The Sour Lemon Score

One

Parker sat in the darkness in the hotel room and waited for the phone to ring. He had questions, and all he could do now was sit around and wait for the answers.

He heard the shuffling of slippers along the walk out front and knew it was Madge coming to talk to him. That was the only thing wrong with her, the only thing wrong with this place of hers — she liked to talk too much. But it was safe; he could stay here and make his phone calls from here, so he was willing to put up with a little inconvenience.

He hoped the fact that the room was in darkness would keep her away, but he didn’t really expect anything to save him, and he wasn’t surprised when she rapped sharply on the door.

“Parker! Turn on some lights and open up! What’s the matter with you?”

Parker got up and switched on a table lamp and went over to open the door. He said, “Don’t yell my name all over the country.”

Madge came in saying, “Brother, you’re almost the only client I got. I don’t know what’s the matter with kids these days. I brought ice.” She held up the plastic bucket. “You got anything to drink?”

“I’ve got a bottle,” Parker said, and went over to the dresser to get it.

Madge dropped into a chair and let her arms dangle. “I’m gettin’ old,” she said.

It was true, and it had been true for a long time now. Madge was in her middle sixties now and a rarity: a hooker who’d saved her money during the good years. She’d bought this place a dozen years ago, this Green Glen Motel on Route 6 north of Scranton, and ran it herself with the assistance of a retarded young heifer named Ethel, who might or might not be Madge’s daughter. The motel returned Madge a modest profit, and in a way it kept her in touch with her original profession, since most of the rooms here tended to get rented by the hour.

Because she knew a lot of the right people and because she could be trusted, Madge’s place was occasionally a meeting ground for groups of men like Parker setting up an operation somewhere and was less often used as a temporary hideout by somebody on the run. Madge didn’t like to risk what she had that way, but if it was an emergency she wouldn’t turn a man away.

She was medium height and thin as an antenna, with sharp elbows and a shriveled throat. Her hair was white and coarse and cut very short in the Italian style worn by women forty years her junior. She was wearing dark green stretch pants tonight and a sleeveless high-neck top of green and white and amber stripes and green slip-on shoes. Great golden hoop earrings hung from her ears. She kept her eyebrows plucked and redrawn in sardonic curving lines. Her fingernails were always long and curved and covered in blood-red polish, but she wore no lipstick, so that her mouth was one more thin pale line in a heavily lined face.

If she’d had less toughness and assurance, the effect would have been pretty bad, particularly with the gleaming white false teeth she flashed every time she opened her mouth, but somehow or other she had the style to get away with it. The young clothes weren’t being worn by an old body but by a young spirit. In some incomprehensible way, Madge had stopped getting older along about 1920.

Parker had come here because he’d needed a base for a little while and he’d known Madge was safe. He could make his phone calls without anybody listening in. He could stay here as long as he wanted without anybody ever getting curious about who he was or where he came from or what he was all about. For all of that, listening to Madge talk was a small price to pay.

As he brought her a drink now she said, “An old friend of yours was here a while ago. Smiles Kastor.”

Parker nodded. “I remember Kastor,” he said.

“He’s doing okay for himself,” she said. She swallowed some whiskey and launched into nostalgia.

Parker didn’t really listen at all. He sat across from her, an untasted drink in his hand, and at intervals he nodded or made some small comment. That was all she needed, just an indication every once in a while that she still had her audience.

What he was mostly doing, sitting there, was waiting for the phone to ring. He had three calls out, and there was nothing to do right now but wait.

Madge talked on for an hour and said something interesting only once, and that was when she sat up and snapped her fingers and said, “You know, I forgot all about it. I bet you did too. I have some money of yours.”

“You do?”

“You and Handy McKay came through here about four years ago; you had some jewelry you wanted unloaded.”

“That’s right,” Parker said. “I forgot about that.”

“Your share’s twenty-two hundred,” she said. “I have it in the safe out in the office. You want it?”

“Hold on to it,” he said. “Take my bill out of it when I leave.”

“Okay, fine,” she said.

It was good to have stashes in safe places here and there around the country. You never knew when you might need it. A Claire wasn’t always available, sitting on your case money a telegram away.

But it was stupid to have forgotten the money here. Parker remembered how that had happened; the jewelry had been an afterthought, an unexpected side result of him and Handy going up to Buffalo after a man named Bronson, a wheel in a gambling syndicate that called itself the Outfit. Bronson had put a contract out on Parker because of some trouble there’d been, and Parker made some more trouble, and Bronson’s successor decided to let the contract lapse. In all of that, the handful of jewelry Handy had found in Bronson’s safe got itself forgotten. But this is where they’d come after they’d finished with Bronson, and they’d given Madge the jewelry to unload for them, and here she was four years later with twenty-two hundred bucks out of nowhere.

She said, “What about Handy? Think I should send it to him?”

“He’s supposed to call me in a little while. I’ll ask him.”

“He retired, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

She waited and then said, “Say something, Parker. God, to get you to gossip it’s like pulling teeth.”

“Handy retired,” Parker said.

“I know he retired! Tell me about it. Tell me why he retired, tell me where he is, how’s he doing. Talk to me, Parker, goddammit.”

So Parker talked to her, telling her about Handy, running a diner now up in Presque Isle, Maine. She listened for a while, but she could never go very long without doing her own talking, so soon enough she interrupted him to tell him about somebody else she knew who’d retired seven different times in a space of twenty years, and Parker went back to his own silence again, not listening, waiting for the phone.

It rang half an hour later. Madge said, “You want me to leave?”

“It don’t matter, stick around.” He went over and picked up the phone and said hello.

Madge said, “Is it Handy?”

It wasn’t. Parker shook his head at her and said into the phone, “How’d we do?”

“Bad A couple of guys heard of Uhl, but I couldn’t find anybody who worked with him or knew how to get in touch with him. Matt Rosenstein drew a fat blank. Listen, I don’t know what you want these two for, but if it’s work a couple of other boys are interested.”

“It’s a special situation,” Parker said.

“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you out.”

“That’s okay.” Parker hung up and went back and sat down.

Madge said, “You looking for information?”

“Yes.”

“I’m the girl to ask, Parker. Try me.”

“George Uhl.”

Her expectant look faded slowly. “Uhl? George Uhl? He must be new.”

“Pretty new. He’s worked six times, he said. He said one time he worked with Matt Rosenstein. The way he said it, Rosenstein should be hot stuff, but I never heard of him.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “Matt Rosenstein, I know him. You wouldn’t ever cross his path. You two have different kinds of outlooks.”

“Tell me about him,” Parker said.

“He’s a scavenger bird,” she said. “He pulls things nobody else wants. He’s done a couple of kidnappings, he was a whiskey hijacker along the Canadian border for a while, he’s been all over.”

“He doesn’t do the big hits?”

“Oh, them too,” she said. “With a pretty respectable string sometimes, too. He’ll work any racket he comes across, so a few times it’s been your sort of thing. But he’s too wild; a lot of smart ones won’t work with him. I’ve heard it said he’s a snowbird, but I don’t think he’s on anything. He’s just one of those naturally wild ones. If this George Uhl thinks Matt Rosenstein is hot stuff, it tells you a lot about George Uhl. Like you probably shouldn’t work with him.”

“Too late to tell me that,” Parker said. “He came recommended by Benny Weiss.”

“Benny’s okay,” she said and shrugged. “But anybody can make a mistake.”

“Where do I find Rosenstein, do you know?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t. I know who he is. He’s been here once or twice with a bunch, but I wouldn’t know how to reach him or even who would know how.”

“That’s what—”

The phone sounded again. Parker broke off what he was saying and went over to answer it, and this time it was Handy McKay. He nodded at Madge and said to Handy, “Get anywhere?”

“Not on Uhl. He’s too new, I guess. But I found out about Matt Rosenstein.”

“Where he is?”

“He’s like you,” Handy said. “You don’t contact him direct. Just like people with a message for you come to me, people with a message for Rosenstein go to somebody else.”

“Who?”

“A guy named Brock, in New York. Paul Brock. He runs a record store there.”

“Hold on while I get a pencil.”

Madge was already on her feet. “I’ll get it.”

She got him pencil and paper, and Parker put down Brock’s name and address. Madge whispered, “Tell him about the money,” and Parker nodded.

Handy said, “That’s all I could get.”

“That’s fine,” Parker said. “Madge says she’s got twenty-two hundred bucks belongs to you. Remember those jewels we took away from Bronson that time?”

“Christ, yes! I forget about that.”

“She wants to know should she send you the money or hold it for you.”

“Send it.”

Parker was surprised. “You don’t want it stashed?”

