Out on the Rim

by Ross Thomas

  “Drink?” Stallings said as he moved to the room refrigerator. She shook her head. Stallings took out a can of beer, carried it back to the couch, sat down, popped open the can and said, “What kind of trouble?”

  “I need a place to stay tonight,” Georgia Blue said.

  “Here, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  “Wu and Durant are looking for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Otherguy, too.”

  “Fuck Otherguy.”

  Stallings drank some of his beer. “Tell me about it,” he said and leaned back, resting the beer can on the left arm of the couch. He draped his own right arm over the couch’s back, hoping it was the most nonthreatening posture he could assume. It then occurred to him that a smile might help keep her right hand down inside the shoulder bag. So he smiled.

  “Why’re they looking for me?” she said.

  “They didn’t say and I didn’t think they much wanted me to ask.”

  “May I stay here tonight?” she said.

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s next year. The future. Tonight’s right now and that’s all I can handle.” She paused and added, almost as an afterthought, “We can do some sex if you’d like.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Stallings said and gave her another smile.

  “No it doesn’t,” she said, bringing her right hand out of the bag. In it was the Walther semiautomatic. “Is this what’s bothering you?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not exactly a turn-on.”

  She put the pistol back into the shoulder bag and then placed the bag on the floor beside her chair. “Better?”

  “Much.”

  Another silence began to build. Stallings let it. The silence collapsed before reaching thirty seconds when Georgia Blue said, “Shit.”

  “Go on,” Stallings said.

  “It happened between the time we got back from the war memorial and had lunch at the Peninsula. That’s when he called.”

  Another silence threatened but Stallings warded it off with: “He being?”

  “Harry Crites.”

  “Ah.”

  “From Washington.”

  “I see,” Stallings said. “Must’ve been about midnight yesterday back there, if it was around noon today here. Give or take an hour.”

  “We didn’t talk about the time. Or the weather.”

  Stallings gave her what he hoped was an encouraging nod. When that failed to produce a response, he said, “What did you talk about?”

  “We have a code,” she said. “A kind of silly verbal code. He used it to tell me to call a number exactly ten minutes after he hung up. I was to call for instructions.”

  “Local number?”

  “A pay phone. It’s always a pay phone.”

  “Did you call it?”

  “I’m supposed to be working for him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So I called it.”

  She waited, as if expecting Stallings to prod her along with yet another question. He obliged with, “Who answered?”

  “A man.”

  “Recognize his voice?”

  “He had an accent.”

  “Filipino?”

  “I’m not sure. He may have been faking it. Probably not. But I don’t know who he was.”

  “He gave you the instructions though?”

  “Yes. He told me to—”

  “The guy on the pay phone?”

  She nodded. “He told me to call Boy Howdy, identify myself, and say I wanted to rent that giant bouncer of his to throw a fright into somebody called Emily Cariaga. I was to offer Boy Howdy two thousand U.S. Then the pay phone man gave me her address in Forbes Park and told me what he wanted the bouncer to warn her about. Then—” She suddenly stopped talking and for a moment Stallings thought she might have been struck dumb.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “She was flying out late this afternoon. She was going to Spain.” Again there was that sudden silence with its air of absolute finality. Stallings felt his irritation growing and decided to vent some of it.

  “Goddamnit, Georgia!”

  She blinked twice, as if mildly surprised by his tone. “This bouncer,” she said. “This monster man who works for Boy Howdy was to warn her she’d better not tell anyone about what she’d learned. No one. Ever. The monster man was to be—extremely firm, the pay phone man said.”

  “I don’t guess he told you what she wasn’t supposed to talk about?”

  “No.”

  “So you called Howdy then?”

  She nodded. “He wanted his money first. I said he could pick it up at the desk downstairs. I left it there for him. In an envelope. And then I went to the Peninsula and we all had lunch.”

  “So we did,” Stallings said, finished his beer, crushed the can, rose and headed for the small refrigerator. As he passed Georgia Blue’s chair he scooped up her shoulder bag. She turned to look up at him.

