Butcher's Moon

Sixteen

Parker got out of the Impala three blocks from the address. “Luck,” Grofield said. Parker nodded, acknowledging the meaningless word, and walked away. Behind him, the Impala U-turned as Grofield went off to position himself.

Not quite nine o’clock on a Saturday night in July; two hours since he’d heard the news report about O’Hara. Tyler was a big enough city to have a substantial downtown, and a small enough city to have its office buildings and its weekend entertainment area all in the same place. Dark office blocks loomed over blinking movie marquees, and the traffic on London Avenue and Center Street was thick and slow-moving.

It was another clear night; high above, the sliver of moon was thinner even than last night, giving off no illumination to speak of, shining no more brightly than the white dots of the stars. Tuesday would be the new moon; no moon at all.

The Nolan Building took up a city block, bounded by London Avenue and Center Street and West Street and Houston Avenue. The ground floor was taken up mainly by a bank on the Center Street side and a stock brokerage and a large restaurant called the Riverboat on the London Avenue side. Next to the Riverboat was the entrance to the office building lobby, the elevators and the building directory.

Parker got there a few minutes early, and spent a while studying the copy of the Riverboat menu taped to one of the restaurant windows. In five minutes he saw four men enter the lobby, none of them Lozini. Was he there already, earlier than his assistants? It didn’t sound right.

Parker was about to go on in when one more car stopped at the curb in front of the lobby entrance, the same black Oldsmobile Lozini had used this afternoon. Watching, Parker saw Lozini and another man get out of the Olds and walk across the sidewalk as the Olds drove immediately away. The second man was fat and ungainly, walking as though he’d be more comfortable with a cane. Or more comfortable sitting down.

Fine. Parker let another two minutes go by, then followed the rest of them in.

The lobby reminded him of the one they’d been using in that jewelry-store robbery that went bad. It even had the same kind of skinny old man in uniform as the night guard, except that this one seemed awake and alert. He also had an assistant, a grinning young Puerto Rican, in a blue uniform jacket and tattered dungarees, who operated the elevator. Parker signed a name and destination in the night book—”Edward Latham, City Property Holdings, 1712”—and was about to get into the elevator when another man arrived. Parker, looking at him, knew that this was somebody else for the meeting, and waited for him.

The other man gave Parker an ironic smile of acknowledgment, and said to the guard, “Sign me in, will you, Jimmy?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Calesian.” Parker could hear in Jimmy’s voice a well-concealed resentment.

To the smiling Puerto Rican boy, Calesian said, “We’ll take ourselves up. I’ll send it back down.”

“Okay,” said the boy. Nothing altered in the smile, just as nothing in the external world could explain it.

Parker and Calesian got into the elevator, and Calesian shut the doors and pushed the button for the seventeenth floor. “This thing’s self-service anyway,” he said. “The building management thinks it’s classier to have an operator.” He spoke in a quiet, self-assured, humorous manner—a more restrained version of Grofield. A small smile on his face, he said, “So you’re Parker.”

“You’re some sort of cop,” Parker said.

Calesian’s smile broadened; he was pleased. “How’d you work that out?”

“An employee wouldn’t show up later than his boss. A cop on the payroll would, just to show he’s still his own man.”

Calesian didn’t entirely like that, but he kept his good humor. “You’re a detective yourself,” he said. “You’ll be happy to hear we got a negative on you from Washington.”

“A negative on what?”

“The name Parker, and a physical description.”

That was all right. He was in fact wanted under several different names, and his fingerprints were listed under the name of Ronald Casper, from a time he’d been on a prison farm in California, but the name Parker had never been officially linked up with any felony. As to the description, the face he wore he’d gotten new from a plastic surgeon ten years ago.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Calesian pushed the lobby button before they stepped out to the hall, and the elevator went away again. “This way,” Calesian said.

1712 was to the right. The door, unlocked, led to a furnished but unpopulated receptionist’s office, with an open doorway on the other side through which he could see several men sitting on leather sofas or armchairs. Calesian went first, and Parker followed him through the doorway, to find Lozini seated at a broad mahogany desk, its surface empty except for a telephone, an ashtray, and a pack of Viceroys. Lozini, looking sour and angry, glared at Parker and then at his watch, but said nothing about time. Instead, after a quick snap glance at Calesian, he looked past Parker and said, “You’re alone?”

