Parker16 Butcher's Moon (11 page)

"But tonight," he said. "Ah, tonight."

"You're free?'*

"Totally." He looked at his watch. "It's just seven now. Why don't I come around for you at eight?"

"That would be just wonderful."

"I don't have your address."

"Oh, ah . . ." He could practically hear the wheels spinning in her head as she worked something out. "I'll, um," she said, "I'll meet you at the corner of Church Street and Fourth Avenue, at eight. Okay?"

Parent trouble. Possibly also a boyfriend to be cooled out. "Fine with me," he said.

"There's an old monastery on the corner there," she said. "Lancaster Abbey. Do you know it?"

"I can find it."

"I'll be waiting right in front."

"Fine. See you then."

He left the phone booth and went back over to the Impala. Parker was sitting at the wheel, listening to the seven o'clock news. Grofield slid in next to him and said, "My love life bubbles."

"You're all set?"

"Just fine."

Parker put the car in gear, and headed out toward the southern end of town, where a number of motels were clustered together. They'd arrange a place for tonight, and then Grofield would take the car for his date. Parker, aside from the fact that he seemed to be monogamous with Claire, never did have anything to do with women while he was working. Grofield understood that in a theoretical sort of way, but it wasn't natural for him not to have something stirring in his own life, and he'd never tried to emulate Parker's monkishness.

Not at home, though. Around the theater he limited his activities strictly to Mary; partly because he liked her enough to be content with no one but her, and partly because he liked her too much to humiliate her. But away, while working, he almost always found some girl to help brighten the laggard hours.

"Listen!"

Grofield looked at Parker, frowning, and saw him pointing at the car radio. The newscaster was talking about a dead policeman, a uniformed cop named O'Hara, shot dead in a diner this afternoon. Possibly, the newscaster said, the work of the same people who had done those robberies last night.

Grofield said, "What's the matter?"

"O'Hara," Parker said. "That's one of the cops from Fun Island. He helped them look for the money." "Oh ho," Grofield said.

"Watch for a phone booth," Parker said. "We have to call Lozini."

Grofield sighed. "And I'd better call my little Dori back," he said.

Sixteen

Parker got out of the Impala three blocks from the address. "Luck," Grofield said. Parker nodded, acknowledging the meaningless word, and walked away. Behind him, the Impala U- turned as Grofield went off to position himself.

Not quite nine o'clock on a Saturday night in July; two hours since he'd heard the news report about O'Hara. Tyler was a big enough city to have a substantial downtown, and a small enough city to have its office buildings and its weekend entertainment area all in the same place. Dark office blocks loomed over blinking movie marquees, and the traffic on London Avenue and Center Street was thick and slow-moving.

It was another clear night; high above, the sliver of moon was thinner even than last night, giving off no illumination to speak of, shining no more brightly than the white dots of the stars. Tuesday would be the new moon; no moon at all.

The Nolan Building took up a city block, bounded by London Avenue and Center Street and West Street and Houston Avenue. The ground floor was taken up mainly by a bank on the Center Street side and a stock brokerage and a large restaurant called the Riverboat on the London Avenue side. Next to the Riverboat was the entrance to the office building lobby, the elevators and the building directory.

Parker got there a few minutes early, and spent a while studying the copy of the Riverboat menu taped to one of the restaurant windows. In five minutes he saw four men enter the lobby, none of them Lozini. Was he there already, earlier than his assistants? It didn't sound right.

Parker was about to go on in when one more car stopped at the curb in front of the lobby entrance, the same black Oldsmobile Lozini had used this afternoon. Watching, Parker saw Lozini and another man get out of the Olds and walk across the sidewalk as the Olds drove immediately away. The second man was fat and ungainly, walking as though he'd be more comfortable with a cane. Or more comfortable sitting down.

Fine. Parker let another two minutes go by, then followed the rest of them in.

The lobby reminded him of the one they'd been using in that jewelry-store robbery that went bad. It even had the same kind of skinny old man in uniform as the night guard, except that this one seemed awake and alert. He also had an assistant, a grinning young Puerto Rican, in a blue uniform jacket and tattered dungarees, who operated the elevator. Parker signed a name and destination in the night book—"Edward Latham, City Property Holdings, 1712"—and was about to get into the elevator when another man arrived. Parker, looking at him, knew that this was somebody else for the meeting, and waited for him.

The other man gave Parker an ironic smile of acknowledgment, and said to the guard, "Sign me in, will you, Jimmy?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Calesian." Parker could hear in Jimmy's voice u well-concealed resentment.

To the smiling Puerto Rican boy, Calesian said, "We'll take ourselves up. I'll send it back down."

"Okay," said the boy. Nothing altered in the smile, just as nothing in the external world could explain it.

Parker and Calesian got into the elevator, and Calesian shut the doors and pushed the button for the seventeenth floor. "This thing's self-service anyway," he said. "The building management thinks it's classier to have an operator." He spoke in a quiet, self-assured, humorous manner—a more restrained version of Grofield. A small smile on his face, he said, "So you're Parker."

"You're some soft of cop," Parker said.

Calesian's smile broadened; he was pleased. "How'd you work that out?"

"An employee wouldn't show up later than his boss. A cop on the payroll would, just to show he's still his own man."

Calesian didn't entirely like that, but he kept his good humor. "You're a detective yourself," he said. "You'll be happy to hear we got a negative on you from Washington."

"A negative on what?"

"The name Parker, and a physical description."

