At eight-thirty she left, with a rueful look at the ruined front door on the way by. Parker had found hammer and nails in a kitchen drawer, and ripped a piece of jamb from an interior door. With the front door lock in place and the splintered pieces of the old jamb back in position, he’d nailed the new length of wood over the old. From the inside, it looked like hell, but nothing showed on the outside, and the door would lock.
Parker watched her cross to her car, parked now where Henry’s had been last night. Her step was firm. She had herself under control.
This was the unknown, starting now. Any time you put somebody on the send, off with the instructions but on their own, you could never be completely certain the glue would hold. She could doublethink herself in the car, on the way to the meeting. She could be blindsided by an unexpected question from somebody there. She could lose her nerve at any step along the way. Or she could hold together and this thing would finally be over.
Darlene got behind the wheel. Carefully she fixed her seat belt. She backed to the street and drove away, not looking toward her house.
Parker turned away from the window. Henry sat slumped on the sofa; he, too, didn’t know if she’d hold up. Mackey stood in the doorway, looking at Parker. ‘Time to make the call?’
He meant to Li. It wouldn’t be good to mention that name in front of Henry, just in case things fell apart somewhere down the line. They might still need Li in the near future, and they would need him thinking about them and not thinking about saving his license. Parker said, ‘Henry, I’ll have to lock you in a closet now.’
Startled, frightened all over again after a long time of calm, Henry said, ‘No, you don’t! I’ll just sit here, I won’t make any trouble.’
‘We have to phone somebody,’ Parker explained, being slow and patient because it would be better to keep Henry dialed down. ‘We can’t have you listen to it, but I’m not gonna just ask you to wait in the kitchen, right next to that back door.’
‘It won’t be long, Henry,’ Mackey said, and then he said, ‘I tell you what. You just go back into the bedroom and close the door. If you open the door, we can see you from here, so don’t open the door.’
‘I won’t,’ Henry promised.
‘It’ll just be a few minutes, like my friend told you,’ Mackey assured him. ‘And then we’ll call oley oley in-free, and you come back to the living room. Go now, Henry.’
Henry got to his feet. ‘I won’t make any trouble,’ he said, and went away down the hall.
They watched until the bedroom door closed, and then Mackey said, ‘I believe him. Henry will not make us trouble.’
‘Make the call,’ Parker said.
Mackey went over to sit on the sofa, next to the phone. He pulled Li’s card from his shirt pocket and dialed, while Parker stood where he could hear Mackey and watch the hall.
‘Mr Li, please. I’m calling on the Brenda Fawcett matter.’ Mackey nodded at Parker, and said, ‘They’re patching him through again. I don’t think he’s ever in his office.’
‘He doesn’t need to be,’ Parker said.
‘No.’ Mackey looked at Li’s card. ‘He’s got all these partners to watch the office.’ Then, into the phone, he said, ‘Mr Li. This is Brenda’s friend. No, I know that, you don’t have any news yet, but within the hour I think maybe you will. You might even have good news. Yeah, it would be. The thing is, if the news is as good as I think it’s gonna be, Brenda’s gonna be out from under before we know it. Yeah, that wouldbe very nice. Now, if it works out like that, maybe you could give her some change to make a phone call, let me know what’s happening. Yeah, I think she should use change to make that phone call. The number’s‘ and he read off the number from the phone he was using. ‘I’ll be here, hoping for the best. Thank you,Mr Li.’
Mackey hung up, and grinned at Parker. ‘Tell the stud he can come out now,’ he said.
Parker did, and when Henry got back to the living room he said, ‘Is it all right if I use the phone?’
Mackey said, ‘You gotta cover your tracks.’
‘Muriel believes,’ Henry said, ‘I’m spending the night at my father’s place. But she’ll expect me back some time this morning. So I’ll have to call her, tell her I’ll stay with my father while they assess the damage at the company, and then I’ll have to call my father and say we have to pretend we’re still together because I have problems I have to work out even more than before.’
Mackey said, ‘Problems? Doesn’t he know what’s going on?’
Sheepish, Henry said, ‘He doesn’t know about Darlene. I had to tell him there was somebody I was seeing, which was bad enough, but I said it was somebody he didn’t know. He doesn’t really like Darlene, and he might not do it if he knew it was her.’
‘That’s a tangled web you’re weaving there,’ Mackey told him, and gestured at the phone. ‘Go ahead and call. You won’t mind if we listen in.’
9
At twenty to ten, Mackey was by the living room window, looking out at the street, when he said, ‘Well, she’s telling the story.’
Parker, in a chair near the hall, got to his feet. Henry, on the sofa, looked from one to the other, watchful, apprehensive. Looking past Mackey, Parker saw the white sedan just stopping at the curb out front, red block letters RPD on its door. ‘Rosetown Police Department,’ he said, and two uniforms came out of the front seat, one on either side.
So Darlene was going through with it. As Mackey had said, she was telling the story, and as they had both known, that meant the law would check her house, just to be sure everything was on the up and up.
As the cops started toward the front porch, Parker said, ‘Up, Henry.’
Rising, Henry said, ‘Where are we going?’
