Backup Men

by Ross Thomas

  “Try us,” Padillo said.

  “His Majesty—this is not critical, mind you—but his Majesty has a theory that amounts almost to an obsession.”

  “About what?”

  “Your Secret Service. He blames them, you know.”

  “For what?”

  “For the death of President Kennedy. Also his brother’s. His Majesty is convinced that it was a gigantic conspiracy and that the Secret Service was in the thick of it.”

  “That’s not only dumb, it’s ridiculous,” Padillo said.

  “The Secret Service wasn’t even assigned to Robert Kennedy,” I said.

  “His Majesty’s point exactly,” Scales said. “‘Why not?’ he asks. Mind you, he’s read virtually everything that has been written on the subject and he is totally convinced of this conspiracy theory. It’s become an obsession with him and that’s why he’s so adamant about refusing Secret Service protection. He is positive that they can be suborned.”

  A look of tired disgust crept over Padillo’s face. “All right,” he said. “The Secret Service is on the take. What about the local police?”

  Scales ran a finger around the inside of his collar, straining his neck this way and that. His pale face grew a trifle pink. “Doctor King,” he murmured. “And Dallas.”

  “The local cops are crooked, too,” Padillo said, nodding his head slightly and biting his lower lip to keep from either laughing or screaming.

  “Of this, his Majesty is convinced.”

  “What about the Gothars?” Padillo said. “What about McCorkle and me?”

  “The Gothars had impeccable credentials, but just to make certain I had them doublechecked—at no small expense, I might add.”

  “Who recommended me?” Padillo said. “As I understand it, the Gothars had to make me part of their package.”

  “That is entirely correct,” Scales said. “You have an admirer who once was in British Intelligence, Mr. Padillo. I leant heavily upon him for advice. He recommended the Gothars as well as you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He prefers to remain anonymous and I respect his wishes.”

  “You should have spent some of that money checking out Kragstein and Gitner,” Padillo said. “Then you might have frightened Kassim into agreeing to Secret Service protection.”

  “His Majesty is well aware of their reputation,” Scales said, a little stiffly. “That’s why your services were engaged.”

  “Because I’m supposed to be better than Gitner?”

  Scales smiled for the first time in what must have been a long while. “Not better, Mr. Padillo,” he said. “But more honest. Decidedly more honest.”

  I was back in the room that contained the bar at three thirty that afternoon. After Scales left us, Padillo and I had talked in a desultory manner for twenty minutes or so and then he had gone in search of Amanda Clarkmann to thank her for her hospitality or to say good-bye or to accept her offer of marriage. I never did find out which.

  I did find another bottle of the Mexican beer and took it back to my room and sipped it while I read a new novel that a lot of critics had liked about a youngster from the Midwest who was trying to make up his mind whether to go to Canada or Vietnam. When he chose Canada, I gave a small cheer, put the book down, and headed for the room that contained the bar. Padillo and Amanda Clarkmann came in a few minutes later and since both of them seemed to be glowing more than usual I assumed that they had spent a pleasant enough afternoon together, probably in bed.

  The king and Scales joined us and then William, the major domo, wheeled in some coffee along with the information that Amanda was wanted on the phone. She used the one near the bar and when she rejoined us she said, “That was the armored truck company. They’re going to be fifteen minutes early. I told William to notify the security people downstairs.”

  Padillo looked at his watch. “We have time for one cup, I think.”

  Amanda Clarkmann poured and served the coffee and offered around a plate of nice little sandwiches, but no one took any except the king, who took four.

  Afterward we walked down the wide hall with the chandeliers, the black and white marble floor, and the Louis Quatorze furniture. Amanda Clarkmann carried a small gray velvet box that I assumed contained the ring. I wouldn’t have minded a look at a ring that was insured for half a million dollars, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  At three forty-five we were all standing in the foyer that faced the elevators. Padillo was next to Amanda. I was between the king and Scales. There was a soft bong from a bell as the elevator reached the nineteenth floor and the doors opened and two men in gray uniforms with drawn guns stepped out into the foyer.

  It had gone just like Padillo had planned it. The only thing wrong was that one of the men with a drawn gun and a gray uniform was Amos Gitner.

  15

  PADILLO was the one to take out first and Gitner knew it. He fired once, then twice, and there was a shrill scream, but Padillo was already halfway across the room in a low flat racing dive. He landed on his left shoulder, went into a roll, and when he came up his automatic was in his right hand. The other man in the gray uniform had stepped out into the foyer, blocking Gitner temporarily. For less than a second the man seemed to debate whether to shoot the king or Padillo. He chose Padillo, but I threw my attaché case at him with a hard underhand throw. The attaché case hit his right hand just as he fired. Padillo shot him twice in the chest and he stumbled back against Gitner.

  I spun toward the king and Scales. The king was already turned and racing down the black and white marbled hall. He ran fast, much faster than he’d run on the rooftop. Scales was right behind him.

  I turned back, clawing my revolver from my coat pocket in what must have been the slowest draw in Christendom. Padillo again fired twice as he moved, this time scuttling sideways. He shot the man he’d shot before, hitting him again in the chest, killing him probably. Gitner had his left arm around the man’s waist now, holding him up, using him for a shield as he backed into the elevator where I could see the bodies of its two operators sprawled on the floor.

