Backup Men (18 page)

“I didn’t think that you would.”

“I can run get it.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “You know, if you get tired of this job, they’ve got some fairly good acting schools down in L.A.”

He made himself look both interested and grateful. “You think they might let me in?”

“No, but they might let you teach.”

After he had gone I put my own food aside to cool and carried the tray containing the rest over to the king and Scales. I knocked on the door three times, announcing loudly that it was McCorkle. I could hear the bolt and lock being undone and after Scales made me tell him three more times who it was he opened the door.

“Hamburgers and coffee,” I said, entering the room and putting the tray down on the writing desk. The king was sitting in a chair, fully dressed. Scales was hovering around, still wearing his worn blue suit. He looked even more seedy than usual.

“The fog, Mr. McCorkle,” Scales said, “will it get worse?”

“Probably. If it does, Padillo and I are going to move in with you after we eat.”

The king was already devouring one of the hamburgers and he didn’t mind talking with his mouth full. He wanted to know whether the fog would be an advantage to us or to them. At least that’s what I thought he asked.

“To them,” I said. “We have to stay awake no matter what. They don’t. They can take a nice nap and then use the fog as cover.”

“When do you think that they’ll—”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Just keep your door locked until we get here.”

Walking back to my room I noticed that the fog had grown thicker even in the short time that I had been with Scales and the king. When I was inside I put the revolver back on the table, placed the hamburgers and coffee next to it, and sat down to watch, wait and eat. There wasn’t much to watch now because I could no longer see the light that burned above the room where the two men waited for someone to kill them. Or try to. One car drove in and went past on its way to a room two doors down from mine, but I could see only its headlights.

I was finishing the last of the coffee when there was a knock on my door. It was Padillo. He came in wearing a sour look and shaking his head.

“It’s worse,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m going to get Wanda. You may as well rejoin them.”

“All right.”

I put the revolver back in my pocket and we started around the swimming pool. Another car entered the motel drive and moved slowly past my room, then headed toward the end of the U-shaped drive. I couldn’t tell what kind of car it was or how many people it contained. Both of us watched it carefully. When the car rounded the end of the U, it cut its lights, but we could tell from the sound of its engine that it was still moving, heading up the other arm of the U-shaped drive, heading toward the room occupied by Scales and the king.

We were still at the pool, halfway from either of its ends, when the driver gunned the car’s engine once as if to pick up speed. We could see nothing until he applied the brakes and the band of red lights across the car’s rear sent a ruby glow through the fog.

Padillo was already racing around the pool. He swore as he ran. We rounded the pool’s far end just as the explosion ripped through the fog. It was a deep, harsh cracking blast, far too loud for a shot. Before its echo died away there was another blast and then a third and after the echoes there was nothing but silence until two car doors slammed. The dull red glow of the car taillights blinked off and the engine screamed and whined as the driver jammed the accelerator to the floor and shot the car toward the motel entrance.

By then we were at the room that Scales and the king occupied. Padillo had his gun out, but there was no longer anything to shoot at. He looked disappointed. Some people had popped out of doors and were asking the fog and each other and the night what had happened, but none of them seemed to know. The door to the room had been blown off its hinges and into the driveway. We entered the room quickly and saw that the bathroom door also had been ripped from its fastenings, but the bathroom light had somehow escaped. It was the only light there was.

The bed nearest the outside door had received a direct hit and the foam rubber of its mattress littered the room. The writing desk was smashed as were the chairs. There were no longer any pictures on the walls. The innards of the smashed TV set were smoking. Padillo went into the bathroom and came back with a glass of water. He poured it on the TV set and it hissed for a few moments.

There was nothing salvageable left. The mirror that had hung above the writing desk now lay in tiny pieces on the floor. There was no glass in the windows. There was something brown splashed on the walls just above the ruined writing desk, but on close inspection it turned out to be coffee.

Padillo turned slowly, giving the mess that was the room a careful survey as he stuck the automatic back into the waistband of his trousers. My revolver was still in my jacket pocket because I had forgotten about it again. Padillo turned to look at me, shaking his head in mild disbelief and disgust that seemed not so mild. The disbelief was directed at the room, the disgust at himself.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” he said.

“It lacks a little something. Such as gore.”

“No blood-spattered walls. No unattached limbs lying about.”

“Which means,” I said, “that there was nobody home.”

“It also means something else.”

“What?”

“We’ve been sacked. Fired.”

I gave the room another elaborate glance. “We probably deserved it. That’s just an offhand opinion, of course.”

Padillo bent down and picked up a piece of blackened foam rubber and sniffed it before tossing it away. “Grenades. Three of them.”

“I thought I heard three.”

Padillo looked about the room once more, as if searching for something, perhaps a farewell note. “They had to have some reason.”

“The king and Scales?”

He nodded.

“Reason for what?”

“For running out on us.”

I gave the room one last final look. What hadn’t been demolished had been ruined. “If they had a reason,” I said, “I think I know what kind it was.”

“What kind?”

“A sound one.”

19

PADILLO and Wanda Gothar waited in the Ford while I went into the motel office where the sad-eyed young room service waiter was holding down the front desk. The night manager was back at the bombed-out room, clucking his tongue over the damage and waiting for the police to arrive.

“Hey, didja hear those bombs?” the young man asked. “Big boom, huh?”

“I was over there,” I said.

“Didja know those two guys?”

“Just casually. They said they had to catch a plane and gave me some money to take care of any charges they might have run up.”

