Parker16 Butcher's Moon (2 page)

"At the house," she said.

"Oh."

Since the house phone was also an illegal extension from the box office, meaning that even if Mary had answered at the house he could still pick up this one and have his conversation here, her phrase suggested the caller was somebody he'd want to talk to in private. He stood up, therefore, giving the Internal Revenue man a bright smile and saying, "You will excuse me, won't you?"

"We'll want to see your books again," the Internal Revenue man said, showing bad temper.

"God knows I don't," Grofield said, and left the office. Mary walked with him, and as he passed the head of the aisle he looked down toward the stage to where two actors in bathing suits were attacking a set with hammers. Frowning, he stopped and said, "What are they taking it down for?"

"They're putting it up," Mary said.

"Oh."

The two of them walked outside, and Grofield stood for a moment on the wooden platform at the top of the stairs, looking nut over the wooded hills of Mead Grove, Indiana. The only sign of human habitation in this direction was the gravel parking lot. The formerly gravel parking lot, lately turning to mud. "We need more gravel," Grofield said.

"We need more everything," Mary said. "That was Parker on the phone."

"Ho ho," Grofield said. "Maybe he has more gravel."

"That would be a blessing," Mary said. She'd played three consecutive landladies in three consecutive rustic comedies recently and hadn't yet gotten rid of the speech habits.

Grofield trotted down the steps and went around the side of the barn toward the farmhouse. The words
Mead Grove Theater
were stretched in giant white letters along the side of the barn facing the county road. There was no traffic at the moment to see it.

Sometime in the late forties some unremembered genius had first decided to convert this old barn to a summer theater, tucked away here in this remote corner of Indiana. He'd put in a stage at one end, and had arranged seating for an audience on a series of platforms, with the first four rows of seats on the Original barn floor, the next four on a platform two steps up, the next four two more steps up, and so on, until he had twenty-four rows of ten seats each, with a center aisle. Two hundred forty seats, and rarely had anybody seen them all full at once.

The problem was, this was not the best place in America for a summer theater. Mead Grove was no big city; in fact, there is no big city in Indiana, with the doubtful exception of Indianapolis, and Mead Grove was in any event too far away from Indianapolis to take advantage of it. There was no college in or near Mead Grove, no well-known tourist attraction nearby, no reason at all for outsiders to come into the area and discover the existence of its local summer theater.

Which left, as potential customers, the citizens of Mead Grove and the other half-dozen towns in the general vicinity, plus the people on the farms in between. Most of them were a little baffled by the need for a live theater anyway, in a world with TV, and doubted it could show them anything they wanted to see. If it weren't for schoolteachers and the wives of doctors, there wouldn't have been any audience at all.

The original converter of the barn to a theater had only lasted a season or two before going broke and leaving the area and his debts behind. For the next twenty years the barn/theater had had a checkered and not very successful career; had been a barn again for a little while, had been a movie house for even less of a while, had been a warehouse full of bicycle parts, and had several times been a financially disastrous summer theater.

It had been nothing at all five years ago, when Alan Grofield had come upon the place. He'd been flush at the moment, from a casino robbery he'd done with Parker, and he'd bought the place outright, full cash, for the barn and twelve acres and two small farmhouses on the other side of the road. His theater was now in its fifth season, was beginning to get a small reputation in the theater world, and had never made a dime.

Well, that was all right. Summer theaters always lose money, particularly when an actor starts them and performs as producer, but Grofield had never expected the Mead Grove Theater to support him. He supported it, and had known from the beginning that he would.

The point was, acting wasn't his living, it was his life. His living was elsewhere, with people like Parker. And it had been a long time since he'd done anything about making a living, not since a supermarket robbery last year outside St. Louis, so he moved across the empty county road at a half-trot, hoping this phone call meant a big easy score that would take the minimum time for the maximum return. Fred Allworth could take over his own parts while he was gone, and Jack . . . His mind full of casting changes, Grofield trotted up the stoop and into the house, full as usual of the racket of resident actors. He went into what had at one time been the dining room but was now his and Mary's bedroom, and sat down on the bed to take the call.

