Tinman

by Karen Black

  I stood there for two or three minutes and was beginning to feel that my maneuver was working when a skinny blonde guy with a wispy moustache stepped out of the bedroom. He directed his attention first to the solarium which occupied the other end of the balcony. He rattled the door and discovered it had to be entered from the living room. I knew that when he turned, his eye would fall on me and I fought to keep from being paralyzed by fear. The only escape route was the ledge, and just as he turned, I released my hand hold and started sidling away.

  “Jesus Christ,” he cried with a high, slightly hysterical laugh, “If I ain’t caught myself a cat burglar,” and with the same swift movement I so vividly recalled from the park in Denver, the switch blade knife appeared and flicked open. Seeing that I was sidling away from the balcony, he dashed for the railing, reached out as far as he could and slashed at me with the knife.

  The pressure of a finger could have tipped the balance and sent me hurtling to the pavement fifteen floors below. Luckily, his knife was razor sharp. It slashed through the fabric of my coat sleeve with very slight resistance. I teetered for a moment at the very extremity of equilibrium, recovered and moved as quickly as I dared out of his reach by fractions of an inch.

  For a moment his face was aflame with fury, but then creased into a skull and crossbones grin. “Well, now,” he said in a high pitched, nasal drawl, “When a fella has a view like this he ought to take the time to enjoy it, and we got plenty of time.” He snickered, drawing it out into a high-pitched whinny. “Man, you oughtta look down. Folks down there are like ants.” He snickered again. “Sides, you oughtta be thinkin’ bout where you wanna land. It might be a tad uncomfortable if you wus to come down on them iron spikes on that fence around the bushes down there. You got any last words? You know it’s sad when a young fella like you just takes it into his head to kill hisself by jumpin’ off a buildin’ without no last words. Ain’t nobody gonna’ know why he did it or how he come to be there.”

  He paused, leaning nonchalantly against the railing, testing the edge of his switchblade on his thumb. He straightened and appeared to be listening for something. Faintly, I could hear the telephone. Was it Corky’s call? I had lost all sense of time. The phone stopped ringing. “Well,” the skinny guy said, “Looks like poor old Charley Farnsworth ain’t home. Maybe you’ll run into him on the way down, if you get what I mean.” During all this banter, I edged myself another six or seven feet further away, hoping he wouldn’t realize he could get a broom or a mop from the utility closet and literally sweep me off my feet and into empty space. But I could go no further. Charley’s apartment was at the end of the hall. There was no balcony on beyond which I might reach. Just the corner of the building…and space.

  God, I thought, somebody’s got to see me out here and call the cops or the fire department. Doesn’t anybody ever look up at buildings? There was no hope I might be seen from one of the other balconies…Charley’s solarium blocked the view in that direction. Meanwhile Wispy Whiskers was taking elaborate pains to clean and pare his fingernails with his switchblade. “Yessir,” he said, “This is goin’ to be bout the cleanest little job I ever done. Don’t have to cut nobody up, no blood, no mess, jest sit here like a innocent bystander, as you might say, while some poor sucker gets shakier and shakier ‘till he just blows hisself away. Course I ain’t sayin’ it ain’t goin’ to be a mite messy down there on the pavement, but as you might say, we’re above all that.” He cackled his high pitched laugh, and his ghoulish monologue went on and on. I fought against the shakes, trying to think of ledges narrower than this that I had negotiated, securely roped of course, picturing my erstwhile mountaineering heroes climbing the Eigerwand solo and conquering Annapurna.

  A new note entered Wispy Whiskers’ taunts. “Looks like you’re a tough son-of-a-bitch, ain’t you? Want to drag it out, do you? Well I can’t fuck around all day with you, boy. Gonna have to figure out how to knock you off your little perch. Suppose I was to heave one of them big flower pots at you? How you figure you might handle that? Yessir, the time has come for flower pot fieldin’ practice.”

