Tinman

by Karen Black

  Mike had handled my divorce with both tact and realism. I leaned on the doorbell, arousing first a dog and then a baby. Finally, just as I was starting to look nervously up and down the street for the squad cars the captain would no doubt soon have cruising the neighborhood looking for me, Mike appeared, looking a little grumpy. I shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, Mike, but you’re my lawyer, and now is when I need you.”

  He motioned me in. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  “A few minutes ago my house got bombed. Booby trapped. Lucky for me, Darwin sprung it.”

  “So that explains the big bang and the sirens. Who did it?”

  “A tall blonde with gorgeous legs and a boyfriend in white pants driving a gunmetal gray corvette.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Look, Greg, don’t dummy up. You came to me for help. I’m your lawyer.”

  “Mike, I’ve told you all I know. I’m not into drugs, or gambling, or somebody else’s bed, if that’s what you’re thinking. I really don’t have a clue as to who or why someone would do this. All I can say is, for Darwin’s sake, I’m sure as hell going to find out.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Get down to the house as fast as you can. Tell the police captain, who is no doubt mad as hell at me by now, that you’re my lawyer, and take it from there.”

  “Why would the police captain be mad at you?”

  “Because I ran out on him. He wanted me to come down to the station to make a statement, and he wants to search the house.”

  “Have you got anything to hide?”

  “No.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be smarter to come back with me and get it over with, let the cops get on your case?”

  Mike’s straightforward logic almost persuaded me, but I slowly shook my head. “An old friend, a guy I’m much indebted to, wants me to meet him, today, never mind where. He says it’s serious. After what has happened, I’ve got to think it is. I called him as soon as I could get my wits together after the explosion. He thinks he needs me now. It’s something I have to do.”

  Mike looked hard at me for a moment, then called to the kitchen where his pretty wife was fixing coffee. “Honey, throw on a coat and take Greg wherever it is he wants to go. I have to take care of some business at his house.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “I’ll take her with me in the stroller.” Together they went upstairs to dress. I stood back from the window and watched a squad car cruise down the street. Mike was back in three minutes in jogging warm-ups with a sleepy baby. “I’ll tell the captain you contacted me and that you fear for your life and have gone into hiding, but I don’t know where–which is true enough.”

  He extricated the stroller from the front hall closet. “I’ll tell ‘em you promised to keep in touch, that they can search the house, and that you will appear if charges are brought against you. By the way, give me your keys, and who has your homeowner’s insurance?” As Mike started down the street pushing the stroller, he hardly fit the conventional image of a sharp, aggressive legal counsel, but Mike had more going for him than pin-stripes and well-shined shoes.

  I picked up the phone and called an airline. The early bird flight to Denver was leaving in less than an hour, and I asked them to hold a seat for Dr. Malcolm Gregory, stumbling a bit over using my pseudonym for the first time. Sue was down in a minute, and we went directly into the garage from the kitchen. I hunkered down in back as low as possible and named a corner downtown near the Radisson Hotel. All I could see of the one squad car we met was the red and blue lights on the roof.

  “Good you kept your head down,” Sue said. “They gave us a hard look.”

  I jumped out on a deserted corner, walked in on the Wabasha Street side of the hotel and went through the lobby to the main entrance on Kellogg with my bag in my hand like any other early morning traveler. It’s a ten minute cab ride to the airport at that hour, and thirty minutes later the plane was rolling down the runway, and I was sitting, outwardly comfortable, trying to collect my thoughts.

  CHAPTER II

  Denver, Sunday

  “Cover your ass,” Charley said. I had tried to see if anyone picked me up and tailed me at the airport, but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t think so. At any rate, no one that got on the plane after me seemed suspicious. Still, if my unknown assailants were cogs in some kind of organization, which I had to think they were, they could have operatives in Denver, easy enough to call and alert them to the flight I was on. But all that was ridiculous. How could they know I wasn’t in a bag at the morgue in Saint Paul? They didn’t stick around to see who sprung the booby trap, and if they did, how could they know I’d slipped away and gotten a plane to Denver? But, maybe evasive action in Denver was called for anyway.

  But damn it all, I was no cloak-and-dagger private-eye type. All I knew about “covering my ass” and being “tailed,” and being booby trapped for that matter, was what I read in paperback detective stories hastily bought at airport newsstands, which I usually failed to finish by the end of the trip. So I seldom found out how Mike Hammer or James Bond…or whoever…extricated themselves from incredible predicaments and “broke the case.” Bugger you, Charley Farnsworth, I thought, where do you come off with this “cover your ass” and “nine-digit-numbers stuff”? You’re no Mike Hammer either. How was I supposed to “shake a tail” in Denver? I had never even used that phrase in serious conversation. Well, I thought, I guess it’s time to give it a try.

  With that settled, I let my thoughts wander back to dear old Darwin, who had saved my life just doing his thing and sacrificed his in the process. I felt bitter, angry, utterly baffled and incredibly sad. I really loved that sweet old dog. He had been my sole companion since my split with Helen. It was difficult to deal with the feelings. It was also hard to believe…a gunmetal gray corvette, with its low-slung, pretentiously-macho lines, growling like a tiger, cruising at the break of dawn down a quiet, shady street…a gorgeous, six-foot blonde with a high-explosive booby trap wrapped in a Sunday paper, tripping up the sidewalk in spike-heeled pumps and a wisp of a costume, prepared to do murder. And then Darwin insisting on doing his thing at precisely that point in time. How could it be real?

