Backup Men

6

“WHAT DO they want you to do?” I said after Burmser slammed the door hard enough to wake three floors of neighbors.

“Keep Wanda Gothar’s client alive.”

“Do they know who he is?”

“Burmser’s boss does. Or says he does.”

“Is he important?”

Padillo sank back in the sofa and stretched out his legs, staring at the ceiling. “He could be the richest kid in the world. If he lives long enough.”

“He’s important all right.”

“You’ve heard about what’s been going on in what they now call Llaquah?”

I thought a moment before answering. “It’s way down the Persian Gulf, about the size of Delaware. It’s also an absolute monarchy with a new oil strike that supposedly makes Kuwait look like a dry hole.”

“Well, the kid’s going to be the king of Llaquah as soon as his brother gets through dying.”

“The playboy brother,” I said. “I read somewhere that he had an accident last month. In France, I think.”

Padillo nodded, still staring at the ceiling. “He flipped his Maserati while doing one-hundred-and-thirty. He was badly burned and his chest was crushed and I don’t know what they’re keeping him alive with. Prayer probably. But he’s now something of a medical curiosity because by rights he should have been dead two weeks ago.”

“When does the wicked uncle come in?” I said.

“What wicked uncle?”

“The one who filed the tie rods on the Maserati and now is just waiting to do in the younger brother.”

Padillo stared at me. “I thought you’d sworn off those late movies.”

“I sneak one now and again.”

“Well, there’s no wicked uncle, but there are a couple of oil companies.”

“That’s almost as good,” I said. “Two giant industrial combines locked in a death struggle over a tiny corner of the world which contains the richest oil reserves known to—”

“No death struggle,” Padillo said. “They’re in cahoots—a cooperative venture, I think it’s called.”

“But nothing so grand as a cartel?”

“No.”

“What’s the kid’s name?”

“Peter Paul Kassim.”

“Peter Paul?”

Padillo nodded and stretched. He yawned, too. I caught it and yawned back. “That seems to be one of his problems,” he said after we were through yawning at each other. “At sixteen he underwent a religious experience and rejected his Muslim faith, converted to Catholicism, and entered a French monastery where he’s been ever since.”

“I take it that the folks back home didn’t much care for that.”

“Not much.”

“Why is he in the States? His brother’s not dead yet.”

“They never got along and when the brother dies and Peter Paul becomes king, the oil companies are going to need his signature on the documents that will complete their deal. The older brother was to have signed them here, but he flipped his car before he could make the trip.”

“How old is Peter Paul?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Who wants him dead?”

Padillo yawned again. “Not the oil companies.”

“No.”

“There’s no wicked uncle.”

“Pity.”

“So that’s what I’m supposed to do. Keep Peter Paul alive and at the same time find out who wants him dead.”

“And you said yes.”

“No. I only said that I’d try to keep him alive.”

“For how long?”

“Until his brother dies and he automatically becomes king and signs the documents.”

“What about afterwards?”

“Right now Peter Paul hasn’t got a dime. The Gothar twins must have taken him on spec—a contingency basis. When he signs those oil company contracts, or whatever they are, he gets five million dollars for his personal use. He can hire his own army then.”

“Why don’t the oil companies move in, if they want him to stay alive?”

“They don’t want to get caught in a crossfire. If something happens to Peter Paul, they’re fully prepared to do business with his successor—whoever he may be.”

“What about the folks back home?”

“They won’t lift a finger because of his infidel dog religion. They’d probably be just as happy if he got himself killed.”

“So that leaves you and Wanda Gothar. I’d think that Peter Paul would welcome the Secret Service after what happened to Walter.”

Padillo shrugged and rose. “Maybe he’s just trying to find out how it feels to have royal prerogatives.”

“Or he’s stupid.”

“There’s always that possibility.”

“Why?” I said.

“You mean why did I take it?”

“That’s right.”

Padillo moved to the door before answering. “I want that letter.”

“On White House stationery.”

Padillo nodded. “On White House stationery.”

I shook my head. “You don’t need it anymore. Five years ago maybe, but not now. You have more than enough to blackmail them with if you really wanted to say no.”

Padillo smiled, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the chair—at the last chair that Walter Gothar ever sat in. “Maybe I’ve gone in for coercion,” he said.

“No. You’re not much good at that either. And they won’t write anything that you could really use.”

