Renard read the letter as though he’d never seen it before. “Hmmmm,” he said, as though acknowledging the seriousness of something he’d been ignoring up till now. “This could be somewhat incriminating, couldn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s the original, I see.” Renard smiled brightly. “You don’t mind if I keep it.”
“No. I’m not law, like I said.”
“I must admit I’m beginning to believe you.” Renard started ripping small pieces from the letter and throwing them over the terrace railing. “You see? I’m littering in front of you.”
“All right,” Parker said. “So now let’s talk. We’ve got the paintings, and you’re the buyer.”
“Not precisely.” Renard was still ripping the letter, throwing one small piece at a time out into the air; a fitful breeze took the pieces this way and that. “I was the buyer for six of the paintings,” he said. “Only six. What Leon planned to do with the others, I really couldn’t say.”
”What were you going to pay for the six?”
Renard hesitated slightly, then said, “Fifty thousand.”
“No. You were going to pay more.”
“Was I?”
“You’ll pay me more.”
“I doubt it,” Renard said. Only a third of the letter remained in his hands.
Parker said, “You saw those passbooks. Griffith was going to pay us one-fifty for the whole batch. We’ll make the same deal with you.”
Renard shook his head. “Definitely not.”
“They’re worth more than twice that.”
“But I don’t want them. I only want the six.”
Parker considered pushing the issue, but something in Renard’s manner told him the man wouldn’t budge. He really didn’t want the other fifteen paintings, not at any price.
But he did want the six. Parker said, “All right, we’ll sell you the six. Which ones?”
“Have you paper and pencil?”
“Yes.” Parker took out a notebook and ballpoint pen. Renard gave him six titles, and he wrote them down, then put the notebook and pen away and said, “Sixty thousand. That’s still less than you were going to pay Griffith.”
Renard offered a faint smile. “Is it?” He shrugged. “I always have been too generous,” he said, “that’s my great failing. Very well. In honor of poor Leon’s memory, sixty thousand.”
Five
Lou Sternberg met Parker at O’Hare International. He had a disgusted look on his face, but he gave the standard greeting: “Have a good flight?”
“Yes.” Parker meant nothing by the word; it was simply a sound that ended that topic.
They walked down ramshackle corridors forever, as though in somebody’s troubled dream, and came out at last to a rainy night, with small lights reflecting off the wet blacktop. Sternberg opened his black umbrella, and pointed: “I’m parked over that way.”
It was still a fairly long walk. In addition to his umbrella, and his usual raincoat and cap, Sternberg was wearing rubbers on his shoes and a gray scarf around his neck. It was impossible to tell if he was disgusted by the job going sour or by the rain.
The car was a rental Chevrolet. Sternberg unlocked it, and Parker got in. Sternberg backed in, closing the umbrella as he came, and maneuvered awkwardly to get the umbrella into the back seat without poking anybody’s eye out.
Neither of them spoke till Sternberg had the car moving cautiously toward the terminal exit. Then he said, “You see where Tommy got off?”
Parker looked at him. “When?”
”Heard it on the radio coming out.” Sternberg grinned and shook his head. “The advantage of being a hippie,” he said. “So many organizations came out on Tommy’s side, so much talk about police harassment, they had to let him go. If they’d had him in there for running a red light, they could have beat on him for a month. But a felony gets too much publicity.”
Parker frowned and said, “What about the troopers’ ID?”
“Who’s going to believe two cops against one long-hair kid? You look at Tommy, now; would you believe he was a heist-man?”
“The girl, too?”
Sternberg nodded. “Both of them, free as air.” Ahead of him, a taxi failed to yield the right of way; Sternberg had to hit the brakes hard, and the rear end would have skidded on the wet pavement if he hadn’t moved the wheel slightly. “They let any damn body drive,” he said.
Parker waited till they were clear of the terminal before saying, “Our situation is bad.”
“I got that idea from your call. Trouble with Griffith?”
“He’s dead. Killed himself when he thought we’d been caught.”
