The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  “Cronin?” he called.

  “Who else? Climb in where it’s warm and cozy, just me an’ Grace Slick.”

  “How about a little more light first?”

  “What do you think, I got a zapper in here?”

  “Turn on the light.”

  Wilson waited. A moment later the weak passenger light came on. The figure behind the wheel wore a wispy beard and his hair was long over his neck and ears. Wilson couldn’t be certain it was the same face he’d seen through the Alfa window that drizzly day on the ramp; the sunglasses had made the big difference. He wore a bulky jacket similar to a GI field jacket and he was holding a can of beer. The light went out. “You got my money?”

  “Your check? Not with me, no.”

  “Don’t shit me, man. What the hell am I here for? You owe me three hundred.”

  “You’ll get your money,” Wilson said, still holding the door open.

  “You know what I went through to get that goddamn check to you? I was sweating blood, man! I got nothing, zilch, not a fucking dime, on account of that three hundred I gave you!”

  In the darkness Wilson couldn’t see the face, but the voice told him enough. He stayed outside the car.

  “I’m flat broke, missing two checks. I got a job waiting out of town, only I gotta get there first! I need that three hundred to get on the road and you tell me you haven’t got it!”

  “I can have it for you tomorrow, but I want to talk first.”

  “What about?”

  “The accident on the ramp that morning.”

  “An accident, so what?”

  “Why were you out there?”

  “What the hell’s it to you? I was out driving around. Who the fuck are you—my probation officer, some VA snooper? How’d you find out my name?”

  “Why’d you give me the Caltronics card?”

  “Because I had to get the shit out of there, what else? I see this card, I use it. So what? What’s it matter whose card?” Wilson heard the sound of a beer can rattling to the floor and the sound of another being opened.

  “Is this your car?” he asked, straightening to search his coat pockets for his gloves. The car seemed familiar and now he remembered. He’d seen it parked nearby the day he’d visited the lot.

  “Some mechanic’s. Went up to Philly to pick up a car. Why?”

  “How come you’re sitting in it?”

  “Because he left it here, because I got keys, man. How’d you think I got in the gate? You wanna go sit in the fucking office instead so you can call the cops? What are you asking all these questions for?”

  “I told you.” He let the door swing back. “You’d better go get yourself a lawyer, a lawyer and a little protection. Some people are going to be looking for you.” He stepped back.

  “Just hold it!” the young man said. “We’re not finished yet! What are you on my ass for?”

  “I told you. I want to talk.”

  “Yeah, talk, just talk. Like always. You think you’re gonna rip me off, think I’m a fucking lush sitting here, screwing up my head. Only if the cops show, I’ve got an ejection seat this time, right out the fucking tube.” His hand rested on the dashboard shelf, pointing toward the front gate. The moonlight moving through the windshield splashed it radium blue, like the small hand of a cadaver. It was a hand curiously without strength, Wilson thought, not a mechanic’s at all. The face was still hidden in the shadows. “Someone shows, I’m gone, man—right out the fence there.”

  It seemed an empty boast, like everything else Wilson had heard. “When they want you, they’ll find you,” he said, pulling on his gloves, “just as I did.”

  “So what the shit’s going on, what’s all this garbage you’re giving me?”

  “That’s what I want to talk about. But this isn’t the place.”

  A car passed slowly in front of the gate. He thought it might be Buster Foreman’s car, prowling the lonely street in front after he’d failed to reappear, but it was too conspicuous for Buster. The headlights were also too dim, as if the alternator wasn’t charging properly. Uneasily, Wilson followed its taillamps up the bumpy street. It turned into a lot and the lights were extinguished.

  He turned back.

  “Hold it,” the young man said. He’d left the car to stand in the moonlight, looking across the engine hood toward Wilson. “How much money you got on you?”

  “Eighty, ninety dollars. Why?”

