Knife at My Back

by Lawrence Lariar

  It was after I lit the match that I saw the gas can.

  Was this the reason why he had tried to bury me under the rocks? The can was medium-sized, the sort of a container used in garages as incidental equipment, or on small outboards for carrying reserve gas. The paint was fresh, and along the bottom rim, somebody had painted MONTORD GARAGE in rough white letters. How long had it been lying on the damp leaves? No rust marks flecked its sides. The painted letters were bright and fresh, probably done at the start of the season. The handle, a wood roller, still seemed varnished and new. Did somebody use it recently? Last night?

  I took my time threading my way back to the caretaker’s shack through the deep wooded valley. Nothing stirred around me but the slim and tickling echoes of my own feet, cracking the brush as I moved ahead. Whoever used this can must have forgotten it. He had returned tonight, to find me prowling among the debris. He would be a desperate man. He would be a murderer. It would be easy to grab him now, because the caretaker must have seen him pass. I began to run when the last thick stretch of woodlands faded behind me. But I slowed my pace to a crawl.

  The lights in the caretaker’s cottage were out. The place dead.

  And on the front door, a sign read:

  OUT TO SUPPER—BACK AT EIGHT

  Chet Fowler

  CHAPTER 8

  Archy Funk nibbled a toothpick, rolled it in his fat lips and then spat it across the lawn. He was doing his best to help me. He was struggling to recall the movements of a variety of characters. He struggled with his whole face, working his brain so that the corrugations rippled across his beefy brow.

  “Nothing important,” he said at last. “I didn’t see nothing to help you, peeper.”

  “Never mind the editorial opinion, Archy. You weren’t asleep out here, were you? Think.”

  “I’m concentrating.”

  “Who did you see? Close your eyes and remember.”

  “If I close my eyes, I fall asleep. But it’s coming back now.”

  “Let it come.” I was watching the door to the big garage, at the north side of the main building, hidden under the big elms. The door was open now and beyond the oblong frame of light two men stood silhouetted. Workers, both of them. “Name them, will you?”

  “All right. First one I see was Buddy Binns. He comes out walking on his toes, like he always walks, you know, sort of half dead. He looked sore to me. Or maybe he ate too much. Anyhow, after a while, Margo steps out and she looks around. I figure she was looking for him and I was right. He sees her and runs to her and they walk over near the pool, talking a mile a minute.”

  “Happy talk?”

  “I can’t hear it, but it isn’t happy. Margo has got a high voice and she’s using it on him. He yells back at her. I wouldn’t call it exactly love, Steve.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “A fight,” Archy concluded. “Even if I can’t hear the words, you can tell what’s cooking. It don’t smell from roses.”

  “Who came out next?”

  “Manny Erlich and Paul Forstenburg. They also step out for a walk. Everybody wants to sniff the breeze tonight, it seems. Manny and Paul go over to the golf course and stand around on the eighteenth green for a while. Then they fade for me, because I got something really juicy to watch.” He licked his lips and enjoyed the next picture in his memory book. “It’s this doll Lili. Now there’s a broad who could have made the grade in burlesque. Born twenty years too late, she was. With a figure like that, she would have had the, boys on the aisle eating out of her hand. What a hunk of woman! Anyhow, she comes out with Don Trask. This Trask guy is really working on her. Know what I mean? Cozy as a bedbug in a mattress. He’s having a small feel day for himself, but nothing she don’t encourage. They both slip along the side of the hotel, heading for the woods.”

  “Not the west gate?”

  “Not there. Over near the tennis courts, where the grass is high and dry. And they don’t come out, so I forget about them. After that, the only one I see is old man Lasker.”

  “Where?”

  “Come to think of it, he was heading for the west gate.”

  I almost popped a gasket. “Alone?”

  “Alone.”

  I slapped a small check mark alongside Lasker’s name in my subconscious file of reference and research. Things were moving fast. Too fast to be good. Over Archy’s sloulder, the two men in the garage were packing up to beat it. They walked slowly out to the right toward the staff house. The garage door was still open. I picked up the gas can and got up and nudged Archy.

  “Where we going?” he asked.

