Ask the Parrot p-23

by Richard Stark

  Parker said, “The wife?”

  “Jane,” Lindahl said, and looked worried. “What’s gone wrong?”

  “She’ll tell us.”

  Lindahl parked next to the Taurus as Jane Thiemann went over to stand by the door to the house, waiting for them, frowning. Looking at her through the windshield, Parker saw a woman who was weighed down by something. Not angry, not frightened, but distracted enough not to care what kind of appearance she made. She was simply out in the world, braced for whatever the bad news would turn out to be.

  Parker and Lindahl got out of the SUV, and Lindahl said, “Jane. How’s Fred?”

  “Coming apart at the seams.” She turned bleak eyes toward Parker. “You’re Ed Smith, I guess.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Fred’s afraid of you,” she said. “I’m not sure why.”

  Parker shrugged. “Neither am I.”

  Lindahl said, “You want to come in?”

  “Fred sent me for his rifle.”

  “Oh, sure. I have it locked in the rack in the bedroom. Come on in.”

  They stepped into the living room, and the parrot bent its head at Jane Thiemann in deep interest. She looked at the television set. “You keep that on all the time?”

  “It’s something moving. I’ll be right back.”

  Lindahl went into the bedroom, and Parker said, “What was the urgency? Fred doesn’t figure to use it, does he?”

  She gave him a sharp look. “On himself, you mean?”

  “On anything. He isn’t hunting deer today.”

  Coming back from the bedroom, carrying Thiemann’s rifle, Lindahl said, “Deer season doesn’t start till next month.”

  She looked at her husband’s rifle as Lindahl offered it to her at port arms, and said, “I’d like to sit down a minute.”

  “Well, sure,” he said, surprised and embarrassed. As she dropped onto the sofa, not sitting, but dropping as though her strings had been cut, he stepped back and leaned the rifle against the wall. “I’m sorry, Jane, I forget how to be civilized. You want something to drink? Water? I think I got Coke.”

  Parker said, “You want the television off?”

  “Yes, please,” she said, and to Lindahl said, “I’d like some water, if I could.”

  Lindahl left the room, and Parker switched off the set, then sat in the chair beside it, facing the sofa. He said, “Fred’s in shock.”

  “We’re both in shock,” she said. “But he’s in more than shock. He’s angry, and he’s scared, and he feels like he’s got to do something, but he doesn’t know what. Thanks, Tom.”

  Lindahl, having returned to give her a glass of water with ice cubes in it, now stood awkwardly for a second, uncomfortable about taking the seat on the sofa next to her. He dragged over a wooden kitchen chair from the corner and sat on that, midway between Parker and Jane Thiemann.

  Parker said, “What does he say, mostly?”

  “All kinds of things. A lot about you.”

  “Me?”

  “He doesn’t understand you, and he feels that he has to, somehow. The only thing he knows for sure, if it wasn’t for you, this would all be different now.”

  “That fella would still be dead.”

  “Oh, I know that, we both know that, he isn’t blaming you, he’s blaming what he calls ‘my own stupid self.’ But if it had been just him and Tom up there, they would have gone to the troopers, and who knows what would have happened?”

  “Nothing good,” Parker said.

  “Well, maybe.” She drank some of the water, then sat holding the glass in both hands in her lap. “Or maybe they would have seen it was an accident,” she said, “and that man was he was only wouldn’t have relatives or—”

  “Garbage,” Parker said. “A man, but garbage.”

  “It’s harsh when you say it that way,” she said, “but yes. The troopers might have looked at it, might have seen what Fred was and what that other man was, and just said, ‘Well, it was an accident, we won’t make a big deal out of it.’ Of course, now he can’t do that.”

  “He never could,” Parker said. “That fella has an identity. They’ll find it, from fingerprints or DNA or dental records or something else. He’ll have relatives, they’ll want to be satisfied. Knowing their cousin is drinking himself to death is one thing; knowing he’s been shot in the back is something else.”

  “Oh!”

  “Fred wouldn’t be hit with a whole lot,” Parker told her, “but he would do some time inside.”

