The Green Eagle Score (9 page)

The Phone rang. Parker awoke at once, put the receiver to his ear, and the operator said, “Eleven o’clock, Mr Lynch.”

“Thank you.” It was Wednesday. The heist was tonight.

Parker got out of bed and padded nude to the bathroom. He showered and shaved, then dressed in black rubber-soled oxford shoes, black trousers, white shirt open at the collar. He left the room, locked it after him, and went across the highway to the diner where he’d had breakfast every day of his stay here. He knew now what was safe to order and what was not.

The waitress knew him, too. She came over smiling when he sat down, saying, “Good morning, Mr Lynch. Getting a late start this morning.”

“Leaving today,” he said. He would have preferred a waitress who minded her own business, but this was a cheery gregarious stocky woman and there was nothing to be done about it. Rather than have her remember him specifically as the customer who’d been surly to her, he’d maintained a small conversation with her every day, allowing himself to be just another salesman passing through, spending a couple of weeks at the motel across the way. He would be much less specific in her mind then, and if the law did come around in a day or two her description of him would be that much more vague.

Now, “Sorry to lose you,” she said. “What’ll it be this morning?”

He ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, orange juice, black coffee, then sat and looked out the window at the trucks going by on the highway. He ate his food when it came, left an ordinary tip, paid the cashier at the door, and walked back across the road to the motel.

He went into the motel office and the woman at the desk looked at him brightly. “Yes, sir?”

“I’m checking out.”

“Yes, sir. What room number, please?”

“Eleven.”

“Do you have your key?”

“I’ll leave it in the room. My luggage is still there.”

“Very good.”

She opened a file drawer and got out his bill. “Any charges this morning? Phone calls, anything like that?” “No.”

“Very good.”

She slid the bill across the counter to him. One hundred forty dollars. He took out his wallet, began to slide some of Norman Berridge’s bills on to the desk.

“Cash?” she said in surprise.

This was a bad moment, and he knew it, but there was no way around it. To skip out on the bill would have the cops looking for him a day early. Have them looking for Devers’ Pontiac, which had been here often enough to be known in the last three weeks. But he couldn’t carry credit cards or a checkbook, at least not legitimately, and it was bad business to kite checks in the neighborhood of a score. Got the law on your trail too soon and too easy. So he was going to have to pay this motel bill, and the only way to do it was with cash.

He shrugged at the woman’s surprise, therefore, and said, “That’s what the company accountant says we have to do from now on. It’s something to do with taxes. I liked it better the old way. Hand over an American Express card and that’s it.”

“You’ll want a receipt,” she said.

“It’s the only way I get reimbursed,” he said. She stamped the bill paid, gave it to him, and scooped the bills off the desk. “Thank you for staying with us, sir. Do come again.”

Parker went back outside. It was a good day, sunny but with a bite in the air. He walked down the row to his unit and unlocked the door. The cleaning girl’s cart was two doors farther along. He went inside, left the door open, and packed his one suitcase, leaving out only a long-sleeve high-neck black pullover sweater, a dark gray sport jacket and a quiet blue-and-black tie. He put the tie in the side pocket of the sport jacket, set the closed suitcase on the floor and lay down on the bed with his eyes closed to wait.

He sensed when the light changed, meaning there was someone standing in the doorway. He opened his eyes and it was the cleaning girl. “I’ll be out of here by twelve-thirty,” he said, and she went away.

It was quarter past twelve when he heard the tires grate on gravel in front of his room. He sat up, saw the Pontiac coming to a stop out there, and got off the bed again.

It was Devers, on his lunch hour. He got out of the car as Parker stepped out into the sunlight, carrying his suitcase in his right hand, his sport jacket and sweater in his left.

Devers said, “You want to drive?”

“Why?”

Devers laughed and shook his head. “I’ll tell you the truth, it’s because I’m a nervous wreck. I’m really shaky today.”

Parker nodded. “I’ll drive,” he said. He put his gear in the back seat and got behind the wheel as Devers trotted around and came in on the passenger side.

