“I think she ran girls.”
“She ran a lot of girls. She was very damn good. A woman is always better than a man at that, but it’s tough to find a woman with business brains. They’d rather marry a man and steer him like a car.” He made steering motions over his stomach. He had a fat man’s way of sitting, feet widespread and flat on the floor.
Parker waited. The fat man hadn’t said anything yet that he should reply to, so he just stood there and waited.
The fat man brooded at the closed door, thinking about his organizational problems. Then he said, “They’re after you too, huh?”
“I think so. I can’t be sure till I find them.”
“But you don’t know who they are, or how come they’re after you. You know how many?”
“Two, I think.”
“You can handle them yourself?”
“I think so.”
The fat man nodded his head at the three hoods. “You want me to loan you a boy?”
“I’m better off on my own.”
“This thing ought to be punished. They left me one hell of a headache. I figured to start my own people out.”
“They wouldn’t know where to go or what to look for.”
“That’s where you could help them,” the fat man said.
“I’m better off by myself.” 80 The fat man pursed his lips. “Look,” he said. “If Mrs. Keane knew this friend of yours, Briley, it means she supplied him girls. So what I can do now, I can put some people to work on the phone, check out all her girls, find out who got sent to a guy named Briley. Then I can tell you where he is. Or on the other hand, I can send people of my own and the hell with you.”
“Briley doesn’t know your people. He knows me. He’ll believe me and work with me. If we aren’t wasting too much time here.”
“Time. Aldo, call the office for me. Lynch, go sit down over there.”
Parker went over to the chair in the corner and sat down. The way the room was arranged, all four of them were now between him and his armaments on top of the television set.
Aldo dialed the phone, talked into it briefly, handed the receiver to the fat man. The fat man rumbled into it for a while, then hung up. “Lynch, come over here.”
Parker walked over.
“Lynch, we decided to save our own manpower. You want to take care of them, you take care of them. You wait here now, somebody will call you, tell you where Briley is. Aldo, give him a card. Lynch, you need help, you lose the trail, anything goes wrong, call Aldo.”
The card said, Family Bowling Center, with a Dearborn address and phone number. Parker put it in his pocket.
The fat man heaved himself to his feet. “Don’t go over to your gun till after we leave.” He walked toward the door, the three hoods around him like tugboats around an ocean liner. At the door, he looked back and said, “Have a good hunt.”
“Thank you.”
They left. Parker glanced at the closed bedroom door, then went over and got the automatic and knife and put them away.
There was the possibility he was simply being set up to eat this rap, though it seemed pointless. Still the chance existed that the fat man would have Aldo dial Police Headquarters from some other telephone, and in five or ten minutes the law would walk in and start asking questions Parker couldn’t answer.
None of the apartment windows overlooked the street. Parker propped the hall door open with a straight chair from the kitchen and walked down the corridor past the stairwell to the window at the end. Down below was the sidewalk and the street. Across the way, two of the hoods were helping the fat man into the back of a black Cadillac. Parker watched the three of them drive away. It didn’t surprise him that the fourth had been left behind; he’d expected the fat man would tie shadow to him until he got to the people who’d killed Mrs. Keane. It was a problem that could be handled later.
He waited half an hour. This was a workingmen’s apartment house, and though there was occasional movement on the floors below, no one appeared up on the top floor at all. And then, after half an hour by the window overlooking the street, Parker heard the phone ring in Mrs. Keane’s apartment. He strode down the corridor, shoved the chair out of the way so the door would swing closed, and crossed the room to pick up the receiver.
A colorless female voice said, “Robin Hood Motel, Pontiac.”
The third time Parker pounded on the door, a sleep-heavy man in T-shirt and jockey shorts opened it and blinked blearily out at him, weaving slightly as he said, “What day is it?”
“I’m looking for Briley.”
“Briley? Christ, is that the sun?”
Parker pushed the door the rest of the way open and went in. The sleepy man tottered backward, not quite losing his balance, saying, “Jesus, fella, don’t knock a fella over.”
Briley’s group had a four-unit separate section of the motel completely to themselves. This section was off behind the parking lot, where they wouldn’t disturb anybody. All the connecting doors were open, the drapes were closed over all the windows, and they had their own private dim-lit world in which to party.
A naked girl was curled up asleep on the floor in 83 front of the television set, which was showing a soap opera with the sound turned off. Two fretful women sat at a kitchen table on the grainy screen and mouthed worried remarks at one another.
A couple was asleep in one of the room’s double beds; the other was empty, but rumpled. Empty bottles, full ashtrays, and stray playing cards were all over the room. The girl sleeping in front of the television set was clutching a thick white candle in one hand.
Parker went over to look at the man asleep in the bed, but it wasn’t Briley. He turned back to the one who was semi-awake and said, “Briley’s the one I want to see.”
“It’s got to be too early in the day. What did I do with my watch?”
Parker went over and took him by the upper arm and applied pressure. “Briley,” he said. “Where’s Briley?”
“Jesus! He’s down at the end! I told you twice already, down in the end room!”
Parker released him. “Thanks.”
“One thing,” the man said, and waved in the general direction of the girl on the floor. “That one’s mine.” Then he weaved over and got into bed with the other couple, and began rummaging with the girl’s body under the sheet. Eyes closed, she rolled over to face him and put her arms around him, and when Parker left the room they were moving together, neither of them entirely awake.
Briley wasn’t in the last room. The ones in between had continued the same general style as the first one, and unit four was no exception, except that in here there was an odd number of people; a man and woman asleep in one bed, and a woman asleep alone in the other.
It took a while to wake the solitary woman. Parker finally took a warm bottle of club soda and emptied it on her. She sat up, then, sputtering, shaking, and Parker said, “Where’s Briley?”
“What?” She used the sheet to wipe her face. “Oog. I hate soda.”
“Briley,” Parker said.
“He got a phone call,” she said. “He went away.”
“Where?”
“How do I know? He wrote something down over there.”
“What time did he get the call?”
She peered up at him, squinting although the room was very dim. “Are you kidding?”
Parker left her and went over to the stand between the beds. The phone was there, and a pencil, and a small memo pad of blank white paper.
The woman patted the wet pillow. “What a hell of a mess you made in here. That wasn’t nice.”
Parker picked up the pad and pencil and walked around the beds and went into the John. He turned on the light and shut the door, and tried to angle the pad so he could read the indentations in the top sheet that had been left when Briley had written on the sheet above it. He could see the lines, but he couldn’t make them out.