  “I’m working,” I said. “Come on along for the laughs.”

  We crossed the lawn and entered the driveway to the garage. The big hotel station wagon sat in the corner and from nearby came the clank and clatter of a mechanic at work. He slid from beneath the car as we approached. He was a youth of obvious zeal and ardor for his trade. He wiped his long hands on his overalls and snapped a cigarette into his mouth and stared at the gas can with the faintly curious air of a man watching his wife undress.

  “Where’d you get it?” he asked.

  “Where’d you have it?”

  “I got a dozen of them, mister.” He swept his hand back to a shelf a foot above floor level. There were nine cans of the same type back there. “Somebody stuck this place with an order of a dozen of them things. We carry ’em on the truck, the station wagon and the boss’s car.”

  “Which boss?”

  “Paul Forstenburg, of course,” he laughed. “Is there any other boss?”

  “Let’s check the cars,” I suggested.

  “Says who?” he asked.

  “Check the cars like he asks you,” said Archy, with a sour cream smile. “This is a detective, sonny. He don’t want to waste time with snotty mechanics.”

  “Oh,” said the kid, and marched over to the station wagon and lifted the rear seat and held up a gas can. He next went to the truck and leaped inside and came out with another can. He hopped down and scratched his head with his dirty nails.

  “That means yours must come from Paul’s car.”

  “Which is Paul’s?”

  “The big Caddy at the end of the drive, down by the entrance.”

  I slipped him a buck and watched his face light up. We left the can with him and stepped along the lot to Forstenburgh’s car. Of course, the luggage carrier was locked. And so was Forstenburg’s intellect when he came out and saw us staring at his rear end.

  “What’s up?” he asked. The excitement of the past few hours had worn his usually even temperament to the bone. He was now as jumpy and jerky as a fly on a hot griddle. “Anything wrong, Steve?”

  “Open your luggage carrier, I said. “I think some of your equipment is missing.”

  “My equipment?”

  “Open it up, Paul.”

  “I haven’t got my keys,” he said, with a snap.

  “Where do you keep them?”

  “On a rack—in the main office.”

  “That’s absolutely correct,” said a voice behind me. It was Lili, all smiles and gaiety, weaving our way and showing us the cut of her latest evening gown, a masterpiece of engineering around the upper torso. When she exhaled, the earth trembled. The earth was trembling now. Lili flicked her hand at a passing shadow who happened to be Don Trask. Don didn’t join us. Don was too busy wiping something off his lips with a handkerchief. Lili grabbed my arm and tugged me close to her, still talking in her wandering, brittle way. “Paul’s keys, my keys, all staff keys are on the rack in the office. Now, what’s bothering you, darling?”

  “You,” I said. I slapped her where she most enjoyed it. “Run along, Lili. I’m working now. I’ll get to you later.”

  “Is that a date?”

  “Later. You know where.”

  �
��I’ll turn the bed down.” She laughed, and slid off toward the entrance.

  “Now what about my luggage compartment?” Paul asked anxiously. It was a cool night, but he was dripping dampness, all the way down his lean face and along the chin where sweating means more than seasonal heat. “Anything wrong?”

  “When did you open it last, Paul?”

  “Last?” He made a great show of his befuddlement. His answer came after the facial gymnastics. “About a week ago, when I had a flat. Why?”

  “You’re sure you didn’t open it since then?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Suppose I told you that your gas can was missing?”

  “Is it?” He gave me the full treatment now, rolling his eyes open and letting the eyebrows crawl up toward his balding hairline. “How do you know?”

  “He’ll make book on it,” laughed Archy. “Five bucks’ll get you five grand your can’s missing. Not a bad line, hah? The man with the missing can.”

  “If that’s so, then somebody took it out,” Paul said with sincerity. “Anybody could have walked inside to the office and taken my keys, Steve. Does it matter?”

  “It may matter a lot,” I said. It was an effort to ease out of the nasty mood that was blossoming inside me. But it would do no good to antagonize Paul Forstenburg. Not yet. “We’ll talk about it later, Paul. Meantime, forget it.”

