Bad News

36

There’s no point driving the getaway car if nobody’s going to get away. Stan Murch, a stocky, open-faced guy with carroty hair, had been sitting in the black Honda Accord, engine idling, just up the block from the bank, for maybe five minutes after his passengers had gone in there, when the three cop cars arrived. No sirens; they just arrived, two angling into the No Parking area in front of the bank, the third angling curbward just past the Accord’s front bumper.

At the first flash of arriving white, Stan had switched off the engine, and as the men in blue piled out of their cars, putting on their hats and pulling out their gats, Stan pocketed his big ball of car keys and slowly eased out to the street. Not a good idea to make rapid movements around excited people with guns in their hands.

One cop from the nearest car gave Stan a quick suspicious glare over his shoulder, but Stan rested a forearm on the Honda’s roof and looked very interested in what all the cops were doing, so he gave up that suspicion and trotted on with his pals. They all went on into the bank, and Stan walked around the corner.

He hadn’t known any of those guys well, and he doubted he’d be getting to know them any better, not for several years, anyway. But none of them would expect their chauffeur still to be there, outside the bank, amid the cop cars, when they were led out. All the surprises would be over by then.

This bank and this town were way the hell and gone out on Long Island, so those had been Suffolk County cops who would be taking a belated look at the recently stolen Accord, in which Stan had worn nice leather driving gloves, only partly because it was December. If the one cop who’d glared at him tried to reconstruct the suspect from memory later, all he’d come up with would be a bland and unremarkable pale face under a black knit cap; not even the red hair had been visible.

On the other hand, this was no longer a neighborhood and a town—and a county—in which Stan wanted to linger, so once he was out of sight of the bank, he walked briskly, looking for wheels.

A supermarket. In front of it and to one side of it, a blacktop parking lot. A bunch of cars clustered in the general area of the entrance, and another smaller clump of cars were gathered in the far corner around the side. Those would belong to the employees, ordered to leave the better parking spaces for the customers. None of them would pop out the supermarket door, arms full of grocery sacks, while Stan was choosing his next transportation, so that’s where he went, deciding on the manager’s car, a blue Chrysler Cirrus—much nicer and more expensive than the resold clunkers all around it—which his third key opened like a flip-top box.

If he had noticed when he switched on the engine that the damn car was almost out of gas, he’d have left it where it sat and taken one of the cashiers’ cars instead. But he was busy looking for other things, like Suffolk County cops or the supermarket manager, so he was all the way to the on-ramp for the Long Island Expressway before the lit Fuel warning attracted his attention.

Well, hell. It was miles from here to Maximilian’s Used Cars, where Stan had decided he would deliver the Cirrus, so that the day wouldn’t be a total loss. But first he would have to put in a couple bucks’ gas.

The next exit, three miles west of where he’d gotten on the LIE, had two huge gas stations handy on the service road, both with convenience stores and car washes attached, plus gigantic signs stuck high enough up in the air to interfere with planes landing at La Guardia. Both were doing very good business.

Stan pulled in behind a late-model black Mercedes-Benz, whose driver, a big bulky bald man in a creamy tan camel’s hair coat, was just finishing at the pump. As Stan got out of the Cirrus behind the Mercedes, he could hear that guy juking those last few drops into the tank: gluk-gluk-gluk.

Stan stood at his pump and read all the options, the different grades of gasoline and the different payment methods, cash or credit, as the bald guy put his nozzle away and screwed on his tank cap. Stan chose cash, and so did the bald guy, who was walking over to the convenience store. Stan put the nozzle in the gas tank filler neck of the Cirrus, then walked over to the Mercedes, got behind the wheel, and drove off.

The Mercedes was a much better car. Also, the gas tank was full.

Maximilian’s Used Cars existed in a kind of neverland that was not quite Brooklyn, not quite Queens, and certainly not Nassau County. A small pink stucco structure blushed at the rear of the lot, behind a display of clapped-out gas guzzlers horrible enough to make any self-respecting building blush. Triangular plastic pennants in gaudy colors strung around the perimeter of the lot did their best to distract attention from the heaps on offer, as did the sentiments scrawled on many of the windshields with whitewash: !!ultraspecial!! !!better than new!! !!a gift!!

Stan Murch drove past this automotive fool’s paradise, turned at the side street just beyond it, and turned again into an anonymous weedy driveway. He pulled to a stop in a scraggly area of beaten ground flanked by the white clapboard walls of garages. Leaving the Benz, he stepped through an unlocked gate in a chain-link fence, followed a path through winter’s dead leaves and weeds, and entered the pink building through its rear door.

He was now in a simple gray-paneled office, where Max himself stood like a snarling beast over the seated figure of his secretary, Harriet, a skinny, severe, hatchet-faced woman who typed away like a robot while Max barked words into her ear: “And I don’t wanna hear from you birds again. Screw you, Maximilian Charfont.”

Stan said, “Charfont?”

