The Sour Lemon Score p-12 Page 6

  “That’s right,” Parker said.

  “You’re strictly business,” she said.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Parker said. “Don’t take it out on me.”

  She stopped what she was doing and just stood there for a minute. Then, in a muffled voice, she said, “Excuse me,” and hurried from the room, keeping her face turned away from him.

  He made the coffee himself, a full pot, and then sat down at the table again to wait. When the coffee was done perking he poured himself a cup and was sitting at the table drinking it when she came back into the room. She was red-eyed, and her face looked puffier than before. There was a pinched look around her eyes and a strained, artificial smile on her mouth. “You were right,” she said. “I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

  She got herself a cup from the cupboard, poured coffee, and sat down across the table from him. “So what is it you want?”

  “Do you know a guy named George Uhl?”

  “George? Young?”

  “About thirty.”

  “Thin hair on top. Black hair. And kind of tall and skinny.” . “That’s the one,” Parker said.

  “Benny brought him around a couple of times,” she said. “I never got his last name, just the George part.”

  “Do you know where he came from? How I get in touch with him?”

  She shook her head thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think so. Benny just brought him around once or twice. Wasn’t he with you people this time?”

  “Yeah, he was.”

  She looked closely at him. “Did he do something? Is that it?”

  Parker nodded.

  “Something that caused what happened to Benny?”

  “Yes.”

  She frowned, trying to understand things, and took the time to sip some coffee. Then she said, “You aren’t the revenge type, Parker, not if there’s nothing in it for you. What do you want with this boy?”

  Parker said, “He crossed us. He shot your husband in the head. He killed the other guy in the job, and he tried to kill me. And he took off with the money.”

  “Oh,” she said. “The money.”

  “That’s what I want,” Parker said.

  “But you don’t have any way to find this George, is that it?”

  “Not if you can’t help me.”

  “I can see that,” she said. She drank some more coffee and then said, “But if you could have found him without me, I never would have seen you at all. Seen you or heard a word from you.”

  “That’s right,” Parker said.

  “Some of the money belongs to me now,” she said.

  Parker shook his head. “Come off it,” he said. “Some things you don’t inherit.”

  “Not unless I can help you,” she said.

  “That’s right. You want a cut, is that it?”

  “Half,” she said.

  “No.”

  “If there’s just you left,” she said, “then half that money belongs to me.”

  “Wrong. Phil Andrews left people, too. He’s got a cut coming.”

  “Are you going to give it to them?”

  “No. But I’m not going to give his share to you either. Benny would have had a quarter of the pie if things had worked out. That would be somewhere between seven and eight thousand.”

  “What do you mean, seven or eight thousand? Benny told me he’d be coming back with fifteen.”

  “That was a top estimate. We ran into bad luck and got about as little as we could. Benny ever overestimate in front before?”

  She nodded grudingly. “All right, all the time. But when he told me fifteen I thought sure he’d come back with ten or twelve.”

  “So did we, but it didn’t work out that way.”

  She frowned, thinking it over, then suddenly started and cried, “My baking!” She jumped to her feet, grabbed a potholder, and opened the oven. Out came the two halves of layer cake, smelling hot and fresh. She put them on the counter to cool and turned off the oven. Then she put the potholder down, turned back to Parker, and said, “I couldn’t trust you worth a damn. Don’t you think I don’t know that? You’d never come back here with the money.”

  “I have two thousand cash in my pocket I can give you,” he said. “Or I can give you my word I’ll come back with a quarter of whatever I get. Which do you want?”

  She glanced up at the kitchen clock, biting her lip. “I wish my brother was around,” she said. “He’d know what I should do.”

  “Call him.”

  “He’s out on his rounds.” She came back to the table and sat down. “Give me the two thousand as an advance.”

  He shook his head. “One or the other,” he said. “Not both. What did Benny say about me? He ever say anything to you about me?”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “I know what Benny thought of you. He could trust you. That doesn’t mean I can trust you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Benny was a fellow professional.”

  ‘You’re his widow.”

  She made a crooked smile. When she talked with him her expressions were at variance with her appearance, the gray hair and the apron and the slippers and the cake in the oven. A very sharp and worldly woman existed down inside the Apple Mary exterior. She said, “Sentiment, Parker?”

  He shrugged. “Make up your mind, Grace,” he said. “If you don’t know anything I’ll have to root around somewhere else.”

  “Do you have somewhere else?”

  “I can just keep asking people in the business till I find somebody who knows George Uhl.”

  “That could take a while.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  She studied him, then said, “Let me see the two thousand.”

  He took a roll of bills held with a rubber band from his side jacket pocket. He slid the rubber band onto his wrist and counted out two thousand dollars onto the kitchen table. There were a few bills left, and these he put in his wallet, then rolled the two thousand and put the rubber band around it. “It’s right here,” he said and put it back in his pocket.

  “All right,” she said. “Let me make a phone call or two. I’ll be right back.” She got to her feet.

  Parker said, “Why not just give me the names and let me make my own calls?”

