No Questions Asked

19

Max Spivey brought the $100,000 by my motel at twenty minutes to five and we counted it together.

“You must know some bank vice-president,” I said.

“We know a lot of bank vice-presidents, but none of them likes to part with a hundred thousand in cash, especially at four in the afternoon.”

“Well, it’s all there,” I said and closed the cheap black attaché case that Spivey had placed on the bed. “Would you like a drink?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

I opened a fresh bottle of Scotch that I had bought earlier and mixed two drinks. Spivey took a big swallow of his and leaned back in the lime green plastic chair. The chair creaked.

“Did you ever double-cross anybody like this before?” he said.

I shook my head. “Never. It’s not good for business.”

“But since they crossed you back in Washington, you figure it’s okay if you cross them this time, right?”

“If you want to go into the morality of it, I guess that’s the way it is.”

“How’re you going to do it?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “It depends upon what kind of a switch they come up with. All I need is a good look at whoever it is that I turn the money over to. When the thief sets up the mechanics of a switch, there’s usually a moment when he’s got to depend on the go-between’s not peeking. Well, I’m going to peek.”

“What if they come up with something so clever that you can’t?”

“Then I’ll have to do something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You want to know something?” Spivey said.

“Sure.”

“I think you earn your money.”

We sat there in a not uncomfortable silence with our drinks until five o’clock. At two past five the phone still hadn’t rung. “You think they’re going to call?” Spivey said.

“They said they would.”

It rang at three minutes past five. I picked it up on its second ring and said, “Yes?”

“Do you have the money?” the distorted voice said.

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’m going to say this just once so I want you to listen real good. First, get yourself some real heavy fishing line, about thirty or thirty-five feet of it. Second, have the money in something that you can tie the fishing line to. Third, go to the Santa Monica pier at two fifty-five. That’s two fifty-five A.M. Start walking toward the end of the pier. Take your time and go real slow because we’re going to be watching. Go along the pier until you come to the bar and grill called Moby’s Dock. It’s on the left. When you pass Moby’s Dock start counting your paces. Ninety-nine paces past Moby’s Dock there’s a place where the pier sort of juts out. That’s where you lower the fishing line over. We’ll tie the book to it and you can draw it up. Then you tie what you’ve got the money in to the fishing line and lower that. Wait three minutes while we check the money. After that, you can take off. But don’t try anything tricky because there’s going to be somebody between you and where the pier starts and if you try something tricky, you won’t make it back to New York. You got it?”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

The phone went dead. I hung it up and turned toward Spivey. “The Santa Monica pier at three A.M.” I said. “I lower a fishing line over the end and bring up the book. Then I lower the money. It’s nice.”

“Where does that leave you?” he said.

“You mean how am I going to be able to cross them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know yet. I probably won’t know until I’m in the middle of it.”

“What if you can’t?”

“Well, if I can’t, I can’t. And then you’ll be out another hundred thousand, but you’ll have the book back, and I won’t make as much money as I’d hoped I would.”

“One other thing,” Spivey said.

“What?”

“What if they decide to cross you again?”

“That thought occurred to me.”

“And?”

“If they try a cross, I’ll put contingency plan number two-A into operation.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

Guerriero didn’t show up until six o’clock. He came in carrying a brown paper sack.

“Did you get it?” I said.

He nodded. “I had to go see a couple of people, but I got it.” He handed me the paper sack. I opened the sack and took out a .38 Colt. It looked like a Detective Special. I made sure that it was loaded and then put it on the bedside table.

“Well, what did you decide?” I said.

“Tell me again how much,” he said. “That’s the only part that I like so far.”

“Five thousand dollars,” I said.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“It is indeed.”

“It would pay for a year’s tuition.”

“It would pay for a lot of things. Well?”

“I’ve been trying to rationalize it.”

“And?”

“Well, I think I’ve come up with something.”

“What?”

