Sharon figured it out you wouldn’t have anything to do with her, she’d leave you alone. But the whole situation made me very nervous. Particularly because Beaghler’s also a pothead, and he figured to bring some grass along on the job. To smoke in the mountains.”
“It was almost a good idea,” Parker said, “except for the people.”
“Well, I got something else right away,” Ducasse said, “so it worked out okay. When I left there, I went back and got in touch with my contact, and he had something for me. They only needed one guy, though, so there was no point contacting you about it.”
Parker shrugged.
“But then there was something else came along,” Ducasse said. “You know Ed Mackey?”
“I used to.”
“Well, I contacted some people here and there, trying to find a buyer for those damn statues. You know, before I walked out on it. So after I got together on this other thing, I heard back from Ed Mackey. It seems he’s putting together an art heist himself, and he needs some people, and through the feelers I put out, he got onto the idea of me. So he got in touch, but I said I was already working, and I mentioned you. He said he knew you and he’d like to work with you, and I said I’d pass it on.”
“He give you any details?”
Ducasse shook his head. “I wasn’t interested, so there wasn’t any point. But I know Ed, he’s a real professional. He’s no Bob Beaghler.”
Parker knew that was true. “I appreciate it,” he said.
“Listen,” Ducasse said, “I know I was getting kind of tight with my money, and I had the idea you were into the same kind of situation, so what the hell. You’d do the same thing for me.”
Parker nodded; he would now. “I picked up a few thousand the other day,” he said, “but it didn’t help much. I need a major score.”
“Well, that’s what this is, according to Ed. I have where he’ll be staying next week.” He took a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it across. Parker took it and put it away without looking at it.
Then there were fifteen minutes of small-talk. Parker never took pleasure in that kind of thing, but he knew other people found it necessary and he’d trained himself to take part in it. Finally, though, Ducasse’s iceless drink was finished and Parker could get to his feet and say, “Good luck on your job.”
“And the same to you,” said Ducasse. He was grinning a little loosely. “May we both get rich,” he said.
Part 2
One
Parker stood looking at the painting. It was four feet high and five feet wide, a slightly blurred black-and-white blowup of a news photograph showing a very bad automobile accident, all mashed parts and twisted metal. A body could obscurely be seen trapped inside the car, held there by jagged pieces of metal and glass. Superimposed here and there on the photograph were small comic-book figures in comic-book colors, masked heroes in bright costumes, all in running positions, with raised knees and clenched fists and straining shoulders and set jaws. There were perhaps a dozen of the small figures running this way and that over the surface of the photograph, like tropical birds on a dead bush. The painting was titled “Violence.”
Parker turned his attention to the mimeographed sheet he’d been given at the door. “Violence” had been loaned to the exhibit by Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Shakauer of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, who had purchased it in 1966 for thirty-five thousand dollars.
Parker moved on to the next painting. Hexagonally shaped, three feet in diameter, it was an exact replica of a red-background white-lettering STOP sign, with plastic sculptured noses glued onto it all over. This one was titled “Thanacleon IV.” Parker looked at the mimeographed sheet again: painted by, loaned by, purchased in 1968 for eighteen thousand dollars.
He moved on. There were twenty-one paintings in the exhibit, mounted on the white walls and on a temporary divider down the middle of the room. Adding up the numbers on the mimeographed sheet, a total of three hundred seventy-five thousand dollars had been paid out at one time or another in the last eight years for these paintings.
Parker studied every one of them. He also studied the seven private guards—gray uniforms, revolvers on right hip—standing around the room like seven more exhibits, and the other two armed guards moving back and forth in the hall outside, constantly passing the doorway. The fifteen or twenty other visitors to the exhibit at the moment all seemed to be ordinary citizens, none of them having that aura about them of the plainclothes cop.
When he had seen everything, Parker folded the mimeographed sheet and put it in his suit-coat pocket and left. The exhibit was being housed for this temporary show in a second-floor room in a downtown bank building, and he had his choice of elevator or stairs to the first floor. He went down the stairs and outside, and a municipal police car was parked by the fire hydrant in front of this entrance. It had been there when he’d gone in, and for the second time the two cops inside it gave him a casual once-over. He turned left, went down to the corner, left again, and half a block to the rented car. Sunlight glistened off everything; the time was two-ten.
It took twenty-five minutes to drive out to the motel. Mackey and his woman were the only ones in the pool area when Parker turned in from the highway. Mackey, standing on the diving board in his flower-patterned trunks, waved a big hello. Parker lifted a hand from the steering wheel, put it back, and drove on in past the office, while Mackey dove into the blue water, swam the length of the pool, climbed out, grabbed his towel, and came padding toward his room. His woman stayed at the pool.
Parker was leaning on the front of the rental car when Mackey got there. Mackey said, “You saw it?”
“I saw it.”
Mackey had his towel around his shoulders and his room key in his hand. Opening the door, he said, “It isn’t really warm enough to swim, you know? Not quite warm enough.” He pushed open the door, stepped in, hit the light switch beside the door. Parker followed him in and shut the door behind him.
