Dirty Money

by Richard Stark

  Claire nodded. “Of course.”

  “So you’ll be out, driving around, walking around,” Mulcany said. “If you see anything, anything at all, anything that seems a little weird, out of the ordinary, let me know. Call me on my cell,” he said, holding it up for them to look at. “If you find me something and I use it,” he said, grinning in full, letting the cell phone drop to his coat front again, “I’ll give you the credit, and I’ll put you in the index!”

  “Well, I don’t know what we might see,” Claire told him, “but that’s a tempting offer. I’ll keep your card.”

  “Great.” He was suddenly in a hurry to move on. “And I gotta check a couple details with— What was her name again?”

  “Mrs. Bartlett. Like the pear.”

  “Oh, great,” Mulcany said. “That I can remember. Thanks a lot!” And he hurried into Bosky Rounds.

  Claire laughed as she and Parker started away from the B and B and down the town road with its wide dirt strip instead of a sidewalk. “Isn’t that nice?” she said. “You lost money on that expedition, but he’s going to make some. So it’s working out for somebody, after all.”

  “I don’t like him being here,” Parker said.

  “Oh, he’s harmless,” she said.

  Parker shook his head. “On some wall,” he said, “that guy’s got those wanted posters tacked up. This time, he looked at you. Next time, maybe he looks at me.”

  8

  As they drove toward their New England seafood dinner, Parker said, “Nick’s the one found the church. It’s abandoned for years, off on a side road. The original idea was, we’d spend the first night there, split up the cash, head out in the morning. But the law presence was so intense we couldn’t move, and we couldn’t take the cash with us. So we left it there.”

  “In the church.”

  “We’ll be going by it in a few minutes.”

  “I won’t see much in the dark.”

  “I don’t want you to even slow down,” Parker told her. “The story the law is giving out is that Nick escaped before he could tell them anything, but they don’t always tell the truth, you know.”

  “You think they might know the money’s there, in the church?”

  “And they might have it staked out, waiting for us to come back. So we’ll just drive by. In daylight, I’ll try to get a better look at it.”

  They kept driving, on dark, small, thinly populated roads, until he said, “It’s on the right.”

  A small white church crouched in darkness, with parking around it. Claire looked at it as she drove by and said, “I don’t see anybody.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  They passed the church again on their way back from the not-bad seafood dinner, and still didn’t see any sign of anybody in or near the place. But then they walked into Bosky Rounds and there in the communal parlor they did see somebody they knew: Susan Loscalzo.

  She got to her feet with a big smile when they walked in, tossing Yankee magazine back onto the coffee table as she said, “Well, hello, you two. Fancy running into you guys here.”

  9

  There were five guest rooms at Bosky Rounds, and with Sandra’s arrival late this afternoon all five were occupied. Now, in another corner of the communal parlor, two couples murmured together, planning their itinerary for tomorrow. Glancing toward them, ignoring the fact that Parker and Claire hadn’t said anything to her greeting, Sandra said, “I saw a bar on the way here looking like it had possibilities. Want to check it out?”

  “Sure,” Parker said, and to Claire he said, “You want to come along?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Nodding, with a little smile at Claire, Sandra said, “One car or two?”

  “We’ll follow you,” Parker said.

  As they turned toward the front door, Sandra looked around and said, “Where’s Mrs. Muskrat?”

  Claire said, “I think we’re on our own till morning.”

  “It’s the kind of place,” Sandra said, “I feel I oughta check in with the proctor before I do anything.”

  Her car, in the gravel lot beside the building, was a small black Honda Accord that would have been anonymous if it weren’t for the two whip antennas arcing high over its top, making it look like some outsized tropical insect in the wrong weather zone. Sandra got behind the wheel with a wave, and Claire started the Toyota to follow.

  Driving down the dark road with that humped black insect in front of her, Claire said, “Tell me about Sandra. Does she have a guy?”

