by Karen Black
“How are the eggs benedict?” I asked.
“I do the hollandaise myself,” he said haughtily, as though that were all we needed to know.
“We’ll risk it,” I said grumpily.
He sniffed audibly and Corky put her hand over her mouth, unable to suppress a giggle, as he swished off to the service bar. “Poor man,” she said teasingly, “he was jealous because of me to begin with, and now you’ve hurt his feelings.”
The eggs benedict were, in fact, first rate when they finally arrived, and we were in the midst of them when a couple entered from the door into the motel and swept to the front of the terrace, apparently without noticing us. The instant I saw them I swiveled my chair around so my back was turned. “Don’t look now,” I whispered to Corky, “but I know that man. It’s Leonard Nathan, the middle N in TINMAN.”
Corky’s eyes widened, “What…do you suppose…?”
“I wish I knew,” I said.
Nathan was in his swimming trunks, a hairy, thick-bodied man with rather spindly arms and legs, and a fleshy but handsome face, large dark eyes, aquiline nose, well-formed, chiseled lips and a strong chin. He was the legal rather than the engineering end of TINMAN and clearly the most cultured and intellectual of the partners, as well as a smart lawyer.
“Who is his…,” Corky groped for a word, “…friend?”
My attention had been so riveted on Leonard Nathan in the moment before I turned away that I had only a fleeting impression of his companion in her designer beachwear, an elaborate, platinum blonde coiffure and a beautiful but totally artificial face–a mask of false eyelashes and exaggerated make-up, which she must have been up perfecting since dawn. “I don’t dare look,” I whispered, “Leonard might recognize me, but I can tell you one thing…that is not Mrs. Nathan.”
Our arrogant maître d’ meanwhile was in a veritable tizzy of attentiveness, getting them seated at just the right table and catering obsequiously to their every whim. Fortunately, they came to rest several tables away, pretty well screened by potted palms. In the next few minutes, the intervening tables were taken. An upscale California crowd, I thought–trim, well-tanned and casually chic. “I feel a little less conspicuous now that the place is filling up,” I muttered.
Corky uttered a quiet mocking laugh under her breath. “What about me? They’re all boys, and I think your Mr. Nathan’s friend is a queen in drag.”
“Are you serious?” I was having trouble enough anyway digesting the situation, Leonard having a socially prominent rich wife and four kids.
“It’s only my so-called feminine intuition,” Corky teased pointedly.
“Okay, okay. I believe you. I believe you. The problem is, how do we get the hell out of here?” The answer was actually obvious: take the time to wait them out, there being no way that a six foot three inch guy as red-headed as I am could simply slip out of that place unnoticed, especially with a nifty friend in a turquoise tank suit who was so unambiguously a girl.
The next hour dragged by interminably, but there is one way I look back on it with considerable satisfaction. For once in my life I evened the score with a supercilious waiter. We simply sat and somehow failed to see him as he bustled around trying everything he could to hustle us out. Leonard and his flamboyant friend, seemingly under no similar duress, got up and left in a flurry of flattering farewells.
“Do come back again when you have all the time in the world to enjoy your breakfast,” our waiter sneered as I paid the bill.
I had kept my back turned, but Corky had been in a position to watch Leonard unobtrusively, partly screened by foliage. She didn’t think he had noticed us, or if he had, he had been very cool indeed about concealing the fact. Nevertheless, we ran back down the beach as though the Hound of the Baskervilles was snapping at our heels.
The real hound at our heels was the riddle of Leonard Nathan, the blonde and the Cliffe Motel. Fitting Charlie into that scene was hard to deal with. Silently we went about showering and dressing. When Corky had finished in the bathroom, and I was in the midst of shaving, my vexation surfaced and I blurted out, “What in the hell were Charlie and I supposed to be doing in that goddamned place anyway?” Corky giggled. “Damn it,” I said, “You don’t have to giggle at everything. This isn’t funny!”
