Ask the Parrot p-23 Read online

  Whatever the odds, Parker would have to risk them. He said, “No, you don’t need me there. This machine of yours, it takes mug shots to go on the ID cards, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “There’s already a picture on my license. You’re going to keep everything the same on it except the name and the home address. You don’t need me there to make the change, you only need the license.”

  Lindahl frowned. “You mean, go there by myself. That way, I’d have to go all the way there twice tonight.”

  “The second time, I’ll drive,” Parker said. “It’s the only way we can do this, Tom. I can’t leave here without identification.”

  “It’s over an hour, each way.”

  “It’s up to you,” Parker told him. “We do it this way, or we don’t do it. Which do you want?”

  Lindahl eyed his beer can. “I’d better switch to coffee,” he decided, and got up to go to the kitchen.

  13

  Lindahl drove off a little before nine. Ten minutes later a knock sounded at the door. Parker was seated in the living room, beside the silent television set, not looking at it, waiting a little longer before going out to explore, but now somebody was here.

  Parker waited, not moving. The front door, and the window next to it, were fitted into the original garage door space so sloppily that sound came through from outside, one or two people talking low, somebody scuffing his feet. Then there was a louder, harder knock and a voice called, “Ed! Ed, you in there?” Very aggressive, pushing hard.

  Ed? Not looking for Lindahl. No; somebody who had watched and waited for Lindahl to leave, then came over to knock on the door, because it was Ed he wanted to see.

  The voice was slightly familiar, recently heard somewhere. Not Thiemann, somebody else.

  “Goddammit, Ed, be sociable! Open up this door!” And whoever it was rattled the doorknob, but since the door wasn’t locked, he unexpectedly lurched into the living room, holding the knob to save himself, barking a laugh of surprise and embarrassment.

  It was the one-eyed guy with the black patch from the meeting this afternoon at St. Stanislas, and coming in behind him, more cautious and wary, his coat holder, Cory. They both looked at Parker, who stayed in his chair.

  The one-eyed man said, “What’s the matter, Ed? How come you don’t open your door?”

  “It’s not my door,” Parker told him.

  “You can answer,” the guy insisted. “When somebody comes along, polite, and knocks in a very polite way, and calls out your name, you can answer, can’t you?”

  “I’m not in a mood for visitors,” Parker told him.

  The one-eyed man was both surprised and offended. “Not in a mood! You hear that, Cory?”

  “Cal,” Cory said, a small warning.

  But Cal wasn’t a man to take warnings. Glaring around the room, he stepped over and dropped backward onto the sofa, facing Parker, saying, “Well, I feel like a visit.” Then he blinked with sudden delight and pointed past Parker, crying, “Cory, looka that!”

  “It’s a parrot,” Cory said.

  “Goddam, it is a parrot! That’s what I oughta have.” Leaning toward Parker, gesturing at the patch that covered his left eye, he said, “You can see how that would go with me, can’t you?”

  “It belongs to Tom,” Parker said.

  Taking a step forward, Cory said, “Cal doesn’t mean he wants it. It just tickled him, that’s all. You know, because of the patch.”

  “I don’t want a goddam bird,” Cal said, and now he was discontented again. Leaning forward ever closer to Parker, he said, “I bet you don’t know we’re twins.”

  “I knew you were brothers,” Parker said.

  “Yeah, but not twins. It’s because of this goddam—” He made an angry swiping gesture toward the patch. “If I could get,” he started, then erased that in the air, and sat back, showing himself calm and logical. “The situation is,” he said, “if I could get the plastic surgery and the glass eye, I could look just exactly like this handsome fella here.”

  “The insurance wouldn’t pay,” Cory explained.

  “I wasn’t that drunk!” Cal yelled, angry again. “And it was that other sonofabitch’s fault, anyway.” Leaning forward toward Parker again, now confidential, he said, “All I need’s a little money, Ed, you can see that. Where’m I gonna get that kinda money, Ed? I’m a carpenter at the modular home plant over in LeForestville, me and Cory both, where we gonna get fifteen, twenty thousand dollars?”

