Parker stood where he was, with his hand still on the door handle.
Stubbs said, “I got to know where you was Saturday.”
Parker kept looking at Stubbs, not to the right where Handy was crawling along the pavement, coming up alongside the car, keeping low out of Stubbs’ range of vision.
“What for?” Parker asked.
“The doc was killed Saturday,” Stubbs said. “One of you bastards did it.”
“I was here in Jersey,” said Parker, as Handy reached up and plucked the automatic out of Stubbs’ hand. Parker leaned in and clipped him on the side of the neck. While Stubbs was getting over that, Handy got to his feet pointing the automatic. “Get out of the car.”
Stubbs got out, holding his neck. “You better not kill me,” he said. “If May don’t hear from me, she sends letters about your new face.”
It irritated Parker, another useless complication. He slid in behind the wheel of the Lincoln and parked it in an open slot by the embankment. Then he came back and said to Handy, “Your place?”
“It’s the closest.”
They put Stubbs in the front seat of the Ford, next to Parker, who was driving. Handy sat in the back seat, watching Stubbs, the automatic in his lap. He gave Parker directions the rest of the way to his place.
Handy had a room in a building that had started out as a private home and then became a boarding house and now was just a place with furnished rooms. But the furniture was clean, and not quite as ugly as at Skimm’s place.
The phone was out in the hall. They stood there, Handy holding the automatic in Stubbs’ back, while Parker dialed Skimm’s place. The ring came in his ear three times, and then Skimm answered, sounding sleepy. Parker told him who it was. “Alma there?”
Skimm hesitated. “Yes. She was just leaving.”
“Sure. I got somebody here I want her to talk to. He’ll ask her when she saw me in the diner. It’s okay for her to tell him.”
“What’s going on, Parker?”
“I’ll tell you sometime. Put Alma on.”
“Okay, wait a second.” There was mumbling, away from the phone, and then Alma came on the line. She sounded snappish.
“Hold on,” said Parker. “Tell this guy when I was in the diner.” He handed the phone to Stubbs.
Stubbs took the phone, frowning in concentration. It was getting too complicated for his battered brain. He said, “Hello? What time Saturday? Where is this diner?”
After that he frowned some more, staring heavily at the phone box on the wall, until he said, in answer to something from Alma, “I’m thinking,” and hung up.
“You happy?” Parker asked.
Stubbs turned around, looking like somebody trying to answer a tough question. “She says you was in there around noon.”
“That’s right.”
“The Doc was killed maybe four o’clock in the afternoon, while I was washing the cars.”
Parker shook his head, disgusted. “You know how far Nebraska is from here?”
Stubbs chewed on that for a while and then said, “Okay, it wasn’t you.” That settled, he turned to Handy. “Gimme the gun back, will ya?”
Handy looked at Parker, wondering if this clown was kidding. “Just wait a minute, Stubbs. I think we’ve got to talk.”
“Sure,” said Handy. He held onto the automatic.
“There’s nothing to talk about. You didn’t do it.”
“This way,” said Handy. He motioned with the automatic.
Stubbs wanted to argue some more, but Parker hit him openhanded on the ear, where a punchy could feel it. Stubbs screwed his face up and hunched his shoulder and cupped his hand over his ear, and then he went where Handy told him.
They walked into the apartment, and Parker told Stubbs to sit down on the leather chair. Handy sat over to the side, in the maroon overstuffed chair, and Parker stood in the middle of the brown rug. He looked at Stubbs for a while, and then he made a disgusted sound. “All right. Now what?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Stubbs said. His face was still screwed up, and his hand was still up protecting his ear. “I’m willing to go.”
“That’s it,” Parker said. “Go where?”
“I got two more suspects.”
Parker nodded. “That’s what I thought.” He went over to the sofa and sat down and lit a cigarette. “All right, tell me about it.”
“The Doc only did three jobs in the last year,” Stubbs said. “We figured it has to be one of them three, or the guy wouldn’t have waited so long. If it was a guy from two years ago, see, and he was going to go for the Doc, he’d of done it already.”
“You and May,” said Parker. “You worked that out?”
“May, mostly,” Stubbs answered. “I figured, I got to get the guy. There’s nobody else to do it, because the Doc was a Red.”
Parker glanced at Handy, and shook his head. Handy shrugged. From listening, he was beginning to understand.
“And if May doesn’t hear from you, she blows the whistle, is that it?”
“Yeah.”
“On who?”
“The last three. She wouldn’t be able to know which one it was, which one got me. So she’d blow the whistle on the last three.”
“Including me,” said Parker.
“But you didn’t do it,” said Stubbs, frowning. He’d missed something somewhere. “You’re out of it, you didn’t do it.”
“What if number two did it?” Parker asked. “And instead of getting him, he gets you. Then May blows the whistle on me. Right?”
Stubbs hadn’t thought of that. He frowned heavily, scrubbing his hand over his face. Then he brightened a little. “Don’t you worry. He won’t get me, I’ll get him.”
Handy laughed. He tossed Stubbs’ gun in the air and caught it. “The way you got Parker?”
Stubbs looked at him, not understanding, and Parker explained. “He knew me by the name of Anson,” he said to Handy.
“Oh.”
Parker said, “Listen, Stubbs. What if you phone May and tell her I’m in the clear?”
Stubbs shook his head. “We talked about that. How it could be faked, maybe. She’s got to see me in person.”
“God damn it,” Parker said, “I don’t have time for this crap.”
Handy shrugged. “You’ll have to go back to Nebraska with him.”
“I don’t have time,” said Parker angrily. “The job’s set up for two weeks from now. We’ve got to set up the cars, the routes, we’ve got to chart the state troopers, we’ve got to buy guns—” He mashed his cigarette out and got to his feet. “There’s too much to do. Stubbs, when’s the deadline?”
Stubbs blinked at him. “What?”
“The deadline, the deadline. When does May blow the whistle if she doesn’t hear from you?”
“Oh. A month from now. From yesterday. Four weeks from yesterday.”
Parker paced back and forth, looking down at the carpet. “Two days,” he said. “Even if we fly out. One day out and one day back. Two days for Alma to fast-talk Skimm, two days with nothing getting done.”
“We could hold the job off for a week.”
Parker shook his head. “It’s sour enough already. I want to get it over with. Another week for Alma to think up some more cute ideas? Another week for that damn cop to see me driving by?”
“What cop?”
Parker shrugged. He didn’t feel like talking about it. “A cop paid attention to me on route 9.”
“Near the diner?”
“South of it.” He turned and studied Stubbs. “The easiest thing,” he said, “would be to bump you and drop you in a pool by one of the refineries. Then two weeks from now I go cut May.”
Stubbs doggedly shook his head. “She’s got her common-law husband with her,” he said. “And his brother. They figure something might happen like that.”