“That’s right. I have to make a phone call.”

“Why?” Lozini was angry and impatient, ready to forget he didn’t really have any weight to throw around in this situation.

“I have to tell my partner,” Parker said, “not to blow up your house.”

To one side, Calesian laughed. The fat man who had come in with Lozini made a short gasping sound of shock. Lozini just stared, and Parker went to his desk, turned the phone around, and dialed the number of the phone booth where Grofield was waiting. There was, in fact, no bomb at Lozini’s house or the time to set one up there, but the threat of it should be enough.

Nobody said anything. There were six men in the room other than Parker, and they all watched him dial and watched his face as he waited for Grofield to answer.

Which happened on the first ring. “Clancy’s Steak House.”

Parker read the number from the phone in front of him. “Got it?”

Grofield read the number back, and said, “Everything okay?”

“Good,” Parker said, and hung up. Lozini said, “He’ll call you.”

“That’s right.”

“If you don’t answer and tell him everything’s all right, he’ll blow up my house.”

“That’s right.”

“I have family in that house.”

“I know that.”

Lozini didn’t seem to know whether to become enraged or reasonable. In a strangled voice he said, “I don’t have any plans against you. This is just a meeting, we’ve got a common problem. Why should I do anything to you?”

“If I’m not around,” Parker said, “you don’t have a problem any more.”

Lozini shook his head. “No. O’Hara didn’t pull that on his own, he wouldn’t have had the guts for it. I told you this afternoon, I’m in a tough situation in this town, things getting worse all the time. Things that don’t connect with you. I may even lose my mayor.” Pointing a finger at Parker, he said, “What it comes down to, somebody in this town is up to something. They’re coming at me from my blind side, and I wouldn’t even know about it until it was all over and I was out on my ass. Except for you. You came in, you stirred things up, you made some trouble, and all of a sudden I’m seeing things I didn’t see before.”

“All right,” Parker said.

“So we’re on the same side,” Lozini said. “I want them because they’re head-hunting after my position in this town, and you want them because they’ve got your money. But they’re the same people.”

Parker shrugged.

Lozini said, “So now we know how the money got out of the park. With O’Hara. The next thing is to find out where it went to, who got it.”

A man to Parker’s right said, “It went to O’Hara. Maybe he split with somebody else, but probably half of it went to him.”

The man named Calesian said, “No, it didn’t. I can give you chapter and verse on O’Hara’s financial picture. He maybe got three or four thousand out of it at the absolute most, but that’s all.”

The other man said, “How can you be so sure, Harold?”

Parker said, “Wait a minute. I don’t know everybody here.” Turning around, he scanned the faces and pointed at Frank Faran. “I know you.”

Faran gave a rueful grin, and nodded his head in a kind of salute. “I guess you do,” he said.

The man who had said the money went to O’Hara now said, “I’m Ted Shevelly, Mr. Lozini’s assistant.” Casually dressed in slacks and pullover shirt, Shevelly looked to be about forty, with rust-colored hair and a stocky well-built frame and the general look of a weekend golfer. He wore squared-off glasses with gold-colored frames, and gave the impression he was maybe a little too calm and casual for his own good; something like Faran, but without Faran’s chumminess or bent for alcohol.

Parker nodded to Shevelly and turned to the fat man who’d arrived in the Olds with Lozini. He was wearing a black suit and a blue dress shirt with wide collar points but no tie, and he was managing to look just as uncomfortable and awkward sitting down as he had been while on the move. Parker said, “And you’re—”

It was Lozini who answered, from behind Parker, saying, “That’s Jack Walters, my personal attorney.”

“Personal?”

Shifting his bulk around, trying without success to lace his fingers above his belt, Walters said, “Not entirely personal. I do know something about the business side as well.”

“More than you want to,” Lozini said, “and less than I want you to.”

Walters smiled, and nodded at Lozini, and went back to looking uncomfortable. But it was clearly only Walters’ body that was awkward; a rock-solid and sharp brain peered out through the man’s eyes.

The next man was probably in his late forties, and looked like somebody who had suddenly in middle age decided to stop being dull and start being a swinger. He was slender, but the deep lines in his face and the looseness of the flesh under his chin suggested he’d once weighed quite a bit more and had dieted himself ruthlessly into a spurious youth. He was wearing brown loafers and pale blue slacks and a madras jacket and a yellow turtleneck shirt, as though he’d been dressed by the costume designer of a Broadway show to be a parody of a Miami vacationer.

