Dirty Money p-24 Read online

  “Of course not,” Claire said, and smiled. “I’m Claire. You’re Sandra?”

  “G’night, Nels,” called one of the customers, rising from his seat, waving a hand over his shoulder as he left.

  “See you, Norm.”

  Parker said to Sandra, “You’re waiting for a phone call.”

  Sandra made a disgusted headshake and gestured at McWhitney. “This fellow and Harbin,” she said. “Where’s he stash him? In Ohio. I’m not going to Ohio, eyeball the fellow, that means, what I’ve got to do, I call my guy in DC, I pass along my tip, and I’m not even sure Nelson here isn’t pulling my chain. What if Harbin isn’t there? I don’t keep a reputation with dud tips.”

  McWhitney said, “I don’t give you dud tips. What’s in it for me? He’s right exactly where I told you.”

  “Have a good one, Nels.”

  “You too, Jack.” McWhitney waved, then said to Parker, “About halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton, Interstate 75, they’re putting in a new restaurant, rest area. There’s a spot they’re gonna blacktop for the parking lot very soon now but not yet, not till the structure’s a little further along. A month ago, it was just messed-up fill in there, bulldozed a little, a lot of wide tire tracks. A few more weeks, they gotta lay that blacktop before winter freezes the ground, but not yet.”

  “I hate it when somebody’s plausible,” Sandra said. “Everything fits together like Legos. Life doesn’t do that.”

  “Every once in a while,” McWhitney told her, “the plausible guy has the goods.”

  Parker said, “So McWhitney gave you the tip, and you gave it to somebody you know in DC—”

  “In the US marshals’ office.”

  “And they’re sending somebody to check it out. If the body’s there, you get your reward money. They’re calling you here?”

  “Not on the bar’s phone,” she said. “On my cell.”

  “All right.”

  “Pretty soon, they’ll call,” Sandra said. She did all her talking with her right hand in her coat pocket. “If they say Harbin’s there, fine. If they say Mr. Harbin’s still among the missing, I’m gonna feel very embarrassed.”

  “He’s there,” McWhitney said.

  “But I’ll get over my embarrassment,” she told them, “because I’ll still have a little something to give them, make up for the inconvenience. Originally, I just had Nelson here.” She smiled around at them all. “But now,” she said, “I got a twofer.”

  4

  McWhitney said, “I’d better lock up.”

  He had to walk down to the end of the bar and open the flap there to come out, then walk back past the others on this side. Sandra stepped back against the line of booths so he wouldn’t pass behind her, then said to Parker, “Funny you should happen by.”

  “Is it?”

  “You find yourself in the neighborhood, just the same day Dalesia slips his bonds.”

  Returning to the others, staying now on this side of the bar, McWhitney said, “Sandra, don’t excite yourself. We aren’t helping Nick. He isn’t gonna let us know where he is.”

  Skeptical, Sandra said, “Why? Because you’d turn him in?”

  “That’s the last thing we’d do,” McWhitney said, “and he knows it. Unless it was turn him in like you’re turning in Harbin.”

  She shook her head. “You were a team.”

  “Not any more.”

  Parker said, “If they take him again, all he has for bargaining chips is the money and us.”

  “Well, it’s me more than you,” McWhitney said. “He knows this place here.”

  “I think,” Claire said carefully, “he knows our phone number.”

  Sandra looked at her with a little smile. “You mean, he knows your phone number. He’s used your phone number. Roy Keenan and me, we looked at that number. Nick Dalesia never did have a wide range of telephone pals. Ms. Willis stood out.”

  Claire shrugged. “I never actually met the man,” she said. “I have no real link with him at all. I was looking for somebody to blacktop my driveway. I forget who said they’d have Mr. Dalesia call me. I talked to him twice, but I thought he sounded unreliable.”

  “That’s nice,” Sandra said. “As long as Nick isn’t there to say it didn’t happen that way.”

  “That’s what we’re saying,” McWhitney told her. He had taken the stool next to Parker, with Claire beyond, the three facing Sandra with her right hand in her pocket and her back braced against the booth’s tall coatrack.

  “All right,” Sandra said. “But while we’re waiting here, it might be we could do some other business together. I mean, if this Harbin thing turns out to be on the up-and-up.”

  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. Nothing’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.”