico always wanted to know the name. He said it was psychological, it calmed the victim down and made him less likely to do something stupid out of panic, but that was just an excuse, something Rico had thought up. He wanted to know the name, that was all.

"Stewart. Rob – Robert Stewart."

"All right, Bob. We're cleaning this place. We want to do it quiet, we don't want your customers all shook up. And we don't want the cops coming down here and seeing all the wheels and everything. You don't want that either, right?"

Stewart nodded again. He was staring at Rico's mouth, watching his lips move behind the rubber mask, making it tremble.

"Now, Bob, the three of us are going to walk into the office. Smile, Bob. I want to see you smile."

Stewart stretched his lips. From a distance, it might look like a smile.

"That's the way. Now keep smiling while we go into the office." Rico turned the gun away into his pocket again, but kept his hand on it. "Here we go, Bob."

Stewart turned around and led the way to the left, Rico following him, and Terry bringing up the rear. They walked into the office, Stewart smiling his strained smile, and Terry closed the door and leaned against it. Rico pulled his gun out again, shoved Stewart to the side and said, "I'm looking for heroes."

A man was squatting in front of the safe, his hands full of stacked bills. A second man was at the desk, a pencil in his right hand, his left holding a telephone to his ear. A third man was at a table entering figures on a ledger. They all looked up and froze.

Rico pointed the gun at the man holding the phone. "Something just came up. I'll call you back."

The man with the telephone repeated the words and hung up. The man at the safe kept licking his lips and glancing at the safe door. He was trying to build up the courage to slam the door. Rico pointed the gun at him. "You – what's your name?"

"What?" He'd been concentrating on the gun and the safe door, and he couldn't understand the question.

"Your name. What's your name?"

He looked over at the man at the desk, appealing to him. The man at the desk said, "Tell him."

"J-Jim."

"All right, Jim. Stand up straight. That's good. Take two steps to your left. Very nice Jim." Rico took two canvas sacks from under his coat and handed them to Stewart. "What you do, Bob," he said, "you go over and empty that safe. Put all the loot in these sacks, Jim, you give Bob that money you're holding. You-" he pointed the gun again at the man at the desk. "What's your name?"

"Fred Kirk." He was a heavy, florid man, probably the manager, since he was the only one who didn't seem to be frightened.

"All right, Fred. If that phone rings, say you can't talk now. You've got a problem here. You'll call back."

"You won't get three miles."

"Quiet now, Fred."

"Don't you know who runs this place? You guys are crazy."

"No more talk, Fred. Don't make me put you to sleep. You-" He turned to the man at the ledger. "What's your name, partner?"

"Kelway, Stanley Kelway." His quavering voice was high and thin.

"Now, don't get upset, Stan. You just keep making them entries."

"I can't." Kelway was perspiring heavily. He kept moving his hands, shifting the pen back and forth from one to the other.

"Too nervous, Stan? All right, just sit there easy."

Stewart came back with the two canvas sacks, both bulging now, nearly too heavy for him to carry. He held them out to Rico, but Rico shook his head. "Oh, no, Bob, you'll carry them. Fred you'll wait till Bob gets back before you make a fuss or Bob won't be coming back. You wouldn't want a corpse on the property, would you, Fred?"

Kirk glowered.

"All right, Bob, let's go."

Terry went first, opening the door and stepping out quickly, looking both ways. The cashiers still worked along, unconcerned, their backs to the action. Beyond the mesh, the customers and the stickmen concentrated on their own business. Terry moved to the right. Stewart followed him, carrying the sacks. Rico backed out, closed the door and pocketed the gun.

There were two customers in the men's room and when they saw the masked men they raised their hands without being asked. Rico closed the door and said, "Bob here is an employee. Aren't you, Bob?"

Stewart nodded.

"Bob will come back in a minute and explain the whole thing. In the meantime, he'd like you to stay right here and not raise any sort of fuss. For your own good, that is. And for his. Isn't that right, Bob?"

Stewart nodded again.

"You don't have to keep your hands up like that, boys. Just stay here and wait. It'll only be a couple minutes. But if you try to leave here too soon, you might just possibly get shot. Isn't that right, Bob?"

Stewart licked his lips. "Do like they say," he said. "They got guns. Just do like they say."

"Don't worry," said one of the customers.

Terry, Rico, and Stewart left the men's room, crossed the hall, and went up the stairs. Terry opened the side door and checked outside, then nodded to Rico. He never talked during a job, unless it was absolutely necessary. Rico did all the talking for both of them.

Rico took the two sacks from Stewart. "All right, Bob," he said. "You did that real well. You can go back downstairs now."