The Sour Lemon Score p-12

by Richard Stark

  An old bell had rung the door when he’d pushed it open and after a minute a very thin, straight old woman came out of the back somewhere. She had gray hair tightly gathered in a bun at the back of her head, her dress was black and dusty, and her bifocals had thin metal frames and round lenses. Her lips were thin. She said, “May I be of service?” Briskly, not caring much.

  Parker looked at her. “I wanted to talk to Dempsey,” he said.

  “Mr. Dempsey passed on,” she said. “I’m in charge now.”

  Parker was doubtful. He said, “I’m interested in guns.”

  “Antique guns?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, we do have some,” she said. She seemed somewhat doubtful herself now. “Some very nice old derringers, for instance.”

  “I had something a little different in mind,” Parker said.

  She looked at him through the lower part of the bifocals, then the upper part again. “Were you a customer of Mr. Dempsey’s?”

  “I was recommended by a customer of his,” Parker said.

  “Who would that be?”

  “Fellow named Grofield.”

  “Oh, the actor.” She smiled. “Yes, I remember Mr. Grofield. A charming young man.”

  Parker didn’t care about that. He said, “He’s the one told me about Dempsey.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Then you’ll want to see some of our special stock, won’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Come along,” she said.

  He went with her down the narrow aisle between the seatless chairs, the cracked vases, the chipped enamel basins, the scarred chifferobes. Everywhere there was frayed cloth, cracked leather, sagging upholstery, chipped veneer, and an overall aura of dust and disuse and tired old age.

  The doorway at the back was low enough so Parker had to duck his head. The old woman led him through a narrow kitchen containing equipment almost as old and tired-looking as the wares in the shop, and then through another low door and down a flight of stairs into a low-ceilinged basement full of more ancient furniture. It was impossible to see how half of it had been maneuvered down the narrow stairs, or why anyone had bothered.

  The old woman said, “What do you need?”

  “Handguns. Two of them. Alike, if possible.”

  “Well, let’s see. You wait here.”

  He waited. She went away and disappeared into the dimness around a Victorian loveseat with a medallion back. Parker waited, occasionally hearing a small sound from the general area ahead of him, and then she came back carrying two shoeboxes. She set these down on a handy dusty surface and opened them up. “Both alike,” she said.

  They were two Smith & Wesson Terriers, a five-shot .32 revolver with a two-inch barrel. A good gun for carrying unobtrusively, good in close quarters, but no good at any range at all and not packing a very hard wallop.

  Parker said, “Nothing heavier than that?”

  “Not two alike,” she said.

  He picked up the guns and hefted them. They were both empty. They both looked in good shape, with their front sights, with no obvious scratches or dents. Parker clicked the triggers of both and said, “How much?”

  She thought it over, frowning at the guns in his hands. Then, very doubtfully, she said, “A hundred for the two?” As though sure he’d argue with her. And before he could say anything she added hastily, “And a box of shells you get too.”

  “That’s all right,” Parker said.

  “It is?” She didn’t believe he wasn’t going to haggle with her.

  “A hundred for the two,” he said. He put the guns back in their shoeboxes and reached for his wallet.

  “That’s fine, then,” she said. “I’ll go get the shells.”

  She went away and got the shells, and when she came back Parker had two fifties in his hand. She handed him the shells, and he handed her the money. She thanked him and said, “You know, I’d rather you didn’t load them in the store here.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “That’s fine. Shall I put some string around the boxes?”

  “Yeah, do that.”

  She put the lids on the boxes and started to carry them away, but Parker said, “Bring the string here, why don’t you?”

  She looked surprised. “Oh, I see! Of course.” She went away, came back with a roll of twine, and said, “I wouldn’t give you empty boxes. Sooner or later you’d just find out and come back. And where else do I have to go but here?” She tied the two boxes together while she talked. “That’s the one kind of person you can trust,” she said. “The person who doesn’t have anyplace else to go.”

  Parker didn’t say anything to that.

  When the package was tied, the woman led the way back upstairs, Parker following with the shoeboxes under his arm.

  Upstairs, Parker said, “You know where I can buy a car in this town?”

  She nodded at the shoeboxes. “That way, you mean?”

  “Where I won’t be asked questions,” Parker said.

  “That’s what I meant,” she said. “Yes, there’s a very good place I know. It’s not very far from here.”

  “Would you call them and tell them I’m on the way over?”

  “Certainly.”

  He waited while she made the call, and then she went outside with him and gave him the directions. It was another sunny day, and she looked out of place out here in the brightness with the dust and the age still on her. As though she were left over from some prior world.

  Parker walked to the place she’d told him about, a used-car lot in a neighborhood of used-car lots. It took some dickering because what he wanted was a mace, a car with papers that looked good and plates that looked good, but half an hour later the deal was set on a two-year-old Pontiac with standard shift and a bad tendency to pull to the left. The car had been in an accident and had rolled, but it would take him where he wanted to go and it wasn’t on anybody’s list of hot cars and the plates would also be clean and cool, and that was all that mattered.

