“So he’s out of the picture. Fine.”
Sandra said, “How long do we go east?”
“You can talk to Nels, can’t you?”
“On our cells, sure.”
“Tell him, we’ll be coming to a bigger road soon. He should turn right and look for a diner or someplace where we can stop and talk.”
It was a bar, a sprawling old wooden place with mostly pickup trucks out front, a pretty good Saturday afternoon crowd at the bar, and an active bumper pool table in the open area to the bar’s left. On the other side were some booths. Pointing to them, McWhitney said, “Grab a place. I’ll buy.”
Parker and Sandra picked a booth, and she said, “You want to drive the whole way tonight?”
“Away from here, anyway. Let’s see what Nels thinks.”
“The thing is,” Sandra said, “my stuff is still in my room at Mrs. Chipmunk’s. But if I go there, that leaves you being two men in a truck again.”
McWhitney came back, his big hands enclosing three beer glasses. Putting them on the table, he bent low and said, “Drink up and we’ll get outa here.” Then he sat, next to Parker.
Parker said, “Something?”
“You see behind the bar,” McWhitney said, “those posters. It’s you and me and Nick again.”
“They’ve been around all week.”
“They got a new one of you over there,” McWhitney said. “I hate to tell you this, but it’s a lot closer.”
Sandra said, “How’d they do that? It better not be Mrs. Chipmunk. I don’t want to walk into a lot of questions about who do I associate with.”
“You’ll talk your way out of that,” Parker told her. “But we’ve got to decide.” To McWhitney he said, “Sandra has to go back to the place where she’s staying, her stuff is there.”
“So you and me travel together, you mean.” McWhitney shook his head. “Back to matching the profile.”
“If that new picture’s that good,” Parker said, “I can’t chance a traffic stop. Sandra, you’ve got to drive me some more. Once we’re south of the Mass Pike, we’re out of the search area, we’ll be okay. Drive me down there, then come back up. I’ll go on with Nels, and you’ll catch up with us at his place later.”
“Another two hours in the car,” she said. “That’s just great.”
5
They were still north of the Mass Pike, in hilly forested country with darkness beginning to spread, when a northbound state police car did a kind of stutter as it passed them, and Parker said, “He’s coming back.”
Sandra looked in her mirror. “Yep. His Christmas tree went on. I guess I should do the talking.”
“No,” Parker said. “He doesn’t want us, he wants the van. Don’t volunteer. If we stop, he’ll throw a light on me.”
Sandra eased to the shoulder to let the cop go by, saying, “I don’t like to leave McWhitney alone.”
“With the money, you mean. But that’s okay. He won’t run out on us, he’s too tied to that bar of his.”
“Then what was he gonna do with Oscar?”
Up ahead, McWhitney pulled off the road, the cop sliding in behind him. Parker said, “He was gonna kill us with Oscar, if he could. Or else just let it play out and see what happens. If it falls that way, he can suddenly say, ‘Oh, here’s a guy can help.’”
“You have nice friends,” Sandra said.
“He’s not my friend.”
Sandra drove over the hilltop and down the other side, and far ahead of them, downslope, the Mass Pike made a pale band of footlights between the darkening ground and the still-bright southern sky.
“I’m gonna stop there,” Sandra said, and nodded ahead toward an old grange hall converted to an antiques shop. An OPEN flag in red, white, and blue hung from a short pole slanting upward above the entrance. Two cars were parked in the small gravel lot at the side. She drove in, parked closer to the road than to the other cars, and watched the rearview mirror. After five minutes she said, “It shouldn’t take this long.”
“Maybe Nels doesn’t look right for the part.”
“I’m going back.”
She U-turned out of the lot and drove back over the hill.
There had been two troopers in the patrol car, both now out. One stood beside McWhitney’s open window, holding his license and registration, talking to him. The other had the rear doors of the van open. Two of the hymnal boxes were on the ground behind the van, their tops at a tilt. The trooper was leaning forward into the van, moving boxes, trying to see if there was anything else inside there. McWhitney’s face, when they drove by, was bunched like a fist with his effort to stay calm and impassive.
“They didn’t like his looks,” Parker said.
“All that trooper has to do,” Sandra said, “is see there’s two kinds of boxes in there.”
Parker looked ahead along the road, but in this direction there were no antiques shops, no buildings at all, just the bright-leaved trees on both sides, reflecting the last of the daylight. “Just pull off on the shoulder,” he said, “If it looks like they’re calling for backup, we’re getting out of here.”
“You know it.”
She angled them onto the shoulder and stopped, lights off and engine running, then watched the scene behind them in her mirror, while Parker adjusted the outside mirror on his side so he could also see what was going on.
There wasn’t a lot of traffic at the moment on this two-lane road, and the few cars that did pass in either direction just went on by the stopped van and patrol car with its flashing lights. They were used to seeing troopers stop other drivers.
Finally the troopers decided to give up. The one handed McWhitney his papers, while the other stood and waited at the rear of the van, hands on his hips. Then the two walked back to their patrol car, with the lights still flashing on its roof. They left the two boxes of hymnals on the ground behind the open rear doors of the van.