“Nate Simms,” this apparition said, getting to his feet and smiling and extending a manly hand. “I’m AI’s accountant. Also, I have a few sidelines.”

Accountant; right. Al? That must mean Lozini. Parker took the man’s hand briefly, and turned to Harold Calesian. “We met in the elevator.”

“That’s right.” Calesian smiled easily. “And made one another right away.”

“What’s your job with the cops?”

Calesian’s smile became slightly self-mocking. “I’m a Detective First Grade,” he said. “I work out of the Organized Crime Squad downtown.”

Turning to Lozini, Parker said, “Is he the top cop you’ve got?”

“They don’t come much higher,” Lozini said. It was clear he didn’t want Calesian rubbed the wrong way.

“But you don’t have anybody higher,” Parker said.

Calesian, speaking mildly to show he wasn’t offended, said, “That’s right, I’m their top man.”

Lozini said, “What’s the point, Parker? So what?”

Parker said to Calesian, “Wouldn’t O’Hara go to you?”

There was a little silence while everybody worked out what Parker had just said, and then Calesian’s smile drooped like a mustache and he said, “I’d prefer them with a little padding around them.”

“I’m just asking the question,” Parker said.

“You want to know if I’m the one who wound up with the money? No, I’m not.”

Parker shrugged. “O’Hara walked out of that amusement park knowing where the money was,” he said. “And knowing he’d need help to get it. Is he going to talk to one of Lozini’s people? Not a chance. He’ll talk to a cop. Aren’t you the cop he’ll talk to?”

“Not necessarily,” Calesian said. “In fact, not even likely. I never had any direct dealings with O’Hara myself; there are layers and layers, you know.”

Ted Shevelly said, “Wait a minute. Let me go back to this question of how much O’Hara got. Harold, you say you looked into the man’s finances, and the most spread you’ll give him is three or four thousand, is that right?”

Calesian nodded. “He absolutely got no more. Maybe less.”

Shevelly said, “I take it what you’re doing is checking his bank accounts and charge accounts and looking into his major purchases in the last two years, like a car or whatever.”

“That’s right.”

“What if he didn’t do it that way? What if he took three thousand off the top for expenses, put the rest in a plastic bag and buried it in the backyard?”

“Wrong MO,” Calesian said. “People have patterns, and O’Hara’s pattern was to spend whatever he had. That’s how he wound up on the take in the first place, by spending ahead of himself. He was still in debt when he died.”

Shevelly said, “He wouldn’t change his pattern, if it was important?”

“No. O’Hara didn’t have the imagination for that.”

Parker said to Calesian, “I thought you never had direct dealings with the guy. You sound like you know him.”

Calesian’s smile flickered on and off again. “One of the ways I help Al,” he said, nodding toward Lozini, “is to check into, uh, defectors from the ranks. If a law officer puts himself on Al’s payroll, it can be for one of two reasons: either he’s on the take, or he’s a plant.”

Lozini said, brusquely, “Harold tells me if I’m getting a plant.”

“Do you get any?”

“A lot of this town,” Calesian said, “is on the square. It isn’t all sewed up, by any means.”

“God knows,” Lozini said.

“There’s also the state CID,” Calesian said, “and even the Federals every once in a while.”

”You can’t put your guard down for a minute,” Lozini said.

Calesian said, “I can give you a thumbnail on every cop in this city who buys his hamburgers with Al’s money. That doesn’t mean I have dealings with them. A lot of them I never even met.”

“All right,” Parker said. “O’Hara wouldn’t come to you because he didn’t know you.”

“He didn’t know me well enough,” Calesian corrected. “We’d seen each other around.”

“Who did he know?”

Calesian spread his hands. “A dozen people. You think there’s a chain of command? There isn’t, not really. O’Hara could have gone to any number of people for help. He might even have done it himself, with just his partner, his squad-car partner.”

Parker remembered the squad-car partner—a mouse, afraid of himself. “No,” he said. “I don’t see the two of them doing it on their own.”

“Particularly,” the attorney, Walters, said, “if O’Hara wound up with so little of the proceeds.”

Shevelly said, “Still, the partner could have been in on it. Any chance he’s the one did for O’Hara?”