  The dealer drove him to a Western Union office where he wired Claire for more money. He got it forty-five minutes later, went back to the lot, traded the cash for the car, and drove out of I he lot. He stopped in several downtown stores and bought a suitcase and gradually filled it with clothing and toilet articles. He didn’t bother to go back to the hotel because there was nothing there but a suitcase he didn’t own, and there was no point making a special trip to pay the bill. When he was done with his shopping he drove south out of Cleveland, and when he was near the entrance to the Ohio Turnpike he pulled off the road, opened the package of shoeboxes, took out the guns, threw the shoeboxes out the window, and loaded the guns. Then he got out of the car and walked a little ways into the woods beside the road and fired each gun twice into a nearby tree. They both worked all right. He reloaded, put the guns away in his pockets, and went back to the car. Now to find Uhl.

  TWO

  One

  Parker sat in the darkness in the hotel room and waited for the phone to ring. He had questions, and all he could do now was sit around and wait for the answers.

  He heard the shuffling of slippers along the walk out front and knew it was Madge coming to talk to him. That was the only thing wrong with her, the only thing wrong with this place of hers — she liked to talk too much. But it was safe; he could stay here and make his phone calls from here, so he was willing to put up with a little inconvenience.

  He hoped the fact that the room was in darkness would keep her away, but he didn’t really expect anything to save him, and he wasn’t surprised when she rapped sharply on the door.

  “Parker! Turn on some lights and open up! What’s the matter with you?”

  Parker got up and switched on a table lamp and went over to open the door. He said, “Don’t yell my name all over the country.”

  Madge came in saying, “Brother, you’re almost the only client I got. I don’t know what’s the matter with kids these days. I brought ice.
” She held up the plastic bucket. “You got anything to drink?”

  “I’ve got a bottle,” Parker said, and went over to the dresser to get it.

  Madge dropped into a chair and let her arms dangle. “I’m gettin’ old,” she said.

  It was true, and it had been true for a long time now. Madge was in her middle sixties now and a rarity: a hooker who’d saved her money during the good years. She’d bought this place a dozen years ago, this Green Glen Motel on Route 6 north of Scranton, and ran it herself with the assistance of a retarded young heifer named Ethel, who might or might not be Madge’s daughter. The motel returned Madge a modest profit, and in a way it kept her in touch with her original profession, since most of the rooms here tended to get rented by the hour.

  Because she knew a lot of the right people and because she could be trusted, Madge’s place was occasionally a meeting ground for groups of men like Parker setting up an operation somewhere and was less often used as a temporary hideout by somebody on the run. Madge didn’t like to risk what she had that way, but if it was an emergency she wouldn’t turn a man away.

  She was medium height and thin as an antenna, with sharp elbows and a shriveled throat. Her hair was white and coarse and cut very short in the Italian style worn by women forty years her junior. She was wearing dark green stretch pants tonight and a sleeveless high-neck top of green and white and amber stripes and green slip-on shoes. Great golden hoop earrings hung from her ears. She kept her eyebrows plucked and redrawn in sardonic curving lines. Her fingernails were always long and curved and covered in blood-red polish, but she wore no lipstick, so that her mouth was one more thin pale line in a heavily lined face.

  If she’d had less toughness and assurance, the effect would have been pretty bad, particularly with the gleaming white false teeth she flashed every time she opened her mouth, but somehow or other she had the style to get away with it. The young clothes weren’t being worn by an old body but by a young spirit. In some incomprehensible way, Madge had stopped getting older along about 1920.

  Parker had come here because he’d needed a base for a little while and he’d known Madge was safe. He could make his phone calls without anybody listening in. He could stay here as long as he wanted without anybody ever getting curious about who he was or where he came from or what he was all about. For all of that, listening to Madge talk was a small price to pay.

  As he brought her a drink now she said, “An old friend of yours was here a while ago. Smiles Kastor.”

  Parker nodded. “I remember Kastor,” he said.

  “He’s doing okay for himself,” she said. She swallowed some whiskey and launched into nostalgia.

  Parker didn’t really listen at all. He sat across from her, an untasted drink in his hand, and at intervals he nodded or made some small comment. That was all she needed, just an indication every once in a while that she still had her audience.

  What he was mostly doing, sitting there, was waiting for the phone to ring. He had three calls out, and there was nothing to do right now but wait.

  Madge talked on for an hour and said something interesting only once, and that was when she sat up and snapped her fingers and said, “You know, I forgot all about it. I bet you did too. I have some money of yours.”

  “You do?”

  “You and Handy McKay came through here about four years ago; you had some jewelry you wanted unloaded.”

  “That’s right,” Parker said. “I forgot about that.”

  “Your share’s twenty-two hundred,” she said. “I have it in the safe out in the office. You want it?”

  “Hold on to it,” he said. “Take my bill out of it when I leave.”

  “Okay, fine,” she said.

  It was good to have stashes in safe places here and there around the country. You never knew when you might need it. A Claire wasn’t always available, sitting on your case money a telegram away.

  But it was stupid to have forgotten the money here. Parker remembered how that had happened; the jewelry had been an afterthought, an unexpected side result of him and Handy going up to Buffalo after a man named Bronson, a wheel in a gambling syndicate that called itself the Outfit. Bronson had put a contract out on Parker because of some trouble there’d been, and Parker made some more trouble, and Bronson’s successor decided to let the contract lapse. In all of that, the handful of jewelry Handy had found in Bronson’s safe got itself forgotten.

