by Giles Blunt
Zig looked around at the Elvis calendar stuck to the fridge, surrounded by a halo of Elvis magnets, and the life-size Elvis doll, if that was the right word, that stood in the place of honour under the window. “Say, what do they make these out of, anyway?” Zig asked, tapping the doll with a knuckle.
“I don’t know. Zig, could you take the tape off me now? I don’t like this.”
“I’ve never actually seen one before. I mean, I’ve seen one, it just wasn’t an Elvis. It was a Bogart.”
“Yeah, I seen them too. But, you know, I prefer Elvis.”
“No shit,” Clem said.
“Tell me something, Melvin,” Zig said. “You still pulling that fake investigator shit?”
“Not just investigator. Food inspector. Water department. I got a bunch of ’em.”
“That’s something might interest me. You could possibly purchase some of my goodwill with one of those.”
“Blanks are in the top drawer. You gotta put in the proper-size photo and get it laminated and stamped.”
“Where do I do that?” Zig said, taking a couple of blanks.
“Ben Ditmar. He’s got all sorts of seals: city, state, you name it.”
“Ben Ditmar?” Clem said. “He’s okay. I beat the shit out of him once.”
“What’s this here?” Zig said.
“Autograph letter.”
Zig peered closely at the item on the wall. Actually, it was two items. A nice picture of Elvis-not one of the ones you see everywhere-looking thoughtful and relaxed, sitting on a couch with an old beat-up guitar. Beside it was a letter on Elvis letterhead, not Graceland, typewritten to somebody named “Mr. Schmelling,” thanking him for his help resolving a real estate issue. It was signed, “Sincerely, Elvis Presley.”
“This looks real,” Zig said. “I mean, to my untrained eye and all.”
“Zig, could you take this tape off me now?” Melvin said. “It’s totally not necessary.”
“I may take this home with me,” Zig said. “Depending.”
“Sure, man, you can take it. It’s worth a few hundred at least. But let’s untape my hands now, huh? This ain’t the way to discuss business.”
“Melvin, there’s only one question you have to answer: where is the take from the Discount Diamond job? Just tell me that and you’re free as a bird.”
“I told you, man. I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”
Zig didn’t answer. He opened up a pocket in his shoulder bag. It was hard to get a grip on the little zipper, wearing the latex gloves, but finally he managed to pull out a clear plastic bag that had a drawstring. It had actually taken a couple of days to come up with exactly the kind of bag he was looking for, and he’d finally found it at a shoe store. The salesman was happy to give him a couple of extras. Just the thing for when you’re packing a suitcase, the guy had said.
Zig fitted the bag over Melvin’s head, not pulling the drawstring.
“Aw, no, Zig, take it off, man. No joke, man, take it off.” Melvin’s voice was muffled by the bag. “Fuck this, man, get it off me.”
“Take your time there, Melvin. Think it over. Simple question, simple answer.”
“I ain’t got nothing to do with no Discount Diamond job.”
“Don’t lie to us,” Clem said. “Honesty’s your best policy here.”
“I ain’t got nothing to do with it. Fuck, man. Take this thing off me. Please, man.”
“You know,” Zig said, “I can actually read your mind right now? I can actually hear what you’re thinking, Mel. You’re thinking, if I tell this asshole where the stuff is at, Conrad Moss is gonna kill me in some extremely painful fashion, so what’s to gain?”
Melvin shook his head vehemently. Zig wasn’t sure if that was in denial or in desperation to shake the bag off. You could hardly make out his features behind the condensation. In any case, what Zig said was perfectly true. If Conrad Moss was indeed the guy behind the Discount Diamond job, he would certainly kill Melvin for talking about it.
“I’m not going to ask again,” Zig said. “Last chance.”
“Okay. Okay. I’ll tell you. Take the bag off, man, please.”
“Tell us first,” Clem said. “Then we take the bag off.”
“No, man. Take the bag off first.”
“See ya, Melvin.” Zig slung his satchel over his shoulder and headed toward the door.
