Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  “Absolutely,” the floor manager said, and took a business card out of his shirt pocket. “Gave me his card, you see? Handing them out to anybody in the crew he talks to. I told him I don’t vote in his district, and he said that’s okay, when he runs for statewide office I can vote for him then. Pretty pleased with himself, huh?”

  Greg looked at the card, and it was Assemblyman Morton Kotkind’s card, sure enough; he’d seen it before. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Thanks.” And he left there, to try to think this out. What the heck was going on here?

  Coming out of the casino, he was just in time to see the nearby elevator door close, with the girl in the wheelchair and her chauffeur companion inside. Going up. He’s the one I’ll talk to, Greg thought. He felt confused, and didn’t want to blow his cover or make a stupid mistake, so he felt he needed somebody to discuss the thing with, and that chauffeur had struck him right away as a competent no-nonsense kind of guy.

  Up the stairs he went, and saw the chauffeur just pushing the wheelchair out onto the glass-enclosed promenade. Greg followed, and found very few people up here now, there being so little to see at night, except the few lights of little river towns. The chauffeur pushed the wheelchair slowly along, in no hurry, apparently just to keep in motion. Greg hurried to catch up.

  6

  Mike Carlow was glad this was the last night. He’d been pushing this damn wheelchair around for over a week, carrying Noelle’s slops into the men’s room, doing his strong silent (but caring) number, and he was bored with it.

  Also, just pushing the wheelchair got to be a drag. But he’d learned early the first night out that he had to keep the wheelchair moving. Stop somewhere, and the sympathetic people started hovering around, asking questions, being pains in the ass. Noelle could pitch a faint every once in a while to make them lay off, but that was work, too. It was simpler to just keep moving.

  Of course, even then you still got the pushy ones, of all types, old and young, male and female. Of them, Carlow thought he probably disliked the young males the worst, the ones who came on all sympathetic and concerned but you could see in their eyes that what they really wanted was to fuck Noelle’s brains out.

  Not that Carlow wanted Noelle for himself. He was meeting her for the first time on this job, he liked her, he thought she was stand-up and could be counted on, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who appealed to him in that other way. For that, he liked a heftier woman, someone out of his own world, the kind you’d meet in the auto race circuit, who could change a tire and whose favorite food was pancakes.

  For Mike Carlow, everything related back to the track and the fast cars. He’d driven his first race when he was fourteen, won for the first time when he was sixteen, and had never much cared about anything else. For instance, he’d figured it out early that the amount of gasoline in the gas tank affected the car’s center of gravity, constantly shifting the center of gravity as the fuel was used up, so while still in high school he’d designed a car that wouldn’t have that problem because there wasn’t any gas tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, and the tubing held the gas. When someone told him it was crazy to want to drive a car where he’d be completely surrounded by gasoline, he’d said, “So what?” He still couldn’t see what was wrong with the idea, and didn’t understand why no official at any track in America would permit such a design into a race.

  Still, there were other cars and other designs that they wouldaccept, so Carlow was reasonably happy. Every year or so he took a job like this one, to raise the money to build more race cars, and every year, one way or another, he survived both his obsession with race cars and the heists he went on to support that obsession.

  “Excuse me.”

  Carlow looked around and it was one of the young studs, in fact one that had hit on them earlier in the evening until Noelle had gone all faint on him. Not wanting to have to deal with the same guy twice in one outing, and also feeling some of the impatience that comes when you know the job is almost finished, and feeling illused because he’d come up here to the promenade because it wasn’tfull of annoying people after dark, Carlow gave him a pretty icy look and said, “Yes?”

  “Do you mind?” The guy was young and eager like before, but now he also seemed troubled. “I need to talk to somebody,” he said, “and I was going to come see you two, anyway. I’m just not sure what to do.”