  “These are people who’ll talk to me, not you.”

  “All right. Go ahead.”

  She left the room, and Parker got up to pour himself another cup of coffee. He sat at the table again, listening to the children yelling and running around out front, smelling the smells of cake and cookies, looking through doorways at small, snug neat rooms. Grace Weiss, childless herself, with a heavy heistman for a husband, had turned herself into a kind of nursery-rhyme mother image, the cake and the cookie lady at whose house all the children of the neighborhood congregated.

  Parker had been here a couple of times before, and he remembered how Benny too had built himself a completely different at-home image. He was the semi-retired putterer, the Little League umpire, the maker of model planes and pup tents with the neighborhood boys, the constructor of birdhouses and clipper of hedges, a vague and amiable little man in baggy pants, with his glasses slipping down his nose. The difference was so complete that the first time Parker had come here he hadn’t recognized Weiss and had then thought Weiss had changed so much, grown too old, and couldn’t be used anymore. But Weiss had let him know he was still his old self on the job, and he was.

  Parker knew that he himself was different when he wasn’t working. More relaxed, a little slower in moving, a little more vocal. But the differences were minor compared with those Benny and Grace Weiss had managed.

  It was fifteen minutes before Grace came back, and when she did she had a folded slip of paper in her hand. She sat down across the table from Parker again, took a sip of her cold coffee, and said, “Nobody knows Benny’s dead, so I just let them all think I was calling on his account. I didn’t say anything about you or anything else.”

  “Good.”
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br />   She looked at the slip of paper in her hand, then at Parker. “I decided I want the two thousand,” she said. “Not because I don’t trust you, Parker, but because I don’t know what can happen. It’s too much of a chance. Benny left me insurance, but how do I collect before I get official word he’s dead?”

  “You won’t,” Parker told her.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said. “So now I have to wait seven years for an Enoch Arden. What do I live on in the meantime?”

  “Benny salted some cash away.”

  “Sure he did. And this house is paid for, and everything in it is paid for. But he didn’t salt that much away, and there’s still living expenses. I don’t have enough to last me seven years. And maybe you’d come back, maybe you really would, and give me seven thousand dollars. But maybe you wouldn’t, or maybe you won’t get the money, or maybe something will happen that neither one of us can forsee. So I’ll take the two thousand. It’s sure.”

  Parker took the roll out of his pocket again and put it in the middle of the table. She didn’t touch it, but she reached out and put the slip of paper on the table beside it.

  Parker picked up the paper and opened it, and written inside were two names and addresses, the first female, the second male. He looked at her.

  She said, “The top one is the girl George was living with last year. That’s her address; he used to live with her there. They split up a while ago, but she might still know where he is.”

  “All right. And the other one?”

  “He and Benny and George were going to do something together once. It was his caper — he found it and planned it.”

  Parker tapped the paper. “This guy? Lewis Pearson?”

  “Yes. It was Pearson’s idea, and he brought Benny and George together. That’s how Benny got to know George — when they were planning this other thing. But it never came off.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Benny told me once he thought Pearson had never been serious about it. I don’t know what went wrong. But Pearson knows George.”

  “You try calling Pearson just now?”

  “Yes. I told him Benny wanted to get in touch with George Uhl, and he said I should tell Benny to stay away from Uhl, he was no good. I couldn’t push the question after that. Maybe you can.”

  “Maybe I can.” Parker got to his feet. “Thanks, Grace.”

  “I did it for the money,” she said.

  I Eight After he rang the bell three times without getting an answer, Parker walked around on the smooth green lawn to the back of the house. It was a white ranch style, very new, on a plot big enough to make the neighboring houses barely felt presence’s beyond the high hedges bordering the property. A white Mustang in the driveway meant somebody was home. It was a hot and sunny day here outside Alexandria, Virginia, so maybe they hadn’t answered the bell because they were out back.

  They were. The rear of the house was dominated by a turquoise swimming pool. A greased, bronze woman in a two-piece white bathing suit lay on a chaise longue in the sunlight, eyes closed behind sunglasses, and a bronzed, stocky man in black bathing trunks, with hairy shoulders, was swimming doggedly back and forth in the pool like a man being paid a small salary to do so many laps every day.

  Parker stood beside the pool and neither of them noticed him. He watched the man swimming back and forth, and finally the man glanced up and saw him standing there and was so startled he sank for a second. He came spewing back to the surface and swam over to the edge of the pool, grabbing the tiles near Parker’s feet. Looking up, squinting in the sunlight, he said, “Where the hell did you come from?”

  “I rang the bell and didn’t get any answer, so I came around.”

  “That damn thing. We never hear it out here.”

  The woman across the way had sat up and was looking at them.

  Parker said, “Are you Lewis Pearson?”

  “Yeah, that’s me. You an insurance man? You don’t look like one.”

  The woman called, “Who is it, Lew?”

  He turned in the water, keeping one forearm on the tiles to support himself, and yelled, “How the hell do I know? Give me a minute, will ya?”

  “You don’t have to snap my head off!”

  “Just butt outski for a minute.”

