When they were done, they switched off the bedroom light again and went out of the room, shutting the door behind them. French went on into the kitchen and Parker went down the hall to the door and out into the stairwell, where he called down, “Okay.”
This had been the arrangement. There was probably no way that Claire could avoid being implicated in the robbery, but she might be able to make some sort of case for herself as a hostage on the basis of where she’d been seen so far. She could claim she’d been waiting in the hotel lobby for a man who stood her up, and that when she left she saw the robbers carrying coin cases, that they grabbed her and held her up in the ballroom, that they had apparently intended to release her after they were finished, and that she’d been taken away as a prisoner afterwards. If this story were to work, Mavis Gross couldn’t be allowed to see Claire working in league with Parker and French, so Claire had waited downstairs while the blonde was being put out of the way.
It seemed to Parker that Claire had had a secondary reason for wanting to wait downstairs, that she was still very shaky at the thought of potential violence, but he didn’t worry about it. Her control had snapped once, but now she knew it could snap and so she was holding to it tighter than before. She’d be all right.
She came up the stairs slowly, not out of reluctance but out of exhaustion, and when she came close Parker could see her eyes were haggard. “We’ll get a couple of hours sleep,” he told her.
“How is—how is Mavis?”
“Fine. Tied and gagged, lying in bed. Not hurt, not scared.”
“She’s probably both,” Claire said, “but I know what you meant.”
They went into the apartment, and while Parker shut the door Claire went on into the living room, turned a three-way lamp on low, and stretched out on the sofa. “I don’t know how I can think about sleeping,” she said, her voice already getting fuzzy.
Parker saw she was going under, so he went on into the kitchen, where French had made himself a thick sandwich and opened a can of beer. He looked up from the sandwich and said, his mouth full, “I can never eat before a job. I get a nervous stomach, you know? But afterwards I could eat for a week.”
Parker sat down across the kitchen table from him. He said, “We’re going to have to work it out.”
“I know.” French put the sandwich down, swallowed beer, and said, “Let me say my say first.”
“I know everything you want to say. You were up tight for cash, you figured you were bucking an amateur operation, everything would have gone smooth except Lebatard tried to draw down on you.”
“Then I got rattled,” French said. “I should have thrown in with you and Lempke right away, as soon as Lebatard turned it sour. But I wasn’t thinking, so when Lempke came through the wall I slugged him. That was stupid.”
“The law has Lempke now. And the other two, Carlow and Mainzer.”
“I don’t know either of them.”
“They work around.”
French said, “It’s too bad about Lempke.” But then he shrugged and said, “He won’t be the first one died behind the walls.”
“The point is,” Parker said, “you queered an operation of mine, so I shoudn’t let you walk around. But you can set it straight again, bringing your own fence in, so the question is how valuable is that. Enough to keep you breathing, but how much besides.”
“Well, there’s three of us,” French said. “So we split it even.”
Parker shook his head. “No, there’s six of us. Lempke and Mainzer and Carlow are still in, they’ve all got contacts that can take their shares. And they’ll need it for lawyers and this and that.”
“So I get a sixth?”
“You get a sixth.” Parker reached out, picked up the beer can, took a swig. “Who’s the fence?”
French grinned. “You kidding? He’s the only one keeping me alive. I give you the name I’m down the chute.”
Parker shrugged. “I can afford to give you a sixth.”
“That ought to be enough to stake me. What the hell, I’m in for a sixth. So what do we do now?”
“We wait till eight o’clock, and then you go rent a delivery van.”
“Why me?”
Parker looked at him. “Because that’s your job,” he said.
French said, “I don’t like leaving you here with the goods.”
“That stuff won’t be getting out of this town for a while. Use your head.”
French drank some beer, looked at his sandwich, and said, “I wish I’d stayed with it back in the beginning. It turned out sweet after all, didn’t it?”
“Up to a point,” Parker said.
Six
UNDER ONE of the railroad bridges over the White River, north of Riley Park, Parker and French worked at transferring the coin cases again, this time from the Microbus to the Dodge delivery van that French had rented. It was nine o’clock on a Sunday morning and nobody was around.
When the cases were all transferred, Parker pulled the D.C. plates off the Microbus and stashed them in the back of the van. Then he and French drove back to Mavis Gross’s place, where they’d left Claire still sleeping. Parker stopped in front of the building and French opened his door, but before getting out he said, “I wait one hour.’ Then I start making trouble.”
“I’ll be back,” Parker told him. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I do worry,” French said. He slid out of the van and shut the door.
Parker drove off, seeing in his rearview mirror French standing there on the sidewalk, looking after him.
Parker drove downtown and went to another parking garage. The attendant here was a moustached Negro asleep in the back seat of a green Lincoln parked beside the office. The Lincoln radio was on, playing a Vivaldi concerto. Parker touched the horn and the attendant immediately woke up and sprang from the car, alert and ready. Parker told him he wanted to leave the van here for a day or two, took the pasteboard the attendant got for him from the office, went back to the street, and walked a couple blocks before he found a booth where he could phone for a cab. He took the cab to within two blocks of the Mavis Gross apartment, walked the rest of the way, and found that French was the one asleep on the sofa and Claire was the one eating a sandwich in the kitchen. She was also drinking coffee, and when Parker came in she went to work making a cup for him.
She said, “What about Mavis? We’re going to have to feed her.”
“French can do that when he wakes up. Let her get to know his face.”
“What about me, Parker?”
“What about you?”
“Do I go back and tell my tragic story? If I’m going to, it better be soon.”
Parker said, “What’s the other choice?”
“To go with you.”
Parker put both hands flat on the Formica tabletop, and looked at his hands as he spoke. “Sometime in the next few days,” he said, “I’m going to kill French. You want to be around for it?”
“No. I don’t want to hear about it. Never again, Parker. I never want to hear about any of it.”
He looked up at her. “What then?”
“I want to be with you,” she said. “I know sometimes you’ll have to go away and do these things, but those times you can’t talk about. Not tell me anything, not before, not after.”
“That’s how I’d be. Whether you wanted it or not.”
“The question is, do you want me?”
He looked at her. “I don’t know for how long,” he said.
“For a while.”
He nodded. “For a while.”
She smiled and said, “Then I don’t go back, do I?”
“Yes you do.”
“I do? Why?”
“We shouldn’t both of us be wanted. If you’re with me, you can help me, do things I can’t do. But not if there’s circulars on you, too.”
Puzzled, she said, “Then what do I do?”
“You go back. You tell your story, and you hang around two months. Two months from today you go to Utica, New York, Central Hotel. There’ll be a reservation waiting for you under the name Claire Carroll. Take the room, and I’ll meet you there.”