Out on the Rim

by Ross Thomas

  Stallings smiled. “I’m sole source, Harry, and I get to charge a lot.”

  They used the silence that followed to stare at each other: Stallings with amusement; Crites with something that resembled rage. Then the rage, if that’s what it was, suddenly went away, replaced by what Stallings interpreted to be an utter and alarming confidence. Crites reached for the dinner check. He studied it and when he spoke his tone was neutral and businesslike. “You’ll pay your own expenses, right?”

  “Sure,” Stallings said.

  “Then let’s start right now,” Crites said and dropped the check on top of the nipa hut sketch.

  After they left the Montpelier Room, Booth Stallings $126 poorer, they headed across the lobby to the Fifteenth Street exit where the tall woman was waiting, camel’s hair topcoat over her left arm, quite ready, in Stallings’ opinion, to spring and kill. He indicated her with a nod. “Why the nanny?”

  They were still a dozen feet away when Stallings asked his murmured question and Crites didn’t answer immediately. First, he had to turn so the woman could drape the topcoat over his shoulders like a cape. After that he had to cock his head to one side and give Stallings a careful head-to-toe inspection. Only then did Harry Crites smile and answer.

  “Enemies,” he said. “What else?”

  Without waiting for a reply or even a farewell, Crites turned and sailed through the open Fifteenth Street door, his camel’s hair topcoat billowing out behind. The tall woman with the dollar-green eyes looked at Stallings, nodded to herself as if reconfirming some previous assessment, smiled pleasantly, said, “Goodnight,” and followed Harry Crites out the door.

  CHAPTER 4

  At 11:08 that night Booth Stallings waited under an old elm across the street from the three-story vanilla house with the black shutters on the south side of P Street in Georgetown. He waited until the last two guests came down the five wrought-iron steps and headed west toward their car.

  When the guests were thirty yards away, Stallings crossed the street, mounted the steps and rang the bell, which was actually a loud buzzer. He heard footsteps on the parquet floor of the entrance hall behind the door. The sound of the footsteps stopped, but the door didn’t open. Stallings hadn’t expected it to. Instead, from behind the door a man’s deep baritone said, “Yes,” managing to make it neither a question nor an answer.

  “It’s your father-in-law, Mr. Secretary,” Stallings said to the man behind the door who was either deputy assistant secretary of state or assistant deputy secretary of state, a pair of rankings whose fine distinctions Stallings had never bothered to fathom.

  “Jesus, Booth, it’s past eleven,” Neal Hineline said from behind the still closed door. “You sober?”

  “Close enough.”

  The door opened and Stallings entered into a reception hall whose parquet floor creaked nicely with age. A remarkable stairway curved up to the second floor. His son-in-law stood—or posed—beside the delicately carved newel post, a man so handsome it was difficult for Stallings to believe that he was as dim as he seemed. Difficult, but not impossible.

  Stallings sometimes hoped it was all an act, and that beneath the wavy blond hair and behind the puzzled puppy eyes was a magnificent brain, busily thinking up all sorts of elegant international schemes. This was, Stallings sometimes thought, one of his last remaining fantasies.

  “Joanna’s right through there,” Hineline said, indicating the living room’s 150-year-old double sliding doors that had been carved by the same craftsman who had created the newel post.

  “It’s you I need to talk to, Neal.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.” Hineline’s right hand strayed automatically toward the inside breast pocket of his gray tweed jacket. “Sorry about the foundation, Booth. How much—”

  “Not money,” Stallings said, stifling a sigh. “Advice.”

  Hineline’s hand stopped its slow journey toward the inside pocket where the checkbook presumably lay. “Advice,” he said.

  Stallings nodded.

  “Did you see your Mr. Crites? The one who called Joanna?”

  “I saw him.”

  “Well, then, why not just pop in and say hello to Joanna and then come on back to my study where we can talk.”

  Joanna Hineline was prettier than her dead mother and, at five-nine, two inches taller. But there was still the uncanny resemblance that always disturbed Stallings until his daughter opened her mouth. After that there was no resemblance at all.