  “All I care about is getting on the road. I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about, I don’t know shit. Someone wants to pull me in, O.K.—let ’em. I’ve been crazy-rated by the VA, man—eighty percent wacko, ask the D.C. cops. What are they gonna do, lock me up again? O.K., let ’em. The VA wants me to turn myself in for sixty days anyway—post-traumatic stress syndrome, you ever heard of it? I don’t, so they cut off the disability check. The D.C. cops bust me once and a guy at Caltronics gets someone to bail me out, so I owe him a favor. What the fuck more do you wanna know? We’re drinking buddies and I do him some favors. He likes my war stories, like those shrinks over at the VA that wanna turn me into a fucking vegetable. I drink a lot on account of these two heads I’m wearing half the time, a goddamn plate in my skull, and now you’re on my ass on account of some goddamn card I pass you out the window. So that’s my life story, all I know, so gimme what you’ve got in your wallet and I’ll get the fuck out of here.…”

  He’d moved toward Wilson as he rambled on, one hand held out, one hand in his pocket, but stopped as Wilson mistrustfully pulled his own gloved hands from his pockets.

  “Who at Caltronics?”

  They stood in silence, facing each other across the front of the car.

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  Wilson said, “When you’re ready to collect your three hundred, give me a call.” He backed away and then turned.

  ‘“Oh, shit, daddy, another of them Vietnam weirdos, a VA whiner,’” Cronin mimicked in a thin, nasal voice, his approximation of the twang of middle America. “You think I don’t know you, fucker? Who sent you after me?”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me nothing, zilch, just a lot of garbage. You’re looking for something, something that smells like big money. Who else is looking? Who else knows you’re out here?”

  Wilson thought it prudent not to reply, and once more they confronted each other, some twenty feet apart, Wilson the taller, Cronin lean and slight, a veteran from another generation, a little high, suspicious, certainly confused, but also curious, Wilson thought, warned of conspiracies he didn’t understand.

  “Who were you doing favors for at Caltronics?” he repeated. Cronin didn’t reply. Wilson waited, then took a cautious step backward, then another, and finally turned back across the moonlit lot. Cronin followed him at a distance. As Wilson reached the door of his car, he heard the other man call out to him and waited. Cronin locked the gate and crossed the street after him.

  “His name was Morris,” he said. “I needed the money, same as I do now. I got a job waiting down in Houston, but I’ve gotta get there first. How much could you let me have, like tonight?” He didn’t look at Wilson as he spoke, but was gazing down the darkened street where the car was waiting.

  “In cash, what I have with me, a check for the rest,” Wilson said. “I’d make it five hundred in all if you tell me everything you know.”

  He gave Wilson the name of a tavern farther out Route 1 toward Fort Belvoir and told him to wait in the rear parking lot. Then he crossed the street and stood under the streetlight and lifted his hand, like a man signaling for a cab. As Wilson drove away, he saw through the rearview mirror a set of weak headlights move out of the darkness toward the lonely figure under the streetlight.

  Wilson turned the corner, headed toward Fort Belvoir. Then he reached under the seat and brought out the car telephone Buster Foreman had installed that afternoon, repeated the new address, and said a car would be following him.

  He found the tavern twenty minut
es later. The neon sign in front advertised drinks, dinner, and live country music on Saturday nights. A few cars and pickups were parked in the gravel lot in the rear, where Wilson waited. Five minutes later, an old Ford Falcon turned into the drive and he recognized the same faulty headlights he’d seen on the street in front of the car lot. The rocker panels were rusted out, the front fenders were ragged, and it carried Virginia license plates. A dark-haired girl was driving. Cronin sat next to her on the front seat. She didn’t leave the car.

  “It was this Monday night, something queer happens,” Cronin mumbled without enthusiasm, not looking at Wilson but concentrating on the flattened cigarette package he was shredding between his fingers. “Morris catches me in the lobby at Potomac Towers and asks am I gonna be around. I’d just brought this car over from Alexandria and I figure he’s got trouble with this Mercedes he’s leasing, the one he’s always got trouble with. So I tell him I’ll be in the office. It’s locked up by then, but I open up and wait around.…”

  They sat in a small, dark booth in the rear. The wall lamp didn’t work. The dance floor and the small bandstand were deserted; only a few of the booths that lined the walls were occupied. A stereo system piped country and western music into the room from the bar in front. A small middle-aged waitress in a black nylon dress had brought them beer.

