Twilight at Mac’s Place

Thirty-one

The trunk lid of the Mercedes coupe was open and one of the thieves, bent over, was rummaging around inside. The other thief, half in, half out of the open passenger door, was rifling the glove compartment. Padillo automatically noticed the slit in his car’s convertible top and berated himself for not having switched to the steel top on November 1.

He waited as McCorkle, ducking low, slipped around the rear of four parked cars and came up behind the thief at the open trunk. McCorkle glanced back, got a nod from Padillo, took three long quick steps and slammed the trunk lid down on the thief’s back. The thief yelled. He yelled a second time when McCorkle raised the trunk lid and slammed it down again. There was a third yell when McCorkle, using the rear bumper as a stepping-stool, sat on the trunk lid, all 221 pounds of him.

At the first yell, the thief rifling the glove compartment had backed hastily out of the car’s open right-hand door and turned, only to run his right cheek just below the eye into the point of a Swiss Army knife’s longest blade. The thief crossed his eyes, trying to see what kind of knife it was, but gave up when Padillo used the knife point to turn him around until he faced the car.

“Hands on the roof, feet spread, just like always,” Padillo said.

When the thief hesitated, Padillo touched the knife point to the back of the man’s neck. “If you try anything brave or dumb, the knife’ll go in exactly four centimeters and, unless I miss, you’ll be a vegetable. If I miss, you’ll be dead.”

The thief leaned against the car, moved his feet back and spread them apart. Padillo searched him quickly and found a .25-caliber Beretta semiautomatic in an ankle holster. As Padillo rose, the thief in the trunk yelled something that may have been a plea. McCorkle replied by bouncing up and down once on the trunk lid.

Padillo closed the Swiss Army knife and returned it to his pocket. He then touched the muzzle of the Beretta to the back of the leaning thief’s neck and said, “Now turn around and tell him what I’ve got.”

The leaning thief turned and called, “He’s got my piece, Marv!”

“Lemme out!” Marv yelled.

McCorkle jumped down from the trunk, raised its lid, put a lock on Marv’s right arm, pulled him out of the trunk and marched him over to Padillo. Tears rolled down Marv’s cheeks toward a fixed smile that displayed a great deal of gum.

“Big bastards, aren’t they?” McCorkle said.

Padillo looked at the man with the apparently perpetual smile. “You’re Mr. Schlitz, right? And your partner here’s Mr. Pabst.”

Schlitz’s tears had stopped but the smile was still in place as he nodded. Mr. Pabst wiped his tiny nose with the back of an immense hand.

“Something funny?” McCorkle asked the smiling Schlitz.

Schlitz shook his head but the smile didn’t go away. Pabst said, “He can’t help it. It’s a nervous thing.”

“Reflex.” Schlitz explained, still smiling. “A nervous reflex.”

“What did Harry Warnock say to look for in my car?” Padillo asked.

Pabst shook his head and said, “You’re not gonna shoot us.”

“What you mean is I’m not going to kill you,” Padillo said. “But try this on: a citizen comes out of a bar and finds two thieves stealing his car. The citizen takes a pistol away from one of the thieves and shoots him in the knee. The other thief comes down with a sudden case of good sense and surrenders. Think the cops will like that?”

“They’ll love it,” McCorkle said. “But how do you decide whose knee?”

“Flip a coin and let them call it.”

“And the one who loses the call loses the kneecap,” said McCorkle, nodding judiciously. “It’s only fair.”

“Harry didn’t send us,” Pabst said.

“No?” Padillo said. “Who did?”

“Nobody.”

“Flip the coin,” Padillo said to McCorkle.

“We heard you talking about the book.” Schlitz said, hurrying to get the words out. “The memoirs.” His smile was back after disappearing momentarily when he closed his lips to say the b’s and the m’s.

“Why’d you think the memoirs would be in my car?”

“The way you were talking in there,” Schlitz said. “You were talking real money, three quarters of a mill or more, so we figured you’d keep the thing close by.”

“How’d you know this was my car?”

“When you and him were in the head, we asked Pong what kind of cars you guys drive. He said he didn’t know about your partner here, but you always drove a real old dark green Mercedes coupe. It wasn’t hard to spot.”