“Not the same man,” Calesian said. “I don’t remember who the partner was two years ago, but it was a different man this time.” With a little grin toward Lozini, he said, “Not one of ours.”

Parker said, “Let’s look into that other partner, the one from before. He might know what O’Hara did or who he saw.”

“I’ll find out about him,” Calesian said.

Nate Simms, the accountant in the bright colors, said, “Excuse me. May I make a comment?”

Everybody looked at him. Lozini said, “Naturally, Nate. Go ahead.”

“I wonder,” Simms said, taking his time, getting his phrases exactly the way he wanted them, “I wonder if we’re going about this the right way. I wonder if perhaps we aren’t rushing forward, when what we ought to do instead is stop a minute and think.”

Lozini said, “Go ahead, Nate. What do you mean?” From the intense way he was watching Simms, it was clear that Lozini respected the man’s opinions and judgments, that whatever Simms said would have an effect on Lozini’s actions.

“As you know, Al,” Simms said, “we have this election coming up in just three days.”

“Don’t I know it,” Lozini said.

“And we also have other problems.” Turning to Parker, he said, “In addition to being Al’s personal accountant, I take care of a few other areas, and one of my areas is policy. You know, the numbers.”

Parker nodded. “I know.”

“Policy has never been a major source of income in this city,” Simms said, “because we just don’t have enough poor people. We’re above the national average in family income, and in employment rate. We don’t have the large sections of low-income housing that you need if you’re really going to run a large-scale policy operation.”

“Go ahead, Nate,” Lozini said. “Parker doesn’t need all that.”

“I wanted him to understand,” Simms said, “that I’m not running a huge operation there.” Back to Parker again, he said, “An accountant is what I am. If policy were big in Tyler, someone else would be in charge.”

“I get the point,” Parker said.

“So,” Simms said, “I can only talk from one small area of interest. But from my area of interest, this is a bad time to get involved in anything that could cause a great deal of trouble and expense and public involvement. Policy is down, it’s been down for the last three years and getting worse every year. We don’t have the cash reserves we once had, and we don’t have as secure a hold on the legitimate side as we once had.”

Lozini said, “I already said all that. Trouble coming in from everywhere, and Parker is what made me see it.”

“That was good,” Simms said. “I don’t deny that, Al, the stirring up was a good thing, it made us all aware of problems that had been creeping up on us with nobody paying any attention. What I’m saying is, we don’t want—”

The phone rang. Parker, looking at his watch, said, “That’s for me.”

Lozini gave an angry-ironic hand gesture, inviting Parker to pick up the receiver himself. He said, “Tell him it’s okay now, will you?”

Parker answered, saying, “Yes.”

“Everything all right?”

“Yes,” Parker said. If things had been wrong—a gun to his head, for instance—he would have said fine.

“Good,” Grofield said.

“This won’t take much longer,” Parker said. “I’ll see you where and when we talked about.”

“Right.”

Parker hung up, and turned back to Nate Simms. “You were making a point.”

“That we can have too much of a good thing,” Simms said, “and then it isn’t a good thing any more. A little stirring up, that was good, it made us aware. Too much stirring up and the general public is going to get aware, and that isn’t good any way at all.”

“That’s why we’re all being friendly together,” Lozini said. “Parker and us, all chums. We’ll stay nice and quiet from now on, just dealing inside our own organization. Because that’s where the trouble is. O’Hara was one of ours, whoever he went to for help was one of ours, and whoever got the money had to be connected with us, one way or another. Had to be.”

“I just want us to wait,” Simms said. “Wait till after the election, that’s only Tuesday, only three days away.”

“No,” Lozini said. “After the election I could be in worse shape than I am now. I want to know what’s happening, I want to know who has to get weeded out.” He gestured at Parker. “And why should he wait?”

“I won’t,” Parker said.

Simms turned a reasonable face to Parker, saying, “Why not? It’s to your advantage, too. If we cause too much disruption, we’ll have police authorities in here that we can’t deal with or work our way around, and you could wind up in as much trouble as the rest of us.”

Parker said, “Pressure is the only thing I’ve got on you people. Lozini wants to do some housecleaning, fine, but he doesn’t need me to help. The only way I get my money is if I keep pressure on. I won’t call time-out for three days, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Simms’ face screwed up in a combination of disappointment and hard thinking as he worked that out. “I suppose so,” he said reluctantly. “I suppose I can see it from your side.”

