Comeback (15 page)

"Better coffee in this place," Thorsen said, and went over to the bar—from the doorway, it was fireplace to the left, bar to the right, Archibald on the phone straight ahead—where he filled two hotel china mugs with coffee from a glass pot on a warmer there. Parker joined him, hiking one hip onto a stool in front of the bar while Thorsen stood behind it, leaning against the back counter. The coffee was in fact much better than the stuff at the hospital.

Parker looked around. "Nice duty," he said.

Thorsen offered a thin smile. "Depends what you like."

When Archibald got off the phone, everybody moved, Archibald rising and turning his smile toward the room as though it contained multitudes, Parker getting to his feet and standing there with the coffee mug in his left hand, Thorsen coming around the end of the bar to make the introductions. "Reverend William Archibald," he said, as the three moved toward one another, "may I present Mr. John Orr, an undercover insurance investigator from Midwest Insurance."

Archibald's handshake was firm but not aggressive. "Mr. Orr," he said, in greeting. "Here concerning our unfortunate loss?"

"Not exactly," Parker said.

Thorsen said, "Mr. Orr was on another case. He was already in pursuit of one of the fellas robbed us, for something else he did."

Archibald smiled, with ruefulness in it. "In that case, Mr. Orr," he said, "I can only regret that you didn't catch up with him last week."

"I feel the same way," Parker told him.

"But now you're here," Archibald said, "I presume you've taken our misfortune under your wing as well."

"That would be a different insurance company," Parker said.

Thorsen said, "Mr. Orr's got a full plate, Will. This fella he's after is a very bad man. Just caused a ruckus down at Memorial Hospital." His voice lowered, becoming as funereal as his boss, as he said, "I'm afraid Tom Carmody's dead."

That startled Archibald. "Why, that's terrible!" Looking at Parker, he said, "Tom was one of my failures, Mr. Orr. I'm not going to get over this."

"Uh huh," Parker said.

"But at least," Archibald said, brightening, "he expressed sorrow for his wayward ways. Toward the end, Dwayne, didn't he? You were there."

"He was sorry, all right," Thorsen said.

"We'll remember him in our prayers," Archibald decided.

A blonde woman came into the room, then, from somewhere deeper in the suite, and attracted everybody's attention; which is what she would do in any room she entered. Ripe to overflowing, she was almost a parody of the sexpot, but kept under strict control, her yellow hair in a tight bun, lush body completely covered in a sexless gray suit and high-necked white blouse, and dark horn-rim glasses worn to distract from the bee-stung mouth.

Archibald's smile when he turned to greet her contained the avarice of ownership; not much question who this woman was. "Ah, Tina," the Reverend said. "Come meet Mr. Orr. He leads a very exciting life."

When she came forward, Parker could see her rein herself in, deliberately hold herself within tight bounds. Her smile was small, almost prissy, and she didn't quite meet his eye as she murmured, "Does he? How nice."

"Mr. John Orr," Archibald said, presenting his proudest possession, "Ms. Christine Mackenzie, conductor of our Angel Choir."

"How do you do?"

Her hand was soft, with toughness within. Holding Parker's a second too long, she said, "What about your life makes it so exciting, Mr. Orr?"

"Not much," Parker told her.

Archibald said, "Mr. Orr's an undercover detective, working for an insurance company."

"Are
you?" The smile opened a bit more, showed a gleam of teeth. "You must have some stories to tell."

"Mostly, I keep them to myself," Parker said.

He'd been aware of the transformation of Thorsen since Christine Mackenzie had come into the room. The man reacted with barely concealed rage and revulsion, covering panic; the sexuality of this woman was clearly far more than Thorsen could take. He wanted out of here, and now, gruffly, without looking at the woman, he said, "Will, Mr. Orr and I are going to my office, call Broad Street, find out if there's any developments."

"Broad Street." Archibald frowned slightly. "That's what they call their police headquarters here?"

"They better not ever move it," Christine Mackenzie said, and giggled, and showed Parker her tongue.

Thorsen turned away, his hands clenched into fists. "Come on, Jack," he said.

"Nice to meet you," Parker told Archibald, and nodded to Mackenzie. "Both of you."