“If I did it and you paid me five thousand, and I spent it on tuition, then I’d sort of be working my way through college, wouldn’t I?”

“Sure you would,” I said.

I rented a car from the Hertz people. I rented a big Ford LTD because I have this theory that before long all that they will be renting are Honda Civics, and that by renting a big Ford I was actually doing research into what will soon become the nation’s past.

The Ford had power everything and after Guerriero dropped me off at the Hertz place I drove around a while, running the windows up and down, adjusting the seat, and playing with the button that locked the doors. The Ford also had a lot of scat to it and on a quiet street where there didn’t seem to be any kids or cops I jammed the accelerator down to the floor. The Ford took off with a whoosh and by the time I had reached the end of the block I was doing an effortless seventy.

Back at the motel I found Maude Goodwater’s number and dialed it. When she answered on the third ring, I said, “This is Philip St. Ives. You mentioned that we might have dinner sometime. I was wondering if you could make it tonight?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure—”

“There’s been a new ransom demand for the book and the insurance company has agreed to pay it. In fact, there’s a chance that I might get the book back tonight, but I have to eat first. Why don’t you join me?”

There was a silence. Finally she said, “It’s — well, it’s such a surprise, I mean about the book, I don’t know quite what to say.”

“Say you’ll have dinner with me.”

“I’d already decided to do that. The reason I said I wasn’t sure is because I meant I wasn’t sure what I could feed you.”

“I was sort of planning on us going out.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it.” she said. “When I mentioned something about dinner, I meant dinner here. Do you like lamb chops?”

“Very much.”

“Lamb chops it’ll be. Seven or seven-thirty?”

“Fine.”

“I’m dying to hear about the book, but I’ll make myself wait until you get here. My God, I’m excited! I didn’t realize I was so caught up in this thing.”

“I haven’t got it back yet.”

“Don’t tell me any more. You can tell me all about it when you get here.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’ll be about seven-thirty.”

We said good-bye and I hung up the phone and found the L.A. map and studied it until I was pretty sure that I could get to the Santa Monica pier without getting lost. I reached under the pillow and took out the .38 and put it in my jacket pocket. I picked up the cheap attaché case and glanced around the room to see if there was anything that I had forgotten. There didn’t seem to be so I went out to the Ford and locked the attaché case in the trunk.

I took Wilshire out to San Vicente and followed that until I found a hardware store. I went in and bought a length of fishing line and a flashlight. Next door was a liquor store so, remembering my manners, I bought a bottle of red wine and, a couple of doors down, a bunch of flowers.

Back in the Ford, I headed west on San Vicente. Under the coral trees that grew along the strip that divided the boulevard, some serious-faced joggers, hard breathers all, plugged along in their slow and solitary race toward better health.

When San Vicente ended at Ocean Avenue I turned left and drove until I came to Colorado Avenue. I turned right and went up over a viaduct that had a 10 m.p.h. sign on it. On the other side of the viaduct was the broad Santa Monica pier that seemed to stretch a half mile or so out into the ocean.

On the pier I drove slowly past the old merry-go-round, which seemed strangely familiar to me until I remembered that it was the one that had been used in The Sting, although the film was supposedly laid in Chicago. Past the merry-go-round on the pier’s left-hand side was a series of hamburger and hot dog stands, a shooting gallery, some souvenir shops, a fishmonger, and maybe a double handful of strollers, mostly young, who wandered up and down in search of amusement.

When I got to Moby’s Dock, which turned out to be a modest-looking restaurant and bar, I stopped the car next to a No Parking sign and got out. I crossed the pier and, starting at the west edge of Moby’s Dock, began walking toward the end of the pier, counting my paces. When I got to ninety-nine I stopped.

The pier’s grey metal railing jutted out in a shallow U-shape to form a railed-in area. It was about wide enough and deep enough for four people to stand in. An elderly black man was standing in it, a fishing pole in his hand, a look of patience on his face.

