The Outfit by Richard Stark Page B

stark blackness of their trunks and branches.
    A hell of a place to be in November ! he thought, thinking of Las Vegas. He glanced ahead, saw his wife's house and repeated the thought: A hell of a place to be in November. A hell of a place to be anytime .
    It was a big stone monstrosity of a house facing the park. Twenty-one rooms, tall narrow windows, three stories, four staircases, impossible to heat. Putting in decent wiring and plumbing had cost a fortune. Buying statues to fill the niches and paintings for the walls had cost another fortune. And then rugs. And half the furniture on the Eastern Seaboard. For what? For a house he inhabited not more than three months out of the year unless something unusual came up.
    But Willa had wanted it. She was a Buffalo girl, from the cracked-sidewalk section back of Civic Centre, and owning one of these stone piles by the park had been her driving ambition for as long as she could remember. And what Willa wanted, whatever she truly wanted, Arthur Bronson went out and got for her.
    He was fifty-six; born in Baltimore seven years before World War I and thirteen years before Prohibition. He'd been driving a rum-runner's truck t fourteen, in charge of collections in the north east area of Washington at twenty, one of the four most powerful men in the Baltimore-Washington area liquor syndicate at twenty-seven when Prohibition ended. He was the most powerful man in that area at thirty-two, member of the national committee from the mid-east states at thirty-nine. He had become chairman of the committee at forty-seven and held that post for the past nine years.
    His cover was impeccable He was senior partner in a Buffalo firm of investment counsellors, with a junior partner who handled all the legitimate business. He was a member of the board of three banks, two in Buffalo proper and one in Kenmore, a suburb. He belonged to a country club and a businessmen's fraternal organization; he was a member in good standing of the church three blocks from his Buffalo home, and his income tax returns would never send him to jail. At fifty-six, he was of medium height, about twenty pounds overweight, and his black hair was flecked distinguishedly with grey. His face was broad and somewhat puffy, but he still retained traces of his earlier dark good looks. He gave the impression of being a solid citizen, a hard businessman, possibly a difficult employer, but absolutely respectable.
    Willa, too, was respectable. In 1930, when he'd married her, she'd been a mediocre singer with a fair jazz band, but she took to rich respectability as though she'd known no other life. She was now fifty-two, a plump and soft-spoken matron, a doting grandmother who was constantly phoning her married daughter in San Jose, to find out how her two grandsons were getting on. The pile of stones facing the park was her home twelve months out of the year. Her husband might be away for months at a time – New York, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Naples – but this pile of stones was Willa's home, and she stayed in it.
    It was not her husband's home, and he avoided it as much as possible. He didn't like the place, it was too big, too solemn, too empty, too draughty, too far removed from life. He preferred hotel suites with terraces overlooking a pool or the sea. He preferred chrome and red leather. When it came to that, he preferred a good, stacked, intelligent, hundred-dollar whore on a white leather sofa to the plump grandmother in the pile of stones in Buffalo, but, at the same time, it was the good whore who got the hundred dollars and the plump grandmother who got the hundred-thousand-dollar house.
    The lead Cadillac crawled on past the driveway and stopped. There were four men in the car, and they looked out the windows intently in all directions, watching the traffic and pedestrians. The second Cadillac with the armed coloured chauffeur at the wheel and Bronson alone in the back seat turned in the driveway like a sleek tank. Only