Dirty Money Read online

  McWhitney said, “What kind of business?”

  “You people took a lot of money up there in New England,” Sandra said, “but then you had to leave it. That’s only three days ago, too soon for you to dare to go back.” To Parker, she said, “But Dalesia might go for it, that’s why you came here to see McWhitney. How to keep the money safe from your friend without exposing yourselves to the law.”

  Parker said, “I think Nick’s pretty busy right about now.”

  “I think your Nick needs money bad right about now,” Sandra said.

  McWhitney said, “You aren’t, I hope, gonna say we should tell you where it is, so you can go get it and bring it back to us.”

  Sandra’s free left hand made a shrugging gesture. “Why not? One woman could get in there and out, and then you’ve got something instead of nothing.”

  “If you come back,” McWhitney said.

  Parker said, “We’ll take our chances. If you don’t get in and out, if they grab you with the money, they’re gonna ask you who told you where it was. What reason would you have not to tell them?”

  Sandra thought about that, then nodded. “I see how it could look,” she said. “All right, it was just an offer.”

  McWhitney said, “I can’t give you people meals in this place. How much longer you think we’re gonna wait?”

  “Until they call me,” she said.

  Parker said, “Call them.”

  Sandra didn’t like that. “What for? They’ll do what they’re doing, and then they’ll call me.”

  “You call them,” Parker said. “You tell them, speed it up, your tipster’s getting anxious, he’s afraid there’s a double-cross coming along.”

  “It won’t do any good to push—” she said, and a small, flat, almost toneless brief ring sounded. “At last,” she said, looking suddenly relieved, showing an anxiety of her own she’d been covering till now. Her right hand stayed in the coat pocket while her left dipped into the other pocket and came out with the cell phone. Her thumb clipped into the second ring and she said, “Keenan. Sure it’s me, it’s Roy’s business phone. What have you got?”

  Parker watched McWhitney. Was the man tensing? Had he given the bounty hunter the truth?

  Suddenly Sandra beamed, the last of the tension gone, and her right hand came empty out of the pocket. “That’s great. I thought my source was reliable, but you can never be sure. I’ll come into the New York office tomorrow for the check? Fine, Wednesday. Oh, Roy’s around here somewhere.”

  McWhitney looked very alert, but then relaxed again as Sandra said into the phone, “My best to Linda. Thanks, she’s fine. Talk to you later.” She broke the connection, pocketed the phone, and said to McWhitney, “It worked out. He’s who he is, he’s where you said.”

  “Like I said.” Now that it was over, McWhitney suddenly looked tired. “Let me throw you people out of here now.”

  As they walked down the bar toward the door, Sandra said, “You got any more goods like that stashed around, you know what I mean, goods with some value on them, give me a call.”

  “What I should have done,” McWhitney said, as he unlocked the door to let them out, “I should have held out for a finder’s fee.”

  Sandra laughed and walked away toward her car, and McWhitney shut the door. They could hear the click of the lock.

  5

  Claire’s place was on a lake in north-central New Jersey, surrounded mostly by seasonal houses, only a fifth or so occupied year-round. In several of these houses were hollow walls, crawl spaces, unused attic stubs, where Parker kept his stashes.

  Two days after the overnight trip to Long Island, he finally stashed the duffel bag he’d brought from upstate New York, then drove to put gas in Claire’s Toyota, paying with cash from the duffel, money on which nobody had a record of the numbers. Heading back, he was about to turn in at Claire’s driveway when he saw through the trees another car parked down in there, black or dark gray. Instead, then, he went on to the next driveway and steered in there, stopping at a house boarded up for the winter.

  He probably knew this house better than the owners did, including the whereabouts of the key that most of the seasonal people hid near their front doors where workmen or anybody else could find them. He didn’t need the key this time. He walked around the side of the house opposite Claire’s place and on the lake side came to a wide porch that in summer was screened. Now the screens were stored in the space beneath the porch.

