Parker pushed in. French behind him. Parker said, “You only get one scream.”
She said, “You think I’m crazy?” Her eyes were frightened, her faint double chin was trembling, but she had control of herself.
French said, “It’s twenty-five minutes after four. Time for you to go back to bed.”
“I didn’t know rapists came in pairs,” she said.
“Wrong,” Parker told her. “We’re just going to stay here a while. You be good and we’ll be good.”
Bewilderment began to take the place of fear. She said, “What is this? What are you two?”
“Men in a hurry,” French said. “Turn around and walk back to your bedroom. Slowly.”
She said, “Is this somebody’s idea of a gag? Did Tommy send you birds around?”
Parker stepped over and took her by the arm, not gently. She had to get a touch of roughness to make her understand this was serious. Holding the arm tight, he pushed her around and shoved her down the hall, saying, “Don’t make it tougher on yourself.”
“My arm!” She held the arm with her other hand and looked back over her shoulder at him, and he could see by her eyes that she now understood this wasn’t anybody’s idea of a joke. She walked obediently forward, saying no more, and Parker and French followed her.
Claire had described the apartment layout to them. There were four rooms, all opening to the left off this long white narrow corridor. The living room was first, and then the kitchen, third the bath, and finally the bedroom. A light fixture with a frosted glass globe in the midpoint of the corridor was the only source of illumination at the moment, but when they entered the bedroom Parker felt along the wall beside the door, found a switch, and turned on the overhead light.
The blonde, whose name according to Claire was Mavis Gross, wore a chin patch when in bed; it was lying discarded now on the pillow, where she’d tossed it when she’d gotten up to answer the door. She headed straight for it, tucking it out of sight under the pillow with a quick movement of her hands, and then turned and said, “All right, what now?”
“You lie down. On your face.”
“Listen,” she said. “You two aren’t sadists or anything, are you? I mean, you’re not going to cut me up or anything.”
“You won’t get hurt,” Parker told her. “The law’s on our tail, we’ve got to lie low for a while. You do like you’re told, everything will be okay.” He didn’t like taking the time to make this kind of long-winded explanation, but he knew it was better in the long run. She’d be more docile, less trouble, less likely to get panicky, and that meant they could get done with her sooner.
The explanation helped right away. She lay down on the bed, face down as she’d been ordered, and waited while French went through the bureau drawers for something to tie and gag her with. He finally used stockings to tie her wrists and ankles, and went to the bathroom for adhesive tape to close her mouth.
When they were done, they switched off the bedroom light again and went out of the room, shutting the door behind them. French went on into the kitchen and Parker went down the hall to the door and out into the stairwell, where he called down, “Okay.”
This had been the arrangement. There was probably no way that Claire could avoid being implicated in the robbery, but she might be able to make some sort of case for herself as a hostage on the basis of where she’d been seen so far. She could claim she’d been waiting in the hotel lobby for a man who stood her up, and that when she left she saw the robbers carrying coin cases, that they grabbed her and held her up in the ballroom, that they had apparently intended to release her after they were finished, and that she’d been taken away as a prisoner afterwards. If this story were to work, Mavis Gross couldn’t be allowed to see Claire working in league with Parker and French, so Claire had waited downstairs while the blonde was being put out of the way.
It seemed to Parker that Claire had had a secondary reason for wanting to wait downstairs, that she was still very shaky at the thought of potential violence, but he didn’t worry about it. Her control had snapped once, but now she knew it could snap and so she was holding to it tighter than before. She’d be all right.
She came up the stairs slowly, not out of reluctance but out of exhaustion, and when she came close Parker could see her eyes were haggard. “We’ll get a couple of hours sleep,” he told her.
“How is—how is Mavis?”
“Fine. Tied and gagged, lying in bed. Not hurt, not scared.”
“She’s probably both,” Claire said, “but I know what you meant.”
They went into the apartment, and while Parker shut the door Claire went on into the living room, turned a three-way lamp on low, and stretched out on the sofa. “I don’t know how I can think about sleeping,” she said, her voice already getting fuzzy.
Parker saw she was going under, so he went on into the kitchen, where French had made himself a thick sandwich and opened a can of beer. He looked up from the sandwich and said, his mouth full, “I can never eat before a job. I get a nervous stomach, you know? But afterwards I could eat for a week.”
Parker sat down across the kitchen table from him. He said, “We’re going to have to work it out.”
“I know.” French put the sandwich down, swallowed beer, and said, “Let me say my say first.”
“I know everything you want to say. You were up tight for cash, you figured you were bucking an amateur operation, everything would have gone smooth except Lebatard tried to draw down on you.”
“Then I got rattled,” French said. “I should have thrown in with you and Lempke right away, as soon as Lebatard turned it sour. But I wasn’t thinking, so when Lempke came through the wall I slugged him. That was stupid.”
“The law has Lempke now. And the other two, Carlow and Mainzer.”
“I don’t know either of them.”