  “She isn’t straight,” Parker said. “She lives with a woman on Cape Cod, and the woman has a child. Sandra supports the child. She thought she was the brains behind Roy Keenan and maybe she was. We got linked to her because she wanted the Harbin reward money and we led her to it. What she wants now I don’t know.”

  “The bank money?”

  “Maybe.” Parker shook his head, not liking it. “It’s not in her line,” he said. “I’d think she’d be out looking for another Roy Keenan now. I don’t know what she’s doing.”

  “Was Roy Keenan straight?”

  “Oh, yeah. That was just a business arrangement. She’d be out of sight with the handgun while Keenan asked the questions.”

  Claire said, “I don’t mean to be a matchmaker, but why wouldn’t McWhitney be a good new Roy?”

  “Because he’s too hotheaded and she’s too hard,” Parker said. “One of them would kill the other in a month, I don’t know which. This looks like the place.”

  It was. The Honda, antennae waving, turned in at an old-fashioned sprawling roadhouse with a fairly full parking lot to one side. The main building, two stories high, was flanked by wide enclosed porches, brightly lit, while the second floor was completely dark. A large floodlit sign out by the road, at right angles to the parking lot, told drivers from both directions WAYWARD INN.

  They parked the cars next to one another and met on the gravel. “I didn’t go inside the place before,” Sandra said. “It seemed to me, big enough for some privacy, dining rooms on both sides, bar in the middle.”

  “Bar,” Claire said.

  “You’re my kind of girl,” Sandra told her, and led the way as Claire lifted an eyebrow at Parker.

  The entrance was a wide doorway centered in the front of the building, at the end of a slate path from the parking area. Sandra pushed in first, the others following, and inside was a wide dark-carpeted hall with a maître d’s lectern prominent. To left and right, wide doorways showed the bright dining rooms in the enclosed porches, the customers now thinning out toward the end of the day. Behind the lectern a broad dark staircase led upward, and next to that a dimly lit hall extended back to what could be seen was a low-lit bar. Atop the lectern a cardboard sign read PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF.

  “That’s us,” Sandra said, and led the way past the lectern and down the hall to the bar, which was more full at this hour than the dining rooms, but also quieter, with lower lighting. The room was broad, with the bar along the rear, high-backed booths on both sides, and black Formica-top tables filling the center.

  Sandra pointed toward a booth on the left: “That looks pretty alone.”

  “Good,” Parker said.

  They went over there, Sandra sitting to face the front entrance, Claire opposite her, Parker beside Claire. From where he sat, the bar’s mirrored back wall gave him a good view of the hall down toward the entrance.

  A young waitress in black appeared almost immediately, hugging tall black menus to her breast. “Supper menu?”

  “We ate,” Claire said. “Just drinks.”

  “I might as well look at it,” Sandra said.

  Claire and Parker both ordered scotch on the rocks while Sandra decided on the popcorn shrimp and a glass of red wine. When the waitress went away, Sandra explained, “I didn’t really have dinner, I just drove up.”

  “You were in a hurry,” Parker told her.

  Sandra gave him a frank look. “I wasn’t out to make trouble for you boys last time,
” she said, “and I’m not now. But now the situation is different than it was.”

  “Keenan’s dead,” Parker suggested.

  “And my government,” Sandra said, “is jerking me around.”

  Parker said, “They want your source?”

  “Absolutely not. That isn’t the way it works.” To Claire she said, “Sometimes the government needs information. The deal is, if you’ve got that information and you’re a legitimate licensed investigator, and you give them that information, or you sell it to them, they don’t turn around and use it against you. It’s kind of immunity plus a paycheck.”

  “Not bad,” Claire said.

  Parker said, “So what went wrong?”

  “Harbin was too popular,” Sandra said, and the waitress arrived with their orders. “I gotta eat just a minute,” Sandra said.

  She was hungry. She scarfed down a couple large mouthfuls of popcorn shrimp, with a swig of red wine as though it were beer, and Parker looked at the other customers in this room.

