Tinman

by Karen Black

  ‘“Of course, Charley.’ I couldn’t imagine how he might have thought otherwise.”

  ‘“I knew it. I just knew it. Still, it was taking an awful chance.’”

  ‘“Knew what, Charley?’”

  ‘“That she would be all right with you. It’s the first time in years anyone has been to the house.’”

  “We pulled up at my hotel. Charley put his hand on my arm as I was getting out and leaned toward me, his eyes brimming with tears. ‘She’s quite mad, you know,’ he said and drove off.”

  Corky stared at me for several seconds, then placed her hand over her mouth. “Oh my goodness. Poor Charley.”

  *

  We came upon McCafferty’s Three Harp Tavern not far from the intersection of Glendale and Colorado Boulevard. The size of the customer parking area in the rear and the fact that it was half full well before the usual lunch hour rush belied an unassuming, faintly seedy facade and modest sign. “Hold it, Greg,” Corky said, as I was about to enter the lot. “Let’s take a turn around the block.”

  “What’s this about?” I asked a little impatiently.

  “I’ve been in taverns like this before, where good old boys hang out to talk sports and other things mere women aren’t supposed to understand. I’d stand out in there like a bubble gum wrapper on a putting green.

  I laughed. “I don’t blame you for being a little skittish after yesterday morning’s adventure, but you can bet that this is just Hennie’s favorite old Irish pub, and dames are OK.”

  “I’m not a dame,” Corky said tartly, “but I don’t think a Chicano chick in Levis and cowboy boots would get very good vibes in there. Besides, I’d probably spook your friend Hennie and you’d never get anything out of him.”

  I turned down a side street and stopped. She was right. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that maybe the time has come in my life when I’m going to need a dress.”

  “It’s that bad?” I said jokingly.

  “Well, yeah,” she answered soberly. “The day will come in this screwy game when I just won’t make the scene as Little Joe the Wrangler. You have lunch with Hennie. I’ll shop for a dress, or at least a skirt.”

  Pasadena wasn’t too far away. I told her how to get there, then showed her on the map we’d gotten from the rental agency, and we agreed that I’d take a taxi after lunch and meet her at the Museum of the Southwest, just off the Pasadena Freeway. I remembered it as a nice quiet place on a hillside with a shady courtyard. “You’ll like it,” I said, “lots of roots.”

  Suddenly I felt a wave of anxiety at the thought of cutting Corky loose in the great, sprawling conglomeration of almost everything that is Los Angeles. She read it in my eyes. “Don’t worry.” She patted my cheek. “Like your friend Buddy Lee McGee said, I’ve been around the block a few times.”

  “If anything goes wrong, call Mike Stephanic in Saint Paul.” I handed her a piece of paper containing his number and some money, waved as she pulled away from the curb, then walked back a block or so to McCafferty’s. An aroma of beer, tobacco, and corned beef and cabbage provided the atmosphere for an ornately carved oak bar, massive oak chairs and tables, and dark oak paneling. Huge, grainy photomurals of dramatic moments at Santa Anita, the Rose Bowl, Dodger Stadium, the Coliseum and other temples of sport covered the walls above the paneling, but the intended heroic impact was essentially obliterated by a haphazard clutter of straw boaters with green bands, bogus shillelaghs, plastic leprechauns, crepe paper shamrocks, numerous snapshots and other mementos of Saint Patrick’s day parades and visits to the auld sod stuck up on the walls and hanging here and there almost at random. As Corky had predicted, a steady rumble of male voices drowned out the handful of “dames” in evidence.

  The surprise was Hennie, already there, leaning unsteadily against the bar. He stared me straight in the eye with a slightly glazed, totally blank expression, then turned his back without a hint of recognition and began haranguing a couple of men next to him. If Hennie wasn’t drunk, he was doing an excellent job of faking it. I knew there had been a time in his life when this was not an unfamiliar state. Charley had a lot to do with getting him on the wagon. Maybe Charley’s murder was reason enough for falling off. I checked my first impulse, which was to try to talk him or shake him into his senses. I had an uneasy feeling that maybe there was more to it than that so I found a seat at a small table in the corner where I could keep an eye on him, ordered corned beef and cabbage with a pint of Guinness stout on the blue plate special and decided to let the scene unfold.

