“If you don’t answer and tell him everything’s all right, he’ll blow up my house.”
“That’s right.”
“I have family in that house.”
“I know that.”
Lozini didn’t seem to know whether to become enraged or reasonable. In a strangled voice he said, “I don’t have any plans against you. This is just a meeting, we’ve got a common problem. Why should I do anything to you?”
“If I’m not around,” Parker said, “you don’t have a problem any more.”
Lozini shook his head. “No. O’Hara didn’t pull that on his own, he wouldn’t have had the guts for it. I told you this afternoon, I’m in a tough situation in this town, things getting worse all the time. Things that don’t connect with you. I may even lose my mayor.” Pointing a finger at Parker, he said, “What it comes down to, somebody in this town is up to something. They’re coming at me from my blind side, and I wouldn’t even know about it until it was all over and I was out on my ass. Except for you. You came in, you stirred things up, you made some trouble, and all of a sudden I’m seeing things I didn’t see before.”
“All right,” Parker said.
“So we’re on the same side,” Lozini said. “I want them because they’re head-hunting after my position in this town, and you want them because they’ve got your money. But they’re the same people.”
Parker shrugged.
Lozini said, “So now we know how the money got out of the park. With O’Hara. The next thing is to find out where it went to, who got it.”
A man to Parker’s right said, “It went to O’Hara. Maybe he split with somebody else, but probably half of it went to him.”
The man named Calesian said, “No, it didn’t. I can give you chapter and verse on O’Hara’s financial picture. He maybe got three or four thousand out of it at the absolute most, but that’s all.”
The other man said, “How can you be so sure, Harold?”
Parker said, “Wait a minute. I don’t know everybody here.” Turning around, he scanned the faces and pointed at Frank Faran. “I know you.”
Faran gave a rueful grin, and nodded his head in a kind of salute. “I guess you do,” he said.
The man who had said the money went to O’Hara now said, “I’m Ted Shevelly, Mr. Lozini’s assistant.” Casually dressed in slacks and pullover shirt, Shevelly looked to be about forty, with rust-colored hair and a stocky well-built frame and the general look of a weekend golfer. He wore squared-off glasses with gold-colored frames, and gave the impression he was maybe a little too calm and casual for his own good; something like Faran, but without Faran’s chumminess or bent for alcohol.
Parker nodded to Shevelly and turned to the fat man who’d arrived in the Olds with Lozini. He was wearing a black suit and a blue dress shirt with wide collar points but no tie, and he was managing to look just as uncomfortable and awkward sitting down as he had been while on the move. Parker said, “And you’re—”
It was Lozini who answered, from behind Parker, saying, “That’s Jack Walters, my personal attorney.”
“Personal?”
Shifting his bulk around, trying without success to lace his fingers above his belt, Walters said, “Not entirely personal. I do know something about the business side as well.”
“More than you want to,” Lozini said, “and less than I want you to.”
Walters smiled, and nodded at Lozini, and went back to looking uncomfortable. But it was clearly only Walters’ body that was awkward; a rock-solid and sharp brain peered out through the man’s eyes.
The next man was probably in his late forties, and looked like somebody who had suddenly in middle age decided to stop being dull and start being a swinger. He was slender, but the deep lines in his face and the looseness of the flesh under his chin suggested he’d once weighed quite a bit more and had dieted himself ruthlessly into a spurious youth. He was wearing brown loafers and pale blue slacks and a madras jacket and a yellow turtleneck shirt, as though he’d been dressed by the costume designer of a Broadway show to be a parody of a Miami vacationer.
“Nate Simms,” this apparition said, getting to his feet and smiling and extending a manly hand. “I’m AI’s accountant. Also, I have a few sidelines.”
Accountant; right. Al? That must mean Lozini. Parker took the man’s hand briefly, and turned to Harold Calesian. “We met in the elevator.”
“That’s right.” Calesian smiled easily. “And made one another right away.”
“What’s your job with the cops?”
Calesian’s smile became slightly self-mocking. “I’m a Detective First Grade,” he said. “I work out of the Organized Crime Squad downtown.”
Turning to Lozini, Parker said, “Is he the top cop you’ve got?”
“They don’t come much higher,” Lozini said. It was clear he didn’t want Calesian rubbed the wrong way.
“But you don’t have anybody higher,” Parker said.
Calesian, speaking mildly to show he wasn’t offended, said, “That’s right, I’m their top man.”
Lozini said, “What’s the point, Parker? So what?”
Parker said to Calesian, “Wouldn’t O’Hara go to you?”
There was a little silence while everybody worked out what Parker had just said, and then Calesian’s smile