  And another thing. Why did I think that blonde was gorgeous? True, her figure from the rear was unforgettable, but I had never seen her face. Why, when I see the back of a tall blonde, do I always think that when she turns around she will be beautiful? It isn’t fair to brunettes, and God knows I’ve been disappointed often enough. This one, I thought, has to have a face hard enough to strike matches. A logical reason for her costume, if there were a logical reason, seemed plain enough. She had to be a showgirl or a cocktail waitress or a hostess…like a Playboy bunny in some nightclub coming straight from work. Or else, to put it bluntly, she was a whore with her pimp. I mused upon possible scenarios in which I might someday meet her face to face.

  It’s only a couple of hours flying time to Denver. You pick up an hour going west, so Stapleton airport was just coming to life when I arrived. This was probably the last year for Stapleton; Denver was building a huge new international airport several miles northeast of town. I thought it was supposed to already be open, but it had encountered some delays. Nobody seemed to pay the slightest attention to me. Even so, I pulled a couple of maneuvers, taking the escalator down to the baggage claim area and then ducking back up an emergency stairway to the main concourse and doubling around several airline ticket counters. Finally, when I was satisfied that I was just chasing my own tail, I went out to the taxi line and jumped in a cab, immediately feeling foolish with the realization that anyone who really wanted to tail me could simply have waited at the cab line while I played my games and then jumped in a cab behind me.

  After my cab left the airport and got rolling, I said to the driver, a stocky, cheerful Chicano type, “Take
a sharp right at the next corner and don’t slow down.” With great aplomb he squealed the tires around the corner, and we sped down the side street. “Now the next right,” I said as I twisted to peer out the rear window to see if anyone followed.

  “Hey, Mac,” the driver said, unwittingly using one of my nicknames, “You tryin’ to shake a tail? Why’n’cha tell me you wus tryin’ to shake a tail?” With that he went into ten minutes of dizzying maneuvers, finally pulling up in an alley behind a neighborhood shopping center. “I don’t think you had no tail to start with,” he said amiably, “but you sure as hell ain’t got one now. Ain’t nobody tails Ramirez in this town.”

  “Thanks, Ramirez,” I said, letting go of the seat back in front of me for the first time and dropping the plans I had started to make about getting off at the downtown Hilton for further evasive action in its multiple byways. “Isn’t there a Pancake House or something a couple of blocks down Broadway, south of the Library?”

  “Hey, you know this town.”

  “Not much, the way it’s changed.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? Good luck with your old lady’s private eye.” Ramirez grinned wickedly as he dropped me off.

  After purchasing the Sunday paper, I settled into several leisurely cups of coffee. The library didn’t open until noon on Sunday. Thinking about it, I was pretty sure nobody picked me up, and nobody followed me. Maybe, I thought, nobody in the world now knows where I am or what I am doing. It seemed like a good idea to try to keep it that way.

  I had gained an hour flying west, and Charley would lose an hour flying east, so he couldn’t make it to the library much before noon. Enough time for me to wonder what in the hell was going on in Charley’s checkered career. No, checkered wasn’t the right word. True, Charley was amusingly eccentric in manner and style, but in “real life,” so to speak, he was a hot-shot engineer and project manager in a major engineering, construction management and consulting firm–big jobs, big bucks, lots of pressure, but hardly life-threatening…aside from heart attacks, cirrhosis of the liver, ulcers and the other occupational hazards of the fast track. The ticket to Alaska and “nine-digit numbers” added up to some kind of major project there, but how did that add up to the fact that, but for the grace of Darwin, I would probably be in a plastic bag at the morgue this fine morning?

  Looking at my watch, I decided if Charley had made all his connections, he could be showing up at the earliest about now. After giving a patient waitress a liberal tip for a small check, I strolled up Broadway toward the Library. A long block before I got to the corner by the park I was sure I spotted Charley coming across the park from the other side. His short, rotund figure in his customary white linen suit with Panama hat and Malacca cane was unmistakable among the assorted street people and visitors lolling or strolling on the broad, shady expanse of grass. He could never pick me out through his thick glasses, so I waited to let him get to the Library first, rather than meeting on the street.

  As I watched from a distance, I suddenly sensed that two individuals had also spotted him and were now following close behind. I had been vaguely aware of them earlier, but just subliminally. They were slouching through the park, flanking him a good ten yards behind and at a like distance on either side, To most observers they would just be a couple of seemingly unrelated street people wandering across the mall. One was a skinny guy in faded jeans with a wispy blonde mustache, the other a big, muscular black guy in a black T-shirt and black leather pants.