“What do I want it stashed for? I’m not going anyplace. I run a diner now, Parker. That’s what I do.”

“Okay,” Parker said. “I’ll tell her. And thanks for the stuff on Rosenstein.”

“Any time.”

Parker hung up and told Madge she was to send the money and gave her Handy’s address. Then the phone rang again and it was the third man Parker had called, and he had the Brock name too but nothing else. Parker thanked him for it and hung up and said to Madge, “I’ll be going in the morning.”

“You’re after this boy Uhl,” she said.

“Have Ethel call me at eight,” Parker said.

“You always were gabby,” she said, and emptied her glass. She got to her feet. “That’s always been your big failing, Parker,” she said. “You talk too much.”

Parker locked the door after her and switched off the light. In the morning he left for New York.

Two

With enough volume to drown out a sonic boom, the loudspeaker over the doorway blared out the voices of a rock quartet declaiming the end of civilization as we know it. Album jackets hung turning from wires in the tall, narrow window beside the entrance. Rain streaked the window, further distorting the distorted photographs on the jackets.

Parker had left the car around the corner on Sixth Avenue. Discodelia, Brock’s record shop, was on Blecker Street in Greenwich Village on one of the tourist blocks. Parker walked up the block in the rain and he was the only one on the sidewalk. It was late morning, too early for tourists, and a weekday. And it was raining.

He turned and went in through the open doorway under the yowling speaker. Because the sound was aimed outward, away from the shop, it was quieter inside, almost cosy.

It was a long, narrow room with a yellow floor and ceiling. A high counter and a cash register and a glum male cashier were just to the left of the entrance, and beyond that both side walls were lined with record bins. The rear wall was a montage of posters, newspaper clippings, publicity photos, and pages from old comic books. More album jackets filled the upper half of both side walls above the record bins. More records were stored underneath the bins. Three boys of about twenty were scattered through the store, flipping through the records in the bins.

Parker said to the cashier, “I’m looking for Paul Brock.”

He shook his head. “He ain’t in the mornings. Try again around two, two thirty.”

“I’m in a hurry,” Parker said. “I’ll try him at home.”

“Okay,” the cashier said.

Parker stood there looking at him.

The cashier frowned, not understanding. “What’s the matter?”

“His address.”

“Who? Paul’s?”

“Naturally.”

“I can’t give out Paul’s home address. I thought you knew it.”

“If I knew it,” Parker said, “I wouldn’t be asking you.”

“Well, I can’t give it out,” the cashier said. “He’d fire me, I start giving out his home address to everybody off the street.”

“You know his phone number?”

The cashier shook his head. “I can’t give you that either. You better come back around two, two thirty.”

“I didn’t ask for it, I asked do you know it.”

“Sure, I know it.”

“Call him.”

The cashier wasn’t getting it, and that was making him mad. “What the hell for?” he said.

“Ask him should you tell me his home address. Tell him there’s a guy here wants to talk to him about Matt.”

“The hell with that,” the cashier said. “I got work to do here. You come back this afternoon.”

“Don’t mess around when there’s things you don’t understand,” Parker told him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe Brock won’t be happy that you wasted my time. Maybe you ought to find out.”

The cashier hesitated. Parker knew if Paul Brock was Matt Rosenstein’s go-between it was likely Brock was himself into a few things here and there, and an employee on close enough terms to speak of him by his first name would have to know at least that there were things happening under the surface of Brock’s life, whether he knew exactly what they were or not. So although the feeling of urgency here was all on Parker’s side, the cashier couldn’t be sure of that, and he was going to have to cover himself just in case Parker was somebody important.

But the cashier’s back was up, and he was resisting. He frowned, and hesitated, and looked past Parker at his three maybe-customers as though hoping one of them would interrupt them by buying something, and in general he let the seconds tick by without doing anything. Parker looked at his watch finally and said, “I don’t have a lot of time.”

“I’ll see what he has to say,” the cashier said sullenly and pulled a telephone out from under the counter. He was sitting on a stool and he dialed the phone in his lap, protecting it jealously so Parker wouldn’t be able to see what the number was. Parker didn’t bother to watch.

The cashier held the receiver to his ear a long time with nothing happening, and Parker had about decided Brock wasn’t home and he was going to have to come back here this afternoon after all when the cashier suddenly said, “Paul? Artie. Listen, Paul. There’s a guy here. He came in lookin’ for you. He wants me to give him your address.” He listened and said, “I don’t know, I never saw him before.” He sounded aggrieved, as though it was Parker’s fault they hadn’t met before. Then he listened again and said, “All I know is what I told you.”

Parker reached across the counter and closed his thumb and first finger on the cashier’s nose. “Don’t tell fibs,” he said, and squeezed, and let go.

“Ow!” Eyes watering, the cashier jumped to his feet, the stool clattering over behind him. He still kept the phone to his face, but he looked as though he’d forgotten about it. Putting his other hand over his nose, cupping the nose protectively, he said, “What are you doing? You crazy?”

“I told you it was about Matt,” Parker reminded him. “Tell Brock I want to talk to him about Matt.”

“Hold on, Paul,” the cashier said and put the receiver down on the counter. He put both hands to his face and squinted past his bunched fingers at Parker. “That hurt, goddammit,” he said. “Hey!”

Parker had picked up the receiver. The cashier lunged for it, but Parker grabbed his wrist and held. He said into the receiver, “Brock?”

A thin voice said, “Hello? Artie? What the hell’s going on there?”

“I want to talk to you about Matt,” Parker said.

There was a little silence, and then the thin voice said, “Who’s this? Where’s Artie?”

“I’m the one wants to talk to you about Matt,” Parker told him. “I’m in a hurry, and I figured you wouldn’t want me talking in public here, so I thought I’d come by and talk to you at home.”

“About what? Who the hell are you, for the love of God?”

“About Matt,” Parker said.

“Matt? Matt who?”

“Matt Rose. You want more identification? A longer name, for instance?”

There was another silence, and then, in a quieter voice, Brock said, “No, I get you. You want to talk about him, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“You got a message for him?”

“I want to talk about him.”

“Christ, you’re a one-track mind. You want to talk about him, you want to talk about him, you want to talk about him. What did you do to my cashier?”

Parker was still holding the cashier’s wrist. He’d tried to get away a couple of times, but each time Parker had bent his arm for him, so now he just stood there, breathing hard, glowering at Parker, making no trouble. None of the three browsers had so much as looked up when the stool had gone over; they were all absorbed in their quests.

Parker said, “He’s all right. He’s right here. You want to talk to him?”

“What for? And what do I want to talk to you for?”

“I’m not trouble for you. All I want is to talk about—”

“Yeah, I know, you want to talk about Matt. Okay, okay. You know where Downing Street is?”

“I can find it.”

“It’s the next block down on Sixth, west side of the street. I’m in number eight, near the corner. Second floor.”

“I’ll leave now. You want to talk to your boy?”

“No. I’ll see you.”

Parker let go the cashier’s hand and gave him the phone. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” he said.

The cashier put the receiver to his head anyway and said, “Paul?” But Brock had already hung up, so now the cashier looked needlessly foolish and he knew it. He hung up the phone with an angry gesture, put it away under the counter, and said, “You didn’t have to get tough.”

“I didn’t,” Parker told him.

Three

“You sound like your voice. Come in.”

Parker walked into a decorating magazine’s idea of the perfect masculine den. Wood was everywhere, massive and darkly stained. Knurled posts, heavy rough-finished tables, lamps with deep-grained wooden bases. And leather, and black iron, and a few discreet touches of brass. The wall-to-wall carpet was vaguely Persian, with an intricate swirling design in tans and creams and dull orange against a background of black. The windows sported wood-grain shutters. Even the air-conditioner in the wall beneath the window had a wood veneer face. And through an arched open doorway done in purposely rough plaster Parker could see another room done in exactly the same style and dominated by a heavy wooden trestle table and high-backed wooden chairs with leather seats.

The outside of the building hadn’t led him to expect anything like this. It was four stories high, narrow, hemmed in by similar buildings on both sides, each building having three windows facing the street on each floor and a high stoop up to a fairly ornate entrance-way. They were old buildings, old enough so that even their facelift false fronts were old — the one on this building was fake red brick — and a hallway inside had continued the same sort of first impression. Long, creaking staircases with rubber treads, bare peach-colored walls.

Paul Brock had not merely moved into the second-story floor-through apartment in this building, he’d moved an entirely different world into it. He’d put a hell of a lot of money into the place where he lived without much chance of ever getting a return on his investment, and it was a safe bet he hadn’t done it all on the kind of income he was getting from that hole-in-the-wall record store. Brock was a man with other things going for him, that much was sure.