  Gitner had to punch the elevator button with his right hand, the one that held his revolver. Then he fired once, twice, three times—spacing his shots, not trying to hit anything, just making sure that no one rushed the elevator until the doors closed. As they closed, Padillo jumped for the button, and mashed it, trying to make the doors reopen. He was either too late or the controls didn’t work that way. Gitner was gone and Amanda Clarkmann lay dead against the wall below a quite good watercolor that showed a street scene of Paris in the Spring.

  She had screamed only once, probably when Gitner’s first bullet had struck her shoulder. The second one had gone into her throat and had made a mess of it. Padillo walked slowly across the room and looked down at her. I couldn’t see the expression on his face. I didn’t really want to.

  When he turned he looked at me, almost curiously, and said, “He used a Magnum. A .357 Magnum. Did you notice that?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he turned and walked down the marbled hall, his automatic dangling and forgotten in his right hand. I followed.

  Once more in the room that contained the bar, Padillo picked up one of the phones and dialed ten numbers. He waited nearly a minute until someone said hello and then he said, “This is Padillo, Burmser. Amos Gitner just shot and killed Amanda Clarkmann in her New York apartment. I’m leaving for San Francisco with the king. Fix it.” Then he hung up.

  I had gone around the bar and poured two double Scotches. I handed him one and he drank it down slowly, not taking the glass from his lips until it was empty.

  William burst into the room, his usually imperturbable face contorted into fear and horror and, I suppose, even rage. He stopped short when he saw the automatic in Padillo’s right hand which he was still holding and had held, even when he’d dialed the phone.

  Padillo looked at him. “Mrs. Clarkmann has been killed,” he said in an almost toneles
s voice.

  “I—I—I” William stopped to gulp down some air.

  “Don’t say anything,” Padillo said. “Just listen. The police will be here shortly. But before they arrive, there’ll be some men here from the Government. The Federal Government. They’ll tell you what to do and what to say. Do you understand?”

  It took him four tries to get it out, but finally William said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Now you need to do three things. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, sir,” William said, some calmer now, but not much.

  “Get me the keys to Mrs. Clarkmann’s Oldsmobile. That’s one. Two, find Mr. Kassim and Mr. Scales and tell them to meet me here. Three, cover up Mrs. Clarkmann. Use a blanket.”

  This time William only nodded before he hurried away, but his face had lost some of its tortured look. He seemed almost glad that there was someone around to tell him what to do.

  Padillo turned back toward me and then looked down at his hands which were holding the empty glass and the automatic. He handed the glass to me and stuck the gun back in the waistband of his trousers.

  “You want another one?” I said, gesturing with the glass.

  He nodded, not looking at me, not looking really at anything.

  “They must have tapped into the central panel box,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  I handed him his drink. “I thought that was a tough job, especially in this building.”

  Padillo shook his head. “Not for Kragstein. He’d have someone legitimate from the phone company do it. It wouldn’t cost him anything. He’d blackmail them into it. He works that way, not because he has to but because he likes to.”

  “That’s how they knew about the armored truck.”

  “That’s how.”

  “Do you think they hijacked it?”

  “God knows,” Padillo said. “Maybe they rented one and then called Amanda and told her that they’d be fifteen minutes early. You can rent anything you want in New York if you have the connections, and Kragstein has them.”

  “I don’t know what to say about Amanda,” I said, not wanting to look at Padillo, but forcing myself to.

  Padillo’s face tightened. “There’s nothing to say.”

  “Yes. Well, I thought—”

  “There’s nothing to say,” and from the way he said it, I decided that there really wasn’t.

  He put his drink down on the bar and again looked at me. “You didn’t pick up that little gray box she was carrying, did you?”

  “The one with the ring? No.”

  “Well, if it’s worth half a million dollars, I don’t suppose we should leave it lying around like that.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t suppose we should.”

  It wasn’t hard to find the ring. It was still in the box and the box was still in Amanda Clarkmann’s left hand. Padillo lifted the blanket away, reached down for the box, and handed it to me. He stood there, holding the blanket, and looking at Amanda Clarkmann for what seemed to be a long time. I opened the box and looked at the ring. It may have been worth a half million dollars, but just then I wouldn’t have given a dime for it.

  I drove out of the basement entrance and onto Sixty-fourth just as a carload of men in dark suits and white shirts got out of a black Ford Galaxie and flashed some identification at the three doormen. Two of the men looked at us and then looked away quickly, as if we were someone whom they’d cross the street to avoid meeting. Maybe we were.

  Padillo sat next to me. The king and Scales were in the rear. Neither of them had said much other than some murmured condolences to Padillo about Amanda Clarkmann’s death. Padillo had turned away before they were half through with their murmurings. We were just coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel when I said, “What’ll we do with the car?”

  “Leave it in the parking lot and mail the ticket back to William.”

  “I have another question.”

  “You worry too much.”

  “Only over nonessentials such as our reservations.”

  “What about them?”

  “If you made them over the phone and Kragstein was tapped in, then he knows where we’re going.”