  I shivered. He’d come up with a plan that might actually accomplish his goal. One of those flower pots, if it hit me, could definitely cause me to lose my balance and fall off the ledge.

  He slowly backed away from the balustrade toward the open sliding door into the bedroom, where several stands of potted plants stood in front of the draperies along the glass wall. He paused for a moment as he reached the door to make one more derisive crack. “Now you jest stay right there, boy. Don’t make no sudden moves, less’n you want to take a dive.” He opened his mouth to cackle again, then sprawled forward, headlong onto the deck.

  I continued to hug the wall, almost paralyzed in fearful anticipation of dodging flower pots while standing on a nine inch ledge fifteen stories up, not sure what had just happened. Wispy Whiskers didn’t seem to be moving.

  Just then, Corky stepped out onto the balcony with something like a short club in her hand. She froze for just the flicker of an eye when she saw me, but she could have been calmly coaching a little kid on his first ski lesson when she spoke. “Easy, Greg. It’s okay now. Just concentrate and go easy. No hurry now.”

  I exhaled forcefully, suddenly realizing I had been holding my breath for a long time.

  She moved slowly to the balustrade. “Don’t force it. Don’t reach for it. Just go steady.” She kept her hands inside the railing and stood quietly. My eyes locked on hers, and I moved inch-by-inch back along what seemed to be a never-ending path. At last my hand touched the hard iron rail. I seized it, threw a leg over it, and we tumbled to the deck clutching each other, then quickly scrambled up, wary of Wispy Whiskers, on the deck beside us, who showed no signs of coming to.

  “Corky, I….”

  She put her finger on my lips. “Shh. You can thank me later for saving your life,” she grinned, “let’s just do what we have to do and get out of here. What do we do about him?”

  I picked up a smooth cylinder of hard, gray stone about a foot long and an inch or so in diameter, lying on the floor beside him. “You hit him with this?”

  “It was all I could find.”

  “Don’t apologize. It did the job.”

  “I hope I didn’t kill him.” For the first time her voice sounded a little shaky.

  “Probably a good job if you did. I’m sure he’s the guy that murdered Charley.” I knelt down beside him. There was a little blood oozing through the long, dirty blonde hair on the back of his head, but he was breathing. “He’s alive, but he’s going to have one hell of a headache and a hard time figuring out where he is and how he got here when he wakes up.”

  “Thank God. So what do we do about him?”

  “Leave him lay and let the cops figure that out when they find him.” I took out my handkerchief and wiped off the balustrade where Corky or I might have left fingerprints. “Touch anything else beside the door knob?”

  “Just that rock I used for a club.”

  “I’ve got that.”

  We went into the living room. One of those big canvas hampers on dolly wheels that hotel housekeepers use to carry towels, linens and cleaning equipment was sitting in the entry. Before I could ask, Corky explained. “It was in the service elevator when I came up, and I figured that in a pinch it would give me an excuse for being here.”

  I wiped off the door knobs. “Okay,” I said, “You go first.”

  As Corky backed out into the corridor pulling the hamper, the bell dinged and the light went on down the hall at the elevator. She pushed the hamper part way back into the doorway. “Jump in fast,” she ordered quietly, “and cover up.” I hunkered down in the hamper and, with help from Corky, pulled some linens over me. I could hear the elevator doors slide open, then shut, as we started rolling down the hall.

  About half way to the elevators a rather obnoxious masculine voice said, “Hey, sweetheart, did you just come out of 1525?”

  “I knock de do
or, but ees nobody een.” Corky’s speech had taken on that slightly plaintive rising inflection that is so peculiarly Mexican.

  “Well, how about letting us in? We’re from the DA.”

  “I don’ have no key. I can’ get een.”

  “Come on Augie, lay off,” another voice said, “I got the master key from the manager.”

  “Cutest little wetback I ever saw. How’d you like to check her out.” the first voice said, receding down the hall.

  “Bastard,” Corky muttered, as we rolled on down to the elevators.

