“Ixnay, Nebraska.” Her voice was soft and hoarse. “Like I said before, maybe later.”
I sighed theatrically and popped open the car door. “It’s been like this ever since I left Krypton,” I said, and stepped out into the snow.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I found a pay phone in a 7-Eleven and called my friend in the DMV; he was, as usual, purely delighted to help me out by running the Thunderbird’s license-plate number through the department’s computer files. This required only a few minutes, and I held the line until his dulcet voice again serenaded my ears.
“How much longer is this blackmail going to go on, Nebraska?” he demanded in tones both hushed and outraged.
“Blackmail is such an unpleasant word. I prefer to think of it as doing a favor for a friend who did you a favor.”
“That was years ago.”
“It was a big favor.”
“Well …” He seemed to be running out of steam. “How many little favors does it take to pay off a big favor?”
“Beats me. Tell you what: I’ll let you know when we get there, okay? Now: Who owns the T-bird?”
“It’s registered to the Greater Omaha Vending and Amusements Corporation. You know, it’s funny,” he added musingly, “that’s a real familiar-sounding name to me …”
“No fooling,” I said, and returned the gray plastic receiver to its stainless-steel hook. It was a real familiar-sounding name to me too. Until yesterday I had never even heard of the Greater Omaha Vending and Amusements Corporation; now it seemed that every time I turned around I was looking at a car registered to it. Or being run off the road by one.
I got the address out of the phone book, filled up the Chevy, and went downtown.
The bells of St. Mary Magdalene were calling the faithful to the church’s special no-frills Mass—a quick hymnless, musicless, sermonless service tailored to office workers’ lunch-hour constraints—as I coasted up to the curb across the street from the vending-machine company. This section of the downtown district, home of missions and pawn shops and liquor stores and whitewashed windows, had been untouched by renovation and rehabilitation. The old two-and three-story red brick buildings were dingy, decrepit. Many bore the faded and ancient traces of advertisements for long-deceased businesses on otherwise blank façades. Many more were crumbling, gutted, vacant. They had been empty for years. They would remain empty for a few more years, and then they would be regenerated. Inevitably. Before the decade was out, the few struggling businesses that remained here because rents were cheap would be forced to close up or move on because suddenly the neighborhood had become the trendy new place to live or work, and they couldn’t touch the rents any longer. You read it here first.
The building I was interested in was an old brick number that sat on the northwest corner, a narrow and deep two-story. I imagined it was once a retail store, perhaps a grocery, and the proprietor lived upstairs. The front of the building featured a huge old plate-glass window next to a disintegrating wooden door that had been painted dark green a very long time ago. The second floor featured a pair of tall skinny windows half-shielded by yellowed shades, no curtains. The east side, the side facing the cross street, was blank except for the gaping hole of a loading bay that had obviously been added not that many years ago to facilitate the comings and goings of heavy, bulky vending machines.
I got out of the car, crossed the street, and wandered nonchalantly up the sidewalk. There were no trucks or other vehicles in the tiny lot adjacent to the loading platform, but the building was backed by an alley that bisected the block. One car was parked in the alley, the Diplomat that had sat in the lot of the West Omaha State Bank and Trust yesterday afternoon.
I doubled back, hopped the three or four steps at the side of the loading dock, and stuck my head into the bay, a big, cold, unadorned space of stained concrete floor and bare walls against which sat a number of vending machines of various types, ages, and states of disrepair. At the far end of the space was a small enclosed room constructed of drywall and plate glass. The foreman’s office. But it, like the rest of the bay, was dark and deserted.
“Lunchtime,” I said aloud.
I crossed the concrete floor—or maybe it was cement; who can keep the two straight?—and listened to the flat echo of my footfalls. No one came running. I took a vague diagonal path toward a gray steel door set in the same wall as the enclosed office, about ten feet down, expecting interference and encountering none.
