The station wagon was parked out front. Three men were walking toward the house, Jake Kengle in the lead. Behind him was Bill Stockton, a tall skinny guy with black hair and a loose-limbed, stooped way of walking. Bringing up the rear was Philly Webb, who owned the station wagon and who would be driving tonight. He was short, chunky, olive-complexioned, with the chest and arms of a weightlifter, giving him a vaguely apelike look.
Fusco opened the door for them and they trooped in, all dressed like Parker in white shirts, black trousers and quiet-soled shoes. Kengle said, “This is the part I don’t like. Just before, you know? When there’s nothing to do but wait.”
“There might be a deck of cards around here,” said Webb.
“Sure,” said Fusco. “We can play at the kitchen table. I’ll be right back.”
Parker sat out, but the other four worked up a poker game to kill the time, most draw and five-card stud. They played for small stakes; it was a superstition that it was bad luck to gamble with money you hadn’t copped yet.
Parker didn’t gamble. He preferred to sit in the living room, either doing nothing at all or going over again in his mind each step of what they were supposed to do today, trying to find things that had been overlooked.
Ellen came back about twenty after two. She looked at the four sitting around the kitchen table, and said to Parker, “How much longer are you all going to be here?”
“A little while,” he told her.
She was acting like somebody being calm with a great deal of trouble. She fluttered a bit in the living room, and then went on out to the bedroom. Parker watched her go, frowning. He didn’t like the way she was acting, hadn’t liked any of the changes she’d gone through the last week and a half.
It had started with that oddball stupid sexless proposition. It had been a proposition, it couldn’t have been anything else, but it had been delivered in such a way as to make it tough to believe it had ever happened. As though she’d done it against her will, and had just gone through the motions without really meaning it.
But she’d meant it, he was sure of that. She’d spent a couple of days giving him cow eyes alternating with bad temper as though he’d been the one trying to put the make on her, and then it had been all over, with a new phase coming in.
The new phase had been hatred, cold silent murderous hatred. Whenever he’d been in the house she was always somewhere around, glaring at him, as though waiting for him to make the one move that would make it all right for her to come after him with a carving knife.
But that hadn’t lasted either. It seemed as though every time she went off for one of her sessions with the analyst she came back with a different set on the world. The next attitude toward Parker had been studied indifference; she’d ignored him as completely as if he weren’t there at all. But not arrogantly, not like a queen ignoring a peasant, which is ignoring in a way that still acknowledges existence. Parker seemed to have ceased to exist for her, as though she had a blind spot and he was standing in the middle of it.
That phase had been the easiest to put up with, but it too had changed, and the most recent attitude had been fear, a kind of guilty jumpy fear that had made him almost as nervous in her presence as she was. He’d asked both Devers and Fusco about it, and they’d both assured him she would have done nothing — like talking to the law — to justify her guilt or her fear. “That’s just the way she gets sometimes,” Devers had said. Fusco’s comment had been, “Ellen wouldn’t fink, period.” Parker had had to take their word for it, but he still didn’t like it; when she slunk and jumped and jittered around him like that it made his hackles rise.
Well, this was the end of it anyway. He’d be leaving this house for the last time this afternoon, and Ellen Fusco could stumble on through life without him.
But there was one last session with her to be gone through. A little after three she came back into the living room and sat down on the other end of the sofa. She was smoking, and she kept nervously tapping the cigarette on an ashtray.
She was going to say something, but she was taking her time. Parker waited, and finally she said, not looking at him, “What if something goes wrong?”
He turned his head and looked at her. She was studying the ashtray on the coffee table, tapping and tapping the cigarette against it. He said, “Like what?”
She made a convulsive shrugging movement. “I don’t know. Anything. The alarm goes out too soon. Somebody asks for identification at the wrong time. Anything at all.”
“We handle it, if we can,” he said.
“But it could happen.”
“It can always happen.”
“Maybe it’s the wrong kind of job,” she said.
He looked at her, waiting for her to go on. She sat there, tap-tapping, huddled in on herself, clasping her left upper arm with her right hand as though to hug herself, and although the fear of him seemed to be gone now — another change — the nervousness was even worse than before. She was like an old car with an engine that’s falling apart; you can just see the hood vibrating, but underneath there it’s throwing a rod.
When he kept on being silent, not responding to her comment about the wrong kind of job, she tossed him a quick look — her eyes were large and round and panic-stricken — stared back at the ashtray, and said, “Oh, not for you, maybe. Maybe you like this kind of thing. But maybe it’s wrong for Stan. Or even Marty. But mostly Stan.”
“It’s his choice,” Parker said.
“I wish he wasn’t involved.”
“Talk to him.”
“I did. A long time ago. The point is—” She stopped, shook her head, frowned at her cigarette, all as though she wasn’t entirely sure what the point was. Finally she said, “The point is, what happens to Stan if something goes wrong? He isn’t a professional, maybe he won’t be able to get away. And it would matter to him, don’t you see? Marty, it doesn’t matter to Marty, he goes to jail, he comes back out, he does the exact same thing again. Jake Kengle was in jail, too, it’s the same thing. But Stan isn’t like that. It would matter to him, if he was in jail.”
Parker wondered how she could believe there was anyone on earth to whom a jail term didn’t matter. But what he said was, “Maybe Stan thinks he won’t go to jail.”
“I know. It’s worth the risk, everybody’s sure it’s worth the risk.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Why don’t you—?”
She stopped again, shook her head violently, finally took a drag on the cigarette. With one last tap at the ashtray, she rose in a cloud of expelled smoke.
Parker said, “Why don’t we what?”
“Nothing,” she said, turning away.
“Why don’t we call it off?”
She shook her head and walked out of the living room. He knew that’s what she’d been about to say, that while starting to say it the impossibility of it all had come through to her — the costumes were in the closet, the guns in the kid’s room, the bus out at the lodge, the string assembled and playing poker in the next room — and she’d stopped herself before saying the whole thing. But it was what she wanted, that much was obvious. To have it not happen, never be going to happen.
It wasn’t the first time Parker had seen somebody’s woman get that kind of last-minute jitters, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. It was good to have a woman like Claire, strong enough and secure enough and smart enough to stay out of it entirely. It would be good to get back to San Juan, to see Claire again, to relax beside the ocean, to spend some time in the casino.
Parker didn’t go to the casino for himself, but for Claire. She did the gambling, if it could be called that.
The casinos in San Juan didn’t have the desperate greedy urgency of Las Vegas, where the gambling rooms have neither clocks nor windows to remind the fish of the passing of time. In San Juan the casinos were merely entertainment appendages of the tourist industry, along with the beaches and the floor shows and the boat rides to St. Thomas for duty-free liquor. The hotel casinos were only open eight hours a day, from eight in the evening till four in the morning, and only three kinds of gambling were available for the idle speculator: roulette, blackjack, craps.