  Hennie soon began to get out-of-control, waving his arms wildly, his raucous, high-pitched voice beginning to carry over the steady drumfire of lunch time conversation. “Bastards,” he was shouting, “power-mad bastards….” I lost the thread of what he was shouting. Then I picked up, “…fuck ideas, they get you killed. Cossacks, bloody fucking Cossacks!” Hennie yelled. The crowd, increasingly aware of the scene, began to stare.

  At this point, a very large individual in a blue serge suit with a black bow tie moved through the crowd, came up alongside Hennie, took him by the collar with one hand and the seat of the pants with the other and bestowed a gentle smile upon him. “Now, now, Mr. Hennigan,” the large man said affably, “let’s not offend the ladies present.” He moved toward the door, lifting Hennie so his feet scarcely touched the floor, while Hennie flailed away in futility. The crowd began to chuckle and then to guffaw, and, to tell the truth, the tableau did have its comic overtones. “Don’t worry about a thing, Mr. Hennigan,” the big man said, “Your car will be here in a minute.”

  At this point it seemed to me that Hennie stiffened slightly and then tried in a more determined way to extricate himself from the big man’s grasp.

  My waiter was standing with the rest of the crowd, gaping at the scene. I shoved a ten dollar bill at him, which momentarily diverted his attention. “That cover it?” I asked and hurried toward the entrance without waiting for a perfunctory thanks. There was a foyer between the outside entrance and the entrance into the bar. The bouncer, a blowsy elderly lady I took to be Mrs. McCafferty, the cashier and the hat check girl were all there trying to pacify Hennie.

  I was about to insinuate myself into this already overcrowded scene, with the idea I might come on strong as a friend of Hennie’s and get him out of there, when the outside door opened and in walked none other than Leonard Nathan, followed by a thick-set, swarthy man in a dark suit wearing a chauffeur’s cap. Outside, before the door closed, I could see a black stretch-limousine with dark, one-way vision windows.

  Leonard was a damn good lawyer and a hard-nosed negotiator. He’d had plenty of practice at keeping a poker face in the clutch, but I think, if I read his eyes right, he was astounded. “Greg,” he exclaimed, as though he were pleasantly surprised but slightly miffed that I hadn’t let him know I was in town, “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Trying to have a good Irish lunch,” I replied, as though I, in turn, were slightly miffed at being interrupted by this unseemly episode. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Someone called from here to say Hennie was having problems, and I thought I’d better get right over. We’ve been worried about him.”

  I’ll bet you have. Since when is a principal partner in a giant engineering firm on call when one of his draftsmen, even a master draftsman, is making an ass of himself in a bar? “My goodness,” I said, “You really are ‘Engineers with a Heart.’” I thought I saw Leonard’s eyes flicker again.

  In the meantime, Hennie had subsided limply, still semi-suspended in the grasp of the large man, his eyes shifting intently back and forth in the exchange between me and Leonard. Hennie looked scared. His freckles were big brown blotches against his normally pale complexion, which had turned bone white. “I’m going to be sick,” he croaked. The large man hustled Hennie toward a corridor with an arrow labeled, Rest Rooms, leaving Leonard and me staring at each other, momentarily at a loss for words.

  The hat chec
k girl retreated behind the cloakroom counter. Mrs. McCafferty resumed her post at the desk with the seating chart, and Leonard and I stepped to one side out of the path of arriving and departing patrons. “I’m really glad you’ve turned up, Greg,” Leonard began. “I tried to reach you in Saint Paul when all this broke this morning. Your attorney said you’d been involved in some kind of accident. An explosion.”

  “It was no accident,” I said grimly, suddenly, without really thinking about it, buying into Corky’s view of who was responsible. “You ought to know.”

  “No, I don’t know,” Leonard said in a very level voice, giving me his sincere look. “I’ve speculated on a possible connection between your…ah…mishap and Charley’s murder, but you were nearly a thousand miles apart. I can also speculate that your being here with Hennie was not entirely coincidental, but I don’t really know that either.”

  “Speaking of Hennie,” I said, “he’s taking his time being sick. I’ll go check on him.”