  “I didn’t make them over the phone,” Padillo said.

  “Who did?”

  “No one. We don’t have any.”

  Because there is only one direct flight a day from Newark to Denver and because not too many persons seemed interested in making the trip, we had no trouble getting first-class reservations on United Flight 855 which would get us into Denver at four o’clock, just in time to make connections with United Flight 367 to Los Angeles, leaving Denver at 4:40 and arriving in Los Angeles at 5:53 providing that no one decided to go to Cuba.

  Padillo turned to me and said, “How much money have you got?”

  “Around five hundred.”

  “Can you pay for your own ticket?”

  “Sure,” I said and handed over two hundred dollars. The United man gave me $13 in change. He actually owed me $13.10, but Congress now lets them round it off to the next highest dollar so if your ticket actually costs $162.02, you pay $163.00, which not only simplifies the airlines’ bookkeeping, but also nets them $50 million a year. It also gives me something else to brood about.

  When I looked at the ticket that Padillo had handed me I saw that my new name was R. Miller.

  “What did you call our two friends?”

  “F. Jones and L. Brown.”

  “And yours?”

  “Q. Smythe—with a y and an e.”

  “That’s real class,” I said. “What’s the Q stand for?”

  “Quaint.”

  There were those who once swore by the air in Denver, claiming that it could cure anything from rickets to tuberculosis. I don’t suppose they do anymore, not if that gray, greasy-looking blanket of smog that I saw out of the plane’s window occurs every other day or so. I could still see the frosted mountains in the background, but the smog even made them look as though they needed to be hosed down.

  “I didn’t know Denver had smog,” I said to Padillo. “What do they do, import it from L.A.?”

  “They grow their own,” he said. “Everybody does nowadays.”

  As soon as we were inside Stapleton Airport, the public address system started calling for Mr. Q. Smythe. “Mr. Q. Smythe, will you please report to the United Airlines information counter.”

  “Do you think there might be two of them?” I said.

  Padillo shook his head and turned to the king and Scales. “Sit down over there,” he said, motioning toward two chairs. “Don’t move.” He turned back to me. “You go. I don’t want to leave them loose.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “Somebody from Burmser.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing. Just listen.”

  I nodded and walked to the information counter where a blond with silvered eyelids smiled at me and said that two gentlemen were waiting for me in the VIP lounge. She gave me directions to the lounge and once inside it wasn’t hard to spot them. They both wore vests and no sideburns and nice, quiet ties and quiet, hard looks. I walked over to them and said, “I’ve got time for just one drink. A Scotch and water.”

  One of them had a turned-up nose and pale blue eyes. He glanced down at a small four-by-five-inch photograph that he held in his left hand. “You don’t look much like this wire-photo of Mr. Smythe, friend.”

  “I just take messages for him.”

  “We’d rather talk to Mr. Smythe,” the other one said, rising from his chair. His nose leaned a little to the left, as if a football cleat might have smacked into it once. He was larger than his partner and he had brown eyes that were almost hazel. Neither of them was over thirty.

  “Mr. Smythe’s tied up,” I said, “and I’d still like that drink.”

  The taller one looked at his partner and then back at me. “You McCorkle?”

  I nodded. He held out his hand and I reached into my pocket and
took out my billfold. Slowly. If they worked for Burmser, I didn’t want to upset them. I handed him a D.C. driver’s license, which had my photograph on it in color. He looked at the photograph and then at me and then back at the photograph. It wasn’t all that bad. He handed the license back, turned, and signaled to a cocktail waitress who came over, smiling expectantly.

  “One Scotch and water and two Cokes,” he said and then motioned me to sit down across the cocktail table from them. I sat down and looked around and smiled to show how nice I thought everything was. They didn’t smile back. They didn’t say anything until the drinks were served and the waitress had left. I picked mine up and took a large swallow. They didn’t touch theirs.

  “We heard about you,” the one with the snub nose said. “They said you were a semi-pro. Not quite sharp enough for the minors.”

  “I won’t even play next year,” I said. “What about the message?”

  “You had trouble in New York,” the tall one with the almost hazel eyes said.

  “Some,” I agreed.

  “They can’t sit on it more than forty-eight hours. Tell your Mr. Smythe that.”

  “All right.”

  “And tell him that they want both Kragstein and Gitner out of the way within forty-eight hours. Especially Gitner.”

  “Out of the way,” I said. “Just where would that be?”

  They exchanged glances and then the one with the snub nose leaned forward and said softly, “That would be dead.”

  “Oh.”

  “Have you got it?”

  “It’s simple enough,” I said. “There’s just one thing.”

  “What?” the taller of the two said.

  “What happens after forty-eight hours if they’re not out of the way?”

  They rose together as if they had practiced it. Maybe they had. The one with the snub nose looked down at me and his blue eyes seemed to drop far below freezing. “What happens?” he said. “Anything that’s necessary. Tell him that. Anything that’s necessary.”

  I watched them leave while I finished my Scotch. The cocktail waitress came over and let me pay for the drinks. Back in the waiting room I found Padillo standing with his back to the wall about ten feet from the king and Scales.