“They didn’t have no charges,” he said. “That was the first thing Hinckle checked. Hinckle’s the night manager.”

“He didn’t check with me,” a woman’s voice said. I turned and a middle-aged woman with frosted hair and green eyeshadow glared at me from her post at the switchboard. “I got T and C on that long-distance call they made and didn’t pay for.”

“T and C’s time and charges,” the young man said, assuming my ignorance.

I reached for my wallet. “I’ll be glad to pay it.”

“They should’ve paid it themselves,” the woman said. “A lot of people think they can skip out on their phone bills here just because it’s a motel and they have to pay in advance. The telephone company don’t like it either.”

“To hell with the phone company,” the young man said, but not too loudly.

“If you’ll just give me the time and charges,” I said.

“We’re gonna start making people put their home phone numbers down when they register,” the woman said. “Then if they call Honolulu or New York and try to skip out without paying, they’ll get stuck for it when they get their monthly bill. The phone company said they’d cooperate.”

“That’s Mrs. Hinckle,” the young man said. “She used to work for the phone company. She thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world. You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think it’s a monopoly and I got a way to beat it.”

“How?” I said, interested in spite of myself.

“You know how when you get your monthly bill the phone company sends along an envelope that you can mail your payment back to them in?”

I nodded.

“Well, all that envelope’s got on it is just their name. Not yours, just theirs. So you know what I do?”

“No.”

He looked around as if he were about to slip me the formula for transforming lead into gold. “I don’t put no stamp on it,” he whispered. “And they gotta pay for it.” He went on hurriedly, still whispering. “Now suppose everybody did this. How many people got phones, maybe fifty, a hundred million?”

“Say fifty.”

“So fifty million times six cents is how much? That’s three million dollars a month the phone company gotta pay in postage due if everybody did it.”

“Ingenious,” I said. “I’ll spread the word.”

“We gotta start small, but it’s coming.”

“What?”

“The revolution, man.”

Mrs. Hinckle bore down on me, clutching a slip of paper. “Number twenty-six owes eleven dollars and twenty-eight cents for a call to Washington. That’s D.C., not the state.”

I handed her fifteen dollars. “Could I have a receipt, please?”

She nodded and went back to her switchboard. From outside, I could hear the wail of a police siren. I estimated it to be two blocks away. “And the number that was called, too, if you don’t mind.”

She looked up and glared at me again, but nodded, and kept on writing. I thanked her when she handed me the receipt and she managed a “You’re welcome.” As I turned away, the would-be revolutionary whispered, “Don’t forget about the phone bill deal.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. “It’s a great step forward.”

On the way to the Ford I looked at the Washington number that Mrs. Hinckle had written on the receipt. I didn’t recognize it, but I have a bad memory for phone numbers. Just as I opened the door on the driver’s side, the police car swept into the motel entrance, its siren dying with a reluctant moan. The two uniformed cops gave me a quick glance, but apparently saw nothing that interested them. I got in the car quickly, started the engine, and headed down Van Ness. Wanda Gothar was in front, Padillo in back. I handed him the receipt.

“They made a call to Washington,” I said. “Does that number mean anything to you?”

He read it, said no, and handed it up to Wanda. She shook her head and gave it back to me. “They must have talked for five or six minutes at least,” I said.

“All right,” Padillo said, “let’s go to the St. Francis.”

“You don’t think that you’re going to find them there, do you?” Wanda said, not trying to conceal the sarcasm in her voice.

“I’m not trying to find them right now,” he said. “At ten o’clock tomorrow that’ll be easy. The king’ll be down at the oil company with his fountain pen uncapped—if he’s still alive. But sometime between now and then Kragstein is going to learn that those three grenades didn’t kill anybody. So he’s going to start looking. First, he’ll look for the king and Scales and when he can’t find them, he’s going to start looking for us. I want to make it easy for him and the St. Francis will be the first place he’ll look because he knows that’s where you’ve been staying.”

Wanda Gothar turned around in the seat so that she could face Padillo. “For the last ten minutes I’ve been asking you questions and you haven’t had any answers. You don’t know why Kassim and Scales vanished. You don’t know where they might have gone. You don’t even know how they managed to slip by you.”

“Fog,” I said. “A pair of elephants could have slipped by.”

“They weren’t elephants,” she snapped. “They were two men who’re none too smart and not nearly clever. Something frightened them or forced them into flight and it’s good that it did because otherwise they’d be dead. What’s the matter with you, Padillo? Are you so preoccupied with revenging that dead woman in New York that you can’t keep your mind on the job at hand?”

“I made a mistake, Wanda. Let’s leave it at that.” I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure that I knew what it looked like—stiff and drawn with his mouth stretched into that thin, hard line.

“We’d better find them,” she said.

“It’s a big town,” I said. “By now they could be in Berkeley or Sausalito or even Oakland, although God knows why anyone would go there. I don’t mind spending the night looking, but if I do, I want to know that I’m at least warm if not red-hot.”

“We’ve only got one lead so let’s try it,” Padillo said.

“The Washington phone number?” Wanda asked.

“If we have any other lead, nobody’s told me about it.”

After I let Wanda and Padillo out in front of the St. Francis, I put the car in the underground lot beneath Union Square and joined them in Wanda’s suite. Padillo tossed me a key. “You’ve got a new room,” he said.

“What about the name?”

“It’s your old one. We’re no longer hiding.”

“Did you call the Washington number?”

“Not yet.” He turned to Wanda. “You want to call or do you want me to?”