Shadow of a Thief

by Norman Green

  There was nothing keeping me there any longer.

  I locked up the Winnebago and took one last walk up over the rocks, down to the water’s edge. It was colder than it had been in a while and I had trouble reconnecting with whatever I had been doing before McClendon showed up. Maybe it was because, in my mind, I was already gone, I was already out there on the turnpike. Or maybe it was just this one unusually persistent horsefly who targeted me for his breakfast. He refused to be shooed away, in the end I had to kill him.

  Stupid fly.

  You have to know when you can push your luck, and when you need to cut your losses and run. When I got back the Jeep was gone, taken, presumably, by its new owner, and it was time for me to go.

  Driving the Winnebago was a lot like driving a rubber-tired landslide, it was bumpy, rocky, noisy, and occasionally downright frightening. I’d done a lot of work on her but I hadn’t been able to change the basic nature of the beast, and even though the engine, tranny, and most of the running gear were pretty decent, when a big tandem rig blew past me I began to understand how that bluefish felt when he got dragged up the beach. I was headed south, motoring down the northeast coast of Maine. My destination was the RV joint in Jersey where I’d bought the Winnebago, and my goal for the day was to get about halfway there before I holed up for the night. Maine has a long coastline, though, and pretty soon I was looking for any kind of excuse to pull over—a cup of coffee, a leak, a chance to stretch my legs, anything. It did not take long for me to get sick of driving.

  Not a great attribute in your contemporary vagabond.

  A truck stop beckoned, it had a big lot, so it was easy to park the beast. As long as you’re not fussy, those places generally covered most of your basic needs, and for less than fifty bucks I was fed, watered, dewatered, and showered. I even sprung for a shave and a haircut. The Hispanic barber working in the phone booth–sized shop stared at me, aghast. His own hair was about an eighth of an inch long and he sported a goatee, same length. “Look in the mirror,” I told the guy. “That’s what I want.”

  “You got money? I’ll need to see, like, twenty bucks, pal.”

  I fished out a twenty. “Go for it,” I said. The barber put me in the chair, stopped once more, clippers poised, looked at me in his mirror, making sure I was down for it, and I nodded. The barber dived in, and a couple of minutes later he had my hair all over his floor.

  That was easy.

  Gassing up the beast was a little tougher to take, two hundred fifty bucks vanished down a rat hole in about five minutes. When I finished with that I pulled the beast down into the far corner of the lot, as far as I could get from the roar of diesels.

  I drew the blinds and opened up McClendon’s attaché again. The envelope with my name on it, the one I’d skipped over earlier, was calling me. I took it out, held it up. My face, neck, and ears were not used to being so exposed, I felt like a tourist at a nude beach. I tore open the envelope.

  It was not just Melanie Wing whose life was encapsulated in that attaché. McClendon had included a couple of handwritten pages about himself. The emphasis was more about his career path; it was his curriculum vitae, so to speak. He did not seem to be an introspective man, or perhaps he was not a writer. At the very least, he had chosen not to share many insights about himself, not on paper. What he had written was basically a greatest-hits list. It opened with a Ponzi scheme he’d taken part in back in the seventies, for which he’d been duly prosecuted, and he’d served four years in Indiana State. They seem to have schooled him well inside that hallowed institution, because thereafter McClendon had confined his ministrations to the commercial arena, and never again did he run afoul of the law. What followed read like an abridged version of Not Particularly Bright Slimeballs Running Mid-Size Corporations in the American Midwest, and How They Can be Screwed, although he’d sprinkled in a few from the East Coast, just for variety. In most cases, McClendon’s victims thought they were getting an inside track with an unprincipled executive at a rival corporation, but some of them were angling for a beta version of an unpatented breakthrough, and in a case or two it seemed McClendon’s targets paid him simply to go away. In short, McClendon had made a life and a career for himself proving that the maxims “You can’t cheat an honest man,” and “The hand is quicker than the eye” were just as valid in the corporate boardroom as they were on the street. He also provided a shorthand explanation of how his schemes worked, but really, they were all the same, they were all based on the same frailties of human nature. Technically, there are only four or five basic scams, though there might be a million variations on those few themes. All you actually needed was a greedy man’s imagination and a magician’s sleight of hand.