“I thought there might be a line or two in it thanking me for doing another swell job for God and country.”

“It was Walter Gothar getting himself killed here in my apartment, wasn’t it?”

Padillo shrugged and put his hand on the door knob. “There was that,” he said, “and something else.”

“What?”

“Maybe I do owe the twins’ older brother a favor.”

“He’s dead and you’re not that sentimental.”

“That’s right,” Padillo said. “I’m not, am I?”

Padillo showed me the letter when it arrived by special White House messenger the next afternoon. It thanked him for his services, but after that it got a little vague. In fact, it was as fine a piece of obfuscated prose as I’d ever read.

Padillo held it up to the light to admire the watermark. “Did you ever hear of the guy who signed it?”

“No.”

“I think he’s in charge of the second-floor washrooms.”

“It’s on White House stationery though. That’s what you asked for.”

“So I did.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

Padillo refolded the letter and put it back in its envelope. “Do you still have your safe-deposit box?”

I nodded. Padillo handed me the letter. “Put it in there for me, will you?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a pretty valuable document, all right.”

“What do you keep in that box?”

“My own valuables.”

“Such as?”

“Well, there’s my eighteen-ninety-eight Indian head penny.”

“My.”

“And there’s the original manuscript of my prize-winning essay entitled, ‘What America Means to Me,’ written at age nine.”

“Priceless.”

“There’s also my Army discharge and twenty shares of Idaho Power and Light, and one thousand dollars case money in small bills. And should something happen to Fredl, she gave me the only copy in existence of her secret recipe for Denver chili.”

“That letter’s going to feel right at home,” Padillo said.

“Of course, if he’s not reelected, the letter won’t be worth much.”

“I’ve already got that figured out.”

“How?”

“Next time he runs, I plan to vote for him.”

We dropped the White House letter off at my bank on our way down to police headquarters where we spent an hour making statements for Lieutenant Schoolcraft. Sergeant Vernon wasn’t around, nor was I interested enough to ask whether it was his day off.

Padillo and I dictated our separate statements into a tape recorder and while we waited for them to be transcribed we sat in a small office on the third floor of Metropolitan Police Headquarters on Indiana Avenue, Northwest. Time slows down once you start dealing with the police. It slows down even further if they manage to put you someplace where they can turn a key in a lock. The office that we waited in contained nothing to hurry time up. It contained three desks, three telephones, a couple of aging manual typewriters, some chairs, and Lieutenant Schoolcraft.

He sat behind one of the desks. Padillo and I sat in a couple of chairs that didn’t match each other or any of the rest of the furniture in the room. No one had said anything for several minutes, possibly because none of us could think of anything that would be mutually encouraging or enlightening. Or even pleasant.

“It’s just like I thought,” Schoolcraft said finally, putting his feet up on the corner of his desk.

“What?” Padillo said.

“The way you two dudes acted last night. Real cool and calm. Too cool and too calm really—just like it was nothing new to get home from work and find a dead body in the living room. Or maybe the bathtub.”

“We both have low blood pressure,” Padillo said.

“That wasn’t why they called me at six in the morning to tell me about you two.”

“Tell you what?” I said.

“It wasn’t so much about you, McCorkle, as it was your partner here. Did you know that you got a special kind of partner, the kind they’ll bend the rules for?” Schoolcraft’s tone was almost as bitter as the expression on his face. “If I remember right, they told me—not asked me—they told me to ‘extend every courtesy’ and to ‘expedite the normal investigatory routine.’ It’s just like Padillo here was something more than a guy who owns half of a fancy gin mill.”

“He’s got a host of friends,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Schoolcraft said and closed his eyes and massaged them with his thumb and forefinger. “Well, after I got that call, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m not cool and calm like you two. I get sort of excitable.”

I decided that he was about as excitable as wallpaper.

“Well, anyway, I couldn’t get back to sleep so I came on down here about seven thirty just to make sure that everyone was going to be courteous enough for you. Guess who got here five minutes later?”

“Wanda Gothar,” Padillo said.

Schoolcraft didn’t like Padillo’s answer and he didn’t seem to care whether both of us knew it. Maybe he was tired of being courteous. Or maybe he was just fed up with a job that brought him phone calls at six o’clock in the morning instructing him to be nice to persons that he didn’t want to be nice to. His dark face twisted itself into a grimace that almost lapsed into a sneer. Then it relaxed and returned to its normal, expressionless pattern. It was a look that he could wear nicely to a funeral or a christening. But Schoolcraft couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice. I don’t think I could have either.

