Mutt told him, ‘Hold on a minute.’ To Parker he said, ‘You’re the one phoned in?’
‘Sure.’ Parker put an agreeable smile on his face, but he didn’t feel agreeable. So the guy had come in here, killed her, waited till Parker had gone back in, and then called the cops, figuring Parker was his patsy.
He could figure again. Parker said, ‘I’m the one called.’
‘How come you wouldn’t give your name?’ Mutt was frowning all around his nose.
Parker shrugged. ‘Why waste the time? I was going to stick around here anyway.’
Jeff spoke again. ‘It don’t smell right,’ he told his partner.
Mutt said, ‘We’ll see.’ He dragged a flat black notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open like he planned to give Parker a ticket. The notebook came with its own pencil, stuck in a little loop at the side. Mutt slid the pencil out, poised it, looked at his watch, wrote down the time, and said to Parker, ‘Tell me about it.’
‘I went out to get beer and cigarettes. I left it out in the hall there; you probably saw the bag.’
Mutt nodded, but Jeff made an obvious effort to show a poker face. He wasn’t giving anything away, Jeff wasn’t.
Parker said, ‘When I came back I knocked on the door, and when I didn’t get any answer I knew something was wrong.’
Jeff, the sharpie, said, ‘How?’
Parker looked at him. ‘Because she was in here and all right when I left, and I was gone ten minutes, and there wasn’t any reason for her not to be in here and all right when I got back. If she didn’t hear me knock on the door, that meant there was something wrong.’
Jeff waggled the gun in a gesture that was supposed to be scairy. ‘Go on,’ he said.
Parker said, ‘I knocked twice, and then I kicked the door in. I came in here and saw her like that and phoned for you guys. Then I waited.’
Mutt looked at his partner. ‘It sounds okay,’ he said.
Jeff wasn’t so sure anymore. He said to Parker, ‘You search the place?’
‘Not the living room. I only got as far as here.’
‘Watch him,’ Jeff told his partner, and took his gun away to go search the living room.
While Jeff was gone, Mutt apologized for him, saying to Parker, ‘Don’t mind him. He’s new on the force.’
‘Sure.’
Parker was distracted, trying to figure a graceful way out of here. He could only sweet-talk these cops for so long, and then it didn’t matter if they were stupid or not. Anybody in the vicinity of a crime, innocent or guilty, is going to be asked questions, routine questions about name and residence and occupation and what are you doing here now, and there wasn’t a question those cops could ask that Parker would be able to answer.
He had to ditch them. He had to get his goods and clear out of here.
Jeff came back and shook his head at his partner. He actually thought he was Humphrey Bogart.
Mutt said, ‘We better phone in.’
Jeff said, ‘What about the closet?’
‘I looked in there,’ Parker told him. ‘It’s empty.’
‘You never can tell,’ Jeff said. ‘Sometimes a man can hide in among the clothing; you won’t even see him there.’
Parker shook his head. ‘There’s nobody in there.’
‘I’ll lake a look.’
Parker watched him, cursing him. He’d open the door to the closet, and he’d see the guns and the suitcases full of money, and that would be the end of it. Parker backed up to the dresser.
Jeff opened the door and looked in and said, ‘What the hell is this? Machine guns!’
Parker picked the wooden jewellery box off the dresser and threw it at the back of Jeff’s head. Before it landed, Parker had taken a quick step and drop-kicked Mutt into the wall. Mutt bounced back, holding his stomach, and Parker clubbed him across the jaw with a hard right and turned to see how Jeff was doing.
Jeff was being comical, without trying. The jewellery box had hit him in the back of the head and driven him into the closet, where his head and arms had got mixed up with the clothing hanging there and his feet had got tangled up with shoes and guns. He was backing out of it all now, shouting something that was muffled by the clothing all around his head. He’d dropped his own gun when he’d been hit, and it was down on the floor now with the others.
Parker went over there fast, pulled him the rest of the way out of the closet, turned him around, and hit him twice. Jeff fell back into the closet and crumpled.
Everything was a mess. Parker grabbed Jeff’s feet and dragged him out of the closet so he could get at his goods. The two machine guns and four pistols were all rattling around together on the closet floor.
Parker cleared everything out of the way, and looked around inside the closet, and the suitcases full of money weren’t there any more.
All right. So it wasn’t somebody alter Ellie, it was somebody after the money, and killing Ellie was just incidental. It was a double-cross from somebody else in on the heist, it had to be; nobody else could have known about the money. One of the others wanted the whole pie for himself, and figured to put Parker in a sling at the same time.
Not hardly. Parker filled his pockets with pistols, and left the apartment.
Parker walked across the blacktop past the gas pumps on their little concrete island. The pumps were bathed in light, spilling on Parker as he went by with his arms swinging from his shoulders like lethal weights. He was big and shaggy in the white light, with flat square shoulders and long muscle-roped arms. His hands looked like they’d been moulded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. He wore no hat; his dry brown hair fluttered on his skull, blown about by a cold November wind. He wore a dark gray suit and a black topcoat. His hands held pistols in the topcoat pockets.
The gas-station office was lit up just as much as the pumps. Inside, a chubby guy in a blue jumper was asleep at a metal desk. Parker walked on by the office and down into the darker area, down to the long shed like building that took up the rest of the block. The entrance was a small door inset in a large corrugated sliding garage door; Parker pushed it open and stepped over the strip across the bottom.
It was past midnight by now, so the interior was more than half full of cabs gleaming yellow and red under the bare bulbs spaced along the ceilings. In the daytime this place would be as empty as an airplane hangar.
Over to the right a wooden shed with glass windows all around had been built into a corner. A guy in a mackinaw lay stretched out asleep on a bench outside this shed, and inside, through the windows, Parker could see two guys working at desks. They wore white shirts, but they’d loosened their ties and unbuttoned their shirt collars.
Two
Parker walked across the concrete floor and pushed the shed door open and went in. One of the white-collar workers looked up and said, ‘Not here, buddy. You want to go outside and around to the front. The gas-station office is over there.’
Parker kept his hands out of his topcoat pockets. He said, ‘I don’t want the gas-station office.’
The worker shook his head. ‘You don’t want us either, pal. You got a problem, talk to the day workers.’
‘I’m looking for one of your drivers.’
The other worker looked up, interested. The first one said, ‘Which one?’
‘Dan Kifka.’
The worker frowned, arid looked at his partner. ‘Kifka? You know any Kifka?’
The other one nodded. ‘Yeah. He works part-time, nightshift. He ain’t been around for a month or more.’
Parker said, ‘He’s supposed to be working tonight.’
The second worker shrugged and said, ‘I’ll check it for you, but I’m pretty sure he ain’t around.’ He got to his feet and went over to a table with small filing cabinets on it.
Parker waited, frowning. Kifka should be working tonight. And he should have been working last night and the night before. That was the cover, that kept him clean so he could stay out in the open.