April Evil (12 page)

They went into the kitchen. The woman sat at the kitchen table reading a magazine. Ronnie had slipped the revolver into his side pocket. It had been a precaution. He did not like getting into strange cars. Something could have gone sour. Somebody could have tipped the Ace. But it was still all set. So the gun could be put aside until the right time came.

The woman looked up. Ace said, “Sal, this is Ronnie.”

Ronnie nodded. He liked the way she looked. He liked big blonde women. This one had no arrogance. She seemed quiet
and humble and acquiescent. She acted beat down.

He knew why when Mullin came out into the kitchen. The man looked lean, mean and jumpy. He needed a shave. “Hello, kid. We’ve been waiting. Come on in the other room. You’re due for a briefing.”

They went into the big living room. Ronnie sat beside Ace on the couch. Mullin paced back and forth and outlined the proposition. Ronnie listened and found himself liking it. It sounded safe. It sounded profitable. He’d been told to use his own judgment.

“How many in the house again?”

“The old man. A chunky colored boy about forty-five. A punk about twenty-five or six, and his wife about twenty-two or three.”

“So why did you need me?”

“I asked for a gun. Ace is on the box. You have to think about the car too. Two can be risky. I’m too hot to contact local talent. I need somebody recommended. I want to figure it all so it will go smooth. Like silk and cream. No pain and no strain. And no shooting unless it has to be that way. You understand that?”

“I understand it.”

“What did you bring?”

“A Detective Special and a Magnum.”

“I’ve got a Luger and six clips. Ace has got nothing. Ace, you want the Magnum?”

“I’ve never carried one in my life. I’m not starting here.”

“You saw the layout, Ace. Tell him.”

“High stone fence around a half acre of land. Phone lines come in over the fence from the west. Big iron gate in the front. Usually it’s closed, and probably locked. The first-story windows on the stone house are barred. I got a glance at the garage. Two car deal and it looks like the jig lives over it. It is set into the northwest corner of the area. The house is about in the middle.”

“Burglar alarms?”

“Maybe. We don’t know yet. We’ve got to make sure of
that, Harry says.”

“How do we do that?”

Mullin spoke up. “The Ace has checked on the punk. He’s the only one who leaves the place. He goes to town about every other afternoon. He sponges drinks, does a little bowling. Ace knows him by sight. You make the contact with him. You and Sal. Buy him drinks. Tell him he’s a great guy. You know the routine. He stayed home today. Tomorrow, Thursday, he’ll probably go into town. He drives an old tan Chev. You’ll get what you can out of him. If you load him right, maybe he’ll take the pair of you back to the house. That would be the best, but maybe it won’t be necessary.”

“Fine,” Ronnie said. “I go back to the house, maybe wearing a sign that says thief?”

“Don’t sweat. They won’t check you too close. When we go in for the score we go in wearing masks. The Ace picked them up today at the five and dime. Ape masks. Good ones. Two bucks apiece. They’ll be so busy with looking at the ape faces, they won’t see anything else. Sal stays in the car. She gives us the horn if anything goes sour outside. Go get the map, Ace.”

The big man brought the map back. He unfolded it and the three of them knelt on the floor. It was a decorative map of Flamingo, in color, with pictures of palm trees and orange trees.

“Here,” said Mullin, “is where we are. There’s the Tomlin house. If everything goes all right tomorrow, we can set it for five o’clock on Friday. There won’t be any deliveries to the house after that time. It will be the best time to do it. If it goes right, we can be out of there by five-thirty. Here’s the route I marked. Ace said the streets are okay. Five miles east of here we run into the Tamiami Trail. Route 41. We can follow that right up to Tampa. We’ll try to get a motel as near the city as we can. There’s a lot of vacancies right now. Sticking to the speed limit, it should take us about an hour and a half to get to Tampa. We make the split right there, and we split up right there. You can leave by train or plane or whatever
you think you want to do.”

“It sounds all right,” Ronnie said. “If it’s one-tenth the money you think is in there, it still sounds all right.”

