The Sour Lemon Score p-12

by Richard Stark

  “Any other way?”

  “No.”

  “There aren’t any other links to Uhl?”

  “Benny Weiss.”

  “Isn’t he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “So Rosenstein is the only lead you have.”

  “So Rosenstein is the only lead you have.”

  “Is Rosenstein the only lead you have?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any other business with Rosenstein?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a threat to Rosenstein?”

  “No.”

  “Can you find Uhl if Rosenstein won’t help you?” Hard question. Irritation. Pain. “Can you find Uhl if Rosenstein won’t help you?”

  “No. Maybe. No. Maybe some way.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What will you do if you can’t find Uhl?”

  “Something else.”

  “That’s good. Good-bye, Mr. Parker.” Floating. Blue. Blue and black. Deeper. Drowning in blue and black. Going down. Going out. Gone.

  Five

  His head was splitting. A violent, vicious headache driving him into consciousness. He groaned, and moved, and felt a hard, rough surface grate beneath him.

  He squeezed open his eyes, and an inch away there was the jagged texture of concrete. He moved and felt the concrete against his body, and knew he was lying face down on concrete. In semi darkness, at night, with electric lighting somewhere not too close.

  His head was grinding as though his brain had been cut in half and a piece of sandpaper was struck between the two halves and the halves were rubbing against it. He felt as though his skull were cracked from the top of his nose up over his forehead and across the top of his head and down to the back of his neck. The pain was so sharp it was keeping him awake and threatening to knock him out again at the same time.

  He couldn’t just lie here like this. He struggled until his hands were under his chest, and then he pushed upward, and shifted, and cringed against the redoubled pain in his head, and finally got himself to a sitting position.

  There were black brick walls around him. Down to the right there was an open space, and beyond that a street light shining on a stretch of empty sidewalk and some parked cars.

  What was that stink, sweet and pulpy ? He grimaced away from it, his head grinding again at every movement, and then he realized the smell was on his clothes. They were damp and slightly sticky.

  Sneaky Pete. Cheap port wine, wino’s blood. It had been poured over him like a baptism; he stank of dollar-a-gallon wine.

  His mind was confused. He remembered everything, but when he tried to think about it, put the elements together, his head would start to grind again.

  Drugged, he’d been drugged, and this was the aftereffect.

  If only it was still raining. The water would help to soothe his head and wash the stink off his clothes. But it had stopped long enough ago so that the concrete around him was dry.

  What time was it? He moved slowly to look at his watch, and it was gone. He patted his pockets and they were empty. He’d been stripped clean. He was lucky he still had his shoes.

  Using the wall for support, he struggled to his feet. He threatened to pass out again for a second, but the nausea and dizziness faded grudgingly and he made it to his feet. Keeping one hand against the wall of the alley, he moved heavily and unevenly out to the street.

  There was a theater marquee just to the left, dark, with a title on it in French. Past the streetlight in the other direction was an intersection and a traffic light. As he watched, the light switched to red in his direction and two cars went across the intersection from right to left.

  He moved slowly down the street to the intersection, keeping close to walls for support. This was a main street here, wide and empty. He looked at the street signs and it was Sixth Avenue— Avenue of the Americas, the sign said— and he was way downtown. Even farther than Brock’s record store and apartment.

  Up that way was his car, but he didn’t have the keys to it now. There was another set in the hotel room, but that wasn’t going to do him any good till he got there.

  An empty cab came up Sixth, he flagged it. It veered toward him, and then veered away again and sped by. He stepped back and leaned against a telephone pole and looked down at himself and saw that no cabdriver was going to pick him up. He looked like a bum and a drunk, he staggered, his clothes were a stained and wrinkled mess, and he looked big enough to be dangerous.

  And he had no money.

  He was staying at a midtown hotel. The only thing to do was to walk it, two and a half miles up Sixth Avenue. He pushed away from the telephone pole and started to walk.

  A little later he passed Downing Street. Brock’s apartment was just around the corner, but he was in no shape to do anything about Brock now. There’d be time for that.

  It was irritating to have to walk right by his own car. He could have broken in maybe, crossed the wires, but his nerves were too unstrung for any delicate work now; his hands were shaking. And it would be stupid to have a cop come by and grab him for breaking into his own car. By the time he got done explaining the cop would just be getting interested.

  There were almost no other pedestrians, very little traffic. A clock in the window of a dry cleaners he passed said four twenty-five. It was the closest thing to a dead time in New York, the bars closed and the straight people not yet out and moving.

  Every once in a while as he walked a police prowl car would roll slowly by, and each time he could sense the cops in it giving him the once-over, but he just kept moving. He knew he looked and acted like a drunk, and he knew New York City cops didn’t bother drunks unless they got troublesome or wandered into the wrong neighborhood.

  It took him an hour and ten minutes to get to his hotel, and then the night clerk looked at him with repugnance and disbelief.

  “I was mugged and rolled,” Parker said. “My room key was stolen. I need another one. The name’s Lynch, room seven three three.”

