Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel Page 6

  Berridge was lying on his back on the floor. The side of his head had been punched in, and a plumber’s wrench with the end bloody and hair-matted was lying on the floor between the body and the toilet.

  They searched the house and it was empty.

  PART TWO

  1

  Parker turned in at the new mailbox, with the name Willis on it. That was the name Claire was using here, because at one time Parker had lived under the name Charles Willis, and Claire was trying to make her presence in his life retroactive to the time before they’d met. So she was going to be Claire Willis for a while.

  At the hotel in New York, where she was either to have been waiting for him or to have left a message, there’d been a message. He’d known when he’d taken the sealed envelope from the desk clerk that it meant she’d found a house. Somewhere in the northeast.

  It turned out to be here, seventy miles from New York, tucked away in a rural corner where the state lines of New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania all meet. It was a small house, country-looking, part gray stone and part brown shingling, built in the middle of a deep rectangular tree-covered lot between this blacktop road and the edge of a lake called Colliver’s Pond. The driveway was crushed stone, there were trees and underbrush all around the house instead of lawn, and the two-car attached garage looked almost as big as the rest of the place.

  The end garage doors were open, old-fashioned doors that swung out to both sides, showing an empty space inside. Next to it, in the half-light, stood Claire’s blue Buick, a legal car bought under her own name. The Pontiac Parker was driving was a mace, bought outside the law but with papers good enough to pass a normal inspection; a car on nobody’s wanted list.

  Parker drove the Pontiac into the garage, took the two suitcases out of the trunk, put them out on the crushed-stone driveway, and was closing the garage doors when Claire came out of the main entrance of the house, wearing slacks and a white sweater, with a cloth tied around her head. She smiled but didn’t say anything, and came walking toward him as he finished closing the doors. She was tall and slender and self-possessed, with the face and figure of a fashion model, and as she reached him she put a very remote expression on her face, through which the smile still shone, and said, “Mr. Lynch?”

  That was the name he’d had the first time they’d met. She needed to keep touching things, to be sure they were still there, and when what she touched was the past, Parker had nothing to say back to her. His past didn’t exist. He said, “Hello.” At the same time he didn’t want to rebuff her, so he reached his arms out and drew her in close.

  She nuzzled his throat and said, “You smell like money.”

  He laughed, a barking sound. “That’s the suitcase. I’ll show it to you.”

  “And I’ll show you the house.” She stepped away from him, but kept one of his hands. “What do you think of it, so far?”

  He didn’t think about houses, they had as much to do with his life as apple trees. But she needed an answer, so he said, “It looks fine. The outside.”

  “There’s all sorts of advantages for us,” she said. “Come on in, I’ll tell you about it.”

  Parker had to take his hand back to carry one of the suitcases. She went on ahead to open the door, and he carried the two bags. At the entrance, he nodded to the right and said, “Neighbors are close.” Spring foliage was skimpy on the trees, and a white clapboard house could be seen less than fifty feet away on that side.

  “That’s one of the nice things,” she said. “Come on in, I’ll tell you everything.” Holding the door, she said, “You hungry?”

  “Later. After I shower.”

  It was a large country kitchen he’d entered, with old electrical appliances around the walls, an old porcelain double sink under the windows facing the neighbor’s house, and a red-and-yellow-patterned linoleum on the floor so old the lines of the floorboards underneath could be seen clearly through it. The formica-and-chrome kitchen set in the middle of the room was twenty years newer than everything else, but still thirty years old.

  Claire shut the door. “We don’t have any neighbors. Both sides, empty almost all year. Come here, let me show you.”

  Parker had put the suitcases down against the wall. Now he followed Claire through a wide doorway at the far left corner of the kitchen and into a large living room. Where the two garages took the front left quarter of the house and the kitchen most of the front right quarter, this living room filled the left rear quarter, behind the garages. In the middle of the wall it shared with the garage space was a stone fireplace. Directly opposite the fireplace was a door, with several small-paned windows stretching away on both sides. Through these windows, and the glass in the door, the lake could be seen, and a small structure of some kind down by the water’s edge.

  Claire led the way diagonally across the living room—it was furnished in maple tables and mohair chairs, all old and battered and lodge-looking—and through the door to a screened porch overlooking the lake. The air was cooler on this side of the house. She said, “It’s a lake. Most of the houses are just for the summer. The real estate woman told me there’s only fifteen-percent occupancy around the lake year round, and most of that is across there on the other side, because this side gets the wind in the wintertime. So we can live here all year without any neighbors, and then go somewhere else in the summer. That’s normal, too, a lot of people rent their houses in the summer. We can do the same.”

  She was proud of herself, and it sounded in her voice. Parker knew she’d done her house searching with his specific needs at the top of her list, and she’d found a place that was perfect, and she was pleased with herself. He said, “It must have been hard to find a place like this.”