  The promenade had benches along the inner wall, but the rest was clear. Down ahead toward the stern, a few people strolled along, moving away. Back toward the prow, an exhausted older couple sat on a bench barely awake. Carlow took all this in because he had a sense for this kind of problem when he was on a job, a sense that told him when there was a rip in the fabric, and he just had the feeling there was a rip in the fabric coming right now. The question was, what had gone wrong, and what could they do about it? “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t you sit on the bench here so Jane Ann can be part of the conversation.”

  “All right.”

  The guy sat, looking disturbed, confused about something, and Carlow arranged the wheelchair and himself so the guy was hard to see from either direction along the promenade. “Tell us about it,” he suggested.

  “Well, the thing is,” the guy said, “I’m here sort of secretly, and I’m not sure if I should blow my cover.”

  Carlow said, “You mean, you’re not an ordinary passenger, you’re not what you seem to be, you’re something else.” A cop? Not a chance.

  “That’s right. My name’s Greg Manchester, and I’m a reporter, and I’m doing a”

  Noelle snapped, with more sharpness than her frail condition would allow, “A reporter?”

  Manchester was too involved in his own problems to notice Noelle’s slip. He said, “The cruise line company won’t permit unescorted reporters, so I just want to do a fly on the wall kind of thing. Not negative, just fun.”

  Carlow said, “So you’re going around looking at things, making notes

  “

  “And taking pictures, too,” Manchester said. “When nobody’s looking.” To Noelle he said, “That’s why I was coming to you anyway, to get your name.”

  Noelle said, “You have pictures of me?Oh, I wouldn’t like that, the way I look”

  “You’re beautiful,Miss Jane Ann, is it?”

  Carlow said, “But then something else happened. What?”

  “There’s a VIP on the ship, I don’t know if you”

  “Yeah, we’ve seen him,” Carlow said, thinking, this is it. This is it right here. “What about him?”

  “Well, he sayshe’s a state assemblyman named Kotkind,” Manchester said, “but he isn’t. He’s a fake. I knowAssemblyman Kotkind, I’ve interviewed him.”

  “Ah,” Carlow said.

  “What I can’t figure out,” Manchester said, “is why anybody would dothat. Did the real assemblyman send this guy in his place? He is handing out the assemblyman’s business card. If I say something, mycover is blown and maybe I just make a fool of myself. Or maybe something’s wrong, and the cruise line should know about it. What do you think?”

  Noelle said, “I think” and began to cough. She tried to go on talking through the coughs that wracked her poor frail body, and Manchester leaned closer to her, concerned, trying to make out what she was trying to say.

  Carlow kept his wallet in his inside jacket pocket because he kept his sap in his right hip pocket; a black leather bag full of sand. It was one smooth movement to reach back, draw it out, lift it up, drop it down, and put Mr. Manchester on ice.

  Noelle’s left arm shot out, her hand splayed against Manchester’s chest, and she held him upright on the bench. “Don’t kill him,” she said.

  “Of course not,” Carlow told her. He knew as well as she did that the law goes after a killer a lot more determinedly than it goes after a heister. If it were possible to keep this clown alive, Carlow would do it. He said, “I need a gag, and I need something to tie him.”

  “
You hold him for a minute.”

  Carlow pushed the wheelchair a few inches forward, and sat on the bench beside the clown. He put his left elbow up onto the guy’s chest and said, “Okay.”

  Noelle was wearing all these filmy garments out of a gothic novel, so now she reached down inside and gritted her teeth and Carlow heard a series of rips. Out she came with several lengths of white cloth, and handed them to him. “I’ve got him now,” she said, and put her hand on Manchester’s chest again.

  Carlow bent to tie the ankles together, then tied the wrists behind the back, then stuffed a ball of cloth into Manchester’s mouth and used the last strip to make a gag.

  Noelle said, “What are you going to do with him?”

  “Lifeboat.”

  They’d watched that damn safety drill every night for over a week, so Carlow knew exactly how to open the sliding glass door and how to open one segment of the top of the enclosed lifeboat just below. “You keep him,” he said, and started to rise.

  “Wait!”

  “For what?”

