“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 only 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 a way 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.