“It better be more than a tenth. I need more than a tenth. Here’s the routine when we go in. We round up the four of them. You keep a gun on them while the Ace takes a look at the box. He has some stuff to work with. If it looks too rough, we’ll have to persuade the old guy. Roughing up the girl will probably do it. Once we get it open, we have to keep them quiet. Tomorrow try to find out if there’s any place in the house where we can lock them up. We could use an hour. Ace will have the plates dirtied up. I’m going to have to ditch the car, so watch prints. And watch prints in the house here, too. Once the time is set, we’ll give the house a good cleaning.”

They talked some more. Ace brought in three cans of beer. Ronnie sat in a deep chair and sipped the beer. He reminded himself to wipe the beer can clean before throwing it out. It wouldn’t make much difference if the others forgot that little detail.

He sat in the deep chair and listened to them talk and plan. He looked at the Ace’s thick neck, and the bald spot that gleamed in the lights. The plan sounded all right. Now it was time to begin to integrate his own plan with theirs. Ace was the primary assignment. But nothing could be done about the Ace until after the box was open. The old man might drop dead of a heart attack and be unable to give the combination.

It might work right there in the stone house. Ace and Mullin, quickly, after the box was open. But the girl would be outside, in the car, and that was a complication. Not in the stone house. Get the money into the car. Get rolling. But once the money was in the car, both Mullin and the Ace would be more on guard. That was the time when accidents happened too often, between the take and the cut. Mullin might even be planning a little accident for the two of them. He had nothing to lose. Any fracas as they were getting into the car would cut down on the getaway time.

It had to happen in the stone house, or before they set out
for the stone house. If it happened in the stone house, it might make sense to take the whole lot of them, the whole seven, the five men and the two women. He might get the blonde in the house on some pretext. Then close the big gates and drive away. Load the car and drive away.

The thought of taking the whole seven of them made him feel excited. It made his hands wet. It was good to think about, but it didn’t make sense. It would make the whole thing too heavy. The whole damn country would be hunting for him.

Then he knew what he would have to do. He would have to take a chance on their not needing the Ace. Once the time was set, Mullin would want to go through with it, even if there was just the two of them. Mullin would have to go through with it. There wasn’t anything else he could do. And no one else he could get to help him.

Ronnie became intensely aware of the Ace. It was always that way. A heightening of curiosity. He could see the Ace more vividly. To Ronnie, the Ace had a death-marked look. How many more beats in that heavy heart? How many more gestures of the thick hands? Ronnie felt the god-power in himself. The power to glaze those eyes and still the breath and turn the man into nothing. Into damp clay.

“You following this?” Mullin asked him sharply.

“I’ve got it all straight.”

The woman in the kitchen could hear their low voices. She sat at the table looking down at the magazine, but she did not see the words on the cheap paper. She was thinking of the strange road she had traveled, the road that had brought Sally Leon at last to this particular Wednesday night, to this Florida town, to this time of waiting and listening to the men in the other room.

She wondered what Barney Shuseck would think of her now if he could see her. She wondered if he would feel anger, or contempt. It had always been difficult to guess what Barney would think, to guess what he would do. Maybe that had been part of the attraction.

In the beginning was the Dream. The Dream of a small solemn blonde girl, fifth daughter of a factory worker in Dearborn. She was no good in school. The Dream was the only important thing. It always had the same ending—the black limousine pulling up to the marquee, the police holding the crowd back, searchlight beams cutting across the dark blue velvet of the California sky. “Hey, it’s Sally Leon!” they would yell and the police would strain to hold them back.

It’s Sally Leon!
Regal in sables, smiling brilliantly and nodding to her fans, walking between the packed throngs into the movie, sitting there with people who adored her, to watch the first showing of the film that would win the Oscar.

