“Tommy?” Mackey looked surprised at the question. “One hundred percent.” he said. “Tommy won’t admit anything, and he won’t talk about us.”
Parker switched off the television set. “What about the girl?” he said.
Mackey shrugged. “I don’t know her. But Tommy trusts her, so what the hell?”
Devers said, “I’ve seen men trust women before.”
Mackey looked worried, but seemed to be trying not to show it. He said, “What does she know anyway?”
“Anything that Tommy knows,” Devers said.
Parker said, “She knows our names and faces, but she doesn’t know where to find us. She knows what city we met in, she knows we were getting paid by an art dealer.”
Devers said, “Does she know Griffith’s name?”
Mackey frowned. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Nobody ever said it in front of her, but Tommy knows it. Would he mention the name to her? What for? And would she remember it?”
Parker said, “We leave here now. We get to Griffith tomorrow morning, we make the arrangements for the switch, we get our money out of the banks. She’s a strong girl, if she does break down, it won’t be for a day or two. We’ll have time to get out from under if we keep moving.”
“God damn it,” Mackey said. “I counted on Tommy. How’d he manage to get himself picked up?”
Parker had stepped into his shoes, and now he shrugged on his shirt. “Let’s go,” he said.
Three
The smell of dew was crisp and clean in the morning air. The sun was an orange circle just above the treetops, and small birds hopped on the wet lawn stretching away from the patio toward the bamboo hedge. The smashing of the windowpane made a quick sharp noise in the silence, and was gone without an echo.
Parker tossed the rock away toward the grass and reached through the hole in the window to unlock the French doors on the inside. Behind him, Mackey and Devers were looking carefully to left and right, but there were no neighbors close enough to have heard, and at seven-thirty in the morning no mailman or delivery boy likely to be arriving around at the front of the house.
They’d phoned Griffith nearly an hour ago, from the edge of town, and had gotten no answer. They had come here and found his car in the garage, but no one had come to the door in response to their ringing of the bell or knocking on the windows. So now they were going in, to find out what the story was. Had Griffith left for some reason, or was he hiding?
Glass shards crackled under Parker’s feet as he stepped into the dim room. No light showed anywhere in the house, and there was no sound other than that made by Parker and Mackey and Devers.
Mackey, standing beside Parker just inside the doorway, said softly, “If that son of a bitch skipped out on us —”
“We’re screwed,” Devers said.
Parker said, “He’s got no reason to run out. Not without the paintings.”
“But what if he did?” Mackey’s voice was low, but angry. “We don’t have any buyer lined up, except Griffith.”
“We’ll worry about that if we have to,” Parker said. He walked across the room and through the doorway on the other side, Mackey and Devers following him.
They found Griffith upstairs, in the tub, in the bathroom connecting with the master bedroom. The water was cold, and a dusky rose in color. The lower half of Griffith’s face was underwater, but the top half was as white as plaster. His eyes were closed, and his hair looked as though it had been glued to his scalp in handfuls.
The three of them crowded into the small room to look at him. Mackey said, irritably, “God damn it. God damn it to hell.”
Devers reached down into the water and took one of Griffith’s thumbs, and lifted his forearm up into the air. The ragged gash in his wrist, flanked by the shallower hesitation cuts, flowed coral-colored water, but no blood. Devers sounded more dismayed than angry when he said, “What did he do this for? What the hell got into him?”
“That,” Parker said, and pointed at the folded newspaper on the closed toilet lid.
Mackey picked up the paper. “Right,” he said. “Here it is.” He handed it to Parker.
This was a different newspaper, but the wording in the separate box was just about the same: part of the gang caught, with a vehicle that had carried at least a part of the stolen paintings. Galesburg was mentioned. It was the same garbled story as in the paper in Nashville, it apparently having been released just barely in time to make most afternoon papers, but not in time to do full coverage on it or check the details.
Devers and Parker looked at the paper together, and Devers said, “He thought it fell through.”
”Why the hell didn’t he wait?” Mackey was getting angrier by the second, glaring at the body as though he might push its head the rest of the way under.
Devers said, “He must have been tight for cash. We really must have strapped him when we made him put the money in savings accounts.”
“No reason to kill himself.” Mackey was sulky.
Parker said, “We search.”
Mackey raised an eyebrow at him. “For what?”
“A lot of things. For a note, in case he left a note with our names in it. For something to tell us the name of his
