What of Terry Conniston? (2 page)

There were two customers in the place, a man and a girl, not together. Floyd Rymer looked at each of them, looked at the clerk, and stopped to browse a Cutty Sark display, waiting for the customers to leave. Mitch looked out the window, thinking it might be a good idea to quit before he got fired. Pull up stakes and try somewhere else—San Francisco maybe, or Las Vegas.

He picked at the front of his shirt, pulling it loose from his chest and enjoying the store's frigid air-cooling. Outside it was a sultry August evening, thick with sweat. The low sun threw shards of painful brightness that drenched the shopping center in deep surrealist hues. A light traffic of air-conditioned cars, windows up, whistled along the boulevard, pulling in and out of gas stations, car lots, pizzarias, Fat Boy drive-ins. Nothing moved very fast; the hour before sunset was the worst time for driving. Tucson was laid out east to west and driving the boulevards put the blinding sun in everyone's eyes. If you weren't driving into it you were driving into fragmented reflections from the brittle chrome and plate glass that lined the strip city's thoroughfares.

One of the customers, a potbelly in a T-shirt, counted his change and wedged a six-pack of beer under his arm and left. The other customer, the plump-hipped girl with hair in curlers, was having a sotto voce conversation with the pimply counter clerk. The clerk said something gruff; the girl turned to leave. She stopped at the door and said, “Now don't be late pickin' me up, hear?”

“Sure—sure.”

The girl reached for the door handle. Her glance went by Floyd Rymer, stopped, went back to him—an automatic female appraisal. Floyd had that effect on them—it annoyed Mitch, it heightened his feeling of being left out of something important. Mitch was not bad-looking; why should the girl look twice at Floyd but not at him?

Floyd's amused self-assured eyes met the girl's; the girl sucked her lip and looked awkwardly away. She hurried out, hips churning.

The clerk said, “How about the boobs on her?”

Floyd said, “Big tits make them look like cows.”

“That's your opinion. How're you makin' it, Floyd?”

“Alas,” said Floyd, and spread his hands before him.

“I've been expecting you to drop by.”

Floyd smiled with his teeth and shaped his right hand into a mock pistol—thumb up, index finger pointed at the clerk, the other fingers curled back. “It's time, Leroy.”

The clerk's acned face shifted toward Mitch: “What about him?”

“He's with me.”

Mitch said, “What?”

Floyd ignored him and wagged his pistol-finger at the clerk. “Empty it out, Leroy.”

The clerk edged behind the cash register and hit the No Sale key. The drawer slid open with a tinkle and clack. Floyd said, “Have a look out the window, Mitch, see if anyone's coming this way.”

“I don't—”

“Look, we're robbing the store. We don't want to be interrupted, do we.”

“Wait a minute—we're
what?
”

“We're wasting wind,” Floyd said and backed up two paces to look past Mitch through the window. “Go ahead, Leroy, it'll be all right.”

The clerk shook open a paper bag and scooped cash into it from the register drawer. He pushed the drawer shut, furtive in haste; handed the bag to Floyd and stepped swiftly away.

“How much?” Floyd asked.

“About seven hundred.” Leroy bit a fingernail. “I don't guess you'll forget what to do with my share.”

Floyd gave him a dry look and said after a moment, “You remember what we looked like?”

“There was three of them, Officer. This great big guy had the gun. They had nylon stockings or something over their faces but I'm sure they was Mexicans. I seen them take off in a green pickup truck.”

“Stick to that.” Floyd rolled the paper bag shut and walked toward the door. “Come on, Mitch.”

Mitch drove with his head hunched, squinting under the lowered sun visor. The windshield was frosted with dust and the road was hard to see. Against his back the seat cover felt squirmy with sweat.

Floyd said, “You really ought to wash this heap.”

They drove past a future slum of sleazy crackerbox development ranch-houses with weedy yards. Floyd said, “Stay inside the speed limit, my fine buffoon. Hang a left there and take us downtown.”

Mitch manhandled the old Pontiac around the corner. Floyd looked at his face. “Lose something, Mitch?”

“I don't suppose you're going to break down and tell me what that was all about.”

“What do you think it was all about?”