She was poor in her schoolwork. She had little interest in boys. Her only interest in money was to have enough to go to every movie that showed in the area and buy every fan magazine that came out. She spent hours before her mirror. She imitated the stars. Her family was amused and exasperated by her. So intense was her dream world that she found it difficult to follow the simplest household directions. In that house there was neither time nor energy to concentrate on the emotional problems of one daughter—particularly one who made no trouble, who moved dimly through life, engrossed in the Dream.

When she was fifteen she left and went to Hollywood. She registered with Central Casting. She was fired from two car hop jobs because she could not remember orders. She attended premieres, crowding close as she could get, staring wide-eyed at the stars, perfectly confident that she would be one some day. She was fired from a department store job in Los Angeles. The supervisor for the floor told her she was too absent-minded. She kept the next job, as waitress in a tavern, for quite a long time.

The first man came along when she was seventeen. He knew the language of the studios. He said he was an assistant producer. He said he could get her a screen test. He lived in one of a string of attached bungalows which encircled a court with a small fountain that didn’t work. She moved in with him.
He made it quite clear that this was the way you got into the movies. He stalled on the screen test for nearly two months, and then a woman in one of the other bungalows told her the man was a studio electrician. She was not hurt or angry. She was impatient at the delay. She moved out, got her job back, and began haunting Central Casting again.

The next man was more plausible. He said he was an agent, and in a sense he was, though he kept his office in his jacket pocket. He got her three days’ work. It was a college picture. She had to sit in the stands with a lot of other girls and smile and yell and wave a banner. She received twenty dollars a day. When the picture came out five months later she found that she was not in it. That scene had been cut. She sat through three showings and made absolutely certain that she was not in it. It was disappointing as she had sent a card to her family telling them she was in the picture. She was ashamed of that, and so she never contacted them again in any way. It was the third and last postcard she ever sent them.

She lived with Wally for seven months. He had a violent temper. He could not seem to get her into any other pictures. In the beginning he financed voice lessons for her, but later he did not want to continue the expense. When he got tired of her, he passed her along to a younger friend, a man who was trying to write scripts. When the younger man left to go to New York, she kept the room they had lived in and got a job as a waitress and kept trying to get into the movies. She had learned to carry herself a little better, and modulate her speaking voice, and sing in a small clear alto. She tried dancing lessons, but found she had no aptitude. It was hard for her to move quickly enough.

A girl she worked with told her she had enough looks so that maybe she could get a job in a club, and told her how to go about it. She went to the club in the early afternoon. It was the afternoon of her nineteenth birthday. After he had talked to her for about five minutes, the man locked the door of his small office. She accepted him without struggle, the way she had learned to accept. It had seemed important with the first
man, but now it no longer seemed important. It was a mechanical thing. Sometimes it was pleasurable, and sometimes it was not. It was a means to an end, and thus must be endured. This was one of the more unpleasant times, but that evening she became a part of the show, a part of the finale. She wore a soiled girdle of feathers around her hips. Her breasts were bare. She had to stand absolutely still, bathed in a strange green light, while a girl whose costume was fresher and whose breasts were covered did a contortionist act. Three other girls stood as Sally stood while the act went on. Sally was pleased to note that they were all older than she was, and not nearly as pretty.

It was a man who came to the Blue Onyx Club who finally got her into the movies. He was a thin bald nervous man with a loose mouth and a deep Pacific tan. He took her at three in the morning, after the last show, to a barren rundown building in a shabby part of Los Angeles. Two other cars were parked behind the building. The man parked his convertible beside them and they went into the the building. There was a cameraman, an electrician, another man of the same breed as the man who brought her, and a muscular young man with a dull sleepy expression.

There were no introductions. The cameraman looked at Sally carefully. “This is better stuff than those last pigs. You sure you want to do this, kid?”

Then she was told what she would have to do. She did not want to do it. But they all acted so matter-of-fact about it. And Mr. Binder, the man who brought her, told her the makeup would be pretty heavy, and she could fix her hair a little different. She was still reluctant and Mr. Binder said he would make it a hundred and a half instead of a hundred. She had never done anything like it before. She was scared and awkward. Finally they felt they had enough, and the sun was out when Binder drove her home.