"Hello?"

"It's me." Parker's voice, as usual, had the tonal variety of a lead pencil.

"Sorry I took so long," Grofield said. "I was in the theater, with a tax man."

"Mary told me."

"The tax man," Grofield repeated. "What I'm saying is, I'm hoping you're calling with good news."

"You remember that time we were together in Tyler?"

"I remember," Grofield said grimly. He remembered; it had been a thing with an armored car, and it had gone to hell. Money gone, time gone, himself loused up for a while. In fact, as a direct result of that job in the Midwest city of Tyler, he'd wound up with some crazy people for a while in northern Canada. "Oh, I remember," Grofield said.

"We left something behind there," Parker said.

For a second Grofield couldn't figure out what Parker was talking about. Then he thought,
The money!
Parker had hidden it somewhere there. But good Christ, that was two years ago. "You think it's still there?" he said.

"It should be," Parker said. "And if it isn't, we'll find out who's got it."

"That's a very interesting idea," Grofield said.

"A friend of mine," Parker said, "is going to be at the Ohio House there on Wednesday. Maybe you could talk to him about it."

"Ohio House. In Tyler?"

"His name is Ed Latham."

That was a name Parker had used before. Grofield couldn't resist saying, "I think I know him."

Humor was wasted on Parker. "You might want to talk to him about this," he said.

"I probably will," Grofield said. "I probably will."

Three

A copper plate on a stone monument in front of the State Office Building on River Street explains that John Tyler, tenth President of the United States, delivered a speech on that spot during the presidential campaign of 1840, and that the name of the town was subsequently changed from Collinsport to Tyler in honor of the occasion. The copper plate doesn't mention that Tyler was running for Vice-President at the time, on a slate headed by William Henry Harrison, nor that Tyler never did run for President himself but simply inherited the job when Harrison died a month after inauguration; but the omission has been more or less corrected by a historic-minded vandal who has written on the stone, just below the copper plate, in orange spray paint: "Remember Tippecanoe."

By the time Collinsport became Tyler, it was already a prosperous river town on one of the principal waterways connecting the Mississippi with the Great Lakes. Lumber and farm produce were shipped through there, and industry started with a furniture plant and a small company that made farm wagons. At the turn of the century a typewriter factory opened, and a while later the wagon company switched to automobile bodies. The First World War added a paper-box factory, the Second World War added electronics plants, and the boom years of the sixties added computer manufacturing.

Tyler, with a population just under one hundred fifty thousand and a median income comfortably above the national average, was rich and soft and easy in its mind. Encircling the city, there was no wall.

Parker arrived at Tyler National Airport at two in the afternoon. The summer sun was shining, and the flat land all around the airport baked in the dry heat. The cab Parker got into had a sticker on the side window saying it was air-conditioned, but the driver explained the air-conditioning had broken down at the beginning of the summer and the boss was too cheap to get it fixed. "Because we'll turn this one in anyway in September, you know?"

Parker didn't answer. He watched the billboards go by, advertising hotels and airlines and cigarettes, and after giving him one quick look in the rear-view mirror, the driver left him alone.

They came into the city through the used-car lots. There was an election going on locally, with posters slapped up on telephone poles and board fences and leaning in barbershop windows; by the time they reached downtown, Parker knew that the two candidates for mayor were named Farrell and Wain. There were three or four times as many Farrell posters as Wain posters, which meant that Farrell had the most money to spend. Which meant Farrell had the support of the people who ran the town. Which probably meant Farrell would win.

Ohio House was a businessmen's hotel near the railroad station, thirty years past its prime. Sheraton and Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn were all clustered together half a dozen blocks away, in an urban-renewal section by the river. Parker had chosen Ohio House because it was still a salesmen's hotel, seedy but respectable, and for his purposes, the most anonymous possible place in town. Nowhere else would it be more likely for two male guests, both traveling alone, to know one another and want to get together for drinks before going on their separate ways.

Parker's room was on the third floor front, with a good view of London Avenue, the town's main street. Off to the right, Farrell had a banner proclaiming his candidacy spread across the street, hanging from light poles. Oh, yes, that was a winner.

