“Just let me change,” she said, and in her animation she almost did look pretty, the complainer lines fading though not entirely disappearing. “I won’t be a sec,” she said.
Parker knew that meant ten minutes, maybe fifteen. “All right,” he said.
“You could watch television — that’s a pretty good show on there right now. A special about the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. You want me to turn it up?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Let me just get rid of … .” Her words trailed off as she picked up the TV dinner and hurried with it from the room.
Parker sat where his eyes would be attracted to the television set, but he didn’t turn the sound up. The movement on the screen — Girders lifting, men in work helmets looking up and moving their arms — distracted him slightly, and for the rest he just made himself be patient.
He knew too little about Uhl, that was the problem. Too little about Uhl and too little about the people around him. He had to poke around blind in Uhl’s life, never knowing what the reaction would be. With Rosenstein he’d succeeded only in setting another wolf on the scent. Pearson would have been good, because he had a sexual complaint against Uhl, but all that time spent driving down to Alexandria had played to Uhl’s advantage, and now Parker was back almost to the beginning again. The last link to Uhl’s life, a discarded girl friend. With Uhl spooked and Rosenstein prowling around somewhere.
The point was, thirty-three thousand dollars wasn’t enough to drive Uhl out of his life. He hadn’t planned, obviously, on taking the thirty-three grand and going to Europe or Canada or South America with it. It wasn’t enough. He’d counted on getting rid of all his partners in the robbery, and then he could go back into his normal life with four times his share and nobody to notice anything or ask him anything. Parker’s being alive had spoiled things for him, but he still couldn’t just abandon his life. He didn’t have enough money for it. If Parker — or Rosenstein — spooked him enough he might finally take off just out of desperation, hoping to start up somewhere else again with the thirty-three thousand as a stake. But what Uhl was going to want to do was hang around the general area, out of sight, until it had all blown over, until Parker and Rosenstein had given up and gone on to other things. And in the meantime Uhl would want to maintain some sort of contact with his regular life to know what was happening, if for no other reason.
Pearson was proof of that. There’d been someone, some individual person, that Pearson could call and get to deliver a message to Uhl. That someone, or maybe a different someone now, could lead Parker to Uhl. All he needed was to be led to the someone.
Which meant he had to get into Uhl’s life, had to make contact with the people Uhl knew. And all he had left to help him was one old girl friend with a hate against Uhl and a complaint against the world.
She was back in ten minutes, and she’d tried her best. She was in a yellow sleeveless miniskirted dress with orange Mondrian lines, her shoes were casual flats in a matching orange, and she carried a small orange handbag. She’d brushed her hair and made up her face and even put on eyelashes. The whiner was well disguised now; if you didn’t look close, you might miss her.
Except for the voice. “There!” she said. “That didn’t take long, did it?” Even through the animation the petulant overtones remained.
“Not long,” Parker said.
She switched off the television set, and they left the apartment. They were on 87th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, and she led the way over to Amsterdam and then south.
Parker tried once or twice to get her to talk about Uhl as they walked along, but she wouldn’t do it. “Not on an empty stomach,” she said, and made stupid conversation about the weather instead. “Isn’t this weather something? Boy! Different every day. What about that rainstorm yesterday? Wasn’t that something?”
“Yes,” Parker said. He was thinking that a lot of time had gone by and he hadn’t gotten anywhere. They’d knocked over the bank on Monday, and it was Thursday before he’d gotten to Brock, the day it rained. Now it was Friday. Four days of running back and forth, and Uhl was still out there someplace, sitting on the money.
The restaurant had an aquarium decorating scheme — fish and fishnets, candles flickering on the tables. They ate Mexican food, cooling their mouths with beer, and afterwards over coffee Parker said, “Now we talk about George Uhl.”
“Do you have a match?”
He held a light for her, and she cupped her hand around his while she lit her cigarette. “Mm, thank you.” She smiled at him through smoke and candlelight. “You have strong hands. And a one-track mind. George is all you’re interested in, isn’t he?”
“For now,” Parker said because he thought he ought to play her game with her just a little. He didn’t want her to freeze.
“I don’t know what you have against George,” she said, looking down at the ashtray as she flicked no ashes from her cigarette, “But I have plenty.”
“I won’t pry into your personal life,” Parker told her, short-circuiting a long, sad story. “All I want is to find out where he is.”
She looked at him and frowned a little. She was being coquettish now, even frowning coquettishly, and with that and the dimness of the candlelight and the cigarette smoke the whiner was almost completely out of sight. Except for the voice. “I haven’t seen him for a year,” she said. “I honestly haven’t. More than a year.”
“You used to know him,” Parker said.
“Didn’t I, though,” she said, twisting her mouth scornfully.
“So you knew the people he knew. You knew his friends.”
“A man like George,” she said, “doesn’t have friends. Just people he uses.”
“That could be. But some people think they’re his friends. Everybody has somebody who thinks he’s his friend.”
She shrugged, flicking ashes again. “I suppose so.”
