“Oh, Mr. Lozini. I mean, I did, but he’s dead. So I guess now it’s, uh, Dutch Buenadella or Ernie Dulare. Or both, maybe.”
Parker pointed, and Faran saw that on the coffee table in the middle of the living room papers were spread: the blueprints and notes Parker had taken last night during the question-and-answer session. Parker said, “You told me all that, didn’t you, Frank?”
“Yes,” Faran said. “Right, yes.”
“And it’s all straight goods, isn’t it, Frank?”
Faran tried for a joke, a laugh, a bit of human contact. “I’m not going to lie,” he said.
No change in the faces in front of him, except that one of them said, “How can we be sure of him?”
“Because,” Parker said, “he knows we don’t let him go until after we’ve checked out everything he told me. And he knows that if he lied to us we’ll kill him. Don’t you, Frank?”
Faran nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
There was a little silence. He looked no one directly in the eye, looked only at the spaces between them, but felt them all staring unblinking at him. Trying to decide about him. His throat ached, felt raspy, as though he’d been shouting at the top of his lungs for half an hour.
Parker said, quietly, “You want to change anything you told me, Frank?”
Faran shook his head, but at the same time he was trying to think, trying to remember everything he’d said. Could he have made any mistakes? No, it wasn’t possible. Parker had made him go over every detail again and again. “I told you the truth,” he said. “I swear I did.”
Faran turned to look at Parker, and saw Parker looking at the dozen men, waiting for them to say whether they were satisfied or not. Faran couldn’t face front again, he had to keep blinking at Parker. His left cheek, the one toward the men, prickled, felt pins and needles.
One of them said, “Okay. You made your point.”
Parker nodded. “Anybody want to ask Frank anything?”
None of them did. Faran was grateful for that, and grateful, too, when Parker said, “All right, Frank, let’s go back.”
The two of them walked back to the bedroom. Faran entered it, and Parker remained in the doorway. Faran turned around and said, “You can trust me, Parker. I won’t cause any trouble.”
“That’s right, Frank,” Parker said. He switched off the light and shut the bedroom door.
Forty-one
Parker put Faran on ice and went back to the living room, where the eleven men had formed themselves into small groups and were talking things over. He let them talk, waiting it out, knowing sooner or later they’d all decide to come in with him.
One of the groups was Devers and Wycza and Ducasse; they’d never met before, but they’d all flown in on the same plane from New York, Devers and Wycza connecting in New York, the two of them realizing that Ducasse was also a part of this once they’d landed in Tyler. Clustered around the sofa to talk were Wiss and Elkins, who always worked together as a team, plus Nick Dalesia, who’d done the driving on the busted jewelry-store job, and Tom Hurley. Handy McKay was listening to an opinion from Philly Webb, and both Ed Mackey and Mike Carlow were sitting off by themselves, thinking about it.
Parker had moved one of the chairs from the dining table to the end of the room nearest the door so he could face the entire group. He sat down now, saw by his watch that it wasn’t yet ten p.m., and waited for things to quiet down.
But they didn’t quiet, not exactly. Instead, Tom Hurley, who finally seemed to have forgotten his grudge against Morse, at least for a while, got to his feet and pointed at the papers scattered on the coffee table and called across the room, “Parker, where are you going to be while we’re running all this other stuff?”
The others all stopped talking and looked at Parker, who said, “Right here. I hold Faran, I keep this place for everybody to get back to, and I’m the phone drop you’re gonna need.”
Hurley pointed at the papers again. “So you’ve got these capers here,” he said. “We go do them, we hit all at once, that’s sensible, I like that. Keeps us clean of cops. You’re back here, you keep the coffee and the doughnuts.”
Quietly, Handy McKay said, “And he set them up. Every score is worked out there.”
Parker, jabbing a thumb back at the pistols piled on the dining table, said, “And I got you hardware from a gun store last night. All new pieces, with ammunition. I couldn’t test-fire them, but you shouldn’t need to shoot them.”
“That’s okay,” Hurley said. “That’s all very nice. My question is, what’s your piece?”
“No cash,” Parker said.
They all looked at him. Ed Mackey said, “Parker? You don’t want any cut?”
“There’s eleven of you,” Parker said. “You go out, you pull the action, you come back, you put all the take in one pile and split it eleven ways. So everybody gets the same piece.”
Hurley, frowning as though looking for the butcher’s thumb, said, “Except you?”
“That’s right.”
Fred Ducasse said, “What’s in it for you?”
“I want you to do a piece of work for me,” Parker said. “Tomorrow, after all this other stuff is done and you’ve