Parker turned from his scanning of the apartment to study its tenant instead. The room distracted one from the man who lived in it, made him tend to disappear into the background, and maybe that was a part of the intention.

Because Paul Brock wasn’t very much. Slightly under medium height, very thin, he had a long, bony neck and an Ichabod Crane sort of face, except that there was a well-worn expression of friendliness and amiability on this face. Brock wore heavy horn rimmed glasses that made his eyes look huge and his cheeks look as though they sagged. He was about thirty. He was wearing loafers and grey slacks and a pale blue short-sleeved polo shirt, and he looked like the kind of guy in the office who’d go around with a cigar box to take up the gift collection every time one of the secretaries was quitting to get married.

He shut the door now and said, “Do you have a name you give out, or do I just clear my throat when I want to attract your attention?”

“Parker.”

“Parker. Nosy or pen? Ha! Well, that wasn’t very funny. It’s too early to offer a drink, but I–It is too early to offer a drink, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Parker said.

“I thought it was. Coffee?”

“I don’t have the time,” Parker said.

“Then let’s get down to business, Mr. Parker. Have a seat.”

Parker sat in a wooden-armed chair with an orange seat-cushion, and Brock settled opposite him on the black leather sofa. Brock tucked his legs under himself like a woman, but it seemed an unselfconscious gesture, and in no other way did he behave overtly like a faggot. The position was somehow more childlike than sexual.

Parker leaned forward and put his elbows on knees. “First of all,” he said, “I’m in the same business as Matt Rosenstein. He doesn’t know me, but we’ve got some mutual acquaintances also in the profession. If you want, I can give you some names till we come to one you know, and then you can check me out to see if I’m what I say I am.”

“I have no doubt you’re what you say you are,” Brock said. “You couldn’t be anything else. In fact, you remind me of Matt in a lot of ways. Not in appearance so much, and probably with more personal control, but still you two are obviously both in the same bag. I don’t have to check on you.”

“Good. There’s another guy also in the same business, and I know he worked with Rosenstein once. I want to find this guy, and I don’t have any way to get in touch with him. Maybe Rosenstein does. That means I have to ask Rosenstein. I asked around and I found out that if I want any answers from Rosenstein I have to ask the questions of you.”

Brock nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “I am Matt’s post office. Who is the man you want to find?”

“George Uhl,” Parker said. “U-h-l.” He watched Brock’s face and saw nothing happen there.

“I wouldn’t know him,” Brock said, “but then I don’t know all of Matt’s friends. Why do you want to find him?”

“Business reasons,” Parker said.

“None of mine, eh?” Brock smiled amiably. “That’s fair enough. So what you want me to do is ask Matt how you get in touch with this man Uhl, is that right?”

“Or send me to Rosenstein,” Parker said, “and I’ll ask him myself.”

Brock’s smile got thinner. “I don’t think that would be the way to handle it. Though I see no reason not to make a phone call for you. You say this man’s name is George Uhl?”

“Yes.”

“Odd name,” Brock said. He untucked his legs and put his feet on the floor. “I’ll make the call,” he said, “and then we’ll wait a while before Matt calls back. You understand that.”

“I’ll wait.”

“You’re making me a nervous host,” Brock said. “May I at least offer you some coffee while you wait?”

“Make the call first,” Parker said.

“Naturally.”

Brock slid to his feet, made a smiling half-bow to excuse himself, and left the room.

Parker sat in the chair and waited. The room forced itself on his attention much more than an ordinary room. His eyes kept traveling from detail to detail, distracting his mind.

He vaguely heard the murmur of speech from deeper within the apartment. That would be Brock on the phone. Then there was silence for a while, and then Brock came in with a silver coffee service on a silver tray with a dish of chocolate chip cookies. “The cookies are homemade,” he said, putting the tray down. “I think you’ll find them quite good. How do you take your coffee?”

“Black.”

Brock poured. The cups were ornate, with tiny, slender curved handles and fragile saucers. The spoons were smaller than ordinary. Brock put a cookie on the saucer with the cup and passed it over to Parker.

It was like Madge again. Waiting for a phone call and spending the meantime in somebody else’s idea of social fun. Coffee and cookies. Parker ate some of the cookie, and it had a good taste to it.

Brock perched on the edge of the sofa, stirring milk and sugar into his own coffee, said, “Artie phoned me back, you know. After you left the store.”

“He did?”

“He said you tweaked his nose.” Brock smiled merrily. “What a strange thing to do,” he said.

Parker shrugged. He drank some of the coffee, and that was good, too.

Brock kept a small conversation going awhile longer, talking about Artie, about the record store, about the rain beating down outside, and Parker answered him the way he’d answered Madge, with nods and monosyllables. But the combination of small talk, hot coffee, and the distracting detail-full room were soporific. Also the vague shush of rain outside the shuttered windows. Parker sat back in the chair and let his body relax while he waited.

After a while Brock said, “Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

Parker nodded, and Brock left.

The room was full of details. The rain whispered outside. The coffee was warm in his stomach. His eyelids were drooping.

When he realized he’d been drugged it was too late to do anything about it. He was too weak to stand. A swirling dizziness was spinning up from his stomach, clouding his sight, befuddling his brain.

He managed to turn his head and look at the doorway to the dining room, the rough plaster arch. It was empty. The dining room beyond, heavy with wooden furniture like a room in a monastery, was empty.

The guns were heavy, his pockets confining, but he got the guns out, he got them out. He pushed forward and went to his knees onto the rug, the rug muffling the thump. He swayed forward and made it to the sofa, a revolver loosely held in each hand. He stuffed the guns under the pillows, deep in under tin pillows.

Night was closing in, full of swirling mists. On hands and knees he moved his heavy dead body away from the sofa, back toward the orange chair. He wasn’t making it. He lunged forward, and miles away some rocky cliff that was his forehead blundered into the wooden chair arm, and he fell, turning, and darkness wrapped a black wool blanket around him hours before he hit the floor.

Four

Floating. Floating. Blue and blue and black. Bottom of the ocean. Outer space, between the stars. Tiny winking lights millions of miles away. Soft floating, wrapped in dark blue bubble bath.

Not anybody. Not a name, not a person, nothing. Nothing to do, nothing to think about, nothing to be. Just floating, on the dark blue cotton candy. Soft blankets. Endlessly turning. Slow.

“Can you hear me?”

Irritation. A rip in the fabric. But still the floating.

“Can you hear me?”

Answer. Easier that way. “Yes.”

“What do you want with George Uhl?”

“Money.”

“What money?”

“My money. Our money.”

“George Uhl has money belonging to you? Does he?”

“Yes.”

“How did he get your money?”

“Double cross.”

“On a robbery?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about the robbery.”

Complicated question. Irritation. Painful.

“Tell me about the robbery.”

Easier to answer. “Bank. Four string. Benny Weiss. Phil Andrews. George Uhl. Thirty-three grand. Uhl shot Weiss. Shot Andrews. Burned house down.”

“How did you get away?”

“Out window.”

“Does he know you’re still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Was thirty-three thousand your piece or the whole pie?”

“Whole.”

“Do you know where George Uhl is?”

“No.”

“Do you know how to find him?”

“Matt Rosenstein. Ask Matt Rosenstein.”

“Any other way?”

“No.”

“There aren’t any other links to Uhl?”

“Benny Weiss.”

“Isn’t he dead?”

“Yes.”

“So Rosenstein is the only lead you have.”

...

“So Rosenstein is the only lead you have.”

...

“Is Rosenstein the only lead you have?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any other business with Rosenstein?”

“No.”

“Are you a threat to Rosenstein?”

“No.”

“Can you find Uhl if Rosenstein won’t help you?”

Hard question. Irritation. Pain.

“Can you find Uhl if Rosenstein won’t help you?”

“No. Maybe. No. Maybe some way.”

“How?”

“Don’t know.”

“What will you do if you can’t find Uhl?”

“Something else.”

“That’s good. Good-bye, Mr. Parker.”

Floating. Blue. Blue and black. Deeper. Drowning in blue and black. Going down. Going out. Gone.

Five

His head was splitting. A violent, vicious headache driving him into consciousness. He groaned, and moved, and felt a hard, rough surface grate beneath him.

He squeezed open his eyes, and an inch away there was the jagged texture of concrete. He moved and felt the concrete against his body, and knew he was lying face down on concrete. In semi darkness, at night, with electric lighting somewhere not too close.

His head was grinding as though his brain had been cut in half and a piece of sandpaper was struck between the two halves and the halves were rubbing against it. He felt as though his skull were cracked from the top of his nose up over his forehead and across the top of his head and down to the back of his neck. The pain was so sharp it was keeping him awake and threatening to knock him out again at the same time.