The door opened to a blank wall, recently and cheaply constructed, badly painted in a brown-and-beige two-tone. The wall served to create a short corridor. At the very end was a grimy, battered door labeled rest room: next to that, in the longer wall, was a doorless opening. That put me in the front room with the big plate window, a room that had the look of a secretary or receptionist’s space: steel desk with built-in typewriter-stand, three four-drawer filing cabinets, and the type of metal cabinet that invariably contains office supplies. All in the standard purple-gray of office furniture. On the desktop sat a green four-button rotary phone. One of the buttons blinked rapidly in its holding pattern. I know how annoying it is to be left on hold forever. So I keyed the line and cut the connection.
At the back of the small room was yet another door, a modern hollow-core wooden door, which was closed. There was no sign or label on the door.
I opened it quietly.
A middle-aged man with a middle-aged gut and grizzled hair sat on a vinyl-backed chair behind a metal desk somewhat larger than that in the outer office. It was only right; this office was bigger, too. A long, laser-carved wooden plaque resting on the desk read frank kirby, and I assumed it was he who was currently pawing through the desk’s file drawer. He didn’t notice me as I took in the room—the desk set, a guest chair, two two-drawer filing cabinets supporting a wooden plank piled with binders and papers, a year-at-a-glance calendar pinned to the back wall near another wooden door that led I knew not where. Perhaps into the office in the loading bay. Two potted plants, one I could identify as an ivy of some sort, one that was unfamiliar to me, struggled for life in the airless, windowless room. They were losing.
He had his phone off the hook, the receiver weighting a small stack of forms on the desktop. I reached over and picked it up. Only then did Kirby, who had been bent at the waist with his head nearly in the drawer, notice me. He gasped, startled, and reflexively pushed away from the desk. The chair wheeled back and crashed into the makeshift table behind him. The binders wobbled and a few poorly balanced sheets of paper fluttered to the floor.
Kirby was a large man, perhaps once athletic, now gone to pot. Probably the only exercise he got was stabbing the buttons on his television remote control. Even I have to get up off my duff and walk over to the thing. His gray hair was neatly and expensively styled; its gentle wave, whether owing to nature or artifice, was as smooth and even as a corrugated roof. His features were long and sharp, above a developing jowliness, and at the moment very surprised.
“Who the hell are you? What are you doing?” he spluttered.
I seated the receiver in its cradle. “I happen to know they hung up,” I said, trying to sound cool and self-assured. It wasn’t too tough: Kirby’s response had been most gratifying. “That gives us some time to talk.” I deposited my hat on a corner of the desk, unzipped my parka, and slipped my hands in its pockets. Then I thrust the corner of the left pocket toward Kirby, who had been inching one hand along the edge of the desktop and toward the center drawer. “Unless you’re reaching for a pack of Juicy Fruit, I’d stop right there.” I growled it as hard-boiled-sounding as possible. If nothing else, last night’s scene with the Fat Lady had taught me firearm safety—viz., how to make myself safe from firearms. I stepped around the side of the desk, opened the drawer with my right hand, and lifted out the automatic resting there.
“My, my.” I weighed the weapon in my palm. “Who’d’ve guessed the jukebox business could be so rough. And a .45, no less.” I slipped it into
my right pocket. “It’ll look swell in the trophy case.”
“You son of a bitch,” Kirby spat. “I’m gonna have your badge for this, you bastard. I got an injunction protects me from harassment.”
“Accent on the first syllable, Frank, harassment, as in police harassment, as in what your injunction protects you from. I assume—if you could get one that protects you from general everyday harassment, we’d all be lined up at the courthouse. The problem is, I’m not the cops; I’m just Joe Citizen, and so your injunction means about as much to me as the rules of the road mean to whoever’s been piloting your shiny blue T-bird around town lately. Namely, nothing.”
His bloodshot eyes widened slightly at the mention of the car and I tried not to smile. I hadn’t done anything like this in months, and it was fun. So I was a show-off, so what? I had made bigger shots than Frank Kirby stand still and listen to me rant and rave, not necessarily in that order, and had lived to tell the tale. The ice I was on now was a good deal thicker than that on which I had skated around with the Mob last summer. Pleasanter all the way around. If Kirby didn’t think so, well, tough.
