Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel (13 page)

“Yes. But what—”

“Give me the names back.”

She hadn’t been paying particular attention to the
names, not knowing they meant anything. She said, “Is it important?”

“Yes. Those are the names to use.”

“Wilmington Hotel,” she said, trying to remember. “Edward—I’m sorry.”

“Latham. Edward Latham.”

“Edward Latham. Is that all?”

“Don’t antagonize them. They’re very mean people.”

The very flatness of the statement made her believe him. “I know how to be a little mouse,” she said, remembering times when she’d fought male strength with female cunning, feeling strong in the memories.

“That’s good,” he said. “I’ll get back there as soon as I can.”

It was rare that he let her feel tender toward him. “I know you will,” she said.

“Clean my stuff out of there right away.”

“I will.”

She heard the click as he hung up, but held the phone to her ear a second or so longer, then reluctantly put it back in its cradle.

Get his things out of here. It was after two in the morning, she was ready for bed, the temptation was strong to let it go until morning. But she believed him about the people he was involved with, and she believed he knew best how to prepare for them. Reluctant, but dogged, she got out of bed again, turned on the overhead light, and got his suitcase from the closet.

One suitcase was all it took; that, and fifteen minutes. Then she dressed, putting clothes on over the nightgown, and lugged the suitcase through the kitchen and out of the house.

It was very dark out, patches of cloud in the sky, no moon. She stood on the gravel a minute, then put the suitcase down, went back into the house, and got the flashlight from its kitchen drawer.

Stow his things in an empty house, he’d said. The houses were empty on both sides, why not pick one of them? She shone the flashlight right and left, and chose the house to her left because there seemed to be fewer trees and bushes in the way.

She left the suitcase outside the lake-side door, and went around the house trying doors and windows, all of which were locked. Finally she broke a window on the side opposite her own house, unlocked it, raised it, and climbed in. The electricity was turned off, so she found her way through to the rear door by flashlight, unlocked it, opened it, and brought the suitcase inside. The bedroom closet seemed a perfectly adequate place to leave it. She went out by the door, leaving it unlocked, and went back across to her own place and inside, carefully locking the door behind her.

In bed again, in the darkness, the rifle on the floor under the bed, she lay gazing at the paler rectangle of the window and thought about Parker, and began to think sexually about Parker. She was lying on her back, but the sexual images involving Parker grew so insistent she rolled over on her side, trying to find a position without sexual connotations.

It was strange, this feeling. When she was involved with a man, and he was with her, she had very strong and healthy sex urges, but when she was alone she never thought very much about sex at all. She had always been glad to welcome Parker back after one of his jobs, because his own sexual appetites were always at their strongest
then, but the time spent waiting was usually empty of sexual frustration. Yet tonight her mind was crowded with remembered incidents, moments, expressions, and she couldn’t get rid of them, couldn’t get to sleep.

After a long while the window rectangle began to lighten. “This is ridiculous,” she said, aloud, and got out of bed. She went to the kitchen and brought back the radio and turned on an all-night music station from New York. Listening to the music, the announcer, the commercials, she finally began to relax toward sleep. During the five A.M. news her mind at last shut down and she slept. And in her dreams Parker mounted her and stroked long and deep and endless, and it kept being spoiled for her because there was someone else just over his shoulder.

4

None of the dogs were any good. Today was Sunday, so no pet shops were open, and Claire had been limited to the private owners advertising in the local Sunday paper. Most of the dogs listed were puppies, and though under normal circumstances she would have liked to start with a puppy and watch it grow, what she needed was a dog that would be a guardian and defender of the house right now.

Three of the advertised dogs were full-grown, and calls to their present owners had made them seem possible choices. Around noon Claire had driven away in the Buick to look at the dogs, and none of the three of them was any good for her purpose. Feeling cranky and irritable at the waste of time and lack of success—and feeling worse because of the less than six hours’ sleep she’d had—she got back to the house at two o’clock to be doubly irritated by the problem of the locked garage door.

