Orleans, or more rarely New York. He never knew ahead of time where it would be, and he didn’t concern himself. He would simply stop at Frank Schroder’s real estate office, pick up the tickets and his instructions and the bag with the money in it, and be on his way.
In that port city, whichever one it turned out to be, he would usually have a phone number to call, though every once in a while there would be an actual physical meet at the airport; New York was mostly done that way. He would turn over the money, receive his stock, and take the next plane back to Tyler. Then he would drive to the house on East Tenth Street, go up to his apartment, and wait for the first knock on the door.
It was never long in coming. Ben Pelzer was the Man’s Man, the wholesaler for all the street dealers in Tyler. Frank Schroder had other wholesalers for other territories, but the nickel-dime action on the street, for the pillbox or paper twist you bought downtown in a doorway or on a park bench, was where Ben Pelzer’s merchandise changed hands.
And the weekend was the rush season. On Friday night and Saturday morning the retailers would come by Barry Pearlman’s place to stock up, and by Saturday night they’d be coming back again to replenish. They couldn’t buy it all at once because this was strictly a cash business, and none of the retailers ever had enough cash on a Friday to buy a full weekend’s supply.
On an average week, Pelzer’s goods brought in about one hundred thousand dollars on the street. Twenty percent of that stayed with the retailers, the rest coming to the Pearlman apartment. Pelzer’s cut was two percent of the weekly cash in hand, averaging about sixteen hundred dollars, which was a very healthy weekly wage indeed. The remaining seventy-five or eighty thousand, Frank Schroder’s share from which additional stock was purchased and the law was paid off and the main partnership received their dividends, was amassed all weekend in a suitcase under Pelzer’s bed.
That was a lot of cash money to have in one place, particularly when people like Ben Pelzer’s customers knew about it, but there’d never been any attempt to steal it. In the first place, everyone who knew about the money also knew whose it was. And in the second place, Pelzer and the cash were never alone in the apartment; two of Frank Schroder’s men always sat in, arriving on Friday no more than half an hour after Ben himself took occupancy, and staying with him and the money all through the weekend. The two regular men, Jerry Trask and Frank Slade, were big and tough-looking, a strong contrast with slender, neat Ben Pelzer, and over the last few years the three of them had filled in the idle hours on the long weekends with an endless game of Monopoly. They loaned one another money, forgave one another rents, invented easy new rules, and did everything possible to keep the game going. They were all paper millionaires by now, using the cash from three Monopoly sets for their liquid assets, with hotels on every property, and wholesale swaps of entire complexes. None of them ever got tired of the game, which was permanently set up on a card table in the middle of the apartment living room.
Pelzer’s work-week—and his time as Barry Pearlman—ended late Monday night. Following the weekend trade, there was always one last spurt of buying on Monday, as the retailers stocked up for their daily business, the serious customers as opposed to the weekend joy-poppers. By midnight on Monday that final rush of business would be completed, but Pelzer always kept the shop open until one a.m., just to be on the safe side. Finally, at one o’clock on the dot, he would leave the Monopoly game and lock himself in the bedroom while Trask and Slade washed the dishes and generally tidied up. If anybody rang the doorbell after one o’clock, they were out of luck— nobody would answer.
In the bedroom, Pelzer would put the suitcase on the bed, take the money out, and slowly count it. This week the total was eighty-two thousand, nine hundred twelve dollars. His two percent of that would be sixteen hundred fifty-eight dollars and twenty-four cents, but he was supposed to even that off down to the nearest hundred, so this week he was exactly making his average: sixteen hundred dollars. He took that money in the cleanest bills, mostly in twenties and fifties, and stuffed it away in a money belt he took from the closet, then put on under his shirt. He took another five hundred dollars, in tens and twenties, set it to one side on the bed, and closed the suitcase. Then he unlocked the bedroom door and carried the suitcase and the extra five hundred dollars out to the living room.
The five hundred was his associates’ pay: two-fifty apiece. He had never discussed his own salary with them, so they were unaware of the disparity between his sixteen hundred and their two and a half; being unaware of it, they were not made troubled by it.
From here on, the routine was that they would leave the apartment and drive in Pelzer’s car over to the parking lot behind Frank Schroder’s real estate office, where another car would be waiting for them. Trask and Slade and the suitcase would transfer to the other car, and Pelzer would go home, where his wife would be waiting up for him with a midnight snack. They’d eat together, do the dishes, and go to bed, Pelzer then remaining at home, puttering around his garden and his workbench, until Friday morning and the beginning of another week.
It was an easy schedule, clear-cut and relaxed. It gave him four nights and three full days with his family every week, it offered him interesting travel and introduced him to a wide variety of human types, it paid him handsomely, and there had never been a bit of trouble.
Until tonight.
* * *
Carlow said, “Here they come.”
The routine was, they had Pelzer’s Oldsmobile Cutlass spotted, nearly a block from the apartment, and they were parked behind it—in a different car now, Carlow having traded the Mercury in on an American Motors Ambassador. The air-conditioner worked better on this car, but there still wasn’t room for all three in front, not with one of them Dan Wycza. He sat in back, leaning forward with his forearms on the seat back, and he and Devers and Carlow watched the three men come out of the small tenement-style apartment house a block away and turn in this direction. The smaller man in the middle carried an apparently heavy suitcase, while the bigger men flanking him kept looking left and right as they walked.
“I look at them,” Wycza said, “I look at those people, and I know they aren’t sensible.”
Devers said, “You think they’ll give us a hard time?”
“I think we ought to start right off by shooting them in the head.”
Devers looked troubled. “I don’t know,” he said.
“I do,” Carlow said. Nodding his head toward Wycza, he told Devers, “He’s right. The two big ones are hired to mother the money. They lose the money, they’re dead anyway.”
“I’m a pretty good shot,” Devers said. “Let me just plink one, and then we’ll give them a chance to work it out for themselves.”
Carlow twisted around to look at Wycza, get his opinion. These three men didn’t know one another, had never worked together, had only met today, Wycza and Devers on the plane and Carlow in Parker’s apartment. It was