There was a black-and-white television set on the dresser, covered with Scotch-taped handwritten notices from the management. On it, Parker watched reruns and game shows and local news programs until dinnertime. He ate in the hotel dining room with half a dozen other men, each of them alone at a separate table, most reading newspapers, one studying the contents of a display folder. Parker looked less like a salesman than the rest of them, but it wasn't an impossible idea. He might have sold Army surplus equipment, or burglar alarms, or special materials to nightclubs.

After dinner Parker went back to the room again, but didn't turn on the TV set. He sat in the dark in the one armchair and looked toward the windows, watching the reflected light from the traffic down below. It was a week night, so the noise level never got very loud.

At eight-thirty there was a knock at the door. Parker switched on the light and opened the door, and Grofield came in, grinning, saying, "A charming establishment. The chamber pot In my room is autographed A. Lincoln. Do you suppose it's authentic?"

"Hello, Grofield," Parker said. "Let's go out to the park."

Four

Grofield fired three times, and three escaping convicts in black-and-white-striped pants and shirts flopped over on their backs. He shifted position, sighted down the short rifle barrel, and plugged five speeding getaway cars in a row. Finishing off with a bomb-toting anarchist and a rolling barrel of bootleg whiskey, he put the rifle back on the counter and nodded in satisfaction at the targets at the rear of the shooting gallery. All around him were the flat reports of other rifles, mixed with the
bings
and
dings
of targets being hit, the constant shuffle of feet going past behind him, the combined noises of several different kinds of music being played in other sections of the park, and hundreds of people talking all at once.

The shooting-gallery operator, a short man in an open black cardigan sweater, with a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth, eased over in front of Grofield and gave him a cool and noncommittal look, as between men of the world. "Nice shooting," he said. The cigarette bobbed when he talked, giving the illusion of a Humphrey Bogart twitch.

Grofield fell into the role as naturally as breathing out. "Pays to keep in practice," he said.

"For the perfect score, you get another ten shots free."

Grofield looked around, and a couple of nearby boys about twelve years old were gaping at the targets, watching every shot in fascination. "Hey, kids," he said.

"Huh?"

"You each get five shots here," Grofield told them. "Compliments of the masked man."

The kids moved closer. One of them said, "What masked man?"

"Me," Grofield said.

"You don't have any mask."

In fact, he did: horn-rim glasses, bushy mustache, a bit of makeup to widen the nose and give him bags under the eyes. But he said, "You get five shots each anyway." To the guy behind the counter he said, "Treat these kids good. They're particular friends of mine." Then, having segued somehow from a Humphrey Bogart movie into a western, he sauntered off, visualizing them watching him go, visualizing himself becoming lost in the crowd.

And he pretty well was lost. Fun Island Amusement Park was fairly big as such places go, and it seemed even bigger at night. The idea of the park was that it was an island, remote from civilization, far from the cares of the workaday world. Built in the shape of a large square, it was completely enclosed by a tall board fence, on the inside of which had been painted a continuous mural of ocean scenes, with ships and birds and fur-off islands. Just inside the fence, a shallow moat ten feet wide made the park technically a true island, completely surrounded by water.

The space inside the moat was divided into eight pie-shape sections, each with rides and games and displays tied to a different island theme. Grofield had found a certain morbid fascination in hanging around the Alcatraz Island section, but it was now ten-fifteen, time to meet up with Parker again over in the part called Desert Island. So he'd best figure out which direction to drift in, and start drifting.

Down to the left was the fountain at the center of the park, spraying in high arches, lit with amber and red and green. (Grofield walked down that way, not hurrying, letting the movement of the crowd take him, and when he reached the fountain he turned right, following an easy semicircle past (he entrances to Treasure Island, New York Island, and Voodoo Island before reaching the one he wanted.

Marooned
! said great shivery neon red letters across the sky; Inside that building, Grofield knew, was a black-light ride on the general desert-island theme. Half an hour ago he himself Had taken the ride, without Parker, to familiarize himself somewhat with the terrain. Parker had been here before, of course, but this was Grofield's introduction to Fun Island.