Parker 09 The Split (12 page)

'Nothing's going on.' Kifka rubbed Janey against his bare chest and winked at her. 'I want to know who knew Ellie, that's all. Who do you know that knew Ellie that I don't know, you know?'

Janey made a face and whispered, 'No new new no.' Kifka pushed her face down into the pillows.

The telephone said, 'When it's all over, for Christ's sake, then tell me, all right? I mean when it doesn't matter any more.'

Kifka said, 'Sure.'

'All right,' said the telephone. 'Let me think.'

Kifka played with Janey.

The telephone said, 'How about Fred? Fred Whatchamacallit, Burrows. You know Fred?'

'Yeah. I already know him.'

'Oh. Well, how about women? You want to know girls that knew her?'

'Anybody.'

'Rite Loomis. You know her?'

'No. What's her address?'

'Uhhhh, Carder Avenue, I don't know the number. She ought to be in the book.'

'Right.' Kifka poked Janey and motioned at the pad and pencil over on the dresser. 'Rite Loomis,' he said, 'Carder Avenue.' Janey went over reluctantly and wrote it down.

Janey stayed at the dresser the rest of the conversation and had two more names to write down before she was done, one with an address and one with a phone number. Then Kifka hung up and she said, 'How much more of this, Dan? Can't you put that silly phone down for a while?'

He shook his head. 'No.' He felt time crowding in, too much time. It was yesterday afternoon that Parker had been ambushed outside Ellie's place, and since then there hadn't been a sign of the bird they were after. Last night they'd all moved out here and Kifka had started his phone calls while the others had gone snooping around after the people Kifka turned up. The nine on the cop's list they weren't bothering with yet, hoping they wouldn't have to. Around midnight last night they'd packed it in, and started again this morning. Now it was almost noon and nothing was happening. Kifka was getting irritated and impatient, and Janey was getting worse.

She said, 'You could take five minutes away from the phone, Dan.'

'Parker's right,' he said. 'I'll never get over this virus with you around.'

'Body heat,' she said. 'It's got to be good for you.'

'Sure.' He made his voice sound aggravated, but he was pleased by Janey. She was an odd thing to happen to Dan Kifka and he was having trouble getting used to it. Kifka was a big blond-haired heavy with two assets: strong arms and an ability to drive. He pushed a hack sometimes for bread and butter, and took what other jobs came his way, punching heads if he was paid to, driving for operations like the stadium heist. He was thirty-four and used to the idea of who he was, and not expecting anything like Janey to come waltzing into his life.

The way it happened, he was driving the cab at the time, and a fuzzy-faced youth with a nasal condition and Janey had flagged him and given him an address out in the suburbs. All the way out they argued back there, the two of them, sniping at each other, the youth injured in a haughty way and Janey coldly furious. While the cab was stopped at a light, she' finally threw him out, pushing the door open, pushing him on out onto the cobble stones, chewing him out the whole time. The youth ended in a paroxysm of snippishness, slammed the cab door, and stalked off into the night. The light changed and Kifka turned his head and said, 'You want to wait for him, lady?'

'Lady' was inaccurate. She was a girl, not a lady, young and tender as garden vegetables. She was wearing a pink dress with a lot of crinolines and petticoats and doodads and gewgaws, and she was enough to make strong men chew carpets. She said, 'I wouldn't wait for that twerp if he was my Siamese twin. Drive on!'

He drove on, and three blocks later she said, 'Stop at a nice bar, I want a drink.'

The customer is always right. He stopped at a neighborhood-type tavern and she said, 'I don't go in these places unescorted. Come with me.'

He said, 'You see how I'm dressed?' He meant wrinkled trousers and a brown leather jacket and a Humphrey Pennyworth cap.

She said, 'So what?' and that was the end of it.

In the bar, over a glass of sauterne, she became a compulsive talker, telling him her own life story and everything she knew about the kid who'd just walked out on her. There was nothing special about either; both of them college kids from one family houses, on their own in a city bigger than their home towns.