  “So all of a sudden he comes busting into the office, really pissed. He asks could he use the phone quick, only he doesn’t wait, just grabs it up off the desk and calls someone. I hear him tell whoever he’s talking to he’s not in his office now, so they can talk. I think maybe it’s a woman he’s talking to, on account of this secretary he’s been dating upstairs at Caltronics. Then he really gets burned and I know it’s not a broad, either. I’ve got a nose for what’s not my business, so I go outside to the write-up counter. Then after a while he gets calmed down and he’s telling this guy he has to go up to Newark for this funeral tonight so he can’t meet him. Then he says maybe at National Airport in half an hour, an hour. Then he gets pissed again—”

  “What did he say?”

  “What he said before, when they were first talking.”

  “What were his words?”

  Cronin still didn’t lift his eyes as he turned the flattened cigarette package in his fingers. “‘Double-crosser,’ ‘double-dealer,’ shit like that. ‘Four-flusher,’ like they’d been double-crossed. I remember because I was thinking I wouldn’t want Morris pissed at me. He gets ugly, real weird sometimes, cold fish eyes. They give a guy chicken skin.”

  “He was calling the man on the phone a double-crosser?”

  “I think they were talking about someone else. But he’s pissed at this dude he’s talking to. ‘You calling me a liar?’ he says, like he was supposed to do something and didn’t do it. Anyway, it’s not my business. After he hangs up he’s still hot. He’s got this briefcase with him and he tells me he’s on his way to catch the shuttle up to New York. He wants me to check out the Mercedes while he’s gone. Wet weather comes, he’s got problems with the electrical, the solenoid sticks, he can’t turn it over. He tells me he’s been having problems all day. Then he gets pissed again, like maybe he shouldn’t go to New York, this other problem that’s come up, some guy trying to put the heat on him, some government guy.”

  Cronin paused to drink from the beer glass, his eyes turned to the deserted dance floor, where a couple stood alone, as if trying to decide whether or not to dance.

  “Did he say what kind of problem?”

  “He says maybe a shakedown, only he’s not sure. He does a lot of government work, Morris does. We talk about it sometimes. The time we drove up to Atlantic City that weekend, all the way up that Saturday he tells me about these contracting officers he works with, how some of them always got their hand out. Only he tells me this time he doesn’t know where this guy is coming from?”

  “Sorry?”

  “He doesn’t know where this guy is coming from,” Cronin muttered, still swallowing his words, “this guy that’s maybe trying to do a number on him.”

  “You think that’s what the phone conversation was about?”

  “Yeah, the way he’s acting. He’s got a lot of government contracts he’s working on around town and he doesn’t know how this guy fits in. He’s got the name on a piece of paper. He wrote it down while he was talking on the phone and he keeps looking at it, like it doesn’t mean shit to him. That pisses him off too. Morris is the kind of guy that’s gotta know everything going on, everything—the kind of guy who doesn’t want anyone getting behind him. Like this corporal I knew in ’Nam, always the last man. That’s how Morris was.” He paused, but this time to look at Wilson, as if he might explain it. “I think he must have done a little time. I think he’s still got some troubles left over, like maybe someone’s still out to nail him.”

  “You think the government might be still after him?”

  “Yeah, like they’re gonna bust him again. Is that right, is that why you’re on his ass?”

  “He might be a federal witness. Did he ever tell you the government was after him?”