  “I don’t know,” Parker said.

  “I bet you got some money, Ed,” Cal said, smiling like he was friendly, showing crooked teeth. “I bet you could help out a fella, if you wanted.”

  “Quid pro quo,” Cory said, to explain things.

  So the artist’s renderings had done their work, after all, at least with these two. Parker said to Cory, “What’s the quo?”

  “We don’t need to go into all that,” Cal said, impatient, sitting back, waving that idea away. “We’re just friendly, that’s all, a couple friendly guys, helping each other out. Just Cal and Cory Dennison and good old Ed—what was it? Smith?”

  “That’s right,” Parker said.

  “Funny kind of name, that, Smith,” Cal said, twisting the name to make it sound strange as he winked his good eye at his brother and said, “You don’t hear it much. Not around here, you don’t.”

  Parker said, “Get to the point.”

  “The point?” Cal seemed surprised, as though he’d thought they’d already reached the point. “It’s just to be pals, that’s all,” he said. “Be of, you know, use to each other. Like if we could do something for you. Or like, it should happen, you might have a stash of money around somewhere, you’d probably want to help a friend with this bad fucking eye here.”

  Parker said, “That’s Tom Lindahl’s sofa you’re sitting on.”

  Cal grinned and shrugged. “So?”

  “Get up from it.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” Cal spread his arms and legs out, settling into the sofa. “Everybody’s gotta be somewhere, you know. Even those—”

  “No, they don’t,” Parker said.

  Thrown off, not getting to make his clever remark about how even the missing bank robbers have to be somewhere, wink, wink, Cal blinked his one eye at Parker and said, “What?”

  “Some people,” Parker said, “don’t have to be anywhere.” He got to his feet, aware of them both tensing up as they watched him. To Cory, he said, “You’re the one with brains. What do you do now?”

  “Hey, listen,” Cal said.

  But Cory patted a hand downward in his brother’s direction, looking at Parker as he said, “Maybe we’ll talk tomorrow. Maybe with Tom here.”

  “Ask him,” Parker said.

  Cory nodded. “We’ll do that. Come on, Cal.”

  Cal looked up at his brother and decided not to argue. He moved to get up, but the sofa, rump-sprung and saggy, was hard to get out of. As he tried to get to his feet while making it look easy, Parker made a small fast gesture with his hands, nothing in particular, but Cal lost his balance and sprawled back onto the sofa.

  “You want to be careful,” Parker told him.

  “Come on, Cal,” Cory said, and stuck a hand out, which Cal angrily took, to be hauled up out of the sofa.

  They moved toward the still-open door, Parker following, seeing their battered red Dodge Ram out there, with the fitted steel toolbox bolted to the bed. They stepped through, and Parker stood in the doorway behind them. “Always be careful,” he told Cal. “You wouldn’t want anything to happen to that other eye.”

  As Cory pulled him toward the pickup with a hand on his elbow, Cal glared back, face distorted, crying, “Never mind the good one! What about this one? What about this one?”

  Parker shrugged. “Ask the parrot.”

  14

  Cory drove, so there was no squealing of tires, burning of rubber. Parker watched the Ram go, then stood in the open doorway another five minutes,
listening to an absolutely silent night, before he stepped outside, shut the door, and walked down the driveway.

  There were two tall streetlights at diagonal corners of the intersection down to his left, but otherwise the road was dark, with here and there the dull gleam of lights inside houses. Parker walked first to his right, past a dark house, then a house where an older couple played some sort of board game in a brightly lit living room, then another dark house, a boarded-up house, and then the last on this side, where a woman muffled up in robes and blankets as though she were on a sleigh in Siberia sat alone to watch TV.