But Archibald said, "Dwayne, you go ahead. Let me have a little word with Mr. Orr, if I might. I'll send him right along."

"Fine," Thorsen said. To Parker he said, "I'm down on the right, 1237."

"Got it."

Thorsen left, and Archibald said, "More coffee, Mr. Orr?"

"No, I'm fine."

Archibald turned to Mackenzie, saying, "Tina, go in the other room, please, and phone the concierge, and ask for somebody to come up and lay a fire, would you do that, please?"

She would rather stay, but that wasn't being given as a choice. "All right," she said, with a shrug that made her breasts call attention to themselves, even within all that nunnery. Approaching Parker, "Glad to meet you," she said, with another smile, and offered her hand once more. "I hope we meet again."

"That'd be nice," Parker assured her.

Archibald was impatient for her to leave, and was making it increasingly obvious. Now, he said, "I'll be along after a while, Tina."

Which meant don't come back, a message Tina understood. She rolled her eyes discreetly at Parker, and went away, and twitched just a little as she left.

Archibald said, "Mr. Orr, sit down a minute, won't you?"

They sat on sofas at right angles to one another near the fireplace, toward which Archibald sent a fretful look, saying, "I meant to call someone, have them lay a fire in there, but I just haven't had a minute to myself." Smiling at Parker in amused self-pity, he said, "I do think a fire cheers up a room, at any season. Don't you?"

"Sure."

"What I wanted to talk about," Archibald said, hunched forward slightly, becoming more confidential, "is your job. You're a sort of undercover policeman, aren't you? But with the insurance company, not the regular police."

"Something like that."

"You have . . . contacts within the underworld, different from what the police might have."

"I'm supposed to, anyway," Parker said.

"People like you," Archibald said, "people in your position, they do moonlight, I believe, from time to time. Isn't that what it's called? To moonlight?"

'You mean collect from two bosses for the same work."

"Well, slightly different work," Archibald corrected him. "Similar work. For instance, you're

looking for this one man anyway, but my understanding is, there were at least three involved in the robbery at the stadium, and probably a fourth man to drive them away. When you catch the man you're looking for, and I have no doubt that you're very able at your job, that you will run this fellow to earth, but when you do, it's extremely unlikely he'll have all the money from that robbery on his person."

"Very unlikely," Parker agreed.

"If you could make it a part of your business," Archibald said, looking Parker forthrightly in the eye, "to retrieve the money stolen from me, whether it's in the possession of the man you're hunting or not, I'd be very appreciative."

'Would you," Parker said.

"I'd pay in cash, of course."

"Uh huh."

"And you ought to have— What do they call it in your business? A retainer?"

"That's one word," Parker agreed.

"Let's say a thousand." Getting to his feet, not waiting for an answer, Archibald turned toward, the desk where he'd been on the phone before. Crossing to it, he said over his shoulder, "Against, let us say, five percent of whatever you reclaim. That's a maximum of twenty-five thousand dollars, Mr. Orr, or just a little less."

Parker got to his feet and watched. Archibald opened a drawer in the desk, took out a thick envelope that seemed to be full of cash, thumbed some bills out, and put the still-full envelope back in the drawer. Then he took up the bills he'd selected, slipped them into a hotel envelope, and came smiling back, envelope held out. "An extra little blessing on your job," he said. "Shall we call it that?"

This was the first time Parker had ever been offered a bribe to help find the money he'd stolen. "Let's call it that," he said, and took the envelope and put it in his pocket.

Thorsen's office was converted from a normal hotel room. The wall-to-wall carpet showed indentations where the bed's wheels had been and the feet of the other furniture, all of which had been taken out and replaced by two desks, four office chairs and a number of telephones. The connecting door to the next room was slightly ajar; Parker guessed that was where Thorsen slept.

When he came in, Thorsen was at the desk nearer the window, just finishing a phone conversation. It didn't seem to be pleasing him. He said one or two brief things, and then he said, "Thanks," sounding sour, and hung up. "Sit down," he told Parker, gesturing toward the chair at the other desk. "Your guy Liss got away."

"Uh huh," Parker said, and took the seat offered. Both desks were gray metal, basic models. The one he sat at had nothing on its surface, and probably nothing in its drawers.