  “One moment,” the clerk said and made no secret of checking his cards to see if somebody named Lynch was really checked into room 733. Parker knew the stink of cheap wine was still rolling off him and he knew what the night clerk was thinking, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  The clerk shut his little file drawer and came back to the desk. “Yes, Mr. Lynch,” he said. He made no move to get a key. “You say you were robbed?”

  “I say I was mugged and rolled,” Parker said, “and a bottle of wine was poured on me.”

  “Have you reported this to the police?”

  “What’s the point? You ever see anybody get picked up for mugging in this town?”

  The clerk made a small move toward the telephone on the desk. “Shall I phone them for you?”

  “You want to make a phone call,” Parker said, “you can call the house doctor.”

  “Did this happen on hotel premises?”

  “I need rest,” Parker said. “You’re keeping me from rest— that’s happening on the hotel premises. In the morning I’ll talk to the cops, but right now I’m worn out and sick.”

  The clerk wasn’t sure which way to go. He said, “I could have a bellboy go up to the room with you if you like.” Because if Parker was legitimate it was a helpful gesture, and if he wasn’t legitimate it would expose him.

  “That’s good,” Parker said. “Bring him on.”

  “One moment, sir.” The clerk rang his bell and turned away to get a key.

  The bellboy was a short stocky elderly Negro with two gold teeth. The clerk handed him the key and said, “Would you assist Mr. Lynch to his room? He was assaulted.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They rode up in the elevator together, and Parker said, “I was rolled. I don’t have any cash on me. I’ll have to take care of you tomorrow night.”

  “That’s perfectly okay, sir.”

  The bellboy let him into the room, switched on th
e light for him, and put the key on the dresser. “Good night, sir.”

  “Good night.”

  The bellboy left, and Parker took off his shoes and got into the shower fully dressed. He let the water rinse the wine out of his suit and shirt, then stripped the wet clothes off and left them in the bottom of the tub. He showered, put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, and collapsed in the bed.

  The last thing he thought was: It wasn’t Brock’s voice. Somebody else asked the questions. But before he could study this thought his mind opened and dropped him into a valley of folded black towels and he was gone.

  Six

  The fourth key worked. Parker cautiously slid the door open and slipped into Brock’s apartment. The living room in semi darkness looked like the entrance to a second-class Cairo hotel. Parker shut the door softly, leaned against it, listened.

  No sound. No lights on anywhere that he could see. He’d gone by the record store and Brock hadn’t been there, but maybe he wasn’t home either.

  After a minute Parker moved again, crossing the room swiftly and silently. He looked under the sofa cushions, and the guns were still there. He put one in his pocket, kept the other in his right hand, and moved on to look through the rest of the apartment.

  It was empty. All the rooms continued the same wood and leather and iron and brass motif, the heavy veneer of masculinity. The kitchen was large, with a lot of chopping-block surface and with copper-bottomed pots hung on display on a pegboard on one wall. The only bedroom, dominated by a king-size bed with a maroon spread on it, had the inevitable shuttered windows plus a heavy Spanish mirror in an ornate frame and rough-textured dark dressers from Mexico. Bullfight posters gleamed dully on the walls, and the closet contained men’s clothing in two different sizes.

  There’d been somebody else here all along. Rosenstein? Whoever he was, it had been his voice that had done the questioning.

  If only he could remember more of the specific questions that had been asked, but it was all very vague and fuzzy in his mind.

  He had two general impressions: that he had been asked questions about Uhl and the robbery and the double cross, and that he had been asked questions about whether or not he was any kind of threat to Rosenstein. He couldn’t really remember that much about his own answers except that he assumed he’d been truthful. He’d been given some sort of drug that relaxed the controlling part of his mind, and he had no doubt he would have told them any damn thing they wanted to know.

  So they knew about Uhl and the double cross, and they knew he was looking for Uhl. The question was, what would they do with that information? Warn Uhl? Or would Rosenstein go after Uhl and the money himself?

  In either case, Rosenstein had the lead on him now. Or whoever the second guy had been.

  In a strange way, that cut his own feeling of urgency to nothing. Being hopelessly behind, he now knew it was impossible no matter what he did to get to Uhl first, to come at him with the advantage of surprise. So now there was no need to hurry. Now he would do things a different way.

  He began by searching the apartment, making it a long and thorough job. He found his wallet and keys in a dresser drawer, and in two other locations he found two caches of money, one with four hundred dollars and the other with just under two thousand. He found two rifles in a closet and three pistols inside a round hassock. He slit open all cushions and stuffed furniture, stripped the backs of all pictures, emptied the canisters in the kitchen, looked inside the toilet in the bathroom. He ripped out suit linings, took the bed apart, emptied dresser drawers to check them for false bottoms, and then left them on the floor.

  Behind the false back of the medicine chest in the bathroom he found the syringe and the small unmarked bottle. He set them aside for later.

  The only thing he didn’t find was any reference to the identity of the second man. There were two toothbrushes in the bathroom, two sets of clothing in the bedroom, small indications here and there throughout the apartment of the second man’s presence, but nothing that gave his name, nothing to say who he was. There were old envelopes and bills addressed to Brock, there were handkerchiefs in the dresser initialed PB, but for the second man there was nothing.