  She turned now, smiling—although not very much—as Stallings entered the living room that was long and narrow and contained many of the French antiques she had begun to collect after she married Neal Hineline and could afford them.

  Her slight smile was not one of welcome, but of amusement—as if something unexpectedly quaint had just strayed in. Stallings thought it may well have. As always, the uncanny resemblance to his dead wife vanished when his daughter opened her mouth and said, “You’re looking chipper for an unemployment statistic—or do we call it jobless now?”

  “I’m neither.”

  “You’ve already found something else?” Joanna Hineline said, signaling disbelief by cocking her left eyebrow to an almost amazing height, just as Stallings’ dead wife had when she’d wanted others to know they’d said something ridiculous, fatuous or dumb.

  After Stallings replied with a shrug and a maybe, Joanna Hineline said, “Then that dinner with your friend paid off.”

  “He’s not exactly a friend.”

  She nodded, as if expecting the comment. “You could say that about almost everyone, couldn’t you? ‘He’s not exactly a friend.’”

  “Almost,” Stallings said.

  “So tell me about the new job. Does it pay a lot?”

  “Ask Neal. If State wants it spread all over town, he’ll tell you. But he’ll probably say it’s none of your business.”

  “In that unlikely event, I’ll simply have to pry it out of him later. In bed.”

  “He’ll like that,” Stallings said, turned and headed for the small downstairs back room that Neal Hineline liked to call his study.

  The room faced south. It had French doors overlooking a tiny garden that night had made invisible. But Stallings knew that with the early spring a fine stand of azaleas might be in bloom. The study also boasted a wall of photographs and a wall of books—mostly history, biography and polemics. There was an old desk fashioned out of beautiful black cherry. The desk sat in front of the French doors. Neal Hineline sat behind the desk, looking important, handsome and complacent.

  Stallings, now seated in a leather club chair, crossed his legs and asked, “How much do you really want to know?”

  Hineline frowned, aiming for thoughtful but hitting puzzled. “What d’you think, Booth? The bare essentials, I suppose. Just do me a fat paragraph and if you start to say something naughty, I may cut you off.”

  It took Stallings less than a minute to outline Harry Crites’ proposition. Hineline listened carefully without interrupting. He then pursed his lips, managing to look judicious. “Yes, well, I don’t see us having any trouble with that. Some private citizens of this country want to make a gift to a private citizen of another country, providing he accepts the gift in yet another country—although I suppose Hong Kong’s still a crown colony and not really a country, is it?”

  Stallings sighed. “It’s a bribe, Neal, and I’m the bagman.”

  Hineline denied the charge with a small smile. “Gift-giver, actually.” He turned then to examine his wall of books. He asked his next question with eyes averted and tone elaborately casual. “How much are you getting, Booth—or should I even ask?”

  “Five hundred thousand and I don’t know if you should ask or not.”

  Shock dropped Hineline’s mouth open a half-inch. “Good Lord! That much?”

  Stallings smiled. “I’m sole source.”

  “But you will report it—to the IRS people, I mean?”
>
  “Every dime.”

  “I see no problem then. Nothing insurmountable, at any rate.”

  “What about Harry Crites? Is he a problem?”

  “Har … ry Crites,” Hineline said slowly, stretching the first name out with almost devoted care. “Your Mr. Crites looks out primarily for Harry Crites. But then don’t we all? You know him well?”

  “Well enough.”

  “I know him by reputation only and he is, I’m afraid, always something of a problem.”

  “Who’s he working for, Neal?”

  A long pause was followed by a careful answer. “It could be—I repeat, could be—just as he says: a consortium. Nuclear power people. Electronics guys. Some sugar and pineapple people. Mining interests. And possibly several others who have capital tied up in the Philippines.”

  “Is he fronting for Langley?”

  The pause was longer this time and the answer even more careful. “I wouldn’t quite rule that out—not altogether, if I were you.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  Stallings rose from the club chair. “Thanks, Neal. You’ve been a great help.” He turned to go, but turned back. “By the way, Joanna’s awfully curious and thinks she’s going to fuck it all out of you in bed tonight.”