Harold Calesian, smiling in a patronizing way, said, “You did your best, Nate.”

Lozini said, “That’s right, Nate. What you’re saying is smart from a nice calm accountant’s point of view. But that’s not where we’re at. Where we’re at is halfway across the rope with no net. This is no place to stop.”

Simms shrugged, displaying resignation. “I guess that’s the way it’s got to be,” he said.

Lozini said, “All right. What we’re going to do is, Ted and Frank, you’re going to take a look at everybody that was in on the amusement-park thing two years ago. Maybe the cop corrupted one of my people, you never know. I want to be sure they’re clean, every last one of them.”

“Fine,” Faran said, and Shevelly said, “When do you want it by?”

“Do it tomorrow,” Lozini told him. “I gave you the list of names, you get together with Frank and work it out.”

“Okay.”

Calesian said, “I’ll check into O’Hara’s partner, the old one.”

Parker told him, “And any other cop O’Hara might have talked to. Anybody he knew that well.”

“That’s a tall order,” Calesian said. “Particularly without anybody noticing what I’m doing. Running a check on one patrolman is easy, I can slip it into routine business, but when you get to ten or fifteen men, it gets noticeable.”

“You’ll do your best,” Lozini told him.

Calesian spread his hands, easy and assured. “Naturally,” he said.

Parker said, “That’s tomorrow, too, right?”

“It’s tough on Sunday,” Calesian said. “I’ll do what I can, but some of it may have to wait till Monday.”

Lozini said, “Why? The cops work seven days a week.”

“Not the clerical staff,” Calesian said. “The kind of small-time check we’re talking about, no urgency, nothing major, that’s always done during the week and during regular business hours. For instance, I can’t call a bank tomorrow, check on anybody’s balance.”

Parker said, “Lozini, the simple answer is, you pay me my money now, and get it back when you find the right people. That way, you can wait till after election and I won’t be sitting in a room somewhere getting impatient.”

“I don’t have the money,” Lozini told him. “Nate told you; receipts are down. Not just in policy, everywhere. Receipts down, expenses up. This election cost us an arm and a leg, and my man may not even stay in. Listen, I’m just as impatient as you are.”

“No, you’re not,” Parker told him. He looked around and said, “Is there anything else I have to hear?” Everybody looked at everybody else.

“All right,” Parker said. “Lozini, I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.”

“Try me at home,” Lozini said, and sourly added, “You know the number.”

Calesian, rising, said, “I’m finished, too, for now. I’ll ride down with you, Parker.”

“By God,” Lozini said grimly, “we’re going to put this together. I don’t like the whole feel of this.”

As Parker left, he heard Lozini behind him going on in the same vein, with his three lieutenants silently listening and nodding their heads. Walking across the empty receptionist’s office with Calesian, Parker listened to Lozini’s voice without the words, and there seemed a slight echo in the sound, a touch of hollowness created both by distance and the tone of the man’s voice. Lozini sounded more and more like someone blustering to hide his uncertainty.

Parker and Calesian walked down the hall to the elevator. Calesian pushed the button, then turned to say, “You know, just between us, what Nate said wasn’t all that stupid.”

Parker shrugged.

“There’s such a thing as too much pressure,” Calesian said. “You have Al where you want him; now might be a good time to ease off a bit. Let him take care of business first, get this election out of the way.”

“No.”

Calesian looked puzzled. “Why not? What’s the problem?”

“Lozini.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

Parker said, “He’s a man who didn’t hear the twig snap.”

Calesian frowned a second, then said, “Oh. Somebody’s coming up behind him?”

“Somebody came up.”

“You think somebody’s going to try a takeover.”

Parker gestured a thumb toward Lozini’s office. “Isn’t that what that was all about?”

Calesian thought about it. “Maybe,” he said. “But who?”

“You know the territory better than I do.”

The elevator door slid back, showing an empty interior. Grinning at it, Calesian said, “That’s a smart boy.”

They stepped into the elevator, and started down.

Calesian said, “If you’re right, you know, that’s even more reason to ease up on Al a little. Don’t distract him while he’s trying to hold his business together.”

“This election you’ve got coming up,” Parker said. “I think maybe that’s the key. Come Wednesday, Lozini may not be around any more.”

Calesian looked troubled, but had nothing to say.

Parker said, “I wouldn’t want to start all over again with somebody new.”