He couldn’t just lie here like this. He struggled until his hands were under his chest, and then he pushed upward, and shifted, and cringed against the redoubled pain in his head, and finally got himself to a sitting position.

There were black brick walls around him. Down to the right there was an open space, and beyond that a street light shining on a stretch of empty sidewalk and some parked cars.

What was that stink, sweet and pulpy? He grimaced away from it, his head grinding again at every movement, and then he realized the smell was on his clothes. They were damp and slightly sticky.

Sneaky Pete. Cheap port wine, wino’s blood. It had been poured over him like a baptism; he stank of dollar-a-gallon wine.

His mind was confused. He remembered everything, but when he tried to think about it, put the elements together, his head would start to grind again.

Drugged, he’d been drugged, and this was the aftereffect.

If only it was still raining. The water would help to soothe his head and wash the stink off his clothes. But it had stopped long enough ago so that the concrete around him was dry.

What time was it? He moved slowly to look at his watch, and it was gone. He patted his pockets and they were empty. He’d been stripped clean. He was lucky he still had his shoes.

Using the wall for support, he struggled to his feet. He threatened to pass out again for a second, but the nausea and dizziness faded grudgingly and he made it to his feet. Keeping one hand against the wall of the alley, he moved heavily and unevenly out to the street.

There was a theater marquee just to the left, dark, with a title on it in French. Past the streetlight in the other direction was an intersection and a traffic light. As he watched, the light switched to red in his direction and two cars went across the intersection from right to left.

He moved slowly down the street to the intersection, keeping close to walls for support. This was a main street here, wide and empty. He looked at the street signs and it was Sixth Avenue — Avenue of the Americas, the sign said — and he was way downtown. Even farther than Brock’s record store and apartment.

Up that way was his car, but he didn’t have the keys to it now. There was another set in the hotel room, but that wasn’t going to do him any good till he got there.

An empty cab came up Sixth, he flagged it. It veered toward him, and then veered away again and sped by. He stepped back and leaned against a telephone pole and looked down at himself and saw that no cabdriver was going to pick him up. He looked like a bum and a drunk, he staggered, his clothes were a stained and wrinkled mess, and he looked big enough to be dangerous.

And he had no money.

He was staying at a midtown hotel. The only thing to do was to walk it, two and a half miles up Sixth Avenue. He pushed away from the telephone pole and started to walk.

A little later he passed Downing Street. Brock’s apartment was just around the corner, but he was in no shape to do anything about Brock now. There’d be time for that.

It was irritating to have to walk right by his own car. He could have broken in maybe, crossed the wires, but his nerves were too unstrung for any delicate work now; his hands were shaking. And it would be stupid to have a cop come by and grab him for breaking into his own car. By the time he got done explaining the cop would just be getting interested.

There were almost no other pedestrians, very little traffic. A clock in the window of a dry cleaners he passed said four twenty-five. It was the closest thing to a dead time in New York, the bars closed and the straight people not yet out and moving.

Every once in a while as he walked a police prowl car would roll slowly by, and each time he could sense the cops in it giving him the once-over, but he just kept moving. He knew he looked and acted like a drunk, and he knew New York City cops didn’t bother drunks unless they got troublesome or wandered into the wrong neighborhood.

It took him an hour and ten minutes to get to his hotel, and then the night clerk looked at him with repugnance and disbelief.

“I was mugged and rolled,” Parker said. “My room key was stolen. I need another one. The name’s Lynch, room seven three three.”

“One moment,” the clerk said and made no secret of checking his cards to see if somebody named Lynch was really checked into room 733. Parker knew the stink of cheap wine was still rolling off him and he knew what the night clerk was thinking, but there was nothing to be done about it.

The clerk shut his little file drawer and came back to the desk. “Yes, Mr. Lynch,” he said. He made no move to get a key. “You say you were robbed?”

“I say I was mugged and rolled,” Parker said, “and a bottle of wine was poured on me.”

“Have you reported this to the police?”

“What’s the point? You ever see anybody get picked up for mugging in this town?”

The clerk made a small move toward the telephone on the desk. “Shall I phone them for you?”

“You want to make a phone call,” Parker said, “you can call the house doctor.”

“Did this happen on hotel premises?”

“I need rest,” Parker said. “You’re keeping me from rest — that’s happening on the hotel premises. In the morning I’ll talk to the cops, but right now I’m worn out and sick.”

The clerk wasn’t sure which way to go. He said, “I could have a bellboy go up to the room with you if you like.” Because if Parker was legitimate it was a helpful gesture, and if he wasn’t legitimate it would expose him.

“That’s good,” Parker said. “Bring him on.”

“One moment, sir.” The clerk rang his bell and turned away to get a key.

The bellboy was a short stocky elderly Negro with two gold teeth. The clerk handed him the key and said, “Would you assist Mr. Lynch to his room? He was assaulted.”

“Yes, sir.”

They rode up in the elevator together, and Parker said, “I was rolled. I don’t have any cash on me. I’ll have to take care of you tomorrow night.”

“That’s perfectly okay, sir.”

The bellboy let him into the room, switched on the light for him, and put the key on the dresser. “Good night, sir.”

“Good night.”

The bellboy left, and Parker took off his shoes and got into the shower fully dressed. He let the water rinse the wine out of his suit and shirt, then stripped the wet clothes off and left them in the bottom of the tub. He showered, put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, and collapsed in the bed.

The last thing he thought was: It wasn’t Brock’s voice. Somebody else asked the questions. But before he could study this thought his mind opened and dropped him into a valley of folded black towels and he was gone.

Six

The fourth key worked. Parker cautiously slid the door open and slipped into Brock’s apartment. The living room in semi darkness looked like the entrance to a second-class Cairo hotel. Parker shut the door softly, leaned against it, listened.

No sound. No lights on anywhere that he could see. He’d gone by the record store and Brock hadn’t been there, but maybe he wasn’t home either.

After a minute Parker moved again, crossing the room swiftly and silently. He looked under the sofa cushions, and the guns were still there. He put one in his pocket, kept the other in his right hand, and moved on to look through the rest of the apartment.

It was empty. All the rooms continued the same wood and leather and iron and brass motif, the heavy veneer of masculinity. The kitchen was large, with a lot of chopping-block surface and with copper-bottomed pots hung on display on a pegboard on one wall. The only bedroom, dominated by a king-size bed with a maroon spread on it, had the inevitable shuttered windows plus a heavy Spanish mirror in an ornate frame and rough-textured dark dressers from Mexico. Bullfight posters gleamed dully on the walls, and the closet contained men’s clothing in two different sizes.

There’d been somebody else here all along. Rosenstein? Whoever he was, it had been his voice that had done the questioning.

If only he could remember more of the specific questions that had been asked, but it was all very vague and fuzzy in his mind. He had two general impressions: that he had been asked questions about Uhl and the robbery and the double cross, and that he had been asked questions about whether or not he was any kind of threat to Rosenstein. He couldn’t really remember that much about his own answers except that he assumed he’d been truthful. He’d been given some sort of drug that relaxed the controlling part of his mind, and he had no doubt he would have told them any damn thing they wanted to know.

So they knew about Uhl and the double cross, and they knew he was looking for Uhl. The question was, what would they do with that information? Warn Uhl? Or would Rosenstein go after Uhl and the money himself?

In either case, Rosenstein had the lead on him now. Or whoever the second guy had been.

In a strange way, that cut his own feeling of urgency to nothing. Being hopelessly behind, he now knew it was impossible no matter what he did to get to Uhl first, to come at him with the advantage of surprise. So now there was no need to hurry. Now he would do things a different way.

He began by searching the apartment, making it a long and thorough job. He found his wallet and keys in a dresser drawer, and in two other locations he found two caches of money, one with four hundred dollars and the other with just under two thousand. He found two rifles in a closet and three pistols inside a round hassock. He slit open all cushions and stuffed furniture, stripped the backs of all pictures, emptied the canisters in the kitchen, looked inside the toilet in the bathroom. He ripped out suit linings, took the bed apart, emptied dresser drawers to check them for false bottoms, and then left them on the floor.

Behind the false back of the medicine chest in the bathroom he found the syringe and the small unmarked bottle. He set them aside for later.

The one thing he didn’t find was any reference to the identity of the second man. There were two toothbrushes in the bathroom, two sets of clothing in the bedroom, small indications here and there throughout the apartment of the second man’s presence, but nothing that gave his name, nothing to say who he was. There were old envelopes and bills addressed to Brock, there were handkerchiefs in the dresser initialed PB, but for the second man there was nothing.