  This first walk through the town was simply to get a sense of it, and the sense was of leftovers, of people still in the stadium after the game is done. There were no children watching television, no toys on porches, never more than two people visible in any house. These were the respectable poor, living in retirement in the only place they’d ever known. They wouldn’t have much that would be of use to Parker, though there might be one thing. Older not-rich people in an isolated community: Some of them might have handguns.

  Down the other side of the road, Parker passed the gas station, closed for the night, with light from a soda machine in front of the office illuminating the pumps and a small night-light gleaming on the wall above the desk inside.

  Up till now, there had been no traffic at all through this town at this hour, the blinking signal lights at the intersection controlling nothing. But as he walked just beyond the gas station, Parker did see a car coming this way from the blackness outside the town. He continued to walk, continued to look at the houses, and the car rapidly approached, its high beams becoming troublesome just before the driver dimmed them; which meant he’d seen Parker and was doing the polite thing.

  The car slowed, coming into the town, then went on by Parker, who kept walking at a steady pace. A few seconds later he heard the tire-squeal as the car made a U-turn, and here it came again, the opposite way, slowing beside him.

  Not a cop. A beat-up older Toyota four-door, some dark color. The passenger window slid down as the car came to a stop beside Parker, and the driver alone in there, a woman, leaned toward him to say, “Can I help you?”

  He could keep walking, but she’d just pace him, so he stopped and turned to her. “To do what?” he said.

  She didn’t seem to know what to do with that answer. She looked younger than the people of this town, probably in her thirties, dashboard-lit in such a way as to give her face harsh angles and extremes of light and shadow. She said, “Are you looking for an address or something?”

  “No.”

  “I just thought— People don’t usually walk around here.”

  “I do.”

  “But you don’t live here.”

  “I visit here.”

  “Oh.” Now at last on familiar ground, she pasted what was supposed to be a friendly smile on her face and said, “Who are you visiting?”

  It would cause less trouble and suspicion just to answer her. “Tom Lindahl.”

  “Tom! I’m surprised. I thought he was—” Then it occurred to her she might be about to say something insulting about Lindahl, and this might be a friend or relative, so she laughed, an uncomfortable sound, and said, “You know what I mean.”

  “You thought he was a hermit.”

  “Yes, I suppose. Yes.”

  “He is a hermit,” Parker said. “But I visit him.”

  “Well, why not?” she said, moving her hands on the steering wheel as though sorry she’d stopped. “I’m glad he has I’m glad he has visitors.”

  “And now,” Parker said, “I’m doing my after-dinner walk.”

  “Of course. Well . . .”

  She didn’t know how to end the encounter, but he did. He nodded and walked on, not looking back. After a long moment of silence back there, the car abruptly burst into life, with another U-turn squeal of tires, and receded quickly into silence.

  A few minutes later, nearing the end of his walk-through, he came to the house where the old man had been asleep earlier today on the front porch. Now the only illumination from that house was the fitful blue-gray glitter from a television set, and when Parker looked in the living room window, the same man, in the same clothing, sat asleep straight up on the sofa, the television light playing across him like reflections from a waterfall.

  So this was as good a place as any to start. When Parker looked back, the Toyota with the inquisitive woman was gone. He walked around to the back of the house, which from this angle was similar to the boarded-up house he’d entered earlier, including even the concrete steps up to the back door flanked by filigree iron railings.

  Taking from his pocket a credit card that had no function any more except what he was going to use it for now, because it had the same burned name on it as the driver’s license Lindahl had taken away with him, he slid it down the jamb between frame and door, worked the bolt back from its recess, and pushed the door open. It squeaked, very slightly, but above that he could hear the screams of police sirens and raucous music from the television set at the other end of the house.

  This was a smaller structure than the boarded-up house, only one story high, not much larger than Lindahl’s converted garage. The messy kitchen was unlit, and so was the small dining room in front of it, crowded with furniture as though the owner had at one point moved here from somewhere larger. A bedroom off the dining room was clearly a seldom-used guest room, so he backtracked to the kitchen, opened a side door there, and found the bedroom.