  Tourists. Nobody that looked like a local, only visitors not ready for this day to end. Conversations were low and easy, but here and there punctuated by a yawn. Nobody looked like law.

  Sandra waved at the waitress, then called to her, “Same again,” and said to Parker, “Three different agencies had money out on Harbin, and a fourth had a leash on him, and none of them knew anything about any of the others. So right now they gotta sort that out so they can decide, when they pay me, which agency budget does it come out of. Right now, they’re fighting about it.”

  “They’re fighting about which of them has to pay you.”

  “That’s about it.” Sandra shrugged, and now she sipped a little wine. “In the meantime, you know I’ve got expenses.”

  “I know,” Parker said.

  “Roy took too long on the Harbin thing,” Sandra said. “That’s why he got careless at the end there. He figured, no penny-ante punk could really just disappear like that. So we were pretty much running on empty when I finally got my answer to the question, and the bitch of it is, I’m still running on empty until they get their official heads out of their official asses.”

  “That’s too bad,” Parker said.

  “Meaning,” Sandra said, “why should you give a shit. The only other two places for cash money I know of right now, to tide me over, is your bank score and Mr. Nicholas Dalesia.”

  Parker said, “Dalesia?”

  “You don’t think there’s reward money out on him, right now?” Sandra asked. “And only one agency, no waiting.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Parker said. “I told you that.”

  “You did, and I believe you, and I believe if you found out where he was he wouldn’t live long because he’s a lot more dangerous to you than I am or anybody else.”

  “Maybe.”

  The waitress brought Sandra’s seconds and she ate a while more, then said, “You know Dalesia isn’t ten miles from here right this minute.”

  “Probably.”

  “He’s got no money, no ID, no transportation. Does he have anybody around here he can go to?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Sandra considered. “Maybe a shut-in, take over a house for a few days.”

  Parker said, “Even shut-ins get visitors, phone calls. Medicine delivered.”

  “Well, he’s a bad penny, he’ll show up.” Sandra used the paper napkin on her lips and said, “The point is, you see where I am.”

  “In my face,” Parker said.

  “Sorry about that,” Sandra said. “I need cash, and this is where it is, or where it’s gonna be. You know I’ve got dossiers on you and your partners.”

  “That your lady friend is holding, out there on Cape Cod.”

  “Well, she’s gone visiting,” Sandra said.

  Parker nodded. “Is that right.”

  “Maybe with family, maybe with friends. Maybe here, maybe there. She’s hoping she’ll hear from me pretty soon.”

  Claire said, “Sandra, you seem like a smart person.”

  “Thank you,” Sandra said, and gave Claire a cool look with not much question in it.

  “Which means,” Claire said, “you already know what you want out of this talk here.”

  “Sure,” Sandra said, and shrugged. “A partnership.” She switched the cool look to Parker. “Think of me as the successor firm to Nick Dalesia,” she said.

  Parker said, “You want his share?”

  “I don’t deserve his share,” Sandra said, “because I wasn’t around for the first part. But I deserve half of his share, and you and McWhitney split the other half.” Waving toward the waitress again, giving her the check-signing signal, she said, “We’re just doing a little business here, so I’ll pick up the tab. You don’t have to agree or say anything. I’m in, that’s all. It’s not your fault, and it’s not mine, and we’ll learn to live with it. And you’ll find I have my uses. In the meantime, we’ll all be cosy together, over at— What do they call that place?”

  “The waiting room,” Claire said.

  10

  Following Sandra out the front door of Wayward Inn, Parker said quietly, “Let her go first.”

  “All right.”

  They said good night, said they’d see one another tomorrow, and got into the cars. It took Claire a while to decide the best place to put her handbag, and by then Sandra had backed out, spun around, and headed for the exit.

  As they followed, Parker said, “Hang back. She won’t let you disappear out of her mirrors, but she’ll let you hang back.”

  “You aren’t going to do anything to her, are you?”