The problem was, the doors could only be locked or unlocked from the outside. It made it very awkward. Sooner or later they’d have to install modern overhead doors, but in the meantime there didn’t seem to be any way to have a lock on these doors that could be gotten at from both sides.

Now she unlocked and opened the doors, drove the Buick in, went back outside, closed and locked the doors again, and walked crunching across the stone driveway to the front door. Another key unlocked that, and she went in.

The only thing that bothered her about solitude was the absence of sound. She had brought the radio back to the kitchen when she’d gotten up this morning, and now she turned it on first thing, and started a pot of tea. In one of the Scandinavian countries they had recently introduced all-night radio for the first time, and the suicide rate dropped by an amazing percentage.

She ate a carton of vanilla yogurt while waiting for the tea. Dinner was the only true meal she ever ate, snacking the rest of the day on foods that were supposed to be good for dieters.

She poured a cup of tea to carry into the living room, and going down the hall past the open bedroom door she saw from the corner of her eye that a man was lying on the bed, on his back, his head propped up by a pillow; he was smiling dreamily through the window at the lake.

She went on another step before the image registered, and then stopped. A T-shaped iron bar of dread appeared within her back and shoulders, bowing her back, hunching her shoulders. The cup slopped tea on her thumb and fingers. She found she was blinking uncontrollably,
and she made herself turn back, turn around and look at him again, in hopes that he wasn’t really there.

She had gone beyond the doorway; it was necessary to take one dragging underwater step back in the direction she’d come, and then she could see him. His shoes were off, showing black socks. He was wearing plaid bell-bottom slacks in shades of yellow and green, very dirty-looking. Some clothing was crumpled like laundry on the floor beside the bed, and above the trousers he was wearing only a gray-looking T-shirt, partly pulled out of the trousers. He wore a watch on his left wrist, with a very wide brown leather band; the wide band made her think of Roman slaves. He looked to be in his middle or late twenties and had long straight brown hair, very much like her own, only less well combed. He was slender, reasonably well built, but his face was fat, with puffy cheeks and protruding lips. She stood in the doorway, staring at him, and he made no move.

A sound behind her made her spin around, and she spilled more of the hot tea. She made a small high-pitched sound of terror in her throat, and looked at the other one, in the living-room doorway. He was wearing a fringed Davy Crockett jacket over a blue shirt streaked with gray as though Clorox had been dribbled over it. His black trousers were tucked into brown paratrooper’s boots. He had a wild friz of hair, blondish-brown, a Caucasian equivalent of the hair-style called Afro, and he was smiling at her. He had the laughing eyes that go with sudden cruelty.

His voice was light, his manner flippant. He said, “Don’t bug Manny, he’s trippin’ out. Come on in here. What you got in the cup?”

She didn’t move. She shook her head, not intending to.

He looked at her, and his expression became suddenly mean, though he still smiled. He said, “You want pencils in the cup? I don’t need you able to see, you know. Just so you can hear and talk, that’s all I need.”

She didn’t understand the specifics of the threat, but knew it was a threat and had no doubt he would do it, whatever it was.
I have to move
, she thought,
I have to do what he says.
She took one step forward, and the second was easier, and she walked toward him, the bones of her face standing out prominently around deep-set eyes.

He stepped to one side, grinning, bowing her into her living room. As she went by he lifted a hand, saying, “What’s in the cup?” He took it, tasted it, laughed in delight. “Son of a bitch, it’s
tea!
Isn’t that cute? You take sugar in your tea, honey?”

Under the things he said, things moved that he didn’t say. She shook her head. “No, I don’t.”

“That’s too bad. Well, different strokes for different folks. Sit down on your sofa, honey, let’s talk. Here, take your tea.”

She took the tea, went to the sofa, sat down. The fireplace was directly in front of her, with yesterday’s dead fire in it. The stones looked cold.

He didn’t sit. He went over and stood at the corner of the fireplace, one foot up on the hearth, one elbow up on the mantelpiece with his hand dangling down, his other hand casually on his hip as he faced her. He said, “We’re looking for a friend of yours. Tell the truth, we thought we’d run into him here. When’ll he be back?”