And no suitcases. He thought of that later when he was done with everything, when the place was a junkyard, a Midwestern town after a twister has been through. He stood in the middle of the living room and thought things over, and then it came to him there hadn’t been any suitcases.

He went back to the wreckage of the bedroom and opened the wide closet doors. Up on the shelf there were some things tucked to the side — a couple of hats and a scarf, things like that — but the middle was empty.

And the dresser drawers hadn’t always been full. And there’d been a dozen or more empty hangers in the closet.

They were both gone somewhere?

Parker went back into the living room, found the phone book and the phone, looked up the number of Brock’s record store, and dialed it. When someone answered, Parker said, “Hey, is Paul there? This is Bernie from Capitol Records.”

“No, he isn’t here now.”

“Be in this afternoon?”

“He won’t be in all week. He had to go away for a few days. You want me to have him call you when he gets back?”

“He’ll be back the beginning of the week?”

“He wasn’t sure. You want me to tell him to call you?”

“Sure. It isn’t important. Tell him Bernie from Capitol Records.”

“Okay.”

Parker hung up and dropped the phone on the floor. Then he got to his feet and prowled around the apartment, but it had nothing else to tell him. It couldn’t tell him where Brock and the other guy were now, or what they were doing. It couldn’t tell him where Uhl was, and that was still the key.

He remembered part of the question-answer session from last night. He’d been asked if he had any other connections to Uhl besides Rosenstein, and he’d said Benny Weiss. Then the voice had said Benny Weiss was dead, so he didn’t have any other connection, and that was true. So here he was, and he was stuck.

Brock would come back someday, though. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. Even if he and the other guy were after the money, thirty-three grand wasn’t enough to make him leave forever. He obviously had too many good things going already right around here.

So is that what Parker should do — stay here and wait for Brock to come back, — the other guy to come back? If they brought the money with them, he’d take it away. If they didn’t, he’d bend them until they told him where to find Uhl.

But that was so long and so chancy. If they had Uhl spooked, they could come back and not know anymore themselves where to find him. Or they could go up against Uhl and lose. Too many things could happen, with him sitting passive in this bombed-out apartment.

But what else was there to do? His only other link to Uhl was Benny Weiss, and Benny Weiss was dead.

Benny Weiss.

Parker stopped in his tracks. Benny Weiss. Maybe, after all...

The things he wanted from here he packed into a paper bag from the kitchen, and then he made his way through the mess to the front door and out. He was moving fast again.

Seven

The porch was full of children. Parker went up the stoop and through them to the front door, and they stopped swinging on the glider, climbing on the railing, playing soldiers on the floor, and stared at him. He stood at the screen door, looking through it into the mohair dimness of the living room, and pushed the bell button. An Avon-calling chime rang far away in the kitchen. The children were silent and wide-eyed behind him, staring at his back because he was something new.

The woman who appeared at the far end of the living room, drying her hands on her apron, was short and round and dowdy, with fluffy gray hair and a faded dress and down-at-the-heel slippers. “Coming,” she called. “Coming.” She scuffed across the living room carpet peering through her glasses at him. Framed in the doorway he had to be a silhouette to her, unidentifiable until she got close, and he saw the instant she recognized him. Her step faltered; her hands stopped moving in the apron; her mouth got a sudden slack look to it. Then she became more brisk again, saying, “Parker. I never thought to see you here.” She pushed open the screen door. “Come on in. You kids keep it down, now.”

A half a dozen of them shouted, “Yes, Mrs. Weiss!” and the racket that Parker had interrupted suddenly started up again.

Parker stepped into the house, and she let the screen door shut behind them. She said, “We’ll be able to hear ourselves think in the kitchen. Besides, I’ve got some baking to watch.”

“All right.”

He followed her through the small, neat, overstuffed rooms to the kitchen, which was large and square and expensively equipped and full of bakery aromas. Three glass cookie jars along the back of one counter were all full, each with a different kind of cookie.

“Sit down,” she said. “Do you want coffee?”

She wouldn’t know about her husband yet, and it would help her if she was doing something when he told her, so he said, “Thanks.”

“Just a jiffy,” she said. Turning her back to him to start the coffee, she said, “You being here is bad news, I suppose. You being here, Benny not being here.”

“Yes.”

“He’s dead, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

She sagged forward for a second, her hands bracing her against the counter. He watched her, knowing she was trying to be as stoic and matter-of-fact as she could, knowing she would hate him to do anything to help her unless she was actually fainting or otherwise breaking down, and knowing that she had to have rehearsed this moment for years, ever since the first time Benny had gone away for a month on a job. Like Claire, Parker’s own woman. Rehearsing the way she would handle it when she got the news. If she got the news. When she got the news.

There was a long, taut second when it could go either way — she could fall to the floor or go on making the coffee — and then she sighed, a long, shuddering sound, and shifted her weight and reached for the coffeepot. Still with her back to him, hands busy making the coffee, she said, “That wouldn’t be why you’re here. Not just to tell me about it. You aren’t the type, Parker. You never were, you never will be.”

“That’s right,” Parker said.

“You’re strictly business,” she said.

“I didn’t kill him,” Parker said. “Don’t take it out on me.”

She stopped what she was doing and just stood there for a minute. Then, in a muffled voice, she said, “Excuse me,” and hurried from the room, keeping her face turned away from him.

He made the coffee himself, a full pot, and then sat down at the table again to wait. When the coffee was done perking he poured himself a cup and was sitting at the table drinking it when she came back into the room. She was red-eyed, and her face looked puffier than before. There was a pinched look around her eyes and a strained, artificial smile on her mouth. “You were right,” she said. “I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

She got herself a cup from the cupboard, poured coffee, and sat down across the table from him. “So what is it you want?”

“Do you know a guy named George Uhl?”

“George? Young?”

“About thirty.”

“Thin hair on top. Black hair. And kind of tall and skinny.”

“That’s the one,” Parker said.

“Benny brought him around a couple of times,” she said. “I never got his last name, just the George part.”

“Do you know where he came from? How I get in touch with him?”

She shook her head thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think so. Benny just brought him around once or twice. Wasn’t he with you people this time?”

“Yeah, he was.”

She looked closely at him. “Did he do something? Is that it?”

Parker nodded.

“Something that caused what happened to Benny?”

“Yes.”

She frowned, trying to understand things, and took the time to sip some coffee. Then she said, “You aren’t the revenge type, Parker, not if there’s nothing in it for you. What do you want with this boy?”

Parker said, “He crossed us. He shot your husband in the head. He killed the other guy in the job, and he tried to kill me. And he took off with the money.”

“Oh,” she said. “The money.”

“That’s what I want,” Parker said.

“But you don’t have any way to find this George, is that it?”

“Not if you can’t help me.”

“I can see that,” she said. She drank some more coffee and then said, “But if you could have found him without me, I never would have seen you at all. Seen you or heard a word from you.”

“That’s right,” Parker said.

“Some of the money belongs to me now,” she said.

Parker shook his head. “Come off it,” he said. “Some things you don’t inherit.”

“Not unless I can help you,” she said.

“That’s right. You want a cut, is that it?”

“Half,” she said.

“No.”

“If there’s just you left,” she said, “then half that money belongs to me.”

“Wrong. Phil Andrews left people, too. He’s got a cut coming.”

“Are you going to give it to them?”

“No. But I’m not going to give his share to you either. Benny would have had a quarter of the pie if things had worked out. That would be somewhere between seven and eight thousand.”

“What do you mean, seven or eight thousand? Benny told me he’d be coming back with fifteen.”

“That was a top estimate. We ran into bad luck and got about as little as we could. Benny ever overestimate in front before?”

She nodded grudingly. “All right, all the time. But when he told me fifteen I thought sure he’d come back with ten or twelve.”

“So did we, but it didn’t work out that way.”

She frowned, thinking it over, then suddenly started and cried, “My baking!” She jumped to her feet, grabbed a potholder, and opened the oven. Out came the two halves of layer cake, smelling hot and fresh. She put them on the counter to cool and turned off the oven. Then she put the potholder down, turned back to Parker, and said, “I couldn’t trust you worth a damn. Don’t you think I don’t know that? You’d never come back here with the money.”

“I have two thousand cash in my pocket I can give you,” he said. “Or I can give you my word I’ll come back with a quarter of whatever I get. Which do you want?”

She glanced up at the kitchen clock, biting her lip. “I wish my brother was around,” she said. “He’d know what I should do.”

“Call him.”

“He’s out on his rounds.” She came back to the table and sat down. “Give me the two thousand as an advance.”

