Dirty Money Page 4

  The small bell over the entrance tinkled and a woman appeared, stopping in front of Mrs. Bartlett’s desk, her profile to Parker. She was a good-looking blonde in her twenties, tall, slim in a tan deerskin coat over chocolate-colored slacks and black boots, with a heavy black shoulder bag hanging to her left hip. Parker knew her, and she would know him, too. Her name was Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa.

  Quietly, Parker said, “Lift your paper. Read it that way.”

  She did so, her expressionless face and the room behind her disappearing behind the newsprint. Out there, Mrs. Bartlett and Detective Reversa talked, pals, greeting one another, discussing something. Parker couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, and then the bell tinkled again, and when he said, “All right,” and Claire lowered the paper, only Mrs. Bartlett was there.

  Claire said, “Can I look?”

  “She’s gone.”

  Claire looked anyway, then said, “She’s a cop.”

  “State, plainclothes. You could hear what they were saying.”

  Claire shrugged. “She was just checking in. Wanted to know if Mrs. Bartlett had seen anything interesting since last time they talked.” Without irony she said, “The answer was no.”

  “Good.”

  “But she’d recognize you?”

  “She made a traffic stop on me, before the job. She’s the reason you had to report the Lexus stolen and get this rental.”

  “I liked the Lexus,” Claire said.

  “You wouldn’t have.”

  “Oh, I know.” Claire looked around again at the space where the detective had been. “But she was here.”

  “She’s part of the search,” Parker said. “She was on that heist from the beginning. She and a bunch more are still around because they know Nick’s got to be somewhere around here and the money’s got to be somewhere around here.”

  “You can’t stay here,” Claire said. “Not if she knows what you look like.”

  “I know,” he said. “We’ve got to get this over with.”

  There was a low flower-pattern settee in the corner of Mrs. Bartlett’s office, and Sandra Loscalzo was seated on it, looking at local maps and brochures from a display rack mounted on the wall. Mrs. Bartlett was at her desk doing puzzles in a crossword book, and Parker stopped to say to her, “We wondered if you could give us some advice.”

  “If I can,” she said, putting down her pencil.

  “We thought,” he said, “we’d like to look at the countryside from a height somewhere that we could get a sense of the whole area.”

  “Oh, I know just the place,” Mrs. Bartlett said, and took one of the maps from the display rack near Sandra, who did not look up from her own researches. “It was a Revolutionary War battle site. Just wonderful views. Rutledge Ridge.”

  With a red pen, she drew the route on the map, naming off the roads as she went. They thanked her and took the map out to the Toyota.

  Sandra drove up to the lookout five minutes after they arrived. Seemingly unbroken forest fell away on three sides in clumps and clusters of bright color, rising only in the north. A few other tourists were up here, but the parking and observation area was large enough for everybody to have as much privacy as they wanted.

  Sandra got out of the Honda and came over to the low stone wall that girdled the view, Claire seated on the wall, Parker standing next to her. “You know that cop,” she said, as a greeting.

  “She knows me,” Parker said.

  “I get that.” To Claire, Sandra said, “Very smooth, with the newspaper.”

  “You noticed.”

  “Well, I take an interest.” To Parker, she said, “You looked the place over last night. Can we go and get it? How much longer do we wait?”

  “I don’t want to wait at all, with that detective around,” Parker told her. “But if she’s still here, that means we’ve still got a lot of law to deal with. The law is looking for a lot of heavy boxes of cash. You rent a truck around here right now, somebody’s gonna stop you just to see who you are.”

  “What about three or four cars? You, me, Claire, and McWhitney.”

  “Four strangers, all going off the tourist trails, getting together, making a little convoy.”

  Sandra frowned out at the view, not seeming to see it. “If I knew where this goddamn stash was—”

  “In a church,” he said.

  She looked at him, wanting to be sure he was serious. “A church?”

  Nick Dalesia found it. Long time abandoned. Water and electricity switched off but still there. The idea was to just hole up overnight, but the heat was too intense, we had to leave the cash behind.”

  “In boxes.”

  “Up in the choir loft. Already church boxes up there, hymns and things.”

  “That’s nice.” Sandra paced, rubbing the knuckles of her right hand into her left palm. “I know you don’t want to tell me where this church is, not yet, but that’s okay. The time comes, we’ll go there together.”

  “That’s right,” Parker said.

  “Unless,” Claire said, “you just can’t stay here any more.”

  “Well, he can’t stay here any more,” Sandra said.

  “If I go away and come back when the law is gone,” Parker said, “a lot of things can happen.”

  Sandra paced, rubbing those knuckles, then stopped to say, “I tell you what. You and me, we drive down to Long Island, six, seven hours, we talk it over with McWhitney.”

  Parker looked at her. “You want to see McWhitney?”

  Sandra shrugged. “Don’t worry, I’m no Roy Keenan, I won’t turn my back on him. But we’ll tell him, you and me, we got an understanding, right?”

  “Half of Nick.”

  “We’ll go now,” Sandra said. “Get there in daylight. Claire can hold the fort, let Mrs. Muskrat know we’re coming back. Right?”