Cool
, she thought.
Cunning.
She remembered what she’d said to Parker on the phone last night: “I know how to be a little mouse.” Did she? She was blinking again, very badly, and was afraid that would betray her; he’d see
the blinking and know she was lying. But it wouldn’t stop, and she said, “I don’t know who you mean. I’m sorry, you have me frightened, but—” She raised her free hand and rubbed her eyelids hard with thumb and forefinger.

“Nothing to be frightened of,” he said, but he used a voice full of laughter and meanness. He said, “We just want to see your friend, talk to him, maybe pick up a little something he’s got for us.”

Her eyes hurt from the rubbing now, but the blinking went on. For an excuse to look away from him, and because she was afraid she would spill tea again, she half turned and put the cup on the end table, saying at the same time, “I live here alone.”

“A head like you? Don’t do dumb lies, honey, we’ll just make you pay for them.”

Now she did look at him, because what she had to say was technically true. “I’m a widow,” she said. “My husband was an airline pilot.”

His expression became uncertain; he said, “What about Parker?”

“Mr. Parker? I only—”

“Mister
Parker! God damn it, I don’t like jokes!”

She was afraid he was going to rush at her and start punching and kicking. She cried, “I just take messages! That’s all, I swear that’s all, I almost never see him, he never comes here!”

“You’re a goddam liar. If he never comes here, how does he get the messages?”

“I call at a hotel in New York, and then he calls me back. Sometimes he comes out to pay me, but only two or three times a year.”

“You call a hotel in New York. You mean where he stays?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t talk to him?”

“No, I just leave a message with the desk.”

“The message you get, you leave at this hotel desk?”

“No. I call there, and I say I want to leave a message for Mr. Edward Latham. Then I just leave my name, and after a while he calls me back, and I tell him the message.”

He was frowning, and he said, “That’s awful damn complicated.”

“That’s the way he wants to do it.”

Still standing in the same position, left leg up on hearth, right hand on hip, left elbow on mantelpiece, he gnawed a thumb-knuckle now and brooded. She watched him, watching him think about it and wondering whether the lie Parker had worked out for her would hold up or not. What if he decided to call the hotel?

“All right,” he said finally, and moved away from the fireplace. “What’s the hotel?”

“The Wilmington.”

“Move over.”

The phone was beside her. She got up and moved to the other end of the sofa, and he sat down and said, “What’s the number there?”

“I’ll have to look it up.”

He frowned at her, with one hand resting on the phone. “Look it up? You call this number all the time, you don’t know it?”

“Not all the time. There aren’t that many messages to pass on. And I’m terrible with numbers.”

“Terrible with numbers. I think you’re lying, honey, and if it turns out you are, you’ll go out screaming.”

He turned his back on her, and picked up the phone, ready to dial.

In a small voice she said, “You have to dial one first.”

He frowned at her again. “What?”

“If you’re calling New York, you have to—”

“Area code, I know.”

“No, before that. You have to dial one first. You see, this is just a little phone company out here, it isn’t—”

“Shut up.” He said it flat and cold, and sat looking at her with totally blank eyes. All the mean comedy was gone from his face now. He said, “I take very bad to frustration. I break my toys. You ought to be warned.”

She nodded, birdlike, afraid to speak.

He turned back to the phone and dialed one, and then the area code, and then a New York number. He waited, and his free hand tapped his knee. She looked at the hand, and it was stubby-fingered and thick, the backs of the fingers covered with burns and scratches as though he’d been doing carpentry work without gloves. The nails were wide and stubby and dirty. The hand looked strong and humorless and mean.

“Hello, Information? Yes, hello, dear, Manhattan. Wilmington Hotel. Okay, dear, thanks a lot.” He broke the connection, started to dial again, stopped, said, “Damn!” He started again; he’d forgotten to dial one, and he must have gotten the recorded announcement.

“Hello, Wilmington Hotel? Do you have a Mr. Latham registered there, Edward Latham? Yeah, I’ll wait.”