  “That’s what scared him,” she said, and now she did look as though she might cry, but shook her head and kept talking. “One of the things that scared him. The idea of . . . prison . . . we can’t . . . we have our own—”

  “Tom told me,” Parker said. “Afterward, he told me. He had to.”

  “I haven’t blabbed around to anyone else, Jane,” Lindahl said. “Honest to God.”

  “Oh, I believe you.” With that bleak look at Parker again, she said, “That whole thing hit Fred worse even than it did George. He’s had to take pills to sleep, or he just lies there all night, thinking about that cell, imagining that cell. He’s in the cell more than George is.”

  Parker said, “How long is George in for?”

  “Oh, a year more, at the most,” she said, dismissing it. “At the most. It was post-stress syndrome, everybody knows that’s what it was. His army record couldn’t have been better, everybody says so. Did Tom tell you he was wounded?”

  “No.”

  “I wasn’t telling stories, Jane,” Lindahl said.

  “I understand that.” To Parker she said, “He was wounded, too. A roadside bomb.” She slid her palm down over her left hip. “It burned a lot of skin off there and smashed a joint. He’s got a plastic joint in there.”

  “So they’ll let him out,” Parker said, “as soon as they can.”

  “No more than a year.”

  Parker nodded. “Have you mentioned to Fred, George will want to see him when he gets out?”

  She blinked at him. “Well, he knows— What do you mean?”

  Nodding at the rifle against the wall, Parker said, “He’s in pain right now. He might decide that thing’s better than a sleeping pill.”

  Her eyes widened, and a trembling hand moved up toward her face, but she didn’t speak. She’d known the same truth but had been trying not to think it.

  Parker said, “When you take the rifle back to him, remind him, George will be very disappointed, all he’s been through, if his father isn’t there to say hello when he gets out.”

  “I will,” she said. “That might . . .” She looked around the room. “I don’t need any more water.”

  Lindahl jumped up to take the glass from her. “We’re sorry, Jane,” he said. “None of us wanted this to happen.”

  “It isn’t you two, it’s him. That’s the worst of it, he knows it’s him.” She got to her feet, slightly unsteady. “I shouldn’t be away from there too long.”

  Parker stood and told her, “With you on hand, he’ll come through this.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Lindahl handed her the rifle. “The safety’s on.”

  “Good.” She staggered slightly under the unaccustomed weight, which meant her husband hadn’t introduced her to hunting. “I’ll tell Fred what you said,” she told Parker. “About George wanting him there, when he comes back.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Lindahl said, and did so. Parker waited, and then Lindahl came back in to say, “You were very sympathetic.” He sounded surprised. “I didn’t think you’d have that kind of sympathetic manner.”

  “I had to,” Parker said. “You know Thiemann’s thinking about killing himself. If he does, the cops’ll talk to the wife three minutes before they find out what happened, and ten minutes after that, they’re right at this door.” Parker shook his head. “I’ll be as sympathetic as I have to. Neither of us wants a gun battle with the law.”

 
8

  Three minutes after Jane Thiemann left, the door opened and Cal Dennison sauntered in, saying, “That lady had a gun.”

  “She’s looking for the bank robbers,” Parker said.

  As Cory entered, shutting the door behind himself as he nodded a cautious greeting toward Lindahl, Cal laughed and said, “Well, I bet she come to the right place.”

  “No, the wrong place,” Parker said.

  Lindahl said, “Cal, you’re jumping off half-assed again.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Cal said, and pulled a much-crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. Smoothing it as best he could on his dark gray shirtfront, he held it out toward Lindahl and said, “You tell me, Tom. You just go right ahead.”

  Lindahl, not touching it, reluctantly looked at the now familiar artist’s rendering and grudgingly said, “Well, they look a little alike, I can see how they’re a little alike.”

  “A little alike?” Cal swung to hold the paper out with both hands at its side edges, arms straight out as he aimed the picture at Parker and said, “Whadaya say, Ed? If you saw this fella comin down the road toward you, would you say, ‘Looks like I got a long-lost twin brother,’ or what?”