“Lock ‘n’ Leave Mini-Storage. Lock ‘n’ Leave Mini-Storage.”
Zig paused at the door, hand on the knob. “You got a key?”
“No, man. No way. Conrad keeps the key. Only Conrad.”
“What’s the locker number?”
“I don’t know, man. I forget, I forget! Come on, man. Take this fucking bag off!”
“Tell us the locker number.”
“Fuck, man, I don’t know. Oh, Christ, man, please.”
“What was that?”
“Seven-oh-four, man. Try locker seven-oh-four. I’m not sure. Bag, man. Bag. Please.”
Zig looked at him for a moment, debating. Then he looked over at Clem, who shrugged. Zig really didn’t want to make a second trip back to this dump. He went back and tightened the drawstring around Melvin’s neck.
Eight-thirty in the morning and here they were at Fisherman’s Wharf, Max gripping his second coffee of the day and looking as bewildered as Max ever looked.
“Seasides like me not,” he muttered, barely audible above the slap of waves and the wind whipping in off the bay. “Look, even the gulls have lost their mirth,” he said, pointing at a row of scruffy birds on the back of a bench.
Max was wearing a windbreaker with Stuyvesant Town stencilled on the back, and a Merrill Lynch baseball cap. No one could possibly mistake him for the man who had robbed the Margot Peabody fundraiser the night before. This morning he looked like a soccer dad, which, to give him his due, until rather recently he actually was. He used to show up at Owen’s games, wearing that cap and jacket, and bellow encouragement from the sidelines. The unsettling thing was, he bellowed encouragement to whoever happened to control the ball. He just liked to see goals, he didn’t mind which team scored them.
“I want to win!” Owen had cried. “My friends think you’re crazy! The coach hates you!”
“A goal is a wonderful thing,” Max said. “It doesn’t become a better thing just because your team scored it.”
Eventually Owen quit sports just to avoid the humiliation, but Max never threw clothes away, no matter how old and worn, so here he was in full regalia. Lately, Owen had been asking himself if Max is ever out of costume.
Not that he was asking himself any questions at the moment. He was reading from some pages he had downloaded off the Internet. The papers were curling in the waterfront damp, and he had to grip them tightly against the wind.
“Tell me again, my starry-eyed son, why we are going to this place at six o’clock in the morning.”
“It’s eight-thirty. They say to go early or it gets too crowded and you can’t enjoy the visit.”
“And why are we visiting a prison in the first place?”
“Oh, come on, Max. You saw the Clint Eastwood movie.”
“Yes, but he was leaving the place, which is what any sensible person does with a prison. No sane person, or even mad person whose medications are in order, goes to a prison.”
“It’s a disused prison, Max. A decommissioned prison.”
“But look at it.”
Max gestured with his paper cup toward the island. Gulls, apparently now awake, circled its lighthouse and the forlorn buildings that looked as if they might slide off the rock into the lethal currents of San Francisco Bay. Even from this distance Owen could feel it putting an indefinable pressure on his heart.
“You’ll enjoy it once we’re there,” he said, not that Max had any choice. This was their deal on their summer road trips: Max chose the shows, but Owen chose the sights they saw in their off-hours.
He read the prison history aloud to Max as they crossed o
ver in the ferry. There were perhaps two dozen people on board, some paging through guidebooks, others snapping pictures. As they approached, Owen opened his backpack and took out his own camera. He took several shots, showing the best ones to Max on the stamp-size digital screen, but Max just harrumphed and looked away.
Owen manoeuvred them over to the ferry’s exit so that they could be first off. “It says be sure to go up to the cellblocks first,” he explained, “before everyone crowds in and spoils the atmosphere.”
“It’s not possible to spoil the atmosphere of a cellblock.”
It was a steep climb, and Owen herded Max along as if he were an irritable old camel. When they got to the top, Max sat down heavily on a bench, red in the face and puffing.
“Wow, look at the city,” Owen said, snapping another picture. “It looks great with the sun hitting it.”