  Parker said to the top of his head, “I’m a friend of Benny Weiss.”

  Pearson turned around again, forgetting the woman, and squinted up at Parker once more. Thoughtfully he said, “You are, huh?” .

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a funny coincidence. Hold on a minute, lemme get outa here.”

  Pearson turned away, pushing wearily off from the edge of the pool, and slogged across to the ladder on the other side. He pulled himself up out of the water, padded over to the empty chaise longue beside his woman, picked up a towel there, and began to pat himself dry. The woman said something to him; he said something back. She glanced over at Parker, said something else to Pearson, and he turned and called, “You want something to drink? Gin and tonic?”

  Parker didn’t want anything but information, but he’d learned a long time ago that people liked you more if you let them play host, and people would only tell you things if they liked you, so he said, “That’d be fine, Thank you.”

  The woman got up, ran a finger under the bottom of her bathing suit in back the way women do, stepped into sandals, and went off to the house. Parker walked around the pool towards Pearson, who was still drying himself, scrubbing vigorously with the white towel. He was of medium height, stocky build, about forty, and hairy all over, legs and arms and back and chest and shoulders. He finally tossed the towel back onto the chaise and said, “You want to stay out here or go inside in the air-conditioning?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “Let’s stay out here,” Pearson said. “I’m working on my tan.”

  He led the way to a table with a beach umbrella over it. Parker sat in the shaded chair and Pearson sat in sunlight. Pearson said, “I don’t know all of Benny’s friends. Which one are you?” He was being friendly and easygoing and relaxed, but Parker could see the eyes studying him, not yet having made up their mind about him.

  “My name’s Parker. I don’t know if Benny ever mentioned me.”

  “Parker?” Pearson started a smile. “Yeah, Benny mentioned a guy named Parker. Once or twice. He thinks Parker’s the best there is. In his kind of business, I mean.”

  “You’re in the business, too,” Parker said. “Anyway, you thought about it.”

  Wariness came back into Pearson’s face. “I did? When was that?”

  “The time you and Benny and George Uhl were going to do something together. Only it didn’t work out.”

  Pearson didn’t say anything. He studied Parker’s face.

  The woman came out with a tray containing iced drinks in tall blue glasses. She put it down and said to Pearson, “Business, Lew?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” he said. He sounded cautious, wary.

  “I’ll swim,” she said.

  “You do that,” he said. He was keeping his eyes on Parker.

  She went over and dove into the pool, and Parker said, “Benny’s wife called you about nine-thirty this morning.”

  “She did?”

  “I was in the house when she called you,” Parker said. “She called you because I asked her to.”

  “She said it was for Benny.”

  “I know. It was simpler that way, to say Benny wanted to get in touch with Uhl. But all you’d say was Benny should stay away from Uhl.”

  Pearson frowned and picked up one of the drinks. “Yeah, I know I did,” he said. “I thought about that later and I was sorry I did that. It isn’t up to me who Benny works with. He knows what I think of Uhl. Just because I’ve got my own personal hack about George Uhl doesn’t mean I should keep somebody else from getting in touch with him.”

  “What’s your bitch about Uhl?”

  Pearson glanced at Parker, at his drink, He
turned his head and looked at his wife floating lazily in the pool. He shook his head and said, “It’s a personal thing; it doesn’t have anything to do with business at all. You aren’t drinking your drink.”

  Parker took the other drink and sipped it, remembering Brock and the drugged coffee. But there wasn’t going to be anything like that here; it didn’t have the feeling about it.

  He said, “Benny doesn’t want to talk to Uhl. I do.”

  Pearson frowned. “You’ve got work for him?”

  “I have a personal thing I’ve got to get settled with him.”

  Pearson gave a sour grin. “You too? Georgy does get around.” He was facing the house, with Parker facing the opposite way, and now Pearson looked at the house and said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “That’s why Grace called, huh? To get Uhl’s address for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “So now you’re coming to me direct,” Pearson said, and then he said, “Uh,” and a small black thing appeared in the middle of his forehead, making him look cross-eyed. His head started to go back, the black thing went deep, burrowing, turning red at the edges, and the sound of the shot finally caught up with it, a flat, echoless clap in the middle of the sunshine.

  Parker dove off the chair. Things speeded up all at once, shots were sounding one on top of the other, Parker was rolling across flagstone and green lawn, the world was full of spinning confusion. Then he was in the shadow of the hedge and he could lie flat on his stomach, peering out, the smell of grass and dirt in his nostrils, the air surprisingly cool down here in the shadow of the hedge. Far away, Pearson’s body was still falling out of the chair, as though that little space existed in slow motion with the rest of the world boiling around it at top speed.

  Parker had one of his guns in his hip pocket. He dragged it out and watched the house. There weren’t any more shots coming from there.

  Pearson’s body landed. It made a soft mound on the flagstones.

  Parker got to his hands and knees and began crawling along the line of hedge, coming indirectly closer to the house.

  The woman’s head appeared up over the edge off the pool, staring at the body lying there. She began to scream.