“They’re not neat,” Sandra said.
“They’re punishing him for making them not like him,” Parker said, “and then for not giving them a reason to pull him in.”
The troopers got into their car, its flashing lights went off, and they steered out past the van and away. Once they were out of sight, McWhitney, furious, came thumping out of the van to put the boxes back.
Parker said, “Drive over there.”
Sandra made the U-turn, and they pulled in to a stop behind the van. Just as McWhitney finished stowing the boxes and shutting the doors, Parker opened his window and called, “We’ll stop at a motel down by the Pike. This is enough for today.”
“More than enough,” McWhitney said, and stomped away to get behind the wheel.
Sandra didn’t wait for him. She pulled out onto the road and ran them south again, saying, “I’ll drop you at the motel, but then I’m done.”
“I know.”
“I’ll stay in touch with McWhitney, find out what’s happening with the money.”
“You can tell your friend to come back from her vacation now.”
Sandra laughed. “I already did.”
6
It was a chain motel with an attached restaurant and bar. Before dinner, Parker and McWhitney met for a drink in the bar, where Parker gave him cash to cover his room, since McWhitney had put the whole thing on his credit card. “It’s getting harder to operate without plastic,” McWhitney commented.
“I’m getting new when we’re done with this.”
The bar was mostly empty, a dim low-ceilinged place with square black tables and heavy chairs on dark carpet. A young waitress in a short black skirt brought them their drinks, and McWhitney signed the bill. When she left, Parker said, “I think I may know somebody who could take care of the money.”
“Somebody to take it off our hands?”
“He probably could,” Parker said. “But he might not want to. We had a disagreement the last time around. But he’s a businessman, he might go along with it.”
“Who and what is he?”
“A guy named Frank Meany. He works for a liquor import outfit in Jersey called Cosmopolitan Beverages. They’re mobbed up and they do a lot of under-the-counter stuff. Some of it is with Russia.”
“That sounds good. How come you didn’t say anything about him before?”
“We didn’t have the money before. Until I’ve got something to trade, I’ve got nothing to say.”
McWhitney nodded. “What was the disagreement?”
“They involved themselves in somebody else’s argument, somebody thought he had a beef with me.” Parker shrugged. “I convinced them to get uninvolved.”
McWhitney laughed. “Stuck their nose in somebody else’s business, and you gave it a little bop.”
“Something like that. I’ll try calling him tomorrow. If he tells me to go to hell, fine, I can’t blame him. If he says, sounds good, let’s meet, it could either mean it sounds good and he wants a meet, or he’s holding a grudge and wants another crack at me.”
“But you figure this is a better bet than Oscar Sidd.”
“Maybe. Worth a try anyway.”
“And I bet you want me along, if the guy says okay, no hard feelings, let’s meet.”
“That’s right.” Parker gestured over his shoulder. “Without the money.”
7
Around eleven Monday morning, Parker took Claire’s car, still the rental Toyota, to the gas station not far from her house where he usually made his phone calls, to avoid leaving records on Claire’s line. It was a process that required nothing more than patience and a lot of change. It was an exterior pay phone on a stick at the edge of the gas station property, unlikely to be observed or tapped. In this rural setting, there was little to draw anybody’s attention.
“Cosmopolitan Beverages, how may I direct your call?”
“Frank Meany.”
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Parker.”
There was a little pause. “Is that all?”
“He’ll know,” Parker said.
The operator was gone a long time, and when she came back she said, “Mr. Meany’s in confer—”
“Tell him we both know all about that.”
“Sir?”
“Tell him we talk now, or we don’t talk. I won’t call back.”
“Sir, I can’t—”
“Tell him.”
It was a shorter wait this time, and then the remembered voice of Frank Meany came on the line, a hard, fast, tough-guy voice. “I thought we were done with one another.”
“You mean the little trouble. That’s all over. Everything’s fine now.”
“But here you are on the phone.”
“With a business deal.”
There was a little shocked silence, and then: “A what?”
“I need expertise and a particular kind of access,” Parker said, “and I think you’re the guy has it.”
“Which expertise would that be?”
“Frank, do you really like long conversations on the phone?”
“I don’t like long conversations with you.”
“Up to you.”
Parker waited while Meany tried to work it out. Meany was a hard-nosed businessman in that gray area where the legal part of what he did, importing hard and soft drinks from various parts of the world, spread a protective blanket over the illegal part. He wasn’t his own boss, but worked for a man named Joseph Albert whom Parker had talked to on the phone that last time but had never met face-to-face. The conversation with Albert had been about how much of Albert’s business he was willing to lose before backing away from his confrontation with Parker. The first asset Parker had been offering to remove was Meany. Happily for everybody, Albert had seen there was no reason to be a romantic; cut your losses, and go.
Would Meany still resent that? Of course. Would he be ruled by his resentment? Parker was betting he was too realistic for that.