  Parker moved past the porch and across a cleared lane between the buildings kept open for utility workers and on to the blindest corner of Claire’s house. Moving along the lake side, not stepping up on the porch, he could see across and through a window at the interior. Claire was seated on the sofa in there, talking with two men seated in chairs angled toward her. He couldn’t see the men clearly, but there was no tension in the room. Claire was speaking casually, gesturing, smiling.

  Parker turned away and went back to the next-door house, where he stepped up onto the porch, took a seat in a wooden Adirondack armchair there, and waited.

  Five minutes. Two men in dark topcoats and snap-brim hats came out of Claire’s front door, and Claire stood in the doorway to speak to them. The men moved together, as though from habit rather than intention. With the hats, they looked like FBI agents from fifties movies, except that in the fifties movies one of them would not have been black.

  The two men each touched a finger to the brim of his hat. Claire said something else, easy and unconcerned, and shut the door as the men got into their anonymous pool car, the white driving, and went away.

  Parker went back around this house to the Toyota, drove to Claire’s place, and thumbed the visor control that opened the garage. When he stepped from the garage to the kitchen Claire was in there, making coffee. “Want some?”

  “Yes. FBI?”

  “Yes. I told them my blacktop story, and said I’d try to remember who gave me Mr. Dalesia’s name, but it had been a while.”

  He sat at the kitchen table. “They bought it?”

  “They bought the house, the lake, the attractive woman, the sunlight.”

  “They gave you their card, and that was it?”

  “Probably,” she said. “They said they might call me if they thought of anything else to ask, and I said I thought I might be going on an early-winter vacation soon, I wasn’t sure.” Bringing Parker’s coffee to the table, she said, “Should I?”

  “Yes. We’ll go together.”

  Surprised, she sat across from him and said, “You have a place in mind?”

  “When I was in Massachusetts last week,” he said, “they were talking about something called leaf peeping.”

  Even more surprised, she said, “Leaf peeping? Oh, that’s because the fall colors change on the trees.”

  “That’s it.”

  “People go to New England just to see the colors on the trees.” She considered. “They call them leaf peepers?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  She looked out the kitchen window toward the lake. Most of the trees around here were evergreens, but there were some that changed color in the fall; down here, that wouldn’t be for another month, and not as showy as New England. “It makes them sound silly,” she said. “Leaf peepers. You make a whole trip to look at leaves. I guess it is silly, really.”

  “We wouldn’t be the only ones there.”

  She looked at him. “What you really want to do,” she said, “is be near the money.”

  “I want to know what’s happening there. You have to drive and pay for the place we stay, because I don’t have ID. And if I’m a leaf peeper, I’m not a bank robber.”

  “You’re a leaf peeper if you’re with me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “On your own, nobody would buy you for a leaf peeper,” she said, and smiled, and then stopped smiling.

  Sensing a dark memory rising up inside her, he said, “Everything’s all finished up there. It’s done. Nothi
ng’s going to happen except we look at leaves and we look at a church.”

  “A church,” she echoed.

  Rising, he said, “Let me get a map, I’ll show you the area we want. Then you can find a place up there—”

  “A bed-and-breakfast.”

  “Right. We’ll stay for a week.” Nodding at the phone on the wall, he said, “Then you can make your answering machine message be that you’re on vacation for a week, and you can give the place you’re gonna be.”

  “Because,” she said, “what’s going to happen up there already happened.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  6

  You folks here for the robbery?”

  The place was called Bosky Rounds, and the pictures on the web site had made it look like somewhere that Hansel and Gretel might have stopped off. Deep eaves, creamy stucco walls, broad dark green wooden shutters flanking the old-fashioned multipaned windows, and a sun god knocker on the front door. The Bosky Rounds gimmick, though they wouldn’t have used the word, was that they offered maps of nearby hiking trails through the forest, for those leaf peepers who would like to be surrounded by their subject. It was the most rustic and innocent accommodation Claire could find, and Parker had agreed it was perfect for their purposes.

