Richard Stark's formula: The Mourner (1963)

WHEN the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away. The asthmatic hit the carpet, but there'd been another one out there, and he landed on Parker's back like a duffel bag with arms. Parker fell turning, so that the duffel bag would be on the bottom, but it didn't quite work out that way. They landed sideways, jokingly, and the gun skittered away into the darkness....

I read the first three Richard Stark novels about master thief Parker two decades ago. Then I got diverted onto the main road of Donald E. Westlake's novels about Dortmunder. Then, as they say, way led unto way.

This morning before work I finished The Mourner (1963), the fourth novel about Parker.

The thief is perhaps slightly sentimental in this tale. For instance, after being betrayed by a partner, he hangs around a crime scene to ensure both quick medical treatment for himself, then bargaining for significant treatment for his gut-shot comrade, Handy McKay. I can't help thinking The Man with the Getaway Face would have walked away and let Handy take his own chances.

The Parker novels are all organized on the same strict outline and time table, like Von Schleiffen's war plans.

Part One starts off in the middle of complications with a tough and violent action scene. Then we go back and forth a few chapters, catching up to that opening jaw-dropper.

Part Two gives us the heist in several chapters, ending with the double cross.

Part Three in a Parker heist novel is always told from the point of view of a character out to thwart Parker. Usually the guy who thought he could get away with stabbing him in the back. (In The Mourner this is Inspector Menlo, part of the secret police of a small Carpathian Stalinist republic. Once Menlo has his hands on the stolen statue of a Medieval mourner, he puts a bullett each in Parker and McKay. Too bad he used a .22 Derringer.)

Part Four: we are back with Parker. We follow him from the moment of double-cross until the end of the book.

Stark/Westlake's best scenes take us from a big picture to a small one.

Here Parker and McKay break into Menlo's house (early in the story when they are still partners):

….ON THAT block was a row of two-family houses, built before the war. The one they wanted was on the corner. What the Outfit used it for normally they didn't know, but right now Menlo was living in the downstairs flat, and the upstairs flat, according to Ambridge, was empty.

They'd stopped off on the way to get rid of the truck and pick up their own car, where Handy had left it earlier in the evening. The car was a Pontiac, two years old. It was hot, but not on the East coast, and the papers on it were a good imitation of the real thing.

Handy was driving, and a block from the address he took his foot off the accelerator. The car slowed. There were tail-lights ahead. A car was double-parked in front of the house they wanted, lights on and motor running.

"Go on past," Parker said. "Then around the block."

Parker looked the car over on the way by. It was a black Continental. The man at the wheel wore a chauffeur's cap and was reading the Star.The car carried New York plates, and they started DPL. Diplomat. Beyond the car was the house, the ground floor all lit up, the upper story dark.

It was almost three o'clock in the morning. The Continental out front with diplomat plates at three in the morning wasn't a good sign. Parker said, "Hurry around the block. Park on the cross street."

"I'm ahead of you," Handy answered. "What did that guy say Manlo was? A defector?"

"Yeah."

They left the Pontiac half a block from Bradley, on the side street that flanked the house they wanted. This way they could get to the back door without tipping the chauffeur in the Continental.

There was a white picket fence separating the back yard from the sidewalk, with a white picket gate. The gate opened with no trouble and no squeaking, and they went across the slate walk to the stoop and up on to the back porch. The kitchen door stood wide open, and the storm door was closed but not locked. The kitchen was empty, but casting bright, wide swatches of light out through the window and doorway.

Handy's touch with doors was the lightest. The storm door never made a sound. They stood on linoleum with a black-and-white diamond design, and listened. The refrigerator hummed, and on a different note the circular fluorescent light in the ceiling also hummed. The rest of the house was silent. Bright and silent.

An open door to the right led to the bedroom, but with no bed in it. The ceiling light was on two seventy-five-watt-bulbs unshielded and in the glare the bedroom was a bleak cubicle full of unmarked cardboard cartons, stacked along the walls. The Venetian blinds were down across both windows.