Finally Meany said, “You wanna come here again? I’m not sure I want you here.” Here being the corporate offices and warehouse of Cosmopolitan, in a bleak industrial area of the Jersey flats just south of where the New Jersey Turnpike Extension, a steel and concrete slab miles long, rose high and blunt over the industrial scree to the Holland Tunnel.
Parker said, “No, I don’t need to go there. Up in the northern part of the state, you know, off the Garden State Parkway, there’s a state park. They got a picnic area there, right in front of the park police building. When people have lunch there, they feel very safe.”
“I bet they do,” Meany said. He sounded sour.
“I bet you and me, just you and me, I bet we could both get there today by two o’clock.”
“From here? Sure. What’s in it for me?”
“That’s what we’re gonna talk about.”
Meany considered that, and then said, “A little picnic lunch with you, in front of the park police.”
“But out of earshot.”
“Yeah, I got that. All right, No First Name. I’ll see you at two o’clock.”
“Brown-bag it,” Parker said.
His second call was to McWhitney’s cell phone. “He’s on. Two o’clock.”
“I’ll be in red.”
8
Parker was the first to arrive. Leaving his car in the parking area, carrying a deli-bought Reuben-on-rye sandwich and a bottle of water in a brown paper bag, he chose a picnic bench midway between the facade of the low brick park police building and the narrow access road around to the parking area. He sat with the building to his right, access road to his left, parking area ahead.
It was a bright day, but a little too cool for lunch in the open air, and most of the dozen other picnic tables were empty. Parker put the paper bag on the rough wood table, leaned forward on his elbows, and waited.
The red Dodge Ram pickup was next, nosing in and around the access road to park so the driver was in profile to the picnic area. Then he opened a Daily News and sat in the cab, reading the sports pages at the back. Parker would have preferred him to move to a table, as being less conspicuous, but it wasn’t a problem.
The next arrival might be. A Daimler town car, black, it had a driver wearing a chauffeur’s cap, and it stopped on the access road itself. The driver got out to open the rear door, and Frank Meany stepped out, looking everywhere at once. He was not carrying a brown bag.
Meany said a word to the driver, then came on, as the driver got back behind the wheel and put the Daimler just beyond the red pickup. A tall and bulky man with a round head of close-cropped hair, Meany was a thug with a good tailor, dressed today in pearl-gray topcoat over charcoal-gray slacks, dark blue jacket, pale blue shirt and pale blue tie. Still, the real man shone through the wardrobe, with his thick-jawed small-eyed face, and the two heavy rings on each hand, meant not for show but for attack.
Meany approached Parker with a steady heavy tread, stopped on the other side of the picnic table, but did not sit down. “So here we are,” he said.
“Sit.” Parker suggested.
Meany did so, saying, “You’re not gonna object to the driver?”
“He gets out of the car,” Parker said, “I’ll do something.”
“Deal. Same thing for your friend in the pickup.”
“Same thing. You didn’t bring a sandwich.”
“I ate lunch.”
Parker shook his head, irritated. As he took his sandwich out of the bag and ripped the bag in half to make two paper plates, he said, “People who ride around in cars like that one there forget how to take care of themselves. If I’m looking at you out of one of those windows over there, and you’re not here for lunch, what are you here for?”
“An innocent conversation,” Meany said, and shrugged.
“In New Jersey?” Parker pushed a half sandwich on a half bag to Meany, then took a bite of the remaining half.
Meany lifted a corner of bread, “Reuben,” he decided. “Good choice.” Lifting his half of the sandwich, he said, “While I eat, you talk.”
“A couple weeks ago, up in Massachusetts, there was an armored car robbery. The news said two point two million.”
“I remember that,” Meany said. “It made a splash.”
Parker liked it that Meany didn’t want to rehash their last meeting, because neither did he. He said, “They caught one of the guys right away, because it turned out they had all the money’s serial numbers.”
“Tough,” Meany said. His small eyes watched Parker as intently as if Parker were a tennis match.
“The people who have the money can’t spend it,” Parker said.
Meany put what was left of his sandwich down onto the paper bag. “You’re saying you have it.”
“No, I’m saying you have business overseas.”
Meany thought about that, and slowly nodded. “So the way you’re thinking about it, I could take this money and make it meld into the international flow and just be anonymous again.”
“That’s right.”
Meany thought about that, looking off toward the Palisades. “It might be possible,” he said.
“Good.”
“And then we’d share whatever I got out of it.”
“No,” Parker said, “it wouldn’t work like that. You’d buy it from us and we’d go away.”
Watchful, Meany said, “What price are you thinking about?”
“Ten cents on the dollar. In front.”
“And the take on this robbery was over two mil?”
“There was some slippage. Call it two even.”
“Two hundred grand.” Meany said, and shook his head. “I couldn’t give you all that in front.”
“I can’t get it any other way.”
Meany said, “Yeah, but what are you gonna do if I just say no?”
Parker said, “You fly to Europe sometimes. You go business class, right?”
“So?”
“Anybody else in the plane?”
Laughing, Meany said, “I get it. There’s gotta be other customers out there. Where’s this money now?”
“Long Island.”
Dirty Money Page 11