Parker 01 - The Hunter (6 page)

He didn't want Mal to know he was alive. He didn't want Mal spooked and on the run. He wanted him easy and content, a fat cat. He wanted him just sitting there, grinning, waiting for Parker's hands.

"Mal was sitting there, grinning, waiting for Parker's hands. He didn't know he was waiting for Parker: he thought he was waiting for a chick named Pearl, a junkie with only two bad habits. I( was the other habit that interested Mal right now. He sat (here in his dressing gown from Japan with a silk dragon brocaded on the back, and he grinned, and he waited for Pearl and Parker.

There was the living room of his suite in the Outfit hotel. The Outfit hotel was a respectable-looking stone structure on Park Avenue in the Fifties, with the name Oakwood Arms on the marquee. The building was eleven stories high, with two L-wings jutting back toward Lexington Avenue, and eight of its eleven stories held innocent, respectable, well-paying guests. The guests on floors one and two and three were not innocent, not respectable, and not well paying. They were Outfit men, and they called the Oakwood Arms home. On the third floor were the permanents, Mal Resnick and the other New York workers who had chosen to live here where questions were never asked because the answers were already known. The second floor was partly filled with other permanents and partly reserved for transients, visiting Outfit men from other parts of the country or occasionally from overseas, in town for conference or vacation. When a junketing syndicate man told his lieutenants, "I'll be staying with the Outfit while I'm in New York," they knew he meant the Oakwood Arms.

On the first floor were the conference rooms and bars and ballrooms and dens which the innocent, respectable, well-paying guests never saw. No illegality was ever committed in the Outfit hotel, no wanted man was ever seen to enter or leave the place. No police spy was ever hired by the management, whose security check of its prospective employees would have been the envy of the government boys at Los Alamos.

The police had never raided the place, probably realizing it would be a waste of time, but the hotel was ready for even that emergency. Well-concealed side exits on the first three floors led into adjoining buildings, and the three desk clerks were prepared to alert the Outfit guests before the law could even get into the elevators.

The hotel had only gradually developed to the plush respectability and safety it now enjoyed. Early during Prohibition it had been bought by the liquor syndicate as a plant, where booze could be stored with relative safety at a location pleasantly close to the speakeasies of midtown. During those early years no one made much of an effort to front the place as a normal hotel, but after the racket-busters began to crack down, and the place was raided a few times, the syndicate realized the building could only be useful if it did a good job of pretending to be what it was not. The remaining liquor was pulled out, the hotel was paper-sold to a. legit front man, and new employees were brought in who didn't know a thing about the place's actual owners or purposes, and for six years the hotel was a sleeper, bringing the syndicate nothing but a small legitimate profit.

In 1930, with the respectable front firmly established, the ()akwood Arms became once more a plant, but this time the mob used it more carefully and more quietly. With the end of Prohibition in 1933, the hotel embarked on its new career as a location for business conferences, as the liquor syndicates merged and disbanded and remergecl again in a frantic reshuffling of influence and interest, converting from suddenly legal liquor to still profitably illegal items like gambling, unionizing, prostitution and narcotics.

In the years since, the Oakwood Arms had slowly developed its role in Outfit affairs. It was used more as a permanent or temporary residence for Outfit executives than for any other reason, with occasional conferences and parties as well. Since the Ap-alachin fiasco of 1957, more and more out-of-town elements of the Outfit had been using the hotel as a safe meeting place. It was quiet, it was well run, and it was guaranteed free from trouble with the law.

So it was with perfect nonchalance that Mal Resnick sat in the living room of his third-floor suite in the hotel, in his dressing gown from Japan, and waited for Pearl, the girl with only two bad habits.

Mal was a beefy man, short and heavy-set, with broad, soft, sloping shoulders and a wide paunch, short thick legs and arms, and a heavy head set square on a thick neck. In the old days, his hands had been large and rough, work coarsened, but now they were only pudgy, the flesh packed thick around the finger bones, the skin soft and pink. He was a cab driver, with a cab driver's body and a cab driver's movements, and nothing would ever change that.