  Cronin considered the question silently, removing another cigarette. “He was all the time nervous, like he was gonna get busted,” he resumed finally, “but he never said anything. Except once, maybe. He was having car trouble and it drove him up the wall, a car undependable like that. I was kidding him, telling him someone making his money shouldn’t have any worries. He gets hot, then gives me a lot of shit about how easy I’ve got it, that when you fuck with some of the guys he knows, you wind up where nobody’s listening, in a Hefty bag someplace, in some Jersey scrap iron yard, buried a couple of tons deep in a bale of highway meat. I figure he’s trying to tell me how tough he is. So I think maybe he did a little time once. So that night when we’re walking out to his car, I tell him maybe he ought to check this guy out if he’s so worried about it—”

  “The man whose name he wrote down?”

  “Yeah,” Cronin muttered, looking away. “I tell him about the time up at Flushing when I was working for this car agency and this shithead comes sneaking around, asking questions, checking up on me. I get the manager to give me his name, look him up in the book, and follow him to work one morning. He’s a fucking investigator for the VA, snooping around trying to find out whether this physical disability I’m claiming is for real. We have it out right there in the parking lot. He gets a little shook and files a complaint, saying I’m harassing him, but so what? It gets it out in the open. Anyway, I’m telling Morris all this, just shooting the shit the way we always do, just talking. I don’t want any of his problems. He’s got big money, maybe, but it’s not buying him anything. So we look at the car and I tell him I’ll pick it up in the morning.”

  Someone entered from the side door and Cronin silently watched him as he strolled toward the bar in front.

  “So that’s when he gets the idea. He thinks the story about the VA investigator is pretty funny, turning the tables like that. He hates the fucking government like I do. So what’s when he asks me to do him a favor, check this guy out for him the way I did up in Flushing, find out who he’s working for, where he reports in the morning, and then let him know when he gets back from this funeral in Newark. I figure he’s putting me on, but he pulls out his wallet. ‘Five hundred bucks,’ he says, just like that. ‘I don’t wanna have to worry about it all the time I’m up in Newark.’ I think he’s shitting me and I tell him maybe I can’t find out. ‘Just tell me you tried,’ he says, and he pulls out these hundred-dollar bills from his briefcase and stuffs them in my pocket, like a goddamn handkerchief, the same way he did when we were up in Atlantic City that second time. I didn’t wanna go because I’m broke almost, just twenty bucks. We’re about ready to walk in the Golden Nugget up there and he asks me how much I’ve got. I tell him and he stuffs these twenty-dollar bills in my coat pocket. I tell him maybe I’ll lose them. ‘Just tell me you tried,’ he says, just like that night in the parking lot.”

&nbs
p; “He took these hundred-dollar bills out of his briefcase?”

  “Yeah, just reached in and there they were. He doesn’t even open it all the way. It doesn’t sound right to me. Five hundred bucks to find out where a guy’s working? That’s a little screwy, I’m thinking, crazy, like something I’d do. But it worries me a little, all these problems Morris has. I try to give the money back, he won’t take it. So I tell him, what if this guy is FBI or something and busts me instead? I was joking but I’m serious too, you know what I mean?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He just laughs it off. ‘Tell ’em to come see me,’ he tells me. ‘I’ll blow the fuckers right out of the water.’ What do you think he meant?”

  Wilson sat back at last and lifted the glass from the table. “I don’t know, not yet. So that’s how you happened to be behind me on the ramp that morning. Morris gave you my name.”

  “Yeah, it was on the slip of paper.”

  “I fucked it up good,” Cronin admitted. “I had the five hundred and I got bombed that night, really stoned. I wake up at five A.M. in this supper club parking lot out in Fairfax, a headful of nothing, like I’d just been medevacked up from Tayinh. I should have turned turtle, but I get on the road and find this place, find the house, and start cruising around, trying to bury this garbage dump I’ve got in my skull. I come around in front of your place twice, it’s raining, and on the third pass some schoolkids are waiting at the end of the road, maybe for a school bus, and they give me this weird look, so I park it this time, up on the hill, and lift the hood, like I’ve got this ignition problem, and that’s where I am when I see this station wagon come out of the drive. I take off.”