  “I knew you were going to do that,” she said.

  Instead of replying, Stallings looked inside the bag.

  “I could’ve stopped you,” she said.

  Stallings took the Walther out, examined it briefly, and stuck it down into his right hip pocket. He dropped the bag back to the floor. “When’d you find out she’d been killed?” he said.

  “Late this afternoon. It was on Radio Veritas, I think. I went downstairs to a pay phone and called the police to make sure it was the same Emily Cariaga.”

  “Then what’d you do?”

  “I went out. I went to the Shoe Mart and Rustan’s in Makati near the Peninsula. But I didn’t buy anything. Then I went to a couple of bookstores. After that, to the Inter-Continental. They have a cafe there with Jeepneys. I mean with booths that look like Jeepneys. I had a drink. Maybe two. I may have eaten something. I know I’m not hungry.”

  “And then straight back here?” Stallings said.

  She nodded.

  “You don’t know who she was, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Durant got a phone call after you left this afternoon,” Stallings said. “It was from Emily Cariaga. She and Durant were—well, pretty good friends, I guess. It was Durant who found her.”

  Georgia Blue grew still. Nothing moved. Stallings didn’t think she even breathed. There was nothing else for him to say so he waited for her reaction. She finally exhaled the breath she had been holding, drew in another one and used it to say, “I see.” There was another long silence until she said, “You’d better call Durant.”

  “What for?”

  “Tell him I’m here.”

  “What’s he going to do tonight that he can’t do tomorrow?”

  She looked at him with an expression that was both puzzled and confused. And then she asked a question to which she obviously knew the answer although it still seemed to surprise her. “You’re … you’re damned decent, aren’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” Booth Stallings said. “Once in a while.”

  When Georgia Blue first entered Stallings’ suite she had been wearing a brown silk blouse, a tan skirt that looked something like chino but was probably silk gabardine, the brown and white spectators, and the leather shoulder bag containing the Walther PPK. When she entered his bedroom at 1:16 A.M., she was wearing only the brown silk blouse.

  Stallings was propped up in bed, reading a book. It was actually a bound set of galleys that a publisher had sent the foundation. While packing for his trip, Stallings had found it on the bedside table in his apartment across from the Washington zoo.

  The book was composed of essays by nineteen notables of varying rank but identical bent. Each essay set forth the writer’s thoughts, often muddled, on terrorism, which none of them could define without waffling. But if they couldn’t agree on what terrorism was, they were unanimous about what should be done to its practitioners. Stallings had found the book to be yet another tiresome disquisition of the “Zap the Fuckers” school. In Washington, it had put h
im to sleep four nights running, so he had packed the galleys instead of the Seconal.

  When Georgia Blue came into the bedroom, wearing only the brown silk shirt, Stallings dropped the bound galleys to the floor, locked his hands behind his head, and stared at her. He remembered when—upon seeing her for the first time in the Madison—he had decided she was one of the three most striking women he had ever seen. He now narrowed the field to two and even considered eliminating the remaining contestant who was an Italian actress pushing fifty.

  “That couch in there too short or are you too tall?” he said, feeling his mouth going into something that he hoped was more smile than leer.

  “Both,” she said and started unbuttoning the blouse. She undid the buttons methodically, looking down at them as she might have if undressing alone. When all the buttons were undone she removed the blouse, folded it neatly, as though for packing, and placed it carefully on a chair.

  She turned back then, neither provocative nor coy, serving up the full course. Stallings devoured it with his eyes, wondering how it would taste on the tongue.

  “That does stir the blood,” he said.

  “Good,” Georgia Blue said as she slipped into bed beside him.

  Kissing her, Stallings decided, was like kissing your first older woman—the one with all the wicked experience. He then decided not to decide anything else and simply go along with whatever happened, except that what happened was far from simple. Instead, it was intricate, a trifle wild, totally sensual and innovative even to Stallings who thought, until now, that he long ago had crossed his last sexual frontier. At one point he experienced a miser’s glow when he realized that this night in this bed in suite 542 of the Manila Hotel would turn into his main account at the Bank of Fantasy—and that he could draw on it without limit for as long as he lived.

