“That’s right.”
“You got a message for him?”
“I want to talk about him.”
“Christ, you’re a one-track mind. You want to talk about him, you want to talk about him, you want to talk about him. What did you do to my cashier?”
Parker was still holding the cashier’s wrist. He’d tried to get away a couple of times, but each time Parker had bent his arm for him, so now he just stood there, breathing hard, glowering at Parker, making no trouble. None of the three browsers had so much as looked up when the stool had gone over; they were all absorbed in their quests.
Parker said, “He’s all right. He’s right here. You want to talk to him?”
“What for? And what do I want to talk to you for?”
“I’m not trouble for you. All I want is to talk about— “
“Yeah, I know, you want to talk about Matt. Okay, okay. You know where Downing Street is?”
“I can find it.”
“It’s the next block down on Sixth, west side of the street. I’m in number eight, near the corner. Second floor.”
“I’ll leave now. You want to talk to your boy?”
“No. I’ll see you.”
Parker let go the cashier’s hand and gave him the phone. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” he said.
The cashier put the receiver to his head anyway and said, “Paul?” But Brock had already hung up, so now the cashier looked needlessly foolish and he knew it. He hung up the phone with an angry gesture, put it away under the counter, and said, “You didn’t have to get tough.”
“I didn’t,” Parker told him.
Three
“You sound like your voice. Come in.”
Parker walked into a decorating magazine’s idea of the perfect masculine den. Wood was everywhere, massive and darkly stained. Knurled posts, heavy rough-finished tables, lamps with deep-grained wooden bases. And leather, and black iron, and a few discreet touches of brass. The wall-to-wall carpet was vaguely Persian, with an intricate swirling design in tans and creams and dull orange against a background of black. The windows sported wood-grain shutters. Even the air-conditioner in the wall beneath the window had a wood veneer face. And through an arched open doorway done in purposely rough plaster Parker could see another room done in exactly the same style and dominated by a heavy wooden trestle table and high-backed wooden chairs with leather seats.
The outside of the building hadn’t led him to expect anything like this. It was four stories high, narrow, hemmed in by similar buildings on both sides, each building having three windows facing the street on each floor and a high stoop up to a fairly ornate entrance-way. They were old buildings, old enough so that even their facelift false fronts were old — the one on this building was fake red brick - and a hallway inside had continued the same sort of first impression. Long, creaking staircases with rubber treads, bare peach-colored walls.
Paul Brock had not merely moved into the second-story floor-through apartment in this building, he’d moved an entirely different world into it. He’d put a hell of a lot of money into the place where he lived without much chance of ever getting a return on his investment, and it was a safe bet he hadn’t done it all on the kind of income he was getting from that hole-in-the-wall record store. Brock was a man with other things going for him, that much was sure.
Parker turned from his scanning of the apartment to study its tenant instead. The room distracted one from the man who lived in it, made him tend to disappear into the background, and maybe that was a part of the intention.
Because Paul Brock wasn’t very much. Slightly under medium height, very thin, he had a long, bony neck and an Ichabod Crane sort of face, except that there was a well-worn expression of friendliness and amiability on this face. Brock wore heavy horn rimmed glasses that made his eyes look huge and his cheeks look as though they sagged. He was about thirty. He was wearing loafers and grey slacks and a pale blue short-sleeved polo shirt, and he looked like the kind of guy in the office who’d go around with a cigar box to take up the gift collection every time one of the secretaries was quitting to get married.
He shut the door now and said, “Do you have a name you give out, or do I just clear my throat when I want to attract your attention?”
“Parker.”
“Parker. Nosy or pen? Ha! Well, that wasn’t very funny. It’s too early to offer a drink, but I— it is too early to offer a drink, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Parker said.
“I thought it was. Coffee?”
“I don’t have the time,” Parker said.
“Then let’s get down to business, Mr. Parker. Have a seat.”
Parker sat in a wooden-armed chair with an orange seat-cushion, and Brock settled opposite him on the black leather sofa. Brock tucked his legs under himself like a woman, but it seemed an unselfconscious gesture, and in no other way did he behave overtly like a faggot. The position was somehow more childlike than sexual.
Parker leaned forward and put his elbows on knees. “First of all,” he said, “I’m in the same business as Matt Rosenstein. He doesn’t know me, but we’ve got some mutual acquaintances also in the profession. If you want, I can give you some names till we come to one you know, and then you can check me out to see if I’m what I say I am.”