“And what were you going to do with the manuscript?” McCorkle asked.

Pabst shrugged. “Sell it back to you.”

“For how much?”

“We hadn’t got that far.”

His disbelief obvious, Padillo said, “And you thought all this up in the five minutes it took us to pee and tell Billy Pong good-bye?”

“If you get an idea, you gotta go with it,” Schlitz said.

McCorkle reached Schlitz with a single step. “I’d better pop this liar back in the trunk while you kneecap the other one.”

The words came tumbling out of Pabst’s mouth, tripping over themselves. “Tinker Burns,” he said. “We were gonna take the thing to Tinker Burns.”

Padillo looked first at McCorkle, who raised an eyebrow that managed to express doubt, surprise and even a little disappointment. Padillo looked back at Pabst. “From the beginning” he said and glanced at his watch. “We’ve got all night.”

It didn’t take all night. It took only fourteen minutes for Pabst and Schlitz, sometimes interrupting and contradicting each other, to describe how Tinker Burns had hired them through Harry Warnock for a vague one-shot that might involve a little breaking and entering.

After first complaining about how little they had been paid, $2,000 apiece, they described how they had shot Steadfast Haynes’s horse, broken into his farmhouse, searched it and bound and gagged “some woman” who walked in on them. But they vehemently denied — despite repeated questions from Padillo and threats from McCorkle — that they had found any trace of the Haynes manuscript.

“What’d Tinker say when you told him all this?” McCorkle said.

“He was sort of pissed off,” Pabst said.

“If you think he was pissed off, imagine what Harry Warnock’s going to be when I tell him I caught you burgling my car.” Padillo paused. “And why.”

Schlitze eyes darted quickly away to his left, Pabst stared down at the parking lot asphalt.

“Harry’s mean,” McCorkle said, making it sound as if he were musing aloud. “And he also knows all those IRA interrogation techniques. The nasty stuff. The first thing he’ll probably ask you is whether you’re really working for him or for Tinker Burns. And no matter what you tell him, he’ll have to make sure you’re not lying.”

Pabst, still staring at the asphalt, muttered, “Harry don’t have to know.”

“Sorry?” Padillo said.

Pabst looked up. “I said Harry won’t know if you don’t tell him.”

“Why wouldn’t I tell him? You sliced my car top. But Harry won’t pay for it unless I tell him what you two did and why.”

“Maybe we could work it out,” Schlitz said with a broad smile utterly lacking in confidence.

“How?”

“I mean if you guys need something done, well, maybe we could do it and that’d sort of pay for your car top and then Harry wouldn’t have to know about this.”

Padillo studied Schlitz for a moment before asking, “Does Tinker Burns worry either of you?”

“Nope,” Pabst said. It was a quick answer and McCorkle thought it was probably far too quick.

“Then you wouldn’t mind lying to him, would you?” Padillo said.

After a cautious nod, Pabst said, “Go on.”

“We want you to call Tinker at his hotel,” Padillo said. “If he’s not there, leave a message. The message will say only that you’ve learned that McCorkle and Padillo have the Haynes manuscript. That’s all. But if Tinker himself answers the phone, tell him you were at Pong’s with Harry Warnock and the lads and heard talk that McCorkle and I have the Haynes manuscript. When Tinker asks for details, tell him that’s all you know. Absolutely all.”

It was Schlitz who repeated a reasonably close version of the instrucotions and asked, “When d’you want us to call him?”

“Now,” Padillo said.

“I’ll use your car phone.”

“I don’t have a car phone.”

Not bothering to conceal his astonishment, Schlitz said, “Jesus, everybody’s got a—”

“I don’t,” Padillo said.

“He doesn’t have a fax machine either,” McCorkle said.

“Well,” Schlitz said, “I guess we can use the phone in my car.”

After McCorkle knocked on the hotel room door, it was opened by his daughter, who apparently wore nothing other than a man’s white oxford shirt and it rather loosely buttoned.

“They have house phones in the lobby,” she said.