  It was over in half an hour, give or take five minutes. They lay, staring at the ceiling, her head on his shoulder, Stallings wishing for the first time in years that he still smoked. Chesterfields. Unfiltered. The Destroyers with their “They Satisfy” promise. Or was that Old Gold? He had almost decided to ask Georgia Blue, even if she weren’t old enough to remember, when she said, “That fucking Durant.”

  “Seems like a nice enough fella.”

  “Not when you think he might kill you.”

  “Because of the Cariaga woman?”

  “He could,” she said. “I don’t know if he will. But he could.”

  “He won’t kill you,” Stallings said. “Not until he gets his money anyhow.”

  She turned her head to find him still staring at the ceiling. “But what if he never gets his money?” she said. “What if I’ve blown the whole deal?”

  “In that case,” Stallings said, still staring at the ceiling, “it won’t be just that fucking Durant you have to worry about.”

  At 8:17 the next morning the venetian blinds went up with a clatter that ended in a small bang. Sunlight streamed in on Stallings and Georgia Blue who lay in the bed, both naked to their waists, which was where the sheet ended. She bolted upright. Stallings opened his eyes to find Otherguy Overby standing at the window, looking out at the bay.

  “Nice day,” Overby said, not turning. “Except they say it’s going to be a little hot later on.”

  He turned then, looking first at Stallings, then at Georgia Blue who made no effort to pull up the sheet. “Wu and Durant are in there,” Overby said, nodding toward the sitting room. “They think we need to talk.”

  “They order coffee?” Stallings said.

  “No, but I did,” Overby said, turned and left the room.

  CHAPTER 21

  Georgia Blue came out of the suite’s bedroom, wearing one of those long white terry-cloth robes that the better hotels provide their guests, along with a warning that he who steals it will pay. She came out barefoot, her right hand deep in the robe’s pocket where it clutched the Walther PPK that Booth Stallings had returned earlier without comment.

  Stallings noticed she had recovered her lost poise. It now seemed almost unshakable as she stopped to look at each of the four men. She nodded at Artie Wu, who sat on the couch in his favorite left-hand corner, a cup of coffee in one hand, a morning cigar in the other. Wu nodded back politely. Georgia Blue’s gaze skipped over Overby, seated as usual in a straight-back chair, and lingered only briefly on Stallings, who looked back at her over the rim of his coffee cup. Her gaze came to rest on Durant, who stood by the room service cart with its too many cups and saucers and its twin chrome pots of coffee.

  Durant turned to the cart and poured a cup of coffee. “Black, right, Georgia?” he said. “No sugar.”

  “Please,” she said.

  Durant turned with cup and saucer, crossed to where she stood in the center of the sitting room, and handed her the coffee. She accepted it with her left hand, keeping her right one wrapped around the Walther in the robe’s pocket. She turned then, looking for a place to sit, and again decided on the green armchair with its side table. Placing the cup and saucer on the table first, she sat down, crossing her legs beneath the long robe, keeping her right hand in its pocket.

  No one said anything until she picked up the cup with her left hand and sipped the coffee. Then Artie Wu spoke. “Booth told us what you told him last night, Georgia. He made it all very factual, very objective. Anything you’d like to add or clarify?”

  “Before I’m sentenced, you mean?”

  “I don’t think you really meant to say that.”

  She thought about it, shrugged and looked at Durant who still stood, leaning now against a wall and smoking his first cigarette of the morning. “I didn’t know who she was, Quincy,” Georgia Blue said. “I didn’t know she would be killed. I’m sorry.”

  Durant stared at her without replying. Finally he said, “Take your hand out of your pocket, Georgia. You’re not going to need it.”

  Georgia Blue’s slight sag of relief was almost invisible. She picked up the cup with her left hand, sipped more coffee, put the cup back down and looked at Artie Wu, her right hand still in the robe’s pocket.

