Except for the four thousand dollars in the corn-flakes package. Two hundred twenty-dollar bills neatly stacked, filling a box of corn flakes that at first didn’t look as though it had been opened. But Parker lifted it and it was too heavy, and when he looked at the bottom he could see where the box had been steamed open and then resealed. He ripped it open and the bills thudded out, four stacks of fifty bills, each with its own paper band around it.
Uhl, like Parker and most other men in the same profession, kept caches of money in different locations, in case the sudden need for a bribe or a getaway should arise. Parker himself had left several of these behind, at times when it had seemed too dangerous to go back for them; was Uhl smart enough to do the same? Or would the four thousand tempt him to stop by here for just a minute? It was worth waiting awhile here to find out. Until morning.
It was then a little before five. At twenty to six the phone rang. Having an idea who it was, Parker answered, saying, “Hello?”
“George? Get away from there, I had to tell him—he was going to kill me, I had to tell him where you lived. I’m sorry, darling, I had to— George?”
Parker said nothing.
“George? George?”
He hung up. With the four thousand in his pockets, he left the apartment.
Six
Ducasse was in the lobby. “Come on upstairs,” he said.
Neither of them spoke in the elevator. Parker had gone back to Claire’s place after Philadelphia, and she’d told him Handy McKay had called to say that Ducasse wanted to see him. Ducasse would be at the Port Dutch Hotel in New York until the following Tuesday, staying under the name Anthony St. Pierre. So today Parker had driven in the sixty miles from Claire’s place, had called Ducasse from a pay phone, and had arranged to meet him this afternoon.
It was an expensive hotel, but Ducasse had taken himself a modest room. As they went in, he said, “You want a drink? Anything from room service?”
“No, thanks.”
“I drink when I’m not working,” Ducasse said. “Mind if I go ahead?”
“Fine.”
Ducasse made himself a gin and tonic without ice. He held the glass up, grinning at it as though it were a foolishness he’d somehow become saddled with, and said, “You know how I got onto this stuff?”
The furniture tended to white imitation Italian Provincial. Parker sat in a chair with a comfortable back and uncomfortable arms and said, “No, I don’t.”
“Every time I’m in a hotel,” Ducasse said, “sooner or later I’m in a conversation I don’t want overheard. And that’s when the ice runs out. In a motel, you just take the bucket and walk down to the machine, but in a place like this you’ve got to call room service. It takes half an hour, and in comes a guy looks invariably like an undercover narcotics man. And everybody sits around not talking and not wanting their face seen. So I trained myself to drink this shit without ice.” He took a swig and made a face. “It’s like drinking iodine.”
Parker said, “You say you’re not working. What happened to the San Simeon deal?”
“There was a sweet pair.” Ducasse sat on the sofa and clinked the glass down on the coffee table. “That Sharon is out to get somebody killed, brother, and that’s all there is to it.”
“That’s why I left.”
“I hung in two more days,” Ducasse said. “But then I’d had it. Once it was out in the open, with you, they were at each other all the damn time. She’s afraid of him, you know, but not enough to make her change her head, only to try to hide things. And she’s too damn stupid to hide anything even from a lightweight like Bob Beaghler.”
“So you quit, too?”
“George Walheim kept telling me to ignore it, it would blow over, everything would be okay. He said that once Sharon figured it out you wouldn’t have anything to do with her, she’d leave you alone. But the whole situation made me very nervous. Particularly because Beaghler’s also a pothead, and he figured to bring some grass along on the job. To smoke in the mountains.”
“It was almost a good idea,” Parker said, “except for the people.”
“Well, I got something else right away,” Ducasse said, “so it worked out okay. When I left there, I went back and got in touch with my contact, and he had something for me. They only needed one guy, though, so there was no point contacting you about it.”
Parker shrugged.
“But then there was something else came along,” Ducasse said. “You know Ed Mackey?”
“I used to.”
“Well, I contacted some people here and there, trying to find a buyer for those damn statues. You know, before I walked out on it. So after I got together on this other thing, I heard back from Ed Mackey. It seems he’s putting together an art heist himself, and he needs some people, and through the feelers I put out, he got onto the idea of me. So he got in touch, but I said I was already working, and I mentioned you. He said he knew you and he’d like to work with you, and I said I’d pass it on.”
“He give you any details?”
Ducasse shook his head. “I wasn’t interested, so there wasn’t any point. But I know Ed, he’s a real professional. He’s no Bob Beaghler.”
Parker knew that was true. “I appreciate it,” he said.
“Listen,” Ducasse said, “I know I was getting kind of tight with my money, and I had the idea you were into the same kind of situation, so what the hell. You’d do the same thing for me.”
Parker nodded; he would now. “I picked up a few thousand the other day,” he said, “but it didn’t help much. I need a major score.”
“Well, that’s what this is, according to Ed. I have where he’ll be staying next week.” He took a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it across. Parker took it and put it away without looking at it.
Then there were fifteen minutes of small-talk. Parker never took pleasure in that kind of thing, but he knew other people found it necessary and he’d trained himself to take part in it. Finally, though, Ducasse’s iceless drink was finished and Parker could get to his feet and say, “Good luck on your job.”
“And the same to you,” said Ducasse. He was grinning a little loosely. “May we both get rich,” he said.
Part 2
One
Parker stood looking at the painting. It was four feet high and five feet wide, a slightly blurred black-and-white blowup of a news photograph showing a very bad automobile accident, all mashed parts and twisted metal. A body could obscurely be seen trapped inside the car, held there by jagged pieces of metal and glass. Superimposed here and there on the photograph were small comic-book figures in comic-book colors, masked heroes in bright costumes, all in running positions, with raised knees and clenched fists and straining shoulders and set jaws. There were perhaps a dozen of the small figures running this way and that over the surface of the photograph, like tropical birds on a dead bush. The painting was titled “Violence.”
Parker turned his attention to the mimeographed sheet he’d been given at the door. “Violence” had been loaned to the exhibit by Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Shakauer of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, who had purchased it in 1966 for thirty-five thousand dollars.
Parker moved on to the next painting. Hexagonally shaped, three feet in diameter, it was an exact replica of a red-background white-lettering STOP sign, with plastic sculptured noses glued onto it all over. This one was titled “Thanacleon IV.” Parker looked at the mimeographed sheet again: painted by, loaned by, purchased in 1968 for eighteen thousand dollars.
He moved on. There were twenty-one paintings in the exhibit, mounted on the white walls and on a temporary divider down the middle of the room. Adding up the numbers on the mimeographed sheet, a total of three hundred seventy-five thousand dollars had been paid out at one time or another in the last eight years for these paintings.