Free Parker 09 The Split by Richard Stark Page B

The room was too small and jumbled for him to want to pull one of the chairs away from the table and sit down. When he was finished transferring all the names and addresses and check marks to the paper he said, 'What do the marks mean?'
    'Those are the ones I've talked to.'
    Parker looked at him. 'Talked to? Or cleared?'
    Dougherty smiled gently. 'You keep your secrets, Joe, I'll keep mine.'
    Parker shrugged. 'It doesn't matter.'
    Dougherty said, 'That's all you want, right?'
    'Right.'
    They walked to the front door, Dougherty saying, 'I wonder what my boss'll say about this.'
    'He'll say you should have taken me.'
    Dougherty shook his head. 'Not me. The robbery detail will catch you.'
    'Maybe.'
    'Oh, they'll catch you. They're very good.' Dougherty opened the front door. 'See you around,' he said.
    'Goodbye,' Parker said.
    Five
    Daylight was fast fading when Parker came out on the roof. He looked around, saw no one, and moved off to his left. He stepped over a low wall defining where two buildings met, and kept moving.
    He'd come up onto the roofs at the eastern end of the block, and the building he wanted was about hallway down. He passed clotheslines, passed a pigeon cote, passed a rumpled, frayed, faded blanket left behind by someone in a hurry. When he'd counted buildings and knew he was at the one he wanted, he moved to the rear and over the side and down the fire escape.
    There was no light in the apartment at all, and both windows opening onto the fire escape were locked. Parker look a roll of Scotch tape from his pocket, ran some piece's of tape back and forth across one of the windows near the inside lock, and then took a gun from his overcoat and used the butt of it to tap the taped window gently until it cracked several times. It was reasonably quiet this way and didn't take too long. When he peeled some of the tape off again, pieces of glass came off with it, leaving a hole large enough for him to get his hand through and unlock the window.
    He doubted there was a plant in the apartment at all, but just to be on the safe side he opened the window with slow caution and climbed in the same way. He could assume there was a police guard outside the apartment door, in the hallway out there, but other than that he should have the place to himself.
    He did. The bedroom looked strange with one of the swords missing from the wall and with the messed-up bed, but the body was gone and so were the guns from the closet. The rest of the apartment was unchanged.
    Parker went through it quickly but thoroughly. He wanted names. Male, female, it didn't matter. What he wanted to know was Ellie Canaday's life. It was someone from that life who'd come in here and ended that life, and taken the money; that was his mistake.
    There were a couple of telephone numbers jotted down on the cover of the phone book, without any names or other identification. Parker wrote them down without expecting much from them.
    On various papers here and there in the apartment Parker found four of the names he'd already gotten from Detective Dougherty, but no new names, and no female names at all.
    Sometimes it was a bad thing to be devoid of small talk. If he'd had meaningless little conversations with her the last few weeks he might have learned something he could use now. lint Parker couldn't stand meaningless conversations, couldn't think of anything to say or any reason to say it.
    The only time he talked about the weather, for instance, was when it had something to do with a job he was on.
    All right, the apartment was useless. Still, he'd had to check it out before going back to Dan.
    He went out the apartment the same way he'd gone in and started up the fire escape again. He went half a flight, and an automatic boomed above him, a metallic sting went pinging and ricocheting around him, slicing off the metal parts of the fire escape.
    He flattened himself against the wall, dragging the pistol out of his left topcoat pocket, and above him again the