  But this is where they’d come after they’d finished with Bronson, and they’d given Madge the jewelry to unload for them, and here she was four years later with twenty-two hundred bucks out of nowhere.

  She said, “What about Handy? Think I should send it to him?”

  “He’s supposed to call me in a little while. I’ll ask him.”

  “He retired, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  She waited and then said, “Say something, Parker. God, to get you to gossip it’s like pulling teeth.”

  “Handy retired,” Parker said.

  “I know he retired! Tell me about it. Tell me why he retired, tell me where he is, how’s he doing. Talk to me, Parker, Goddammit.”

  So Parker talked to her, telling her about Handy, running a diner now up in Presque Isle, Maine. She listened for a while, but she could never go very long without doing her own talking, so soon enough she interrupted him to tell him about somebody else she knew who’d retired seven different times in a space of twenty years, and Parker went back to his own silence again, not listening, waiting for the phone.

  It rang half an hour later. Madge said, “You want me to leave?”

  “It don’t matter, stick around.” He went over and picked up the phone and said hello.

  Madge said, “Is it Handy?”

  It wasn’t. Parker shook his head at her and said into the phone, “How’d we do?”

  “Bad A couple of guys heard of Uhl, but I couldn’t find anybody who worked with him or knew how to get in touch with him. Matt Rosenstein drew a fat blank. Listen, I don’t know what you want these two for, but if it’s work a couple of other boys are interested.”

  “It’s a special situation,” Parker said.

  “Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you out.”

  I “That’s okay.” Parker hung up and went back and sat down.

  Madge said, “You looking for information?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m the girl to ask, Parker. Try me.”

  “George Uhl.”

  Her expectant look faded slowly. “Uhl? George Uhl? He must be new.”

  “Pretty new. He’s worked six times, he said. He said one time he worked with Matt Rosenstein. The way he said it, Rosenstein should be hot stuff, but I never heard of him.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “Matt Rosenstein, I know him. You wouldn’t ever cross his path. You two have different kinds of outlooks.”

  “Tell me about him,” Parker said.

  “He’s a scavenger bird,” she said. “He pulls things nobody else wants. He’s done a couple of kidnappings, he was a whiskey hijacker along the Canadian border for a while, he’s been all over.”

  “He doesn’t do the big hits?”

  “Oh, them too,” she said. “With a pretty respectable string sometimes, too. He’ll work any racket he comes across, so a few times it’s been your sort of thing. But he’s too wild; a lot of smart ones won’t work with him. I’ve heard it said he’s a snowbird, but I don’t think he’s on anything. He’s just one of those naturally wild ones. If this George Uhl thinks Matt Rosenstein is hot stuff, it tells you a lot about George Uhl. Like you probably shouldn’t work with him.”

  “Too late to tell me that,” Parker said. “He came recommended by Benny Weiss.”

  “Benny’s okay,” she said and shrugged. “But anybody can make a mistake.”

  “Where do I find Rosenstein, do you know?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t. I know who he is. He’s been here once or twice with a b
unch, but I wouldn’t know how to reach him or even who would know how.”

  “That’s what — “

  The phone sounded again. Parker broke off what he was saying and went over to answer it, and this time it was Handy McKay. He nodded at Madge and said to Handy, “Get anywhere?”

  “Not on Uhl. He’s too new, I guess. But I found out about Matt Rosenstein.”

  “Where he is?”

  “He’s like you,” Handy said. “You don’t contact him direct. Just like people with a message for you come to me, people with a message for Rosenstein go to somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy named Brock, in New York. Paul Brock. He runs a record store there.”

  “Hold on while I get a pencil.”

  Madge was already on her feet. “I’ll get it.”

  She got him pencil and paper, and Parker put down Brock’s name and address. Madge whispered, “Tell him about the money,” and Parker nodded.

  Handy said, “That’s all I could get.”

  “That’s fine,” Parker said. “Madge says she’s got twenty-two hundred bucks belongs to you. Remember those jewels we took away from Bronson that time?”

  “Christ, yes! I forget about that.”

  “She wants to know should she send you the money or hold it for you.”

  “Send it.”

  Parker was surprised. “You don’t want it stashed?”

  “What do I want it stashed for? I’m not going anyplace. I run a diner now, Parker. That’s what I do.”

  “Okay,” Parker said. “I’ll tell her. And thanks for the stuff on Rosenstein.”

  “Any time.”

  Parker hung up and told Madge she was to send the money and gave her Handy’s address. Then the phone rang again and it was the third man Parker had called, and he had the Brock name too but nothing else. Parker thanked him for it and hung up and said to Madge, “I’ll be going in the morning.”

  “You’re after this boy Uhl,” she said.

  “Have Ethel call me at eight,” Parker said.

  “You always were gabby,” she said, and emptied her glass. She got to her feet. “That’s always been your big failing, Parker,” she said. “You talk too much.”

  Parker locked the door after her and switched off the light. In the morning he left for New York.