What he was, after just a little bit of it, Kifka was bored. She paid for her own sauterne, glass after glass, but meanwhile he wasn't picking up any fares, so it was still costing him money. Eventually he figured the one sure way to get rid of her was make a pass, so he did, and forty-five minutes later they were in bed together at his place.

It had been going on for eight months now, with time out for her summer vacation from college when she'd gone home for three months. Kifka had figured that was the end of it right there, but come September and there was Janey again, twitching her rump with pink impatience.

At first he'd kept his own life story to himself pretty completely, but gradually he got so he trusted her more, and by now she knew everything there was to know about him.

Except how to cure him of a virus.

'Body heat,' she said, getting it all wrong.

He pushed her away and said, 'One more phone call, all right? One more guy on the list and I'm done.'

'If you promise.'

'I promise.'

But just as he was reaching for the phone it rang. He picked it up and it was Abe Clinger checking in, saying, 'Scratch two more off the list. Bill Powell and Joe Fox, both covered for the time.'

Kifka repeated the names for Janey to cross off on the main list, and then he said, 'Abe, we're running out. We got to go to the cop's list now.'

'I anticipated,' Clinger said. 'Believe me.'

Kifka gave him two names and addresses, and Clinger gloomily repeated them to make sure he had them right, and then they broke the connection.

'One phone call, you said,' Janey reminded him.

'That wasn't it.' He shoved her back and dialed another number.

The voice that answered was fuzzy with sleep, wanting to know what time it was. Kifka told him it was practically twelve o'clock noon, and the voice said, 'Man, I was up till all hours last night. This crazy cat just back from Mexico, he dropped around, we talked the night away; I don't think you know him.'

'Never mind do I know him, did he know Ellie Canaday?'

'Sure! Hell, they used to go together, you know what I mean?'

Kifka held a hand up in the air for Janey to start paying attention. Carefully he said, 'What's this guy's name?'

Four

Abe Clinger was a businessman, not a crook. It was his nature to be a businessman, and only the force of circumstances had him temporarily playing the part of a crook, a temporary condition that had lasted now about twelve years.

Television was to blame. Television was a blot and a rotten thing, ruining the eyes of young America, an insidious monster in living rooms all across the nation, showing sex and sadism, people smoking and holding glasses full of beer, destroying the livelihood of honest businessmen trying to make an honest dollar even with the minimum wage going all the time up up up and taxes getting worse every year. Even with government intervention and payments for workmen's compensation and social security and all the rest of it, it might have been barely possible to keep an honest man's head above water, except for the rotten box, television.

Abe Clinger had owned a movie theater. But a movie, theater, the real thing, with a kiddie matinee on Saturday with twelve cartoons and a Western and a chapter, and beautiful dinnerware given away to the ladies on Wednesday evening, and always a double feature plus cartoon plus newsreel plus coming attractions, changed twice a week on Wednesday and Sunday. A nice friendly neighborhood theater that was like an institution almost, like the branch of the public library or the post office substation, a part of the neighborhood.

Until television.

Then, to make matters worse, when he burned the theater down for the insurance he did several things wrong and he got caught. His wife of twenty-six years, when she learned he'd borrowed to the hilt on his life insurance and was also letting it lapse because he was going to jail, divorced him. His two sons looked at him with disgust and reproach, said, 'Pop', in long-suffering voices, and went away to change their names.

But in jail he met a couple of people who made a new life possible for him, and when he got out on parole after spending the minimum time behind bars he was pretty sure he would never be bankrupt again. There was always work in the armed robbery line for a man who looked like a businessman or a bookkeeper or a general manager or whatever in the office type the job might require. Carrying guns always made him nervous nevertheless, and he was yet to fire one of them, but he understood it was necessary in this trade, like being a Democrat in his previous occupation. Still, the new line of work had its advantages, like no employees and no overhead and no long hours, and his blonde was a hell of an improvement over the former Mrs Clinger, and generally speaking he had no complaints.

Except he was not a detective. Snoopyfooting around after people's whereabouts was not his line of work, and not about to be.