A hall led off the kitchen. Midway along it was a brace of doorways facing each other. The one on the left opened on to the bathroom, gleaming with white tile and white porcelain and white enamel, with a brightly burning white fluorescent tube over the mirror above the sink. The doorway on the right led to another bedroom, this one containing a bed. This too was garishly lit, and looked like a whore's crib. A double bed dominated the room, covered by a cheap tan spread, and without pillows. A scarred dresser stood on the opposite wall, and the bed was flanked on one side by a black kitchen chair and on the other by a small wooden table containing nothing but a chipped ashtray.

At the end of the hall was a dining-room, lit by a rococo ceiling fixture of rose-tinted-glass. The cream-and-tan wallpaper was a faded pattern of ivy and Grecian columns. Centred beneath the light was a poker table, round and covered with green felt, with eight wells around the outer edge for the player's money and drinks. Eight chairs crouched around the table, on a faded Oriental rug. There was no other furniture in the room.

The third bedroom, off the dining-room, was apparently the one Menlo was using, for there was clothing draped on the chair, hairbrush and cuff-links and other things on the dresser, and an expensive-looking alarm clock on the night table.

A wide archway led from dining-room to living-room, which was furnished in an old-fashioned way, in dark colours and heavy overstuffed furniture.

Every light in the house was on, and the Continental still waited out front, though all the rooms were empty.

Handy caught Parker's eye, and pointed at the floor. Parker nodded. Still moving cautiously and silently, they went back to the kitchen. The first door they tried opened on to the pantry, but the second showed cellar stairs angling away to the left. Light came up from below, and the sound of someone talking, softly and conversationally. And there was another sound, a steady scraping and chuffing, slow and rhythmic.

Handy already had the.380 out. Parker unlimbered the Terrier, and led the way down. The stairs angled sharply to the left, and then went straight down the rest of the way, towards the rear wall of the house, so that most of the basement was behind Parker as he came down. He came halfway, then crouching on the stairs, ducked his head under the banister and looked back at the rest of the cellar.

Three hundred-watt bulbs were spaced along under the I-beam that ran down the middle of the ceiling. All were unshielded, and all were lit, throwing the dirt-floored cellar in stark, almost shadowless, relief. An old coal furnace hulked on one side, with its squat oil converter crouched in front of it. Several barrels of trash were standing alongside two deep metal sinks.

Down at the other end, the fat man was digging his own grave....

___

Jay

9 April 2018

Ever-decreasing circles: The Jugger by Richard Stark (1965)

Joe Sheer from Omaha, retired but long a sort of world wide web server relaying messages between North American heisters, is facing trouble in his old age in the town of Sagamore, Nebraska.

Parker,

You got to excuse an old man. I need help. You know I never in my life pushed for anybody to get me out of any trouble, but I'm getting old and rusty and scared. If you want to tell me to go to hell that's okay, but if you got the time and inclination I could use a hand up here. I don't promise you any profit out of it at all. In fact I don't see how you could break even on travel expenses unless I pay for them, and I will. If you got a woman, bring her along and I'll pay for her too. A young hardcase like you could take care of this problem of mine with no sweat, and sit around and drink beer a while afterwards. This isn't trouble I would have thought twice about ten years ago, but now is another story. Anyway, if you're coming, just come, and if you're not then don't and I won't hold it against you. Whatever you do for God sake don't call me on the telephone.

Joe


The source of Joe's trouble is Sagamore, Nebraska's murderous and dumb police chief, Abner L. Younger. Well, Younger is stupid, but lethal to those he thinks are not already in his control. (He's no Lou Ford.)

Younger thinks Sheer buried over a million from a lifetime of heists at his Sagamore property. It never occurs to Younger that men like Sheer could run through loot, survive hand-to-mouth, and end up with nothing.