  Hineline smiled and rose. “She’s more than welcome to try, of course.”

  Stallings nodded, turned again and headed for the study door.

  “Mind how you go, Booth,” his son-in-law said.

  “You bet,” Booth Stallings said.

  After his younger daughter, Lydia Mott, greeted Stallings with a neck-wrenching hug and a smacking midnight kiss in the foyer of the old Cleveland Park house on Thirty-fifth Street Northwest, he was led by the hand back to the kitchen, seated at the big round scarred table, and forced to eat a slice of lemon meringue pie. Since there was no coffee ready and she didn’t want to make any, Lydia Mott mixed her father a bloody mary, assuring him that it went amazingly well with lemon pie. To his surprise, it did.

  Stallings was halfway through the pie when Howard Mott, the criminal lawyer, entered the kitchen, wearing an old plaid bathrobe. He winked at Stallings, served himself some pie along with a bloody mary, nodded encouragingly, and sat down at the table to eat, drink and listen.

  “All ears?” Stallings said, looking first at Mott, who nodded again, and then at Lydia Mott, noticing not for the first time that she wasn’t nearly as pretty as her older sister. For one thing her face was so mobile and her emotions so transparent that friends and utter strangers liked to tell her their most godawful secrets just to watch the light show her face put on as sympathy, consternation, amazement, concern, grief and joy blazed across it. Stallings often thought his younger daughter’s pathologically forgiving nature made her the perfect mate for a criminal lawyer.

  When he was finished with his tale—a slightly longer version than he had spun Neal Hineline—the awed Lydia Mott whispered, “Oh, my God, Pappy!” She then turned to her husband and said, “What d’you think, sugar?”

  Sugar was short and chunky and thirty-six years old with a curiously unfinished look. Just a few more blows from the DNA chisel and Howard Mott might have looked distinguished, if not exactly handsome. Instead he looked as if he had been put together by someone who hadn’t bothered to read the directions.

  His intimidating half-finished look was complemented by a magnificent mind, not much hair and countersunk black eyes that some thought could peep into souls. He used a silken bass voice to thunder, cajole and produce a rumbling confidential whisper that an often mesmerized jury could easily hear from thirty feet away. He won most of his cases.

  “What do I think?” Mott said. “I think the shit’s deep and rising.”

  “That’s understood,” Stallings said.

  “It’s also illegal, despite what my brother-in-law, the beloved simpleton, says. I can think of a dozen laws you’d break. But what’s most important is this: nobody ever pays a bagman half a million to deliver five million unless the deal’s dirty.”

  “Another given,” Stallings said.

  “But you’re still going ahead and doing it, aren’t you?” Lydia Mott said.

  Stallings nodded and then said, “But I’m also going to need some help.”

  “Handholders,” Mott said.

  “You know any?”

  Mott put the final bite of pie into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, put down his fork and rose. “Come on upstairs.”

  Stallings followed his son-in-law up the stairs and into a room that held a very old rolltop desk, a couch for Saturday afternoon naps, and an elaborate stereo system to play the operas that were Mott’s passion. He waved Stallings to a chair, sat down at the desk, and began rummaging through its drawers and pigeonholes until he found the business card he wanted.

  Mott read the card, tapped it against a thumbnail, read it again, looked at Stallings for a long moment, turned to the desk, picked up a ballpoint pen and wrote two names on the back of the card.

  “These two guys are probably about what you need,” Mott said as he wrote. “I hear from the usual unimpeachable sources that they’re very good, fairly honest and awfully expensive. You willing to pay?”

  “I expect to,” Stallings said.

  Mott again turned to his father-in-law. “The last I heard they were out on the Rim someplace. Hong Kong. Singapore. Bangkok. Malacca. They move around. But this is their stateside contact. Sort of their agent.” He handed the card to Stallings who noticed it was engraved and that it read:

  MAURICE OVERBY

  House-sitter to the Stars

  The only thing on the card was a phone number with a 213 area code that Stallings knew meant Los Angeles. He looked up at Mott. “How’s he pronounce it? Maurice or Morris?”