  Leonard held out a restraining hand. “I don’t think you ought to do that, McCafferty’s man will take care of it.” I looked Leonard steadily in the eye and pushed his hand aside. The chauffeur, who had stuck like a shadow a pace behind Leonard, stepped up and blocked my way.

  “I see,” I said, “You’ve brought your muscle.” We stood there tensely, I contemplating the pros and cons of a physical confrontation, the Chauffeur looking to Leonard for a cue.

  “Knock it off, Abe,” Leonard said, and the chauffeur relaxed but remained where he was.

  At this point Hennie emerged, unsteadily but under his own power, with the large man a step behind. He paused on his way toward the front entrance and fixed me with a bleary eye. “Keep digging, Greg,” he said, “there’s got to be a pony somewhere in all this horse shit.”

  Leonard nodded impatiently and McCafferty’s man took Hennie firmly by the arm and ushered him out the door to the limousine. As he went out he called back over his shoulder, to the crowd at large, “Remember, you cocksuckers, many a word of truth is written on shit house walls.”

  Leonard’s expression was bleak. He shook his head slowly. “Poor bastard,” he said. Then he turned to me. “Greg, I want you to come down to the office with me. I must talk with you.”

  I thought about getting into that long, black limousine with the one-way vision windows and Leonard’s friendly chauffeur. “Some other time,” I said.

  “No, Greg, now. I must insist. Time is of the essence.”

  I shook my head. Leonard’s chauffeur put his hand in his side coat pocket and walked up behind me. I felt something hard in the small of my back. “Leonard,” I said, “This clown can’t be serious.” I felt a harder jab. “You’re a smart lawyer, tell me how you’re going to beat a murder rap if your flunky uses a gun on me in here?” Leonard was turning a deep crimson. “Mrs. McCafferty,” I called across the foyer, “this is Mr. Leonard Nathan and his hired thug, Abe. You might just happen to be called on to identify them in court.”

  “You idiot,” Leonard snarled at Abe, “Get your ass out of here and wait for me in the car.” Abe mumbled something under his breath, but slunk out.

  “You see, Leonard,” I said sarcastically, “why I think it’s a lot nicer in here than in your limousine.”

  “Please, Greg.” Leonard clasped his hands in front of him, pleading for credence like a Levantine rug merchant. “That was not my idea. I had no intention of threatening you. I need to talk with you. If I ever wanted to murder anyone, at this point, it’s that goddamned gorilla, Abe.”

  “Man who hires gorilla may be engaged in monkey business.” I intoned.

  “Greg, Greg, What can I say? I don’t blame you for rubbing it in.”

  Leonard’s large, luminous brown eyes were absolutely brimming with sincerity. I half believed him. “Okay, okay,” I said, “I’ll come in to see you sometime between eleven and three tomorrow, on a couple of conditions. One is that I can have as much time as I want to talk privately with Hennie. Another is that I go straight through your public reception whenever I show up without cooling my heels while that dizzy peroxide blonde at the desk lacquers her fingernails and some bouncer checks my security clearances.”

  I had a sudden, compulsive urge, whether wise or not I’ll never know, “Oh, yes,” I added, “I’d like to know how a place called the Cliffe Motel figures in all of this.”

  The color absolutely drained from Leonard’s face. He was silent for a moment. Then, tight lipped, he said, “Okay, Greg, tomorrow,” and walked out.

  I went back into the bar and ordered a beer for something to do while I tried to gather my thoughts. Hennie was afraid of something. He avoided direct contact with me until the end, when the jig was up, so to speak. Did that mean he thought he was being watched even before Leonard showed up? What was all the raving and ranting about? Was there a message in it? Did he actually want to attract attention, say to establish witnesses to his presence in McCafferty’s? Or was it just drunken paranoia? And of immediate practical interest; was I being watched, and could I slip out without being followed? Under the pretext of going to the john, I got up to survey my options. Hennie’s parting shot about where the truth was written popped into my mind. I found myself taking an unusual interest in graffiti.

