He shrugged. “Make up your mind, Grace,” he said. “If you don’t know anything I’ll have to root around somewhere else.”
“Do you have somewhere else?”
“I can just keep asking people in the business till I find somebody who knows George Uhl.”
“That could take a while.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
She studied him, then said, “Let me see the two thousand.”
He took a roll of bills held with a rubber band from his side jacket pocket. He slid the rubber band onto his wrist and counted out two thousand dollars onto the kitchen table. There were a few bills left, and these he put in his wallet, then rolled the two thousand and put the rubber band around it. “It’s right here,” he said and put it back in his pocket.
“All right,” she said. “Let me make a phone call or two. I’ll be right back.” She got to her feet.
Parker said, “Why not just give me the names and let me make my own calls?”
“These are people who’ll talk to me, not you.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
She left the room, and Parker got up to pour himself another cup of coffee. He sat at the table again, listening to the children yelling and running around out front, smelling the smells of cake and cookies, looking through doorways at small, snug neat rooms. Grace Weiss, childless herself, with a heavy heistman for a husband, had turned herself into a kind of nursery-rhyme mother image, the cake and the cookie lady at whose house all the children of the neighborhood congregated.
Parker had been here a couple of times before, and he remembered how Benny too had built himself a completely different at-home image. He was the semi-retired putterer, the Little League umpire, the maker of model planes and pup tents with the neighborhood boys, the constructor of birdhouses and clipper of hedges, a vague and amiable little man in baggy pants, with his glasses slipping down his nose. The difference was so complete that the first time Parker had come here he hadn’t recognized Weiss and had then thought Weiss had changed so much, grown too old, and couldn’t be used anymore. But Weiss had let him know he was still his old self on the job, and he was.
Parker knew that he himself was different when he wasn’t working. More relaxed, a little slower in moving, a little more vocal. But the differences were minor compared with those Benny and Grace Weiss had managed.
It was fifteen minutes before Grace came back, and when she did she had a folded slip of paper in her hand. She sat down across the table from Parker again, took a sip of her cold coffee, and said, “Nobody knows Benny’s dead, so I just let them all think I was calling on his account. I didn’t say anything about you or anything else.”
“Good.”
She looked at the slip of paper in her hand, then at Parker. “I decided I want the two thousand,” she said. “Not because I don’t trust you, Parker, but because I don’t know what can happen. It’s too much of a chance. Benny left me insurance, but how do I collect before I get official word he’s dead?”
“You won’t,” Parker told her.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “So now I have to wait seven years for an Enoch Arden. What do I live on in the meantime?”
“Benny salted some cash away.”
“Sure he did. And this house is paid for, and everything in it is paid for. But he didn’t salt that much away, and there’s still living expenses. I don’t have enough to last me seven years. And maybe you’d come back, maybe you really would, and give me seven thousand dollars. But maybe you wouldn’t, or maybe you won’t get the money, or maybe something will happen that neither one of us can forsee. So I’ll take the two thousand. It’s sure.”
Parker took the roll out of his pocket again and put it in the middle of the table. She didn’t touch it, but she reached out and put the slip of paper on the table beside it.
Parker picked up the paper and opened it, and written inside were two names and addresses, the first female, the second male. He looked at her.
She said, “The top one is the girl George was living with last year. That’s her address; he used to live with her there. They split up a while ago, but she might still know where he is.”
“All right. And the other one?”
“He and Benny and George were going to do something together once. It was his caper — he found it and planned it.”
Parker tapped the paper. “This guy? Lewis Pearson?”
“Yes. It was Pearson’s idea, and he brought Benny and George together. That’s how Benny got to know George — when they were planning this other thing. But it never came off.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Benny told me once he thought Pearson had never been serious about it. I don’t know what went wrong. But Pearson knows George.”
“You try calling Pearson just now?”
“Yes. I told him Benny wanted to get in touch with George Uhl, and he said I should tell Benny to stay away from Uhl, he was no good. I couldn’t push the question after that. Maybe you can.”
“Maybe I can.” Parker got to his feet. “Thanks, Grace.”
“I did it for the money,” she said.
I Eight After he rang the bell three times without getting an answer, Parker walked around on the smooth green lawn to the back of the house. It was a white ranch style, very new, on a plot big enough to make the neighboring houses barely felt presence’s beyond the high hedges bordering the property. A white Mustang in the driveway meant somebody was home. It was a hot and sunny day here outside Alexandria, Virginia, so maybe they hadn’t answered the bell because they were out back.
They were. The rear of the house was dominated by a turquoise swimming pool. A greased, bronze woman in a two-piece white bathing suit lay on a chaise longue in the sunlight, eyes closed behind sunglasses, and a bronzed, stocky man in black bathing trunks, with hairy shoulders, was swimming doggedly back and forth in the pool like a man being paid a small salary to do so many laps every day.
Parker stood beside the pool and neither of them noticed him. He watched the man swimming back and forth, and finally the man glanced up and saw him standing there and was so startled he sank for a second. He came spewing back to the surface and swam over to the edge of the pool, grabbing the tiles near Parker’s feet. Looking up, squinting in the sunlight, he said, “Where the hell did you come from?”
“I rang the bell and didn’t get any answer, so I came around.”
“That damn thing. We never hear it out here.”
The woman across the way had sat up and was looking at them.
Parker said, “Are you Lewis Pearson?”
“Yeah, that’s me. You an insurance man? You don’t look like one.”
The woman called, “Who is it, Lew?”
He turned in the water, keeping one forearm on the tiles to support himself, and yelled, “How the hell do I know? Give me a minute, will ya?”
“You don’t have to snap my head off!”
“Just butt outski for a minute.”
Parker said to the top of his head, “I’m a friend of Benny Weiss.”
Pearson turned around again, forgetting the woman, and squinted up at Parker once more. Thoughtfully he said, “You are, huh?” .
“Yes.”
“That’s a funny coincidence. Hold on a minute, lemme get outa here.”
Pearson turned away, pushing wearily off from the edge of the pool, and slogged across to the ladder on the other side. He pulled himself up out of the water, padded over to the empty chaise longue beside his woman, picked up a towel there, and began to pat himself dry. The woman said something to him; he said something back. She glanced over at Parker, said something else to Pearson, and he turned and called, “You want something to drink? Gin and tonic?”