  “Close friends and slight acquaintances usually call him Otherguy. Now why would they call him that?”

  Stallings smiled. “Because some other guy always did it, didn’t he? Whatever it was.”

  “Exactly,” Howard Mott said.

  CHAPTER 5

  A shirtless Otherguy Overby, wearing only baggy chino walking shorts and a pair of laceless New Balance jogging shoes, stood in front of the open four-door garage, waiting for water and trying to decide what to drive to the Los Angeles International Airport. He could choose from a Mercedes 560 SEC sedan; a Porsche 911 cabriolet; a seven-passenger Oldsmobile station wagon; or a high-sprung, four-wheel-drive Ford pickup.

  He had almost decided on the Mercedes when he heard the truck grinding up the long gravel drive. He turned to watch as the Peterbilt tractor-cab nosed around the corner of the enormous house and shuddered to a stop, air brakes hissing. Coupled to the Peterbilt was a tanker containing ten thousand gallons of fairly pure water that wholesaled at two cents a gallon.

  Luis Garfias, the young Mexican driver, lit a cigarette and stared down at Overby for several seconds, as if trying to place him. He finally nodded in the self-satisfied way some do when they’ve managed to match a face to a name. “Your water, Señor Otherguy.”

  “You’re late, Luis.”

  Luis Garfias smiled and blew out some smoke. “Your mother,” he said, put the Peterbilt in gear, and started creeping toward the ten-thousand-gallon water tank that rested on a man-made earth mound just to the right of the drive. The mound was high enough to raise the bottom of the tank level with the roofline of the two-story house, thus permitting gravity to do its work and send water flowing to the nine bathrooms, two kitchens, three wet bars, two Jacuzzis and one laundry room, not to mention the octagonal swimming pool that twice a year required twenty thousand gallons all for itself.

  Now wearing a paisley tie, starched white broadcloth shirt, well-tended black oxfords and what he thought of as his gloom-blue suit, which seemed a size or so too large, Overby opened one of the two large refrigerators, removed two bottles of San Miguel beer, snapped off their caps and served one of them to Luis Garfias who sat
slumped in a chair at the round kitchen table whose top had been fashioned out of two pieces of invisibly bonded rare old maple and would easily seat eight.

  Garfias looked at the beer’s label. “Who likes this Flip beer—you or Billy?”

  “Me,” Overby said, pouring his own beer into a tall glass. “Billy doesn’t drink.”

  “Anymore.”

  “Anymore.”

  Garfias drank two swallows of beer from the bottle. “Mex beer is better.” He had another swallow. “But this ain’t bad. So when’s Billy getting out?”

  “Friday,” Overby said, sitting down on one of the custom cane-bottomed chairs that surrounded the table.

  “She coming back?”

  “No.”

  Garfias glanced around the huge kitchen, obviously pricing an O’Keefe & Merritt restaurant-size gas range, two microwave ovens, a commercial freezer, the twin refrigerators, a double rack of copper pots and pans, and an assortment of other appliances that may or may not have been used in the past year or two. “Christ,” Garfias said, “he built this fucking place for her.”

  “He’s going to sell it,” Overby said.

  “How much it cost him—to build and everything?”

  “About two point seven.”

  “What’s he asking?”

  “One point nine, I think.”

  Garfias shook his head regretfully, as if he had just decided not to make a counteroffer after all. “Never get it. Not without water. Tell me this. How come somebody smart as Billy, when he’s not on the shit anyway, how come he builds a place without no water?”

  “There was water when he built it. Four wells.”

  “How long’d it take ’em to go bad—one month? Two? Three maybe?”

  “A year.”

  “They lasted about as long as she did.”

  She was Cynthia Blondin, the estranged twenty-three-year-old companion of Billy Diron who was a founding member of Galahad’s Balloon, a rock group that had made him a multimillionaire by the time he was twenty-eight. Now thirty-nine, Billy Diron had nearly completed the prescribed four weeks at the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs for his addiction to alcohol, cocaine and the occasional toot of heroin.