  “He could be a thousand guys,” Parker said.

  “Not a thousand.”

  Lindahl said, “Cal, if this picture looks so much like Ed here, and everybody up at the meeting at St. Stanislas had a copy of the picture, and Ed was standing right there with us, how come nobody else saw it? How come everybody in the goddam parking lot didn’t turn around and make a citizen’s arrest?”

  “It was that story in school,” Cal said, and frowned deeply as he turned to hand the sketch to Cory. “That writer we had to read, all that spooky stuff. Poe. The something letter. All about how everybody’s looking for this letter, and nobody can find it, and that’s because it’s right out there in plain sight, the one place you wouldn’t think it would be. So here’s a fella, and a whole bunch of guys get together to find him, and where’s the best place he oughta hide? Right with the bunch looking for him, the one place nobody in the county’s gonna think to look.”

  Voice arched with sarcasm, Lindahl said, “And you, Cal, you’re the only one there figured it out.”

  “Could happen,” Cal said, comfortable with himself. “Could happen.”

  “Not this time,” Parker said, and Cory said, “Look at that.”

  They all turned to the television set, and there was the artist’s rendering again, this time with superimposed red letters: FUGITIVE BANDIT STRIKES AGAIN.

  “Jesus!” Cal said. “Where’s the goddam sound on that thing?”

  Lindahl stepped quickly over to the remote on top of the set and brought the sound on, an off-camera female voice saying, “—possibly still working together.” The picture on the screen switched from the artist’s rendering to a wide shot of the shopping mall where Parker and Lindahl had been this morning. “It was a slow morning at The Rad in Willoughby Hills Center until the bandit—or bandits—put in their appearance.”

  As the television picture cut to the exterior of the clothing store Parker had robbed, showing uniformed police going in and out of the place, Parker was aware of Lindahl vibrating beside him, shock and anger working their way through him but so far not erupting into speech. Parker’s hand went into his right trouser pocket, lightly touching the pistol there. It would have to be all three of them, if it started now.

  “Clerk Edwin Kislamski was alone in the shop at eleven-forty-five this morning when a man entered, threatened Mr. Kislamski with a handgun, and robbed the cash register of over three thousand dollars.”

  The clerk himself now appeared, seated on a wooden bench against a green wall in what looked like the front room of a state police barracks. For some reason, he was wrapped in a thick cream blanket, as though he were a near-drowning victim. He clutched the blanket to himself with both hands. Above it, a kind of terrified half-smile flickered across his face like distant searchlights as he spoke: “I recognized him right away.” An apparent cut, and then, “Oh, yeah, I got a real good look at him. I got a better look at him than I wanted.”

  “Hah!” Cal crowed. “I bet that’s true! Change your pants, sonny!”

  “Shut up, Cal,” Cory said.

  Now, on the television screen, outside The Rad, a woman reporter was seen interviewing some sort of senior police officer, with a lot of braid on his cap bill, but the sound was still the voice-over: “Captain Andrew Oldrum of State CID says there’s reason to believe the other fugitive from the recent Massachusetts bank robbery was the driver of the getaway car.”

  Lindahl stared at Parker, who didn’t look back, but shook his head. He needed Lindahl to remember not to act up in front of the Dennisons.

  Now the interview was heard, or at least part of what Captain Oldrum had to say: “Given where they’d been spotted in the past, it looks as though they may be backtracking now, which would be a smart move on their part, if they can get into an area we’ve already cleared.”

  “Captain Oldrum, why would they risk so much to commit what, in comparison, is a very small robbery, after the multi-hundred-thousand-dollar robbery in Massachusetts?”

  “Well, Eve, we have reason to believe, from the one bandit we’ve apprehended so far, that they no longer have that money on them. Also, even if they still have some of it, the other two know from that first arrest their stolen money’s too dangerous to spend, because we’ve got the serial numbers. So what they need is cash they can use without drawing attention to themselves. Still, this robbery seems like a pretty desperate move, so it looks like we’re a lot closer to them than we thought earlier in the day.”