I moved up next to the black man and peered over the railing. The sea, a soiled grey, lapped at the wooden pilings about thirty feet below. As I turned to go the black man nodded to me. “Catch anything?” I said.

“Just fishin’,” he said and grinned. I grinned back and returned to the Ford. I drove on down the pier until it ended at a group of small buildings that housed a bait shop and the pier’s maintenance office. There was a turn-around place that I used, and started driving slowly back toward the beginning of the pier.

When I got to the railed-in enclosure that jutted out from the edge of the pier, the old black man was putting some fresh bait on his hook. He looked up and saw me and gave me a wry smile. I waved at him and drove on, looking carefully at all the nooks and crannies and doorways and recesses that, once it grew dark, somebody could hide in. There were a lot of them.

I left the pier thinking that I didn’t much like what I had seen. I didn’t like it because it had no emergency exit. There was only one way on and one way off and there were too many places that somebody with a gun or a knife or just a very large rock could hide. From the point of view of whoever had the stolen book the pier was perfect. From my point of view it was awful.

From Ocean Avenue I cut down to the Pacific Coast Highway and headed toward Malibu. It was almost seven o’clock and I got to drive into a sunset that had to be called spectacular, for lack of a better word. It had bands of hot reds and angry oranges and at its center was the glowing yellow ball of the sun that seemed to be plunging into a crimson sea.

The sun had almost gone down by the time I reached Maude Goodwater’s house on Malibu Road. I took the gun from my jacket pocket and locked it in the glove compartment. Carrying the flowers and the bottle of wine I went around to the trunk and took out the attaché case.

She opened the door to my ring and accepted the wine and the flowers gracefully, as if they were a complete surprise. She was wearing a long, loose gown of a thin creamy material that was gathered at her waist with a golden cord. As she arranged the flowers in a vase I watched her body move beneath the dress. I found it an extremely erotic sight.

“What would you call it?” she said, turning to watch the sun as it dropped down behind two low hills of a point of land that edged out into the sea.

“I was thinking of ‘spectacular’ on the way out,” I said. “But that’s not really a very good word.”

“It’s different every night,” she said. “Sometimes it’s so beautiful that the only way I can react to it is to sit down and cry. That’s sort of dumb, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “Not really. Funny, but I thought that the sun was supposed to set in the west. Isn’t that west?” I pointed at the ocean.

She shook her head. “That’s south. The coast curves out here and the house faces due south. It mixes everybody up.”

“You’ll miss it, won’t you?” I said. “The beach and the house and the sea. I know I would.”

She nodded slowly, as if she were trying to decide just how much she would miss it. “I’m really hooked on it and it’s got so that it’s hard to imagine living anywhere else. Maybe if I get the book back, I can sell that and maybe stay on for a while longer. Do you think I really will get it back?”

“I think so,” I said. “After I pay them the hundred thousand tonight, or this morning, I guess, they’ll have milked it for all that it’s worth.”

“Let’s have a drink,” she said, “and then you can tell me about it. What would you like, a martini?”

“I’d like a martini, but I think I’d better have Scotch.”

She went over to the bar and came back after a minute or two with the drinks. She handed me mine and then sank gracefully onto the couch. I joined her.

“They called me at three o’clock this afternoon,” I said. “I say ‘they’ because I have to assume that there’s still more than one person involved. Anyway, it’s the same voice that I talked to in Washington. It’s so distorted that it’s hard to tell whether it belongs to a man or a woman. Whoever it belongs to offered to sell the book back for a hundred thousand dollars. I checked with Max Spivey and his boss at the insurance company, Ronnie Saperstein. They agreed to pay it. The switch will take place at three o’clock this morning on the Santa Monica pier. That’s about it.”

She nodded thoughtfully and then took a sip of her drink. “The insurance company is going to be out an awful lot of money, isn’t it?”

“Three hundred and fifty thousand.”

“But I’ll get the book back? I mean, if I sell it, they won’t get part of that, will they?”