  They snapped into hard focus when, as Charley neared the street by the Library, they speeded up and converged on him. I yelled but was too far away for Charley to hear, so I started moving toward him. They were only a few feet from Charley when he became aware of them and started to run. They caught him at the edge of the grass. The big black guy pinned Charley’s arms behind him, and in one swift, continuous move, the skinny blonde guy whipped a switch blade knife from his hip pocket, flicked the blade open, stabbed Charley in the abdomen with the upward thrust of an experienced killer, frisked him for his wallet and grabbed his brief case as he slumped to the ground. A 1970’s vintage, two-tone Oldsmobile 88 with rusted out fenders pulled up. The muggers jumped in and were gone. It was all over in less than ten seconds.

  The dozen or so people in the park and on the street who had seen it simply stood openmouthed and astonished. After what seemed like an eternity, but in reality was only a few seconds, several bystanders started to yell and run to see if they could help Charley, and others swiftly or furtively slipped away. Where I stood…half a block down Broadway…I felt as though I were sleepwalking in a slow-motion nightmare. I started toward the body, but realized from the reaction of other onlookers that he was dead, and I didn’t really want to see him that way.

  A few yards down the street was a bus stop and a bench. I made my way to it and sat down, wondering what to do, watching while a couple of squad cars came, followed by an ambulance. They covered Charley with a sheet, put him on a stretcher, loaded him into the ambulance and drove away. The police finished taking statements from several witnesses who came forward, but nobody noticed the bewildered, slightly nauseated guy on the bench half a block away.

  A bus came by and stopped to let somebody off. “Go to the Airport?” I asked.

  “Transfer at Colorado Boulevard.”

  I got in, glad to have the next 45 minutes to think while the bus lurched along from street corner to corner. Before I got to the airport I had to have the answer to a simple, basic question…where was I going to go when I got there?

  As I thought it over, I began to see myself as some kind of wild card in a deadly game, but I didn’t know what the game was nor who the players were. It was dangerous, for high stakes, and nobody was likely to play fair. Then why not just get the hell out? Why not just stay on the bus, go back downtown, go to the police, tell them everything I knew, which God knows wouldn’t take long, and then get on the plane, go back to Saint Paul and do the same thing?

  Clearly, as a law-abiding citizen, that was the way to go, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wouldn’t get the job done. It might help the cops in Denver catch the punks who murdered Charley. It might help the cops in Saint Paul find the blonde who blasted Darwin. But would it lead to the truly guilty…the players in Charley’s nine-digit numbers game?

  I pictured those types operating from office towers of glass and chrome, shielded by icily cool receptionists and middle management flak catchers. I felt sure that nobody in that rarified atmosphere would be forthcoming with the slightest clue that there even was a game in which murder was a move and hired killers were pawns. The answers to why Charley needed to see me, why he had gotten twenty thousand dollars out of the bank for my use and why he had set me up with a false identity were not to be found in Denver or Saint Paul.

  As for the booby trap on my doorstep and the fact that I had skipped town, that would only add up to the conclusion that Charley and I were up to no good. The obvious inference would be that McGregor had taken it on the lam because he had a ton of dope to get rid of or a bundle of bogus bills to launder. I could picture hours at the police station with bright lights in my face while the fat little police captain tried to sweat something out of me.

  I liked to think that I could stand up to it, but even then I could get framed in a web of circumstantial evidence, and what a golden opportunity that would be for my unknown adversaries to deflect attention from themselves by feeding the cops a bunch of misinformation about me. But no matter how it came out, Gregory McGregor, promising young geotechnical engineering expert, would end up in the minds of the public and the police alike, not to mention colleagues at the Institute, as a very shady character or, at best, a man of mystery and juicy gossip. What had happened to me was just too improbable and bizarre to happen to a perfectly straight citizen. The captain had practically said so as we stood in my shattered house. Like it or not, I decided, I was in the game, and the only way I could see to play it was to keep my wild card i
n the hole until the other hands declared themselves.

  As for whether or not I liked it, there was one big thing that staying in the game had going for it. It offered the possibility of direct, personal revenge. Which was nothing to be proud of philosophically, but there was no use pretending that my decision to stay in play was entirely based on all those logical arguments I had gone through. I, personally, wanted to get the people who got Darwin and Charley. Long before Stapleton airport tower came into view, I knew I was going to Los Angeles.

  I felt secure enough bumping along in the city bus, but as we entered the airport traffic circle, I could feel the hackles rising on the back of my neck. Somebody out there knew I was going to Los Angeles to meet Charley and was concerned enough about it to attempt murder in Saint Paul. Somebody out there found out that Charley was going to Denver and murdered him. Somebody out there not only had the motivation to do these things, but also had the resources to conjure up the hit men. Persons, I corrected myself. I mustn’t forget equal rights for the blonde. How far could they reach? Would they assume that I had headed for Denver too? Would they be watching the airport?

  The bus had slowed down in the crunch of traffic on the departure level ramp before I could come up with good answers to these questions. Just where the bottleneck tightened and the cars and busses started jockeying for places to discharge passengers, a big, broad-shouldered black guy in a very dapper, sky-blue denim leisure suit was very carefully eyeballing each incoming taxi and limo. I can’t really say I recognized him, but there was a certain cut to his jib that bothered me, and the guy in black leather pants in the park had certainly had time to change. I quickly leaned over to tie my shoe as the bus went by.