Richard Stark - The Jugger

He recognized her. He said, “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Oh,” she said. “There you are.”

“You ready to leave that town?”

“No kidding.”

“Buy two tickets on the train to Omaha. Be sure you buy two.”

“And you’ll reimburse me, won’t you?”

“Don’t worry about it. Take the next train down here. One leaves there at six-twenty, it gets here quarter to seven.”

“I’m not even packed yet.”

“So pack. Remember, buy two tickets.”

“I remember.”

He hung up, and left the phone booth, and waited. At twenty to seven he got his suitcase from the locker where he’d stashed it, and at quarter to she came up the ramp from the tracks and he fell in beside her.

She said, “Don’t tell me, let me guess. We came in together, right?”

“Right.”

“Together all the way, right?”

“Right.”

“So now what? Miami?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What about tonight?”

“I got us a hotel room.”

“Another hotel room,” she said.

“This one’s different,” he said. He took her arm.

There were things Parker couldn’t know, things that made the whole structure break apart.

The suicide note. It was a fine suicide note, except it wasn’t accurate. When the law went to Dr. Rayborn, he denied everything for a while, and when he finally did break down he said that what he’d helped Younger cover up was a suicide, not a murder. Joseph Shardin had hanged himself, Rayborn said, and he wouldn’t change the story.

Regan was running the investigation this time, the whole thing was his, and he wasn’t about to let go. It took time, but he got a court order to have Joseph Shardin dug up, and when an autopsy was done the finding was that Shardin had committed suicide after all, but that he had, at some recent time prior to the suicide, been severely tortured.

If the Shardin murder wasn’t a murder, but was a suicide, then the Younger suicide wasn’t a suicide, but was a murder.

And there were other things. A shovel in Younger’s office, just an ordinary shovel. But what was it doing there? Regan took to prowling around the Shardin house, and after a while he noticed where a part of the cellar had been dug up and filled in again, and when he had it dug up again there was a body in there, and it turned out to be the teenager from next door, a nineteen-year-old boy who’d supposedly left a note and gone away on a trip a few days before.

It began to seem to Regan that Charles Willis was the key to the whole thing. But Willis was gone, and so was the Samuels woman. Still, Regan wanted to talk to them.

There were fingerprints in the hotel room Willis had occupied his first night that matched up with fingerprints in the Shardin house, where Willis had lived the rest of his stay in town. It took a while to get the fingerprints and match them up, but when Regan had two good ones he sent them off to Washington to see what he could find out about Charles Willis.

Everything would have worked fine if Younger really had killed Joe Sheer, but he hadn’t, and from that it just kept rolling and rolling, and finished with an answer from Washington, saying the man called Charles Willis was really Ronald Casper, wanted in California for jail-break and murder. Mug shots followed, but Parker had had plastic surgery done on his face since he’d served time as Ronald Casper, so when the mug shots didn’t look like Charles Willis it slowed everybody down a little.

But not for long. Regan knew something was wrong somewhere along the line, but he didn’t yet know what. He sent out another request; would the FBI office in Miami take a look for Charles Willis there? The address he’d given had probably been phoney, of course, but just to be on the safe side somebody ought to check it.

Another surprise; the address wasn’t phoney after all.

Parker was waiting for the elevator when the manager came over and said, “Could I see you a minute? In my office.”

“What’s up?”

“It should be private.”

Parker looked at him. The manager’s name was Freedman, J. A. Freedman. Parker had spent a month or two of each of the last ten years at this hotel, and by now he knew J. A. Freedman pretty well.

Freedman touched Parker’s arm and said, softly, “It’s important. Really.”

“All right.”

Freedman led the way to his office. He was short and barrel-shaped and walked as though he’d do better if he rolled instead. His face was made of Silly Putty, plus horn-rimmed glasses.

In his office, he motioned Parker to sit down and then said, “Frankly, Mr. Willis, this is somewhat embarrassing. I don’t quite know how to go about it.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Apparently,” Freedman said, making vague gestures as though he wanted to minimize what he was saying, “apparently, you’re in some sort of trouble. It’s none of my business, tax trouble, I suppose, business trouble of some kind. It could happen to any of us, to me, to anybody.”

It was almost two weeks since he’d come back from Sagamore. The woman he’d left down here had been gone by the time he’d come back, so he’d been keeping Rhonda around since then. As soon as Freedman said trouble, Parker knew it had to do with Sagamore, something had broken there. He said, “Why do you say I’m in trouble?”

“Two Federal agents came here looking for you.”

It was Sagamore. He said, “What did they say?”

“Nothing, Mr. Willis. Only that they were looking for you.”

“What did you say?”

Freedman spread his hands. “I have to co-operate. You’re a businessman yourself, you understand the problem.”

“Sure.”

“I told them your room number, but that I didn’t believe you were in. They said they’d wait in your room. I sent them up with a bellboy to let them in, and I’ve been watching for you ever since. Half an hour, I suppose. The least I can do is warn you. There are two of them, so I imagine they hope to catch you off-guard, get you to say more than you should. I thought you should know, in case you want to contact your attorney, make any preparations.”

They already had Rhonda. She’d hold out five minutes when she found out they were Federal. Parker said, “Thanks. I appreciate this.”

“Not at all. Our positions could easily be reversed.” Freedman smiled sadly. “Government doesn’t understand business,” he said.

Parker got to his feet. “Things I’d better do first,” he said.

“Of course, of course. I hope this trouble won’t — inconvenience you too badly.”

“Maybe it won’t. Thanks again.”

“Anytime.”

Parker went back out to the lobby. Did they have another man down here? Did they have pictures of him? He didn’t cross the lobby, but went the other way, through the bar and out of the door on the other side and diagonally across to the hack stand. He didn’t wait for the boy in the purple uniform to open the door for him, but did it himself and crowded into the back seat. “Coconut Grove,” he said. “Bayshore Drive.” The first address that came into his head, to get him away from here.

Riding away from the hotel, he wondered what had gone wrong. Well, it didn’t matter. It had gone sour, that’s all. The Charles Willis name was useless now, the whole cover shot.

It meant about sixty thousand to him, too, stashed away in bank accounts and hotel safes under the Willis name. He didn’t dare go after any of that now. He had about a hundred on him, and that was it, that was all he had to get started on.

In Coconut Grove he left the cab and stole a car, a white Rambler station wagon. He pointed it north and started driving, leaving behind everything, the name he’d built up and the money he’d stashed, and the whole pattern of life he’d developed.