George didn’t specifically doubt Rosenstein, but he didn’t trust him either. His wariness, and the thirty-three thousand dollars rucked away in a suitcase in the guest room closet, kept him uninterested in Rosenstein’s offer. He said so, but Rosenstein kept pressing, kept wanting to have a meeting with him, until George began to get actively suspicious, at which point Rosenstein abruptly gave up, told him he was missing a sure winner, and hung up.
That was yesterday, and ever since that call George had been uneasy. He sensed people moving around out there, somewhere beyond the range of his sight and hearing, prowling around, up to something. He was getting nervous.
And then late this morning Barri had called again, and the message this time almost made him drop the receiver. “Benny Weiss wants to get in touch with you.”
“Wait! Wait, wait, wait!”
“What’s the matter, George?”
All he could do was keep saying wait. He was standing in Ed’s living room; he was alone in the house; there was silence and springtime outside, sunlight and grass. He had to get his mind back inside his head, and until then all he could do was say wait.
Finally he found a question he could ask: “Who called you? He called you himself?”
“No. A guy named Lew Pearson called. He said he was passing the message on.”
Lew Pearson. That bastard. Wouldn’t he like to do George a favour, though. “I’ll call you back,” he said and hung up and prowled the house a while, trying to make up his mind.
What did it mean? Benny Weiss was dead. Parker? How would Parker get to Lew Pearson? Through Benny’s wife maybe. So were Pearson and Parker combining against him? Was Pearson spilling his guts to Parker about everything he knew? Or was Pearson taking over from Parker, or running something on his own?
Maybe they were all in it together, Pearson and Rosenstein and Parker. Closing in on him.
He couldn’t just stand around here. He’d been jittery since the call yesterday; he’d wanted to move, act, do something, but there hadn’t been anything to do.
Now there was something to do. Nip Pearson in the bud.
He left a note for Ed on the kitchen table. He considered taking the money, but it would be safer here and finally he left it. And then he headed south.
A little over three hours later he was at Pearson’s house. He rang the bell, got no answer, found the door unlocked, and worked his way silently through the house, pistol in his hand. Then he looked out a back window and saw Lew sitting out there with a bathing suit on, Madge drifting around in the pool.
Ask questions? Did he want to know what was going on? No, he knew what was going on. There was only one meaning for Pearson’s message: He’d been trying to rattle George, make George expose himself by doing something stupid. And there was a quick way to defend himself.
He opened the window a couple of inches and knelt on the floor. He braced his gun hand on the sill, and he never saw the guy in the other chaise longue until after he’d shot Pearson. That chaise was facing the other way. There was nothing showing but the top of a head, and that was easy not to see at this distance. And Pearson had acted like a man alone, sitting there sipping his drink.
But then George fired his first shot, and the other man erupted out of the other chaise, and damned if it wasn’t Parker again. George emptied his pistol at the son of a bitch, but Parker rolled like a cat across the lawn and got clean away.
Would nothing stop him? This was George’s second try at him, and he’d failed again.
“The next time,” George muttered, “I take my first shot at you.” Then he got to his feet and hustled out of there.
Two
Barri Dane stood by the door, smiling at her students as they trickled out bravely to face the day. She shut the door behind the last of them and the smile fell from her face like a picture off a wall. When she walked across the bare floor of the rehearsal room her reflection kept pace with her in the wall-length mirror on her right, but she didn’t bother to look at it. She knew what she looked like in black leotards, she knew the twenty-eight-year-old body was as firm and slender and well-curved as the eighteen-year-old body had been, she knew that the twenty-eight- year-old face looked tougher and more knowing and more provocative than the eighteen-year-old face had looked, and she knew the fatigue she was feeling would show only in a slight slump of the shoulders, a slight flat- footedness in the walk. So she walked the length of a twenty-two-foot mirror without glancing in it once, went through a curtained doorway into the living quarters of the building, turned on the shower water in the bathroom, and then stripped out of the leotard in the bedroom while waiting for the water to run hot.
Washington, D.C., is a tough town for the young single woman, and that’s because there are so many of them there. Government never has enough bureaucracy, and bureaucracy never has enough secretaries, stenographers, typists, and file clerks. So Washington is full of young women, and because there are so many of them a lot of them are lonely.
Barri Dane’s current livelihood was a direct result of this loneliness. Although in the past she’d been a stripper, a con artist’s shill, and a few other things, today she was an educator, a teacher with her own studio and with two well-attended classes every day.
It was part of her self-promotion when she said that the main thing she taught was confidence. “If you finish this course with new self-confidence,” she always told new classes, “we will both have succeeded.”
In more mundane terms, Barri Dane’s course was a general study in physical education. There were classes in calisthenics and in hygiene, as well as classes in belly dancing, in modeling, and in judo. A student could sign up for a complete four-month course, two one-hour sessions a week, for one hundred fifty dollars, or she could select a shorter program devoting itself to any one of the subjects Barri taught, for smaller amounts of money. There was a good living in it and it was by far the cleanest and most legitimate means of earning a dollar she’d ever found for herself, but after nearly two years she was bored to death with the damn thing. Still, there was nothing much else to do, so she kept on with it.
The water was hot. She stepped in and started to soap and got to thinking about George Uhl. She knew he wasn’t much; she’d always known that, just as she’d always known that she was invariably attracted to the George
