Butcher's Moon

Twenty-nine

Parker couldn’t stay in one place. Rage drove him, and frustration. He waited in Lozini’s house for twenty minutes, then had the houseman call Shevelly and Faran and the fat lawyer Walters and the swinging accountant Simms, but nobody knew where Lozini had gone. Parker couldn’t wait any longer. He was prowling the living room, pacing back and forth, aware of Lozini’s family huddled away upstairs, and after the last useless call he grabbed the phone book and looked up Harold Calesian.

He was listed, with an address on something called Elm Way. Parker tossed the phone book at a chair and told the houseman, “When your boss comes back, tell him to stay here. I’ll keep in touch.”

“Yes, sir.” The houseman had the pale face and out-thrust cheekbones of someone who’s terrified without knowing what to be afraid of. He hurried ahead of Parker to hold the front door open, then seemed reluctant to close it again after Parker had gone on through, as though afraid Parker might think it an insult.

Parker drove to the nearest gas station and got directions to Elm Way. It was on the other side of the city, past downtown, so the attendant recommended he go the other way to the Belt Highway and take it around.

Elm Way sounded suburban, ranch-style houses on green plots penetrated by slowly winding blacktop streets, but when Parker reached it the street was straight, concrete, and flanked by big-shouldered apartment buildings, upper middle income, urban renewal, less than ten years old.

Calesian’s building was the biggest of them, taking up a full block width on the right side of the street. The shrubbery at the base of the building looked too green, as though it were artificial, as though in winter it would still be there, arsenic-green, thrusting out of the snow.

There was tenant parking in the basement. Parker drove down the ramp from sunlight to fluorescent light, and found most of the spaces empty; it was Sunday, and the Sunday drivers were out. He backed the Impala into a space near the exit, and took the elevator up to the first floor, where the mailboxes told him Calesian’s apartment was 9-C, at the top of the building. He rode up there, rang the bell twice, and popped the lock with a credit card.

The apartment was cold, the air chilly and flat. Parker moved silently across the foyer, looked across the living room at the view of Tyler through the closed terrace doors on the far side, saw the thing wrapped in plastic on the floor near those doors, and went on to check out the rest of the apartment.

It was empty. None of the drawers or closets contained anything that he wanted to know or study; but Calesian wasn’t the type to leave evidence against himself lying around.

Finally he went back to the living room. He thought he knew what that thing was, wrapped in plastic in there on the floor. Kneeling, he folded the translucent plastic back.

Yes. Lozini.