THE RUDOLPH VALENTINO CRUMPTON STORY Part 10

On the night Tommy and Rudolph chose to carry out their latest unholy contract Tommy picked his helper up at his apartment just before midnight. The two drove to a church parking lot on the northern part of Pittsburgh where Tommy had again left a small mini-van he had taken from another customer in the used car business and fully stocked it with 40 gallons of the now familiar Amoco white gas. Following their usual routine, the two gloved up and stored all their personal effects and anything that might identify them in the trunk of Tommy’s newest Cadillac and eased out of the parking lot a few minutes before 1:00 a.m. Rudolph was surprised when within :10 minutes Tommy pointed out the target property for the night. Tommy had always been careful to leave his car at least several miles away from the target. “We may need to get out of here quicker than we have before”, was his only answer when Rudolph questioned him about the change in his planning. Rudolph could not really think of any problem with the new arrangement so he let it drop and begin to think about the work ahead. Rudolph liked the looks of the building as they approached the front from the mostly empty parking lot in front of the store. They pulled around the building and past a huge dumpster and up to a loading dock attached to the backside of the store, Tommy reached over Rudolph and took from the glove compartment in front of Rudolph a snub-nosed .38 pistol and handed it to Rudolph. “Do you know how to use one of these things”, Tommy whispered as he slipped the mini-van into ‘P’ just outside of a walk through door on ground level next to the raised loading dock. “No, I’ve never shot a gun in my life,” Rudolph could barely find his voice. “What the hell are we doing,” was the best he could come up with. “They said there would probably not be any one here but just in case we might better be prepared,” replied Tommy. “We always know the place is empty,” protested Rudolph, “who told you there might be somebody here”? “The guy that owns this building”, answered Tommy. “Why don’t he know whose here, it’s his place ain’t it”, Rudolph was beginning to have a funny feeling about what was happening. “My man owns the place but he’s leasing it to the yo-yo’s who own the store and they won’t pay their rent and he’s ready to get them out. He said they were so broke they couldn’t afford guards or security systems and he didn’t think anyone would be here this late, he just wasn’t sure”, Tommy was still talking as he opened the door. “He gave me the key to this door and the floor plan so I think he knows what he’s talking about”. “You think”, Rudolph snapped, “you’re about to get us both killed or at least sent to jail and you think it’s going to be all right”, Rudolph had never had the occasion to be this pissed at Tommy before. Against his gut feeling Rudolph got out of the mini-van and walk to the door that Tommy was already trying to unlock. Tommy knew he messed up by not being more up front with Rudolph and was so scared just from the tone of Rudolph’s voice and his appearance he had trouble getting the key to work and struggled with it for what seemed like several minutes. When Tommy finally made the key work and unlocked the door the two eased into the warehouse portion of the store and allowed their eyes to adjust to the total darkness inside. Rudolph whispered they should make a quick sweep of the entire building before they began to unload the gasoline stored in the cargo portion of the mini-van. Still carrying the gun Tommy had given him in his right hand Rudolph slowly moved to the right side of the large warehouse space while Tommy eased to the left side. The two met again near a swinging double door in the middle of the wall that evidently separated the warehouse portion of the building with the showroom that faced the parking lot they had just driven across. Everything was as quite as it had been when they first entered the building and Rudolph was beginning to feel a little better as the two came together. “Let’s get the gas and get this done”, Tommy whispered as the two came within hearing distance of each other. “Not until we check out the front”, Rudolph returned the whisper, “I ain’t taking any chances, you don’t know shit about this place, they might have the National Guard out there. You got to be the dumbest son-of-a-bitch in the world to get us into something like this”. Tommy never dreamed Rudolph would be this upset and promised himself he would make it up to him by giving him more money on this one job to make up for surprising him like this. The two eased through the swinging double doors and quietly begin to move around the perimeter of the showroom area, again Tommy moving to the left and Rudolph moving toward the right side of the where mattresses and bedding were piled six to eight feet high. The side of the showroom where Tommy was slowly walking had two or three small offices built into the back of the showroom and provided a little light from a couple of desk lamps that glowed through huge windows looking out over the showroom. As Tommy approached the second office both Rudolph and Tommy heard what could have only been the sound of someone knocking a pile of papers or desk hardware onto the floor in the second little office behind Tommy. Just after the sound came from the office one row of lights running from the back of the showroom to the front came on and the two heard a shout from inside the office, “stop right there, I’ve got a gun and I’ll blow you to hell”, someone was yelling. Rudolph saw Tommy, now in the light, drop to the floor and saw a man in a security guard uniform burst through the little office where the sounds and voice first came from. Rudolph knew the guard did not see him before he ducked behind the stack of mattresses. Frozen like a statute Rudolph waited for the next sound. “Stand up you son-of-a-bitch or I’ll send you to hell this very minute”, a voice other than Tommy screamed. “Wait, Wait, I’m getting up, don’t shoot me, I don’t have a gun, don’t shoot”, Tommy was screaming; fear causing him to almost whimper Rudolph thought. Rudolph could not resist the temptation to peek from around the mattresses to see what was going on and just what he was facing in the next few minutes. Rudolph saw the guard, an older man, considerably over weight and brandishing a silver handgun that looked like a cannon. Tommy was easing up from behind a sofa where he had taken cover. Rudolph saw a handgun in Tommy’s hand hidden from the guard who was shaking badly. Rudolph was afraid the guard was about to shoot Tommy by accident because he was shaking hard. As Tommy reached full height the guard told him to “get your hands in the air”. Rudolph watched as Tommy with one motion, brought his hands from around the side the guard could not see into sight and with one quick move fired his gun into the night watchman’s face, hitting him just below his right eye, creating a huge hole into what had once been his cheek bone. Without stopping for a minute Tommy ran around the sofa and chairs that separated him and the guard and quickly fired two more shots into the now obviously dead security man’s head. “Let’s get the hell out of here Tommy screamed as both he and Rudolph started moving toward the swinging doors leading back into the warehouse. The two quickly made their way through the walk through door they had first entered. They were into the truck and moving through the parking lot without anyone saying a word. They were on the street that ran in front of the store and two blocks away before anyone said anything.