  It was depressing, really.

  Appended to the end of all this, though, was a short list of names. The offended parties, McClendon’s list of suspects. He may very well have been correct in his assumption that his daughter was murdered by one of the people on his list, but I found myself disappointed by McClendon’s dry recitation. I wondered what it must be like to be a priest. Personally, I don’t care to hear that you committed this sin or that one, or that you’d repeated it so many times since your last update. I want to know what the object of your desires looked like, what she smelled like, what she said, what you whispered in her ear, what sort of fruit she used to entice you from the paths of virtue. And did you still think she was worth burning for? Afterward, you can go say as many Hail Marys as you cared to, but first, goddammit, I want the story.

  I locked up the beast and went in search of a pay phone.

  No pay phones. I was coerced by circumstances into buying a prepaid cell phone.

  “Saul.” McClendon sounded groggy on the other end of the line. Past his bedtime, apparently. “What the hell time is it? Where are you?”

  “Truck stop,” I said. “I’m heading south, but I got some questions.”

  “I bet you do. You still driving the Batshitmobile? You ain’t thinking about taking that thing into New York City, are you?”

  “No, I’m gonna park it. Did you know she was pregnant? Annabel, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I knew,” McClendon said, his voice quiet. “I wanted her to get rid of it. A kid, did I need a kid? And the mortgage comes next, and the lawn and the station wagon, and the square life. I couldn’t take it, so I ran. Listen, I told you I wasn’t proud of what you were gonna find out . . .”

  “I’m not asking just to beat you up,” I said. “But I wanna see if she’s got any family left. I’d like to know what I’m walking into.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I get you. Well, you ain’t gonna find my name on the Wing family Christmas card list.”

  “Are they looking for you?”

  “No,” he said. “Not that I’m aware.”

  “Annabel still alive?”

  “Yeah,” McClendon said, quieter still. “Yeah, she is.”

  “Where’s she live?”

  “Flushing,” he said. “Queens, New York. You want her phone number?” He recited it to me. “The rest of the family is in Manhattan, why the hell anybody would wanna live in friggin’ Manhattan I will never know, but that’s where they are. Annabel wound up in Flushing all on her own. She always was a rebel and I don’t think they ever forgave her for having my daughter. What’s your angle here? You just gonna go walking in there, or what? What’s your play?”

  “I’m gonna be her half brother,” I told him. “Father long gone, mother locked up, no other siblings. Then I hear about this girl and even though I never met her, I can’t leave it alone, so I’ve decided to come see what I can find out.”

  “Not bad,” McClendon said. “You know what, I like it, it even has the right smell. So you’re gonna be my actual son for a while?”

  I found myself suddenly annoyed. “That okay with you, Pops?”

  “It could work,” he said, oblivious. “Though I wouldn’t go leaning on the McClendon family connection too hard. The less they associate you with me,
the better off you’ll be. We should probably be estranged, you and I. Like, you got my name out of state records—no wait, I got it. You found your mother’s marriage certificate. Yeah, I like it. So from that you track me down, and I tell you to go take a flying leap.”

  “Let me think about it,” I told him. “I’ll get back to you with the particulars, just in case somebody walks it back in your direction. Next question. That PI firm you hired. Did you say they were ex-cops? I remember that right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You got something against ex-cops?”

  “What if I do? But their report seemed, ah, perfunctory.”

  “They had connections inside the NYPD,” he said. “They got me copies of the police reports. The real ones, not that shit they gig up for public consumption.”

  “Yeah. I saw them.”

  “And they did some interviews. Neighbors, schoolmates, that kind of thing. Guy told me they’d keep on taking my money if that was what I wanted, but he didn’t think they were getting anywhere. So I let it go. It kept me up at night, though. That’s why I wound up coming to you.”