The water running in the washbowl began to sound deafening. In a minute or two I turned it off to listen for the small sounds of Corky stirring about, knowing I had been an asshole, taking my irritation out on her. There was no sound. I stepped into the room with my face half lathered. Corky was gone. I rushed to the sun deck. There was nothing but sand and distant unfamiliar figures between me and the sea. I rushed to the front door. The parking area was empty. I ran out to the motel entrance on the Coast Highway, half lathered and in my under shorts. A small figure with a black Stetson hat and a backpack was a hundred yards down the road trudging toward a bus stop.
I tore back to the room, grabbed the car keys and screeched on to the highway just as a bus passed, zoomed around the bus to the tune of angry horns and pulled into the bus stop just ahead of it. Corky refused to look at me. “Please!” I yelled. Corky got on the bus, and the bus driver sat on his horn. Grudgingly I pulled out of his way, dashed to the next bus stop and got out of the car to the mingled consternation and amusement of the four or five people waiting there. “You’re on report. I got your number,” the driver yelled as he opened the door. Just then somebody inside the bus called out, “Give him a break, Sweetheart, the guy loves you!” There was a burst of applause inside the bus, and Corky stepped out.
We were silent all the way back to the motel, unable to look at each other. I parked in the stall in front of the room, and we sat in the car for a moment, motionless. Corky turned and looked me over, then through clenched teeth said, “I am trying not to giggle.”
Suddenly, I was the one laughing hysterically as I caught a glimpse of my face in the side mirror and realized what an outrageous sight I must have been…half shaven and in my undershorts, yet.
My laughter turned to nervous embarrassment. I raced from the car to the room, hoping no one else would see me. Corky went straight to the bathroom, came out with a damp washcloth, pushed me down into a chair, and wiped off the lather caked on one side of my face, which had begun to itch maddeningly. I pulled her down onto my lap. “Corky,” I said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken my frustration out on you.” She shook her head, but settled down a little less rigidly.
“I’m sorry too, Greg. I know I giggle too much. I guess it’s a bad habit I acquired in my hippie “snow bunny” days when the slothful crowd I hung out with thought it was cute, or “adorable” as one guy used to say. I’ll work on it. I’m not sixteen anymore, and “regular” folks don’t find it either “cute” or “adorable.” They obviously find it annoying…as you’ve demonstrated.
“And I giggle at dumb things. I should have known you’d be touchy about Charley and the Cliffe Motel, but, hey, I’m here to tell you, you are certifiably the most heterosexual man that ever was.”
“It isn’t that. It’s just that, in separate ways and separate lives, you and I loved Charley like a father or a dear old jolly uncle. When we met and started putting our separate parts of Charley’s life together, we were willing to share him, and sharing a bit of ourselves at the same time. Now we’ve had a peek into an alien world, and we can’t help visualizing other loves and other claims on Charley. We don’t like sharing our Charley with that world, and….” I groped for words. “It’s damned uncomfortable,” I finished lamely.
“We don’t have to talk about it now. There are lots of other things we need to think about. Tell me about the men that make up TINMAN.”
I was glad to get on to a less awkward theme. “The T is Terry Tinsdale, ex-colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers…a big, bluff, jolly Irishman from Boston, but don’t let that fool you. He opens doors in East Coast politics and knows where lots of bodies are buried.” Corky looked slightly aghast. “A figure of sp
eech,” I hastened to add. “He’s TINMAN’s basic salesman and Washington lobbyist.”
“The I is Admiral Harry Lee Ingram, USN, retired, former Sea Bee commandant…a very cool cat underneath a good-ole’ boy Texas drawl…the operations and logistics man, quiet, but very tough and demanding.”
“The N is Leonard Nathan; obviously I’m rewriting some of my book on Nathan, but I always liked him, certainly better than the other partners…urbane, Ivy League education, lots of family connections in the power elite of film and real estate in southern California…always did thoughtful things like giving me theater and concert tickets when I was out here on short notice. Not only that, he liked discussing them afterward. His wife is the only daughter of a major movie mogul and is a big-time patron of the arts.”