But Max was staring in front of them. “What manner of fiend would lock a human being up on a godforsaken rock like this?”
“These were not minor criminals,” Owen said. “These were hit men. Multiple murderers.”
“Not likely to be improved by sea air and a sound regimen, then.”
Max’s mood didn’t improve when they visited cellblock D, which was once reserved for the worst of the worst. Toilets in the solitary confinement cells were holes in the floor. In some of these, the light had been kept on twenty-four hours a day. In others, there was no light at all.
Max cheered up when they got to cellblock B, which had housed Frank Morris, who, along with two fellow prisoners, managed to pull off the only successful escape in Alcatraz’s history. He and his colleagues had chiselled away at the cement around an air vent, using tools such as a metal spoon soldered with silver they had melted down from a dime, and an electric drill created out of a vacuum cleaner motor stolen from the prison shop. They covered their exit by placing papier mache heads in their beds. The heads were now on display on the bunks.
“What ghastly wigs,” Max said. “Must have made them out of old paintbrushes. Now, may we please leave? What kind of nephew hauls his gentle old uncle off to prison on a bright sunny day?”
By now the rest of the ferry-load of visitors had made their way up to the cellblocks. The place was taking on a Disneyland feel.
“Just one last stop,” Owen said.
It was in block C, his downloaded material informed them, that a psychic visiting the prison had been disturbed by a “disruptive spirit” named Butcher. Deep in the night, long ago, inmates had awoken to the sound of a prisoner yelling for help, screaming that a wild creature with red eyes was trying to kill him. The next day, it turned out, one Abie Maldowitz had died in his bed, apparently suffocated. He had been a hit man for the mob, and his nickname had been “The Butcher.”
Cellblock C was as dank a ruin as the rest of the place.
“Get me out of this house, Benvolio,” Max said, “or I shall faint. Truly, Owen. The exit. Now.”
They had to walk against the incoming crowds to get out. The sun had taken the chill out of the air, but the wind was still howling around the prison, and their windbreakers flapped like pennants. They walked past the ruin of the warden’s house, past the gardens that the guards’ wives had planted, long overgrown, and sat on a large flat rock facing the water.
Max immediately decided that he should have used the washroom and lumbered back toward the prison, leaving Owen staring at the gulls, the whitecaps and the enormous freighters in the bay. He had something important he had been waiting to tell Max. Something Max was not going to want to hear. He had thought the ferry ride and the sea air might provide a good occasion, but Alcatraz was having an unsettling effect on his guardian, and now did not seem an opportune moment. He was beginning to wonder why Max was taking so long when a voice called out behind him.
“Excuse me, I think I’ve found something of yours.”
Owen turned to see Max being led down the hill toward him by a chubby young man in a yellow pullover.
“They need more signs,” Max said. “All these bloody brambles look the same.”
“Seemed a little disoriented,” the young man said in a quieter voice.
“That happens sometimes,” Owen said. “Thanks for bringing him back.”
“Let’s have no more prisons,” Max said when the man was gone. “Sightseeing may be your department, but I’m putting in a formal request.”
“Max, how can we keep putting on shows if you forget where you are half the time?”
“Rubbish. Just got turned around, that’s all.”
“I don’t know. There were a couple of moments I thought you zoned out when you were dancing with Evelyn del Rio.”
“I was having fun. You remember fun, don’t you?”
“You’re worrying me these days, Max.”
Max did a King Kong imitation, drumming on his chest and hooting. “Fit as a fiddle,” he said, “and ready to roll. Las Vegas, Tucson, Dallas-not to mention Savannah, Georgia-the Max and Owen show is going to bring down the house!”
FOUR
Zig hated the smell of horseshit, and he could detect it from a long way away. At first he couldn’t understand why a self-storage outfit would smell like manure. But the moment he and Clem had stepped off the huge freight elevator, he’d figured it out; you could tell by the shape of the units.
“Jesus,” Clem said. “Why’s it smell like horseshit in here?”
“Used to be a riding academy,” Zig said. “Remember there was a sign coming north off the Strip?”
