“Yes, I know. Goodbye, Mr. Lynch.”
Parker sat in the car next to the phone booth and watched the customers pump their own gas, then pay the clerk in the bulletproof glass booth. Nine minutes later, the phone rang.
8
Claire made meals for herself when Parker was away, but when he was at home they always ate out. “You wouldn’t want what I eat when I’m here by myself,” she told him once. “No man would think it was dinner.” So they’d drive somewhere and eat.
Tonight’s place was competent and efficient and, like a lot of country restaurants, too brightly lit. Claire waited until the waitress had brought their main courses, and then she talked about Cathman: “He’s a bureaucrat. He’s exactly what he says he is.”
“Then he doesn’t make any sense,” Parker said, and carved at his steak.
Claire took a small notebook from her bag and opened it on the table beside her plate. “He’s sixty-three,” she said. “He has an engineering degree from Syracuse University, and his entire adult life he’s worked for state government in New York. He was in some sort of statistical section for years, and then he moved on to fiscal planning. Two years ago, he retired, though he didn’t have to. I think what it is, he disagreed with state policy.”
“About what?”
“Gambling.”
Parker nodded. “That’s where it is,” he said. “Whatever’s thrown him out of whack, the gambling thing is where it is.”
“You mean that would make him change his spots.”
“Change the whole coat.”
Claire sipped at her wine, and said, “Maybe he needs money after all. A mid-level civil servant, retired early, maybe it’s rougher than he thought it would be.”
“What about this consultant business?”
Claire shook her head. She sliced duck breast, thinking about it, then said, “I don’t think it’s doing all that well. Mostly I think because he’s advising state governments against gambling and they’re all in favor of it.”
“He told me about that,” Parker agreed. “The pols see it as painless taxes.”
“People don’t want you to consult with them,” Claire said, “if you’re only going to advise them not to do what they’ve already decided they’re going to do. So what jobs he gets, mostly, have to do with fund allocation for mass transit and highways and airports. Here and there, he gets a job doing research for anti-gambling groups in state legislatures, but not that much.”
The music in here was noodling jazz piano, low enough to talk over but loud enough for privacy. Still, when the waitress spent time clearing the main course dishes from the next table, Parker merely ate his steak and drank some of his wine. When she left, he said, “But he isn’t in it for the money, I don’t think. The thing with me, I mean.”
Claire nodded, watching him.
Parker thought back to his dealings with Cathman. “It doesn’t feellike it,” he said, “as though money’s the point. That’s part of what’s wrong with him. If it isn’t money he wants, what doeshe want?”
“You could still walk away,” she said.
“I might. Bad parts to it. Still, it’s cash, that means something.”
“The boat isn’t even here yet,” she pointed out. “You still have plenty of time to be sure about him, learn more about him.”
“You do that,” Parker told her. “His home life now. Wife, girlfriend, children, whatever he’s got. People bend each other; is anybody bending Cathman?”
“You want me to do that?”
“Yes.”
Claire nodded. “All right,” she said, and ate a bit, and then said, “What will you be doing?”
“The river,” Parker said.
9
It was called the Lido, but it shouldn’t have been. It was an old bar, a gray wood cube cut deep into the ground floor of a narrow nineteenth-century brick house, and at two on a sunny afternoon in April it was dark and dry, smelling of old whiskey and dead wood. The shirtsleeved bald bartender was tall and fat, looking like a retired cop who’d gone to seed the day his papers had come through. At the bar, muttering together about sports and politics other people’s victories and defeats were nine or ten shabbily dressed guys who were older than their teeth.
Not looking at any of them, Parker went to the corner of the long bar nearest the door, sat on the stool there, and when the barman plodded down to him like the old bull he was, he ordered beer. The muttering farther along the bar faltered for a minute, while they all tried to work out what this new person meant, but Parker did nothing of interest, so they went back to their conversations.
Parker paid for his beer, drank it, and left, and outside the sunlight seemed a hundred percent brighter. Squinting, he walked down the half block to the Subaru he was still driving no reason not to, and he’d dump it after the job, if the job happened and leaned against its trunk in the sunlight.
He was in Hudson today, a town along the river of the same name, another twenty miles north and upstream from Rhinecliff, where he’d met Cathman at the railroad station. The town stretched up a long gradual slope from the river, with long parallel streets lined like stripes up the hill. At the bottom was a slum where there used to be a port, back in the nineteenth century, when the whalers came this far up the Hudson with their catch to the plants beside the river where the whale oil and blubber and other sellable materials were carved and boiled and beaten