  The service elevator seemed incredibly slow, but we rode it to the basement, went up the stairs a minute or two apart, walked out the door and went separately to the parking ramp. As we drove out, we stopped at the street exit to let an ambulance and a couple of squad cars go screaming by on the way to the hotel. We put four or five blocks behind us before we found out what a relief it was to breathe again. I pulled over to the curb and extricated the piece of drill core Corky had used for a club from under my belt, where I had stuck it to smuggle it out of the hotel.

  Corky shuddered. “Why did you keep that?”

  “It might have our fingerprints on it, and besides, it’s my all-time favorite rock specimen. It saved my life.”

  “What is it, anyway?” Corky asked after we settled into the traffic on the Santa Monica freeway.

  “A section of diamond drill core.”

  “Okay, but what’s that? What’s it for?”

  “It’s ideal for flattening would-be hit men,” I grinned. She scowled. “Seriously, it’s a rock sample cut by diamond drilling. A diamond drill is basically a steel pipe studded with diamonds at the end. When you turn the pipe the diamonds, which are harder than anything, cut down through the rock, leaving a core of rock inside the pipe. When you pull the drill pipe up out of the hole, you have a continuous sample of the rock you drilled inside the pipe. It’s the best way to explore underground rock conditions for mining and other engineering purposes.” I found myself launching into a rambling dissertation on the technicalities of drilling.

  “Greg, honey,” Corky said sweetly, “I think that’s about all I need to know about drill core for now. I just wondered if it was the kind of thing Charley would usually have laying around.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said sheepishly, “I guess I’m just a little wound up.”

  “Odd,” Corky agreed, smiling thinly. “So am I. Do you suppose we might have been a little scared this afternoon? So maybe it’s good,” she went on, “to talk about mundane things, like where are we going now?”

  “The Cliffe Motel, on the Coast Highway. You may recall that our mutual friend, Dr. Gregory, has a guaranteed reservation there for tonight.”

  Corky squared around in her seat to look directly at me. “Gregory McGregor,” she said, “are you out of your super-thick, one-track, hard-rock skull? They, whoever ‘they’ are, have that place staked out. ‘They’ had your ‘secretary’ collect the message Charley left for you there. That place is nothing but a trap designed just for you.”

  “I know, but I figure I’ve got to make contact with them if I’m ever going to find out who ‘they’ are.”

  “Greg,” Corky laid her hand on my arm, “You don’t have to keep punching until you cave in, or do you have a thing about getting yourself out on high ledges?”

  I squirmed a little. Unbidden images of teetering on that ledge kept coming back to me, and each one made me feel a little queasy. “Your onetime loyal crew has just mutinied,” she said firmly, “and I’m giving the orders around here now. The first one is, stop at the first fast food place we come to.”

  “Frankly,” I said as we drove up to a rather garish Chinese takeout restaurant, “the thought of food doesn’t really turn me on.”

  “Wait here,” she said, ignoring me. She was back in a few minutes laden with plastic plates and containers. “The second order is, stop at the first decent looking motel we come to.”

  “Aye, aye, sir…ma’am,” I said meekly.

  It was all but dark as we drove westward toward Malibu. Beyond the clutter of lights along the highway, the Santa Monica Mountain Range on the right loomed like big black cutouts against a faintly starred sky, and on the left the sea was a wine-dark void between the beach front houses. The most appealing thing about the next motel we came to was a neon sign that flashed “vacancy.” The room was nowhere near as glitzy as the price, but it opened onto a deck above the beach, which in some totally abstract way in relation to our immediate need seemed nice. I let Corky in with the Chinese food and went back for the luggage. She was bustling about setting the table when I came back. I dropped the bags in the middle of the floor, came up behind her and put my arms around her. “God, I’m hungry,” I said.

  She turned her head to smile sidelong up at me. “Somehow I get the feeling that it’s not for chow mein.” One by one I undid the buttons of her shirt.

