"You have . . . contacts within the underworld, different from what the police might have."
"I'm supposed to, anyway," Parker said.
"People like you," Archibald said, "people in your position, they do moonlight, I believe, from time to time. Isn't that what it's called? To moonlight?"
'You mean collect from two bosses for the same work."
"Well, slightly different work," Archibald corrected him. "Similar work. For instance, you're
looking for this one man anyway, but my understanding is, there were at least three involved in the robbery at the stadium, and probably a fourth man to drive them away. When you catch the man you're looking for, and I have no doubt that you're very able at your job, that you will run this fellow to earth, but when you do, it's extremely unlikely he'll have all the money from that robbery on his person."
"Very unlikely," Parker agreed.
"If you could make it a part of your business," Archibald said, looking Parker forthrightly in the eye, "to retrieve the money stolen from me, whether it's in the possession of the man you're hunting or not, I'd be very appreciative."
'Would you," Parker said.
"I'd pay in cash, of course."
"Uh huh."
"And you ought to have— What do they call it in your business? A retainer?"
"That's one word," Parker agreed.
"Let's say a thousand." Getting to his feet, not waiting for an answer, Archibald turned toward, the desk where he'd been on the phone before. Crossing to it, he said over his shoulder, "Against, let us say, five percent of whatever you reclaim. That's a maximum of twenty-five thousand dollars, Mr. Orr, or just a little less."
Parker got to his feet and watched. Archibald opened a drawer in the desk, took out a thick envelope that seemed to be full of cash, thumbed some bills out, and put the still-full envelope back in the drawer. Then he took up the bills he'd selected, slipped them into a hotel envelope, and came smiling back, envelope held out. "An extra little blessing on your job," he said. "Shall we call it that?"
This was the first time Parker had ever been offered a bribe to help find the money he'd stolen. "Let's call it that," he said, and took the envelope and put it in his pocket.
9
Thorsen's office was converted from a normal hotel room. The wall-to-wall carpet showed indentations where the bed's wheels had been and the feet of the other furniture, all of which had been taken out and replaced by two desks, four office chairs and a number of telephones. The connecting door to the next room was slightly ajar; Parker guessed that was where Thorsen slept.
When he came in, Thorsen was at the desk nearer the window, just finishing a phone conversation. It didn't seem to be pleasing him. He said one or two brief things, and then he said, "Thanks," sounding sour, and hung up. "Sit down," he told Parker, gesturing toward the chair at the other desk. "Your guy Liss got away."
"Uh huh," Parker said, and took the seat offered. Both desks were gray metal, basic models. The one he sat at had nothing on its surface, and probably nothing in its drawers.
Thorsen said, "You don't sound surprised."
"I'm not. How'd he do it? Is the other one still with him?"
"Quindero? Oh, yes. Calavecci is not a happy man."
"Quindero," Parker suggested, "thinks he must be a desperate criminal, with nothing to lose."
"And he isn't," Thorsen said. "But by the time this is over, he probably will be. Or dead."
"How did Liss get out?"
"The hospital morgue is in the basement," Thorsen told him. 'There's a special back way in, unobtrusive, from a side street, with a ramp, for the hearses from the different morticians. They don't like dead bodies and hearses around the front, gives the wrong image, looks like failure."
Parker said, "So the two of them went down there."
"Where a body was being loaded. The hearse driver and a morgue attendant. I guess Liss didn't want to make too much noise, which was lucky for those two guys, because he just concussed them and tied them up. Then he and Quindero and the hearse—and the body, just to get even more people upset—went up the ramp and through a shit-poor roadblock there, and disappeared."
"And now," Parker said, "Quindero has committed a felony."
"He has, hasn't he? This mess is not getting neater," Thorsen said. "Did Archibald offer to pay you to find his cash?"
"A thousand now, one percent later."
"Did you take it?"
"It was impolite not to," Parker said.
"That's true. Excuse me," Thorsen said, and turned away to one of his phones. He pressed four numbers, so it was a call inside the hotel. "Okay," he said, and hung up.
So it was going to be like that. Parker turned toward the slightly open connecting door, and in came four more of Thorsen's young troops, of the same standard issue: Dark suits, dark ties, dark shoes, white shirts, close-cropped hair, expressionless faces. They would do well at taking orders, and they would do well at giving orders, too. Parker smiled at them, then looked at Thorsen. "And I thought we were getting along pretty good," he said.
"Now, whoever you are," Thorsen said, with no friendliness in it at all, "let's hear your real story."
10
"What was it you didn't like about my story so far?"
"Everything," Thorsen said. "But to tell you the truth, and it's humiliating to say this, simple fuck that I am, I bought it for a while. Jack Orr, daredevil insurance spy." He shook his head, discouraged with himself.
"Go on buying it," Parker suggested. "It's nice, and it's true, and it's the only story I've got."
"We'll change your mind on that pretty quick," Thorsen said.
The four young guys all shifted position and moved their shoulders around, like a herd that had just caught a whiff of something on the breeze. Parker looked at them, and then back at Thorsen, who said, "Let me tell you when I finally got to singing in time with the chorus. It was when your friend Liss took a shot at you."
"He knows who I am," Parker pointed out. "He knows I'm after him."
"Everybody in that hall was after him," Thorsen said. "He didn't need to bust his own concentration to even some old scores. You said it yourself: He came there because Tom Carmody and the other robbers were the only people who could place him absolutely at the robbery, and he doesn't want anybody around who can do that. So he killed Tom, and the only other person he tried to kill was you."
Parker grinned, as though Thorsen must either be kidding or crazy. "Making me one of the heisters?"
"Heisters," Thorsen echoed. "That's a crook's word for it. We say robbers, or hitters."
"Crooks are who I hang out with."
"I'll tell you what happened," Thorsen said, ignoring that. "After the robbery, you all got split up somehow. One bunch spent the night in that gas station. Liss stole that police car and probably killed the poor cop. And you waited at the motel, until I showed up."
"Wait a second," Parker said. "Am I a heister, am I a robber, or am I a guy waiting at the motel?"
"I figure the details have to come from you," Thorsen told him.
Parker shook his head. "It's your fairy tale," he said, "you'll have to fill it in yourself. George Liss takes one shot at the guy been chasing him eight months, and to you that means the guy s in on the heist."
"That shot," Thorsen said, "made me start to think about something that had snagged me but I'd just let it go by. You know what that was?"
"You'll tell me," Parker said.
"There's a lot of different words for the room that, when I was in the Marines, we called the head. There's the bathroom, the toilet, the lavatory, the washroom, the WC. The Irish call it the bog. I've been places they called it the cloakroom, don't ask me why. But one thing is constant and sure and solid and you could build your house on it: Nobody named John calls that room the john."