“You made a deal with Leroy to stage that phony robbery and split with him. But why bring me into it? What do you want a witness for?”

“Maybe just to prove how much I trust you,” Floyd said. But a block farther on he added gently, “You're not a witness, Mitch—you're an accessory.” He smiled.

“What the hell do you mean?”

“You helped me rob the place and you're driving the getaway car.”

“For Christ's sake I didn't even
know
about it.”

Floyd turned sideways in the seat and laid his left arm along the back of it. “If I'd told you about it beforehand would you have gone with me?”

“No. Yes. Christ, I don't know, but at least you could've given me a chance to think about it first.”

“Aeah. Well there are a few things you do all right, Mitch, but thinking isn't one of them.”

Mitch closed his mouth. There was no point arguing when Floyd was in one of his superior moods. Mitch spared him a brief sidewise glance. Floyd looked relaxed, one arm crook'd on the seat back, the other propping up the roof, elbow on sill. Mitch said, “We could get in a lot of trouble.”

“Not if you keep your mouth shut.”

“Is that why you brought me in on it, to make sure I'd keep my mouth shut?”

Floyd made no answer of any kind. It was as if he hadn't heard. But he said in a patient tone, “Look, we needed money, now we've got money.”

“A few hundred bucks isn't worth five years in Florence.”

“You ought to know about that.”

“I haven't been in any trouble since I got out. I want to keep it like that.”

The street dipped under a railroad overpass and Mitch leaned forward to see into the dimness underneath. When they emerged on the downtown side the street narrowed between austere new high-rise buildings and they inched forward in traffic clotted like blood. Mitch said, “When I asked you for a job I told you I'd done a few months' time. You said that was all right so I thought you were doing me a favor, but I'm getting the feeling you hired me
because
I'd done time, not in spite of it.”

“I don't know what you're complaining about. You'll never make a living playing that guitar of yours—if you've got any talent it must be in your grandmother's name.”

“That's not true and you know it.”

“I do?”

“I hold up my end. I'm the best you've ever had in this third-rate band.”

“To be sure,” Floyd murmured. “But that does us a fat lot of good when we can't get booked.”

A light turned green and they started to move ahead. Floyd said, “Turn left up ahead and start looking for a phone booth. I want to make a call.”

Mitch made the turn into the southbound boulevard. It was a woebegone strip of lumberyards, motels and bars. There was a tight string of intersection gas stations, pennants flapping, bitterly engaged in a furious price war.

Floyd said, “Listen, there are millions of musicians around—do you really want to spend the rest of your life picking at a guitar in fifty-cent bars? How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Grade B jobs for Grade B wages. All you can get, Mitch. You want to eat beans the rest of your life? You want to get old and retire on your union pension? I don't.”

“It's better than prison.”

“Only the stupid ones end up there.”

“Here's your phone booth.”

The sun was going down fast; neon signs were lighting up. Mitch stopped by the roadside booth and Floyd got out, leaving the car door open. He didn't shut the phone-booth door and Mitch could hear the coins drop in the phone. After a minute Floyd spoke into the mouthpiece:

“This is Rymer. I've got a car that needs fixing…. No, I'm afraid it won't move at all. I'd like to have the mechanic come over here and look at it. I'm at the Twenty-first place, same as last time…. Sure, you've done some work for me before. It's a 1949 Studebaker.… Yes, right away—say ten minutes.”

Floyd hung up and got back into the car. “Let's go down Twenty-first.”

“You haven't got any 1949 Studebaker.”

“Think of that,” Floyd said.

Don't get uptight
, he told himself.
Don't bust your mind until you find out what the bastard's up to
.

It was a dingy maculose street. Shanties of corrugated metal, junkyards, here and there a squat adobe bar isolated by dusty yards. Floyd said, “That one on the corner under the Schlitz sign.”

A wheelless Model-A Ford stood on bricks in the vacant lot beside the bar. Mitch pulled into the dirt yard by the billboard; dust hung around the car when Floyd got out. The door chunked shut and Floyd leaned his shaggy head in the window. “Come in with me.”

“What for?”

Floyd came around the car and opened Mitch's door.

“You going to rob another till?”

“Relax. Nothing like that.”