  There were two places people usually kept a handgun inside a house, both in the bedroom: either in a locked box atop a dresser or in a locked drawer in a bedside table. There was no box on top of the dresser in here, only coins, socks, magazines, and a very thin wallet, but the lower of two drawers in the bedside table was locked.

  Parker opened the drawer above that one, felt in the near-darkness through a jumble of medicines, flashlight, eyeglasses, and a deck of playing cards, and found the key. He closed that drawer, unlocked the other, and took out a Smith & Wesson Ranger in .22 caliber, a stubby blue-black revolver with a two-inch barrel, moderately accurate across an average room, not much good beyond that. But it would do.

  Parker pocketed the revolver, felt some more in the drawer, and found a small heavy cardboard box. When he took it out and opened it, it contained more cartridges. The box was almost full. Had the revolver never been fired? Possibly.

  He pocketed both the gun and the box of ammunition, relocked the drawer, and put the key back in the drawer above. To the sounds of forensic explanation from the living room, he silently let himself back out of the house.

  As he walked down the side driveway toward the road, the television sound abruptly shut off and lights came on in the living room, spilling out of the windows. Skirting that glow, Parker continued on out to the road, saw the old man just exiting the living room toward the rear of the house, and walked on back to Lindahl’s place.

  Would any of the people in these houses here have anything else of use to him? No. What he needed was a good amount of cash and clean transportation. He’d start to assemble those once he got the altered driver’s license. If he got it.

  Back at Lindahl’s house, he saw that the answering machine had collected no messages, so possibly Lindahl was simply doing the job. Parker sat down to wait.

  Lindahl had said the trip would take a little over an hour each way, and he’d left just before nine, so when the silent television set started the eleven o’clock news, Parker stood, watched the set until he saw there was no fresh news about the bank robbers, then left the house, still with all its lights on, and went over to let himself into the boarded-up house, pulling the plywood panel shut behind him. Using Lindahl’s flashlight, he went upstairs, found the pull-down staircase to the attic, and climbed up.

  The round window that was the only opening in the house that hadn’t been covered with plywood was a pale blur to his right. Switching off the flashlight, he crossed to it and looked out. T
he window, at the rear of the house, was at head height, about a foot wide. Through it he could see Lindahl’s place and a bit of the driveway, but nothing more. Revolver in one pocket and flashlight in the other, he leaned against the wall, looked out the window, and settled down to see what would arrive.

  15

  At twenty-five after eleven, a glow brightened the front of Lindahl’s house, and then his black SUV appeared, moving slowly. It stopped in the usual place, and Lindahl got out, stretched, yawned hugely, and walked over to enter his house.

  Parker watched. Nothing else happened over there. Then, after two minutes, the front door opened again and Lindahl stepped out, peering to left and right. He barely glanced at the boarded-up house. He might have called a name, but if he did, Parker couldn’t hear it. In any event, after one more look around and a baffled headshake, he went back inside.

  Now Parker turned away from the window. The attic was absolutely black, with a rectangular hole somewhere in its floor for the staircase. He took the flashlight from his pocket, closed his fingers over the glass, switched it on, and slowly separated his fingers until he could make out the area ahead of him and the beginning of the staircase.

  Going down, he didn’t bother to lift the attic stairs into their upper position. Reaching the back door, he switched off the flashlight and put it on the counter, then let himself out, put the plywood in place, and crossed to enter the house.

  Lindahl was in the bedroom, but he came out when he heard the front door. The look of bafflement was still on his face. “Where’d you go?”

  “Looking around the neighborhood. You did the license?”

  Bewilderment was replaced by a proud smile as Lindahl took a laminated card from his shirt pocket and extended it. “Take a look at that.”

  It looked very good. It was the same New York State driver’s license as before, colored in pale pastels, with the same photo of Parker on it, but now his name was William G. Dodd and he lived at 216 N. Sycamore Court, Troy. The card itself seemed to be just slightly thicker than those used by the state of New York, but not enough to attract attention.