  “Sure,” Claire said. “But why do you want to do the driving?”

  “Because you are,” Sandra told her. “And you are because he isn’t sure his license would play nice with cop computers. Me, I’m so clean they give me a gold medal every time they see me.” She cocked a brow at Parker. “Ready?”

  Parker looked at his watch. Nearly ten. He said to Claire, “I’ll be back late tonight.”

  She nodded. “I’ll be here.”

  12

  Sandra was not so much a speeder as permanently aggressive, taking what small openings the road and the traffic gave her. It wasn’t yet three-thirty in the afternoon when she parked diagonally across the street from McWhitney’s bar, named in neon in the front window MCW. “Surprise,” she said, and gave Parker a twisted smile.

  “Not too many surprises,” Parker said.

  Three-thirty on a Friday afternoon McW was a lot livelier than last time, about half full but with the clear sense that a greater crowd was on its way. McWhitney had a second bartender working, though he didn’t really need him quite yet. McWhitney was busy, eyes and hands in constant motion, but he saw Parker and Sandra come in and immediately turned away, saying something to his assistant. Stripping off his apron, walking away, he pointed leftward at an empty booth and came down around the bar to join them at it.

  “The lion lies down with the lamb,” he said, not smiling.

  Sandra grinned at him. “Which is which?”

  “You got your Harbin,” McWhitney told her, not hiding his dislike. “We got no more specials.”

  Sandra turned to Parker. “Tell him.”

  “She’s in on the church with us,” Parker said. “For half of Nick.”

  “In on the church?” McWhitney was offended. “She’s been there?”

  “Don’t know where it is,” Sandra said. “He won’t tell me. But I think I can help you get the money out.”

  McWhitney frowned at Parker. “I don’t like this.”

  “It isn’t what any of us had in mind,” Parker agreed. “But that neighborhood up there is still a hornet’s nest, and the hornets are still out.”

  “There
’s a cop up there can make him,” Sandra said, “And almost did.”

  McWhitney looked at Parker. “The woman cop?”

  “Her.”

  McWhitney leaned back as his assistant bartender brought three beers, then left without a word. Taking a short sip, McWhitney said, “So we all just gotta go away for a while.”

  “Until what?” Parker asked him. “Until they get Nick again? Until Nick gets in there on his own and cleans it out? Until some kids fool around in there one night and find it?”

  McWhitney nodded, but pointed a thumb at Sandra. “So what’s she doing in it? She just happens to be this place, that place, and every time we see her we give her money? Half of Nick? What if Nick shows up?”

  “You’ll kill him,” Sandra said.

  McWhitney shook his head. “I still don’t see what you’re doing in here.”

  “I’ll help dig,” Sandra said, and nodded at the floor. “Probably in that basement of yours.”

  “Never mind my basement.”

  “Also,” Sandra said, “I have a way to get your money.”

  Parker said, “You didn’t say that before.”

  “I wanted to see how this meeting was gonna go, do I want to go through the trouble, or just screw you people and score it on my own.”

  “Listen to this,” McWhitney said.

  Parker said, “You’ve figured out a way to get the money out.”

  “I think so.” To McWhitney she said, “You pretty well know the business operations around this neighborhood.”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Do you know a used-car lot, maybe kind of grungy, no cream puffs?”

  McWhitney grinned for the first time since he’d laid eyes on Sandra. “I know a dozen of them,” he said. “Whadayou need?”

  “A truck. A small beat-up old truck, delivery van, something like that. Black would be best, just so it isn’t too shiny.”

  “A truck.” McWhitney sounded disgusted. “To move the stash.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What makes this truck wonderful? It’s invisible?”

  “Pretty much so,” she said. “Whatever color it is, and I really would like black, we use the same color to paint out whatever name might already be on it. Then, on both doors, in white, we paint Holy Redeemer Choir.”

  “Holy shit,” McWhitney said.

  “We’re the redeemers,” Sandra told him. “It’s okay if the name on the doors is a little amateurish, but we should try to do our best with it.”

  McWhitney slowly nodded. “The choir’s coming to get their hymnals.”

  “And we’ll get some, too,” Sandra said, “in case anybody wants to look in back.”

  “Jesus, you always gotta insult me,” McWhitney said. “Here I was thinking you weren’t so bad.”

  “I was used to dealing with Roy,” she said, and shrugged.

  Now McWhitney laughed out loud. “You should thank me for breaking up the partnership.”

  Parker said, “Can you get this truck? Fix it up about the name?”

  “It’s gotta be me, doesn’t it,” McWhitney said. He didn’t sound happy.

  “You’ve got the legal front,” Sandra said, and gestured at the bar around them. “This needs to be a truck with clean title, because you will be stopped, once you get up in that area.”

  Parker said, “Can you do all that this afternoon, or do we have to wait till Monday?”

  “If I start now and find it in the next hour,” McWhitney said, “the dealer can still deal with Motor Vehicles today, and I can come up there tomorrow. Maybe with dealer plates, but all the paperwork.”