“We can wait out here till you get—”

McCorkle was interrupted by Granville Haynes’s voice from behind the partially open door. “Who is it?”

“It’s Pop and the old guy who rides shotgun.”

“Then ask them in.”

“You’re invited,” she said, walked away from the half-open door and disappeared into the bathroom.

McCorkle entered the room, followed by an amused looking Padillo. Once inside, McCorkle turned slowly, nodding at Haynes, who wore pants, shirt and loafers, but no socks. McCorkle continued his slow turn, noting the room-service cart, the empty and half-empty glasses, the discarded copies of the Sunday Washington Post and New York Times, the rumpled bed and, finally, Padillo’s amused expression.

“What’s so funny?” McCorkle said.

“Outraged fathers are always funny.”

“Who says I’m outraged?”

“Your choleric flush.”

“Care for a drink?” Haynes said.

McCorkle turned to stare at him. “Care? No. Need? Yes.”

“Scotch, vodka, beer, what?”

“Scotch.”

“Mr. Padillo?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“You may need one after you hear about our threatening phone call.”

“Who from?”

“Since Erika took the call, I’ll let her tell it.”

After the drinks were poured and served, Erika McCorkle came out of the bathroom, wearing pants and over them the man’s white shirt, now buttoned except for the collar button and the one just below it. She went to the mini-refrigerator, removed a can of beer, popped it open and drank thirstily. She then turned to her father and said, “Okay. Let’s have it.”

McCorkle took another look around the room. “I suppose this is as good a way as any to spend a long Sunday afternoon. Your mother and I used to spend them like this in Bonn a hundred years ago. Usually out at her place in Tannenbusch. She lived in a one-room studio on the top floor of a Hochhaus with a view of the Rhine and the Drachenfels. Padillo always opened up on Sundays, so I’d drop by Fredl’s around noon with a bottle of wine or two and a couple of steaks. People still ate steak then. Fredl would read the papers, all six or seven of them, and after that we’d talk and fool around, then eat, and talk and maybe even fool around some more. Around six or seven I’d drive out to Godesberg to take over from Padillo. Sometimes she’d come with me.”

“She came with you most of the time,” Padillo said.

McCorkle nodded. “I guess she did.”

“You two weren’t married then?” Erika asked.

“Not even engaged.”

“How old was she?”

“Fredl? Twenty-four, twenty-five.”

“And you?”

McCorkle looked at Haynes, who was leaning against the windowsill again and wearing what seemed to be a look of polite sympathy. “Thirty-two, thirty-three,” McCorkle said. “Around in there.”

“This was the late fifties?”

“The late, late fifties.”

“You and Mutti never talk about it, do you?”

“Not much.”

“He’s not talking about it now,” Padillo said.

“Then what’s he saying?”

“For Christsake, Gurgles,” Padillo said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Gurgles?” Haynes asked.

“When she was learning to talk,” Padillo said, “she couldn’t quite handle Erika McCorkle and it came out Erigga McGurgle. I called her Gurgles until she turned six and made me stop.”

“That still doesn’t explain what Pop was saying.”

Padillo shrugged. “Ask him.”

She turned to McCorkle. “Well, what was it — a roundabout invitation to join the grown-ups?”

“Who wants that?”

“What then?”

“I think it was a promise,” McCorkle said.

“What kind of promise?”

“That next time I’ll use the house phone.”

Wearing her sunshine smile, she hurried over to McCorkle, went up on tiptoe, kissed him and, still smiling, turned to Granville Haynes and said, “You can tell we’re a very demonstrative family.”

“If the demonstration’s over, maybe you should tell the family about the threatening phone call.”

She turned automatically to Padillo, as if he were the usual receiver of bad news. “Mr. Tinker Burns called,” she said. “About twenty or thirty minutes before you got here. He was looking for you and Pop. After I told him we didn’t know where you were, he asked — no, he told me to give you a message. I asked him to hold on while I got something to write with. But he said I wouldn’t need anything because his message was short and simple.”

“And was it?” Padillo said. “Short and simple?”

She nodded. “Mr. Burns told me to tell you that unless you let him look at Steady’s manuscript, he’s going to break your fucking necks. Or have it done.”