Ducasse had come close enough so he could look through the open doorway at Bob Beaghler, who was now standing in there with his hands on his hips, looking both embarrassed and defiant. Ducasse glanced at Sharon, who was biting her under lip and trying to decide whether or not to get angry. Then he sighed and looked at Parker and shook his head. “I guess I’ll hang in here a little longer,” he said. “I’m living on my case money as it is. Maybe they’ll calm down now, after this.”
“Maybe,” Parker said. “See you around.”
“So long,” Ducasse said. He looked wistful as he watched Parker get into his car.
The last Parker saw of them in the rear-view mirror, Sharon was running for her red Olds convertible and Ducasse was on his way through the lighted doorway to talk to Bob Beaghler.
Five
Parker slipped the credit card into the narrow opening at the edge of the door and slid it downward until it hit the bolt. He applied pressure slowly, the bottom edge of the card pushing against the curved face of the bolt, the card moving downward a fraction of an inch at a time, and suddenly the door popped inward and was open.
Parker put the credit card away in his shirt pocket. It was the one he’d used in San Francisco, and while it could no longer be safely used anywhere in the country to buy or rent things, it could still open most locked doors that hadn’t been double-bolted. And in the majority of suburban houses, that meant either the kitchen door or the door to the attached garage; people devote their attention to guarding against entry through the front door or through windows, and hardly think at all about the rear entrances to their houses.
In this case it was the door to the garage. Stepping through the dark opening, Parker could see the streetlight through the small windows in the main garage door straight ahead. But in the intervening space between himself and that door, there was no car.
It was almost two in the morning now, and not a light showing in any of the suburban houses on this curving block. Was the woman who lived here merely out late, or had she gone away somewhere on a vacation?
Or was she in fact here, having loaned her car to Uhl?
The word had come to him early this morning, indirectly from Kirwan through Handy McKay. George Uhl was supposed to have set up a thing for himself with a divorcee in one of the bedroom communities outside Pittsburgh. Kirwan had learned the woman’s name and the name of the town; the local phone book had given Parker this address.
It was too bad about the car being gone. Or maybe it wasn’t; he’d know better after he’d been through the house.
There was a door to his left, seen dimly in the streetlight glow through the garage-door windows. He took his revolver from under his left arm and moved that way, turning the door knob slowly, pushing the door open slowly, seeing darkness that separated itself into several lighter masses: refrigerator, stove, cabinets.
There were two steps up from garage level to kitchen level. He went up them quietly, at a slight crouch, listening for sounds from inside the house, shifting his weight slowly to make no creaking-floor sounds of his own. He pushed the door closed again behind himself, and started across the kitchen.
He heard the clicks on linoleum and saw the dark shape hurtling at him just an instant before it hit, slamming into him at chest height and knocking him flat on his back on the floor. Its breath was hot and sour in his face, and then it was going for his throat, and he had no choice but to jam the revolver barrel into its hairy side and pull the trigger.
It gave a convulsive leap, and he shoved it away to the left as he rolled to the right. He hit the wall and got up quickly on one knee, staring, listening, waiting.
Its claws were scrabbling on the linoleum, but it wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t killed it, but he’d de-fused it. He got to his feet and brushed his left sleeve across his face where it had slobbered on him.
The sound of the shot hadn’t been very loud. He had muffled it by pressing the muzzle into its body, so the noise wouldn’t have been heard by anybody on the street; but it might have been heard by somebody in the house, if there was anybody around to hear it.
With the claws scrabbling on the linoleum, he couldn’t hear the rest of the house, so he moved deeper into the kitchen until he saw the streetlight again to his right. A doorway to the living room. He stepped through onto carpet, did some more listening, and heard nothing ahead of himself at all. Nothing but the scratching behind him. The thing still hadn’t made any sound of its own, only that click of claws on linoleum.
It took him ten minutes to search the house, moving slowly, using no light other than that which came in through the windows along the front. It was a ranch-style house, all built on one level, with the garage at one end, living room and kitchen in the middle, bedrooms at the other end. And all completely empty. The closet in the main bedroom was full of clothing, all of it female, suggesting that the woman wasn’t away for an extended period of time. In the bathroom there were three toothbrushes, but no toiletries that could be thought of as exclusively male. It was likelier, in any event, that Uhl had a place of his own and wouldn’t be living here on any kind of long-range basis.
Back in the kitchen, Parker opened the refrigerator door to get enough light to see what he’d killed. The thing had stopped scratching now, and when he put light on it he saw it was dead: a Doberman, lying on its side with its legs stretched out in running posture, its eyes open and covered by a gray film. There hadn’t been a lot of blood, but some was on the floor.
Next to the entrance to the garage was a door leading to the cellar stairs. Leaving the refrigerator door open, Parker opened this door, switched on the cellar light, and went down for a quick look around. He hadn’t expected to find anything of interest, and he’d been right. Finished, he went back upstairs, took the dog by one leg, dragged it over to the cellar doorway, and pushed it downstairs. Then he switched off the cellar light, cleaned the bloodstains off the linoleum with a dishtowel, and threw that down the stairs after the dog. Shutting the cellar door, he looked around the kitchen to see if any traces remained, found none, and closed the refrigerator again. Then he went into the living room to sit down and wait. There was a picture window facing the street in there, its draperies drawn more than halfway open, and he pulled a chair down to the end of the room so he wouldn’t be visible from out front.
It was ten to four when the headlights suddenly flashed across the living-room wall. Parker got to his feet, and when he heard the garage door lifting, he moved quickly down to the other end of the living room, where the doorway to the kitchen was, and waited for whoever was coming in.
