“I don’t want to bring him back. I want to hear about how he died.”
“Surely you have no suspicion there was anything untoward in Mr. Shardin’s death?”
But Parker shook his head. “I know he had a bad heart,” he said, lying. “That was why he retired when he did. I don’t think there’s anything funny about the way he died; who’d want to kill him or do him any harm? He was just an old guy, retired, taking it easy.”
“Certainly.” Gliffe nodded, smiling fatuously. “The golden years,” he said. “I myself am looking forward—but that, of course, is in the future. What business did you say Mr. Shardin was in?”
So he’d finally come out with the question head-on. In answer to it, Parker said, “He wasn’t in any business around here, he was retired.”
Before Gliffe could say anything else, explain what he’d meant to say or try to pin Parker down more closely, Parker got to his feet and said, “I better be going. I don’t want to take too much of your time.”
“Not at all, not at all.”
Gliffe stood up behind the desk, his lips pursing just a trifle in discontent. They shook hands again, and Gliffe said, “I’m happy to have had a chance to meet someone who knew Mr. Shardin in life. Not having had the opportunity to know him, I was frankly curious about him, about his past, his friendships, his life in general.”
“Well, that’s all over for him now,” Parker said.
Irritation flickered across Gliffe’s face. “Yes,” he said. “So it is.”
Parker said, “I can find my own way out.”
3
Tiftus was on the lawn, sitting on the sign that said FUNERAL HOME.
He got to his feet when Parker walked out to the sunlight, and came over towards Parker smiling and tapping his head. “Am I smart?” he wanted to know.
Parker said, “No.”
“I’m in your room there, you’ve got the local paper. I says to myself, what the hell does Parker want with a crummy local paper? What else but the obituary, the undertaker’s address? Now, am I smart?”
Parker stood in front of him and said, “Already today I hit you twice. Once I knocked the wind out of you, once I knocked the consciousness out of you. Here you are back the third time. You call that smart?”
“I told you you could count on me this time, Parker, and I meant it.” The little man was smiling his cocky grin, but underneath it there was steel; something new and different for Tiftus. He said, “If you want us to be partners, that’s okay. If you want us to be competitors, that’s okay, too. It’s up to you.”
Parker said, “Good-bye.” He started down the street.
But Tiftus hadn’t been giving an ultimatum after all. He trailed along, bright as a counterfeit penny, trotting to keep up with Parker’s long stride. “You really put a scare into Rhonda,” he said, as though it were something funny but slightly naughty Parker had done. “You really scared her.”
Rhonda. She must have picked up the name the same place she got the tan.
“We’re both in this,” Tiftus said, panting a little because of having to move so fast. “Don’t think I’ll quit.”
Parker kept walking, ignoring him.
Tiftus trotted and panted, skipping along in Parker’s wake like a Scottish terrier. He said, “Where you going now, Parker? You going out to Joe’s house? You know where it is?”
Parker strode on.
Tiftus said, “You been here before, haven’t you? You and Joe was good buddies, wasn’t you?”
Parker had nothing to say to him.
Tiftus said, “I know it, Parker, I know all about it. You used to come up here and visit him all the time, I heard about that. You think you got the inside track now, don’t you?”
Parker said nothing, but he was listening. Tiftus might say something useful after all.
Tiftus said, “I’m not greedy, Parker, you know me, you know I’m not the greedy type. We could work something out. You hear me?”
Parker didn’t slacken his pace, but he said, to see if Tiftus would tell him anything, “Work what out?”
“The split,” Tiftus said, as though that explained anything. As though it explained everything. “The split.” He said it twice. “I don’t ask fifty-fifty,” he said, and his voice showed he knew how generous he was being. “I know Joe was your friend, you got more of a claim than me, I know that. But I’m here, too, Parker, you got to accept that. I got a claim, too, because I’m here. You got to work out a split with me.”
“How much?”
“Make me an offer.”