He shook his head. “One or the other,” he said. “Not both. What did Benny say about me? He ever say anything to you about me?”

“I know, I know,” she said. “I know what Benny thought of you. He could trust you. That doesn’t mean I can trust you.”

“Why not?”

“Benny was a fellow professional.”

“You’re his widow.”

She made a crooked smile. When she talked with him her expressions were at variance with her appearance, the gray hair and the apron and the slippers and the cake in the oven. A very sharp and worldly woman existed down inside the Apple Mary exterior. She said, “Sentiment, Parker?”

He shrugged. “Make up your mind, Grace,” he said. “If you don’t know anything I’ll have to root around somewhere else.”

“Do you have somewhere else?”

“I can just keep asking people in the business till I find somebody who knows George Uhl.”

“That could take a while.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

She studied him, then said, “Let me see the two thousand.”

He took a roll of bills held with a rubber band from his side jacket pocket. He slid the rubber band onto his wrist and counted out two thousand dollars onto the kitchen table. There were a few bills left, and these he put in his wallet, then rolled the two thousand and put the rubber band around it. “It’s right here,” he said and put it back in his pocket.

“All right,” she said. “Let me make a phone call or two. I’ll be right back.” She got to her feet.

Parker said, “Why not just give me the names and let me make my own calls?”

“These are people who’ll talk to me, not you.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

She left the room, and Parker got up to pour himself another cup of coffee. He sat at the table again, listening to the children yelling and running around out front, smelling the smells of cake and cookies, looking through doorways at small, snug neat rooms. Grace Weiss, childless herself, with a heavy heistman for a husband, had turned herself into a kind of nursery-rhyme mother image, the cake and the cookie lady at whose house all the children of the neighborhood congregated.

Parker had been here a couple of times before, and he remembered how Benny too had built himself a completely different at-home image. He was the semi-retired putterer, the Little League umpire, the maker of model planes and pup tents with the neighborhood boys, the constructor of birdhouses and clipper of hedges, a vague and amiable little man in baggy pants, with his glasses slipping down his nose. The difference was so complete that the first time Parker had come here he hadn’t recognized Weiss and had then thought Weiss had changed so much, grown too old, and couldn’t be used anymore. But Weiss had let him know he was still his old self on the job, and he was.

Parker knew that he himself was different when he wasn’t working. More relaxed, a little slower in moving, a little more vocal. But the differences were minor compared with those Benny and Grace Weiss had managed.

It was fifteen minutes before Grace came back, and when she did she had a folded slip of paper in her hand. She sat down across the table from Parker again, took a sip of her cold coffee, and said, “Nobody knows Benny’s dead, so I just let them all think I was calling on his account. I didn’t say anything about you or anything else.”

“Good.”

She looked at the slip of paper in her hand, then at Parker. “I decided I want the two thousand,” she said. “Not because I don’t trust you, Parker, but because I don’t know what can happen. It’s too much of a chance. Benny left me insurance, but how do I collect before I get official word he’s dead?”

“You won’t,” Parker told her.

“That’s wonderful,” she said. “So now I have to wait seven years for an Enoch Arden. What do I live on in the meantime?”

“Benny salted some cash away.”

“Sure he did. And this house is paid for, and everything in it is paid for. But he didn’t salt that much away, and there’s still living expenses. I don’t have enough to last me seven years. And maybe you’d come back, maybe you really would, and give me seven thousand dollars. But maybe you wouldn’t, or maybe you won’t get the money, or maybe something will happen that neither one of us can foresee. So I’ll take the two thousand. It’s sure.”

Parker took the roll out of his pocket again and put it in the middle of the table. She didn’t touch it, but she reached out and put the slip of paper on the table beside it.

Parker picked up the paper and opened it, and written inside were two names and addresses, the first female, the second male. He looked at her.

She said, “The top one is the girl George was living with last year. That’s her address; he used to live with her there. They split up a while ago, but she might still know where he is.”

“All right. And the other one?”

“He and Benny and George were going to do something together once. It was his caper — he found it and planned it.”

Parker tapped the paper. “This guy? Lewis Pearson?”

“Yes. It was Pearson’s idea, and he brought Benny and George together. That’s how Benny got to know George — when they were planning this other thing. But it never came off.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Benny told me once he thought Pearson had never been serious about it. I don’t know what went wrong. But Pearson knows George.”

“You try calling Pearson just now?”

“Yes. I told him Benny wanted to get in touch with George Uhl, and he said I should tell Benny to stay away from Uhl, he was no good. I couldn’t push the question after that. Maybe you can.”

“Maybe I can.” Parker got to his feet. “Thanks, Grace.”

“I did it for the money,” she said.

Eight

After he rang the bell three times without getting an answer, Parker walked around on the smooth green lawn to the back of the house. It was a white ranch style, very new, on a plot big enough to make the neighboring houses barely felt presence’s beyond the high hedges bordering the property. A white Mustang in the driveway meant somebody was home. It was a hot and sunny day here outside Alexandria, Virginia, so maybe they hadn’t answered the bell because they were out back.

They were. The rear of the house was dominated by a turquoise swimming pool. A greased, bronze woman in a two-piece white bathing suit lay on a chaise longue in the sunlight, eyes closed behind sunglasses, and a bronzed, stocky man in black bathing trunks, with hairy shoulders, was swimming doggedly back and forth in the pool like a man being paid a small salary to do so many laps every day.

Parker stood beside the pool and neither of them noticed him. He watched the man swimming back and forth, and finally the man glanced up and saw him standing there and was so startled he sank for a second. He came spewing back to the surface and swam over to the edge of the pool, grabbing the tiles near Parker’s feet. Looking up, squinting in the sunlight, he said, “Where the hell did you come from?”

“I rang the bell and didn’t get any answer, so I came around.”

“That damn thing. We never hear it out here.”

The woman across the way had sat up and was looking at them.

Parker said, “Are you Lewis Pearson?”

“Yeah, that’s me. You an insurance man? You don’t look like one.”

The woman called, “Who is it, Lew?”

He turned in the water, keeping one forearm on the tiles to support himself, and yelled, “How the hell do I know? Give me a minute, will ya?”

“You don’t have to snap my head off!”

“Just butt outski for a minute.”

Parker said to the top of his head, “I’m a friend of Benny Weiss.”

Pearson turned around again, forgetting the woman, and squinted up at Parker once more. Thoughtfully he said, “You are, huh?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a funny coincidence. Hold on a minute, lemme get outa here.”

Pearson turned away, pushing wearily off from the edge of the pool, and slogged across to the ladder on the other side. He pulled himself up out of the water, padded over to the empty chaise longue beside his woman, picked up a towel there, and began to pat himself dry. The woman said something to him; he said something back. She glanced over at Parker, said something else to Pearson, and he turned and called, “You want something to drink? Gin and tonic?”

Parker didn’t want anything but information, but he’d learned a long time ago that people liked you more if you let them play host, and people would only tell you things if they liked you, so he said, “That’d be fine, Thank you.”

The woman got up, ran a finger under the bottom of her bathing suit in back the way women do, stepped into sandals, and went off to the house. Parker walked around the pool towards Pearson, who was still drying himself, scrubbing vigorously with the white towel. He was of medium height, stocky build, about forty, and hairy all over, legs and arms and back and chest and shoulders. He finally tossed the towel back onto the chaise and said, “You want to stay out here or go inside in the air-conditioning?”

“It’s up to you.”

“Let’s stay out here,” Pearson said. “I’m working on my tan.”

He led the way to a table with a beach umbrella over it. Parker sat in the shaded chair and Pearson sat in sunlight. Pearson said, “I don’t know all of Benny’s friends. Which one are you?” He was being friendly and easygoing and relaxed, but Parker could see the eyes studying him, not yet having made up their mind about him.

“My name’s Parker. I don’t know if Benny ever mentioned me.”

“Parker?” Pearson started a smile. “Yeah, Benny mentioned a guy named Parker. Once or twice. He thinks Parker’s the best there is. In his kind of business, I mean.”

“You’re in the business, too,” Parker said. “Anyway, you thought about it.”

Wariness came back into Pearson’s face. “I did? When was that?”

“The time you and Benny and George Uhl were going to do something together. Only it didn’t work out.”

Pearson didn’t say anything. He studied Parker’s face.

The woman came out with a tray containing iced drinks in tall blue glasses. She put it down and said to Pearson, “Business, Lew?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he said. He sounded cautious, wary.

“I’ll swim,” she said.

“You do that,” he said. He was keeping his eyes on Parker.

She went over and dove into the pool, and Parker said, “Benny’s wife called you about nine-thirty this morning.”

“She did?”

“I was in the house when she called you,” Parker said. “She called you because I asked her to.”