That was all right. He was in fact wanted under several different names, and his fingerprints were listed under the name of Ronald Casper, from a time he'd been on a prison farm in California, but the name Parker had never been officially linked up with any felony. As to the description, the face he wore he'd gotten new from a plastic surgeon ten years ago.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Calesian pushed the lobby button before they stepped out to the hall, and the elevator went away again. "This way," Calesian said.

1712 was to the right. The door, unlocked, led to a furnished but unpopulated receptionist's office, with an open doorway on the other side through which he could see several men sitting on leather sofas or armchairs. Calesian went first, and Parker followed him through the doorway, to find Lozini seated at a broad mahogany desk, its surface empty except for a telephone, an ashtray, and a pack of Viceroys. Lozini, looking sour and angry, glared at Parker and then at his watch, but said nothing about time. Instead, after a quick snap glance at Calesian, he looked past Parker and said, "You're alone?"

"That's right. I have to make a phone call."

"Why?" Lozini was angry and impatient, ready to forget he didn't really have any weight to throw around in this situation.

"I have to tell my partner," Parker said, "not to blow up your house."

To one side, Calesian laughed. The fat man who had come in with Lozini made a short gasping sound of shock. Lozini just stared, and Parker went to his desk, turned the phone around, and dialed the number of the phone booth where Grofield was waiting. There was, in fact, no bomb at Lozini's house or the time to set one up there, but the threat of it should be enough.

Nobody said anything. There were six men in the room other than Parker, and they all watched him dial and watched his face as he waited for Grofield to answer.

Which happened on the first ring. "Clancy's Steak House."

Parker read the number from the phone in front of him. "Got it?"

Grofield read the number back, and said, "Everything okay?"

"Good," Parker said, and hung up.

Lozini said, "He'll call you."

"That's right."

"If you don't answer and tell him everything's all right, he'll blow up my house."

"That's right."

"I have family in that house."

"I know that."

Lozini didn't seem to know whether to become enraged or reasonable. In a strangled voice he said, "I don't have any plans against you. This is just a meeting, we've got a common problem. Why should I do anything to you?"

"If I'm not around," Parker said, "you don't have a problem any more."

Lozini shook his head. "No. O'Hara didn't pull that on his own, he wouldn't have had the guts for it. I told you this afternoon, I'm in a tough situation in this town, things getting worse all the time. Things that don't connect with you. I may even lose my mayor." Pointing a finger at Parker, he said, "What it comes down to, somebody in this town is up to something. They're coming at me from my blind side, and I wouldn't even know about it until it was all over and I was out on my ass. Except for you. You came in, you stirred things up, you made some trouble, and all of a sudden I'm seeing things I didn't see before."

"All right," Parker said.

"So we're on the same side," Lozini said. "I want them because they're head-hunting after my position in this town, and you want them because they've got your money. But they're the same people."

Parker shrugged.

Lozini said, "So now we know how the money got out of the park. With O'Hara. The next thing is to find out where it went to, who got it."

A man to Parker's right said, "It went to O'Hara. Maybe he

split with somebody else, but probably half of it went to him."

The man named Calesian said, "No, it didn't. I can give you chapter and verse on O'Hara's financial picture. He maybe got three or four thousand out of it at the absolute most, but that's all."

The other man said, "How can you be so sure, Harold?"

Parker said, "Wait a minute. I don't know everybody here." Turning around, he scanned the faces and pointed at Frank Faran. "I know you."

Faran gave a rueful grin, and nodded his head in a kind of salute. "I guess you do," he said.

The man who had said the money went to O'Hara now said, "I'm Ted Shevelly, Mr. Lozini's assistant." Casually dressed in slacks and pullover shirt, Shevelly looked to be about forty, with rust-colored hair and a stocky well-built frame and the general look of a weekend golfer. He wore squared-off glasses with gold-colored frames, and gave the impression he was maybe a little too calm and casual for his own good; something like Faran, but without Faran's chumminess or bent for alcohol.

Parker nodded to Shevelly and turned to the fat man who'd arrived in the Olds with Lozini. He was wearing a black suit and a blue dress shirt with wide collar points but no tie, and he was managing to look just as uncomfortable and awkward sitting down as he had been while on the move. Parker said, "And you're—"

It was Lozini who answered, from behind Parker, saying, "That's Jack Walters, my personal attorney."

"Personal?"

Shifting his bulk around, trying without success to lace his fingers above his belt, Walters said, "Not entirely personal. I do know something about the business side as well."

"More than you want to," Lozini said, "and less than I want you to."

Walters smiled, and nodded at Lozini, and went back to looking uncomfortable. But it was clearly only Walters' body that was awkward; a rock-solid and sharp brain peered out through the man's eyes.

The next man was probably in his late forties, and looked like somebody who had suddenly in middle age decided to stop being dull and start being a swinger. He was slender, but the deep lines in his face and the looseness of the flesh under his chin suggested he'd once weighed quite a bit more and had dieted himself ruthlessly into a spurious youth. He was wearing brown loafers and pale blue slacks and a madras jacket and a yellow turtleneck shirt, as though he'd been dressed by the costume designer of a Broadway show to be a parody of a Miami vacationer.

"Nate Simms," this apparition said, getting to his feet and smiling and extending a manly hand. "I'm Al's accountant. Also, I have a few sidelines."

Accountant; right. Al? That must mean Lozini. Parker took the man's hand briefly, and turned to Harold Calesian. "We met in the elevator."

"That's right." Calesian smiled easily. "And made one another right away."