Thorsen said, "You don't sound surprised."

"I'm not. How'd he do it? Is the other one still with him?"

"Quindero? Oh, yes. Calavecci is not a happy man."

"Quindero," Parker suggested, "thinks he must be a desperate criminal, with nothing to lose."

"And he isn't," Thorsen said. "But by the time this is over, he probably will be. Or dead."

"How did Liss get out?"

"The hospital morgue is in the basement," Thorsen told him. 'There's a special back way in, unobtrusive, from a side street, with a ramp, for the hearses from the different morticians. They don't like dead bodies and hearses around the front, gives the wrong image, looks like failure."

Parker said, "So the two of them went down there."

"Where a body was being loaded. The hearse driver and a morgue attendant. I guess Liss didn't want to make too much noise, which was lucky for those two guys, because he just concussed them and tied them up. Then he and Quindero and the hearse—and the body, just to get even more people upset—went up the ramp and through a shit-poor roadblock there, and disappeared."

"And now," Parker said, "Quindero has committed a felony."

"He has, hasn't he? This mess is not getting neater," Thorsen said. "Did Archibald offer to pay you to find his cash?"

"A thousand now, one percent later."

"Did you take it?"

"It was impolite not to," Parker said.

"That's true. Excuse me," Thorsen said, and turned away to one of his phones. He pressed four numbers, so it was a call inside the hotel. "Okay," he said, and hung up.

So it was going to be like that. Parker turned toward the slightly open connecting door, and in came four more of Thorsen's young troops, of the same standard issue: Dark suits, dark ties, dark shoes, white shirts, close-cropped hair, expressionless faces. They would do well at taking orders, and they would do well at giving orders, too. Parker smiled at them, then looked at Thorsen. "And I thought we were getting along pretty good," he said.

"Now, whoever you are," Thorsen said, with no friendliness in it at all, "let's hear your real story."

"What was it you didn't like about my story so far?"

"Everything," Thorsen said. "But to tell you the truth, and it's humiliating to say this, simple fuck that I am, I bought it for a while. Jack Orr, daredevil insurance spy." He shook his head, discouraged with himself.

"Go on buying it," Parker suggested. "It's nice, and it's true, and it's the only story I've got."

"We'll change your mind on that pretty quick," Thorsen said.

The four young guys all shifted position and moved their shoulders around, like a herd that had just caught a whiff of something on the breeze. Parker looked at them, and then back at Thorsen, who said, "Let me tell you when I finally got to singing in time with the chorus. It was when your friend Liss took a shot at you."

"He knows who I am," Parker pointed out. "He knows I'm after him."

"Everybody in that hall was after him," Thorsen said. "He didn't need to bust his own concentration to even some old scores. You said it yourself: He came there because Tom Carmody and the other robbers were the only people who could place him absolutely at the robbery, and he doesn't want anybody around who can do that. So he killed Tom, and the only other person he tried to kill was you."

Parker grinned, as though Thorsen must either be kidding or crazy. "Making me one of the heisters?"

"Heisters," Thorsen echoed. "That's a crook's word for it. We say robbers, or hitters."

"Crooks are who I hang out with."

"I'll tell you what happened," Thorsen said, ignoring that. "After the robbery, you all got split up somehow. One bunch spent the night in that gas station. Liss stole that police car and probably killed the poor cop. And you waited at the motel, until I showed up."

"Wait a second," Parker said. "Am I a heister, am I a robber, or am I a guy waiting at the motel?"

"I figure the details have to come from you," Thorsen told him.

Parker shook his head. "It's your fairy tale," he said, "you'll have to fill it in yourself. George Liss takes one shot at the guy been chasing him eight months, and to you that means the guy s in on the heist."

"That shot," Thorsen said, "made me start to think about something that had snagged me but I'd just let it go by. You know what that was?"

"You'll tell me," Parker said.

"There's a lot of different words for the room that, when I was in the Marines, we called the head. There's the bathroom, the toilet, the lavatory, the washroom, the WC. The Irish call it the bog. I've been places they called it the cloakroom, don't ask me why. But one thing is constant and sure and solid and you could build your house on it: Nobody named John calls that room the john."