“I just can’t seem to come up with any surprises at all for you this morning,” he said. “But seeing that you’re so good at guessing, maybe you can guess what Miss Gothar wanted.”

“She wanted you to give me a message,” Padillo said.

Schoolcraft nodded his head several times, his eyes never leaving Padillo’s face. “You know something,” he said. “She reminds me of you. You two don’t look anything alike, but she sort of reminds me of you. Her brother’s just been killed and all and there’re a couple of questions that I thought I’d like to ask her when she’s still shook, you know—such as where’s she been and does she maybe have some idea about who might have wanted her brother dead. Questions like that. But before I even get my mouth set she’s giving me a message to give to you.”

“Wanda’s like that,” Padillo said. “She’s always held up well under pressure.”

“Well, since I didn’t have any instructions to treat her special, I went ahead and asked my questions.” Schoolcraft fell silent for a few moments, as if recalling the questions he’d asked and the answers he’d received. “You know how long I’ve been asking questions? I mean, professionally?”

“How long?” I said.

“Seventeen years. I’ve questioned all kinds: motherfuckers and stiff screwers and childbeaters and highgrade con artists and people who just cut up other people because they thought it was fun. You name it and I’ve asked about it. But I never questioned anybody like her.”

“She’s special all right,” Padillo said.

Schoolcraft nodded and it made him look even more unhappy than before. “She wasn’t shook,” he said. “Not the least little bit.”

“She wouldn’t show it,” Padillo said.

“No tears, no voice tremor, nothing. She flat refused to make a positive ID of the body, her own brother. Now with anybody else I’d say that maybe they couldn’t stand the sight, you know. But with her—” Schoolcraft broke off his sentence and was silent for another moment or so as if deciding how he wanted to describe Wanda Gothar’s attitude. “She just didn’t really give a shit,” he said finally.

“That’s right,” Padillo said.

Alertness flickered in Schoolcraft’s dark eyes and his nose wrinkled a couple of times as if he had just smelled something he liked. “You mean she hated her own brother—twin brother, at that?”

Padillo shook his head slightly. “They were close. Very close.”

“Then why doesn’t she give a shit that he’s dead?”

“Because he is.”

“So?”

“When somebody’s dead, there’s not much anyone can do about it, is there? Wanda’s what might be called the ultimate realist. For her, dead is dead.”

Schoolcraft moved his head slowly from side to side several times. “It’s not natural.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling as if thinking about what he had just said. “Maybe that’s not the right word. Normal. It’s not normal.”

“It is for her,” Padillo said.

“When I asked her where she was last night—all night—you know what she said?”

When neither of us replied, Schoolcraft looked pleased. “She said, ‘Out.’ That’s all. Just one word, ‘Out.’”

“You leaned on her pretty hard, I suppose,” Padillo said.

Schoolcraft nodded. “Hard enough for nearly an hour. But all I got was that one word, Out. No explanation, no evasions, not even an apology. Just that one word.” He paused to shake his head, perhaps at the wonder of it all. “Guess what she said when I asked her if she had any idea about who might have needed to kill her brother?”

“I can’t,” Padillo said.

“She said no. Just one word again, n-o. No. She said it fourteen times in a row because I started counting.”

“You gave up on fourteen?” I said.

“I gave up at six, but went on to fourteen and then quit because all I’d get to number fifteen or sixteen or even thirty-two was that same one-word answer, no. So I didn’t get much this morning, not from her, not from you, not even from the people who run this place, except some bad advice, but I can get that from them every day.”

“You got something else,” Padillo said.

“What?”

“A message for me.”

A broad white smile split Schoolcraft’s dark face. It was a boy’s smile really, a happy boy, and I felt that he seldom had much cause to show it off.

“That’s right,” he said. “I did get that. It’s some message. You ready?”

“I’m ready,” Padillo said.

“She said to tell you, ‘In or out by four in six-two-one.’ Isn’t that some message?”

“Some message,” Padillo agreed.

“You got it?”

“I’ve got it.”

“You know what it means?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not going to tell me.”

“No.”

“You want me to tell you what it means?”

“All right.”

Schoolcraft put his feet back on the floor, rose, and leaned over his desk toward Padillo. “It means that you and me will be seeing a lot more of each other.”