Devers had left the engine running. Parker put it in reverse, backed it around in a tight half-circle, switched into drive and joined the thin stream of westbound traffic on the highway.

Devers said, “You get used to it after a while?”

“After a while,” Parker agreed. “Some guys always get flutters before. Some always get them after.”

“When do you get yours?”

“I don’t.”

He wasn’t boasting, it was the truth. The situation they were going into tonight would only make him colder and colder, harder and harder, surer and surer. He knew everything was organized, he knew the way it was supposed to come off, the step-by-step working out of the prepared script, and he was like a cold-blooded stage manager on opening night; no jitters, just a hard determination that everything would happen the way it was supposed to happen. He knew that the others, the actors, were all atremble, but that wasn’t for him. Stage managers don’t tremble.

Not even when something goes wrong. That was what he was there for tonight, just as much as his pre-planned actions. He was there also to be ready for the unexpected, to improvise if anything went wrong, to keep the production safe and moving no matter what. So he couldn’t get the flutters before or during, and it didn’t make any sense to get them after. So he just didn’t get the flutters.

Devers wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Boy, I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how you go about getting used to something like this.”

“You keep doing it,” Parker told him.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Just this side of North Bangor there was a white clapboard house with a sign hanging from a tree out front reading: TOURISTS. Behind the house were half a dozen cabins, miniature versions of the house. A black Buick station wagon was parked next to one of the cabins. Devers gestured a thumb at it as they drove by, saying, “They haven’t left yet.”

“They’ll be along,” Parker said.

“They” were the other three men, Jake Kengle and Philly Webb and Bill Stockton, all of whom had come into town on Monday, had listened to the outline of the caper, and had elected to be dealt in. The station wagon was Webb’s, and the only constant about it was its brand; it never stopped being a Buick. But it hadn’t been black more than a week or two, and would be some color other than black by the end of this week. And the Maryland license plates it sported now were only one of the many sets it had known in the past and would know in the future. Webb prided himself out loud on having attained the untraceable car, but Parker thought it likelier that Webb just liked to have something to play with.

He took the right turn before Monequois that bypassed the town and went directly out to the air base. He stopped before the main gate and Devers said, “See you tonight.”

“Right.”

Devers climbed out and walked away toward the gate. Parker turned the car toward Monequois.

He reached the Fusco house at one o’clock, and put the car in place beside the house. The day was beginning to warm up a little, but it wouldn’t get much above seventy before starting back down again two or three hours from now.

Parker went into the house. Fusco was seated at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal. He called, “I’m babysitting. Ellen’s off to see her shrink. Said she’ll be back a little after two.”

Parker didn’t care where she was or when she’d be back. He said, “Did you get the coats?”

“In the bedroom closet.”

“Good.”

Parker left the living-room and went down the short hall to the master bedroom. It was neat and plain and functional and impersonal, like the rest of the house. It was Ellen Fusco’s room, and either she or he had managed to create a room that gave no sign of occupancy at all. The dresser top was bare, there was no clothing on the chair beside the bed, the nightstands held neat metallic lamps and clean ashtrays, the bed was anonymously and neatly made.

There were two closets. The one Parker opened first was full of the woman’s clothing, neat and rigid. The other one was Devers’, and it seemed sloppy by comparison, even though the clothing was all on hangers. But the shoes on the floor were not lined up in pairs, and the shelf was cluttered with stray objects.

In Devers’ closet were the coats. Tunics, really, like the white pullover tunics worn by some barbers and dentists. But these weren’t white, they were glistening metallic gold, as bright as the gold foil around a chocolate candy, seeming to glitter and sparkle inside the closet with their own light. They had long sleeves, high hard collars and elastic wrists. They looked as though they should be worn by a team of Cossack acrobats on television.

Parker took one of the tunics out, looked at it in the light, nodded in satisfaction and put it back again. It had been worth Fusco’s trip to New York City, to a costume rental place there. These tunics had the right look to them.

He went back to the living-room. In the kitchen, Fusco was now rinsing out his cereal bowl. Parker called to him, “They look good.”

