Mackey shook his head. ‘You should be along. We need to know the situation, what we should do.’
‘He doesn’t want meanywhere,’ Williams said. ‘I’ll wait here. You leave the phone with me.’
Into the phone, Mackey said, ‘Two of us, but we gotta be careful. You don’t want us in your office.’ He listened, then grinned at Parker: ‘He likes to laugh, this lawyer.’ Into the phone again, he said, ‘Good, that sounds good. Wait, give me the names.’
There were a notepad and pen on the table, left over from some scheming by Angioni and Kolaski. Williams slid them over and looked alert, and Mackey said, ‘Fred Burroughs and Martin Hutchinson. Four o’clock. We’ll be there.’ Hanging up, he said, ‘It’s his club, downtown. He wants us to meet at the handball courts. He says it’s loud there, lots of echoes.’
‘Nobody can tape,’ Parker said.
Mackey nodded. ‘That’s the idea.’
It wasn’t easy for Parker and Mackey to turn themselves into people who might be accepted as a member’s guests in a club downtown that featured handball courts, not after the twenty-four hours they’d just lived through, but they managed. Washed and shaved, in the clothes they’d planned to wear when they’d quit this town after the job, casual but neat, they left the beer distributor’s at three-thirty and walked half a dozen blocks before they saw a cruising cab and hailed it. It felt strange to Parker to walk along the street in a town where every cop had just last week memorized his face, but the afternoon was November dark and Parker let Mackey walk on the curbside. They saw no law at all, and then they were in the cab.
The Patroon Club had a doorman, under a canvas marquee mounted from building to curb. He held open the cab door while Mackey paid the fare, then called them sirand walked with them under the marquee to the double entrance doors, where he grasped a long brass handle, pulled the door open, bowed with just his head, and said, ‘Welcome to the Patroon.’
‘Thanks,’ Mackey said.
Inside was a dark wood vestibule, coat closet with attendant on the left, low broad dark gleaming desk straight ahead, behind which sat an elderly black man in green and white livery. He looked alert, inquisitive, ready to serve: ‘Help you, gentlemen?’
‘We’re here to meet Jonathan Li,’ Mackey told him. ‘Fred Burroughs. And this is Martin Hutchinson.’
‘Oh, yes, Mr Li left your names.’ Opening a folder on his desk, he said, ‘If you could just sign the register.’
The register was a sheet of paper with columns to be filled in: name, date, time, company, member to be visited. They both wrote things, and the man behind the desk gestured at the inner door behind himself, saying, ‘Mr Li said you’ll find him by the handball courts. That would be straight through, down the stairs, and second on your right.’
Mackey thanked him again, and he and Parker went through the door into a plush dark interior, just slightly seedy. Downstairs, they found three handball courts in a row like three stage sets, side walls not meeting the ceiling, windowed at the interior end to face bleachers where spectators could sit. Only the nearest court was in use, two players in their forties, both of them very fast and very good. They made noise, but not too much.
Li sat on the third row of bleachers, watching the game, then nodded when he saw Mackey and Parker come in. He patted the cushioned bench beside him, and they came over, Parker to take a seat at Li’s right, Mackey choosing a place on the second row, just to their left, where he could sit sideways and look up at them both.
Li nodded to Parker and said, ‘Before we begin, just let me make the situation clear. I assume you did not come here trailing police’
‘No,’ Parker said.
‘No, of course not. But to consider the possibility, however remote, if in fact we areinterrupted by an official presence, I will explain that we were meeting to work on the details of your turning yourself in, and youwill say the same.’
‘Naturally,’ Parker said.
‘Good.’ Li turned to Mackey. ‘Now, to yourfriend. The police seem unable to learn her true identity.’
‘They never will,’ Mackey said.
‘I begin to believe you’re right. She was paying for her hotel room with a credit card under the Brenda Fawcett name. They have now learned from the credit card company that the bills are sent to an accountant in Long Island, who pays with money taken from the account of a client of theirs named Robert Morrison. They have not physically seen Morrison in some years, but send him statements to a maildrop in New York City. They manage a few money market accounts for Morrison, and he occasionally sends them more money How, if I may ask? The police don’t know, or at least didn’t tell me.’
‘Money orders,’ Mackey said. ‘Every once in a while, top up the tanks with some money orders.’
‘So Ms. Fawcett is not their customer, nor can they directly reach Morrison, who pays her bills.’
Mackey said, ‘Does she give them a story?’
‘The police here?’ Li smiled, almost in a proprietary way, as though it were a story he’d made up himself. ‘She says,’ he told them, ‘she is fleeing an abusive husband. Court orders didn’t help, police protection didn’t help a little dig there, of which they are not unaware she is in fear of her life, she will never give anybody at all her correct name for fear this man will find her.’ Li shrugged. ‘The police don’t exactly believe her,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t a story they can do anything about.’
‘Brenda’s good,’ Mackey said. ‘She can do all the emotions: outrage, fear, just a little sex.’
Parker said, ‘The point is, to get her out.’
‘Clean, if we can,’ Mackey added.
‘When it comes down to that,’ Li told them, ‘as I’ve been pointing out to the ADA assigned to this case, a young woman with little experience and, if I may say so, no feel for the job, there is no crime here. When picked up this morning, at the hotel, Ms. Fawcett had clearly not spent the night crawling through walls and tunnels. Nothing to connect her to the Armory or to Freedman jewels was found on her person nor in her hotel room’
