“We’ll be in touch,” Parker said.
They shook hands all around. When they left, Kirwan was crumpling the papers together to take them out and burn them.
Two
Parker walked through the house and saw Claire out by the lake, sunning herself. She was wearing a two-piece white bathing suit, and she was lying on a dark blue towel. It was still only June, but she already had a good tan, accented by the white suit.
He slid open the glass door between the dining room and the back porch, crossed the porch, went down the stoop, and walked over the just-trimmed lawn toward where she was lying. She had turned her head at the sound of the door sliding, and now smiled in his direction as he approached. She was wearing sunglasses, large blue ovals with white frames. Through the blue glass, her eyes were level and bright. She said, “You’re back sooner than I thought.”
“It fell through.” He squatted beside her and placed one palm on her stomach, just above the white trunks. Her flesh was warm, almost hot, and covered with a butter-like suntan lotion.
“I’m all oily,” she said. But she smiled, and reached up to touch his other arm.
“You’re hot,” he said. “You don’t want to overdo.” He shifted his hand to her near thigh, cupping his fingers down along the side of her leg, so that his knuckles brushed softly against the skin of her other thigh. The flesh under his palm was hot, but down between her legs it was cooler.”I’m used to it now,” she said. Then she sat up and said, “I’ll shower. Don’t kiss me, I’ll just make you all slippery.”
He straightened and gave her a hand to help her up. They walked back into the house together and he said, “I have a phone call to make.”
“All right.”
She went away to the bedroom. Parker walked first to the kitchen to wipe the suntan lotion from his hand on a paper towel, and then turned back to the living room, where the phone was. He dialed the number of a diner in Presque Isle, Maine, four states from here, a diner run by a man named Handy McKay. McKay had been a sideman of Parker’s several times in the old days. He was retired now, living on his diner, and he served as a middleman for people in the business who wanted to get in touch with Parker.
Somebody else answered, but Handy came on a minute later and Parker said, “It’s me. I’m home again.”
“Didn’t work out?”
“Remember me telling you about a guy named George Uhl?”
“Couple years ago.”
“He showed up, and caused trouble.”
‘Too bad.”
“I’d like to get in touch with him.”
“I don’t know if I’d be any help.”
“Just mentioning it,” Parker said. “And also, I’m available again.”
“No messages since we talked.”
“All right.”
“When you going to come visit?”
“Sometime.”
“Sure. So long, now.”
“So long.”
Parker hung up and went to the bedroom. The two-piece bathing suit was on the floor, and the shower was running in the bathroom. He took off his clothes and went in to join her.
Three
Parker said, “I reserved a car here. The name is Latham, Edward Latham.”
The uniformed girl behind the counter said, “Yes, Mr. Latham, one moment, please.”
It was late afternoon, and San Francisco International Airport was doing fairly heavy business. He’d expected to have to wait on line at the car rental counter, but he was the only one here.
“Yes, Mr. Latham, here it is. A LeMans with air. You made the reservation in New York this morning?”
“That’s right.”
“May I see your driver’s license, sir?”
He handed over his Latham license. It claimed to have been issued by the State of New Jersey, and it had cost him a hundred dollars. He had a number of licenses from different states in different names, depending on what he needed at the moment. The only states he avoided were those, like Massachusetts and California, which put the driver’s photo on the license; he preferred to have no pictures of his face.
“Will this be on a credit card, sir?”
“Yes.”
He handed her the card he’d bought for twenty-five dollars last night in New York. He’d been guaranteed five days before this card’s number would show up on the credit company’s hot list, and even then it would only be the regional list for the Northeast. It wouldn’t make the hot list out here until some of Parker’s purchases on the West Coast filtered their way through the bureaucracy to the computer.
Still, he watched the girl as she riffled the pages of the hot list, looking for the number. This wouldn’t be the first time a hot card had been sold as cool.
But this one was all right. The girl put the list away and spent a while filling out forms. Then Parker initialed “EJL” to acknowledge he was paying three dollars for the extra collision insurance, and signed Edward Latham at the bottom of the form.
The girl gave him one copy of the form in a brightly colored paper folder, gave him a smile, gave him the thanks of the company for doing business with them, and gave him directions to the terminal exit where he would find his car. He thanked her and walked off, carrying the black attache case that was the most luggage he ever traveled with.
The car was a bronze Pontiac LeMans with eight thousand miles on it. Eight thousand very heavy miles, from the looseness of the body and tightness of the brakes. It accelerated hard enough from a standing start to want to burn rubber at the slightest tap on the pedal, but the acceleration was mostly wheezed out above fifty. Not that he needed the car to do much for him, just take him to the meeting. If the job wasn’t any good, it would also take him back to the airport for a night flight east. If he’d be sticking around, he’d ditch it somewhere in downtown San Francisco this evening.
He took the Bayshore Freeway north to the city, following the directions Ducasse had given him. It was just after five when he left the airport, and he met the flow of outbound rush-hour traffic coming the other way. But traveling toward the city was easier, and he could make good time, coming into town in under half an hour, and then riding the Bay Bridge over toward Oakland. The address he was heading for was 1377 Mount Diablo Street in Concord, a small suburb in the East Bay, east of Oakland.
Just after the bridge, Parker cut off onto Interstate 580, then switched to another freeway, California 24. to go the rest of the way into Concord. He was moving with the heaviest traffic now, traveling away from San Francisco, but the worst of the rush hour was already over.
The address was in the middle of a poorish neighborhood in the process of being torn down. Across the street from the house he wanted there was a great open gouge out of the earth, where the houses had been stripped away and a deep pit dug in the ground. A sign half a block earlier had said this was something to do with the installation of a Bay Area Rapid Transit line. Down in the crater were stacks of steel reinforcing rod. coils of hose, stakes with yellow tags on them, and rows of parked trucks and bulldozers and earthmovers.
The construction site was neater and cleaner than the house. Parker stopped the LeMans in front of a small L-shaped white plaster house, it was one story high with an asphalt shingle roof. The pale pink numbers 1-3-7-7 were set in descending order down one of the four-by-four porch posts. In the front yard, knee-deep in weeds, were two big recently rained-on cardboard boxes of trash. Untended shrubs and bushes grew wild across the front and down the side of the house toward an unattached garage.
There was one car parked in the driveway up near this garage, and two more at the curb in front of the house. The one in the driveway was a dusty red Oldsmobile compact convertible with a white top. The lead car in front was a black Chevy Nova with overly wide tires and the look of being owned by somebody who cared more about function than beauty, and the other car was a dark green Plymouth Fury sedan that had about it—as did Parker’s—the look of a rented car.