Madge talk was a small price to pay.
As he brought her a drink now she said, “An old friend of yours was here a while ago. Smiles Kastor.”
Parker nodded. “I remember Kastor,” he said.
“He’s doing okay for himself,” she said. She swallowed some whiskey and launched into nostalgia.
Parker didn’t really listen at all. He sat across from her, an untasted drink in his hand, and at intervals he nodded or made some small comment. That was all she needed, just an indication every once in a while that she still had her audience.
What he was mostly doing, sitting there, was waiting for the phone to ring. He had three calls out, and there was nothing to do right now but wait.
Madge talked on for an hour and said something interesting only once, and that was when she sat up and snapped her fingers and said, “You know, I forgot all about it. I bet you did too. I have some money of yours.”
“You do?”
“You and Handy McKay came through here about four years ago; you had some jewelry you wanted unloaded.”
“That’s right,” Parker said. “I forgot about that.”
“Your share’s twenty-two hundred,” she said. “I have it in the safe out in the office. You want it?”
“Hold on to it,” he said. “Take my bill out of it when I leave.”
“Okay, fine,” she said.
It was good to have stashes in safe places here and there around the country. You never knew when you might need it. A Claire wasn’t always available, sitting on your case money a telegram away.
But it was stupid to have forgotten the money here. Parker remembered how that had happened; the jewelry had been an afterthought, an unexpected side result of him and Handy going up to Buffalo after a man named Bronson, a wheel in a gambling syndicate that called itself the Outfit. Bronson had put a contract out on Parker because of some trouble there’d been, and Parker made some more trouble, and Bronson’s successor decided to let the contract lapse. In all of that, the handful of jewelry Handy had found in Bronson’s safe got itself forgotten.
But this is where they’d come after they’d finished with Bronson, and they’d given Madge the jewelry to unload for them, and here she was four years later with twenty-two hundred bucks out of nowhere.
She said, “What about Handy? Think I should send it to him?”
“He’s supposed to call me in a little while. I’ll ask him.”
“He retired, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She waited and then said, “Say something, Parker. God, to get you to gossip it’s like pulling teeth.”
“Handy retired,” Parker said.
“I know he retired! Tell me about it. Tell me why he retired, tell me where he is, how’s he doing. Talk to me, Parker, Goddammit.”
So Parker talked to her, telling her about Handy, running a diner now up in Presque Isle, Maine. She listened for a while, but she could never go very long without doing her own talking, so soon enough she interrupted him to tell him about somebody else she knew who’d retired seven different times in a space of twenty years, and Parker went back to his own silence again, not listening, waiting for the phone.
It rang half an hour later. Madge said, “You want me to leave?”
“It don’t matter, stick around.” He went over and picked up the phone and said hello.
Madge said, “Is it Handy?”
It wasn’t. Parker shook his head at her and said into the phone, “How’d we do?”
“Bad A couple of guys heard of Uhl, but I couldn’t find anybody who worked with him or knew how to get in touch with him. Matt Rosenstein drew a fat blank. Listen, I don’t know what you want these two for, but if it’s work a couple of other boys are interested.”
“It’s a special situation,” Parker said.
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you out.”
I “That’s okay.” Parker hung up and went back and sat down.
Madge said, “You looking for information?”
“Yes.”
“I’m the girl to ask, Parker. Try me.”
“George Uhl.”
Her expectant look faded slowly. “Uhl? George Uhl? He must be new.”
“Pretty new. He’s worked six times, he said. He said one time he worked with Matt Rosenstein. The way he said it, Rosenstein should be hot stuff, but I never heard of him.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “Matt Rosenstein, I know him. You wouldn’t ever cross his path. You two have different kinds of outlooks.”
“Tell me about him,” Parker said.