  “Damn it, Mike,” she said. “Get the camera. That’s myface he’s got there, and probably yours, too.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Carlow sat again, and patted him down, and found first the cassette recorder and then the Minolta. “Nice camera,” he commented, and pocketed both.

  He looked around. The half-asleep couple were still in the same spot. Toward the stern, three or four people were looking out and downriver at where they’d been, talking together. Carlow stood, crossed to the outer glass wall, slid open a panel, stepped through onto the curved roof of the lifeboat, leaned down, gave the stiff handle a quarter turn, lifted, and a rectangular piece of the roof opened right up. Then he crossed back to Noelle, sat beside Manchester again, and said, “Now I have to get him over there.”

  “Put him on my lap,” she said, “and wheel us over.”

  “Nice.”

  He held Manchester while Noelle wheeled herself backward out of the way. Then he stood, picked up Manchester under the armpits and placed him seated on top of Noelle. “So this is what they call a dead weight,” Noelle said.

  Carlow wheeled them both across the promenade to the open glass door, where the cool night air now drifted in. He stopped, and she shoved, and Manchester went toppling out and down into the lifeboat. Carlow winced. He’d land on a stack of life preservers, but still. “Goodbye,” Noelle said.

  “He’ll have a headache in the morning,” Carlow commented, as he moved the wheelchair to one side so he could shut everything up again.

  “Let him take a picture of that,”she said, unsympathetic. “Asshole.”

  7

  Susan Cahill didn’t really like Morton Kotkind, Lou Sternberg could tell. She smiled at him, she waved her tits at him, she smoothed the way for him as they made their long slow inspection tour of the ship, she even went out of her way to chat with him during dinner at the captain’s table, since the captain himself was making every effort notto be friendly and accommodating but was instead doing a very good impression of an iceberg from his native land; and yet, Sternberg could tell, Susan Cahill didn’t really like Morton Kotkind.

  Which was fine with Sternberg, who hadn’t liked Kotkind either, during those days in the lawyers’ bar on Court Street in Brooklyn, getting to know the man, getting to know him so well it was an absolute pleasure to feed him the Mickey Finn yesterday. Probably, Sternberg thought, Cahill would be just as happy to feed a Mickey to me,and the thought made him smile.

  Cahill picked up on that, and smiled right back, across the dinner table. “Mister Assemblyman,” she said, “I believe you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “I’m not here to enjoy myself,” he snapped at her, and put his pouty brat face on again, which she bravely pretended not to see.

  But in fact he was enjoying himself, hugely, which was rare on a heist. For him, pleasure was at home, his little town house in London 2, Montpelier Gardens, SW6 with its little garden in the back enclosed by ancient stone walls, with roses to left and right, cucumbers and brussels sprouts at the back. There he lived, and in that city his friends lived, people who had nothing to do with any kind of criminality, except possibly in the tax forms they filled out for Inland Revenue.

  That was an extra bonus in Sternberg’s living arrangements; he filled out no tax forms anywhere. To be resident in the U.K. for more than six months, legally, one had to sign a statement that one will be supported from outside the country, will neither go on the dole nor take a job away from some native-born Englishman. Howthe foreigner supports himself from outside the country doesn’t matter, only that he does. So there was never a reason to deal with Inland Revenue. At the same time, since he didn’t live or work in the U.S., didn’t even pay any bills or credit accounts or mortgages there, he also flew below the IRS’s radar. Which meant there was no one anywhere to say, “Just how doyou support yourself, Mr. Sternberg?” Lovely.

  In fact, it was the occasional job with a trusted associate like Parker that took care of his material wants, while the house in Montpelier Gardens saw to his spiritual needs, so except for the occasional soulless transatlantic airplane ride he was a reasonably happy man, though you could never tell that from his face.

  The airplane rides were necessitated by his iron rule that he would never work and live in the same territory. London in fact, all of England was out of bounds. Whenever it was time to restock the bank accounts, it was off to America once more, with Lillian the char left behind to see to the roses and the cucumbers; the brussels sprouts took care of themselves.