“She said it was for Benny.”

“I know. It was simpler that way, to say Benny wanted to get in touch with Uhl. But all you’d say was Benny should stay away from Uhl.”

Pearson frowned and picked up one of the drinks. “Yeah, I know I did,” he said. “I thought about that later and I was sorry I did that. It isn’t up to me who Benny works with. He knows what I think of Uhl. Just because I’ve got my own personal hack about George Uhl doesn’t mean I should keep somebody else from getting in touch with him.”

“What’s your bitch about Uhl?”

Pearson glanced at Parker, at his drink. He turned his head and looked at his wife floating lazily in the pool. He shook his head and said, “It’s a personal thing; it doesn’t have anything to do with business at all. You aren’t drinking your drink.”

Parker took the other drink and sipped it, remembering Brock and the drugged coffee. But there wasn’t going to be anything like that here; it didn’t have the feeling about it.

He said, “Benny doesn’t want to talk to Uhl. I do.”

Pearson frowned. “You’ve got work for him?”

“I have a personal thing I’ve got to get settled with him.”

Pearson gave a sour grin. “You too? Georgy does get around.” He was facing the house, with Parker facing the opposite way, and now Pearson looked at the house and said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“That’s why Grace called, huh? To get Uhl’s address for you.”

“Yes.”

“So now you’re coming to me direct,” Pearson said, and then he said, “Uh,” and a small black thing appeared in the middle of his forehead, making him look cross-eyed. His head started to go back, the black thing went deep, burrowing, turning red at the edges, and the sound of the shot finally caught up with it, a flat, echoless clap in the middle of the sunshine.

Parker dove off the chair. Things speeded up all at once, shots were sounding one on top of the other, Parker was rolling across flagstone and green lawn, the world was full of spinning confusion. Then he was in the shadow of the hedge and he could lie flat on his stomach, peering out, the smell of grass and dirt in his nostrils, the air surprisingly cool down here in the shadow of the hedge. Far away, Pearson’s body was still falling out of the chair, as though that little space existed in slow motion with the rest of the world boiling around it at top speed.

Parker had one of his guns in his hip pocket. He dragged it out and watched the house. There weren’t any more shots coming from there.

Pearson’s body landed. It made a soft mound on the flagstones.

Parker got to his hands and knees and began crawling along the line of hedge, coming indirectly closer to the house.

The woman’s head appeared up over the edge off the pool, staring at the body lying there. She began to scream.

Parker got to his feet and ran for a corner of the house. There were no more shots. He moved quickly down the side of the house, but then he heard a car door slam somewhere out front. He ran and got to the front of the house in time to see a pale blue Chevy disappearing away to the right. Uhl’s car.

He could hear the woman still screaming. Go back there? No, she wasn’t going to know anything, and a hysterical woman could be several kinds of unexpected trouble.

Parker knew what had happened; he could see the whole thing clear and entire. Pearson had told him about having second thoughts after refusing to tell Grace Weiss how to get in touch with Uhl. So he’d done something about the second thoughts, but instead of calling Grace back he’d gone directly to Uhl.

Uhl must have had a bad minute there when Pearson called him and told him Benny Weiss wanted to see him. But then Uhl had to have worked it out and realized it meant Parker was after him. And he’d almost settled for Parker at the same time.

Where would Uhl go now? Pearson hadn’t gotten around to telling Parker how to find Uhl, but Uhl couldn’t know that or take a chance on it. So now he’d dig a hole someplace and climb in and pull the dirt in after him. Now he was going to be twice as tough to find.

And Parker had only one name and address left. Joyce Langer, 154 West 87th Street, New York City.

Pearson’s wife was still screaming. Parker got into his car and drove away from there.

Nine

The girl who opened the door to Parker’s knock had the aggrieved look of the born loser. Without it, she would have been good-looking. A willowy girl with long chestnut hair streaming down her back in the manner of urban folk singers, she had good brown eyes and a delicately boned face, but the hangdog expression destroyed her shot at beauty. You looked at her and you knew right away her voice would be a whine.

It was. She said, “What is it? I’m having dinner.”

It was eight o’clock, a little late for dinner if she was by herself, and from her clothing Parker guessed she was by herself. She was in wrinkled dark blue bell-bottom slacks, rope-sole sandals, and a gray sweatshirt with a cartoon character’s face on it.

Parker said, “I want to talk to you about George Uhl.”

Her face hardened, the complainer lines deepening in her forehead and around her mouth. “I haven’t seen George for over a year,” she said. “Try somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said, and started to close the door.

Parker stuck his foot in the entrance. “Just a minute,” he said.

She looked at the foot as though she couldn’t believe it, and when she looked back up at Parker her complainer’s face was on her so strong she looked as though she had a toothache. She said, “What do you think you’re doing?” And the whine had gone up an octave.

“You don’t like George Uhl,” he said.

“What does it matter to you who I like? Do you want me to call for help?”

“I don’t like George either,” Parker said. “If I find him, I’ll cause him some trouble.”

She looked at him appraisingly. “You will?”

“Yes.”

“What is this? You a jealous husband or something?”

“Something.”

She looked past Parker at the hall, frowning, and then half turned to look at the apartment behind her. “I was just having dinner...”

“I’ll wait.”

“The apartment’s a sight.”

“I couldn’t care less,” he said.

She looked at him again. “You’re really mad at George?”

“Yes.”

She hesitated a second longer, then shrugged and pulled the door all the way open, saying, “Okay, come on in.” Even that was said as though a heavy weight had just been put on her.

Parker walked into a sloppy living room, with a TV dinner on the coffee table and the television on with the sound turned low. He stood there and she shut the door after him, saying, “I don’t like fuss when it’s just me. You know how it is.” She was embarrassed about herself, though Parker didn’t care, and her embarrassment wouldn’t make her change anything.

“I know how it is,” Parker agreed.

She came around him, looking forlornly at her dinner. “It’s probably cold anyway. Listen — uh. What did you say your name was?”

“Tom Lynch.”

“Hi, Tom. I’m Joyce Langer.” It looked for a second as though she would even offer to shake hands with him.

“I know,” he said.

“Listen,” she said, trying to be animated. “Have you had dinner?”

Parker had driven straight up from Alexandria with stops only for gas. Four hours ago he’d had some of Lew Pearson’s gin and tonic, but nothing since. He said, “No, I haven’t.”

“Then why don’t you take me? I know a pretty nice little Mexican place down on Seventy-ninth Street. Okay?”

Parker was feeling the sense of urgency more than ever now. The people he was talking to were spread out up and down the eastern seaboard; he was wasting most of his time driving from one city to another. In the meantime Uhl could be anywhere. And Rosenstein could still be ahead of him.

But Joyce Langer could close up on him at any second, and he knew it. She was an injustice collector, a whiner, a stubborn, ineffectual hater. She might not be able to tell him a damn thing, but he would have to keep her happy until he found out one way or the other, so he said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Just let me change,” she said, and in her animation she almost did look pretty, the complainer lines fading though not entirely disappearing. “I won’t be a sec,” she said.

Parker knew that meant ten minutes, maybe fifteen. “All right,” he said.

“You could watch television — that’s a pretty good show on there right now. A special about the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. You want me to turn it up?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Let me just get rid of...” Her words trailed off as she picked up the TV dinner and hurried with it from the room.

Parker sat where his eyes would be attracted to the television set, but he didn’t turn the sound up. The movement on the screen — Girders lifting, men in work helmets looking up and moving their arms — distracted him slightly, and for the rest he just made himself be patient.

He knew too little about Uhl, that was the problem. Too little about Uhl and too little about the people around him. He had to poke around blind in Uhl’s life, never knowing what the reaction would be. With Rosenstein he’d succeeded only in setting another wolf on the scent. Pearson would have been good, because he had a sexual complaint against Uhl, but all that time spent driving down to Alexandria had played to Uhl’s advantage, and now Parker was back almost to the beginning again. The last link to Uhl’s life, a discarded girl friend. With Uhl spooked and Rosenstein prowling around somewhere.

The point was, thirty-three thousand dollars wasn’t enough to drive Uhl out of his life. He hadn’t planned, obviously, on taking the thirty-three grand and going to Europe or Canada or South America with it. It wasn’t enough. He’d counted on getting rid of all his partners in the robbery, and then he could go back into his normal life with four times his share and nobody to notice anything or ask him anything. Parker’s being alive had spoiled things for him, but he still couldn’t just abandon his life. He didn’t have enough money for it. If Parker — or Rosenstein — spooked him enough he might finally take off just out of desperation, hoping to start up somewhere else again with the thirty-three thousand as a stake. But what Uhl was going to want to do was hang around the general area, out of sight, until it had all blown over, until Parker and Rosenstein had given up and gone on to other things. And in the meantime Uhl would want to maintain some sort of contact with his regular life to know what was happening, if for no other reason.