  Was he relieved? He took us into the bar and insisted that we let him buy a round. His passing worry had faded and the bubbles were off his chin and he seemed to enjoy swallowing two hookers of liquor in quick succession. We were joined by a few of the customers, the lean and hungry dolls who prowl the bar in search of bedmates and bedlam. I brushed them away and walked out through the lobby. Don Trask had bypassed the bar a little while ago. I watched the office door and saw him in there, talking fast to Lili. He came out after a while and slid his eyes at me and tried to avoid me.

  But he didn’t quite make it.

  I caught him at the door.

  “In a hurry?” I asked. “Or can I join the party?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he growled, as cordial as a snake under a rock.

  “Then you won’t mind company.”

  “What’s eating you, small fry?”

  “You,” I said. He knew the shortcuts to my spleen, the dirty-mouthed crumb. Don Trask, of all the Broadway ten percenters, had the ability to antagonize with a word or a look. Somebody had dropped him in a bucket of manure when he was a kid, or maybe they weaned him on vinegar. His mouth spouted prose as rancid and foul as maggoty meat, and twice as sickening. Over the years, whenever we had met before, he had always shown me the end of his thin nose. He was doing it again now, waiting for me to take the hook and explode. But that kind of explosion would be salt in his soup. So I kept my lip zipped.

  And he tried again, of course. He said, “What are you trying to prove, Conacher? I heard about the job Lasker gave you. So you’re on a big bad case. But that doesn’t mean I have to sit down and talk for you. I told Jorgenson all I know. Which is nothing.”

  “You didn’t tell him all.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  We were outside now, in the shadows behind the big and garish entrance. The Montord glowed and sparkled like the, front of a New York night club, complete with uniformed lackeys at the door and enough neon to light up a small town. I had my back to the hotel, so that Don Trask’s face was alive with the light from behind me. He looked down at me with the usual thin mask of scorn. But I had hit him where it hurt with my line of dialogue. Deep beyond his curious scowl lurked a growing doubt. He gnawed his cigar end viciously.

  I said, “Did you tell him about your trip to Lili’s room last night?”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Then it was you I saw hopping through the window?”

  He was trapped and the clamps hurt so hard that he let himself step back a pace, as bothered as a goosed virgin. There are two types of Broadway agents—the quick and the dead. And Don Trask fancied himself the leader of the big brain group, the man with the smart head and the smarter tongue. He swallowed it now.

  And he said, “Clever boy. Can you prove it?”

  “If I must.”

  “You must.”

  “Your cigar band is showing,” I said. “Corny, but cute, Trask. You left your trade mark behind when you skipped last night. I’ll tell you a secret—you smoke too much. When I interviewed the clerk at the cigar counter, he told me about your recent purchase of Cuchelleros. He hasn’t sold that brand for two weeks. Not until you came up here. So it all adds up for me. Unless Lili has taken up cigar smoking among her other vices.”

  What was happening to him now? His face reflected a change of pace as he stared at the mangled cigar in his fingers and dropped it on the grass and rubbed it to oblivion with his heel. A sudden thoughtfulness hit him. And hard. He would be coming my way now, and I knew the reason.

  “If you’re worried about Margo,” I said. “I wouldn’t think of telling her, Trask.”

  “What’s holding you back?” he, said evenly, still fighting me with every inch of his mean face. “Or were you thinking of putting the bee on me? A small hunk of blackmail, maybe?”

  He hit the bull’s-eye with that crack. Sometimes the reflexes can’t be tied up forever by clean and deliberate thought. Old man Freud hit it on the nose when he said: “It is perfectly fine to understand what irritates us. But sometimes we cannot help reacting. Sometimes the stimulus is too severe.” Trask had hit me where it hurt and he was standing back to enjoy my discomfort. But I was no longer in the mood for swallowing his foul ideas Trask was big but he was flabby a pot of flesh that had lost its muscle a long time ago, when he left the business of writing cheap comedy to pursue the soft and easy life of the agent. He would stand there forever, smirking and sneering at me, unless I reacted soon. So I reacted. I brought my right foot up and stepped down on his brogans. But hard. I put everything I had into the move, cracking down on his toes with the edge of my hard heels. He opened his mouth wide enough to swallow billiard balls. He let fly with a piercing scream that rippled down into the valley and set up echoes as mad as the call of the loon. He doubled up and yowled, and when his body bent, I slapped his face. So hard, so deliberately, that he fell backwards on the lawn and sat there gawking up at me with the desperate but futile fury of an equestrian kicked by his favorite horse.