  “Now what, Artie?” she said.

  Artie Wu sent one of his fat smoke rings toward the ceiling. “The plan stays the same,” he said, “except we speed it up. Emily Cariaga was apparently killed to shut her up. But we don’t know what she’d found out or how important it was, and it seems pointless to speculate. We get in and out of this thing fast and hope the Manila cops’ll lose all interest in Durant and me.”

  “I think the Cariaga lady found out who’s putting up the five million,” said Otherguy Overby to whom speculation was meat and drink.

  “Very pat, Otherguy,” Durant said.

  Overby gave him a cold look. “So I like things neat. But just because I like ’em that way doesn’t mean that when nice and neat comes along I’ve got to toss it out just because I like it so much. That’s waste.”

  “He has a point,” Booth Stallings said, turning to Wu. “Can’t you guys check it out? See the same people she saw. Find out what they talked about?”

  “Quincy and I’ll try, of course,” Wu said. “But I don’t think we’ll get anywhere. Emily moved at social heights where the air’s thin and the climb up’s difficult—if not impossible—for a couple of grifters with no credentials other than their cheerful smiles and witty small talk.”

  “That’s what I thought you two did best,” Stallings said. “Separating the undeserving rich from their money. If you can do that, why the hell can’t you get them to babble?”

  “To part them from their money,” Durant said in a too patient tone, “all we have to do is tickle their greed. But we’re not going for their money this time. We’re going to ask them to confide in us about something that got someone they know killed. And we don’t have that kind of leverage.”

  “But we are going to try, Booth,” Artie Wu said.

  “You’d better try damned hard,” said Stallings.

  Wu nodded his agreement and turned to Georgia Blue. “
I said we’re going to speed things up, Georgia. That means Otherguy flies down to Cebu today on the noon plane and you follow on the three o’clock flight. Booth’ll fly down tomorrow, with Quincy and me following the next day, which is—” He looked at the calendar on his watch. “Wednesday, April the first.”

  “April Fools’ Day,” said Overby, ever literal.

  No one spoke for several seconds. Instead, they watched Artie Wu blow three more smoke rings into the air. As the last one drifted to the ceiling, Wu said, “Let’s have some more coffee and then I’m going to deliver a small homily that I trust everybody’ll take to heart.”

  Overby rose, went to the room service table and picked up one of the chrome pots. He moved about the room, filling the cups. Everyone sipped politely at coffee that no one really seemed to want. Booth Stallings kept his eyes on Artie Wu, not quite marveling at the big man’s ability to dominate the room—any room, for that matter.

  It was partly Wu’s great size, Stallings decided, and partly his brilliance that enabled him to lead and command, almost without seeming to. But his real weapon was that effortless easy charm that made virtually everyone like him and, far more useful, seek his approval. Even you aren’t immune, Stallings warned himself.

  And then there’s that fucking Durant, he thought, unconsciously adopting the by now familiar designation. Durant, who’s just as smart, or nearly so, and who carefully cultivates that ticking-bomb image, which he damn well might be. The charming, lovable Mr. Wu and his terrible paladin. Some combination.

  It occurred then to Booth Stallings—for the first time—that they, the five of them, might really steal the five million after all. The notion was so bizarre that it made him smile and almost caused him to chuckle. But he stifled the chuckle, drained his coffee cup and turned his attention to what Artie Wu had to say.

  “With the exception of Booth here,” Wu began, “we’ve all known each other forever, which may be too long. We know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, quirks and hang-ups. None of us is perfect, God knows, but each of us is competent. Extremely so. Well, we’re going for the lallapalooza—for five million dollars and, as Otherguy says, that’s major money. With an even five-way split it should be enough for everybody and I’m convinced we can bring it off. But each of us is human and therefore susceptible to dangling temptation. So if it’s ever dangled in front of you, and you’ve decided you can’t resist, just remember this: I’ll come after you. And right behind me will come that fucking Durant. One of us will find you. Maybe both of us. And you’ll never ever spend the money.”