Backup Men

18

IT WAS nearly dark and the April fog was settling down for the evening as I walked Wanda Gothar to the stairs that led to the second floor.

“You should have brought a coat,” I said.

“I’m not cold.” She stopped at the stairs and looked up at me. Curiously, I thought. “Why are you here, McCorkle? This isn’t your métier.”

“My wife’s out of town,” I said. It was as good an answer as any.

“Is she pretty?” Before I could reply, Wanda Gothar nodded thoughtfully and said, “Yes, she would be. You’d need that.” She looked at my face some more, studying it as if she hoped to discover some vanished trace of character. “Children?” she said.

“No.”

“Are you planning on any?”

“The demand for them seems to have slacked off.”

“And you’re faithful to your wife.” It wasn’t a question.

“Being unfaithful is hard work and I work hard to avoid that.”

“Was Padillo in love with her?”

“Who?” I knew whom she meant, but I was trying to think up an answer.

“The woman in New York.”

“He seemed to like her a lot.”

“And she was rich.”

“Very.”

“That could have stopped him.”

“From what?”

“From marrying her. Did you ever notice that in some ways he’s frightfully old-fashioned?”

“No.”

“If he weren’t concerned about such an outdated emotion as revenge, we wouldn’t be here.” She made a small gesture that took in the motel. “This is no sanctuary, it’s a trap. There must be a great many places to hide in San Francisco. He could easily have found one.”

“Why don’t you tell him?”

“Because,” she said, “I’m even more old-fashioned than he is.”

She turned and started up the stairs to her room. From the rear she looked as old-fashioned as next week. But perhaps she was right, I thought, as I made my way around the heated, Olympic-sized swimming pool that no one was swimming in, and headed for the room that Padillo had rented for me, the one from which I could pot away at Kragstein and Gitner with the office .38 if they ever showed up. And if I could see them in the fog. And if I didn’t fall asleep.

Revenge might be an old-fashioned emotion or motive or whatever it was, I thought, as I tossed the room key onto the plastic topped writing desk, but it still drew all sorts of people into all sorts of trouble. It could make a wispy little housewife chuckle as she splashed acid in the Other Woman’s face. A fifty-year-old accountant grinned at midnight while he stuffed the money into the suitcase and thought about the look on the boss’s face when it was discovered that the monthly payroll was on its way to Rio. And I had seen the self-righteousness in the face of the steady customer who had sped out to Chevy Chase to pick up his shotgun so that he could come back and blow the head off the waiter who had spilled the veal Niçoise all over the wife’s new dress.

That type of revenge was based on rage which, if heated to just the right temperature, can make any action, no matter how foolish, seem coldly logical and completely justified—even slamming the six-week-old baby against the wall because it won’t stop crying.

But there was nothing impetuous in the way that Wanda Gothar and Padillo sought their revenge. They went about it dispassionately, purposely setting a weak-jawed trap and then installing themselves as part of the bait. I decided that I didn’t want either one of them miffed at me.

I turned a chair around at the window, mixed a drink from a pint of Scotch that I’d bought in Los Angeles, turned off the lights, and settled down to watch the entrance of the motel. I even took the revolver out of my jacket pocket and laid it on a convenient table next to my chair so that I could reach it easily when I needed to shoot someone.

After an hour of this I went over to the phone and asked the desk to ring Padillo’s room. When he answered, I said, “You forgot something.”

“What?”

“The magic glasses. I can’t see through the fog.”

“I’ve noticed,” he said. “You’re the native, do you think it’ll lift?”

“Not tonight.”

“It could be to our advantage.”

“How?”

“Kragstein may not want to try it in the fog.”

“You’re the expert,” I said.

“I’m just trying to think like Kragstein.”

“Is it hard?”

“Not if you have a nasty turn of mind.”

“What you’re saying is that he could keep us up all night and then try it in the morning when he’s fresh and we’re pinching ourselves to keep awake.”

“That’s what he could hope that we think.”

“And if we do,” I said, “it could make us careless.”

“Especially around three or four o’clock in the morning.”

“So either way we stay awake,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“All night.”

“All night. What’s your visibility now?”

“Wait a second,” I said and crossed over to the window and peered out. Across the swimming pool I could still see the glow of the light above the room that the king and Scales occupied. Their curtains were drawn and I could see no shadows moving behind them. Perhaps they had already locked themselves in the bathroom.

I went back to the phone and said, “If the inspector’s hansom cab draws up, I’ll be able to tell what it is, but that’s about all. I’d say that I’ve got about forty percent visibility, but it’s going to get worse.”

“How much worse?”

“I’m not the weather bureau.”

“Guess.”

“All right, I’ll guess that it’ll get so bad within an hour that I won’t even be able to see the swimming pool.”

“Christ,” Padillo said. He was silent for a moment while he sorted out the alternatives. Or options, since he lived in Washington. “We’re going to have to feed them.”

“Don’t forget the hired help.”

“Okay. I’ll call room service and order some hamburgers and coffee. They can deliver Wanda’s and mine. You can deliver to the king and Scales. If the fog’s worse after we eat, you and I will move in with them and Wanda can take my room.”

“There’s just one other thing,” I said.

“What?”

“I want onions on mine.”

The room service waiter who brought the hamburgers and coffee was a sad-eyed youth whose despondency seemed to stem from society’s failure to recognize his true potential.

“You know what they call this?” he said. “They call this on-the-job training. I’m supposed to be learning it from the ground up.”

“The motel business?” I said, watching him slam the tray down on top of the television set.

“Motel management, they call it. Down at the employment service they claim it’s got a real future. I already been here three weeks and ain’t learned a damn thing.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “How much?”

“Six hamburgers and three coffees. That’s twelve-eighty-six with tax.”

It was an exorbitant tab, but there was no sense in arguing with the help so I handed him three fives and then watched him fumble around in his pocket for change. He gave me a small embarrassed laugh and even managed to blush a little. “I ain’t got any change,” he said, looking so wretched and apologetic that I almost wanted to pat him on the shoulder.

“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.”