  I had always heard that the relief of tension after exposure to great danger can act as a powerful aphrodisiac. It’s true. It does.

  Later, in the middle of the night, we sat cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, ravenously devouring the cold Chinese food spread out between us–by far the best Chinese dinner I have ever had.

  CHAPTER X

  Los Angeles, Day 2, Tuesday Morning

  A sunbeam, almost horizontal in the early morning, shone through a gap in the east window draperies, glanced off a mirror and struck my eye. Gently I extricated my shoulder from beneath Corky’s head and carefully substituted my pillow. Among the gadgets in the bathroom was a “Kurtesy Koffee Kaddy,” with packets of instant coffee in a dispenser. I put the water on, slipped into shorts and went to get a morning paper from the vending machines at the front office. I returned to see an eye as dark and liquid as a cup of good, black coffee peeking at me over the curve of the pillow. She sat up, holding out her arms. The covers fell away from her breasts, and in no time at all, it seemed, the Kurtesy Koffee Kaddy boiled dry. “Stay right here,” she said, plumping the pillows up behind me. “I’ll take care of the coffee this time.”

  She opened the draperies that covered the entire west wall, and we were glad we had a room with a deck above the beach and the ocean on beyond. Sitting side by side we sipped our coffee and started going through the Los Angeles Times. We found the story soon enough. It was on the second page of the first section:

  L.A. ENGINEER SLAIN IN COLORADO

  Charles C. Farnsworth, an officer in TINMAN, Inc., well known Los Angeles engineering firm, and scion of an early Southland pioneering family, was identified Monday as the victim of a fatal attack on the state capitol plaza in downtown Denver. He was fatally stabbed about noon on Sunday by two assailants who escaped in an automobile driven by an accomplice. Robbery was the apparent motive. His briefcase, wallet and other identification were taken, but his identity could not be established until Monday through fingerprints on file in Washington with the FBI.

  It was pretty much all there…the possible linkage with the shooting of a policeman by an intruder at the Farnsworth condominium in Aspen…the puzzling discovery of a man in the Farnsworth apartment in Los Angeles, unconscious from a blow on the head…evidence that the apartment had been ransacked, though it had not been established that anything was taken…the interest in locating Consuela (Corky) Gonzales, an occupant of the Farnsworth house in Aspen…all events in which we had played critical roles and yet in which we were somehow nonexistent. Reading it in impersonal journalistic prose created an odd feeling that somehow we had slipped into a fourth dimension and were indeed nonexistent in the real world.

  More immediately disturbing though was news we had not known. The assailant in Aspen had eluded police by taking the chair lift to the summit of the mountain, where he appeared to have been picked up by a helicopter that took off from a small meadow about half a mile from the top of the lift. “Damn, damn, damn,” Corky muttered.

  “Who has helicopters flying around the high country?”
I mused.

  Corky pondered a moment. “TINMAN!” she cried, clapping her hand to her forehead, “Down there at the oil shale project on Parachute Creek. That’s it, Greg. You’ve got it!”

  “Got what? There must be plenty of others…oil companies, crop dusters around Delta and Montrose, big ranchers down in South Park, luxury ‘wilderness’ and rafting trip outfitters.”

  “Oh, sure,” Corky said impatiently, “and the Denver Water Board, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Reclamation, but why talk about them when TINMAN is right in the middle of it?”

  “You’ve really got it in for TINMAN,” I said irritably, “Any other reason to think Charley’s own company did him in?”

  Corky shrugged and looked away.

  “Seriously,” I pressed her sharply, “Why TINMAN?”

  “You know, Greg,” Corky turned on me, “You really are a square. You think those great big construction companies you work for are the guys in the white hats. Underneath it all you, and Charley too I guess, are really enamored by those big, macho machines tearing holes in the ground.” I must have flushed a deep red, which I do when nettled, and she relented. “Please, Greg,” She put a hand on my arm, “I didn’t mean it…not the way it sounded.”