Twilight fanned gray and pink across the clouds. Mitch got out of the car and followed Floyd into the bar. It was dim and pungent, lit by blue bulbs and beer ads and redolent of stale beer and tobacco smoke. Four or five patrons—Mexican laborers and an old carpenter in overalls—sat on bar stools hunched over lonely drinks. The gaudy jukebox's heavy speakers pulsed with the loud bass notes of a rock and roll tune.

Floyd propped himself on a stool, one leg stretched to the floor, and ordered two beers. He looked at the clock. Mitch watched the bartender draw beers and bring them forward. A dumpy woman came into the place, looked at nobody, went straight through to the bathroom at the back.

Floyd took a slow sip from his beer, yawned, and got off the stool. “Come on.”

“What?”

Floyd started toward the back of the room. Baffled, Mitch followed him into the rancid yellow dimness of the bathroom.

Floyd let him through and shut the door. The dumpy woman stood just outside the toilet booth; she had a plain round face, a bulbous blob of a nose, a little sweetheart rose on the collar of her cotton dress. Her eyes expressed tired contempt. “I hope you ain't wasting my time because I don't do business on the cuff.”

Floyd unrolled the paper bag and took out a fistful of cash. The woman watched with polite bovine interest. “You've just said the magic word,” she said. “How much stuff do you want?”

Mitch glanced at the door; he felt irritated and apprehensive. He looked at the woman and at Floyd. Floyd stood motionless, the smoke of a cigarette making a vague suspended cloud before his cold face. “Enough to take care of a big habit for a week or so,” he said.

“Ten pops?”

“Make it fifteen.”

“Cost you ten apiece,” she said with no show of emotion. “A hundred and fifty.”

Floyd counted it off in twenties and tens, squared up the sheaf and put the rest back in the paper bag. He handed the bag to Mitch. The woman reached for the money but Floyd drew back. “Where's the stuff?”

“I'll get it to you.”

“No,” Floyd said.

“You don't trust me?” She smiled a little. “Look, my mother didn't raise any stupid kids. I'm not going to walk into a place like this with that much junk in my handbag.”

“Then get it.”

The woman pinched her lower lip between two fingers. Her studious gaze shifted from Floyd to Mitch; several beats went by before she said, “You're not users, either one of you. How do I know you're not cops?”

“We're not cops,” Floyd said dryly.

Uncertainty quivered, in her eyes; finally Floyd smiled and shook his head and said, “Use your head. Did I turn you in last time?”

“All right, all right. It's outside in the car. Follow me out in a minute.”

When she left the bathroom Floyd made no move to follow her. The door squeaked shut and Mitch said immediately, “I didn't know your brother had a habit
that
big. How long can he last like that?”

“How should I know?”

“Don't you care at all?”

Floyd just looked at him. There was no reading his face. Mitch said, “Why in hell don't you send him in for a cure?”

“He's had the cure twice,” Floyd muttered, and turned, his mind on something else. He washed his hands at the sink and dried them on a paper towel. “All right,” he said, and went out.

Mitch paid for the beers on the way out. They found the dumpy woman waiting in a dusty new station wagon. She had the engine running, the lights switched off, the door shut and the window open. It was getting dark fast. She handed Floyd a small package and Mitch saw Floyd turn over the money—it disappeared immediately inside her dress, which was probably where she'd had the goods hidden all along. She pulled the gear lever into reverse. Floyd said in a mild way, “If this stuff's no good I'll know where to find you.”

The station wagon backed out and swung around into the street before she turned the lights on. It fishtailed away with a scudding of back tires chattering for traction. Floyd coughed and batted dust away. “That's what happens when you give petty authority to scum like that. Let's go.”

Mitch got in the car and started it up and they drove through the raw, neon-lighted streets without talk. He was thinking there were a lot of things about Floyd that didn't make sense. Floyd's junkie brother couldn't play the bass fiddle for sour apples—if Floyd had had a good bass man he could have put together a good band a long time ago. Georgie had a $150-a-week habit: he was nothing but a liability. Yet Mitch had just seen Floyd take stupid risks for Georgie's sake. Floyd was not a stupid man. It didn't quite add up. Brotherly love did not fit into Floyd's image.