  Taking out a business card, Sandra wrote the Bosky Rounds name and phone number on the back. As she pushed it across the table, she said, “Call us when you get there, we’ll go out to the place together. I’m looking forward to see this truck you get.”

  “What you’re looking forward to,” McWhitney told her, “is what’s in that church.”

  Sandra smiled. “Answered prayers,” she said.

  13

  Parker drove the first half of the trip back, because his ID wasn’t likely to be an issue before they got to the search zone. They stopped for dinner midway, at a chain restaurant along the road, where no locals would look at them and remember them. While they waited for their food, Parker said, “This whole thing is the wrong side of the street for you.”

  Sandra grimaced. “I don’t think of it like that,” she said. “What I think, there’s no sides to the street because there is no street.”

  “What is there?”

  She studied him, trying to decide how much to tell him, moving her fork back and forth on the table with her left hand. Then she shrugged, and left the fork alone, and said, “I figured it out when I was a little girl, what my idea of the world is.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A frozen lake,” she said. “Bigger than you can see the end of. Every day, I get up, I gotta move a little more along the lake. I gotta be very careful and very wary, because I don’t know where the ice is too thin. I gotta listen and watch.”

  “I’ve seen you do it.”

  She grinned and nodded, as though more pleased with him than with herself. “Yeah, you have.”

  They were both silent a minute, and then their food came. The waitress went away and Sandra picked up her fork, but then she paused to say, “You go see a war movie, the guy gets hurt, he yells ‘Medic!’, they come take him away, fix him up. Out here, you get hurt, you yell ‘Medic!’, you know what happens?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “There’s no sides,” she said. “No street. We just do what we’ve got to do to get across the lake.”

  14

  They got back to Bosky Rounds a little before nine that night. As Sandra pulled into a parking space beside the building, Claire came down off the porch, shaking her hand at them not to get out of the car. They waited, saying nothing, and she came over to slide into the backseat and say, “We have to leave.”

  He twisted half around in the seat to look at her, shadowed back there, far from the light on the porch. “Why?”

  “That woman detective was here again,” Claire said. “I heard her talking to Mrs. Bartlett. Because they haven’t found Nick Dalesia, they’re convinced all three of the robbers came back here, to get their money.”

  Parker said, “Why would they have an idea like that?”

  “Because,” Claire said, “they don’t believe Nick could hide this long without help, and who else would there be to help him?”

  Sandra said, “I’d figure it that way, too.”

  “Nick’s running a string of luck,” Parker said. “For him. Not good for the rest of us.”

  “She brought wanted posters,” Claire said. “Pictures of Nick, but drawings of the other two.”

  “I’ve seen them,” Parker said. “They’re not close enough.”

  “Not if you’re just walking by,” Claire told him. “But if you’re sitting in that place having breakfast, and out in the office on the wall there’s a drawing of you, people will make the connection.”

  Parker said, “She put posters on the wall?”

  “They’re papering the whole area, every public space.” Claire leaned forward to put her elbow on the seatback and say, “I packed all of our things. Everything’s in the car. I’ve just been waiting here for you to get back and then we can leave.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You can’t stay,” she insisted.

  “But not that way,” Parker said. “They’ve got your name, they’ve got your address, they’ve got your credit cards. You stay here tonight, tomorrow morning you check out. If you leave here tonight, you’re just pointing an arrow at yourself.”

  Claire didn’t like that. “What are you going to do?”

  “McWhitney’s coming up tomorrow with a truck, we’re gonna take that cash out of there. You’ve got my stuff in the car?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll move i
t over to this car. You go back to the room until tomorrow. I’ll show Sandra where the church is and I’ll stay there tonight.” To Sandra he said, “When McWhitney gets here, you can lead him to the church.”

  Sandra said, “That probably won’t be until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “When you come to the church,” Parker told her, “bring me a coffee and Danish.”

  Claire said, “Then how will you get home?”

  “I’ll find a way,” he said.

  15

  There won’t be any twenty-four-hour delis around here,” Sandra said.

  “That’s all right,” Parker said. “I won’t starve to death between now and tomorrow afternoon. Take the right at that yellow blinker up there.”

  “The right,” she said, with some sort of edge, and looked sidelong at him. “That’s where you lost me last night.”

  “Thought I lost you.”

  Now she laughed and made the right, and said, “McWhitney’s sore because McWhitney’s a sorehead. You know better.”

  “We’ll see how it plays out.”

  “Don’t fool around,” she said. “We’ve got a deal.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s better for you. It’s better for you and McWhitney both.”

  “You mean,” Parker said, “we get our own pieces, and part of Nick.”

  “You get more than you were going to get,” she said, “and now you’re partners with somebody who can help you get it.”

  “Don’t sell me any more,” Parker said. “I get the idea.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  He said, “I know, you were used to Keenan.”

  “I’m getting over it.”

  Till now there’d been no other traffic along this road, but a wavering oncoming light turned out to be a pickup truck, moving slowly and unsteadily, tacking rather than driving, with a driver fighting sleep. Sandra pulled far to the right to let him by, then looked in the rearview mirror and said, “The funny thing is, most fools get away with being fools.”