Around him were the symbols of his success, the stereo hi-fi built into the wall, the well-stocked bar, the deep-piled carpet and plush armchairs and sofas. His was a two-room suite, living room and bedroom only, proclaiming him still on one of the lower rungs as an Outfit executive. But the fact that he could live here at all proclaimed even louder that he had power within the mob, that he had made it: he wasn't a goon or a hanger-on, he was one of the Boys.

He looked at his watch and saw that it was quarter after seven. That meant that Pearl was fifteen minutes late, and Mal grinned again. Pearl was late, Pearl would be punished. She knew that, and she would come anyway -- and whatever he decided the punishment should be, she would go along with it.

It occurred to him sometimes that she was probably so insen-sitized by drugs that his punishments meant practically nothing to her, but he rejected the idea. She felt it, by God. When Mal put his hands on her to make her hurt, she hurt. And if it took more to break through the deadening of the heroin in Pearl's system, so much the better. Mal had the patience, Mal had the time, and Mal had the incentive.

He looked at his watch again, saw that it was twenty minutes past seven, and the phone rang. His right hand reached out negligently, expecting it was Pearl calling in resigned panic from some phone booth somewhere in the world, and he brought the phone lazily to his ear. "Mal," he said.

"Mal, this is Fred Haskell. I'm sorry to call you at home, but -- "

"Don't be sorry, sweetie. Just don't call.

"But," said Haskell, "I thought maybe this was important. Maybe I ought to call you right away."

Haskell was a junior executive, a rung or two beneath Mal in the Outfit chain of command. Mal still remembered too clearly t he last time he'd loused himself up by a stupid mistake on Out-lit business, so he didn't throw his weight around now. He said instead, "Something about business, Fred?"

"I'm not sure. I got a call from that cab guy out in Brooklyn. Stegman. He wanted to get in touch with you."

Mal frowned. He didn't like to be reminded of Stegman or of Lynn or of anything else connected with that operation. "You didn't give him my number, sweetie," he said.

"Hell no, Mai -- you know me. I told him I hadn't seen you in months."

"Good boy."

"So he said I should ask around. He said he had to get in touch with you, it was important."

Mal's frown deepened. Was that stuff coming back to plague him? It couldn't. Unless maybe Lynn was suddenly deciding she wanted more dough.

He ought to drop that bitch, she wasn't worth it. A grand a month was heavy money; he couldn't really afford it. And what did he get from her? Nothing. He put it to her a few times, and every damn time she just lay there like a board and closed her eyes and went a million miles away somewhere. He tried to hurt her, and she hurt easy, but he couldn't reach her any other way at all, and the hell with that.

Was she a danger to him? If he was to drop her now, what the hell could she do? Not a damn thing. She didn't know where he was, and even if she did he had nothing to fear from her physically. And if she spread the word about where and how he'd gotten the dough to pay back the Outfit, all he had to do was say she was a lying, vindictive bitch, he'd kept her for a while and then gotten tired of her and she was trying to get even. Nobody would listen to her.

So why keep her around? If it was conscience money, it was stupid. And it couldn't be anything else.

So he made his decision. If she wants more dough, I drop her. To Haskell he said, "Did he tell you what it was?"

"He said some guy had come around looking for you. Killed some broad and then came around wanting you."

"Some guy?" Ryan? No, he was dead. They were all dead. One of the South Americans? How the hell could they have found out who was in on the hijack? Somebody from the Outfit selling the guns? There was no way for them to connect him with the deal either. "What did this guy look like?"

"He didn't tell me. He just said some guy came around talking mean and wanting you."

"Talking mean. The hell with that."

"I thought you ought to know about it, Mal, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah, yeah, you done right. Listen, I want to talk to that son of a bitch."

"Stegman?"

"Who else? Set up a meeting."

"At your place?"

"Go to hell, sweetie. I'll meet him at Landau's, by the bridge. In back."

"Landau's, by the bridge."

"At nine o'clock."

"Tonight?"

"When the hell else, idiot?"

"I'm not sure I can get in touch with him, Mal, that's the only ihing."

"Get in touch with him, sweetie. Do it. That lousy cab company of his is working now."