Parker takes an interest in all this because he thinks he needs to suss-out his own exposure. Did Sheer give Younger the names and aliases of old comrades?

The Jugger (1965) by Richard Stark is not on a par with the first three novels about Parker. As with The Mourner (1963), Parker seems like the old self-contained shark, but comradely proclivities keep pushing to the surface. I suspect by the fourth and fifth book in the series, Stark/Westlake could see the corner he painted himself into with the character.

In the end, taking care of Younger creates enough ripples to completely unravel Parker's legal civilian credentials under the name Charles Willis.

Back to the drawing board.


Jay
10 April 2018

Gutted: The Handle by Richard Stark (1966).

The Handle by Richard Stark (1966).

The bad news first: Grofield is back as Parker's first choice for a team to gut the gambling island of Cockaigne, 60 miles south of Galveston.

Grofield is a clever cluck who comes and goes like a virus through the Parker novels. He seems like an escapee from a lightweight caper penned by Donald E. Westlake or Lawrence Block. An actor who supports his theatrical career by cold-blooded and murderous crime? Yock, yock, yock.

Still, a Stark heist plot can overcome most such failings.

The owner if the casino on Cockaigne is - and I am not making this up - Baron Wolfgang von Altstein. He has sold the Soviets and the Cubans on the idea that he is building an intelligence network, but he's actually a Sturmabteilung alumnist in it for himself.

Both the U.S. government and the outfit want Baron von Altstein and his operation stopped. (Shades of Operation Mongoose).The outfit hires Parker to do it. The U.S. government goes along, hoping to double cross Parker when the heist is over.

This is very far from a midwest armored car hijacking.

Seems like we're in James Bond la-la-land. Gert Frobe is playing von Altstein, Ken Adam did the casino design, and Peter Hunt is editing.

Poor Salsa. Too good a man to be thrown away like this.

Jay
12 April 2018

Richard Stark's finale

When Westlake/Stark returned to the Parker character in 1997, there was a new curiosity about the connectedness of characters and plots. The titles of the novels starting with Comeback demonstrate this knowing linkedness:

Comeback (Mysterious Press, 1997)

Backflash (Mysterious Press, 1998)

Flashfire (Mysterious Press, 2000)

Firebreak (Mysterious Press, 2001)

Breakout (Mysterious Press, 2002)

In hindsight, there is a cohesive arch leading toward the superb Breakout, where the protagonist assumes the task of an Edmond Dantes: escape incarceration or be imprisoned forever. 

*   *   *

The last three Richard Stark novels written by Donald E. Westlake form an ambitious overarching trilogy of plot. Westlake had done the same at the beginning of the criminal flueve in 1960 with The Hunter and it's for subsequent volumes: the heister Parker coming back from the dead to square off against former partners and the outfit.

Nobody Runs Forever and subsequent volumes form a Westlake/Stark Northeast trilogy, covering a postage stamp of the New York/Massachusetts border area, before heading south for Long Island.

In Nobody Runs Forever (2004) Parker, McWhitney, and Dalesia plot to knock off an armored car carrying a small Massachusetts town's cash holdings when the branches are combined. There's an inside line for intelligence, but they're being shadowed by two bounty hunters, Ray Keenan and Sandra Loscalzo, whose everyday work Parker has inadvertently thwarted. 

Nobody Runs Forever ends with the clockwork operation against the armored car. The heist team hides the loot locally in the choir loft of a defunct church. Cops flood the area too fast for Parker, McWhitney, and Dalesia to drive the cash and themselves away the next morning. They split up and Parker heads for the tall timber, pursued by literal bloodhounds.

*   *   *

As Ask The Parrot (2006) begins, Parker is climbing a wooded hill just ahead of cops and bloodhounds. As he reaches the  top he meets Tom Lindahl.

….The afternoon sun was to Parker's left, the sky beyond the man a pale October ash, the man himself only a silhouette. With a rifle.