“And now the ‘Ice Mann’ cometh. That’s what the boys in engineering and design call him, or else ‘Mann the Machine.’ Oscar Helmut Mann came over here after the war in the same deal that brought von Braun and a bunch of other German science and high-tech people. I guess he must have had some strong anti-Hitler credentials. He can’t have been a Nazi, or he could never have become a partner of Leonard Nathan, who is Jewish. He’s a genius; his special field is stress analysis and structural design, but he’s good at anything, as long as it involves numbers and material objects. He’s the most totally withdrawn person I have ever known, speaks only when strictly necessary, is not known to have a single grace word like please or thanks in his vocabulary, uses people like tools, and, it’s only fair to say, is content to be a tool of TINMAN as long as he is used on problems dealing with materials and structures. Other people can worry about people and money.”
As I completed my thumbnail sketches of the TINMAN partners, it struck me as a little ironic that I had spent the most words characterizing the man of least words.
“How big is TINMAN,” Corky asked.
“Eight or nine hundred in the L.A. international headquarters, another four or five hundred in the West Coast Regional office. Maybe four thousand, worldwide.”
“I was silly, wasn’t I?
“How so?”
“Thinking of TINMAN as this great big, monolithic bunch of baddies. There have to be some good guys and some bad guys in an outfit that big.”
“Corky, if you weren’t so adorable, I’d be alarmed that you’re too clever, but I am onto your game. You are deliberately leading me into a plan for tweaking TINMAN in a way that will make me think I thought of it myself.”
Corky looked away, shaking her head, but not before I caught the Cheshire cat grin on her face. “Okay,” I said, “I think I get the message. Who do I know in TINMAN who is a good guy, loyal to Charley, in a position to know a good deal about what’s going on, and not too involved in internal power struggles and office intrigue? As is so often the case, as soon as the problem is concisely formulated, the answer suggests itself. Patrick Hennigan.”
“Is he a secretary or an assistant to Charley?”
“No, Hennie is an artist. Nominally a senior architectural draftsman, but at heart an artist. He loved to work with Charley, because Charley cared about the esthetic character of his designs as well as the presentation and rendering of them. They had a great rapport, and Hennie tried to do all of Charley’s conceptual drafting and rendering.”
“But he wasn’t in the same office or shared a secretary?”
I grinned. “I’m tracking you, Corky. No, I’m pretty sure I can call him without alerting anyone.”
I dialed TINMAN and asked for Mr. P. A. Hennigan. In a moment Hennie’s scratchy voice said, “Hennigan here.” Hennie looked something like a cocky bantam rooster, somewhat small in stature, usually quiet, a behind-the-scenes sort of guy, but he could crow if the occasion warranted, and I’m pretty sure he could produce a pretty good set of spurs if he thought it necessary. Today, he seemed subdued, even in the way he uttered his name.
I had a feeling I should be cagy. “This is Geotechnical Graphics,” I said in a flat, all business voice.
There was a short silence at the other end, then Hennie said, “Let me check my calendar” Another short pause. “No, sorry, I have a luncheon tomorrow at McCafferty’s in Glendale, perhaps next week.” He hung up.
“So now what?”
“I think we’re having lunch tomorrow at McCafferty’s in Glendale,” I said uncertainly.
“Could we just enjoy the beach and the sun for the rest of the afternoon?” Corky asked. “I haven’t spent a day at the beach in…well…ever.”
“Great idea. I can rest up and plan for my first confrontation.”
CHAPTER XII
Los Angeles, Day 2, Tuesday Afternoon on the Beach
I went up to the lobby for a couple of beers for me and a couple bottles of water for Corky, and a bag of chips. Then I noticed another bag of chips that said “fat free.” Corky would probably go for that, so I added it to my cart, along with some suntan lotion. I’d never spent much time just ‘sunbathing’ as they call it, but I’d heard that redheads burn easily. I also stopped and filled the room ice bucket with ice.
We dressed in our bathing suits, Corky in the skimpy turquoise number, me in a pair of trunks I picked up at a little out-of-the-way shop in Grand Junction while waiting for my ride to the airport, not actually expecting to have an occasion to use them. They just kind of jumped out at me…purple with a black stripe down each side and an inside lining.
We laid the beach towels on the uncovered deck and slathered each other with the lotion, and filled a couple glasses with ice. I stuck my second beer in the ice bucket, then we plopped ourselves down. It felt good to just relax. Trouble was, I couldn’t. Being inactive was not part of my nature, and with all that was going on, it didn’t set well right now. I tried lying on my stomach for several minutes, then turned over to my back.