  She smiled. “It took a while. But you can relax here, you don’t have to be on guard.”

  There was no answer to that. He was on guard everywhere, it was natural to him. He said, “What’s that building down by the water?”

  “A boathouse. There’s no boat, though. Want to see it?”

  There was a slate walk from the porch steps across to the boathouse. Stumps showed where trees had been sawed away to give a clearer view of the lake from the house, but there were still several trees standing, and underbrush between. Boulders lined the water’s edge, with ropy shrubs growing out over some of them, and a wooden dock ran out over the water along the side of the boathouse.

  There were spider webs across the closed boathouse door. Claire brushed them away, saying, “They build these new every day. I wish they’d get discouraged.” She opened the door, pushing it inward, and stepped inside, saying, “The floor’s very narrow here.”

  The boathouse was about twelve feet wide and twenty-five feet long, with a concrete floor about eighteen inches wide along three sides. A vertical garage door closed the wide opening in the fourth wall; through its grimy windows the far shore of the lake could be seen. Water lapped at the concrete inside the boathouse about two feet below floor-level.

  Claire said, “We can get a boat, if you want.”

  Parker never liked to be in a place with only one exit, boat or boathouse included. He said, “Maybe later on. Let me get used to a house first.”

  Her smile was a bit crooked. “That will be different, won’t it?”

  They went back to the house. Parker had met Claire three years before, in Indianapolis. She was an airline pilot’s widow, and an in-law of her dead husband, a coin dealer named Billy Lebatard, had involved her in a coin convention robbery. Lebatard was an amateur with a rich fantasy life, and at the end the job went very sour, Lebatard was killed, there was bloodshed everywhere, and Parker had dragged Claire out of the way at the last minute. They’d been together since then, but her one experience of his profession had been enough, particularly after the husband she’d lost in an airplane. Now she wanted to know none of the details of the ventures he went on, not even where he was going or how long he expected to be gone. When he was around they lived together—in resort
hotels, mostly, up till now—and when he was gone she waited for him.

  In the living room again, she said, “I’ve been expecting you to show up at night, so I’ve been making a fire after dinner. I wanted to have a fire going when you came in.”

  “We’ll make one a little later.”

  “It doesn’t matter what time of day you get here,” she said.

  They went back to the kitchen and he put one of the suitcases up on the kitchen table. She sat in one of the chrome tube chairs and watched. The suitcase was closed with two belts and three snaps; Parker opened the belts, used a key to unlock and open the snaps, and then lifted the lid. He took out the two sweaters on top, dropped them on a chair, and the suitcase was full of bills.

  Claire grinned at the money. “I must say it looks good.”

  “There’s twelve thousand. I took away seventeen, but I stashed five.” He had several caches around the country, for emergencies. Back when the Charles Willis name had been blown, back from before he’d met Claire, all his original caches had been lost to him. He was still, four years later, rebuilding them.

  “Can I spend some of it on the house?”

  “You can spend it any way you want.”

  “I want to get some better furniture. And a decent kitchen.”

  “Do we have a basement?”

  “Just under part of the house. You get into it through the garage.”

  “We’ll want to have a place to stow some of this.”

  “I started a checking account in town. It’s about six miles back toward New York.”

  “We can’t go there with twelve grand in a suitcase.”

  She laughed, shaking her head. “No, I thought I’d deposit two or three hundred a week, whatever we need. There’s something solid and dependable about a checking account. I want this house to have such a perfectly legal and normal look to it that nobody will ever even think twice about it.”

  “For me?”

  She looked sharply at him, then smiled and said, “All right. For both of us. But partly for you.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “And if I have a nesting instinct, that’s part of what makes me a woman.”

  “I didn’t argue.”

  She looked around the room, looked at him again, shook her head. “You make me feel like I’m trying to domesticate a gorilla.”

  He closed the lid down over the money. “Gorillas have mates.”

  “You aren’t a gorilla,” she said. “And I’m not trying to domesticate you. It’s just strange to have you here, that’s all.”

  Parker looked at her. Most of the time he didn’t think about it, but every once in a while he realized she was important to him. He made his voice and his face softer, and said, “We’ll both get used to it.”

  “I know we will.”

  “I’ll take the shower now.”

  The final quarter of the house, behind the kitchen and beside the living room, contained the bedroom and adjoining bath. Both rooms had windows overlooking the lake, and a door led from the bedroom out onto the same broad porch he’d been to before from the living room. Both rooms were connected to the kitchen, and had a connecting door between them as well. The bathroom, being in the corner, had windows in two walls, both glazed.

  These rooms, too, were old-fashioned, with a brass double bed and tall wooden chifforobe in the bedroom and a lion-foot tub with a plastic shower curtain hanging from a rod over it in the bathroom. Parker put both suitcases away in the bedroom closet, stripped, and took a hot shower, standing on a rubber mat in the white tub. While he was still there, the shower curtain opened and Claire stuck her head in. “Is there room for two?”