    Not a cop. Not with a group. A man standing, looking down toward Parker, hearing the same hounds Parker heard, holding the rifle easy at a slant across his front, pointed up and to the side. Parker looked down again, chose the next tree trunk, pulled himself up.

    It was another three or four minutes before he drew level with the man, who stepped back a pace and said, "That's good. Right there's good."

    "I have to keep moving," Parker said, but he stopped, wishing these shoes gave better traction on dead leaves.

    The man said, "You one of those robbers I've been hearing about on the TV? Took all a bank's money, over in Massachusetts?"

    Parker said nothing. If the rifle moved, he would have to meet it.

    The man watched him, and for a few seconds they only considered one another. The man was about fifty, in a red leather hunting jacket with many pockets, faded blue jeans, and black boots. His eyes were shielded by a billed red and black flannel cap. Beside him on the ground was a gray canvas sack, partly full, with brown leather handles.

    Seen up close, there was a tension in the man that seemed to be a part of him, not something caused by running into a fugitive in the woods. His hands were clenched on the rifle, and his eyes were bitter, as though something had harmed him at some point and he was determined not to let it happen again.

    Then he shook his head and made a downturned mouth, impatient with the silence. "The reason I ask," he said, "when I saw you coming up, and heard the dogs, I thought if you are one of the robbers, I want to talk to you." He shrugged, a pessimist to his boots, and said, "If you're not, you can stay here and pat the dogs."

    "I don't have it on me," Parker said.

    Surprised, the man said, "Well, no, you couldn't. It was about a truckload of cash, wasn't it?"

    "Something like that."

    The man looked downhill. The dogs couldn't be seen yet, but they could be heard, increasingly frantic and increasingly excited, held back by their handlers' lesser agility on the hill. "This could be your lucky day," he said, "and mine, too." Another sour face. "I could use one." Stooping to pick up his canvas sack, he said, "I'm hunting for the pot, that's what I'm doing. I have a car back here."

    Parker followed him the short climb to the crest, where the trees were thinner but within a cluster of them a black Ford SUV was parked on a barely visible dirt road. "Old logging road," the man said, and opened the back cargo door of the SUV to put the rifle and sack inside. "I'd like it if you'd sit up front."

    "Sure."

    Parker got into the front passenger seat as the man came around the other side to get behind the wheel. The key was already in the ignition. He started the car and drove them at an angle down the wooded north slope, the road usually visible only because it was free of trees.

    Driving, eyes on the dirt lane meandering downslope ahead of them, the man said, "I'm Tom Lindahl. You should give me something to call you."

    "Ed," Parker decided.

    "Do you have any weapons on you, Ed?"

    "No."

    "There's police roadblocks all around here."

    "I know that."

    "What I mean is, if you think you can jump me and steal my car, you wouldn't last more than ten minutes."

    Parker said, "Can you get around the roadblocks?"

    "It's only a few miles to my place," Lindahl said. "We won't run into anybody. I know these roads."

    "Good."

    Parker looked past Lindahl's sour face, downslope to the left, and through the trees now he could just see a road, two-lane blacktop, below them and running parallel to them. A red pickup truck went by down there, the opposite way, uphill. Parker said, "Can they see us from the road, up in here?"

    "Doesn't matter."

    "They'll get to the top in a few minutes, with the dogs," Parker said. "They'll see this road, they'll figure I'm in a car."

    "Soon we'll be home," Lindahl said, and unexpectedly laughed, a rusty sound as though he didn't do much laughing. "You're the reason I came out," he said.

    "Oh, yeah?"

    "The TV's full of the robbery, all that money gone, I couldn't stand it any more. Those guys don't get slapped around, I thought. Those guys aren't afraid of their own shadow, they go out and do what has to be done. I got so mad at myself—I'll tell you right now, I'm a coward—I just had to come out with the gun awhile. Those two rabbits back there, I can use them, God knows, but I didn't really need them just yet. It was you brought me out."