Damn Tiftus! He kept talking all the time, talking as though he knew exactly what he was talking about, but he never said anything. Jabber jabber jabber, and nothing coming out.
Some things were obvious: Tiftus was here because he thought there was money to be made here somewhere, and his hope for money was connected with Joe Sheer somehow, and he figured Parker was here for the same reason. But did Tiftus’ hopes and expectations have anything to do with Joe’s troubles? Or with the way Joe died? Or with why Captain Younger was hanging around?
There were too many questions, too few answers, and not enough time.
It was too bad Tiftus was such a loser, so unreliable, such a mistake. If it had been somebody with brains and dependability, somebody like Handy McKay or Salsa, Parker would have worked an arrangement with him by now and they’d all know where they stood. But not Tiftus; Parker wouldn’t link up with Tiftus ever.
Take the business of the woman. Tiftus is supposed to be coming here to work, and he brings a woman along. Parker had a woman, too, and he’d left her in Miami when he’d come up here. But Tiftus brought his along; a man who won’t give up comfort for success makes a bad partner.
Tiftus said again, “Make me an offer, Parker.”
The only thing to do was get away from Tiftus, ignore him, find out what there was to know from other sources. Parker stopped, turned, and grabbed a handful of orange shirt. “Here’s the offer,” he said. “Third time today.”
“Don’t!”
Parker clipped him, enough to feel but not enough to knock him out. When he let the little man go, Tiftus sat down on the sidewalk like a baby.
Parker stood over him, hands closed into fists. “The next time you show up,” he said, “I’ll fix you so you don’t show up anymore. You know me, Tiftus, you know I don’t say things for fun.”
Tiftus didn’t say anything. He just sat there.
Parker looked around. They were on a residential street, houses with porches. A few cars went by, and the people in them looked curiously at Parker and Tiftus but didn’t stop. There were no pedestrians in this block.
Parker said, “Good-bye, Tiftus.”
He turned around and walked away. Behind him, Tiftus just sat on the sidewalk. The people in the cars going by looked at the brightly dressed little man sitting on the sidewalk. After a few minutes he got to his feet and went away. He didn’t follow Parker.
4
It looked like a private home, except for the small metal sign on the lawn:
L. D. RAYBORN, MD
Parker went up on the broad porch and saw the other sign beside the front door. This one simply said OFFICE and had an arrow pointing away to the right. Parker went that way, his steps echoing on the bare boards of the porch. The porch was freshly painted but empty of furniture, as though the house were vacant. At the side of the house he saw that the porch went around to a little cubby-hole where there was another door.
And another sign, this one above the doorbell: RING AND WALK IN.
He rang, then tried the knob. The door was locked. Exasperated, he rang again, longer this time.
He was just about to go back to try the main door when this one opened, and an angry nurse, glaring at him through the screen door, said, “Office hours are not until two.”
Parker shook his head. “I’m not a patient,” he said. “I want to see the doctor on another matter.”
“I can’t help that,”
she said. “Office hours are not until two.”
“Then I’ll try him at home,” Parker told her. He turned around and went away, and behind him she called, “It won’t do you any good. Office hours are not until two.”
He went back around the empty porch to the main door and rang the bell, and after a minute the door was opened by a stocky man in paint-smeared trousers and a grey undershirt. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Dr. Rayborn.”
“That’s me, oddly enough,” the stocky man said, and smiled down at the clothes he was wearing. “I’ve just been puttering around.” He was about fifty, with a sort of professional joviality about him, but not bad enough to be offensive. He looked up from his clothing and said, “If this is a medical visit, my normal office hours are from two till five. Unless there’s some sort of emergency?” He said it with the air of a man not discounting any possibility, no matter how remote or how troublesome.
“It isn’t a medical visit,” Parker told him. “I want to talk to you about one of your patients, Joe Shardin.”
“Oh, Joseph Shardin!” He seemed unaccountably pleased. “You knew him?”
“We were old friends. My name is Willis, Charles Willis.”
