the stairs and found that apartment 7 was on the second-floor rear. This door was double-bolted, and Parker didn’t travel with a lockman’s tools, so he left the door and went on up the stairs to the roof.
There was a fire escape down the back. The windows at the rear were also all dark, and there was no light source other than the stars and a quarter-moon. Parker went down the fire escape to the second floor, turned to the window that should lead in to apartment 7, and peered through it looking for light. He saw none, and went to work on the window.
Like those in the front, it was of casement type. A lever-and-ratchet arrangement inside would open or close it, and it would swing out like a door rather than raising. Parker inserted the credit card at the top corner, then slid it along the top toward the hinged end. This forced the outer corner away from the frame sufficiently for him to get a grip on it with his fingertips. He pried the corner farther open, and slipped a pencil into the space just as the credit card slipped through and fell inside the apartment. Pulling the corner out while simultaneously sliding the pencil along the top toward the hinged end, he made the opening steadily wider, until there was a sudden click-click sound from the bottom of the window as the ratchet slipped two or three notches.
Now the leading edge of the window was open about half an inch. Parker could get a firmer grip now, pull harder, and force the ratchet to give several more grooves, until he could slip his hand inside and turn the lever, opening the window the rest of the way. He stepped into a small dark bedroom, retrieved his pencil and credit card, and searched the apartment as he had earlier searched the house—silently, and in darkness.
It was empty. There was a flashlight in a kitchen drawer, and Band-Aids in the bathroom medicine chest. Parker put Band-Aids over the flashlight glass, leaving just a small open slit, and then used this narrow light to go through the apartment again, looking for something that would tell him where else Uhl might go. But he had apparently rented the place furnished, and had few possessions of his own. There was no address book, there were no letters, there was nothing to say a word about Uhl’s past or future. Some ordinary clothing in the closets and drawers, a few decks of cards, some paperback books; it was like the leavings in a rented summer cottage after the season is over.
Except for the four thousand dollars in the corn-flakes package. Two hundred twenty-dollar bills neatly stacked, filling a box of corn flakes that at first didn’t look as though it had been opened. But Parker lifted it and it was too heavy, and when he looked at the bottom he could see where the box had been steamed open and then resealed. He ripped it open and the bills thudded out, four stacks of fifty bills, each with its own paper band around it.
Uhl, like Parker and most other men in the same profession, kept caches of money in different locations, in case the sudden need for a bribe or a getaway should arise. Parker himself had left several of these behind, at times when it had seemed too dangerous to go back for them; was Uhl smart enough to do the same? Or would the four thousand tempt him to stop by here for just a minute? It was worth waiting awhile here to find out. Until morning.
It was then a little before five. At twenty to six the phone rang. Having an idea who it was, Parker answered, saying, “Hello?”
“George? Get away from there, I had to tell him—he was going to kill me, I had to tell him where you lived. I’m sorry, darling, I had to— George?”
Parker said nothing.
“George? George?”
He hung up. With the four thousand in his pockets, he left the apartment.
Six
Ducasse was in the lobby. “Come on upstairs,” he said.
Neither of them spoke in the elevator. Parker had gone back to Claire’s place after Philadelphia, and she’d told him Handy McKay had called to say that Ducasse wanted to see him. Ducasse would be at the Port Dutch Hotel in New York until the following Tuesday, staying under the name Anthony St. Pierre. So today Parker had driven in the sixty miles from Claire’s place, had called Ducasse from a pay phone, and had arranged to meet him this afternoon.
It was an expensive hotel, but Ducasse had taken himself a modest room. As they went in, he said, “You want a drink? Anything from room service?”
“No, thanks.”
“I drink when I’m not working,” Ducasse said. “Mind if I go ahead?”
“Fine.”
Ducasse made himself a gin and tonic without ice. He held the glass up, grinning at it as though it were a foolishness he’d somehow become saddled with, and said, “You know how I got onto this stuff?”
The furniture tended to white imitation Italian Provincial. Parker sat in a chair with a comfortable back and uncomfortable arms and said, “No, I don’t.”
“Every time I’m in a hotel,” Ducasse said, “sooner or later I’m in a conversation I don’t want overheard. And that’s when the ice runs out. In a motel, you just take the bucket and walk down to the machine, but in a place like this you’ve got to call room service. It takes half an hour, and in comes a guy looks invariably like an undercover narcotics man. And everybody sits around not talking and not wanting their face seen. So I trained myself to drink this shit without ice.” He took a swig and made a face. “It’s like drinking iodine.”
Parker said, “You say you’re not working. What happened to the San Simeon deal?”
“That’s why I left.”
“I hung in two more days,” Ducasse said. “But then I’d had it. Once it was out in the open, with you, they were at each other all the damn time. She’s afraid of him, you know, but not enough to make her change her head, only to try to hide things. And she’s too damn stupid to hide anything even from a lightweight like Bob Beaghler.”
“So you quit, too?”
“George Walheim kept telling me to ignore it, it would blow over, everything would be okay. He said that once