“No. It’s insured for five hundred thousand. That’s what they’d have to pay you, if they didn’t get it back. This way they’ll only have to pay three hundred and fifty thousand.”

“They must not be very happy,” she said.

“They’re realists,” I said. “Unhappy realists, I suppose.”

She leaned back on the couch and looked at me. The thin white material of her dress pressed against the nipples of her breasts, outlining them perfectly. I stared at them for a moment. Then I reached out and touched the one that was closest to me. She looked down at my hand.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“How does it make you feel?” she said.

“Excited.”

She took my hand and moved it to her other breast. I caressed the nipple with my fingers. “I don’t mean this,” she said. “I mean how do you feel about doing what you’re going to have to do?”

“Excited,” I said. “Nervous, maybe.”

She ran her tongue over her upper lip. “Is there a chance that something might happen?”

“Yes.”

She pressed my hand harder against her breast. I could feel her heart beating. “Tell me what might happen,” she said, her breathing fast and shallow. “Tell me what they might do to you, even if you have to make it up.”

So I put down my drink and told her. And as I told her my hand went from her breast to the smoothness of her thighs. I kept on talking because it seemed to be what she wanted — or needed. I was next to her now, her body pressed tightly against mine, my fingers moving deep into her wet warmness. Her head was back, her mouth open, and her tongue seemed to be tasting the things that I told her.

There was a quick, frantic period as we stripped off our clothes and then she was down on her knees in front of me and her mouth and tongue were doing incredible things and I quit talking because there really wasn’t anything left to say and besides, she wanted to talk. She didn’t really talk, of course. She made strange little cries and once she moaned from far down in her throat. And then she was on the couch and I was over her and then I went inside her and her mouth opened wide, as if she were going to scream, but she didn’t. The frenzy mounted as we lunged at each other and she started making those strange little cries again, interrupting them to whisper, “Hurt me, hurt me a little, please.” So I hurt her a little, but not very much, and she screamed this time, and then there was one more long series of frantic lunges and counter-lunges that led us up to the silent explosion, which was what it was all about.

We lay there on the couch breathing at each other for a while and then she said, “I sometimes think I’m a little weird, don’t you?”

“No.”

“I mean all that talking stuff. That’s weird.”

“Does it help?”

“It turns me on. God, how I hate that phrase.”

“Then don’t use it.”

“It excites me, the talking I mean. It’s sort of s-m, isn’t it?”

“Sort of, but it’s harmless.”

“Do you like it?”

“What?”

“Hurting me like that?”

“I like pleasing you and if that’s what you like, then I’m all for it.”

“And you don’t think I’m too kinky?”

“Not enough to count.”

She sat up and handed me a cigarette, taking one for herself. “When this is all over, what will you do, go back to New York?”

“Yes.”

“Are you married? Or did I ask that?”

“You didn’t ask, but I’m not.”

“But you were, weren’t you? I can tell.”

“How?”

“Guys that haven’t been married don’t fuck as well as you do.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Really. There’re little things that they just don’t know about.”

I sat up. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s true. How often do you do this?”

“I suppose as often as I can.”

“I don’t mean screwing. I mean this go-between thing.”

“Oh. That. Several times a year. Two or three. Maybe four sometimes. That’s several.”

“What do you do in between the go-between stuff?”

“Not much. I sort of mess around. I read a lot. It’s one of the few things that I do really well so I do a lot of it. I’m a very good page turner.”

“You could do that almost anywhere, couldn’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“Why don’t you do it here?”

“You mean in L.A.?”

“You know what I mean. I mean here — on the beach. With me.”

“You’re not talking about marriage, are you?”

“You know I’m not talking about that. I like you. I think I’d like living with you for a while. You seem to like the beach and the ocean. You even seem to like me. So why don’t we like each other together for a while? It’ll probably be six months before I have to give up this place. After that, if it’s working, maybe we can find another place down the road. Or maybe we’ll just move on — separately. What do you think?”