  “Plenty.” He put his hand out to help her, and she stepped over the side of the tub and in.

  “Steamy.” She turned in a circle, getting completely wet. Then he kissed her, sliding his hand down the long slick line of her back, the hot water streaming down their faces, and she raised her dripping arms lazily to close them around his neck.

  2

  Parker sat looking into the fire. A night wind had come up, and wood made small creaking noises in the top of the house. There was a low attic up there, he’d looked it over earlier today, and it was as full of noises now as a ship at anchor.

  Claire had turned off all the lights in the living room, so their only sources of illumination were the fire and light-spill from the kitchen. It made Parker nervous, the semi-darkness and the anonymous sounds, but he understood there was nothing to beware of here, and he knew the atmosphere would make Claire happy, so he said nothing.

  She was sitting beside him on the sofa, leaning her shoulder against his, and after a long silence she said, “What are you thinking about?”

  “I have to call Handy McKay.” Handy, who used to be in the same profession and was retired to his own diner now in Presque Isle, Maine, was Parker’s contact with the rest of the bent world. Anybody who wanted to get in touch with Parker about a job or anything along those lines had to call Handy, who would pass on the message.

  “Don’t call him tonight.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  “In the morning.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  She said, “Is this going to be too dull for you?”

  “I like it.”

  “You’re sure?” Doubt and fear were evident in her voice.

  “If we want a vacation somewhere else,” he said, “we can go, and then come back.”

  “That’s right.” She sounded happier.

  “For now I like it.” He tried to find a way to let her know he was telling the truth, and finally said, “I can feel my shoulders getting loose.”

  “That’s good,” she said, and leaned closer to him. He could smell her perfume and the fire, intermixed.

  A little later she said, “Would you tell me about where you were?”

  “You mean the job?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you never wanted to hear about it.”

  “I feel different now. I still don’t think I want to know anything ahead of time. But when it’s over, and you’re back, I think I’d like to hear. Unless you don’t want to tell me.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She abruptly sat up and leaned forward to pick up her cigarettes from the coffee table. Keeping her face turned away, so that she was a silhouette between him and the fire, she said, “Sometimes I wish I was attracted to normal average everyday men who live quiet safe lives and never make anybody nervous.”

  This had been between them since the beginning. She was only interested in men whose lives were dangerous, but when she had one she wished he’d be more careful. Parker said, “I know. Your husband. And the stock-car racer.”

  “And you.”

  “I’m the worst of all.”

  “I moved into this house over a week ago. Every night I sat here like this, and I couldn’t even anticipate. I picked the house with you in mind, and I didn’t know if you’d ever see it.”

  “I know.”

  “You are the worst of all, dammit. With the others, at least I knew where they were, I knew what they were facing, and if something happened I knew about it right away. But you, some day you’ll go off and you never will come back and how will I know when to stop waiting?”

  This came over her from time to time, and there was never anything Parker could say to her. He wouldn’t lie to her, and he had no reassuring truths to say. He intended to go on being careful, within his own definition of the word, but it was true that something could always happen, that it might be one time that he wouldn’t get back. Once he’d tried to point out to her that it was no good spoiling the times he did come back by worrying about his not returning sometime in the future, but she’d thought that kind of attitude was unfeeling, so he hadn’t mentioned it any more. Now all he did was wait it out.

  She sat hunched forward a minute longer, smoking, looking angrily at the surface of the coffee table. Then she shook her head a
nd threw the cigarette into the fire and turned her head to say, “I’m sorry. I have to open the valve every once in a while, I guess, and let some of the steam out. Will you tell me about this last time? What kind of place was it? Not another coin convention.”

  “No. A rock-and-roll concert.

  “She grinned uncertainly. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.” He went on to tell her the whole story, from beginning to end. He left out only two things: the names of the people he was with, because they wouldn’t mean anything to her, and the discovery of Berridge’s dead body in the house afterward. None of them had been able to figure out what Berridge was doing there—he’d known about the place, of course, from the earlier meetings, but there’d been no reason for him to go there the night of the job—nor had they turned up the guy who’d killed him. They’d stayed in the house three days, having removed Berridge to the basement that first night, and the killer hadn’t come back. Keegan had been full of explanations, but none of them had sounded probable, and in the end none of them had mattered, because they’d split the take and waited out the manhunt and left the house to go their separate ways, and the death of Berridge had affected them not at all. Parker left the death out for two reasons: because he knew it would disturb her, and because it raised unanswerable questions that didn’t matter but that he knew would plague her mind.

  At the end, when he was finished describing the routine to her, she said, “So it went just right, didn’t it?”

  “Mostly.”

  “If only they could all be like that. Simple, safe and finished with, and back you come.”

  “That’s right,” he said.