Mackey considered. “I’ll call him,” he said. “I’ll call him at his home tonight, I’ll explain the situation.”
“Good,” Parker said. He got to his feet. “You ready?”
Mackey was stuffing things from the dresser top into his pockets: wallet, cigarettes, matches, keys. “Ready.”
Two
When they got out of the car they could hear rock music, very loud, coming from the other side of the house. There were a dozen automobiles parked on the curving drive, most of them foreign sports cars. The house was two stories high, white, rambling, with white pillars in front.
Mackey said, “I don’t know should we go through the house or around it.” It was warmer today than yesterday; he pulled out a white handkerchief and patted his forehead.
“Through it,” Parker said. He wanted to know who Griffith was, and his house would be a part of him.
Brenda said, “Is my skirt wrinkled in back?” and turned around. She was a slender girl, mid-twenties, good- looking, with a lot of leg. And just as Mackey was a hundred times better than Beaghler, Brenda was a thousand times better than Sharon. She knew who she was, she didn’t have to struggle with anybody, there was never any sense of tension between her and Mackey, no tug of war as to which one of them would run her life. She ran it herself, and she did a good job of it.
Now Mackey smiled happily at the rump she’d turned toward him and said, “Yeah, baby, it’s awful wrinkled. Maybe you oughta take it off and leave it in the car.”
She didn’t see the humor. Very serious about it all, she tugged at the hem of the short skirt in the back, saying, “No, really, is it? We sat in the car so long.”
“It’s okay, Brenda,” Mackey said, still with the same happy grin on his face. “Don’t worry about it, nobody’s gonna hate to look at you.” And he patted her on the behind.
Parker stood there and waited for Mackey to get done with his clowning, so they could move on. Griffith had only agreed to this meeting if it could be handled as though it were a social occasion, which was why Brenda was along. That had been the compromise Mackey had worked out, and Parker was willing to ride with it as long as it didn’t become inconvenient.
Brenda was the first to realize that Parker wasn’t being an amused spectator of the horsing around, but was simply waiting for them to stop; she grew at once brisk and efficient, turning around to face Mackey again, saying to him, “Now cut it out, Ed, you’re supposed to be here on business.”
Mackey glanced over at Parker, and his grin faded. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “So let’s go.”
Parker went up between the middle pair of pillars to the porch. A screen door was closed, but the main door inside it stood open, and chilled air drifted out. Parker opened the screen door, looked into a large square entrance hall empty of people and dim after the sunlight outside, and stepped in, followed by Mackey and Brenda.
It was a big house, expensively but thinly furnished, each room looking as though one or two important pieces had recently been removed from it. A wide variety of paintings hung on the light-colored walls. The floors tended to dark woods, sometimes parquet, infrequently covered by small rugs. Light and almost fragile-looking furniture was the rule.
Parker moved directly toward the rear of the house, from the entrance hall through a small airy parlor, down a hall past broad arched doorways showing more airy rooms to left and right, and at the end of the hall into another parlor, this one broad and full of plants. French doors on the opposite side led out to a slate patio and an expanse of lawn sloping gently downward toward a high thick bamboo hedge.
The music was live. When Parker stepped through the open French doors, he saw four musicians at work to his right, methodically pumping away in front of banked amplifiers lined up along the rear wall of the house. Electric guitar, electric organ, Fender bass and drums. The musicians were all very young, and all looked serious and self- absorbed, like apprentices learning to build ship models in bottles.
The music was very much louder out here, drowning all other sounds. Parker had to lean close to Mackey’s ear and shout, “You know what he looks like, you lead the way.”
Mackey nodded, and gazed out over the lawn. About forty people, the men in shirt sleeves and the women in expensively casual day wear, were scattered across the lawn between the house and the bamboo hedge. Down at the far end, a long white-cloth-covered table had been set up in front of the hedge, functioning as a bar at one end and a buffet at the other, with white-uniformed and black-bow-tied men efficiently at work behind it. Although here on the patio nothing could be heard but the music, the guests out on the lawn seemed to be talking to one another.
Mackey scanned the crowd, and then turned back to Parker and shrugged, with an eyebrow-raising movement; he didn’t see Griffith out there. He made a stirring motion with one down-pointing finger; he would circulate around the lawn and look for Griffith. Parker nodded and jabbed a thumb at the French doors; he would wait inside, away from the worst of the noise.
When he went back in, he shut the doors behind him, which cut the volume of the music in half. He wandered around the room looking at the paintings; they were all recently done, but traditional in style, naturalistic. No abstractions here, though he had seen some in other rooms he’d passed while coming through the house. He stopped in front of one painting that showed a civilized cocktail party in a quietly wealthy room. People stood in small groups across the surface of the painting, chatting with one another. There weren’t too many guests for the size of the room, and those present were all middle-aged, well-dressed, obviously well-bred. The quiet sounds of their conversations could almost be heard emanating from the painting, blotting out the rock music from the patio.
“That is a contrast, isn’t it?”
Parker turned his head, and standing beside him was a fairly short man in a white Norfolk jacket, pale blue turtleneck shirt, and dark blue slacks. The drink he was holding was tall, carbonated, iced, and transparent. There was something a little too graceful about the way he was standing. He had black hair, thinning on top and worn long over his collar in back. Between his wide mouth and narrow nose ran a thin line of mustache.
Parker looked back at the painting. A contrast. “Yes,” he said.
“I mean, with that crowd out there.”