“We got to get rid of this gasoline”, was the first thing Tommy said. “Gasoline my ass”, Rudolph almost screamed, “do you know what just happened”, Rudolph was calm but obviously shaken. “Hell yes, it went bad but that don’t mean we need to get caught with forty gallons of gasoline in a stolen truck, I’m not going to jail because some fat old bastard making six bucks an hour decided to draw down on me in a two bit furniture store”, Tommy shot back. “I’m not sure now they didn’t have some kind of security camera out back and may be able to identify this truck or even us; we’ve got to get rid of this now”. “I’m going to drop you off at the car and you follow me,” Tommy said, “I’ll get this out of town and we will burn the truck, after that there is no way anyone can tie us to the store”. Tommy went straight to the parking lot where the Cadillac was parked, gave Rudolph the keys and causally drove away with Rudolph following in the car.

Rudolph was in deep thought as he followed Tommy for nearly an hour to a remote area to the southwest of Pittsburg. Tommy was headed to some old abandoned strip mines in a God forsaken part of Pennsylvania near Ruff Creek. The mines had been worked out long before there was any attempt at reclamation and were only used now for teenagers parking and swimming in the summer. During the long drive Rudolph made the decision to go his separate way from Tommy. Tommy had become sloppy, the success they enjoyed either made Tommy lazy or just plain sloppy. Rudolph was smart enough to have learned he was going to work outside the law and he needed to cover all the bases before the illegal act was committed. Tommy was becoming a liability and in this business liabilities would either get you killed or sent to jail, neither of which seemed to appealing to Rudolph. This was not the first time Tommy had almost gotten them in trouble and he was simply taking too many risks to suit Rudolph. Rudolph had put over $65,000 in a safe place over the last four years and it was time he struck out on his own. Rudolph had bought an old Chevy pickup and had some contacts that could keep him busy until he got established. He knew Maxine could help him and he just did not need Tommy any more.