I smiled. “I think it’s an interesting idea.”

“That’s not a yes or a no. It’s not even a maybe.”

“What it is,” I said, “is a ‘this is so sudden.’ ”

“You mean you’d like to think about it?”

“Uh-huh, I’d like to think about it.”

“You’re not hung up on this male aggressiveness thing, are you?” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t bother you that I did the asking?”

“Not in the least,” I said. “It happens all the time.”

Later, after the lamb chops, and the wine, and more lovemaking, which turned out to be far more gentle and less frantic than the first time, I got quietly up from the large bed, picked up my clothes, and moved into the living room. I had left Maude Goodwater asleep, her mouth slightly open, her breathing deep and regular.

I put on my clothes, found the Scotch, poured myself a drink, and stood by the big glass windows looking out at the dark ocean. The tide seemed to be coming in and the big waves rolled over and slapped themselves down on the sand and then hissed as they slid back into the sea. I liked the sound that the sea made and I wondered why I had never lived beside it in the past. I considered the invitation that I had to live beside it. It was really more of a proposition than an invitation and it was the second one that I had received within a week. I looked at my watch and saw that it was one-fifteen. That meant it was four-fifteen in New York and I wondered if Mary Frances Ogletree, the gambler-doctor, was sleeping as deeply as Maude Goodwater was.

I thought about my two invitations to share bed and board and decided that it was the times and not my winning ways that had prompted them. The times were indeed changing and I suppose I was changing along with them, but not quite quickly enough. The problem was that although I would indeed like to move in with Maude Goodwater and share her Malibu beach, I would also like to move in with Dr. Mary Frances Ogletree and let her teach me how to play no-lose five-card stud.

Both invitations had been, as far as I could tell, sincere and well-meaning and prompted by good intentions, which, as everyone knows, pave the way to hell. And no doubt each woman thought that I would be nice to have around the house, probably not much more bother than a well-mannered cat. My back would be nice and warm against their feet at night and during the day I could provide a giggle or two and once or twice or perhaps three times a year I could go out and do something clever to get back something that had been stolen and thus earn a whole bunch of money that would enable me to come up with my half of the rent and the grocery bill.

It would be a very adult arrangement, but spiced with a bit of wickedness because of my occasional consorting with thieves, and there would probably be nothing but jolly times until the day came, as I know it must come, when my nerve went.

It may not be this year, or next year, or even the year after that, but one of these nights when I’m all dressed up in my Southwick suit, my pebble-grained loafers, my regimental striped tie, and my airline flight bag stuffed with a couple of hundred thousand dollars or so, I’ll be walking down a black alley toward its center where the dark danger lies and I’ll stop, and stare, and turn around, and go back toward where the lights are. After that I will no longer be what I am now, which is a go-between. I will not be less than I am now, I will simply be something else. I’m not sure what. Older, I suspect.

And so because of this and, although I protested it, a certain amount of pride, I knew that I would not move in and play house with either woman. I was flattered, but not flattered so much that I could pretend that it wouldn’t end badly. I didn’t even want to think about how it might end because I had gone through all that once before and once should be enough for any sensible man.

So I stopped thinking about that and started thinking about what I would have to do at three o’clock that morning, which is when I would start earning my money. I was thinking very hard about it and I didn’t hear her until she said, “What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. “Two o’clock.”

“Have you been up long?”

“No. Not long.”

“What’re you thinking about?”

“About what I’m going to do.”

“You mean about us?”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too, but right now I’m thinking about what I’m going to have to do at three o’clock.”

“Are you scared?”

“A little.”

“Are you always scared?”

“Yes.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

“No.”

“I’d be scared,” she said, “having to go out and do what you do without even knowing who’s going to be out there waiting for you.”

“It’s not quite like that this time,” I said.

“Why?”

“I know who’s going to be out there waiting for me.”