  “Did you ever meet your daughter?”

  “Melanie,” he said, exhaling. “Her name was Melanie. And, no, I didn’t. I was halfway hoping she’d call me one day, but she never did. Maybe she would have. But what was I supposed to do? ‘Hey baby, this is your father, I’m the guy who ran out on you before you were born, and now that you’re all grown up and got a job, I wanna be Dad and carry your picture in my wallet . . .’ I couldn’t do it.”

  “So there was no contact?”

  “Well, I don’t know what you mean by contact. I called Annabel once in a while, I sent money whenever I was flush. In lieu of taxes, you might say. Paid for braces, Catholic school, college tuition, that kind of thing. I wasn’t a complete asshole. Not quite, anyway. Listen, are you sure this is where you wanna start? My feeling was that someone I ripped off somewhere along the line killed her just to get back at me.”

  “Yeah? You get any calls to that effect? Anybody send you any gloating letters? Graphic pictures?”

  “No. Nothing. I see what you’re saying. Why snuff her if you’re not gonna watch me squirm. I don’t know if I’m with you on that, though. I’ll tell you something, my experience, people mostly kill for the money. You got it, they want it, or else you’re costing them and they’re sick of paying. When in doubt, it’s the money. You might come across a sicko once in a while, but that’s the exception, and alla this ‘crime of passion’ shit, that’s for the movies.”

  “Well, I gotta start somewhere, Mac, and I wanna find out who she was. I was thinking that I’d have liked to have met her. I mean, I didn’t even find out she was alive until after she was dead, if that makes any sense.”

  “Wow, you’re going all Method on me, here,” McClendon said. “I can do Method.” His voice was changing, he was waking up, recovering his performer’s face. I figured I had probably gotten everything truthful I was going to get out of him on this phone call. “Listen, Saul, you are planning on getting a haircut, ain’t you?” He was into it now, he was playing the concerned father. “I mean, these Chinese people tend to be conservative as hell. And I don’t want no son of mine to go around looking like he sleeps on a goddamn park bench, you know what I’m saying?”

  Yeah, the guy was fully awake now. “Don’t worry about it, Mac.”

  “No, serious, Saul. I mean it.”

  “Mac, I was wondering. You ever wonder what your customers would think if they found out about your conviction?”

  Mac chuckled. “Christians love people with convictions.”

  “Really? You’re not worried?”

  “Saul, you don’t understand us at all.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Stillman put it in a press release, way back when I started. We know what we are, Saul. No point pretending otherwise.”

  “All right. Catch you later.”

  The two main reasons why I liked Porter’s Perfect RV Warehouse were, first, it was located just off the Jersey Turnpike, and second, you could catch a bus to Manhattan from the center of the town just a mile or so distant. I piloted my ancient Winnebago carefully between the rows of shiny, modern, penile-enhancing lifestyle statements. Put a single scratch in any one of these things, I told myself, and the repair bill would likely exceed even the most optimistic estimate of the Batshitmobile’s market value. I pulled up into the open space right outside the glass-fronted office building and shut down. I left my knapsack by the door and went in search of Frank, the unhinged little man who owned and ran the joint.

  I didn’t have to look far.

  Frank stood inside the big window, phone clamped between his shoulder and his ear, arms out wide in disgust, the look on his face proclaiming that he’d just smelled something distinctly unpleasant. I repressed a smile and went around to the side door. “I gotta go,” I heard Frank tell the phone, looking like he wanted to spit on the floor. “I’ll get back to you.” He snapped the phone shut and stuck it in a pocket. “I thought I seen the last of that damn thing,” he moaned, staring up at the office ceiling. “God, why do you hate me? Couldn’t you let that piece a shit catch on fire somewhere far away from here?”

  I glanced over at Frank’s mother, who was also his bookkeeper. She was seated at a desk against the far wall, and I had never seen more of her than the back of her head. “You weren’t crying like a bitch when you sold it to me.”

