Tyler was a big enough city to have a substantial downtown, and a small enough city to have its office buildings and its weekend entertainment area all in the same place. Dark office blocks loomed over blinking movie marquees, and the traffic on London Avenue and Center Street was thick and slow-moving.
It was another clear night; high above, the sliver of moon was thinner even than last night, giving off no illumination to speak of, shining no more brightly than the white dots of the stars. Tuesday would be the new moon; no moon at all.
The Nolan Building took up a city block, bounded by London Avenue and Center Street and West Street and Houston Avenue. The ground floor was taken up mainly by a bank on the Center Street side and a stock brokerage and a large restaurant called the Riverboat on the London Avenue side. Next to the Riverboat was the entrance to the office building lobby, the elevators and the building directory.
Parker got there a few minutes early, and spent a while studying the copy of the Riverboat menu taped to one of the restaurant windows. In five minutes he saw four men enter the lobby, none of them Lozini. Was he there already, earlier than his assistants? It didn’t sound right.
Parker was about to go on in when one more car stopped at the curb in front of the lobby entrance, the same black Oldsmobile Lozini had used this afternoon. Watching, Parker saw Lozini and another man get out of the Olds and walk across the sidewalk as the Olds drove immediately away. The second man was fat and ungainly, walking as though he’d be more comfortable with a cane. Or more comfortable sitting down.
Fine. Parker let another two minutes go by, then followed the rest of them in.
The lobby reminded him of the one they’d been using in that jewelry-store robbery that went bad. It even had the same kind of skinny old man in uniform as the night guard, except that this one seemed awake and alert. He also had an assistant, a grinning young Puerto Rican, in a blue uniform jacket and tattered dungarees, who operated the elevator. Parker signed a name and destination in the night book—”Edward Latham, City Property Holdings, 1712”—and was about to get into the elevator when another man arrived. Parker, looking at him, knew that this was somebody else for the meeting, and waited for him.
The other man gave Parker an ironic smile of acknowledgment, and said to the guard, “Sign me in, will you, Jimmy?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Calesian.” Parker could hear in Jimmy’s voice a well-concealed resentment.
To the smiling Puerto Rican boy, Calesian said, “We’ll take ourselves up. I’ll send it back down.”
“Okay,” said the boy. Nothing altered in the smile, just as nothing in the external world could explain it.
Parker and Calesian got into the elevator, and Calesian shut the doors and pushed the button for the seventeenth floor. “This thing’s self-service anyway,” he said. “The building management thinks it’s classier to have an operator.” He spoke in a quiet, self-assured, humorous manner—a more restrained version of Grofield. A small smile on his face, he said, “So you’re Parker.”
“You’re some sort of cop,” Parker said.
Calesian’s smile broadened; he was pleased. “How’d you work that out?”
“An employee wouldn’t show up later than his boss. A cop on the payroll would, just to show he’s still his own man.”
Calesian didn’t entirely like that, but he kept his good humor. “You’re a detective yourself,” he said. “You’ll be happy to hear we got a negative on you from Washington.”
“A negative on what?”
“The name Parker, and a physical description.”
That was all right. He was in fact wanted under several different names, and his fingerprints were listed under the name of Ronald Casper, from a time he’d been on a prison farm in California, but the name Parker had never been officially linked up with any felony. As to the description, the face he wore he’d gotten new from a plastic surgeon ten years ago.
The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Calesian pushed the lobby button before they stepped out to the hall, and the elevator went away again. “This way,” Calesian said.
1712 was to the right. The door, unlocked, led to a furnished but unpopulated receptionist’s office, with an open doorway on the other side through which he could see several men sitting on leather sofas or armchairs. Calesian went first, and Parker followed him through the doorway, to find Lozini seated at a broad mahogany desk, its surface empty except for a telephone, an ashtray, and a pack of Viceroys. Lozini, looking sour and angry, glared at Parker and then at his watch, but said nothing about time. Instead, after a quick snap glance at Calesian, he looked past Parker and said, “You’re alone?”
“That’s right. I have to make a phone call.”
“Why?” Lozini was angry and impatient, ready to forget he didn’t really have any weight to throw around in this situation.
“I have to tell my partner,” Parker said, “not to blow up your house.”
To one side, Calesian laughed. The fat man who had come in with Lozini made a short gasping sound of shock. Lozini just stared, and Parker went to his desk, turned the phone around, and dialed the number of the phone booth where Grofield was waiting. There was, in fact, no bomb at Lozini’s house or the time to set one up there, but the threat of it should be enough.
Nobody said anything. There were six men in the room other than Parker, and they all watched him dial and watched his face as he waited for Grofield to answer.
Which happened on the first ring. “Clancy’s Steak House.”
Parker read the number from the phone in front of him. “Got it?”
Grofield read the number back, and said, “Everything okay?”
“Good,” Parker said, and hung up. Lozini said, “He’ll call you.”
“That’s right.”
