‘Those are the ones I’ve talked to.’
Parker looked at him. ‘Talked to? Or cleared?’
Dougherty smiled gently. ‘You keep your secrets, Joe, I’ll keep mine.’
Parker shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Dougherty said, ‘That’s all you want, right?’
‘Right.’
They walked to the front door, Dougherty saying, ‘I wonder what my boss’ll say about this.’
‘He’ll say you should have taken me.’
Dougherty shook his head. ‘Not me. The robbery detail will catch you.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Oh, they’ll catch you. They’re very good.’ Dougherty opened the front door. ‘See you around,’ he said.
‘Goodbye,’ Parker said.
Five
Daylight was fast fading when Parker came out on the roof. He looked around, saw no one, and moved off to his left. He stepped over a low wall defining where two buildings met, and kept moving.
He’d come up onto the roofs at the eastern end of the block, and the building he wanted was about hallway down. He passed clotheslines, passed a pigeon cote, passed a rumpled, frayed, faded blanket left behind by someone in a hurry. When he’d counted buildings and knew he was at the one he wanted, he moved to the rear and over the side and down the fire escape.
There was no light in the apartment at all, and both windows opening onto the fire escape were locked. Parker look a roll of Scotch tape from his pocket, ran some piece’s of tape back and forth across one of the windows near the inside lock, and then took a gun from his overcoat and used the butt of it to tap the taped window gently until it cracked several times. It was reasonably quiet this way and didn’t take too long. When he peeled some of the tape off again, pieces of glass came off with it, leaving a hole large enough for him to get his hand through and unlock the window.
He doubted there was a plant in the apartment at all, but just to be on the safe side he opened the window with slow caution and climbed in the same way. He could assume there was a police guard outside the apartment door, in the hallway out there, but other than that he should have the place to himself.
He did. The bedroom looked strange with one of the swords missing from the wall and with the messed-up bed, but the body was gone and so were the guns from the closet. The rest of the apartment was unchanged.
Parker went through it quickly but thoroughly. He wanted names. Male, female, it didn’t matter. What he wanted to know was Ellie Canaday’s life. It was someone from that life who’d come in here and ended that life, and taken the money; that was his mistake.
There were a couple of telephone numbers jotted down on the cover of the phone book, without any names or other identification. Parker wrote them down without expecting much from them.
On various papers here and there in the apartment Parker found four of the names he’d already gotten from Detective Dougherty, but no new names, and no female names at all.
Sometimes it was a bad thing to be devoid of small talk. If he’d had meaningless little conversations with her the last few weeks he might have learned something he could use now. lint Parker couldn’t stand meaningless conversations, couldn’t think of anything to say or any reason to say it.
The only time he talked about the weather, for instance, was when it had something to do with a job he was on.
All right, the apartment was useless. Still, he’d had to check it out before going back to Dan.
He went out the apartment the same way he’d gone in and started up the fire escape again. He went half a flight, and an automatic boomed above him, a metallic sting went pinging and ricocheting around him, slicing off the metal parts of the fire escape.
He flattened himself against the wall, dragging the pistol out of his left topcoat pocket, and above him again the automatic boomed and the slug went whining and whizzing on down the fire escape.
The first shot is for time. Not even bothering to look up, Parker raised his hand up over his head and fired upward, generally in the direction from which the shots had come. With the echoes of that shot still sounding around him, he ducked away again, back down the fire escape.
He could hear the sound of running feet within Ellie’s apartment as he went on by the window he’d broken. So the cop on guard duty out in the hall had heard the shooting and was coming to see what was happening.
Parker felt a cold rage pouring through him. The bastard was right there, right up there on the roof! It had to be him again, hanging around, hanging around, taking his stupid potshots at Parker just as though he knew what he was doing. Right up there on top of the goddam building, and instead of going up and taking the stupid bastard apart piece by piece until the money fell out, Parker was running like a rabbit the other way.
Because of the cop. Because the maniac on the roof was so stupid he’d stand up there and shoot off a gun with a cop on plant inside the same damn building.
So he was up there, and by rights Parker had him cold, but instead of having him cold Parker was forced to let him go. And more than that. He didn’t want the law to get its hands on the silly bastard yet, either, so he was going to have to make a distraction, he was going to have to cover for the bastard.
He had to make it possible for the bastard to get away.
Cursing, raging, Parker went on down the fire escape, firing a couple of shots nowhere in particular in order to distract the cop’s attention from the roof. Above, the cop had found the broken window and had become aware of Parker going down the fire escape and was hollering for him to stop.