"Okay, Mal, I'll try."

"Don't try, sweetie. Do."

Mal slammed the phone onto the hook and surged out of the (hair. Who was it? Who the hell was it?

He strode across the living room, throwing off his dressing ^own as he went. Beneath it, his chunky body was nude, heavy iind fat-rolled, with an even sunlamp tan.

He threw on his clothing muttering to himself, remembering names and faces, trying to figure out who it had been. Killed a broad and came looking for Mal. Killed a broad and came looking --

Killed Lynn.

His suit and shoes on, he came out to the living room again, staggering slightly, as the realization hit him. Killed Lynn. It had to be, it was the only broad connecting him to Stegman. Killed Lynn.

Oh, sweet Jesus Christ in Heaven!

The doorbell rang.

He stood frozen, staring at the door. The bell rang again and lie bellowed, "Who is it? What do you want?"

Her answer came faint through the door. "It's me, honey. It's Pearl."

He pulled open the door and she came in, her mouth open, ready with excuses.

"It's Parker," he said, and hit her twice in the stomach. She fell retching to the floor, and he stepped on her back on the way out.

By day, the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge lies on the windows of Landau's Bar and Grill. By night, there are too many shadows to pick out the source of any one.

Mal parked his Outfit car two blocks away and walked through the Dutch slum to Landau's. The regulars hunched at the bar watched him in the back mirror as he walked clown the length of the place, and they disliked him because he wore a suit and tie. But they knew better than to turn around, to speak or gesture or notice him in any way. They knew, vaguely, that Landau's was different from the other bars in the neighborhood, that it led some sort of double life. Suits and ties congregated in the back room every once in a while, and it was best to leave them alone.

Stegman was already there, and nervous. He got up from the small room's one table when Mal came in, and said, "Jesus, am I glad to see you! This place is a hole."

Mal shut the door. "What did he look like?"

"What? Big. A mean-looking bastard, Mal. He braced me without a gun or a knife or anything. He said if he had to he'd kill me with his hands, and I swear to Christ I believed him."

"It's Parker," said Mal to himself.

"He had big hands, Mal." Stegman held up his own hands, claw-curved. "The veins stuck out all over them."

"The son of a bitch," said Mal.

"I tell you, I wouldn't want him after me."

"Shut up!" Mal glared, his hands closing into fists. "What am I, a nobody? I got friends."

"Sure you have, Mal."

"Am I supposed to be afraid of the son of a bitch? He couldn't get near me."

Stegman licked his lips. "I thought you'd want to know about it, Mal."

"All I have to do is point," said Mal. "I pick up the phone and I say his name, and he's a dead man. And this time he stays dead."

"Sure. I thought you'd want to know so you could take care of it."

Mal crossed suddenly to the table, scraping the chair out and plumping down into it. "Sit down," he said. "Tell me what he said. What did he say about me?"

Stegman sat across the table, his hands palm down on the table top. They trembled slightly anyway. "He said you could stop paying off the girl, she was dead. She was in the morgue. He said he was looking for you. That's all."

"Not who he was? Not why?"

"Nothing. Just what I said."

"And he told you if you saw me you should let him know."

Stegman shook his head. "No, he didn't. He just let it go."

The bartender pushed open the door, stuck his head in. "You gents want anything?"

"A beer," said Stegman.

"Nothing," said Mal. "Peace and quiet."

The bartender waited, looking at Stegman. "Beer or no beer?"

Stegman shrugged, awkwardly. "No beer," he said. "Later maybe."

"We'll let you know," said Mal.

The bartender went away, and Stegman said, "That's all there was, Mal. I told you everything."

"What did you tell him?"

"Nothing. What could 1 tell him? 1 didn't know where you were, what could I tell him?"

"What about the money?"

Stegman nodded quickly. "Yeah, I told him about that. About the checking account. He wanted to know about that, how I got the money."

Mal gnawed on his lower lip, looking across the room. "Could he trace me through that? The statements go to you. The bank wouldn't tell him nothing."

"That's what I figured," said Stegman eagerly. "It wouldn't hurt to tell him the truth. What could he do?"