  And the first thing Mrs. Bartlett, the owner, the nice motherly lady in the frilled apron and the faint aroma of apple pie, said to them was, “You folks here for the robbery?”

  “Robbery?” Claire managed to look both astonished and worried. “What robbery? You were robbed?”

  “Oh, not me, dear,” and Mrs. Bartlett offered a throaty chuckle and said, “It was all over the television. Not five miles from here, last week, a week ago tomorrow, a whole gang attacked the bank’s armored cars with bazookas.”

  “Bazookas!” Claire put her hand to her throat, then leaned forward as though she suspected this nice old lady was pulling her leg. “Wouldn’t that burn up all the money?”

  “Don’t ask me, dear, I just know they blew up everything, my cousin told me it was like a war movie.”

  “Was he there?”

  “No, he rushed over as soon as he heard it on his radios.” To Parker she said, “He has all these different kinds of radios, you know.” Back to Claire she said, “You really haven’t heard about it?”

  “Oh, us New Yorkers,” Claire said, with a laugh and a shrug. “We really are parochial, you know. If it doesn’t happen in Central Park, we don’t know a thing about it.” Handing over her credit card, she said, “I tell you what. Let us check in and unpack, and then you’ll tell us all about it.”

  “I’d be delighted,” said Mrs. Bartlett. “And you’re the Willises,” she said, looking at the credit card.

  “Claire and Henry,” Claire said.

  Mrs. Bartlett put the card in her apron pocket. “I put you in room three upstairs,” she said. “It really is the nicest room in the house.”

  “Lovely.”

  “I’ll give you back your card when you come down.” She turned to say to Parker, “And you’ll have tea?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  It was a large room, with two large bright many-paned windows, frills on every piece of furniture, and a ragged old Oriental carpet. They unpacked into the old tall dresser and the armoire, there being no closet, and Parker went over to look out the window toward the rear of the house. The trees began right there, red and yellow and orange and green. “I’ll have to look on the map,” he said. “See where this is.”

  “You mean, from the robbery site,” Claire said, and laughed. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Bartlett will tell you, in detail. Will you mind sitting through that?”

  “It’s a good idea,” Parker said, “for me to know what the locals think happened.”

  “Fine. But one thing.”

  He looked at her. “Yeah?”

  “If she gets a part wrong,” Claire said, “don’t correct her.”

  Over tea and butter cookies in the communal parlor downstairs, Mrs. Bartlett gave them an exhaustive and mostly accurate description of what had gone on up in those woods last Friday night. It turned out, she said, that two of the local banks were going to combine, so all of the money from one was going to the other. It was all very hush-hush and top secret and nobody was supposed to know anything about it, but it turned out somebody knew what was going on, because, just at this intersection here—she showed them on the county map—where these two small roads meet, nobody knows how many gangsters suddenly appeared with bazookas, and smashed up all the armored cars—there were four armored cars, with all the bank’s papers and everything in addition to the money—and drove off with the one armored car with the money in it, and when the police found the armored car later all the money was gone.

  Parker said, “How did the gangsters know which armored car had the money in it?”

  “Well, that,” Mrs. Bartlett told them, leaning close to confide a secret, “that was where the scandal came in. The wife of the bank owner, Mrs. Langen, she was in cahoots with the robbers!”

  Claire said, “In cahoots? The banker’s wife? Oh, Mrs. Bartlett.”

  “No, it’s true,” Mrs. Bartlett promised them. “It seems she’d taken up with a disgraced ex-guard in her husband’s bank. He went to jail for stealing something or other, and when he came back they started right up again where they left off, and the first thing you know they robbed her own husband’s bank!”

  “But the law got them,” Parker suggested.