“Come in, then, do come in, I’d love to chat with you.” He smiled, and patted Parker’s arm, and closed the door after him. “This way, come into the parlor.” As he led the way into a large, airy room full of overstuffed furniture and complicated doilies, but with no carpet on the waxed floor, he said, “Joseph Shardin was a fine man, a fine man. The kind of man you hate to lose, if you know what I mean. Sit down anywhere.”
Parker was assuming that Gliffe had called to warn the doctor Parker was coming. In a town this size, everybody knowing everybody else so well, Gliffe would do that whether there was anything to cover or not. And the doctor would make believe he hadn’t got any call; that he was being polite.
Settling himself in an armchair that just kept sagging downward till he was almost sitting on the floor, the doctor said, “You say you were an old friend of Joseph Shardin?”
“We were in business together,” Parker told him. “Years ago.” He wasn’t being evasive for the hell of it; it was just he didn’t know much about Joe Sheer’s cover story, what Joe had been claiming around here to have retired from.
The doctor said, “He was retired now, you know.”
“I know. He retired five or six years ago.”
“When he moved here.” The doctor nodded, as though they’d come to an important agreement about something or other, and then he said, “I believe he had relatives in Omaha; that’s only thirty-five miles from here, you know. Or, no, wait a minute, he didn’t have any relatives at all, did he?”
This was complicated, and for a minute Parker wasn’t sure how to handle it. Joe Sheer had divided his time between a house in this town here and an apartment down in Omaha. It was in Omaha, in the safer privacy of a good-sized city, that he’d met with old friends from time to time, or occasionally took on the role of advisor to some group planning a tricky score. Here, in this little town, he’d just been a retired old man, a fisherman, a checkers player, a porch sitter, a pipe smoker. If he’d explained his trips to Omaha by letting it be known around town he had relatives down there, then by his death he’d blown that part of his cover sky-high. He didn’t have any relatives in Omaha; he didn’t have any relatives at all. None that would claim him, anyway.
The best way out of this was to plead ignorance: “I never knew much about his family.”
“He was a solitary man,” said the doctor, being a trifle portentous now, “but not a lonely one. That is, he never struck me as being lonely, the way some elderly folk are, wistful, just waiting around for the grave. It never seemed to him he’d had his fill of life, or that’s the way it looked to me.”
“Did you treat him long?”
“The last three years, about,” said the doctor, and nodded, agreeing with himself.
“How long . . .” But the question didn’t get to be asked yet; a telephone started ringing. The doctor raised a hand for silence, and his head to listen. Looking into the middle distance, his head up and alert as a hunting dog, he listened to the phone ring, and then the murmuring silence that followed it. Parker waited with him, not saying anything.
Rubber shoes squeaked in the hallway outside, the nurse appeared in the doorway. She glanced at Parker, was affronted at his having got into the house after all, and turned her head away, saying, “It’s for you, Doctor.”
“Thank you. I’ll take it here.”
The nurse went away again, and the doctor got to his feet, saying, “Excuse me just one minute, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
The doctor walked over by the windows—the curtains a patterned silhouette cutting off the brightness of the day outside—and sat down on what looked like an uncomfortable antique chair next to a gleaming small table. The telephone, sitting on this table, was for some reason almost invisible; maybe because of the dark wood of the table and the pattern of the curtain behind it.
The doctor picked up the receiver and said, mildly, “Rayborn here.” He listened, sitting half-turned away from Parker, the bright daylight outside the window making it difficult to make out details of his form or face. Parker had only the voice to go by.
The doctor said, “Is this who I think it is?” Then he said, “Yes, he called.” While listening this time, he turned his head and smiled at Parker, reassuring him he wouldn’t take long, then turned back and said, “Yes, he is.” He listened, and said, “Of course not.” Another space, and he said, “I’ll try. I don’t promise anything.” A wait again, and then, “You do that. Good-bye.”