“Why you gonna put a riding academy in the middle of Las fucking Vegas?”
“I don’t know, Clem. Why do certain assholes have to smell like a fucking distillery all the time?”
“I had an Irish coffee. What’s the big deal?”
They walked along the corridors of units, each one numbered and padlocked, until eventually they found 704. A security camera halfway down the corridor stared at them with a baleful purple gaze.
“Stu better be taking care of the kid on the front desk,” Zig said.
“He will. He was gonna start a big argument about missing items and insurance and threaten lawsuits, the whole bit. Kid won’t be looking at no camera. Anyway, that’s why we got ball caps.”
“He better be good, this guy.”
“Stu’s good. Known him for years.”
“I haven’t.”
Zig took the bolt cutters out of the duffle bag and sent the lock crashing to the floor. When they stepped inside the locker, the smell of horseshit was a lot stronger.
“Fuck me,” Zig said. “Fucking Melvin.”
Except for some loose plastic bags and pellets of Styrofoam, the locker was empty.
“I knew we shoulda kept that guy alive for a while.”
Zig turned on Clem. “Oh, yeah? You knew it, huh? You’re so fucking clairvoyant? I suppose that’s why you said something at the time, right? That’s why you said, ’Hey, Zig, maybe we better keep him alive till we make sure he’s telling the truth.”
“Okay, okay, you’re right. You’re right. I shoulda said something.”
Zig kicked the locker wall with the heel of his boot, making a dent.
He cursed himself silently as they headed back to the elevator. It should have been obvious that no one would store the proceeds from a jewellery heist in a place like this. A smart thief would put them in a safe somewhere, just like a jeweller. He’d been half expecting to find a safe inside the locker, which would have posed a problem, for sure, but he could see in retrospect why that didn’t make sense.
“I am sick and fucking tired,” he said, “of learning from mistakes.”
“I know what you mean, boss.”
“Next time’ll be different.”
“Way different.” Clem punched the elevator button.
“Next time we detain the guy someplace safe, someplace where speed is not required. We’re gonna be way more thorough. And we’re gonna make sure we got our hands on the goods before we do anything els
e. Melvin just panicked and made shit up.”
“I think you’re right,” Clem said. “He wanted that bag off in a big way.”
As the elevator rattled them back toward street level, the barnyard smells began to diminish. Zig kicked the door. Fucking Melvin.
It was Max and Owen’s practice to take back roads wherever possible. They sought out the old U.S. highways that had been superseded by the interstates. Partly this was a security measure-the old highways were less frequently patrolled than the interstates-but mostly it was for pleasure. Max always scheduled their shows so that there was no hurry, and he liked to see the small towns and the countryside. Otherwise, he said, you might as well leave the Rocket at home and take a bloody plane.
Consequently, it took them fourteen hours to drive from San Francisco to Las Vegas, taking US 93 down through Nevada. Along the way they listened to dialect CDs, practising accents as they drove. Max was particularly insistent on Australian at the moment. When they weren’t doing that, he liked to find the smallest radio stations to hear the local news and ads. “When Walker’s Shoes are what you wear, it’s almost like you’re walking on air.” And he enjoyed hearing the “so-called Christians,” as he called them, foaming at the mouth over homosexuals, liberals and other degenerates.
Sitting beside him all day, Owen tried to think up a good way to tell him his news. After the next town, he would think, then maybe after the next gas station. So far he hadn’t managed to work up the courage.
Max was at the wheel as they approached Vegas, and even though he was exhausted and yearning for his bunk, Owen felt as if they were landing on a distant planet. As the sun set, the sky turned lilac, then mauve, and in the dry desert twilight the lights of the city became visible when they were still a hundred miles away.
“It looks like an idea,” Max said. “Not even an idea-a notion-soon to become an idea.”
“You should’ve been a poet, Max.”
“I am a poet. Every poet’s a thief. Poets break into your mind and heart, and their verses are so many shards of glass they leave scattered around.”