  I sat down in the first booth and began to survey the usual scatological palimpsest. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about a variety of outlets for human sexuality. I moved on to the next booth. Nothing in Hennie’s fine, neat hand stood out, but down near the bottom of the partition panel, almost behind the toilet bowl in a very awkward place and a shaky hand, was a tiny little drawing of a pyramid with an eye at the apex, like the seal on the back of a dollar bill. At the base, in place of the Roman numerals, the word HERODOTUS was printed. It caught my eye mainly because it was so different from the rest of the clutter. If Hennie drew it, I thought, it must have been when he was crouching over the bowl to vomit, and I fancied I could still detect the sour smell of it.

  But there had to be more to it than that. I searched through the tiresome clutter of graffiti to the point of distraction but could find nothing. I put my hand on the door latch and took one last frustrated look at the partition panel, not at the graffiti on the panel, just at the panel, and it hit me. Hennie had used the entire surface to draw a very simple diagram composed of four thin, faint lines through all the crap.

  There was a long horizontal line near the bottom of the partition running all the way from the back of the booth to the front. A sweeping curved line started low at the back of the partition an inch or two below the horizontal line, turned upward, cut across the horizontal line, continued diagonally almost to the top of the partition, then turned downward for a few inches before ending at the front of the booth. Another short horizontal line near the top of the panel ran from the front of the booth to a point an inch or two below the top of the curved line. Lastly, a vertical line near the front of the booth ran from the lower horizontal line to the upper horizontal line. In tiny printing at the top of the curved line it said, “No dam.”

  The bouncer came in as I was leaving. “I thought you’d fallen in,” he said as he stepped up to the urinal.

  “Thanks, I’m okay.” So, he’s had his eye on me, I thought, and while he is otherwise engaged, I had better make my move. I walked out of the men’s room, straight on past the bar and through a door marked “employees only” as though I owned the place, out the service entrance and through the back of the parking lot to a side street. I stood behind a bushy mugo pine and watched for repercussions. I was not disappointed. In a couple of minutes the bouncer burst through the back door, followed by one of the waiters. They looked hastily around the parking lot, then jumped into separate automobiles, and tore out of the lot, one headed north, the other south, on Glendale Avenue. Doing anything on foot simply does not occur to Angelinos. Quietly, and a little smugly, I took a cab at the taxi stand in front of McCafferty’s, the last place they would think to look. But a qu
estion remained. Why were my comings and goings of interest to the bouncer at McCafferty’s? Could Leonard have asked them to keep an eye on me?

  *

  CHAPTER XIV

  Los Angeles, Day 3, Wednesday afternoon

  A long flight of steps shaded by old, gnarled trees led down from the museum parking lot to a loggia bordering a plot of rich green grass and a fountain. A girl in a sleeveless black dress was sitting on the grass with her back toward me. One glimpse of the curve of her arm and I knew it was Corky, but something was different. She turned and bestowed upon me one of her dazzling smiles. She had obviously been to a first class beauty salon and had the works: hair framing her face in rich, soft waves cut short at the nape of the neck, and make-up deftly applied to emphasize the lustrous darkness of her eyes, the sensuality of her lips and the oval symmetry of her features. She was Dolores del Rio, Sophia Loren, and Merle Oberon all rolled into one. In short, she was glamor. She could melt a man at thirty paces.

  I had started to run across the grass and then didn’t. I walked toward her slowly, knelt down and kissed her carefully.

  Her expression turned a little quizzical. “I knew it,” she said. “You miss Little Joe the Wrangler.”

  “Can you blame me?” I shrugged. “But…give me a little time, say several more seconds, and I could be seduced.”

  “I knew you were a faithless wretch.”

  “That’s the way I like it,” I leered, “As long as it’s the same girl.”

  She patted the grass beside her. “Sit down and tell me about your day.”

  “Oh, nothing much to tell. The usual day at the office in the sleuth business. A guy pulled a gun on me, but only once. I want to hear about your day.”

  Her eyes widened, “Oh, Greg, a gun!”

  “Nothing serious. It was actually kind of funny. But you have a pretty dress and a haircut besides. First things first.”

  “It’s not a haircut, silly, it’s a coiffure…a whole new me.” She got up and twirled around. The dress was black, sleeveless, low-cut, nicely fitted at the waist and neatly detailed in a stubby raw silk. “Kind of sexy, don’t you think?” She beamed at me over her shoulder.