“And my money,” Parker said, “went to either Dulare or Buenadella, whichever one is doing this, to help finance the rebellion. So that’s where we go to get it back.”
Lozini looked at him with something like awe. “Good Christ but you’re single-minded,” he said.
“I came here for my money,” Parker said. “Not a gang war.”
“So you’ll go to both Ernie and Dutch? How do you figure out which one it is?”
“We’ll find out before we go. We’ll ask one of the people that went over to him.”
“Abadandi?”
“He can’t talk right now,” Parker said. “Give me Calesian’s address.”
“Calesian? Why him?”
“Nobody’s going to make a move against you,” Parker said, “without having your top cop in their pocket. Calesian’s smart enough to know you’re on your way out.”
“That son of a bitch.”
Parker said, “What about Farrell?”
Lozini and Green both looked at him in surprise. Lozini said, “Who?”
“Your mayor,” Parker said. “You sure he’s on the way out? Maybe he went over, too.”
“Farrell isn’t my mayor,” Lozini said.
Green said, “Wain is the mayor. Farrell’s the reform candidate running against him.”
Parker frowned at them both, and said to Lozini, “You always kept saying ‘my man.’ I figured that was Farrell.” To Green, he said, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
”Tell you what?” Green was obviously as bewildered as Lozini.
Lozini said, “What difference does it make? Alfred Wain is my man, and he’s on the way out. George Farrell is the reform man, and he’s on the way in.”
Parker said, “Farrell is the one with the big banner across London Avenue. Posters all over the place.”
“That’s right,” Lozini said. “We haven’t been spending that way. Money’s been tighter for us the last couple of years, I already told you that. Receipts are down everywhere, you heard that from Nate Simms last night. Besides, we never had to spend that much. Farrell’s working in a different league.”
“I should have made sure,” Parker said. He seemed to be talking mostly to himself. Frowning toward the pool, he said, “It’s my mistake, I shouldn’t have taken it for granted.”
Lozini said, “I still don’t get you.”
“Your receipts aren’t down,” Parker told him. “They’re skimming off the top. Farrell is
Green said, in a small voice, “Oh.”
The whole thing opened all at once for Lozini like a sunflower. “Those dirty bastards. They’ve been financing Farrell with my money.”
“And mine,” Parker said. To Green, he said, “So we by-pass Calesian, we go to Farrell.”
“Right.”
Parker got to his feet. “Retire, Lozini,” he said. “Go to Florida and play shuffleboard.”
Lozini watched the two of them walk through the sunlight and into the darkness of the house. Shuffleboard. Calesian. Abadandi. Ernie Dulare or Dutch Buenadella. Farrell. With his money.
Lozini got to his feet. Aloud he said, “I haven’t fired a gun in twenty-seven years.” His voice was absorbed into the water of the pool: flat, no echo. He walked around the pool and on into the house.
Twenty-two
Paul Dunstan got up at nine, a little earlier than usual for a Sunday. A couple of the guys from the shop were coming around to pick him up at ten to spend the day out at the beach. He got up early enough to have time to spare, padded around his three-room apartment taking care of minor clean-up details, and generally coasted the hour away. It was a relaxed and pleasant interval, spoiled only briefly when he glanced at the table by the front door and saw the retirement check there, still in its envelope. It had come yesterday, and he’d cash it tomorrow.
He hated those checks; they were his only reminder of his years on the police force in Tyler, three hundred miles from here. He’d thrown one away once, but that was even worse; a barrage of letters from the office of the Tyler City Clerk, wanting to know if he’d received the check, what had he done with it, when would he cash it. One reminder a month was bad enough, so now he cashed the check each month when it came in, pocketed the seven dollars and tried to think no more about it.
Dunstan was twenty-nine years old, and seven dollars a month was the pension his four years on the Tyler police force had entitled him to, an entitlement he’d rather have done without. He had a new job now, a new life in a new city, and all he wanted was for the past to stay quietly and permanently in the past.
At one time he had thought he would spend his entire lifetime in police work, even though he’d mostly just drifted into it. The Army had made him an MP during his three-year enlistment, after first training him as a refrigeration engineer, the field of his choice. After the Army he’d had a number of unsatisfying jobs before going with the Tyler force, and had found police work congenial and easy. Most of the time. And profitable, too, in a smallish way.
He and Joe O’Hara had been radio-car partners for over two years when the mess happened at the Fun Island