I leaned against a wall and braced one heel against the edge of Kirby’s desk, keeping both hands crammed deep into my pockets. “Up until about half an hour ago, Frank, I was at a total loss to understand where that T-bird came from, how it fit into the picture, why it was tailing me yesterday evening, and why it tried to run me off the freeway last night. I’m still in the dark, to be honest, but now that I know that it’s registered to the same company as a car parked in the lot of the West Omaha State Bank yesterday”—the red-rimmed eyes narrowed—“I know who can lift from me the veil of confusion, cause the scales to fall from mine eyes and the clear white light of understanding to shine forth. Are you with me, Frank?”
“I—”
“Speak up, son, belt it out. The dialogue’s beginning to drag, the audience is getting restless, and I’m tired of carrying the conversational ball.”
“I—there’s a mistake here. Some kind of mistake. Got to be …”
“Well, that’s not a very good start, but maybe you’ll improve.”
The phone rang and Kirby’s hand went for it automatically. “Tut-tut,” I said, waggling my left hand in its pocket. He stopped. The phone kept ringing. He looked at it, looked at me.
“This is my business here, you’re wrecking my business,” he whined. I could understand his discomfort; from what I could see, the coin-op business was lousy. I hoped Kirby had socked some away during the video-game craze. But I didn’t hope that hard.
“Tough cookies,” I said. “They’ll call back. Probably.”
Kirby made a grab for the phone but I guessed from the way his eyes had been shifting that he was going to try something, and I whipped his automatic out of my right pocket and into his face. He had the phone to his ear and was bawling into the mouthpiece, yelling for the police. Unfortunately, the call was coming in on a line whose button was not depressed. Kirby was talking to a dial tone. By the time he realized the problem and poked the lighted stud, the caller had hung up.
“That’ll be about enough of that,” I said through gritted teeth. “I think the picture’d be a lot prettier if you just sat there with your hands neatly folded on the desktop, fingers interlaced.” I moved the gun marginally. “Today would be nice.”
“You know,” Kirby said ruminatively, his eyes cast down at the gun, his tongue darting out to moisten his lower lip, “I was just thinking I didn’t put the clip back in that gun last time I cleaned it.”
I hefted it without moving it out of line with his considerable gut. “Really? Feels nice and heavy to me. Shall we try it?”
He said nothing.
“Well, okay, maybe later. For now, let’s get back to issues and answers. I want to know what you were doing at that bank yesterday. I want to know why you had me followed after I left there. I want to know why your guys buzzed me off the road. And I want to know now.” Tough as nails, that’s me. I had started this tête-à-tête with a psychological advantage, but the element of surprise is an unstable one with a short half-life, and I could feel it decaying even now. Kirby was coming to suspect that I wasn’t going to shoot him—excuse me; drill him, us tough guys never just shoot anyone—so if I was going to get anything out of him I had to get it fast, before the suspicion solidified into certainty. And before any personnel breezed back from lunch. Thus the Alan Ladd act.
Kirby had folded his hands as I had instructed, perhaps because I had decided to leave the gun in sight, in order to help him remember it was around; now he separated his palms and angled his thumbs back in a constrained shrug. “Like I said, it’s a mistake. In my line of work, Mr. Nebraska, a fellow encounters a surprising number of slow payers. When a guy owes you a substantial amount of money, it’s a good idea from time to time to remind him that you’re still waiting. D’you see what I mean?”
“Um.”
“Good. So I guess there must have been some sort of a mix-up is all, and some of my employees got you confused with one of the slow payers I had asked them to follow up on. Probably transposed a digit on the license plate or something and came up with your car completely by mistake.”
“Uh-huh. What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
“Exactly.”