  “Oh, yes, of course, the police immediately captured them,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “They’ll pay for their crimes, don’t you worry. But not the robbers, no, not the people who actually took the money.”

  “The people with the bazookas,” Parker said, because the Carl-Gustaf antitank weapons from Sweden had not been bazookas.

  “Those people,” Mrs. Bartlett agreed. “And the money, too, of course. There’ve been police and state troopers and FBI men and I don’t know what all around here all week. I even had three state police investigators staying here until Tuesday.”

  “I’m sorry we missed them,” Claire murmured.

  “Oh, they were just like anybody,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “You wouldn’t know anything to look at them.”

  “I suppose,” Claire said, turning to Parker, “we ought to go see where this robbery took place.”

  “It’s still traffic jams over there,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “People going, and stopping, and taking pictures, though I have no idea what they think they’re taking pictures of. Just some burned trees, that’s all.”

  “It’s the excitement,” Claire suggested. “People want to be around the excitement.”

  “Well, if you’re going over there,” Mrs. Bartlett said, “the best time is in the morning. Before nine o’clock.” She leaned forward again for another confidence. “Tourists, generally, are very slugabed,” she told them.

  “Well,” Claire said, “they are on vacation.”

  Parker said, “So, when we go out to dinner, we shouldn’t go in that direction.”

  “Oh, no. There are some lovely places . . . Let me show you.”

  There was a specific route Parker wanted, but he needed Mrs. Bartlett to suggest it. He found reasons not to be enthusiastic about her first three dinner suggestions, but the fourth would be on a route that would take them right past the church. “New England seafood,” he said. “That sounds fine. You want to give Claire the directions?”

  “I’d be very happy to.”

  7

  It was still a couple of hours before sunset, and Claire wanted to walk outside a while, to work off the stiffness of the long car ride. They stepped out the front door, and a young guy was just bouncing up onto the porch. “Hi,” he said, and they nodded and would have passed him but he stopped, frowned, pointed at them, and said, “I didn’t talk with you folks, did I?”

  “No,” Claire said.

  “Well, let me—” He was patting himself all over, frisking himself for something, while he
talked, a kind of distracted smile on his face. He looked to be in his early twenties, with thick windblown brown hair, a round expectant face, and large black-framed glasses that made him look like an owl. A friendly owl. He wore a dark gray car coat with a cell phone dangling in front of it from a black leather strap around his neck, and jeans and boots, and it was the car coat he searched as he said, “I’m not a nut or anything, I wanna show you my bona fides, I’ve got my card here somewh— Oh, here it is.” And from an interior pocket he plucked a business card, which he handed to Claire.

  The card was pale yellow, with maroon letters centered, reading

  TERRY MULCANY

  Journalist

  laureled with phone, fax and cell phone numbers, plus an e-mail address. There was no terrestrial address.

  Claire said, “It doesn’t say who you’re a journalist for.”

  “I’m freelance,” Mulcany said, smiling nervously, apparently not sure they’d be impressed by his status. “I specialize in true crime. No, keep it,” he said, as Claire was about to hand the card back. “I’ve got boxes of them.” The grin semaphored and he said, “I lose them all the time, and then I find them.”

  “That’s nice,” Claire said. “Excuse me, we were just—”

  “Oh, no, I don’t want to take up your time,” Mulcany said. “I just— You heard about the robbery, here last week.”

  “Mrs. Bartlett just told us all about it.”

  “Oh, is that her name, the lady here?”

  Claire bent to him. “You aren’t staying here?”

  “Oh, no, I can’t afford this place,” and the smile flickered some more. “Not until my advance comes in. I’ve got a deal with Spotlight to do a book on the robbery, so I’m just here getting the background, taking some pictures.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, we can’t help,” Claire told him. “We just heard about the robbery ourselves half an hour ago.”

  “That’s fine, I don’t expect—” Mulcany interrupted himself a lot, now saying, “You’re here for the foliage, aren’t you?”