    Parker watched his profile. Now that he was talking, Lindahl seemed just a little less bitter. Whatever was bothering him, it must make it worse to hold it in.

    Lindahl gave him a quick glance, his expression now almost merry. "And here you are," he said. "And up close, I got to tell you, you don't look like that much of a world-beater."

    He steered left, dogwn a steep slope, and the logging road met the blacktop.

Tom Lindahl is one of life's losers especially to himself. He lives in an old converted garage, subsisting on Social Security and what he can hunt. He has staked out the mountain because he has a proposition for any armored car heister he might chance to meet.

There is the usual to-ing and fro-ing with ancillary characters, some of whom realize Lindahlhl and Parker are not on the up-and-up in their "old pal" ruse. Together they join a local Rod and Gun Club posse hunting the armored car bandits, creating further complications.

Ask A Parrot is a satisfying and cozy lark, the middle of a longer structure, allowing Parker to inadvertently help the loser Tom get revenge on the world that betrayed him. It also offers a very satisfying racetrack robbery.

*   *   *

Dirty Money (2008) returns Parker to the main plot stream begun in Nobody Runs Forever. He gets safely back to Claire and rural New Jersey and plans to regroup to retrieve the hidden armored car loot. This reunites him with fellow heister McWhitney and bounty hunter Sandra Loscalzo. The trio must not only beard local road block. The armored car cash has traceable serial numbers: they will have to sell it to a middleman who can transfer the cash abroad.

….Parker was the first to arrive. Leaving his car in the parking area, carrying a deli-bought Reuben-on-rye sandwich and a bottle of water in a brown paper bag, he chose a picnic bench midway between the facade of the low brick park police building and the narrow access road around to the parking area. He sat with the building to his right, access road to his left, parking area ahead.

     It was a bright day, but a little too cool for lunch in the open air, and most of the dozen other picnic tables were empty. Parker put the paper bag on the rough wood table, leaned forward on his elbows, and waited.

     The red Dodge Ram pickup was next, nosing in and around the access road to park so the driver was in profile to the picnic area. Then he opened a Daily News and sat in the cab, reading the sports pages at the back. Parker would have preferred him to move to a table, as being less conspicuous, but it wasn't a problem.

     The next arrival might be. A Daimler town car, black, it had a driver wearing a chauffeur's cap, and it stopped on the access road itself. The driver got out to open the rear door, and Frank Meany stepped out, looking everywhere at once. He was not carrying a brown bag.

     Meany said a word to the driver, then came on, as the driver got back behind the wheel and put the Daimler just beyond the red pickup. A tall and bulky man with a round head of close-cropped hair, Meany was a thug with a good tailor, dressed today in pearl-gray topcoat over charcoal-gray slacks, dark blue jacket, pale blue shirt and pale blue tie. Still, the real man shone through the wardrobe, with his thick-jawed small-eyed face, and the two heavy rings on each hand, meant not for show but for attack.

     Meany approached Parker with a steady heavy tread, stopped on the other side of the picnic table, but did not sit down. "So here we are," he said.

     "Sit." Parker suggested.

     Meany did so, saying, "You're not gonna object to the driver?"

     "He gets out of the car," Parker said, "I'll do something."

     "Deal. Same thing for your friend in the pickup."

     "Same thing. You didn't bring a sandwich."

     "I ate lunch."

     Parker shook his head, irritated. As he took his sandwich out of the bag and ripped the bag in half to make two paper plates, he said, "People who ride around in cars like that one there forget how to take care of themselves. If I'm looking at you out of one of those windows over there, and you're not here for lunch, what are you here for?"

     "An innocent conversation," Meany said, and shrugged.

     "In New Jersey?" Parker pushed a half sandwich on a half bag to Meany, then took a bite of the remaining half....

All of which allows for some merry reversals of fortune and biters being bit.

Dirty Money was the last Westlake/Stark Parker novel. It ends with Parker having worked his ass off for what amounts to moderate payout. But modest pro that he is, Parker would never admit he ends up sitting pretty.