There was no reason to suppose the call had anything to do with Parker, but if it had he could supply the other half of the conversation. If Gliffe and Rayborn and Younger were all in this together, whatever it was, then Gliffe wouldn’t just call Rayborn, he would call both the other two. But it would take him a while to get in touch with Younger, because Younger was probably still standing in front of the hotel. But eventually word would get to Younger, and Younger would check the room and see that he was gone. Then he would call Rayborn. When Rayborn said, “Yes, he called,” that meant yes, Gliffe called. When he turned and looked at Parker and then said, “Yes, he is,” that meant yes, Parker is here. When he said, “Of course not,” he meant of course he hadn’t told Parker anything. When he said, “I’ll try. I don’t promise anything,” he meant he’d try to keep Parker from leaving here before Younger could show up.
If the call had anything to do with Parker at all. If there was anything going on between Younger and Rayborn and Gliffe.
Rayborn, having ended the conversation, came back across the room. “A patient,” he said, smiling, and shrugging. “We’re always on call, we general practitioners. Now, where were we?” He sat down again in the same sagging armchair.
“I was out of touch with Joe the last three years,” Parker said, lying. “I wondered how long he’d had this heart trouble.”
“Two years or more,” the doctor said, lying right back at him. “In fact, I think it was his increasing blood pressure that first brought him to me.”
Joe Sheer didn’t have any history of heart trouble, right up to three months ago, Parker knew that for sure. He also knew Joe had a doctor down in Omaha. A sudden unexpected heart attack could have taken him here, and then this doctor would be in charge instead of the doctor in Omaha, but that was the only way. The story the doctor was telling was bushwah.
Which meant Captain Younger was headed this way, no question.
Parker wanted to talk to the captain, wanted to find out what the captain was trying for, but not yet. There was still more to be done first.
He got to his feet and said, “Well, I won’t keep you. You must be busy.”
“Not at all, not at all.” The doctor struggled out of the chair, trying to look casual, saying, “I have plenty of time, office hours don
’t begin till two.”
“I have to get back to the hotel,” Parker told him, and started walking towards the front door.
The doctor trotted after him. “I haven’t even offered you coffee yet. Or a drink? Surely you can spare ten minutes, I’d love to talk with you about Joe Shardin, a fine old man, there really can’t be any reason for you to rush away, you just barely got here, we’ll have a drink and . . .”
Parker opened the door. “Maybe I’ll come back when I’ve got more time,” he said. He looked at the doctor, who was blinking and looking winded, and still trying to be casual. “We’ll have a lot to talk about,” Parker told him. “Some other time.” He stepped out onto the porch and let the door close behind him.
When he was a block away he looked back and saw the black Ford pulling to a stop in front of the doctor’s house. But then he turned the corner and didn’t see what happened next.
5
It was a smallish white clapboard house on a narrow lot in the middle of the block, flanked on both sides by houses larger than itself, but with vacant lots and fields and unfinished streeting in the block behind it. There was a driveway in from the street, running beside the house, but no garage. A gnarled apple tree stood in the middle of the back yard.
Parker had come the front way the last time, and by night. This time he was coming the back way, by day, walking across the scrubby weedy fields with his hands tucked deep in his coat pockets and his shoulder hunched against a cold breeze blowing across from his left. He came in at an angle, so he could see past the apple tree to the blank, black rear windows of the house and along the driveway to the curb out front. No face showed in the windows, and no car was parked at the curb.
In retirement, Joe had gone the whole way, even getting interested in the things retired types were supposed to be excited about, including gardening. The back yard was half lawn and half flower garden, broken up into alternative squares of each like a checkerboard, with a red slate walk meandering through it and around the apple tree and eventually to the back porch, a narrow affair with three creaking steps. A milk-company box stood on this porch, along with a broom, two empty beer cases, and a hoe. A clothes-line pulley hung from a hook on one of the porch uprights, but there was no clothes-line attached to it.
The Jugger Page 3