She frowned, thinking it over, then suddenly started and cried, “My baking!” She jumped to her feet, grabbed a potholder, and opened the oven. Out came the two halves of layer cake, smelling hot and fresh. She put them on the counter to cool and turned off the oven. Then she put the potholder down, turned back to Parker, and said, “I couldn’t trust you worth a damn. Don’t you think I don’t know that? You’d never come back here with the money.”
“I have two thousand cash in my pocket I can give you,” he said. “Or I can give you my word I’ll come back with a quarter of whatever I get. Which do you want?”
She glanced up at the kitchen clock, biting her lip. “I wish my brother was around,” she said. “He’d know what I should do.”
“Call him.”
“He’s out on his rounds.” She came back to the table and sat down. “Give me the two thousand as an advance.”
He shook his head. “One or the other,” he said. “Not both. What did Benny say about me? He ever say anything to you about me?”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I know what Benny thought of you. He could trust you. That doesn’t mean I can trust you.”
“Why not?”
“Benny was a fellow professional.”
‘You’re his widow.”
She made a crooked smile. When she talked with him her expressions were at variance with her appearance, the gray hair and the apron and the slippers and the cake in the oven. A very sharp and worldly woman existed down inside the Apple Mary exterior. She said, “Sentiment, Parker?”
He shrugged. “Make up your mind, Grace,” he said. “If you don’t know anything I’ll have to root around somewhere else.”
“Do you have somewhere else?”
“I can just keep asking people in the business till I find somebody who knows George Uhl.”
“That could take a while.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
She studied him, then said, “Let me see the two thousand.”
He took a roll of bills held with a rubber band from his side jacket pocket. He slid the rubber band onto his wrist and counted out two thousand dollars onto the kitchen table. There were a few bills left, and these he put in his wallet, then rolled the two thousand and put the rubber band around it. “It’s right here,” he said and put it back in his pocket.
“All right,” she said. “Let me make a phone call or two. I’ll be right back.” She got to her feet.
Parker said, “Why not just give me the names and let me make my own calls?”
“These are people who’ll talk to me, not you.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
She left the room, and Parker got up to pour himself another cup of coffee. He sat at the table again, listening to the children yelling and running around out front, smelling the smells of cake and cookies, looking through doorways at small, snug neat rooms. Grace Weiss, childless herself, with a heavy heistman for a husband, had turned herself into a kind of nursery-rhyme mother image, the cake and the cookie lady at whose house all the children of the neighborhood congregated.
Parker had been here a couple of times before, and he remembered how Benny too had built himself a completely different at-home image. He was the semi-retired putterer, the Little League umpire, the maker of model planes and pup tents with the neighborhood boys, the constructor of birdhouses and clipper of hedges, a vague and amiable little man in baggy pants, with his glasses slipping down his nose. The difference was so complete that the first time Parker had come here he hadn’t recognized Weiss and had then thought Weiss had changed so much, grown too old, and couldn’t be used anymore. But Weiss had let him know he was still his old self on the job, and he was.
Parker knew that he himself was different when he wasn’t working. More relaxed, a little slower in moving, a little more vocal. But the differences were minor compared with those Benny and Grace Weiss had managed.
It was fifteen minutes before Grace came back, and when she did she had a folded slip of paper in her hand. She sat down across the table from Parker again, took a sip of her cold coffee, and said, “Nobody knows Benny’s dead, so I just let them all think I was calling on his account. I didn’t say anything about you or anything else.”
“Good.”
She looked at the slip of paper in her hand, then at Parker. “I decided I want the two thousand,” she said. “Not because I don’t trust you, Parker, but because I don’t know what can happen. It’s too much of a chance. Benny left me insurance, but how do I collect before I get official word he’s dead?”
“You won’t,” Parker told her.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “So now I have to wait seven years for an Enoch Arden. What do I live on in the meantime?”
“Benny salted some cash away.”
“Sure he did. And this house is paid for, and everything in it is paid for. But he didn’t salt that much away, and there’s still living expenses. I don’t have enough to last me seven years. And maybe you’d come back, maybe you really would, and give me seven thousand dollars. But maybe you wouldn’t, or maybe you won’t get the money, or maybe something will happen that neither one of us can forsee. So I’ll take the two thousand. It’s sure.”
Parker took the roll out of his pocket again and put it in the middle of the table. She didn’t touch it, but she