Fusco shut the water off. “You like them? I had to try three places.” He dried his hands on a dish towel and came into the living room. “You should see what they tried to give me.”

Parker sat down on the sofa. “You got everything of yours cleaned out of here?”

“Sure,” Fusco said. “There wasn’t that much. I sent off a package Railway Express this morning.” He’d checked out of his hotel Sunday morning, had been sleeping on the sofa here since then, except for last night when he’d slept at a hotel in New York.

“To an address?” Parker asked him.

“To Manhattan. To be picked up.”

“Good.”

“You want coffee? Something to drink?”

“Nothing.”

Parker shut his eyes. He knew most people tended to get jumpy the day of a score, knew that jumpy people like to talk. He didn’t want to be talked to, and the easiest way to avoid it was by keeping his eyes shut. People leave you alone if you have your eyes shut, even if they know you’re awake.

He sat there like that, waiting, not thinking about much of anything, giving stray thoughts to Puerto Rico and Claire, until Fusco said, “Here’s the boys.” Then he opened his eyes and got to his feet.

The station wagon was parked out front. Three men were walking toward the house, Jake Kengle in the lead. Behind him was Bill Stockton, a tall skinny guy with black hair and a loose-limbed, stooped way of walking. Bringing up the rear was Philly Webb, who owned the station wagon and who would be driving tonight. He was short, chunky, olive-complexioned, with the chest and arms of a weightlifter, giving him a vaguely apelike look.

Fusco opened the door for them and they trooped in, all dressed like Parker in white shirts, black trousers and quiet-soled shoes. Kengle said, “This is the part I don’t like. Just before, you know? When there’s nothing to do but wait.”

“There might be a deck of cards around here,” said Webb.

“Sure,” said Fusco. “We can play at the kitchen table. I’ll be right back.”

Parker sat out, but the other four worked up a poker game to kill the time, most draw and five-card stud. They played for small stakes; it was a superstition that it was bad luck to gamble with money you hadn’t copped yet.

Parker didn’t gamble. He preferred to sit in the living-room, either doing nothing at all or going over again in his mind each step of what they were supposed to do today, trying to find things that had been overlooked.

Ellen came back about twenty after two. She looked at the four sitting around the kitchen table, and said to Parker, “How much longer are you all going to be here?”

“A little while,” he told her.

She was acting like somebody being calm with a great deal of trouble. She fluttered a bit in the living-room, and then went on out to the bedroom. Parker watched her go, frowning. He didn’t like the way she was acting, hadn’t liked any of the changes she’d gone through the last week and a half.

It had started with that oddball stupid sexless proposition. It had been a proposition, it couldn’t have been anything else, but it had been delivered in such a way as to make it tough to believe it had ever happened. As though she’d done it against her will, and had just gone through the motions without really meaning it.

But she’d meant it, he was sure of that. She’d spent a couple of days giving him cow eyes alternating with bad temper as though he’d been the one trying to put the make on her, and then it had been all over, with a new phase coming in.

The new phase had been hatred, cold silent murderous hatred. Whenever he’d been in the house she was always somewhere around, glaring at him, as though waiting for him to make the one move that would make it all right for her to come after him with a carving knife.

But that hadn’t lasted either. It seemed as though every time she went off for one of her sessions with the analyst she came back with a different set on the world. The next attitude toward Parker had been studied indifference; she’d ignored him as completely as if he weren’t there at all. But not arrogantly, not like a queen ignoring a peasant, which is ignoring in a way that still acknowledges existence. Parker seemed to have ceased to exist for her, as though she had a blind spot and he was standing in the middle of it.

That phase had been the easiest to put up with, but it too had changed, and the most recent attitude had been fear, a kind of guilty jumpy fear that had made him almost as nervous in her presence as she was. He’d asked both Devers and Fusco about it, and they’d both assured him she would have done nothing—like talking to the law—to justify her guilt or her fear. “That’s just the way she gets sometimes,” Devers had said. Fusco’s comment had been, “Ellen wouldn’t fink, period.” Parker had had to take their word for it, but he still didn’t like it; when she slunk and jumped and jittered around him like that it made his hackles rise.