  And no suitcases. He thought of that later when he was done with everything, when the place was a junkyard, a Midwestern town after a twister has been through. He stood in the middle of the living room and thought things over, and then it came to him there hadn’t been any suitcases.

  He went back to the wreckage of the bedroom and opened the wide closet doors. Up on the shelf there were some things tucked to the side— a couple of hats and a scarf, things like that— but the middle was empty.

  And the dresser drawers hadn’t always been full. And there’d been a dozen or more empty hangers in the closet.

  They were both gone somewhere?

  Parker went back into the living room, found the phone book and the phone, looked up the number of Brock’s record store, and dialed it. When someone answered, Parker said, “Hey, is Paul there? This is Bernie from Capitol Records.”

  “No, he isn’t here now.”

  “Be in this afternoon?”

  “He won’t be in all week. He had to go a way for a few days. You want me to have him call you when he gets back?”

  “He’ll be back the beginning of the week?”

  “He wasn’t sure. You want me to tell him to call you?”

  “Sure. It isn’t important. Tell him Bernie from Capitol Records.”

  “Okay.”

  Parker hung up and dropped the phone on the floor. Then he got to his feet and prowled around the apartment, but it had nothing else to tell him. It couldn’t tell him where Brock and the other guy were now, or what they were doing. It couldn’t tell him where Uhl was, and that was still the key.

  He remembered part of the question-answer session from last night. He’d been asked if he had any other connections to Uhl besides Rosenstein, and he’d said Benny Weiss. Then the voice had said Benny Weiss was dead, so he didn’t have any other connection, and that was true. So here he was, and he was stuck.

  Brock would come back someday, though. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. Even if he and the other guy were after the money, thirty-three grand wasn’t enough to make him leave forever. He obviously had too many good things going already right around here.

  So is that what Parker should do— stay here and wait for Brock to come back,-the other guy to come back? If they brought the money with them, he’d take it away. If they didn’t, he’d bend them until they told him where to find Uhl.

  But that was so long and so chancy. If they had Uhl spooked, they could come back and not know anymore themselves where to find him. Or they could go up against Uhl and lose. Too many things could happen, with him sitting passive in this bombed-out apartment.

  But what else was there to do? His only other link to Uhl was Benny Weiss, and Benny Weiss was dead.

  Benny Weiss.

  Parker stopped in his tracks. Benny Weiss. Maybe, after all….

  The things he wanted from here he packed into a paper bag from the kitchen, and then he made his way through the mess to the front door and out. He was moving fast again.

  Seven The porch was full of children. Parker went up the stoop and through them to the front door, and they stopped swinging on the glider, climbing on the railing, playing soldiers on the floor, and stared at him. He stood at the screen door, looking through it into the mohair dimness of the living room, and pushed the bell button. An Avon-calling chime rang far away in the kitchen. The children were silent and wide-eyed behind him, staring at his back because he was something new.

  The woman who appeared at the far end of the living room, drying her hands on her apron, was short and round and dowdy, with fluffy gray hair and a faded dress and down-at-the-heel slippers. “Coming,” she called. “Coming.” She scuffed across the living room carpet peering through her glasses at him. Framed in the doorway he had to be a silhouette to her, unidentifiable
until she got close, and he saw the instant she recognized him. Her step faltered; her hands stopped moving in the apron; her mouth got a sudden slack look to it. Then she became more brisk again, saying, “Parker. I never thought to see you here.” She pushed open the screen door. “Come on in. You kids keep it down, now.”

  A half a dozen of them shouted, “Yes, Mrs. Weiss!” and the racket that Parker had interrupted suddenly started up again.

  Parker stepped into the house, and she let the screen door shut behind them. She said, “We’ll be able to hear ourselves think in the kitchen. Besides, I’ve got some baking to watch.”

  “All right.”

  He followed her through the small, neat, overstuffed rooms to the kitchen, which was large and square and expensively equipped and full of bakery aromas. Three glass cookie jars along the back of one counter were all full, each with a different kind of cookie.

  “Sit down,” she said. “Do you want coffee?”

  She wouldn’t know about her husband yet, and it would help her if she was doing something when he told her, so he said, “Thanks.”

  “Just a jiffy,” she said. Turning her back to him to start the coffee, she said, “You being here is bad news, I suppose. You being here, Benny not being here.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s dead, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  She sagged forward for a second, her hands bracing her against the counter. He watched her, knowing she was trying to be as stoic and matter-of-fact as she could, knowing she would hate him to do anything to help her unless she was actually fainting or otherwise breaking down, and knowing that she had to have rehearsed this moment for years, ever since the first time Benny had gone away for a month on a job. Like Claire, Parker’s own woman. Rehearsing the way she would handle it when she got the news. If she got the news. When she got the news.

  There was a long, taut second when it could go either way— she could fall to the floor or go on making the coffee— and then she sighed, a long, shuddering sound, and shifted her weight and reached for the coffeepot. Still with her back to him, hands busy making the coffee, she said, “That wouldn’t be why you’re here. Not just to tell me about it. You aren’t the type, Parker. You never were, you never will be.”