11
The restaurant was around the corner from Madison Avenue, three blocks from Madame Irina. Inside, it was crowded, tables too close together, people eating elbow to elbow at the long banquette down the right side. In front of the restaurant, on the sidewalk, only two of the tables within the wrought-iron railing were occupied, one of them by Parker and Claire. It was cool out here, traffic noise from the avenue was constant, but they could talk in private.
Parker waited till they'd ordered and the food had arrived. Then he said, 'Every once in a while, something that was old that was supposed to be done with, comes back and has to be dealt with again. This is one of those.'
'Tell me about it.'
'A few years ago,' he said, 'while I was away on a job, you went to see some people in New Orleans.'
'Oh, yes,' she said. 'Lorraine and Jim.'
'I phoned you to wire me money.'
'I remember,' she said. 'You called twice. The first time for five hundred dollars, and the second time for three thousand.'
'It was a job that went bad,' Parker said. 'I came back with nothing.'
'You came back,' she said.
He shrugged that away. 'We were four,' he said. 'One of them that I didn't know, his name was George Uhl, it turned out he was a crazy. He tried to kill the three of us to keep the money for himself. He got the other two, and I had to go after him. That's when I phoned you.'
'George Uhl,' she said. 'That isn't one of the names you showed Madame Irina.'
'No. Uhl is dead now,' Parker said. 'But he had a friend, this Matt Rosenstein, and Rosenstein dealt himself in to take the money just because he knew it was there. Brock was his partner, or front man. I had to talk with them because they might know where Uhl was. But then they wanted in.'
'And those two are still alive,' she said.
'When I last saw them,' Parker said, 'they were both wounded, neither one of them was moving, and they were in a house where they'd been holding a family prisoner. The woman there had no reason to do anything after I left but call the cops. If she called the cops, those two, if they lived, are in jail the rest of their lives. But somehow they're around somewhere, and they sent a fellow to get me. Revenge, I suppose. They have somebody else out there now, watching the house. I'm on another thing, nothing to do with Brock and Rosenstein, and I don't have the time for this distraction now. The other thing'll go down soon, and then I'll see what to do about Brock and Rosenstein.'
'But until then,' she said, 'I can't go to my house.'
'I'm sorry for that,' he said. 'I know you'd rather be there.'
'That's all right,' she said. 'I'll stay in the city until the alterations are done on my coat, and then I'll wear it for a while in Paris.'
12
'Good,' Elkins said, sounding hurried. 'I was hoping you'd call pretty quick.'
I had things to do,' Parker said. This pay phone at LaGuardia airport was surrounded by other callers with problems of their own, and the number he'd dialed was a pay phone at a gas station in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he having ten minutes earlier called Elkins' motel room in the same town to let the phone ring once. Now, hearing the trouble in Elkins' voice, he said, 'What went wrong?'
'Larry apparently had a security lapse,' Elkins said.
'What, the law got him?'
'No, not that kind. It affects
The car he chose from long-term parking was a gray Volvo with the parking lot's ticket stuck behind the visor, a date on the ticket of the day before yesterday, and a nearly full gas tank. Three and a half hours later he left it in the municipal parking lot in Great Barrington and walked to the motel, about a mile out north of the main town among the big stores and fast-food restaurants. Elkins was in room 11, and when he opened to Parker's knock Wiss and Lloyd were in there, too. Elkins and Wiss both looked worried, Lloyd mostly embarrassed.
They'd opened the connecting doors between this room and number 12, and brought the chairs from that one in here, so everybody could sit at the round wood-look table under the hanging swag lamp, with Elkins' green Honda and the traffic of state route 7 outside the window. Parker said, 'What security? Who found out what?'
'I don't have that part yet,' Lloyd told him. 'What happened, Mr. Parker, it was just my old habits coming out. I should know better, I'm in a different world now, but I still keep backing everything up.'
'Backing what up?' Parker asked him. He would be patient, and he would keep asking questions, and eventually what Lloyd was saying would start to make sense.
'Data,' Lloyd said, as though that were an explanation. 'I spend most of my time at the computer, you know, though I'm not supposed to, the terms of the parole are I'm supposed to keep away.'
'They found you at it?'