  This particular journey to the land of his birth looked to be a fairly easy one, and profitable. The last time he’d worked with Parker it had been anything but profitable, but that hadn’t been Parker’s fault, and Sternberg didn’t hold it against him. This job looked much more likely to provide another year or two of comfort in SW6.

  The problem with the job was that it was taking too long. Sternberg had pretended to be other people before in the course of a heist a telephone repairman, a fire department inspector but never for five hours. From eight P.M. till one A.M., in this confined space on the Spirit of the Hudson,essentially on his own since Parker and Wycza’s job was just to stand around looking tough and competent, Lou Sternberg not only had to be a politician and a Brooklynite, he also had to be a bad-tempered boor. He actually was bad-tempered at times, he had to admit, but he’d never been a politician or a Brooklynite, and he certainly hoped he had never been a boor.

  Ah, well. Dinner passed, the turnaround at Poughkeepsie passed, the inspections of the casino and the kitchens and the purser’s office and the promenades and the game room and the laughable library and all the rest of it slowly passed. The engine room was interesting, being more like a windowless control tower than like anything purporting to be a steamship’s engine room Sternberg had ever seen in the movies. And through it all, he maintained this sour and offensive persona.

  There were reasons for it. First, the original was like this. Second, bad temper keeps other people off balance, and they never believe the person being difficult is lyingin some way; rudeness is always seen as bona fide. And the third reason was the money room.

  There’d been only one real fight so far, the one over the handguns, and Sternberg had won that, as he’d expected to. The money room would be another fight accessto the money room was almost certain to be a fight and by the time they got there Sternberg wanted the entire ship’s complement to be convinced that if they argued with this son of a bitch assemblyman, they lost.

  Of course, if Susan Cahill had led them straight to the money room at nine-thirty or ten, it would have been a real waste, because most of the money wouldn’t have arrived yet, but they’d assumed that she wouldn’t want to mention the money room at all, and so far she hadn’t.

  Twelve-fifteen, and not a single goddam thing left to look at. The last place they inspected was the nurse’s office, and found she was well equipped in there for first-l
evel treatment of medical emergencies, and also had a direct-line radio to the medevac helicopter at Albany Hospital, probably for when winners had heart attacks. Sternberg stretched the moment by congratulating her on her readiness and enquiring into her previous work history, and unbent so far he could feel the curmudgeon facade start to crack.

  So finally they came out of her office, and it was only twelve-fifteen, and Cahill said, “Well, Mister Assemblyman, that’s it. You’ve seen it all. And now, if you wouldn’t consider it a bribe” and she beamed on him, jolly and sexy “the captain would love to buy you a drink.”

  Sure he would. Too early, too early. What should he do? This was Sternberg’s call alone, he couldn’t confer with the other two, couldn’t even take time to look at them. Accept a drink? Should he stall another half an hour that way, then all at once remember the money room and demand to see it? Or go with it now, knowing they’d be cutting their take by about forty-five minutes worth of money?

  Go now, he decided. Go now because they were in a movement here, a flow, and it would be best to just keep it going, not let it break off and then later try to start it up again. And go now because he was tired of being Mister Assemblyman. “We’re not quite finished,” he said. “When we arefinished, if there’s still time, I’ll be very happy to join you and the captain you will join us, won’t you? in a drink.”

  Either she was bewildered, or she did bewilderment well. “Not finished? But you’ve seen everything.”

  “I haven’t seen,” he said, “where the money goes. It’s still on the ship, is it not?”

  She looked stricken. “Oh, Mister Assemblyman, we can’t do that.”

  He gave her his most suspicious glare. “Can’t do what?”

  “That room,” she said, “you see, that room is completely closed away, for security reasons, nobodycan get into that room.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “There must be people in there. How do they get out?”

  “They have their own door on the side of the ship,” she explained, “with access direct to the dock and the armored car, when we land.”