So why? Parker and Kifka and the others were all doing it, working away at this like it was a sensible job of some kind instead of craziness. Pete Rudd last night had made an excellent amount of sense, but the others all talked him out of it, and if the truth be known, Abe Clinger wasn't in all that much of a hurry to kiss the money good-bye either. As he'd said last night, twenty thousand dollars is twenty thousand dollars.

So here he was, walking down a cold street with a gun in his pocket, playing detective like Lloyd Nolan in all the second features he used to show, looking for somebody to ask stupid questions, carrying a clipboard for a prop.

This was an apartment-house block, a long block used up on the right side by four massive shouldered brick apartment houses, the front all acne'd with air conditioners. The one Clinger wanted was third, with a fine old stone arch over the entrance, the building number carved into the keystone of the arch, the whole thing looking like an ad for Pennsylvania.

There was an elevator, slow, trembling, painted red inside. Clinger rode it to the seventh floor, found the door he wanted, and rang the bell. He was no longer self-conscious about giving the spiel, he'd already done it eight times in other doorways. This time, of course, was the first time with someone from the policeman's list, but if there was one person he looked not a bit like, it was Parker, so what was to worry?

A young man in khaki trousers and a flannel shirt opened the door and stood like his skeleton was disjointed at the hip. He said, 'Yeah? Something?'

Clinger held his clipboard and ballpoint pen very prominently in front of him. He said, 'Are you the man of the house?'

'Yeah?'

Apparently it wasn't just a question, but also the answer, Clinger said, 'If you have a minute, I represent Associated Polls. We're running a little survey. This shouldn't take up much of your time at all.'

'You wouldn't be selling nothing? Encyclopedias, nothing like that?'

'Word of honor, I am not selling a thing. You have a television set?'

'Sure.'

Sure. Everybody has a television set. Ask a man does he go to the movies, see what happens. But everybody has a television set, even beatniks. It offended Clinger, it made him feel like the butt of a joke to have to play the role of a television pollster, but Parker was right that this was the best way to handle it. In any case, he couldn't think of any better way.

He said, 'I could come in?'

'Yeah, sure, what the hell.'

Clinger smiled his thanks and went on in.

From here on, it should be smooth sailing. The bit was, he would ask about television viewing habits, and in the course of it he'd find out whether the suspect was watching television this Tuesday night when Parker's woman was killed. If the suspect was, then he wasn't a suspect anymore. If he wasn't, a few sly questions might find out what he was doing, or, if the suspect insisted on being vague about his movements Tuesday, then Clinger would so report to Kifka, and someone else would try a different lack.

In any case, Clinger's part shouldn't lake: more than five minute's and was safe as house's.

Except for the two bulky men who got to their feet as he walked into the living room, look their hands from their topcoat pockets, and began to walk toward him. One of them opened his mouth and said something to Clinger about showing his company identification.

Cops, Real cops.

The gun in Clinger's pocket had never felt so heavy or so useless or so monstrous, like a boil on the back of the neck. Without the gun, at least it would be possible he could fast-talk himself out of this. Without the gun, at the very worst he could clam up and wait it out and eventually be given an opportunity to jump bail because they really didn't have anything on him.

But with the gun, he was already breaking a law, concealed weapons; they had him as easy as pie.

Jail. He remembered it - gray and bleak and boring, impossible to survive in twice. No money, no soft furniture, no blonde.

He turned and ran, side stepping the man of the house, bursting through the doorway and into the hall again. Behind him, shouts and imprecations, thudding of heavy feet.

Running, he fumbled the gun out of his pocket, meaning to get rid of it somehow, somewhere. Down the elevator shaft, in the incinerator, out a window, just anywhere. If they didn't catch him with the gun in his possession, actually in his possession, he still had a chance.

Behind him, the cops had already seen the gun in his waving hand and had misunderstood his purpose in holding it. They had their own guns out, and when they shouted to him to stop and to drop the gun and he did neither, they opened fire, the shots cracking out in the narrow hallway with a sound like mountains breaking.

Two bullets buzzed past Clinger's head, and he kept running. The third thudded into his skull, hit him in the bald spot like it was a target, and he ran down.