Jay

1 November 2020

Comeback by Richard Stark (1997)

Richard Stark wrote Parker heist novels (perhaps better 

described as Parker-gets-back-his-share-of-the-

heist) from 1960 to 1974. 

The heists were varied nicely: armored cars, islands used as casinos, whole mountain towns with cash payrolls. The first four novels have one overarching storyline of Parker sweating and wrecking the outfit until it cries uncle.

Stark brought Parker back in 1997 with Comeback. Quite a comeback it is.

*   *   *

Where do you find a mountain of cash in the age of internet banking?

....Parker and George Liss had never worked together, though they'd come close. Twice, they'd met on other guys' deals that hadn't panned out. He had no real opinion about George Liss, except he thought he probably wouldn't want to count on him if things turned sour.

     The money situation at the moment was all right, but not perfect. There was cash here and there, stowed away. He could wait for something that smelled good. Even in a world of electronic cash transfers and credit cards and money floating in cyberspace, there were still heists out there, waiting to be collected.

     When the phone rang the second time, Parker was in the enclosed porch that faced the lawn and the lake and the boathouse, standing there, looking out. The day was overcast, and looked colder than it was. He picked up the phone on the third ring and said, "George?"

     "I've got something." The voice slurred a little, making a furry sound in the phone lines.

     Parker waited. George Liss could have a lot of things, including a need to turn someone else over to the law to take his place.

     Liss said, "It's a little different, but it's profitable."

     They were all different, and they were all supposed to be profitable, or you wouldn't do it. Parker waited.

     Liss said, "You still there?"

     "Yes."

     "We could get together someplace, talk it over."

     "Maybe."

     "You want to know who else is aboard." And again Liss waited for Parker to say something, but again Parker had nothing to say, so finally Liss said, "Ed Mackey."

     That was different. Ed Mackey was somebody Parker did know and had worked with. Ed Mackey was solid. Parker said, "Who else?"

     "It only takes three."

     Even better. The fewer the people, the fewer the complications, and the more the profit. Parker said, "Where and when?"

     They came together first in the parking lot of a lobster restaurant on Route 1 just south of Auburn, Maine, a place where a couple of rental cars from Boston's Logan Airport wouldn't look out of place. Parker left his Impala and crisscrossed through the parked cars to the Century Regal where Ed Mackey, blunt and taciturn, sat at the wheel with his girlfriend Brenda beside him and George Liss in the back seat. Parker joined Liss, a tall, narrow, black-haired man with a long chin, who nodded at him and smiled with the side of his mouth where the nerves and muscles still worked, and said, "Have a good flight?"

     This wasn't a sensible question. Parker said, "Tell me about it."

     "It's a stadium," Ed Mackey said, half-turning in the front seat, knees pointed at Brenda as he looked back at Parker. "Usual stadium security. Twenty thousand civilians inside."

     Parker shook his head. "All you walk out with," he said, "is credit card receipts."

     "Not this one," Liss said, and the left side of his face smiled more broadly. A sharpened spoon handle had laid open the right side, in a prison in Wyoming, eleven years ago. A plastic surgeon had made the scars disappear, but nothing could make that side of his face move again, ever. Around civilians, Liss usually tried to keep himself turned partially away, showing only the profile that worked, but among fellow mechanics he didn't worry about it. With the slight slurring that made his words always sound just a little odd, he said, "This one is all cash. Paid at the door."

     "They call it love offerings," Mackey said, deadpan.

     Parker tried to read Mackey's face. "Love offerings? What kind of stadium is this?"

     Liss explained, "The stadium's the usual. The attraction's a guy named William Archibald. A TV preacher, you know those guys? Evangelists."

     "I thought they were all in jail," Parker said.

     'The woods are full of them," Liss said, and Mackey added, "Mostly the back woods."

     Parker said, "He's preaching at this stadium, is that it?"

