“All right,” Flynn said, but there was something in his voice and in his eye that Mackey didn’t like. “Hold it,” he said. Flynn gave him an attentive look.
Mackey said into the phone, “I think this fella here needs a pep talk from Florio. He looks like he’s nerving himself up to something.”
Flynn, all wounded innocence, said, “I wouldn’t—” but Mackey shushed him with a wave of his hand.
Wycza said, “Hold on,” and turned to Florio. He said, “My man Flynn says your man Flynn doesn’t understand the situation. He might have something cute in mind.”
Angrily, Florio said, “Over my—” and stopped.
“That’s right,” Wycza said. Extending the phone toward Florio, he said, “Maybe you ought to tell him that yourself.”
Mackey, hearing Wycza, held his phone out toward Flynn. “Your master’s voice,” he said.
Flynn took the phone doubtfully, held it to his ear as though it might bite him, and said, “Mr. Florio?”
The phone bit him. Looking pained, Flynn tried to break in three or four times with no success, and finally managed to say, “Of course, Mr. Florio. You’re the boss, Mr. Florio, I wouldn’t— No, sir, I won’t.”
Mackey waited, looking around the room. According to Faran’s sketch, that door on the right should lead to the vault room where the money was kept, and the door on the left should lead to the employees’ parlor where the dealers and stickmen took their smoke breaks and where the three armed guards hung out when they weren’t out patrolling the floor. Coming at the joint this way, through Florio and Flynn, they were by-passing all the security devices, the armed guards and the timelocks and the buzzer alarms and all the other protective arrangements that had been set up around here.
It was Parker’s plan, to Faran’s inside information, done without any casing at all, and it was working just beautifully.
Flynn, chastened, finally handed the phone back to Mackey. He was still a trifle mulish, but Mackey didn’t doubt he meant it this time when he said, “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“That’s fine.” Mackey said into the phone, “You there?”
Wycza said, “Right here.”
“Everything’s fine now.”
Flynn said, “I’ll need to use the phone. I can put that call on hold if you want.”
“Good idea.” Into the phone, Mackey said, “You’re going on hold for a minute.”
Flynn took the phone, called his receptionist, and told her. “Call George and tell him there are two men about to come over to the door. He’s to let them in, and then you should let them directly through in here. That’s right. Thank you.” He pressed a button that took Dan Wycza off hold and returned the phone to Mackey. “There.” he said.
Outside, Hurley had quit the blackjack game twenty dollars ahead and was now kibitzing the crap table where Dalesia had so far lost thirty-five dollars. Hurley saw the man on duty at the brown wooden door reach for the wall phone, and tapped Dalesia, saying, “Time to go.”
“Right.” Dalesia left a five-dollar chip riding on the nine, and the two men walked across the room to where the doorman was just hanging up the phone. He said, “You the two gentlemen Mr. Flynn’s expecting?”
They thought he meant Mackey. “That’s right,” Dalesia said, “we’re the ones.”
The door buzzed, and the doorman pushed it open. “Go right on in,” he said.
“Thanks,” Dalesia said.
* * *
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.