“No, no—you and I have a failure to communicate. See, your fairy tale is ridiculous. I don’t for a second believe you give your enforcers a license-plate number and have them comb the city trying to find it. Besides, if I’m a wrong number, how do you know my name? Also you’re forgetting that I made your car in that bank lot yesterday. When I was in the lobby with Castelar, you were killing time in the inner office, no? You had plenty of time to get on the horn and call your minions. Maybe they were hovering around the neighborhood, maybe they picked me up en route back to the city. I don’t much care about that. What I care about is—I can’t think of any other way to put it—how come?”
He looked at me for a long time. “Okay,” he sighed at length. “You seem like a pretty straight guy to me. I’m gonna be straight with you.”
I braced myself. There are a few prefaces that always start the little internal alarm system a-clangin’. One is Don’t get me wrong; another is I’m glad you asked that question; and another is I’m going to be completely honest with you. Whenever you hear a variation of one of those, look out.
Kirby leaned forward, resting his weight on his elbows and forearms. “Like I said, this business of mine, it’s something else. And some of my competitors can be kind of … well, it pays to never turn your back on them, if you know what I mean. Now, I’m completely on the up-and-up—don’t get me wrong—but some of these other guys, they have important contacts, right? Connections. Friends with last names that sound like some kind of pasta dish. You know?”
“Go on.”
“Well, so that’s how come I had to get my injunction. Because these guys spread a lot of money around police headquarters, and the next thing you know I got cops coming in here every other day, hassling me and my men, tearing the place apart, stopping trucks on their way to make deliveries. Bad for business, very bad. So my lawyer gets this injunction and then things cool down for a couple of months. But I know the kind of people I’m dealing with, see, and so I’m keeping my eyes open for their next move.” He widened his eyes as if to demonstrate.
Kirby leaned back again, his folded hands still on the desktop, and raised his shoulders. “So here I am at the bank yesterday, my banker’s been killed, I’m in the middle of trying to renegotiate a loan the guy I’m talking with doesn’t know anything about, and then he tells me there’s a private eye hanging around the place asking all sorts of questions. Well, naturally I get concerned. Okay, paranoid; I don’t mind admitting it. I’m thinking, who knows, maybe they killed my banker so’s to delay my loan because without it I’m down the tubes. Maybe this private-eye guy’s supposed to throw a scare into the new banker—Castelar’s brother—so he’ll jerk me aro
und and I won’t get my money or something. Who knows, right? So I get on the phone, and the rest you figured already. I tell a couple of my employees to follow you and see what you’re up to.”
“All right, maybe that explains yesterday afternoon. What changed the program between then and last night when they tried to scramble me?”
“Oh no,” he protested strongly. “No, no. I’m really glad you asked me that, because that was a mistake. You gotta believe me, that was a mistake. I didn’t say anything about roughing anybody up. They must’ve misunderstood me or got carried away or something. I’m really sorry about that. I’m gonna have a long talk with them—”
The tone of his voice changed on the last mouthful of words and I wheeled in the direction his eyes had shifted. Too late. One of the very lads we had been discussing had edged open the door that I had come through. Now, as I turned, he took two long strides into the room and chopped me expertly on my right wrist bone. My hand and arm turned to Cream of Wheat, so I decided to set down the gun. On the floor. The lad casually stooped to scoop it up and pocket it as the door on the opposite wall opened and a tall, narrow-shouldered man in a bad hairpiece slunk into the room.
I should have anticipated it. As the great Chandler himself said, “When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.” My two guys didn’t have guns—they weren’t brandishing them, anyhow—but the intent was the same.
Kirby got to his feet. “Where’ve you two been? I thought this jerk was—”
“He still might,” I interrupted. “Aren’t we forgetting something?” I waved my left pocket in small circles.
The two men looked at Kirby, who was looking at me. The one who had knocked the gun from my still-lifeless right hand was edging his fingers ever so slowly toward the jacket pocket in which he had deposited my—rather, Kirby’s—gun. I told him to cut it out and he did.
Moving Targets Page 19
