She sat on the leather chair facing him, flouncing into it, one leg dangling over the arm. “Small talk was never your forte,” she said. “Go ahead and ask your favor.”
“You know a guy named Mal Resnick?”
She hunched her shoulders, bit the corner of her lower lip, stared sideways at a fringed lampshade. “Resnick,” she said, the name coming out muffled because her teeth still held the corner of her lip. “Resnick.” Then she shook her head and bounced to her feet. “Nope, it doesn’t ring a bell. Was he one of our crowd? Should I know him from the coast?”
“No, from here in New York. He’s in the syndicate somewhere.”
“The Outfit, baby. We don’t say syndicate any more. It’s square.”
“I don’t care what you call it.”
“Anyway — oh.” Her eyes widened and she stared at the ceiling. “Oh! That bastard!”
“You know him?”
“No, of him. One of the girls was bitching to me. He got her for an all night — it was supposed to be fifty bucks. There was only thirty-five in the envelope. She complained to Irma, and Irma told her there was no sense raising a stink about it, he was in the Outfit. She said he was lousy anyway. All grunts and groans, no real action.”
Parker leaned forward, elbows on knees, and cracked his knuckles. “You can find out where he is?”
“I suppose he’s at the Outfit,” she said.
“What’s that, some kind of club?”
“No, the hotel.” She started to say more, then suddenly swirled around, reaching for a carved silver box on the teakwood table. She flipped it open, withdrew a cigarette with a rose red filter, and picked up a heavy silver Grecian-style lighter.
Parker watched her, waiting till she had the cigarette lit before he said, “Okay, Wanda, what is it?”
“Call me Rose, will you, dear? I’m out of the habit of answering to the other.”
“What is it?”
She looked at him a moment, thoughtfully, cigarette smoke misting around her face. Then she nodded and said, “We’re friends, Parker. I suppose we’re friends, if either one of us could be said to have friends.”
“That’s why I came to you.”
“Sure. The loyalty of friendship. But I’m an employee, too, Parker. In a business where it pays to have loyalty to the company. And the company wouldn’t like me to tell anybody about the Outfit hotel.”
“So you didn’t tell me a thing.” He cracked his knuckles impatiently. “You know that already, why talk about it?”
“How strong are you, Parker?” She turned away and walked across the room to the draped windows, talking over her shoulder as she went. “I’ve often wondered about that. I think you’re the strongest man I’ve ever met.” She stopped and looked back at him, one hand on the drapes. “But I wonder if that’s enough.”
“Enough for what?”
She pulled the drape to one side. The window was tall and wide. She stood framed against it, looking out, tiny and shapely. “You want an Outfit man named Resnick,” she said. “If I know you, you want him for something he won’t like.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Parker said.
She smiled, nodding. “There,” she said. “That’s something he won’t like. But what if something goeHwrbng, and you get grabbed, and they ask you where you found out about the hotel? If they ask you hard?”
“I got it from a guy named Stegman.”
“Oh? What you got against Stegman?”
“Nothing, it’s just believable. Why, do you know him?”
“No.” She slid the drapes shut again, prowled the room some more, crossing to the opposite side merely to flick ashes into a blue seashell. “All right,” she said, “you wait here. I’ll make a phone call. I want to know for sure whether that’s where he is or not.”
“Fine.”
“If you want a beer after all,” she said, “the kitchen is that way.”
She left the room, and he killed time by lighting a cigarette. Then he picked up a green porcelain frog from the nearest table and looked at it. It gleamed and its eyes were black. He turned it over and it was hollow, with a round hole in the bottom, and the words Made in Japan impressed in the porcelain next to the hole. He put the frog back and looked around at the room. She was doing all right these days.
She came back and said, “He’s there. I even got the room number.”
“Fine,” he said, getting to his feet.
She smiled, with a trace of sourness. “You aren’t a guy for small talk,” she said. “Get what you want, and go.”
“One thing at a time,” he said, “that’s all I can think about. Maybe I’ll come back and see you later?”
“The hell you will. Here, I wrote it down.”
He took the paper from her and read her small careful script — Oakwood Arms, Park Avenue and 57th Street. Suite 361. He read it three times, then crumpled the paper and dropped it into a free-form glass ashtray. “Thanks.”
“Anytime, dear heart. We’re friends, aren’t we?” The sarcasm twisted her mouth.
He reached into his pocket, dragged out his wallet. “I meant it about the twenty bucks,” he said.
She looked at the two tens he held out to her, hesitating.
“Oh, go to hell, will you? Get yourself killed, you bastard. Seven years, and you don’t even ask me how I’ve been.”
Parker put the tens back in the wallet, the wallet back in his pocket. “The next time,” he said, “I’ll bring slides.”
She snatched up a frog, spun around to hurl it at him, and stopped. He stood waiting, looking at her. Her arm dropped. She muttered, “I ought to tell him you’re coming.”
“You don’t want to do that,” he said. He walked to the door.
Chapter 4
The waitress kept asking him if he wanted anything else.
It distracted him from looking out at the street. She had a band on her finger, so finally he said, “What’s the matter, don’t you get enough from your husband?” So after that she left him alone.
She glared awhile from the other end of the counter, but he could ignore that. He could look out at the street, and let his fifteen-cent cup of coffee cool. It was a Park Avenue coffee shop, and expensive. Pastrami on rye, eighty-five cents, no butter. Like that.
Directly across the street was the Oakwood Arms, a gray stone hulk with a modest marquee. A thin tall white-haired guy worked the front steps with a yellow-handled broom for a while, then went back inside. He and the doorman were both in blue uniforms with yellow trim.
A cab pulled up and two hefty matrons got out, giggling at each other as they pawed through their pocketbooks to pay the cabby. A blue-uniformed bellboy trotted through the revolving door and down the clean steps and the cabby opened the trunk. One matron had light blue luggage, the other light gray.
The cabby drove away, with a fifteen percent tip on the button, and as the matrons and bellboys were going in a guy in a pale gray suit came out, looking prosperous, followed by a younger guy in a black suit, looking cautious. Parker watched the two of them, ticking them off in his mind. Outfit wheel and bodyguard.
The wheel flagged a cab, while the bodyguard looked all around, and then they got in and drove away.
It was getting dark now. The hell of it was, he didn’t know whether Mal was out or in. If he was out, then he’d have to wait while he went in and then came back out again. If he was in, it would be simpler.
Guests arrived, most of them obvious tourists, a few obvious Outfit people, a few others borderline. None of them Mal, and none of them he recognized. Aside from himself, there was no stakeout outside the building.
But he knew what there’d be inside: two or three guys sitting around in lobby chairs, reading papers, glancing up whenever somebody came in. If the somebody was wrong, a somebody the Outfit didn’t want there, the two or three guys would put down their papers and saunter over and book-end him away through a door out of the lobby. They’d take him into a back room where they could ask him what they wanted to or tell him what they wanted to tell him.