     "To make a movie," Mackey said, "and show it on the TV later."

     "The people walking in," Liss said, moving his hands around in the space between himself and Parker, "they put down a twenty-dollar love offering, every one of them. No exceptions. Twenty thousand people."

     Brenda spoke for the first time: "Four hundred thousand dollars," she said in her husky voice, rolling her full lips around the words.

     "Brenda does my math for me," Mackey said.

     "Plus," Liss said, "they got these barrels up front by the stage, you get inspired along the way, you want to help the preacher spread the word on the TV, you can go up and toss whatever money you want in the barrel."

     "On TV," Mackey said. "On the big screen up behind the preacher. I seen it work, Parker, it's like hypnotizing. These people love to see themselves on that big screen, walking right up there, tossing their cash in the old barrel. Then a month later, they're at home, TV on, there they are again. Live the moment twice. The day you gave the rent money to God."

     "We figure," Liss said, "that doubles the take."

     Brenda opened her mouth, but before she could say anything Mackey pointed at her and said, "Brenda. He can work it out."

     Parker said, "There's going to be more than the usual security, if it's all cash."

     "Archibald has his own people," Liss agreed.

     "But we got a guy on the inside. That's what made it start to happen."

     "Not one of us," Parker said.

     "Not for a minute," Mackey said.

     "He works for the preacher," Liss said. "And now he's mad at him."

     "Greedy? Wants a bigger slice?"

     "Just the reverse," Liss said, and half his face laughed. "Ol' Tom got religion."

     'Just tell it to me," Parker said.

     Mackey patted the top of the seatback, as though calming a horse. "It's a good story, Parker," he said. "Wait for it."

     People had to tell their stories their own way, with all the pointless extras. "Go ahead," Parker said, and sat back to wait it out.

     Liss said, "I had twenty-nine months' parole last time I got out. It was easier, just hang around and do it, then have a paper out on me the rest of my life. This guy Archibald, one of his scams is, his people volunteer to give this counseling to ex-cons. It's all crap and everybody knows it, it's just to find new suckers, and to get some kinda tax break."

     "A cash business," Parker said. "He's doing okay with taxes anyway."

     "Oh, you know he is. But William Archibald, he's one of those guys, the more you give him to drink, the thirstier he gets. So I drew this guy

     Tom Carmody to be my counselor, once a week he'd come around the place I was living, and then when he'd fill out the sheet, that meant I didn't have to go in to the parole office. A good deal for everybody. And after the first few weeks, we pretty much come clean with each other, and after that we'd just watch basketball on the tube or something, or have a beer around the corner. I mean, he knew what I was and no problem, and I knew what scam he was on, so we just got on with life. Except sometimes he'd go on crusades, and—"

     Parker said, "Crusades?"

     "When Archibald takes his show on the road," Liss explained. "Rents a hall, a movie house, a stadium, someplace big, does his act three, four times, brings in a couple mil, takes it all home again. Tom was one of the staff guys he brought along on these things, so then I'd get some gung ho trainee from the office instead, and I'd have to be real serious and rehabilitated and grateful as hell to Jesus and all this shit, and then when Tom came back we'd laugh about it. Only, then, about the last six months—yeah, two years we're dealing bullshit and we both knew it, and then the last six months he began to change it all around. Not trying to reform me or nothing. It was Archibald he got agitated about."

     Brenda spoke again, this time drily: "He noticed Mister Archibald was insincere."

     "He got hung up on the money," Liss said. "How Archibald takes all the suckers for all this money, and it doesn't go anywhere good. I dunno, Parker, it wasn't the scam that got ol' Tom riled up, it still isn't. It's what happens with the money after Archibald trims the rubes. He'd talk about all the good that money could do, you know, feed the homeless and house the hungry and all this, and then he wanted to know was there any way I knew that he could get a bunch of that cash. Not for himself, you see, but to do good works with it."

Jay

26 October 2020