  Now the cut was to the television studio, where the same woman reporter smiled at the camera and said, “Police are asking anyone who might have been shopping at Willoughby Hills Center at the time of the robbery, and might have seen the fugitives, or their vehicle, or anything at all that seemed suspicious, to phone the special number on your screen—”

  “Let’s call it,” Cal said. “We got him right here.” Laughing at Lindahl, he said, “And you got to be the driver!”

  “Shut up, Cal,” Parker said. “Tom, switch off that set.”

  Cal, suddenly bristling, said, “My brother tells me to shut up. You don’t tell me to shut up.”

  As Lindahl killed the sound on the television set, Parker took a step forward and slapped Cal hard, open-handed, across the cheek, under the patch. Cal jolted back, astonished and outraged. Parker stood watching him, hands at his sides, and Cal, fidgeting, wide eyed, tried to figure out something to do.

  “Okay,” Cory said, stepping forward, not quite between them, but just to the side, like a referee. “Okay, that’s enough. If it goes any further, you got me, too.”

  Parker half turned to him. “They say it was definitely one of the guys they’re looking for, and they say he was at this mall, and I’m not. But let’s say your brother’s right. They just said on the TV the bandits don’t have the money any more, or if they do, they can’t pass it because the law’s got the serial numbers. So if I am the bandit, I either don’t have the money or I have money nobody can use. And if I am the bandit, why weren’t you two dead last night?”

  Cory had nodded through all of that, thoughtful, and now he said, “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Something doesn’t smell right.” Cory nodded toward his brother but kept looking at Parker. “Cal and me, we both noticed it, and we talked about it.”

  Cal had apparently decided the slap on the face was now far enough in the past that he didn’t have to react to it at all, so, his aggressive style back, he said, “What are you doin here, that’s the point. Whether you’re him or you’re not him, and I still know goddam well you’re him, but even so, how come you’re here? What are you doin here?”

  “Visiting my old friend Tom.”

  “Bullshit,” Cal said. “Maybe those old farts at the gun club bought it, but we don
’t. We never did. I took one look at you up at St. Stanislas and I said, ‘What’s goin on with that fella?’ That was even before I looked at the picture.”

  Lindahl now stepped forward. He was paler than usual, and Parker could see he still hadn’t completely adapted himself to what he’d just learned from the television set, but his expression was determined. “Cal,” he said, “you never called me a liar before.”

  Cal turned to glower at him. “You gonna punch me now? I don’t think so, Tom.”

  “Then don’t call me a liar.”

  “Cal,” Cory said, crowding in on top of whatever Cal had meant to say, “we’re done in here.”

  Cal now had reason to glower at everybody. “Done in here? Whadaya mean done in here? Now the guy’s knocking off shopping malls!”

  “That’s nothing to do with us,” Cory told him. “Come on, Cal. Tom, I’m sorry we busted in on you.”

  “Anytime,” Lindahl said, though he sounded angry. “Just knock first.”

  “We will. Come on, Cal. Sorry if we upset you, Ed.”

  “You didn’t,” Parker said.

  “Well . . .” Cory herded Cal to the door and out, Cal wanting to yap on about something or other, Cory pushing him out with nods and hand gestures, the two finally outside, Cory closing the door without looking back.

  Parker continued to stand and frown at the closed door. After a minute, Lindahl gave him a puzzled look. “What is it?”

  Parker nodded at the door. “Cory’s scheming,” he said.

  9

  Six hours. Six hours from now, Parker and Lindahl could leave Pooley and head south to the racetrack, which would be shut and dark and ready for them when they got there. That wasn’t the problem; the problem was in the six hours.

  Cory Dennison was out there somewhere, scheming, that was the first thing. He’d decided that, whoever Parker was, he was up to something the Dennison brothers would find interesting and should therefore be in on. So what would they do? Hang around the neighborhood? Watch Lindahl’s house and SUV, follow them if they left? All the way to the racetrack?