The woman who appeared at the far end of the living room, drying her hands on her apron, was short and round and dowdy, with fluffy gray hair and a faded dress and down-at-the-heel slippers. “Coming,” she called. “Coming.” She scuffed across the living room carpet peering through her glasses at him. Framed in the doorway he had to be a silhouette to her, unidentifiable until she got close, and he saw the instant she recognized him. Her step faltered; her hands stopped moving in the apron; her mouth got a sudden slack look to it. Then she became more brisk again, saying, “Parker. I never thought to see you here.” She pushed open the screen door. “Come on in. You kids keep it down, now.”
A half a dozen of them shouted, “Yes, Mrs. Weiss!” and the racket that Parker had interrupted suddenly started up again.
Parker stepped into the house, and she let the screen door shut behind them. She said, “We’ll be able to hear ourselves think in the kitchen. Besides, I’ve got some baking to watch.”
“All right.”
He followed her through the small, neat, overstuffed rooms to the kitchen, which was large and square and expensively equipped and full of bakery aromas. Three glass cookie jars along the back of one counter were all full, each with a different kind of cookie.
“Sit down,” she said. “Do you want coffee?”
She wouldn’t know about her husband yet, and it would help her if she was doing something when he told her, so he said, “Thanks.”
“Just a jiffy,” she said. Turning her back to him to start the coffee, she said, “You being here is bad news, I suppose. You being here, Benny not being here.”
“Yes.”
“He’s dead, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
She sagged forward for a second, her hands bracing her against the counter. He watched her, knowing she was trying to be as stoic and matter-of-fact as she could, knowing she would hate him to do anything to help her unless she was actually fainting or otherwise breaking down, and knowing that she had to have rehearsed this moment for years, ever since the first time Benny had gone away for a month on a job. Like Claire, Parker’s own woman. Rehearsing the way she would handle it when she got the news. If she got the news. When she got the news.
There was a long, taut second when it could go either way— she could fall to the floor or go on making the coffee— and then she sighed, a long, shuddering sound, and shifted her weight and reached for the coffeepot. Still with her back to him, hands busy making the coffee, she said, “That wouldn’t be why you’re here. Not just to tell me about it. You aren’t the type, Parker. You never were, you never will be.”
“That’s right,” Parker said.
“You’re strictly business,” she said.
“I didn’t kill him,” Parker said. “Don’t take it out on me.”
She stopped what she was doing and just stood there for a minute. Then, in a muffled voice, she said, “Excuse me,” and hurried from the room, keeping her face turned away from him.
He made the coffee himself, a full pot, and then sat down at the table again to wait. When the coffee was done perking he poured himself a cup and was sitting at the table drinking it when she came back into the room. She was red-eyed, and her face looked puffier than before. There was a pinched look around her eyes and a strained, artificial smile on her mouth. “You were right,” she said. “I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
She got herself a cup from the cupboard, poured coffee, and sat down across the table from him. “So what is it you want?”
“Do you know a guy named George Uhl?”
“George? Young?”
“About thirty.”
“Thin hair on top. Black hair. And kind of tall and skinny.” . “That’s the one,” Parker said.
“Benny brought him around a couple of times,” she said. “I never got his last name, just the George part.”
“Do you know where he came from? How I get in touch with him?”
She shook her head thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think so. Benny just brought him around once or twice. Wasn’t he with you people this time?”
“Yeah, he was.”
She looked closely at him. “Did he do something? Is that it?”
Parker nodded.
“Something that caused what happened to Benny?”
“Yes.”
She frowned, trying to understand things, and took the time to sip some coffee. Then she said, “You aren’t the revenge type, Parker, not if there’s nothing in it for you. What do you want with this boy?”
Parker said, “He crossed us. He shot your husband in the head. He killed the other guy in the job, and he tried to kill me. And he took off with the money.”
“Oh,” she said. “The money.”
“That’s what I want,” Parker said.
“But you don’t have any way to find this George, is that it?”
“Not if you can’t help me.”
“I can see that,” she said. She drank some more coffee and then said, “But if you could have found him without me, I never would have seen you at all. Seen you or heard a word from you.”
“That’s right,” Parker said.
“Some of the money belongs to me now,” she said.
Parker shook his head. “Come off it,” he said. “Some things you don’t inherit.”
“Not unless I can help you,” she said.
“That’s right. You want a cut, is that it?”
“Half,” she said.
“No.”
“If there’s just you left,” she said, “then half that money belongs to me.”
“Wrong. Phil Andrews left people, too. He’s got a cut coming.”
“Are you going to give it to them?”
“No. But I’m not going to give his share to you either. Benny would have had a quarter of the pie if things had worked out. That would be somewhere between seven and eight thousand.”
“What do you mean, seven or eight thousand? Benny told me he’d be coming back with fifteen.”
“That was a top estimate. We ran into bad luck and got about as little as we could. Benny ever overestimate in front before?”
She nodded grudingly. “All right, all the time. But when he told me fifteen I thought sure he’d come back with ten or twelve.”
“So did we, but it didn’t work out that way.”
She frowned, thinking it over, then suddenly started and cried, “My baking!” She jumped to her feet, grabbed a potholder, and opened the oven. Out came the two halves of layer cake, smelling hot and fresh. She put them on the counter to cool and turned off the oven. Then she put the potholder down, turned back to Parker, and said, “I couldn’t trust you worth a damn. Don’t you think I don’t know that? You’d never come back here with the money.”
“I have two thousand cash in my pocket I can give you,” he said. “Or I can give you my word I’ll come back with a quarter of whatever I get. Which do you want?”
She glanced up at the kitchen clock, biting her lip. “I wish my brother was around,” she said. “He’d know what I should do.”
“Call him.”
“He’s out on his rounds.” She came back to the table and sat down. “Give me the two thousand as an advance.”
He shook his head. “One or the other,” he said. “Not both. What did Benny say about me? He ever say anything to you about me?”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I know what Benny thought of you. He could trust you. That doesn’t mean I can trust you.”
“Why not?”
“Benny was a fellow professional.”
‘You’re his widow.”
She made a crooked smile. When she talked with him her expressions were at variance with her appearance, the gray hair and the apron and the slippers and the cake in the oven. A very sharp and worldly woman existed down inside the Apple Mary exterior. She said, “Sentiment, Parker?”