Parker didn’t reply; he wasn’t the chattiest of guys, which she thought ironic for an informant.
Parker was fifty-one and divorced, and lived alone. An ex-wife and teenage son lived in South Carolina; he hadn’t seen either in years. He considered himself something of a movie buff and watched four-plus hours of television a night, more on weekends. One of those guys who could rattle off the movies on which Quentin Tarantino had done uncredited rewrites. His only ambition was working less and watching more. Exactly the reason that she’d chosen him. He would take the easy money and be happy. Double-crossing her would cut into his La-Z-Boy time. Plus, men his age tended not to take women her age seriously, and she found it useful to be underestimated.
“How was work?”
Parker shrugged as if the topic of his own day bored him. So much for a riot. She slid him his beer and laid a stack of napkins on the table between them. He took the napkin with the money folded in it, making a point of always counting it in front of her. She could understand how working around convicts all day might diminish your faith in humanity. His lips moved as he did the math, and when satisfied, he slipped the money into his jacket pocket and pushed several folded sheets of paper across to her.
She read through Parker’s notes, which included a list of magazines and newspapers that Merrick received. She scanned it for anything anomalous, but it looked the same as every other week. Almost all were business related: the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist. The China Economic Review and Journal of Asian Economics headlined a long list of Chinese business periodicals. They puzzled her slightly. Merrick Capital had specialized in emerging markets but had never made an investment in China. Why the interest? Was China his destination after release?
Well, not if she had anything to say about it.
“How has he been this week?”
“Full of himself. Imagine James Cameron winning the Oscar for Titanic,” Parker said. “Then multiply it by cocaine.”
She shuddered to think what that might look like. “Any variation to his routine?”
Parker shook his head and took a sip of beer. “Same as always. Work detail. Little exercise. Reads in the library or out in the yard. Watches an hour of TV. Dinner. Plays cards with a couple of guys. Reads until lights out. You could set your watch by the guy.”
“Then why haven’t you ID’d his man in there?”
Merrick had a guard in his pocket. Lea was convinced of it. Someone acting as courier between Merrick and his contact on the outside. She needed the identity of the contact, now more than ever. It was the key to everything, but so far Parker hadn’t been able to flush him out.
“The man is careful, what can I tell you? I got it down to one of two. I’ll know next week.”
“I’m running out of weeks. He gets out in less than a month. And with this magazine interview . . . I need a name, Parker. Yesterday.”
“Next week.”
“You’re not stringing me along, by any chance?”
Parker’s expression darkened. “It’s either Slaski or Leonard. But I can only be in one place at a time. I’ll have it next week.”
“That’s good, because if I don’t get what I need, then there’s no payday at the end of this rainbow for you. Understand me?”
Parker nodded. “I’ll get it.”
“Good.”
“Why you hate him like you do?”
“My family.”
“One of those,” Parker said.
“One of those.”
Parker nodded and picked a few pretzels out of the bowl and munched on them thoughtfully. Building up the strength to actually use his words.
“Lawyer come to see him.”
“What lawyer? Henry Susman?”
“That’s the one.”
“Henry Susman was at the prison?” Lea sat back, dismayed. “When?”
“Couple days ago. Him and Merrick had themselves a sit-down. Your boy came out looking like he’d been shown pictures of his own mother in compromising positions.”
If Susman had seen her . . . She didn’t finish the thought. She saw now how complacency and overconfidence had crept into her thinking in the time since she’d landed in Niobe. She felt safe in Niobe, and that had made her lazy. Well, it stopped now. This was the homestretch, and with that damn interview in circulation, the situation had become dangerously fluid. It was time to tighten up her ship, and Merrick’s phone was the first step. She wondered what had been urgent enough to bring Susman down from his perch on the Upper East Side. What could the two possibly have to discuss now?
“Any idea what they talked about?”
“Those rooms are private. All I can say is the lawyer didn’t look none too pleased neither. I thought he was gonna wring Merrick’s neck.”
Wring his neck? Susman was a lot of things, but a neck-wringer wasn’t one of them.
“What did the lawyer look like?”
“Oh, big fellow. About six two, two twenty. Brother filled out that suit.”
“Susman was black?”
“There some other kind of brother?”
“And you’re sure his name was Susman?”
“What it said on his ID.”
Now she really was worried. Someone posing as Henry Susman had visited Charles Merrick in prison. A pretty brazen move, and confirmation that, as she’d feared, the interview was drawing flies. But then why hadn’t Merrick blown the whistle on the imposter instead of going along with it? Could it have been the partner that she’d long suspected Merrick had? It had never occurred to her that they would be reckless enough to meet at the prison. Maybe the partner recognized how foolish the interview had been even if Merrick couldn’t.
Nothing but conjecture, unfortunately. She didn’t know a damn thing now except that she really needed Merrick’s phone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The visitation room at Niobe Prison reminded Guo Fa of the old Shanghai Railway Station of his childhood—yellow light falling to a stained floor that would never come clean again. The burnt smell of electricity. Fa sat at a narrow metal table and studied the inmates engrossed in quiet conversation with loved ones. He rarely thought of his wife, who lived back home, but he missed her now. A distance had sprung up between them after the miscarriage that had almost taken her life and had rendered her barren. When this was all over, he would call her more regularly. He was her husband and should do better, no matter how disappointed she might be with his career.