“I didn’t say anything at all yet,” he answered Mackey. “I was thinking, we got to get hold of that lawyer Claire found me.”
Mackey beamed. “You’re right! Jonathan Li. He’s the guy.”
“I’ve still got his card, up with my stuff,” Parker said, and got to his feet. “But we need to get us inside there, too. I don’t know how yet.”
He went upstairs to his room. In the few days they’d been out, they’d accumulated a small amount of possessions; some clothing, toilet articles. Parker’s things were in the drawers of an abandoned wooden desk. He found the card and looked at it again, the many partner names in fine blue letters against ivory, the name Jonathan Li in gold at the bottom right. He carried the card downstairs, put it on the table, and said, “The problem is, none of us can go to him.”
“I can phone him,” Mackey said. “I’m not an escaped felon, where he might have to tell the law about me, I’m just somebody the cops want to talk to about people who are escaped felons.”
“There’s a payphone—” Williams started to say.
“No, I don’t need that,” Mackey told him. “Tom had a cellphone, it should be upstairs with his stuff. I’ll be right back.”
He left, and Williams looked at Parker, considering him. “You don’t like this,” he said.
“None of us likes it.”
“Yeah, I know.” Williams nodded. “But Mackey feels like he owes Brenda, and I feel like I owe you and Mackey, but you don’t feel like you owe anybody anything. Tell you the truth, I wish I could be like that.”
“If you were like that,” Parker told him, “you wouldn’t have phoned your sister.”
“Meaning,” Williams said, “one of these days I’m gonna do something like that, because I feel like I owe somebody something, and I’m gonna put my head right in the noose.”
“Maybe not,” Parker said, and Mackey came back downstairs with the cellphone.
“I don’t know,” he said, hefting the phone. “Is he in the office yet? I can’t leave a callback number.”
“Try,” Williams said.
So Mackey sat at the table and punched out the number, then listened, the cellphone a small black beetle against the side of his blunt head.
“Jonathan Li, please. Would you tell him it’s a guy, he’s so happy about how Mr. Li dealt with the Ronald Kasper problem, now he wants to hire Mr. Li on the Brenda Fawcett problem. Sure.”
Mackey put his other hand over the mouthpiece and said, “He isn’t in the office, but they can patch in to him. In his car, I guess, or wherever.”
Then he bent to the phone again. “Mr. Li? Yes, this is Ed, you remember me.” Shrugging, he said to the others in the room, “He’s laughing.” Then, into the phone: “Yeah, you’re probably right. Yeah, that’s what they said on the radio, Fifth Street station.”
Raising his eyebrows at Parker, he said into the phone, “Sure, I think you can get a retainer from Claire again, same as last time. Probably easiest.”
Parker nodded. Mackey said into the phone, “She wired it to your account last time, didn’t she? So she’ll do it again. You just tell me how much. Fine, tell me then. That’s terrific. Nice to do business with you again, Mr. Li.”
Mackey broke the connection, put the phone on the table, and said, “After he laughed, he told me he wasn’t surprised there’d be a link between a friend of Ronald Kasper and a friend of Brenda Fawcett. He says he knows it’s urgent, he’ll go over to the Fifth Street station right now, let Brenda know he’s her legal, he understands I’m probably somewhere he can’t phone me so I should phone him in three hours. By then he’ll know the situation, he’ll tell us how much is the retainer.”
“In three hours,” Williams said. “Good.”
Parker said, “We still have to get us into this Fifth Street station.” Standing, he said, “I’m gonna spend the three hours asleep.”
2
“He wants to meet,” Mackey said. He held the phone to his chest while he talked to Parker. The three of them were again at the downstairs conference table.
Parker said, “You’re the one he wants to meet.”
Mackey shook his head. “You should be along. We need to know the situation, what we should do.”
“He doesn’t want me anywhere,” Williams said. “I’ll wait here. You leave the phone with me.”
Into the phone, Mackey said, “Two of us, but we gotta be careful. You don’t want us in your office.” He listened, then grinned at Parker: “He likes to laugh, this lawyer.” Into the phone again, he said, “Good, that sounds good. Wait, give me the names.”
There were a notepad and pen on the table, left over from some scheming by Angioni and Kolaski. Williams slid them over and looked alert, and Mackey said, “Fred Burroughs and Martin Hutchinson. Four o’clock. We’ll be there.” Hanging up, he said, “It’s his club, downtown. He wants us to meet at the handball courts. He says it’s loud there, lots of echoes.”
“Nobody can tape,” Parker said.
Mackey nodded. “That’s the idea.”
It wasn’t easy for Parker and Mackey to turn themselves into people who might be accepted as a member’s guests in a club downtown that featured handball courts, not after the twenty-four hours they’d just lived through, but they managed. Washed and shaved, in the clothes they’d planned to wear when they’d quit this town after the job, casual but neat, they left the beer distributor’s at three-thirty and walked half a dozen blocks before they saw a cruising cab and hailed it. It felt strange to Parker to walk along the street in a town where every cop had just last week memorized his face, but the afternoon was November dark and Parker let Mackey walk on the curbside. They saw no law at all, and then they were in the cab.
The Patroon Club had a doorman, under a canvas marquee mounted from building to curb. He held open the cab door while Mackey paid the fare, then called them sir and walked with them under the marquee to the double entrance doors, where he grasped a long brass handle, pulled the door open, bowed with just his head, and said, “Welcome to the Patroon.”
“Thanks,” Mackey said.
Inside was a dark wood vestibule, coat closet with attendant on the left, low broad dark gleaming desk straight ahead, behind which sat an elderly black man in green and white livery. He looked alert, inquisitive, ready to serve: “Help you, gentlemen?”
“We’re here to meet Jonathan Li,” Mackey told him. “Fred Burroughs. And this is Martin Hutchinson.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Li left your names.” Opening a folder on his desk, he said, “If you could just sign the register.”
The register was a sheet of paper with columns to be filled in: name, date, time, company, member to be visited. They both wrote things, and the man behind the desk gestured at the inner door behind himself, saying, “Mr. Li said you’ll find him by the handball courts. That would be straight through, down the stairs, and second on your right.”
Mackey thanked him again, and he and Parker went through the door into a plush dark interior, just slightly seedy. Downstairs, they found three handball courts in a row like three stage sets, side walls not meeting the ceiling, windowed at the interior end to face bleachers where spectators could sit. Only the nearest court was in use, two players in their forties, both of them very fast and very good. They made noise, but not too much.