Pearson was proof of that. There’d been someone, some individual person, that Pearson could call and get to deliver a message to Uhl. That someone, or maybe a different someone now, could lead Parker to Uhl. All he needed was to be led to the someone.

Which meant he had to get into Uhl’s life, had to make contact with the people Uhl knew. And all he had left to help him was one old girl friend with a hate against Uhl and a complaint against the world.

She was back in ten minutes, and she’d tried her best. She was in a yellow sleeveless miniskirted dress with orange Mondrian lines, her shoes were casual flats in a matching orange, and she carried a small orange handbag. She’d brushed her hair and made up her face and even put on eyelashes. The whiner was well disguised now; if you didn’t look close, you might miss her.

Except for the voice. “There!” she said. “That didn’t take long, did it?” Even through the animation the petulant overtones remained.

“Not long,” Parker said.

She switched off the television set, and they left the apartment. They were on 87th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, and she led the way over to Amsterdam and then south.

Parker tried once or twice to get her to talk about Uhl as they walked along, but she wouldn’t do it. “Not on an empty stomach,” she said, and made stupid conversation about the weather instead. “Isn’t this weather something? Boy! Different every day. What about that rainstorm yesterday? Wasn’t that something?”

“Yes,” Parker said. He was thinking that a lot of time had gone by and he hadn’t gotten anywhere. They’d knocked over the bank on Monday, and it was Thursday before he’d gotten to Brock, the day it rained. Now it was Friday. Four days of running back and forth, and Uhl was still out there someplace, sitting on the money.

The restaurant had an aquarium decorating scheme — fish and fishnets, candles flickering on the tables. They ate Mexican food, cooling their mouths with beer, and afterwards over coffee Parker said, “Now we talk about George Uhl.”

“Do you have a match?”

He held a light for her, and she cupped her hand around his while she lit her cigarette. “Mm, thank you.” She smiled at him through smoke and candlelight. “You have strong hands. And a one-track mind. George is all you’re interested in, isn’t he?”

“For now,” Parker said because he thought he ought to play her game with her just a little. He didn’t want her to freeze.

“I don’t know what you have against George,” she said, looking down at the ashtray as she flicked no ashes from her cigarette, “But I have plenty.”

“I won’t pry into your personal life,” Parker told her, short-circuiting a long, sad story. “All I want is to find out where he is.”

She looked at him and frowned a little. She was being coquettish now, even frowning coquettishly, and with that and the dimness of the candlelight and the cigarette smoke the whiner was almost completely out of sight. Except for the voice. “I haven’t seen him for a year,” she said. “I honestly haven’t. More than a year.”

“You used to know him,” Parker said.

“Didn’t I, though,” she said, twisting her mouth scornfully.

“So you knew the people he knew. You knew his friends.”

“A man like George,” she said, “doesn’t have friends. Just people he uses.”

“That could be. But some people think they’re his friends. Everybody has somebody who thinks he’s his friend.”

She shrugged, flicking ashes again. “I suppose so.”

“They’re the ones who’ll know where he is. But I don’t know yet who they are.”

She looked at him abruptly with something very pained behind her eyes. “How did you hear about me?”

“From a woman named Grace Weiss.”

The name obviously meant nothing to her. She said, “Who on earth is she?”

“The wife of a guy George knew.”

“How did she know anything about me?”

“I don’t know.”

The complainer crept a little more into the open. “I don’t like the idea of people talking about me. People I don’t even know.”

“She told me you used to know George. That’s all she said. And if you used to know him, you know some of his friends.”

“I suppose.”

“Who would they be?” Parker asked her.

She would have liked to dwell on the injustice of strangers talking about her, but she came around reluctantly to consider Parker’s question. She said, “It’s been a while. George and I never really were that close anyway. He just used me, the way he uses everybody. He doesn’t let anybody get close to him, not really close.”

She wouldn’t stay on the track. Parker nudged her back on, saying, “But you had to know some of the other people he knew.”

“Well, there was Howie; that’s one.”

“Howie. You know his last name?”

“Something Italian. Let me think. It was like coffee, you know, the instant coffee? What is it, espresso. Progressi, that was his name! Howie Progressi.”

“Where’s he live?”

“Oh, somewhere in Brooklyn. He has a garage down there. He and George are both car nuts. Howie enters those demolition derby things out on the Island. You know the kind of thing?”

“No. Demolition derby?”

“A lot of crazy guys get into beat-up cars,” she said, “and they all go out in the middle and bump into each other. It’s supposed to be a gas, but frankly I never saw that much in it. I went with George a couple of times, and it was just creepy. Everybody in the stands screaming and yelling and cheering, and these crazy guys out there in the middle of the track bumping into each other. And the last car still moving is the winner. Is that creepy? And they talk about they wonder if this country’s violent. Wow.”

“And Howie Progressi drives in these things?”

“All the time. He never wins or anything, but he doesn’t even want to win, if you ask me. He’s just there to bump into other cars. He and George were buddies for a while. I don’t know if they are still.”

“And you don’t know his address?”

“Just somewhere in Brooklyn.” She shrugged. “I suppose he’s in the phone book.”

“All right. Who else?”

“There was somebody named Barry he used to see sometimes. I never met him, and then he moved to Washington or someplace.”

Washington? Near Alexandria. Uhl had been close enough to get to Pearson within a couple of hours, depending on what time Pearson had his change of heart and contacted Uhl. Parker said, “Who is this Barry?”

“I don’t know. That’s all I ever heard was Barry. No last name or anything. I remember him and Howie talking about this Barry together one time and giggling like crazy. Because they had a secret, you know. They knew Barry and I didn’t. That was supposed to be funny.”

“Howie knows Barry, though, is that right?”

“Sure. They had a lot of fun over that one.”

“Anybody else?”

“There was a cop,” she said. “I never met him either, but George saw him sometimes. They had something going on. I don’t know what.”

“What was his name?”

“Dumpke, or Drumpke. Dugald?” She frowned, rubbing the lines in her forehead with one finger. “Dumek!” she cried. “That’s it, Dumek!” She spelled it.

“What’s his first name?”

“I don’t know. George always just called him Officer Dumek. He’d say, ‘I’ve got to go see Officer Dumek.’ Wait, I did see him one time. We went to the movies, up to the New Yorker, you know? On Broadway? And we were walking back and there was a police car stopped by a fire hydrant and there was nobody behind the wheel, but there was a policeman on the right side, sitting there with his arm out the window, and when we went by he waved and said, ‘Hi, George.’ And George said hi back, but I forget what name he said. But then he told me that was Officer Dumek. But I couldn’t describe him or anything. He was just a policeman in a police car at night. You know?”

Parker nodded. “Okay. Anybody else?”

“Nope.” She shook her head, being totally positive.

“Maybe somebody you haven’t thought of?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m pretty sure not.”

Parker gave it up. He said, “If he was in trouble, do you think he’d come to you?”

“Oh, I wish he would,” she said savagely.

“Yeah, but would he?”

“I don’t know. He’s so damn arrogant, I suppose he might. If he didn’t have anybody else to turn to, maybe he would. Think he could just walk back in and take over again.” The whine was as sharp as vinegar now, the lines in her forehead looking like pencil strokes, crayon stokes, in the candlelight. Then she leaned forward and said, “You’re really mad at him, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’d really beat him up, wouldn’t you?”

It was what she wanted to hear, so he said, “Yes.”

“I tell you what,” she said, her voice dropping, becoming more confidential. “If I hear from George at all, I’ll call you. Okay?”

Parker considered the offer. Was there anything else under it? No, he didn’t think so. He said, “All right. That’d be good.”

“And if I think of anybody else, anything else that might help you, I’ll call. Like Officer Dumek’s first name, or anything like that.”

“Good. You can reach me at the Rilington Hotel, in midtown. You know of it?”

“Rilington Hotel. I can look it up in the phone book.”

“Right. I’m in and out of there, so if I’m not registered when you call, just tell them to hold the message for me.”

She nodded. “You’re from out of town, then, is that it?”

“I’m in New York a lot of the time,” he told her to keep her interest alive.

It did. “Then maybe we can get to know each other a little,” she said. “I could show you around the city some, if you don’t know it very well.”

“After I find George,” he said.

“A one-track mind,” she said, smiling. “I told you that’s what you had.”

“That’s what I have.”

She looked off toward the fishnets on the wall. “I wonder where George is,” she said.