Parker said to the cashier, “I’m looking for Paul Brock.”
He shook his head. “He ain’t in 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.