  “Blackmail,” I said, “is a dirty word.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Trask got up slowly and brushed himself off. I had pulled the string too fast for him to take a stab at me before he went down, and he was overcome by a mixture of embarrassment and chagrin.

  I said, “Sorry, Trask, but you asked for it.”

  “Yes, I suppose I did.”

  He hung his head and avoided looking up at the path, where a few clients were strolling willy-nilly, on the alert for an incident of this type, so that they could feed it to their tablemates at the next meal. Big hotels like The Montord are huge caves of gossip and their residents fatten on the daily speculation involving the people around them. Trask had been seen by these termites, and the fact that they would discuss his fall over tomorrow’s coffee was a keen blow to his lofty soul. He continued to shake his big head at the lawn, as sad as a frustrated lover. I followed him into the surrounding gloom, feeling a bit sorry that I had slammed him in sight of the hotel guests. The maggots were still gawking at us back there on the path, waiting for a renewal of our hostilities.

  “My pratt fall should keep their slimy tongues wagging for a week,” Trask laughed softly.

  “Forget it,” I said. “They didn’t see you.”

  My balm didn’t soothe him. He was suddenly humble and soft. It made sense when I put it all together. Trask had long ago abandoned the idea of physical stress and strain. He had made a name for himself as a wit and a brain, the type
of sedentary sage who would be unaccustomed to rally his feeble muscles for any counterattack. He would consider the use of bone and brawn beneath his personal dignity. The record of his past showed a long line of quiet retreats from any show of fisticuffs. And this reputation for acting as a punching bag was his personal cross, a business that began ever since he fell in love with Margo Lewis.

  Everybody within thirty miles of Lindy’s knew that Don Trask had been burning with love for her ever since the day he signed her. His smoldering passion was a current legend on Broadway. Yet, on several occasions, in bistros and bars, he had been leveled and lowered by assaults from a variety of ardent escorts to the fiery Margo. He had stood up to them and let them feel the barbs from his slick tongue. But he had been slapped down and left to rub his bruises every time he opened his mouth to protest Margo’s easy friendship with the wolves. Trask’s role of quiet lover boy was a comic routine and he knew it. Margo favored anything handsome in pants, and occasionally overlooked the facial charms for the more important blessings of the purse and the promise. She was as loose and free as the wash on Monday’s line. But not quite so clean. In the four years of her association with Don Trask, rumor told that she bad not loosened her well-oiled zipper one notch for Don Trask.

  “I should apologize,” he said, with a sad shrug. “I’m upset, Conacher. I’m not myself since I came up here.”

  “Then who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m something out of a bad television show,” he said, fixing me with his dead eyes for a long pause. He started across the lawn, his hands clasped behind his back, his steps slow and aimless, headed in the general direction of the first green. “I’m the rejected suitor, the big slob who’ll never make the grade, the fall guy, the patsy, the goat and the drip. You’re talking to a man out on a limb, Conacher, a man perpetually goaded to hate.”

  He stopped suddenly and stood firmly and adjusted his body so that he had the right lighting for his face, so that I could read the full measure of his changed mood. He was grim and resolute now. He was forceful and open. “Sure I was in Lili’s room last night. Why the hell not? She’s an easy piece and I needed companionship. How do you think I feel when I see Buddy Binns mincing around after Margo? Of all the long list of her recent flames, Buddy Binns is the most nauseating, the toughest to swallow, the most ridiculous to accept. A cornball. A comic with the brain of a flea who considers himself God’s gift to show business, the type of egomaniac who gives theatrical folks the screaming meemies because he fancies himself several cuts above the common herd. I tell you I go mad when I see him, Conacher. And that was why I had myself a half dozen drinks last night and then tried to bed down with Lili Zenda.”