Renard shook his head. “Definitely not.”
“They’re worth more than twice that.”
“But I don’t want them. I only want the six.”
Parker considered pushing the issue, but something in Renard’s manner told him the man wouldn’t budge. He really didn’t want the other fifteen paintings, not at any price.
But he did want the six. Parker said, “All right, we’ll sell you the six. Which ones?”
“Have you paper and pencil?”
“Yes.” Parker took out a notebook and ballpoint pen. Renard gave him six titles, and he wrote them down, then put the notebook and pen away and said, “Sixty thousand. That’s still less than you were going to pay Griffith.”
Renard offered a faint smile. “Is it?” He shrugged. “I always have been too generous,” he said, “that’s my great failing. Very well. In honor of poor Leon’s memory, sixty thousand.”
Five
Lou Sternberg met Parker at O’Hare International. He had a disgusted look on his face, but he gave the standard greeting: “Have a good flight?”
“Yes.” Parker meant nothing by the word; it was simply a sound that ended that topic.
They walked down ramshackle corridors forever, as though in somebody’s troubled dream, and came out at last to a rainy night, with small lights reflecting off the wet blacktop. Sternberg opened his black umbrella, and pointed: “I’m parked over that way.”
It was still a fairly long walk. In addition to his umbrella, and his usual raincoat and cap, Sternberg was wearing rubbers on his shoes and a gray scarf around his neck. It was impossible to tell if he was disgusted by the job going sour or by the rain.
The car was a rental Chevrolet. Sternberg unlocked it, and Parker got in. Sternberg backed in, closing the umbrella as he came, and maneuvered awkwardly to get the umbrella into the back seat without poking anybody’s eye out.
Neither of them spoke till Sternberg had the car moving cautiously toward the terminal exit. Then he said, “You see where Tommy got off?”
Parker looked at him. “When?”
”Heard it on the radio coming out.” Sternberg grinned and shook his head. “The advantage of being a hippie,” he said. “So many organizations came out on Tommy’s side, so much talk about police harassment, they had to let him go. If they’d had him in there for running a red light, they could have beat on him for a month. But a felony gets too much publicity.”
Parker frowned and said, “What about the troopers’ ID?”
“Who’s going to believe two cops against one long-hair kid? You look at Tommy, now; would you believe he was a heist-man?”
“The girl, too?”
Sternberg nodded. “Both of them, free as air.” Ahead of him, a taxi failed to yield the right of way; Sternberg had to hit the brakes hard, and the rear end would have skidded on the wet pavement if he hadn’t moved the wheel slightly. “They let any damn body drive,” he said.
Parker waited till they were clear of the terminal before saying, “Our situation is bad.”
“I got that idea from your call. Trouble with Griffith?”
“He’s dead. Killed himself when he thought we’d been caught.”
“Good Christ.” Sternberg frowned out at the traffic through the moving windshield wiper, as though the answer to some question might be found written on the side of a passing truck.
“We found one guy Griffith was dealing with, in New York. But he’s only interested in six paintings.”
“For how much?”
“Sixty thousand.”
“Twelve thousand apiece.” Sternberg shook his head, his expression bitter. “Well, it wasn’t worth the trip,” he said, “I can tell you that much.”
“It wasn’t for any of us.”
“I came farther.”
Parker shrugged.
Sternberg grumbled a minute, then turned and said, “What about the rest of them? Fifteen of the damn things.”
”We talked it over,” Parker said. “Mackey and Devers and me. We’ve got to give them up.”
Sternberg looked both shocked and disgusted. “Give them up? There’s ninety thousand riding there!”
“Nobody to collect from.”
“What about insurance companies?”
“You want to stick around and deal with them?”
“God damn it,” Sternberg said, and glowered out at the traffic.
“Neither do the rest of us,” Parker said. “I hate insurance companies,”
Sternberg said. “They’re goddam thieves.”
“I know.”
“We’d be lucky to get twenty cents on the dollar.”
“More likely to get picked up in a trap,” Parker said. “Besides, what do we do with the paintings while we dicker?”
“So we give them back.”
“And take our twelve thousand,” Parker said, “and go home.”
“Christ.” Sternberg shook his head. “This has not been a good year for me,” he said. Parker said nothing.
Six
Parker was on a deck chair by the lake, letting the sun dry his body. Summer was nearly here, and the empty houses around the lake were beginning to fill up; motorboats droned most of the time now, and curious faces were starting to be everywhere. Soon it would be time to take Claire and go somewhere else until the fall.
This was Claire’s house, but she’d picked it with Parker in mind. For most of the year, the area around the lake was as good as a ghost town, with the privacy that Parker preferred and had always found before this in resort hotels. Only in the summer did the place take on the look and feel of a normal community, surrounding him with the questions and prying that the straight world thought of as natural.
It was only too bad the art heist hadn’t worked out as well as it should. He and Claire would use up Renard’s twelve thousand and more during their two months away from the house.
Parker heard the sliding door open, and turned to watch Claire walk across the lawn from the house. He enjoyed watching her; she kept being new, and that was a rare thing in a woman.
She said, “There’s someone on the phone for you.”
That would be Mackey. “Thanks.”
As Parker got to his feet and draped the towel over his shoulders, she said, “I took it on the bedroom phone.”
“Right.” He padded barefoot across the lawn to the house, and went through the sliding doors into the bedroom, where the telephone receiver was lying on the bed. He picked it up: “Hello?”
“I’m here.” Mackey’s voice.
“Fine.”
“I called our friend, and he wanted to meet tonight.”
Mackey was in New York with the six paintings for Renard in the back of a stolen pickup truck. The rest of the group had separated, Sternberg to Boston and Devers to Los Angeles and Tommy and Noelle to Cleveland, leaving Parker and Mackey to finish the deal with Renard and send them their cash.
And Renard apparently wanted to make the switch right away, tonight. “That’s good,” Parker said.
“How long will it take you to get here?”
“An hour and a half,” Parker said. Looking through the glass doors toward the lake, he saw Claire walking this way. “Make it two and a half,” he said.
Seven
Parker sat in the passenger seat and watched the dark side streets go by. Mackey was driving the small truck, a red Ford Econoline van, with the six paintings stacked in the back, still in their protective crates, and covered by a tarp.
It was a little before midnight, and they were following Second Avenue south through Manhattan. Until 34th Street they’d been in pretty heavy traffic, but then most of it had peeled off for the Midtown Tunnel to Queens and Long Island, and the rest had dropped off one by one until now, south of 14th Street, they were just about alone. Two cruising taxis, dome lights lit, and one slow-moving police car were quickly left behind.
Parker said, “This is a beautiful setup for a hijack.”