“Okay, what’s up?” Corky asked. She had brought the crossword puzzle from the L.A. Times with her and had already almost completed it.
“At this moment, silence is not my friend.” I turned onto my side, facing her, and said, “You know, that first night in Aspen when you were telling me a little bit about yourself, you mentioned your dad had saved enough money to buy a big rig, and you’d tell me later how he did that. I don’t want to make you sad or anything, but could you tell me a little more about your dad and your life when you were a kid?”
She propped herself up on one elbow, folded the crossword puzzle paper and stuck it under her towel, then took a sip of her water. “Yeah, sure. My dad–Pops.” She lowered her head, pressed her lips together, and then smiled sadly. “He was kind of short, like me, but he was strong. I’m strong too, for a girl, but I mean he was strong, like a bull. That’s why they called him El Toro. He was a real Mex, a bracero, and he was some worker. He started out as a packer and loader for Allied Vans, you know, carrying pianos up and down stairs on his back. He had a terrific reputation for getting the job done. Got a tough move? Call El Toro. He worked his way up to be a driver.
“Before I tell you about his truck, I’ll need to explain a little about my family. I wouldn’t call where we lived a barrio, not like the barrios they usually picture on TV. It was just a neighborhood with a lot of shabby little old bungalows with crab grass and dandelion lawns about the size of postage stamps and dusty backyards full of junk with here and there a few petunias trying to fight back. We had a dinky little old red brick bungalow with five tiny rooms for mom, pops and us six kids, like a hundred other bungalows up and down the street. Little brown kids all over the place…little girls with their raggedy dolls playing house in packing boxes…little boys playing stickball in the streets, and bigger boys covered with grease, trying to make hot rods out of junkers in the backyard.
“My oldest sister, Isabel, was really like a second mom. Mom was what you call a ‘building custodian.’ As far back as I can remember she scrubbed floors and cleaned johns in downtown office buildings on the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift five nights a week. Isabel fed us our supper and put us to
bed and told us stories and got us off to school in the morning so mom could sleep.
“Then there were the four boys, and then me, the baby sister, everybody’s pet. I wasn’t big on dolls or other girl stuff. I thought the sun rose and set on my big brothers. What a pest! They were into motor bikes and hot rods, so I had to be into them too. They’d shoo me away, and I would hang around and sniffle, and they would feel sorry, and I would be back in the middle of it. You got trouble with your car, Mac? Let me at it. I’ve been messing around with motors since I could walk.”
Corky fell silent, took another sip from the melting ice cubes, her attempted smile looking more like a grimace. Then she sighed, pushed a strand of hair out of her face and continued.
“But they were all workers, except me. I was the little pet. No, that’s not fair. I was too little then, but Isabel and the boys worked after school as soon as they were big enough to get a job. We didn’t have much time for fixing up the house…it was rented anyway. But we always had enough food, and we didn’t go around looking shabby. Pops dressed me like a little doll. But Pops was tight-fisted. We didn’t have any frills either. Everybody had to lay what they made on the table every week, and Pops took it and passed out what each of us could have to spend. The boys used to get pretty sullen about that, but you know, looking back on it, those were the good times.” Corky exhaled slowly, raised her face skyward and smiled, recalling a pleasant memory.
“Then one day Pops drove up in the biggest, shiniest semi-trailer truck you ever saw. Man, did it have chrome and lights and custom paint! The whole side panel was a huge, black bull pawing the ground, with a scarlet matador’s cape, like it was making a pass at the bull, which said, ‘Raphael Gonzales-Independent Trucking Contractor,’ in gold. That bull became famous on highways from coast to coast. At first we couldn’t believe it. It was awesome, really awesome. Pops had a tough, serious face most of the time, but you should have seen the grin on him. We all piled into the cab, all of us. It even had a bunk and a toilet behind the driver’s seat, and we went for a ride past every house we knew blowing the horn. Man, what a horn! Right out on Colfax Avenue a squad car pulled us over. The cop came up. ‘Hey, Toro,’ he yelled, ‘you really got it made,’ and he shook his hands together over his head.