Tommy led them to an isolated area, littered with old rusted equipment and a decaying shack that once was used as an on site office for the mining company. The company had raped what was once a beautiful valley at some time in the past leaving only a scar on the landscape. Tommy stopped near the old office shack and got out to stretch after the long ride. Rudolph pulled in right behind him and turned the car around before getting out to join Tommy next to the mini-van. “Let’s burn this and get out of here, I’m about the starve and I don’t want to eat until we get back to town, some hick waitress will recognize us when the find the truck and I don’t want to explain what we doing in this shit-hole”, Tommy was more interested in eating than worrying about killing the guard. Tommy suggested they only use one can of the gasoline to spread around the mini-van and to simply open the remaining cans. “It won’t take much to get it started and by the time we get back on the road this thing will blow sky high”, Tommy told Rudolph. Rudolph knew what he was going to do and he was as calm as he had ever been in putting a plan into action. “I’ll get a can out of the back while your checking the glove box and the front seat to be sure we did not leave anything”, Rudolph told Tommy. As Tommy got back into the driver’s seat of the mini-van and leaned over to check out the glove box. Rudolph walked around the front of the truck to the passenger side, and reaching through the front passenger window while Tommy was leaning across the console to open the glove box calmly pulled the gun Tommy had given him earlier and fired one shot through the top of his old partner’s head. Still wearing the rubber gloves and without hesitating he tossed the gun on top of Tommy’s body and walked to the back of the mini-van and removed two cans of Amoco white gas. He put one in the trunk of the Cadillac and sloshed the other generously throughout the interior of the little truck/car. He lit and tossed a book of matches onto the floorboard of the front seat and watched the flames quickly engulf the truck. He returned to the Cadillac he had driven to the site and slowly drove down the long gravel road to the highway that would take him back to Pittsburgh. As he turned onto the highway he heard the explosion and saw a flash that signaled the cremation of Tommy and the start of his new life. Rudolph had no feelings at all about what just happened. He actually felt worse about the security guard back in the furniture store than he did about Tommy and something inside him questioned just why that was.

Rudolph took the Cadillac to the old airfield/industrial park where Tommy taught him to drive and drove to the most deserted part of the field, far away from any of the businesses located there. He spread the second can of white gas throughout Tommy’s newest show car. With a second book of matches, he carried as a backup, set this last link with Tommy on fire and walked away just as the sun was beginning to rise over the skyline of Pittsburgh. Rudolph walked the entire five-mile trek back to his little apartment as Pittsburgh begin to stir. Little did Rudolph know on that day a kid named Donald Ray Butler in Eatonville, Alabama would celebrate his tenth birthday by taking a trip to Birmingham on a train his dad worked as a flagman. Neither certainly had any idea the role each would play in the other’s life many years down the road.

Rudolph slept most of the day after his hike home from the old airport. He awoke around 4:30 that afternoon and walked to a small diner near his apartment to eat and check out the afternoon paper to see if any mention was made of either of the events he had been a part of the night before. The story about the break-in at the furniture store took up about 1/2 of the second page in the ‘City’ section of the paper, the guard was a retired steelworker and veteran of the Korean War. He had four children and six grandchildren and lived with his wife of forty-two years. He had only taken this job a few months earlier and was working only a couple of nights a week to help pay for one of his granddaughters college education. The paper said the owners of the store were probably going to declare bankruptcy since business was already bad and now they feared no one would ever shop them again. Rudolph could not find any mention of Tommy or his car, both of which were burned to a crisp. Rudolph ate the blue plate special and walked back to his apartment and quickly fell asleep, still exhausted by the events of the night before.

The second day after the separation with Tommy there was an article in the ‘Southwest’ section about a man being found shot and burned in a stolen mini-van. The police figured it was a drug deal gone bad and the body had been sent to the crime lab for identification. The police said the forensic people would have to depend on dental records or something new call DNA since the heat had been so intense the body was burned far beyond what was normal in most burn cases.

Over the next month or so Rudolph thought seriously about what he would do now. He came close to either dying or going to jail and those thoughts had a huge effect on him. He had become convinced a man could work just outside the law and make a good living. He was savvy enough to know those things one could do and those he should not do. He now knew the circumstances dictated the extremes a person must go to in order to stay out of trouble but recognized bad situations could be avoided if a person were smart and knew what he was doing. The role of security guards seemed to be a perfect fit for someone that did not mind breaking the law but wanted to be safe in doing so. Security guards played some role in everything he and Tommy had done. Either they were gone at the right times or they were looking the wrong way when something went down. If all the people they worked for had to manipulate the guards then the guards were the key to being successful or failing. With his limited education Rudolph decided this security guard thing could be worked into a profitable position for a man with an imagination.