“Hi, Stan,” Harriet said.

“Hi, Harriet.”

“What’s it to you?” Max wanted to know. “Read that back to me, Harriet.”

Leaving the paper in the typewriter, Harriet read while Max, a bulky older man with heavy jowls and thin white hair, his white shirt under the black vest smudged from leaning against used cars, listened and paced. He no longer smoked his old cigars, but ethereal cigar smoke wafted behind him anyway as he paced.

Harriet read: “‘Better Business Bureau of Greater New York. Gentlemen: When you first made contact with me, I assumed it was your purpose to bring me better business. Now I see your hope is to drive me out of business entirely, by aligning yourselves with these malcontents and mouth-breathers who apparently can neither see the particular automobile they are in the process of purchasing nor read the standard contract relating to that purchase. The Royally Mounted A-One Collection Agency knows these people better than you do, and I suggest you check with them before leaving any of them alone in your office. As for me, the laws of the State of New York are good enough for me, and your Boy Scout pledges are not needed, thank you very much. I would prefer that our correspondence end at this point. Sincerely, Maximilian Charfont.’”

Max stopped his pacing. He said, “Didn’t I have some swear words in there?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, what happened to them?”

“This is a very old typewriter,” Harriet pointed out. “From the Victorian era. It won’t type dirty words. If you got me a nice new computer, I could type Portnoy’s Complaint in here.”

“You don’t want a computer,” Max informed her, “and I don’t want no complaint.” Rounding on Stan, he said, “And wadda you want?”

“Well, I’d like to call my Mom, if it’s okay.”

Max lowered an eyebrow. “Local call?”

“Sure, a local call,” Stan said. “You expect my Mom to leave the five boroughs?”

“I don’t expect anything,” Max said. “That’s it, you drop by, use the phone? You wanna flush the toilet, too, drop a few notes to absent loved ones?”

“No, just the phone call,” Stan said. “And out back, there’s a Mercedes you might like.”

“Ah-huh,” Max said.

“Gas tank’s full,” Stan told his departing back.

Harriet had replaced Max’s letter with some Motor Vehicle form and was typing again, full tilt. She said, “Use the phone over there, okay?”

Meaning the room’s second desk. “Sure,” Stan said, and sat at desk number two and dialed his Mom’s cell phone, which she now kept in her cab, while she was working, so they could keep in constant touch.

“Hello!”

“Don’t shout, Mom.”

“I gotta shout, I’m next to a cement mixer!”

“You want me to call you back?”

“What?”

“You want me to call you back?”

“No, that’s okay,” Mom said, at a much more reasonable volume. “He turned off. How you doing out on Long Island?”

“Well, that’s what I’m—”

“Hold on, I got a fare, a fare!”

“Okay.”

Mom must have put the phone on the front seat next to her, amid the newspapers and take-out crap that always accumulated in there. He could hear a male voice, but not what it said, and then he heard his Mom’s distant voice say, “You got it,” and a few seconds later, she was back, very pleased. “JFK,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? Listen, that’s good, because things worked out different.”

“Long Island, you mean?”

“Well, it didn’t happen,” Stan said. “The rest of them all went off to discuss things with the officials, you know?”

“Uh-oh.”

“So it turns out,” Stan said, “I’ll be home for dinner after all.”

“No, you won’t,” Mom said.

“Why not?”

“John called, he’s got something. He wants a meet at the O.J., six o’clock.”

“Okay, then,” Stan said as Max came back in, trailing the memory of cigar smoke. “Where I am instead, I’m at Maximilian’s. When you’re done at Kennedy, come over here, pick me up, and we’ll go up to the O.J. together.”

“Don’t let that Maximilian cheat you, Stan.”

“What an idea,” Stan said, and hung up, and said, “Well, Max? Is that attractive?”

“But what does it attract?” Max wanted to know. “Truthfully, Stanley, how hot is that vehicle?”

“Well,” Stan said, “if it happened you wanted to fry an egg . . .”

“That’s what I thought. So that means,” Max explained, “a lotta work in the shop, changing parts, changing numbers on things, getting paperwork that doesn’t turn into dust in your hand. This is all expensive, Stanley, it’s time-consuming, the boys in the shop, it’s gonna take a lot of time away from their regular work, I’m not sure it’s even worth my while to get into it. But I know you, I like you, and I know you’re anxious to get movin outta here—”

“As a matter of fact, no,” Stan told him. “My Mom’s got a fare to Kennedy, and then she’s coming here to pick me up. So we got all the time in the world to discuss this. Isn’t that nice?”

“My lucky day,” Max said.

The phone rang, and Harriet answered: “Maximilian’s Used Cars, Miss Caroline speaking. Oh, I’m sorry, no, Mr. Maximilian is no longer with us, he retired to Minsk. Yes, I’ll pass that along. You, too.” Hanging up, she returned to her machine-gun typing. “The one with the machete,” she said.