  “I can’t. When she and her partner Keenan were first looking for Harbin, they made dossiers of what they could find out about the people at that meeting where he disappeared. Nelson’s bar, Nick phoning you. If something happens to Sandra, her friend on Cape Cod gives that stuff to the law.”

  “They already know my phone number.”

  “Getting it again, from a second direction, means they’ll take a closer look. You don’t want that.”

  Claire shook her head, eyes on the taillights out in front of her. “If I have to give up my house, I will,” she said. “Be Claire somebody else, I will. But I won’t want to.”

  “We’re trying to make it not happen,” Parker said. “Right now, Sandra’s on guard, something could kick her off. Her friend I don’t know anything about. But so far, we can deal with it. The worst would be if McWhitney found out she was here.”

  “Why?”

  “He’d kill her, right away, first, worry about dossiers later. Then everybody has to move.”

  Claire brooded about that. “Do you think he’ll come up?”

  “Not now, not over the weekend, he’s still got that bar to run. Early next week, he might. Up ahead there, at the intersection, you’re gonna turn left. There’s a deli on the right, parking lot beyond it. Make the turn, go in there, shut everything down.”

  Claire nodded and said, “I thought maybe we weren’t going straight back.”

  The intersection ahead was topped by a yellow blinker signal. Sandra’s Honda drove under it and through. Claire, without a signal, made the left, made a right U-turn into the deli’s parking lot, tucked the Toyota in next to a Dumpster back there, and switched everything off. They waited, and then a black car went by out there, from left to right, accelerating.

  Parker said, “Give her a minute, then go back out and go straight through the intersection.”

  “All right,” she said. “Where are we going?”

  “To visit the money,” Parker said. “Start now,” and she did. As they jounced out onto the road, he said, “We don’t wanna do all this dance and the money’s long gone.”

  “Stop at the road up there on the right. Then just drive around a while. Give me half an hour.”

  “All right,” she said, and when she stopped at the corner, the two visible houses both dark for the night, she said, “Will you bring some out?”


  “No,” he said. “We don’t want samples. We just want to know it’s there. And alone.”

  He got out of the Toyota and walked down the dark side road. There was partial cloud cover above, but some starlight got through, enough to see the difference between the blacktop and the shoulder.

  It was not quite midnight now, a Thursday in October, nothing happening on this secondary road at all, no lights in the occasional dwelling he walked past. Soon, ahead of him on the right, he could make out the white hulk of the church. It was a small white clapboard structure with a wooden steeple. Across the road, difficult to see at night, was a narrow two-story white clapboard house that must have been connected to the church. Both buildings had been empty a long time.

  Parker started with the house first. If there were a law presence here, watching the place, this would be the most comfortable spot to wait in.

  But the house was empty, and when he crossed the road, so was the church. There was no sign that anybody had been in it since he and Dalesia and McWhitney had quit it a week ago.

  Finally, he went up to the choir loft to check on the money. The bank had been transporting its cash in standard white rectangular packing boxes, and the church had stored its missals and hymnals up in the choir loft in the same way; not identical boxes, but similar. Parker and McWhitney and Dalesia had mixed the bank’s boxes in with the church’s boxes and left them there, arranging them so that, if anybody came upstairs and started looking in these boxes, the first three would contain books.

  They still did. And the ones behind and beneath them still contained the close-packed stacks of green. Nothing had changed. The money still waited for them.

  When they got back to Bosky Rounds, someone was seated in the dark on the porch, in a rocking chair. Rocking forward into the light, Sandra said, “Visiting our money?”

  “Your part is still there,” Parker told her.

  11

  Breakfast at Bosky Rounds was in a room smaller than the communal parlor, an oblong crammed with square tables for two, at the right front corner of the building, with a view mostly of the road out front. Friday morning, Parker and Claire ate a late breakfast, each with a different part of the New York Times, Parker facing the doorway through which the entrance foyer and Mrs. Bartlett’s desk could be seen.