* * *
Dutch Buenadella owned two more dirty-movie palaces in Tyler besides the Mature Art. One was called the Cine, and the other was the Pussycat. But the Mature Art was the only one of the three with a good burglar-alarm system and a solid reliable safe, so the skim cash from all three theaters was kept there, piling up until once a month it was split into so many pie slices and distributed to the partners.
It had been three weeks since the last distribution, and the safe upstairs in the manager’s office at the Mature Art held nine thousand two hundred dollars in skim cash from the three theaters. In addition, there was eight hundred fifty dollars cash maintained as a sort of floating fund to help grease the ways should any unexpected problems come up, or to bribe a fire inspector, or pay a fine if it should come to that. And there was also an envelope, sealed and wrapped with two rubber bands, marked Personal in Dutch Buenadella’s handwriting and underlined, containing four hundred dollars; one of Buenadella’s private caches in case it ever turned out to be necessary to leave town in a hurry when the banks were closed, such as at four o’clock in the morning.
Ralph Wiss had breathed on the lobby door and it had opened. Elkins had looked in the cashier’s drawer and found it empty, and then the two of them had gone on upstairs, following Elkins’ pencil flashlight. The manager’s office was next to the men’s room, from which came a muted but rancid odor that it seemed impossible to get used to.
Because the manager’s office had a window that overlooked the street, they couldn’t switch the overhead fluorescent light on, but with the Venetian blinds closed over the window, they could operate by the light of Elkins’ flash. The office was a small cluttered room with a sloppy desk piled high with papers, an incredible number of notes and messages taped to the walls, a bulking water cooler next to a scratched metal filing cabinet, and a stack of metal film-carrying cans piled messily in one corner.
In another corner stood the safe, a dark green metal cube twenty inches on a side, with an L-shaped chrome handle and a large combination dial. Elkins gave Wiss the flashlight, and Wiss studied the front and top and sides of the safe, running his fingers over the metal, squinting at the line where the door joined the edge. He made a kind of whistling S sound between his tongue and his upper teeth as he studied the safe, a noise that Elkins had at one time found annoying—it sounded like a tire going flat—but over the years had grown used to, so that ho no longer really heard it.
“Drill,” Wiss decided.
Elkins nodded. “Sure.”
Wiss brought an empty film can over, set the flashlight on it so that it shone on the face of the safe, and sat on the floor directly in front of the safe with his black-leather bag at his side. As he opened the bag, Elkins said, “I’ll go on downstairs.”
Wiss was involved in his own head. “Uh huh,” he said, taking things out of the bag, and didn’t look around when Elkins left the room.
Elkins made his way downstairs in the dark, entered the cashier’s booth, and sat on the stool there with his elbows on the counter. He could look out diagonally through the cashier’s window and the glass doors at the street, where absolutely nothing at all was happening.
After a minute he heard the faint whirring of an electric drill from upstairs.
* * *
At Vigilant, the four guards and one of the ready-room men were tied and gagged and locked in one of the smaller rooms downstairs. Handy McKay and Fred Ducasse and Philly Webb were upstairs, playing pinochle. The other ready-room man was tied to a chair and blindfolded, so that the three men wouldn’t have to wear their hoods. They needed the ready man present in case the phone should ring. As Handy had told him, “If it rings, you’ll do the talking. If you say the right things, there won’t be any problem. But if you say something that brings trouble here— guess who’ll be the first one in the line of fire?”
“I’m not crazy,” the man said. He had gotten over being annoyed that Handy and Ducasse weren’t crazy either.
“That’s fine,” Handy told him, and then made a phone call himself to Parker. “Everything’s fine here,” he said.
“Good.”
Handy gave him the phone number at Vigilant and said, “See you later.”
“So long,” said Parker.
* * *
Flynn stood in the vault doorway, lips pursed in disapproval, watching Dalesia and Hurley stuff wads of bills into two flat black dispatch cases they had been carrying beneath their shirts. When both soft leather cases were bulging with bills, the two men brought out money belts from around their waists and began packing the compartments of those as well.
Next door, Mackey sat at Flynn’s desk, the phone to his ear, occasionally exchanging a word with Wycza. Mackey had his feet up on the desk and was smoking a cigar from Flynn’s humidor. He had considered putting Wycza on hold long enough to call Brenda, waiting for him at the Holiday Inn, but decided he shouldn’t fool around like that. Besides, she was probably asleep by now.
Downstairs, Wycza and Florio talked health food. Wycza, like most professionals, believed in keeping the civilians as calm as possible, since nervous people tend to insist on getting themselves shot, so he had tried several conversational openings with Florio, talking about the boxing world and the nightclub world and the gambling world, until he got around to physical exercise, care of the body, and health food. That turned out to be Florio’s subject; the floodgates opened, and out it came. “Now, Adelle Davis—”
“Carlton Fredericks—”
“Natural sea salt,” Wycza insisted, “is a fake. That’s one case where it doesn’t matter, salt is salt.”
“The processing plants.” Florio, forgetting Mike Carlow’s gun, forgetting the robbery going on upstairs, leaned over the table, gesturing, talking emphatically and learnedly.
Wycza, too, was a health nut, and had almost himself forgotten the reason they were all here. He rode his hobby-horse just as hard as Florio did, the two men finding broad areas of agreement and occasional bumps of deep
