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 on to 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 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 you 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’s 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?”