  “Do you got any idea how much money I lost on that fucking thing? I only took it in trade as a favor to an old customer, you didn’t pay me back half of what I had into it. If I’da known it was gonna come back to haunt me, I woulda drove it down to the Meadowlands and burned it up myself.”

  Frank’s mother turned away from her computer, shifted in her chair to look at the two of us. “Relax,” I said. “I’m not trying to trade it back in, quit whining for crissake. I just need to get some work done on it.”

  Frank’s mother struggled to her feet, groping for her cane.

  “Do you got any idea what my overhead is in this place?” Frank said. “Listen to me. You really oughta be doing business with someone who specializes in relics like that.”

  “You telling me you can’t fix a lousy heater?”

  Frank’s mother wobbled across the floor in our direction.

  “No!” Frank said. “I ain’t telling you no such thing. What I’m saying is that I know a guy, and it’d be cheaper for you and less aggravation for me if you took it directly to him. He loves them old—”

  Frank’s mother elbowed him in the ribs. “Outa the way,” she said.

  “Ouch! Ma-aa . . .”

  “Move it, I said.” She shoved him aside and pulled a service ticket out of a drawer. “Hello, Mr. Fowler. If you could just fill out the top of this ticket, we can get you on your way.”

  “Of course. Thank you, Mrs. Porter. You remember me?”

  “Ma-aah . . .”

  “Shut up, Frankie. I never forget a customer, Mr. Fowler, especially one who pays cash. Was the heater your only problem? Would you like us to check the rest of it out for you?”

  “Ah, yeah. Absolutely. Okay if I leave it here for a couple days?”

  “No,” Frank said, reaching for the service ticket, but the old lady snatched it out of his reach.

  “Of course,” she said. “Did you leave the keys in it?”

  “Got ’em right here,” I said, and I handed them over.

  “You need a ride to the bus station? Frankie, give the man a ride.”

  Porter stared at her, mouth open, eyes wide. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah!” she snapped. “Stop in Idaho and pick me up a bag a potatoes! What a stupid question. Gwan! Mr. Fowler is a busy man. He has things to do!”

  Porter stared up at the ceiling, silently imploring his god, who was apparently occupied elsewhere.

  “I never seen her like that. Never. She just sits over there crunching numbers. She even look at you when you was h
ere last time?” Porter had pulled his van around front to pick me up. I glanced through the big window, saw Frank’s mother standing on the other side of the glass with an odd look on her face, a sort of lopsided sardonic quarter smile, like she knew something I didn’t. Like if Mona Lisa had a sister who was a little older and a lot more street-smart. I nodded to her.

  “Not that I recall,” I said, climbing into the van.

  “What the hell you suppose got into her? Maybe she had a little reefer with her lunch.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

  Interrugnum

  He heard a voice, faint, somewhere above him. “Is he going to be all right?” It sounded like Aniri.

  “Yeah, he’s okay.” It was the Babalao. “He’s coming around now.”

  “Should we get him dressed?”

  “You get your clothes on first, hon, ’cause I might be a priest but I ain’t made outa stone, you know what I’m saying.”

  Corey stirred, raised a hand to his head. “What happened to me?”

  “Power,” the Babalao said. “Power happened to you.”

  “What was in that cigar?”

  “Tobacco. That’s what they make ’em out of, you know. Maybe I should change up to a better brand, but I like them plastic tips. More sanitary, I think.”

  “You didn’t load it? Spike it with something?”

  “Nah. Ask Aniri, she didn’t even get woozy or nothing.”

  Corey’s vision was returning. Aniri swam into view, she was pulling her shirt down over her head and shoulders. God, he thought, God, I love that woman . . .

  “What was it for, then? The cigar.” Corey was becoming uncomfortably aware that he was still naked, still sitting in the dirt of the courtyard behind the storefront on Eighth Street. The Babalao squatted next to him, supporting him with an arm around his shoulders.